Raster. Jaargang 5

[p. 406]

Nathaniel Tarn

From ‘The Persephones’

The First Persephone

for P.R.T.

Lying, face down, earth.
Pressed down with hands at the back of the skull
face into earth.
Pressed down as if with the weight of wings
a thing, winged, very heavy in the sky
that wd. perhaps have crashed and been ready to be

taken into the earth.

Weighed down with weight of fins
flukes, colossal weight of blubber
balleen, into the earth.
Weighed down with fur, scales, feathers, into the earth,
with branches, leaves, flowers, fruit
into the earth.
Pulled from below by hands of undergods
pulled down from below into the earth.
With fingers clutching at her neck, pulled down from below
with fingers clutching her armpits
with claws and pincers clutching at
pushing and prying into her
pulled down into the earth.
And like a ship sinking in an oily sea
slowly, down down down, she goes like a scarf, but a scarf of lead
in a sea of lead.
And the season saying no all the time

trying to bud and to leaf.

Where children wait.
The children who have never had a childhood
appearing miraculously young and beautiful
into the adult life of their parents
as if sprung fully-armed from their heads.

Where the daughter found again

[p. 407]

 

courted as was her mother in the season of willows and wands

 

in a slow swirl overhead like smoke

 

and all the great stores of the city open to her desires

 

a kiss on her mouth

 

and her loins working suddenly against his mouth

 

where she has turned the world over in his hands

 

and prised it apart.

 

 

 

The king of darkness in his habitation

 

invisible - a cloud nothing more but a great one

 

like the cloud of a squid surprised

 

giant squid from the deep

 

unnameably at the mother, lost in her clouds

 

 

 

while snows drown out the earth   and the buds sleep.

[p. 408]

The Third Persephone

Looking out, the site of a mountain
the head of the lord of darkness

as if cradled

among the marigolds

what he cd. make of love

very little.

No infants in his kingdom, no eyes.
Only grown children in his kingdom

of whom he had seen

but the late seedlings, never the germ of emotion.
How was he to tell

(looking inside himself for an image

for a sliver of the imagination of the beloved)
who had never sucked at a breast

who had never kissed leaves

whose eyes had not been brushed by the sun?

All that he had of love was strained

through the minds of the dead as they reached him

and these figments never amounted to

the possibility of looking out

of looking out with a single heart on the flowers.

So that the yearning he thought

as he had thought so often

the yearning must come out of its pure self,

be self-engendered

no fucking of virgins for this

even

but -

the virgin turned in on herself

a snail looking for herself inside her house

[p. 409]

 

in the convolutions of the tunnel

 

and no holy spirit

 

 

 

and yet, such is the power of music,

 

the songs they have brought down with them

 

from the upper air

 

(where they heard them perhaps

 

in the mouths of children)

 

 

 

is it possible for this...    to subsist

 

this nameless, self-inflicted passion

 

looking out like a hawk from a cloud

 

or a lighthouse keeper from his turret?

 

 

 

whereupon, with that thought,

 

his eyes swivelled

 

and among the flowers of the field lit on the fairest.

[p. 410]

The Tenth Persephone

Why is the queen of the dead exalted among the dead being
only one among the dead and chosen by chance
and chosen by apparent chance and apparent predestination
both together in the unfathomable desire of the other gods?

her head being allowed to go through the upper air

into the perfection of seasons for some part of the year,
though her feet remain weighted down by slow snakes
stirring slowly in the onze of the trenches
and only her green hands in the upper sky
- the great oaks stretching their hands on waking -

giving sign of her life?

He who receives the many

even he who's used to reducing the dead to a common substance,

doesn't wish to single her out

will not give her more than a passing glance

a sign of recognition

of the small affections...

when he burns

when in fact he burns that the branch may break
that the long voyage may end for the planet
and the furthest point of death be returned from
the separation into dead and live
summer and winter, and only green be seen above ground

that he might go home

but she is taken up,

she is received with smiles and trumpets by the big-breasted
daughters of ocean and brought to her mother
and is taken up into the arms of the mother
into the fins of fish, into the wings of birds,

[p. 411]

 

and her hands are held outwards, and her arms

 

in the position of everything that breaks and shoots -

 

 

 

She is shown the marvelous city,

 

taken through its streets in triumph, spoken to,

 

welcomed at arches and doorways, asked to bless

 

the fountains where young girls wash clothes,

 

given the freedom of the city, told of the labyrinth.

 

 

 

He who receives the many being but

 

then one lost father of so many saved

 

the one who stays behind, growing much younger,

 

down from his age at last, golden in fire

 

his long night dipped him into and the royal mother

 

 

 

while the clouds of far heaven correct the fields of earth

 

and the dark kingdom is smothered.

[p. 412]

From ‘Lyrics for the Bride of God’:

The Kitchen

I don't budge from this kitchen.
It's the only furnished part of a vast house

with tables and chaos apart from the usual appliances

and a recipe-book from a forgotten country.

I once saw that it was dark beyond the kitchen
in the basement and on the three floors
in all the various rooms smelling of carpet-cleaner and wall-wash.
I've been told it goes on being dark there by the visitors.

She doesn't live in this kitchen which is a solitary place

I know that on some nights she sits in the living-room

beyond darkness

with her own choice of books

and sometimes plays with her cosmetics in another

and there are other nights

she sleeps in the nude upstairs face down on the pillows

waiting for a surprise attack.

She has not yet made up her mind

whether or not to come into   and occupy the house

she is empowered   that is to say she has the means

to bring light into the house and turn on all the appliances

which would flush me from the kitchen where I live

as I've said to friends and students: like something out

of Beckett

perhaps she is afraid of the bills...

[p. 413]

III

 

Pieces of her occupy certain windowledges

 

I see her hands from time to time in the fireplace

 

her crotch and creases play havoc with the mirrors

 

and I eat the fruit of that tree as the cannibals did

 

in Atlantis

 

 

 

o ekeine periple!

 

 

 

the victim's body smoked and carved / upside down beside the door!

 

 

 

Eating and making love

 

in Eden:

 

one total complex.

The art, perhaps IS to forget

white clouds   smoke in interstices

mist on the synapses linking thought to thought.

You will be killed my son: no one can last this way

but can you swear it matters?

There was ambition,

desire in coming here / a goal in sight

to write

the inches of Atlantis down before she drowned

(and to take on that journey some sort of homely Helen
not gone to whore in Troy, no stayed at home, and dull become

a little

until that wreck of Asia gone through the middle island

reached at last

these Western stuccoes):

but there'd been nothing in Atlantis to stitch thought to thought

about her

no coherence:   the center had not held
and the circumference had gone crazy
even among the ones with kindly dispositions

[p. 414]

 

you will not get it out of my mind

 

that my ways are not your ways he said before

 

and this is an Israeli girl

 

and our frontiers won't give an inch.

After the age of revolutions / after the age of actions / into

the age of talk merely

so that what I do if she wants me on that trip
is accept her one day, refuse her the next, she is exasperated
into loving me far more extremely than she had ever loved
and cooking for me all day in the kitchen

by special dispensation

and washing all my shirts
and hanging herself up at night to be had all ways.
And I explain that I cannot explain

that I am not responsible

that we dichteren

have never been solid citizens at the best of times since Plato,
are chauvinist, fascist, sexist pigs

(vide Arendt on Dark Times and Bébé)

The chronology of that golden age escapes me

exactly when she ceased burning like a furnace upon me

and joy turned aside from me and forced me to hide

which is also to say:

between loving her and not loving her and forgetting her
there is some cultural as well as personal smoke

and my tragedy

or ours

is that of the time

and the time is also of Atlantis.⁺

+ (In the Hebrew Kabbalah, the Female Principle of God, or Shekhinah, fetches the soul-sparks exiled in each member of Israel on the Last Day and returns theet to God. In the ‘Lyrics for the Bride of God’, the Shekhinah is treated both as a theological principle and as a very living woman, with many metamorphoses. N.T.)
© Nathaniel Tarn, 1971.