from Notebooks
N20P69
transcription:
who comes to mind that is this place that is this time
that comes to mind & thinking here of thee i sing
those on the horizon feel the swell & take it home
at each turning turn &
turn so it may be a
returning
for one i know the horn the given instrument of his singing
each turn it is a yearning feel the swell & take it home
for another i know the making of the book is his given instrument
“for to believe is precisely this dialectical wavering” <109>
instrumental in our singing what comes to mind
feel the swell & take it home
N20P70
transcription:
voices from the public address
echo & float away applause
“this question
about the meaning of meaning …
this kinship of meaning and knowledge …
If it is an adventure of the intelligible …
to become aware
of the question itself,
which calls to it” <111>
as happens at the edge of wading out into swimming into & beside an unimaginable depth an adventuring barely at the edge of exercise or recreation you are moving into these swells arising at the edge of will call it the dao shoreline of a governing emptiness
“the ‘gesture’ of being carried out by beings, inasmuch as they assert themselves as beings,…
it supposes this substance, beneath all motion …
a reign of a fundamental rest in the verb ‘to be,’
which the grammarians lightly call auxiliary …
That this rest reigns
precisely beneath the vault
of fixed stars, … Through this rest,
where everything has a place and is
identified, everything takes place.” <112>
N20P71
transcription:
so lost in a simple place can’t find my way back
he names it cognitive loss i say a difference of degree
he says he can’t follow the conversation
old pound could not make it cohere
perhaps it does not
i say a difference of degree he says you do not realize the pain of loss
are we not being shown something else in losing the way
whose way was it are there not others
the older boy at the table he is a man he is thirty or so sits with his parents he has
a sweet full smile it is a little off he finds something to talk about something he knows
it is fishing & he shows pictures on his cell phone
“His being in the world – even unto death,
which measures its finitude –
is a comprehension of being” <114>
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N20P72
transcription:
stripped down to basic words
which had been adequate all along you stumble
say upon a rock it is then the obstacle new fact
as limitation becoming the new
& perhaps tragic schooling of your soul
we can hardly stand to watch it happen
we too will stumble upon said rock
& the puzzled & painful saying of what can be remembered
“it is the world spread out before us that incessantly
escapes. It is lived experience
that is postponed in lived experience.” <116-117>
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N20P73
transcription:
oh yes it is a visitation & truth is “we want to be here” awakening in a compromised state
so that mind arrives at acute sense of growing incapacity i tell you g-d is there too your dissolution
“but rather that thought is disquieted by, or awakes from, the positivity wherein it stands in the world” <119>
to be running out of room “the room that measures years” to be running out of time
beauty music that marvel each day light being here together
“whether the question … is not the very mode of relationship with the Other,
with the uncontainable, with the Infinite. With God.” <119-120>
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Hank Lazer’s seventeenth book of poetry N18 (complete), a handwritten book, is available from Singing Horse Press: http://singinghorsepress.com/titles/special-offer/. The four poems/pages in EOAGH , from N20, were written in Honolulu during a family gathering. The quotations are from Levinas’ Of God Who Comes to Mind; the immediate occasion for these meditations on loss and forgetting was my interaction with my uncle, a retired neurosurgeon and longtime astute reader of my poetry. Witnessing his ongoing cognitive losses (from an earlier stroke), I am seeking ways to understand this process as an ongoing schooling of one’s soul. N18P69 (“who comes to mind…”) has been performed with soprano saxophonist Andrew Raffo Dewar.
thanks for this & for susan’s humane contribution to eoagh & to tim for letting these pages expand our understanding of who can speak and who speaks