poems by Michael Heller

presented by Raluca Tanasescu
click aici pentru versiunea română

 

MICHAEL HELLER (b. 1937) is an American objectivist poet, of Jewish and Romanian origins, who has published over twenty volumes of poetry, essays and memoirs. His newest book is This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010. Other recent works include: Eschaton (2009), a book of poems, and Beckmann Variations & Other Poems, a work in prose and poetry (2010). His collection of essays on George Oppen, Speaking the Estranged, was published in 2008. An expanded edition was published in 2012. His many awards and honors include prizes from The New School for Social Research, Poetry in Public Places, the New York State CAPS Fellowship in Poetry, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America, a New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fund for Poetry. For many years, he was on the faculty of New York University and has taught at The Naropa University, The New School, San Francisco State, Notre Dame and other universities. His papers are collected in the Stanford University Libraries.

 

 

Autobiographia

 

 

Weren’t you given a text?  To honor the congregation, the organ dulcet,

the cantor’s hum, hymnal of Europe’s East, steps of sound made fugal

 

but laden with a weariness (joy for another day), history transmogrified

into plaint upon plaint, to be ushered into manhood, to be brought other’s pain.

 

Early on, the Shekinah gone into exile. Most of that century you saw

not love but power, cruelty, the face which laughs against the sun.

 

What could you do if you were not steeped in things like the others

but merely walked to buy milk or bread,  heaven above, earth below,

 

to visit the old streets, the elm’s grainy seeds lying across paving stones,

tourists milling and the Atlantic past the bridge brilliant as a sword cut.

 

Saline, solute, salve, this art burning to base metal.  What carries one

who would sing a hymn but eddies of language–never the pure thing–

 

maelstroms and tidal pools, word-forms, the will hemmed in like an ocean

to its basin,  rhymed to the rack of its tides.  The word’s ring deflected

 

in the baffles of the city into space, echo bounced from storefront to tower,

fading toward soundlessness–ear cupped to catch emptiness, translation

 

to Paradise from which speech fled.  Put down this cloth, said the rabbi.

Cover the text and emplace the cap.  Live neither in blacks nor whites.

 

Avert from the scroll  rising above the earth, gaze upon limitless blue,

the inventive weaving of clouds.  Live straight ahead.  Appearance

 

will be your pain and mentor.  Be at the threshold, not at the Ark.

And later,  to go back to plucking a word from the weave,

 

lamé, silver, deep magenta, designs mazed over the fold, lines and margins,

and underneath, as though one sensed through flesh, the delicate structure

 

of beths and vavs on parchment, the inner and outer of secrets.

 

 

On A Phrase of Milosz’s

 

He is not disinherited,
for he has not found a home

 

 

He has found vertiginous life again, the words

on the way to language dangling possibility,

 

but also, like the sound of a riff on a riff,

it cannot be resolved.  History has mucked this up.

 

He has no textbook, and must overcompensate,

digging into the memory bank if not for the tune

 

then for something vibratory on the lower end of the harmonics.

He’s bound to be off by at least a half-note–here comes jargon

 

baby–something like a diss or hiss.  Being is

incomplete; only the angels know how to fly homeward.

 

Yet, once the desperate situation is clarified, he feels

a kind of happiness.

 

*

 

Later, the words were displaced and caught fire, burning syllables

to enunciate the dead mother’s name.

 

(Martha sounding then like “mother”)

 

Wasn’t it such echoes that built the city in which he lives,

the cage he paces now like Rilke’s panther?

 

He was not disinherited.

 

He was not displaced

 

He is sentimental, hence he can say a phrase like his heart burst

 

The worst thing is to feel only irony can save

 

The worst thing is to feel only irony.

 

 

Lecture with Celan

 

How many know

the number of creatures is endless?

 

So many know,

only a gasp in their questions is possible.

 

All that fullness–

of wounds that won’t scar over,

 

pain’s grillework

persisting in the memory.

 

What sets one free

within the sign and blesses the wordflow

 

without barrier?

Not literature, which is only for those

 

at home in the world

while air is trapped in the sealed vessel,

 

contained in our

containment, our relation to earth.

 

Omnivore language,

syntax of the real, riddling over matter,

 

more difficult to ken

than the talmudic angelus. Thus what black

 

butterflies of grief

at this leaf, at this flower? Already you

 

have moved over ground

beyond past and future, into a strange voicelessness

 

close to speech,

both dreadful and prophetic–all else utility

 

and failure. And now,

the work builds to a word’s confines,

 

to a resemblance of lives

touching the history of a rhyme between earth and dying.

 

 

A Dialogue of Some Importance    

 

 

One’s hand. Its whole existence.

Miniscule things it seeks to grasp.

 

the hand that moves to touch,

lost by the mind before it moves,

so who propels it thus?

 

Her nipple. A crumb. The furled edge of a tissue.

Surely there is some charm to rolling bread

into small resilient balls, casting them off

the fingertips to squawking ducks.

 

is it only an emissary,

a move of a heart in flight,

to mark where, in outward scenery,

it seeks to lodge itself?

 

Often, I am swamped by incredible pleasure,

by the wild connection a thing makes between

my thumb and finger, as though desperately alive

in some galvanic dance. Ouroboros tastes his own tail,

 

self love? love’s self?

who guides a hand knows

the horror of attached.

 

but I have made deities

out of the lint of carpets,

metallic granules and snotballs,

especially out of lost eyeglass screws.