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DarkArt
j a m e s m e e t z e
I-XII
A MANOR HOUSE MONOGRAPH
a l s o b y j a m e s m e e t z e
Dayglo. ahsahta press, 2011
It’s Overhead. fashionably pressed, 2007
I Have Designed This For You. editions assemblage, 2007
Serenades. cy press, 2004
a l s o b y j a m e s m e e t z e
Dayglo. ahsahta press, 2011
It’s Overhead. fashionably pressed, 2007
I Have Designed This For You. editions assemblage, 2007
Serenades. cy press, 2004
DarkArti-xii
J a m e s m e e t z e
a m a n o r h o u s e m o n o g r a p h | n y & s d 2 0 1 3
DarkArt i-xii
J a m e s m e e t z e
a m a n o r h o u s e m o n o g r a p h | n y & s d 2 0 1 3
DarkArt i-xii
7
C O U N C I L
No one wants
more than this
theory of forgetting
this ribbon of steel
a river turned
or a precarious mind
that turns it
on its side.
No one wants this
more than I do
when our heads flood
with all the voices
the furniture movers
move, the voices
of being who we are
when we are free.
When America over-
flows within us.
No one wants
to be a river
more than we.
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9
D a r k a r t I
It is the reluctant magic of human struggle
too connected to living. It is a library
in which we are lost beyond the door.
If I open it, I will remember the outside
of poetry, the bark and June beetles
having fallen from heaven
because it is seasonal, it is summer’s
migration rest-area.
If I discover in wood the light
of someone else’s cool breath
I am magic for it, I am a common fool
in the unmoved world.
My prayer is a ghost, a leaf falling to the ground
the rhythm of what life is and is not doing.
I am told there is a god for everyone
and this is our darkness, our loss:
to know is to wander blind without inquiry.
Look, ghost, you too are legend, madman
a stanza in our larger story.
The words are only echoes returned
both origin and copy, body and shadow.
Eventually, the image wisps away, sings
and listens at each discreet transformation.
My prayer is narrative; it too is a form of song.
These hold together everything we remember.
10
D a r k a r t I I
We raise our voices until only echoes
only civil twilight, until time or heaven
eats our propositions, our temporary
ownership, and our certain foreclosure.
The flimsy magician’s hat-trick can’t fix it.
The broken tower is an irreparable future
gravity and day and dust adumbrate.
The myth beneath it all, a lake
in which a battle shakes.
I hear the report and think, maybe
now it will end, now we can say.
Morning’s salient digits announce
a new decline. Still, we are magic when
we wake like only the breeze matters
the projections of light
only gold and warm. Prediction of light
and heat; a better magic above us.
A different darkness now begins in blue
a spectral composition of light, of matter
of no sound escaping to carry words in space.
The specters of our past are with us to say.
In the oak, bare and crooked spoke
an historical man to me
of now and future history.
11
D a r k a r t I I I
Here is a point in life those lives
both other and behind me inform.
Want and story and loss inhabit me
speaking words aloud to make them real things.
A disappearing act gone long
reverberates in the eyes, or
the mind’s eye, it is a flash of magic
no text can so easy unravel.
The answers lie between boards.
The ghosts are over my shoulder
they are reading with me.
We metamorphose when we read.
So who’s to say that light isn’t blue or pink
when woven between leaves, isn’t wood
or pulp, isn’t paper printed with ink.
The story grows darker with the forest,
the poem in the space between trees.
A different magic is a darker being
when it lives inside us complete
and electric, acting and reacting, fire and matter.
Gray matter in the body’s copse, gray
presence, it bends over to hear.
We learn something in the register of a whisper.
It isn’t wind we are listening to.
12
D a r k a r t I V
The moon is a burnt-out Edison bulb.
You can’t read by it, it’s so cold.
A realer cold gathering in the touch
of dreams of real people
as ghosts, saying words that won’t ever return.
The words have not unfinished business.
They are magicked into being
in our throats, our mouths, in air, to say
“where language fails, poetry begins.”
So we are present at its genesis
on I-don’t-know-what day.
We thump out its rhythms metronomically
like a phantom hand drums on our shoulders.
If the rhythm of all life, if you listen
shines in the body like a celebration
then why is it so hard to be happy
to be inside a life, and living it?
To not be darkness
or the absence of real light under a dark sky?
Why does the city’s glare subjugate the stars?
It’s the history of light being guided
to each of us, to illuminate a path
to follow the voices that lead us on our quests.
To find whatever the grail might be.
12
D a r k a r t I V
The moon is a burnt-out Edison bulb.
You can’t read by it, it’s so cold.
A realer cold gathering in the touch
of dreams of real people
as ghosts, saying words that won’t ever return.
The words have not unfinished business.
They are magicked into being
in our throats, our mouths, in air, to say
“where language fails, poetry begins.”
So we are present at its genesis
on I-don’t-know-what day.
We thump out its rhythms metronomically
like a phantom hand drums on our shoulders.
If the rhythm of all life, if you listen
shines in the body like a celebration
then why is it so hard to be happy
to be inside a life, and living it?
To not be darkness
or the absence of real light under a dark sky?
Why does the city’s glare subjugate the stars?
It’s the history of light being guided
to each of us, to illuminate a path
to follow the voices that lead us on our quests.
To find whatever the grail might be.
13
D a r k a r t V
It is our condition to question
the placement of the thing
whether neutral in its field, or utilitarian
in its holy seat, my public face.
Come to find it isn’t here, isn’t waiting
in the golden light like an answer.
I was reading about cups, words contained
in a trinket of flesh, words for
the thing of love: the human body, I guess.
The way a body churns
everything else is only talismanic
you touch it and are taken.
How can one divorce an object of its feeling?
Will the memory of a place
make it real again?
Does the orchard still bear its fruit
or is it too just a myth of old religion?
Who guards the gate, who waxes
the artifact into a remembrance?
I wanted to drink from the goblet, say
into the handset, “this is the answer,
I have read the prediction
for sun in all our eyes.”
The grail is hidden behind a cloud.
It is the way we are connected.
14
D a r k a r t V I
Certain connections are made
in true discourse
that negate this impossible distance.
These two points in time, situated
on a map, the particulars of history
and locality phenomena, are attached
to a common memory.
The immovable tissue of the Interstate
the study of fences and infinite length
our imprint left on the immortal world
the integration of man and earth
and man’s idea of earth.
It’s the idea that we all just stumble through life
until we land in each other’s arms and know
providence is stronger than accident.
To feel is a condition without remedy, a question.
Are we better off to simply believe
than we are to really see?
Is the process of arriving more important
than the vehicle in which the journey is taken?
Does the language itself limit the possibility?
Poetry is the darkest art.
From it, the world unbraids
into a scientific representation of
the one thing we cannot equate.
15
D a r k a r t V I I
I can say dark because I know
how light happens; every filament
burns toward its end like we do.
Even the biggest stars
their projections in the dark
are waiting to be pulled into the hat.
Because of this vibrating string
a note here changes the whole fabric
and another note returns order.
I wanted to say without distortion:
language is just a tool.
Warped, it becomes a poem.
The order of the poem is arbitrary,
like constellations are; the recipient
of it draws a line from here to here.
So we see a line.
Anyone can make a god out of it.
Morning has broken
because magic is at the heart
of the story we are taught, but
magic is also naughty.
Stars pulled from the collapsible hat
become a bunny, or a lion, or an archer, then
everyone oohs and ahhhs.
16
D a r k a r t V I I I
If I could hocus pocus you into my arms
like a levitated assistant, we would call it floating.
To float upon Orion’s shield.
The Isle of California read to be floating too.
Ghost of the native tongue, a pixel on the map
says, no one builds a friendly city
to write a new legend.
No earthly body is a master of maps.
Each hamlet’s dot has a mirror image on the star chart.
I go there, we go there, or we are somewhere else
a constellation’s history of movement.
We are always in the process of
not knowing, I don’t know, reading the book of.
Many places on the map we’ve yet to go
floating in and out of.
We are above the distance between two cities
with not a cloud at all to rest upon.
Everything is small when lives are being lived
smaller than this or that issue, smaller
than our cumulative memory when the lights go out.
If I could float with you into the otherworld, I would.
If I could have anything to share, then
this simple articulation of sharing would mean
love is a better magic than resurrection.
17
D a r k a r t I X
Again we must begin, must say a constellation is visible
is a little trickier, say assemble all we know
of human geometry: my arm makes an angle
and my brain makes a connection of little bursts.
I am thinking in discreet units.
I am a triangle.
I am a feeling triangle.
My arm unfolds and reaches toward the ideal.
In these little bursts, I think of you in negative space
and you are elemental, you are a charm
of light on this dim bracelet.
The guidance we read bends for us
like a stave of English Yew, how prophesy is
bent to mean anything.
There is no quest, just a flashlight in the distance
the signal of the fool.
The night sky is littered with these
errands of the foolish.
We can’t turn anything to gold
so we keep looking up for it.
We have begun to say how nimble words can be:
gentle, spell, very, far from me.
Feel how they tumble in your fingers
pieces of dust, pieces of stone, pieces of the story.
18
D a r k a r t X
Narrative arcs will always intersect
our real lives in this circle
our emblems in that circle.
Are we following the arc?
In a molecular cloud, light and matter
are kaleidoscopic in my magic eye.
Does the arc follow the sound of my voice?
Does it use the language I know?
Partly for sun, partly for cloud.
Did you note the loft of dandelion seed
as it hovered gently to another field?
Are we always beneath a vast field
of blackness, though it appears blue
waving our arms to feel our way?
Maybe it’s the greatest trick played on humankind
that we think we’re alone on our rubber ball.
We produce applause for ourselves
for no real reason, just to put our hands together
in an irregular staccato clap, clap.
Look at how far we’ve come.
Look how magical it is to gaze at a glowing
screen and interact with our evolving storyline.
There is no special equation for storytelling
neither now, nor even in our telescope’s future.
19
D a r k a r t X I
Intermittently, the messages do arrive
like my daily horoscope to say
do not sit alone with your scrutiny
of the little things: text, figures, balances
or hummingbirds buzzing on a gray day.
If nostalgia enters our cosmographeme
do we remember each increment of anguish
where so much space?
Is our alphabet really that important?
W X Y Z vocalise, the nonsense melody
that colors each day’s ambience.
Can you hear the feeling of a place in its coloratura?
I can see a great island rise
like alchemy’s gold is just metaphorical
and real beauty is more precious than shiny rocks.
Strata whispers in varied tones, cloud-wake
flood-waters’ poem, prepared trees with wind.
There is a translation of birdsong for orchestra.
Sharp and rising vibrato, then a magic flute
the echo’s contradistinction tells me
this is our instruction for listening.
Let go of frames and forms, silence
in what is never without sound.
D a r k a r t X I I
This is the time to acknowledge memory,
the fuzzy inaccurate revisions, the magic
in idle life we reconnoiter to be better engineers
of our own uncertain destiny.
Our libraries have too many answers
and, being such an individualist species
we will never agree or find a consensus.
We will never walk the righteous path.
This is the shape of two currents meeting
and bending, being like water, which we are
but can never embrace.
So the stars’ projection of the far-off past arrives
on this dark orb to a faint and incandescent reply.
Electric magic, arrogant magic, burning
to a predestined resolution.
We are here. I am among us with a song
that is every sound the world makes without words.
Silence is the place of true language
speaking with what breath all of us have.
I sit here and say there, my tired heart
there are those words we know
and use only as incantations.
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22
t I N Y D Y N a M I N E
The colors chime October’s trinity
a messy palette to compose from
but you are a dynamic pronoun
and this is our way
our tiny effort at pink, orange
the connotations of red.
The history of blood
today’s white tunics
and monomaniacal cross.
The leaves burn autumn
at the stake of sundown.
O book, you are a heretic too.
Manor House, LLCNew York, San Diegowww.mhquarterly.com
Copyright © 2013 by James MeetzeAll rights reserved
Frontispiece by Debra Scacco: I am trapped in your shadow, Ink on paper, 150 x 150 cm, 2012; Designed by James Meetze. Covers printed by Daniel Heffernan at Clove St. Press, signatures printed in the United States, and hand sewn in an edition of 150. Typeset in Mercury with Goudy Text titling.
This is ________ of 150.
First Edition, 2013ISBN: 978-0-9859095-3-6
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThanks to the editors of the fine print and digital publications in which these poems first appeared, often in earlier versions: American Letters & Commentary, The Equalizer, The Offending Adam, and Ping Pong: The Literary Journal of the Henry Miller Library.
m a n o r h o u s e m o n o g r a p h s
1. Dark Art by James Meetze, 2013
2. In The Air by Peter Gizzi / Richard Kraft, 2013
I can say dark because I know
how light happens; every filament
burns toward its end like we do.