In the new place you don’t speak of yourself
your feet facing the front
you tread backwards with needles in your throat
The etched plot was there before you suddenly stepped in
The old place walks ahead of you
someone claps his hands and then you have two husbands
one forgetting you, the other not remembering
The distance walks away with you
both in the new country, and the old country
You gather the leaves, stuffing them into your ears
and pull up the blindfold, fearing you will be raped in the eyes
You buy a new set of false teeth
and write your brother at home to mail you a brand new false
mouth
Instead, he sends you Discourses of Shams of Tabriz, Rumi’s mentor,
Because time is ripe to write the Third Script:
The one neither the scribe nor the reader will understand
“Shines
in the mind of heaven God
who made it
more than the sun
in our eye.
Fifth element; mud; said Napoleon”
After the explosion into incomprehension
the unimpossible beauty you might call it
(two negations equaling not affirmation
but running the whole gamut of endless negation)
Pound dissolves words into meanings, and Shams says:
don’t, I say
But after the first four lines of Canto LI, Pound has already missed the point
you hear him reading the rest of the poem
four sets of false teeth blocking breath’s rush to the mouth,
giving reference and preference to history,
missing the point once again
You are after Walter Benjamin’s fasting man
but who is fasting here?
You want to tell someone or write somewhere
that you find affinities between Shams and Benjamin too
both of them are pre-Adamite hermaphrodites in sudden languages
It hurts that no one knows
You buy a small bouquet of flowers
You’re going to see your new boss
clinging to the precipice of his Imperial desk
And everyone is in search of something here
they call it competence, and you call it
the salad dressing of the new malady
They say you ought to have eye contact with everyone
you have it with the beasts
why not with humans?
And you are the new talk of centuries
both the old and the new
and you have hoisted both of themon your shoulders
All hurt minds of both dark hemis
pheres
broke down into exile
at home or abroad, etching with broken wrists
what Benjamin called “a charmed circle of fragments.”
And your small bouquet of flowers laughs at your hypocrisy
you toss it away and you watch
until it gets tossed back at you
Suddenly the word ‘obfuscation’ comes between you and the boss
you see him sleeping while you are speaking,
eye contacting And the birds in the yard
chirp away in frenzy, laughing at you
And you start telling your boss of the “fasting man
who tells his dream as if…”
You stop, the boss is sleeping and you are scared
scared that he will suddenly snore
And you won’t know what to do with the malady of both centuries,
The birds have stopped singing
He wakes up as soon as you stop
and says: “don’t, don’t bother the snoring, if I snore,
I’m still listening.”
And he closes his eyes, and you tell him about the word ‘obfuscation,’
To decipher the obliterated cipher of your being and his
And “the fasting man who tells his dream as if he were…”
He suddenly wakes up and says: “be sure I’ll do something about it,
but competence, don’t forget competence…”
And Walter Benjamin says: “a charmed circle of fragments.”
I was not asking for money.
It soils the hand that gives
and the hand that takes
but I don’t tell him, I need a job, a better job, for
sure
And this is not the question. I’m trying to have the eye contact going
And I gauge competence
For this you need a new sort of concentration
Like the one you had when you were being born
Passing through someone in blood and puss, deaf and blind
the concentration of a solid constipation
a towering, excruciating empire of constipation
And then somebody slapping you hard, screaming ‘obfuscation!’
And you opening your eyes to the world, recognizing
that the boss has no snoring habits
He has the unfortunate habit of sleeping soundly only, yes only…
—this I won’t tell you— but here it is anyway;
only, when a writer in exile speaks
You don’t know the new country for sure
and now you hardly know the old one either
And you start again, with your only strength in the argument:
“The fasting man who tells his dream as if he were talking…”
And the boss wakes up: “don’t stop, I’m listening!”
“But Sir, you’re interrupting, I haven’t stopped yet!”
I’m passing through mud and puss, deaf and blind
He sleeps now like a baby in a cradle
on the grass on top of a cliff by the coast
and the waves rolling with the white foam of their whales down
there
“As I was saying…” I begin
And I stop in Benjamin’s “charmed circle of fragments.”
“I am not from this country, you know. I am just talking about
‘the fasting man who tells his dream as if he were talking in his sleep.
Comprenez?” This is a country with two official languages!”
But there is some kind of innocence in this man’s guilt
as there is some kind of guilt in my innocence.
Now, I am all ready for action.
I put my left hand in my pocket
slowly,
sexually
surreptitiously
Remember Benjamin: “Your strength lies in improvisation.
All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”
I open the blade of my knife in my pocket as he sleeps
take out the knife
the baby, oh, the baby, in a cradle on the grass
on top of a cliff by the coast, and the whales down there in the waves
I need a test: is he awake when he is awake?
Is he asleep when he is asleep?
Is he awake when he is asleep
Is he asleep when he is awake?
Is he he?
So language tells you things that reality doesn’t tell you
I decide: I’ll wake him up by telling him a funny story:
The woman says, you cannot do that here, it’s impossible. She
cannot help laughing. The old man is holding something
between his two hands. Kids passing by don’t notice it. It’s
only the shrewd eyes of the old woman that notices the veinstricken
hands of the man holding it between them. Then she
says he shouldn’t be ashamed of himself. He is genuine.
Artistic. Look at the young generation: they don’t even know
how to hold it between their hands! She gets going, but after a
minute she turns back to tell him he can hold it like that for as
long as he wants to. But he has turned his back to her. And she
doesn’t find the hairy back interesting at all. And then suddenly
she sees the front and back of the man at the same time, and
her own face with all the wrinkles reflected in the mirror,
facing both of them.
Is this the “charmed circle of fragments, Benjamin?” I scream
And when the boss wakes up to sneeze ‘obfuscation!’
—dear reader or listener!
“Hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon froere!—
If you want to take a leak, please feel free to get up and go
and do so
This is not a practice in suspense poetry
I thrust the knife, with the same left hand
drive it to the hilt into the heart
And fall supine before him, when he is rising
not to call an ambulance,
but to answer the telephone that started ringing
a minute before I was dead.
Toronto, August 30, 2003