STOPPAGES

The Stoppages Tree (Julia Guerin)

This poem was inspired by Marcel Duchamp's concept of "Stoppages." A "stoppage" is like a measuring stick, only each stoppage is of a different length. Each section of the poem is a "stoppage," a different measurement of experience. My daughter, Julia, composed this painting based on language from the poem, and using images of "stoppages" from Duchamp's work.

                              1

I am seduced by the stoppage of time,

like Bruckner with his endless symphonies

pushing back the inevitable

silence of the unattended moment.

For the next ten seconds nobody dies.

Late afternoon—the maple goes darker,

cell by cell darker in the slant sunlight.

I can’t be sure the leaves were just as red

ten years ago, or that John Milton’s blood

wasn’t a fraction thicker than my own.

                               2

            I wield shears

                beneath honey locust—

            tenant-neglected,

                grown to ground—

            scissor and step back,

                watch the fluttering

            stem-bound leaves

                follow the branches down.

            I bundle new deadwood;

                three green needles,

            like fangs, guard each twig;

                black bark thorns,

            driven by the gathered droop

                of leaves being lifted,

            pierce through leather

                the flesh of my palms.

            My mind, cuspidate

                in my fingers, moves

            through the patterns of thorn

                proliferating pain.

           

                               3

            The sound of somebody

            dropping the doorknocker

            just once . . . I flee

            unremembered phantasms,

            hold eyes closed tightly—

            tongue like paper—reach

            for the glass of water, seem

            the glass in the dark

            and dilate waking.  Setting

            the glass off the table

            edge, grope, settle it on

            the corner.  More sleep.

            Go to sleep.  Eyelids pinch

            a thread of sunlight spinning

            through the curtain dust.

            The radiator knocks . . .

            just once.  Vagueness spreads

            an exit through counted time

            past another me I meet

            fading, questioned in sodden

            stillness and crepuscule.

            Quick manufacture of deep

            inconsequence—someone not

            I overhears singing I have

            not composed, conversation

            rendered without regret,

            the voice of the homunculus

            at the core of the blood cell

            and metaphor.  I’m billiard-

            brained!  Blood and ivory balls

            percuss on clipped green

            and blue crystal; in each

            sphere a ray is loosed

            to sublimate the ricochet.

            The angel’s share offered

            and unattained (air breathed

            in sleep), a rarification

            of spirit I can’t sniff, taste,

            pour into existence, but

            think is a wonder of wines.

                              4

What interior thing sleeps with memory,

knows the certain locus of nothing

and the time of any new thing only

in the night-light of its circumscription?

What does this slumbering watcher feel

waking beside a lover of years past

who’s discovered herself under wild skies,

in a land contoured by the height of sand?

His eyes pinched, his ears stopped,

his dream-worn senses insinuate

the wonder of that endlessness

and expatiate like a ticking clock

on what he thinks he knows of his own death.

Seeking out the reality three

dimensions deep within himself, his mind,

that strict lump that can explain a bird,

that cagey bastard, calmly discourses

on phantom and fading gods, while his warming

beauty evaporates and mingles with his breath

ecstatically generating weather.

                                    5

        It was perfectly smooth, the earth

        I woke to—featureless, without

        mountain, grass, sand, bird, lion—

        skin-tight, a bald head.

           

        Balloon on which plaster is packed,

        this world before a world; I stood

        in dark after moonless dusk, and

        said, nonetheless, this is my world.

        I recognized the horizon,

        the leavening of gravity,

        the proximity of sky.

        A fit of rain sprayed my face.

           

        The lazy Susan landscape threw me

        down.  My first sweetheart limped

        up on the brace of her polio.

        Naked, I rolled on my belly.

        I woke, the nixie gone, salt water

        on my lips.  The moon rose, pulling

        water back into a great wave,

        holding it back above my head.

                               6

            Johann Sebastian Bach is

                        walking

                                    into this room.

            Buddha croaks

                        and Bach

                                    still

                        walks into this room.

            Walk the road,

                        stop, cough,

                                    crack the bone

                        of sound—

            Bach is walking

                        into this room

                                    whirling

                        a grager.

            Through stained glass,

                        scan

                                    berry trees

                        and sun swizzle—

            Bach is waltzing

                        into

                                    this

                        room.

            Clap your eyes!

            Johann Sebastian

                        Bach is

walking

                        into

            this room.

                                                                                

                              7

        A creaking ecstatically extended

        wakes me early in the night.

        Winter air binds board in stone (a

        hairline runs down the façade,

        splitting bricks, parting mortar from its

        hold) one more fraction of an inch.

        Prone, I imagine the house shift

        off its load-bearing edge

        and topple into the basement.

        When will it stop, the house grind

        out its antagonism of stress and nail

        to silent, unlevel motionlessness?

        Or will I stop waking to this house?

                            8

            Water on the beach

            and the pebbled surf—

            the air is full

           

            of milk.  A hand

            touches me; there

            I hate, but not

            the hand.  Nature

            is the second

            displeasure, when

            the first tips

            the world and drinks.

            Round, hard, the pebble,

            and black.  Not

            much else.  Wet,

            it shines.  Dry,

            dull.  I keep it

            in a dish of green

            water.  The blunted

                                               

            shard of glass,

            the charred stick,

            the aluminum bent

            to a coin, the

            dimensionless dream

            of sand, calm

            if I look at them.

            As I age it is not

            that I like people

            less, but have less

            to do with them.

            I can say the one

            thing—about the pebble—

but the other comes

in white noise,

            water on the beach.

On a Dreamed Report of Death

We await those who die in wires,
tolled at midnight with little bells.

A dead face is an injected wax
or unbelieved victim of murder.

Yes, I knew him. Long ago. He is dead?
Only dead again? And only now?

A remarked absence. Emotion vacancy.
Oh, a vague perhaps, perhaps. Regret

for the loss of intelligent laughter.
But the wonder of our being is faded.

I know the color of my blood is blue,
see it through the crepe of my wrist.

I can’t imagine his now gone red,
a blue jay turned to cardinal overnight,

then to crow, scribbled with white words,
living on again in description.

Death, an appendage of memory,
a wireworm on the body of a fish

we try to grasp, releases its host
to test our flesh with constriction.

We wrench ourselves to be free of it,
and when we are, think only of our pain.

All recollection is a form of lie.
Here, in this city block of wild sand,

the mounds in the yard are my old friends;
only the man I am may tend them.

They sleep beneath the scratching of my rake,
dance into gardens only in my sleep.

I wish him long life beneath the sun.
Perhaps he thinks of me now and then.

The House

My parents and six siblings and I lived in this house on Sr.

Officers Row at Warren Air Force Base. My dad was a colonel.

The house in dreams is always the same,
Though its rooms, like lungs, bulge and contract
And sometimes the rain
Bends ceilings and bursts through in cataracts,
Frightening as spitting your teeth down the drain.
Dad’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The old trees, too, are still the same.
We rake and burn leaves in the driveway
And recall legendary Claire,
Who caught fire leaping on a dare, they say,
Whose ghost still turns on the faucet upstairs.
Mom’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The stairway in the front hall is the same.
I find my mail stacked on the newel post,
Though I don’t live here.
Though I am still alive, I am a ghost
The others cannot touch or see or hear.
Dad’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The ways we use each room are still the same,
But the television is black and white
And the kitchen is a mess.
We feel no urgency, no physical delight
In being where there is no light, no darkness.
Mom’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The river runs through our backyard just the same.
Memories of trysts and laughter, beneath the willows,
Though vivid, never intrude.
The river is a dark chalice threatening to overflow,
Or frozen as stone, dead, supine, nude.
Dad’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

My bedroom and closet still seem the same.
While the window no longer looks out on the trains
On the trestle beneath the moon,
The closet door mirror no longer refrains
From showing me what has come only too soon.
Mom’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The attic and the basement are both the same.
We hide in one or the other with our fear—
Of life, or of death—
The attic when all that we hold dear
Disappears; in the basement holding our breath.
They’re gone, and that house will never be the same.

Natural Violence

“What stops the rain

    if not desire,”

jokes the rippled windowpane.

    Frozen fire

laves each desiccated blade.

    Living dead,

the unenlightened shade

    shakes its head.

Let he who hasn’t sinned

    be the first

to stop the stones of wind

    and murder thirst.

Another brief thundershower

    washes the soil,

leaves it dry as flour,

    water under oil —

flash-floods down the street,

    filling sewers,

desultory ending to the heat.

    A man lures

a twelve-year-old into his car

    and disappears.

She is found, not far

    from home, in tears.

Lightning is the veins of his 

    hand tearing

the limb from the tree.  Thunder is

    his swearing.

Falling out of purple sky

    like fists, hail

answers every answer “why?”

    Crops fail.

Farmer sends his milk cow

    to slaughter

for want of hay.  Now 

    he drinks water.

They dredge the river and tow

    the flatboats

until the water will not flow

    and nothing floats.

Flowering Crab

Scarlet unopened, the buds of flowering crab

bleach out in sunlight, go pale pink and drab.

After the third day, the wind loosens the petals,

and one flutters to the grass and settles.

It works its way down to the soil—

wind and water rub it thin as foil.

Then, between each cell, oxygen convenes,

until the petal of itself is rendered clean.

It dissolves into pattern everywhere;

if grown again to petal it won’t know or care.

Abstraction, Sonnet #624

The sound of time is the sound of light,
So the morning sun would seem to say;
But now, when it’s either soon or late,
Is silent, dark, when any shade of gray.
Infancy (now in its shroud of amnesia)
Saw a thing as it was there to hear
With ecstatic nerves of synesthesia,
Or like a planet without an atmosphere,
Naked to the bombardment of the stars,
Spun from space. That memory, stored
In our synapses, fights a prolonged war
To glimpse what our mind has barred;
A light the color and the sound of time
We know is not a product of the mind.

Song of the Telegraph (Charles Burchfield), Sonnet #623

I’ve always seen the world as quivering,

Motes in my eyes, random as Brownian

Motion, more than sight, but delivering

What has been awaited for an eon.

Even rocks I find on Michigan shores,

Which crowd memorabilia on my desk,

Tremble in the dimness the light abhors.

(Rocks have too many answers, so don’t ask.)

Living things are a different matter:

Trees, cats and birds shudder even when still,

And when they move they pretend to shatter

Within a blinked tear that’s started to rill.

What’s not dead is my electricity,

Motion grounding my own haecceity.

Note: haecceity (hakˈsēədē/) means “the property of being a unique and individual thing”

Horizon, Zenith and Atmosphere (Paul Klee), Sonnet #622

I see that cold red dot

At the center of all,

As I stand, myself a spot

Not round, not flat, not tall,

No more than open eyes —

No zenith on horizons,

Just air as thick as sighs

Repeat seeking orisons.

The red dot draws on will

Until I disappear

With nothing to fulfill,

Nothing to find or fear.

At the center of pressure

I can’t take its measure.