MARC WIDERSHIEN |
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Marc Widershien, a native Bostonian, began his studies of art and music at an early age. His principal teachers–Helmut Krommer (art), Sarah Mindes Scriven and Linwood Scriven (violin)–highly influenced his thought and development. At the age of 18, he met Samuel French Morse and later John Malcolm Brinnin, studying poetics with both. Widershien has had wide experience in publishing poetry, translations, book reviews, articles, and visual art. His work is archived at SUNY Buffalo. His recent book, The Life of All Worlds, is set to go into its third printing. Of the poems on this page, "DrumBeat," "Of Songs," and "The Crystal Lily" were first published in The Neovictorian/Cochlea. See www.marccreate.com for more information on Widershien's life and work.
CONTENTS
Drumbeat Of Songs The Crystal Lily The Bison Knelt Prayer for My Mother Morning in Babylon Last Day in London Elegies April – Parkman Drive Larz Anderson Park The Child Charlestown, 2000
DRUMBEAT
In memory of Ann
1.
It is a political year. The climate is bedded down
in dark irrational cold. I turn up the gas heater.
By noon the sun has splashed the living room windows
above the upright piano, and the music of autumn beguiles.
The leaves, impaled against the sky, seem more golden.
It is the last drum-beat of autumn on the earth.
2.
Torrential rain. The violet iris with its yellow points
leans out of a half-filled glass. It cannot live
outside the crystal. Today rain, tomorrow rain.
The bloom cannot risk the insurgency of the season.
3.
October 15 – the sun has gone terse
the squirrel is laid open on the country road
the fiery goldenrod has come and gone.
The season of the malcontent,
it has been an angry year.
4.
Search for consolation.
Kneel at the altar of Jamaica Pond
and imagine it as it was a century ago
like an impression caught in a shutter,
an eternal moment out of time
that makes the current day
more bearable. Meanwhile,
the water at midday
offers up its absolution.
5.
Stone arches of the Fenway,
a gazebo in the middle of a field
and the mystery of feet without faces walking
6.
Is there a rebus about dying?
Nature's pictures speak
but I cannot find the voice,
my mouth is stopped by salt.
Today there is a regatta on the Charles
while a heavy storm approaches.
The rowers are in tune with the bell horn.
There is a natural rhythm to every event.
But death is undefinable.
Unleavened dreams expire on a hospital bed.
7.
The days of autumn
are coming to an end.
The leaves are auburn mush
on the flooded roads.
Many lives are lost in torrential
rain as the bituminous clouds have
shown no mercy to the faltering breath.
There is a moment of light, however,
for every hour of distress.
8.
The hours of pain have come to an end.
She sleeps peacefully, a white rose and a red rose
on her bosom. Her blue eyes once open like the sea
are now introspective. Her hair still scarlet
blows in a room still as a mausoleum.
I walk to the window and look out at the Boston
skyline engraved with early morning light.
I walk back and stroke her forehead.
The tubes are now removed
as she no longer labors for breath.
I ask her to speak, but can only realize
an empty silence. My heart implores her
not to leave, but if I must be alone
I must accept my own vacant stare
into the rich abyss.
9.
Tonight we set back the clock.
We drive to Salem, home of witch hangings,
of the Scarlet Letter and the Industrial Revolution.
The last weekend before Halloween,
there are tourists, and fairs, and museums.
We are jittery, but feel light surround us,
the light of a deceased woman who relished
the Gothic We dine in Swampscott
over an ocean view with a tide that now
envelops the shore. The light begins to
fail. We have enjoyed the day
vicariously – which uplifts us for the time being. 10. It is Tuesday. She is
ashes. Locks of her hair are
all that is left of her envelope. I
try to find her in my dreams, in
music, in the abundance of acidic leaves and
the African violets that have survived
this long. There is nothing left
she can call her own. Her soprano voice
descends on me from the heavens. I call her name; it
comes back to me. It is the memory of a
voice or an expression – enchanting,
everlasting. This is my supplication. It is the last
drum-beat of autumn on the earth.
October 29, 1996 Boston
_____________________________ OF SONGS
In memory of Paul Celan Orphic man
how the rivers of his
nature rise up to shelter
him. The ghosts of morning
walk with him,
chant with him,
while the sun slides
along branches and the world
slithers of its own accord. Return return
the pomegranates are
in flower . Grasp the
circumference of air in your hands; spirits rush through
–. You are the neck of
the hourglass slowly the nectar –.
Walk up from the wilderness
into the garden
by the mountains of
spice –
Shulemite slowly slowly
you forever in my
weaving.
____________________________ THE CRYSTAL LILY So many stark
beautiful faces gone into the
worlds of light. Man made art out of
the materials: rockweed anemones, the herring
gull, pink coral, the bark of a tree – until the jackboot
summoned you to the kingdom of the
night – . The child who saw the
skeleton in the mirror still haunts us with
a question What have you done
with my life? A pond crystalled
with lilies or a swamp maddened
by flesh rotting into rags – it
was here that the madman found
his destiny. The child we were
asks us: What have you done
without our lives? Blackened sun against
a full sky of suns too numerous
to count too radiant for the
eye. Jerusalem grieve a moment
a millennium
you generations of
the Diaspora grieve then go on
____________________________ THE BISON KNELT The bison knelt at
the water hole by the treeless plain and finding no water
expired, but woke in the
hunting ground where the spears were
made of crystal and the human shed
his skin. Stars addressed the
skies and the mountain
peaks touched them. In the past the night
sky was a violet curtain with rips here and
there, but now it was all one sky
one day. The dead were not
here to be seen, and what one had
taken as given was not. No deer shot on
ranges no one shut up behind gray walls,
for this was a place of no men or if they
looked like men it was only an
appearance incorruptible as
diamond – transparent as air.
___________________________ PRAYER FOR MY MOTHER You enriched me from
the busy womb fed me nutrients and birthed me into
1944. To go back, to try to walk that curving
shore that brought us here
would be defeat. I have learned to
walk the world outside, watching the autumn
dyings feeling the forgiving
bliss. Preying on one
another we cannot soar higher
than we are at this moment. I would follow you
into the next garden – which would be a
violation – there where thought
becomes a way of saying. Torn from the walls
of our loins language still
prevails. We touch what we
cannot see, yet we touch – we
touch the abundant space and achieve
redemption of a kind, a growth of another
kind that tells us how to
live It is not the fact of
our dying but of living that
endures. On the charts of
human consciousness all the totems are
inscribed. From the broad
windows of a hospital room under the constant
stars, soaring buildings in
their graceless light become fragments of
Olympia. So may my mother
taste of the sun before its birth.
1988 ___________________ MORNING IN BABYLON Behind the casket
walk twenty Jewish men some bearded as if
just off the boat, others clean_shaven:
the mystical and mundane. The tanager is an
unmusical bird that alights on their
waistcoats and yarmulkes. They take no notice; they walk through
towns and valleys, mountains that
overlook the snaked rivers. Still there is no
music as they bury their
dead, for the soul is a
bull breaking through its
outward annihilation. The washed body is ready for
deliverance, there is no summer
shooting of the wild fowl, and the nests are
undisturbed. Twenty drops of blood sewed once in Zion course through
history. Nothing has changed.
Today is a mourning
day and there is no music
on the earth.
______________________ LAST DAY IN LONDON Across the sea of
cloud, over the island vulnerable as peace, jagged edges below give a puzzle shape to the abyss. I find a civilization at 35,000 feet among these rocks of
a distant world. The 727 is our earth
for now, busy cubicle always on the brink of extinction.
We're bound for
American shores, the tradesman's coast rich with jewels and
insanities, but all one knows of
saneness. No high gates, city walls, its bounty of
democracy an infection. A Haitian immolates
himself in front of Boston's
state capitol, to protest fascism in another land. The clouds have given
way, each frontier is like blue air over a godly
beach, and a white ribbon
running across the empyrean. No twisted track and unused chimney
stacks, round arches and
graffiti on tiles inlaid with Spanish
art, no turrets, archways, flags at full mast
over Buckingham, no towns: Gants Hill,
Wanstead, Leytonstone-Mile End-Bethnal
Green, medieval woodcutters
at Charing Cross. Coming home to
America, its starvation of the
spirit, somehow gives the
spirit sanctuary – tired hopes are at
full mast. _________________ ELEGIES The oak tree dwells in the lapidary skies
of November, its bark coarse and
toughened like an elephant's
hide. What prophecy rings inside that trunk as out of the innards of Leviathan? From the breakfast
table I am watching myself
watch you – the oak leaves last
to fall in the orphaned year. Is it for love you share the
perilous growth? Then you appear in a miraculous
spring. I am that blind
brother who walks toward you, Thoreau's tree made
divine. You bear acorns, your
leaves are lobed. The gods run in your
veins and elevate you
toward the summits toward those barely
imagined healing places. ____________________ APRIL – PARKMAN DRIVE
Nature confesses
harmony in the April snows, music dresses the
unstill waters under advancing clouds. I drive along
on a knotted road. Mozart prevails with
a solitary clarinet that rises over land
and water and prevails. Reality: a row of
gulls on a sand bar. All is a
proclamation, told with subtlety for which I cannot
find the word. It must be a constant
aspiring.
___________________________ LARZ ANDERSON PARK Curving hills diagonal dance of a
kite bending colors emerging
over the horizon. Skies determined me
that day hiking the hill of birch and berry in the foreground where sky confronts
earth What happy
configurations of families bickering over kites as one by one they rose and fell. _____________________ THE CHILD Proclaim
reclaim
the peregrinating child in whose debt you
are. Say no to the sun's
aphasia, but turn it on a
lathe. Bathe in a sea of
dolphins, swim in the nectar of
your own delights. Turn those rings of
fire at a concert hall in hell where all the dancers
meet. Deny the blood,
its spiny branches, of a past too ripe
with lineage, and walk, astral
child, share calliopes and
dazzling nights, walk by healing
places, and you will revive all that is
essential. Brief outcroppings of
time and antiquities are
not enough. This time make it
right. __________________ CHARLESTOWN, 2000 Rasping, grating
gulls break through our sleep, making ever widening
circles, ship's bell out in
the harbor of the Navy Yard. Early summer morning
breaks like kamikazes over the USS Cassin
Young decommissioned after
the War. Navy barracks have
transformed themselves into rows of luxury
condos. Bricks are torn from
buildings and the bare ground
reminds us of our unfinished
compositions. Tracks rusted out,
boat launches, these were
smoldering, booming navy yards where 300 ships were
built from 1939-1945. Thinking of the
wastes of metal and timber, I am, nevertheless,
wooed by fascination. I keep walking. SS Nubska was a
coastal steamship. It sits in drydock,
with bleached logs for ballast, rusted out, insides
gone, steamroom gone rotting black stacks.
Maybe there are
ghosts in the nearby cellar of Three Cranes
Tavern. The water still retains its sickly green with spools of spit
and ropes on moldering piers. The tracks are rusted
out, boat launches in disrepair, tenon secured into
the keelson which is the backbone
of a ship. Ghosts sing out of
the sailor's cenotaph. But joggers appear
like morning glories, pigeons cross my
path, and ghosts in the galley of the Cassin Young
serve up a hearty breakfast before heading out to
sea, steaming toward Okinawa and certain
death.
May 20, 2000 Charlestown Navy Yard, Charlestown, Massachusetts ______________________