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.