Dirt Eaters

for Brenda and Conrad

No one was the wiser
How much blood
There would be

No one seemed to care
Given to stenches
They can’t see

Offshore we must find
A means that is
Pure to gather again

We must shove dirt
In our mouth until
We taste blood

That blood occulted
Like the 5% who
Took all the wealth

In the meantime
There will be new
Uses in this eating

Of dirt this new re
membering which must
Remain our meaning.

All This is Discourse (Statement)*

Reading Oppen’s Daybooks and selected prose recently I was struck again by the diversity of Oppen’s philosophical sources, which include Neoplatonism, Jacques Maritain, Aquinas, Leibnitz, (William) James, Karl Jung, and of course Martin Heidegger. While there is no denying Oppen was invested in philosophical problems and discourse, he also realized philosophy’s limitations as they relate to poesis. For Oppen philosophy could never be anything more than a stimulus for the work at hand, if not also another object to be incorporated into the work, another set of words to be tested as things with which to think, to generate, to know as much as anyone knows. I wonder in fact if some damage has not been done to the reception of Oppen’s work by the focus on philosophy, as well as by such self-mythologizing accounts as Oppen’s own letters concerning his suspected “plagiarism” of Heidegger. Eschewing any rigorous analogization of Oppen’s poetry and philosophical concepts and systems, it seems more important that we, as scholars and poets, put to use our own experience about how philosophy and theory infiltrates our work, potentializes the imagination, and lends itself to poetry’s toolbox, if only to the ends of inoperativity (those tools breaking). For it seems, as Zukofsky notes in *Bottom: on Shakespeare*, that poetry and philosophy do not usually get along, and yet at the same time would jealously put on the mask of the other. Oppen’s work for me is proof that the poet may be every bit as rigorous as the philosopher in thinking one’s existence in relation, however the thing philosophy does not often do which Oppen’s poetry does is enact. Philosophy lacks action. And where philosophy becomes active, when it does the thing it would otherwise propose and systemetize, it broaches poetry. Poetry’s enaction (what Stein famously called “composition as explanation”) proves Spinoza correct when he writes “the eyes are demonstrations of the mind.” However I would extend this proposition to the poem’s movement. To read the poem as a kind of field of meaning a la “composition by field,” but also the wonderful event horizons of Oppen’s late-work, is to move with the line and into lines as lines intend meaning in their motions, the measure and sound and consequence of those motions. This “saying of saying” or “pure expression” exceeds conceptualization embodying what is perhaps most ethical about the poem as an act of meaning: that the poem exceeds what can be said and thus thought about it beyond its own reenactment. The way we make it active by reading it and thinking with it beyond any convenient recourse to criticism or theory per se.

*presented as an opening statement for The Shape of Disclosure George Oppen Centennial Symposium panel, "The Literary-Philosophical Spectrum," organized by Poets House April 8th, 2008 at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Two Inconsequentials (Deadpan)

with Dorothea Lasky

"Two inconsequential things can come together to form a consequence."
--Jack Spicer


Everything is important

Everything is so important now
The lilac flower growing up
From what seems to be a washbasin
The clouds
I remember the old leper’s lips in this moment
I remember the odd man in California
Who did not love his wife
But could not stop talking about her either
And so, maybe he loved her slightly
But yet had something like hate, not the full thing, his complaints
Echoed in me
They were complaints about me somehow
And what about the boy
Who was left for dead under the airplane?
What about him?
I cannot remember his name, although I want to
These poems are essays
Important ones
And everything else became important when I met you
Everything became important again
I had been called elitist by those closest to me
For trying to think that we had a shot
To come on and make this world right
I had my voice made fun of
I had died inside a million times by
The lack of anything, infinite resignation
Infinite resignation, Kierkegaard says
Is the last stage before faith
And you can’t have anything
Like a belief in the moon
Without seeing your own black night in front of you
Like some tempting ghoul, its ferocious eyes
Darling, we are the ghouls, but we are also tender
And when act upon the world in this way
The world cannot help but be happy at our choice
To not give up
I will not give up!
I will not give up anything til
They lay my dead head upon the ground
And smash it, take pictures of it
Do all the horrible things they had always wanted to do to it
Before they do all those horrible things
I will make one choice to be good with you
Let us be good, iced-bright one
The purest thing empties out of you
And I can hear it
The sweetest bird-like thing
Is what it is, is what you are
Its acid-yellow head
Infinitely tender upon us all
Otherworldly, tenderly enacting
The kind of actions that make the saint
But not a bad saint, a good saint
In front of me in these symptoms
In this age of doom
All my dying ideas
Alive again
Because you breathed the air that you did
Important air
That swirls around you
Everything
Every piece of air important
Because it feeds us and you
And our brothers and sisters
And the other people we love
Because they are living with us
In this important moment, this time of being us
So that we cannot help but rejoice that we are one thing
So God?
Yes God
We are all one thing in this God
We have infinite resignation to be God
Because God is the thing
After you have all but given up
Everything
The most important everything
But everything
My love
And yours
The children’s love
To breathe this air
The air of health
Which is in and of itself
With the black clanging in the distance
A version of a saint


That heart slowed by glass
That heart that is not mine
Not yours that heart outside
Which I can see no longer

Works floats there and is a
Resin for what once was li
ved what twice-dying breath

Slows within this resin there
Is a sense of effect in glass
How one got here to be so red
And not somewhere for the
Heart to stop time would be

Like this we will begin in
Allegory again demonstrati
ons will be a medicine for

Thinking and doing what we
Do the cause of all glass to
Frame this and exhibit a case
Of us encasement of our fact.


You’re dying O you’re dying
Into the stage lights and second
Lives reflections that are the

Lives of adult children not sure
What age they are yet living
Against that light of day what

Hardens us against it once ag
ain made the face soft you are
Talking and I am always tired

But two inconsequential things
Can become a consequence ba
cked by what life was impend

ing a stage happening at every
Moment we died of our dying
What women what men are we

What result of this that some
Time passes how the face beca
me hardened in this knowing.


How the people we are become
Us actually exponential powers
We became action before that

Light as a kind of action those
Lights feel hard we knew we we
re dying before we knew what

Hit us exactly some images of
Us seem to be more real for the
Fact that there are others we hold

Inside us other women other men
For the fact that we make pictures
We are “not me” we are them th

ese eyes blinking through us all
The identities we had to kill did
We really have to kill them to be

Any one and the curtain and the
Stage and the audience that is
Never one hearing these lines.


I think of Henry
James the way
his characters mo

ve like animals
with memories
remembering wh

at they did not do
what they could
not become be

cause truly time
is their master
and what we can

not imagine our
deaths as the stage
lights pour down

on our faces and
the sunlight pours
down like it were

this real light of
dying O we are
dying to meet ea

ch other there you
talk while I am al
ways tired resig

ned infinitely res
igned to touching
you in these dis

tances in them
fear almost seemed
like our friend.

I am angry at you, Death (Deadpan)

with Dorothea Lasky

I am angry at you, Death

Death, I have been angry at you
For such a long time
And I still am
So angry at you
For giving me too many things to take myself away from
Hollow out the time of them for the sake of it
Metal bowls I leave the fruit in, but they change eventually
I don’t want to ever not change, but I want something constant
Like the ocean
I don’t want the ocean to ever die
And yet, you steal the saltwater from it as a lark
You take the seabirds from it one by one
As you glance at them casually, a party
Of seabirds raining down
My breath labored
At the light of all my birds
Raining down on the ocean.
You know, one day, I will kill you
Before you have a chance to
Do anything anymore to the people I love
Leaving them awry in the summer sun
Or bloody on the pulpit
Leaving all the people I love bloody on the pulpit
And raining down with things I cannot contain
I cannot contain you but I will kill you
So swiftly one day in the morning
I will enter a room and there will be so much
Folding of the Spring that I have created and made
My life into it will be like you are dead once and for all
How will you feel to be dead once and for all?
All of it happening to you like you have no empathy
I don’t think it is that you have no empathy
But moreso that you are so wild
You cannot stop to consider our feelings
On the day I will kill you I will be so wild
That I will not have a civilized moment to consider your feelings
I will act upon you in a reddish smoky haze
Because I am more powerful than you ever gave me credit for
My limits exceed that of other men before me
And I have prepared for this strike
My whole life
And when the time is upon us
I will do the thing I have set out to do for this humanity
As you creak under me into the earth
A groaning, lepered thing
A fallen thing we will all learn to forget forever


I had one little book

I had one little book
Of a boy thrust in the snow
Now I will think of him forever
In his quietude, the warm December lights of the inside
And then January, the quietest month
With its green smokestacks
And the purple fog hanging over everything
I walked from the Green St. Station
To my house on the edge of the park
And no one knew
That I was that little boy
I never told a soul I wrapped myself
In reddish towels and laid down
In the middle of the floor
Til time came to me as a convincer
I was silenced only by own regret
That I had been born this thing
We all look upon
And I look upon
The many things
That are encased in glass
Dear Love, Friends, and Animals, like you
I do not want to be in glass ever
Instead, you can leave me in the snow
As you pour water slowly over my bones
Flowers will grow from me eventually
The flowers, they will grow from me eventually
If you finally learn to be silent with me
If you finally learn to leave me be


Deadpan 2

I don’t care if the system is corrupt
I will continue to donate my organs to history
Take my heart, my brain, my brainhole
Take it: veins, eyes
And legs
That have wrapped around the trees of summer when I was alone
I didn’t want to be this thing as clear as day
Anyway
Anyway, I wanted to be
The purest clump of sand in the palm of my love
Where is he? Where is that clump of sand where I am held?
I can feel the love of my soul surrounding me
But no hand upon me
And in that
I place the hand upon myself
Oh could I look upon myself
Sweet slumber of hands on me
Yellow seagulls above the olive green pools
Orange sandbars in the blue-green pools


Quote of the day: *Don’t shoot me please!*
Shining out in your wild sentences silences

Like a sin of these structures bursting an
Ecology bust every ought how will our

Culture survive without New Orleans one
Wonders there is no way to lyricize so

We disaster culture crowns its remnants
Revenants and ruins politics the hyper-

telic claims siphoning the dead for whose
Use a force no “nature” has seen that open

Which is us our subsistence while we keep
Fucking each other up the silence sentence

In this repeats a structure of every police
The maximuses of exiled wishes we are not

Sure what they have said those citizens the
Levees themselves in broken articulation a

Variation on a variation of a theme by Will
iams I’m sorry we didn’t reinforce properly

The levees of New Orleans the oil we suck
ed from the Gulf made us rich we suspect

The waterfront real estate of the 9th Ward
Will make us richer sincerely sovereignty.


Veritic in songs stars cycle
Disaster cuts the vision was
A distance we could feel but

Never know audience to the
Perception of words as we
Were hearing them float

In the lights that dream of
Distance the way tanks dreamt
Us blood flowed like crude

From a bird’s appearance in
That light under it a night of
Floodlamps and checkpoints.


Under it that night song permanent
Tanks don’t turn here and veins don’t

Bleed yet flesh vanishes from flesh
A proposition about fire the light be

fore a thousand arrows flew thru it
So it seemed Lear floated on those

Burning stairs a ghost if eyes were
Ever certain and they are not would

We see ourselves again in reflections
Of other eyes could this heart Cor

delia be true if eyes didn’t just take
In light but threw it out into world

What I alighted under it singing oth
er kinships in this dark under this

Dark lamp by which our straying
Says everything the dead who never

See me speaking for them won’t save
Us spirits what work I can’t intend.


How will we know anything
The snow that surrounds us
Like an endless color I knew

We are simply a diadem for
ced to rule ever forced to
Rule by these objects with

These objects like the body
Was an object you said you
Object to this that we should

Be cremated so that they ca
n’t do anything with us when
We're dead those collectors

Of curiosities and culture
Other experiments upon un
ruly bodies subjects all this

Makes me think of our dis
agreement about some lines
I wrote that “the dead do not

intend anything” though I
Meant this as a question ab
out their powerlessness.


What exterior was I felt
Inside it your patience
The blood folds these
Worlds were one single

Information the way
The sunlight hits us while
We are here in bed no
Subject but in this ob

jective no other outside
In the lips begin it is not
As if we are outside them
Or inside them merely

When they touch and
Feeling begins somewhere
Else the lips begin to kiss
Like mirrors touching

Making no reflection but
One we can’t see this is ca
lled immediacy so love is
What we subtract from.

Organs Without Bodies

We gave our limbs we gave our throats
We gave our eyes to it and this is not
A voice for the dead organs float with
out bodies I wouldn’t wish my life

Upon anyone like an impossible image
We were anything other than this yet
That song gets sung for the numerous
For the numinous we are wastes the wo

rld is laid waste in reverse when we
Imagine other uses for I and we the
Way they became weapons and speak for
What they shouldn’t what they are not

This gift unaccountable of what a body
Can do we know too much we do not
Know what use to put it to so this is
More terrible than anything we know.