For whom do the angels play
For whom do the angels play? They are so skeptical of the self-aggrandizement of saints, immersed in their wrongs and punishments, in their paths to God, the supreme autoeroticist and exhibitionist. Only Job, the patron saint of quivering lute strings and violin-plucking, who suffered so successfully that now he can protect music and the muses, comes close to Him. Almost as naked as Bellini’s Signor in the Accademia in Venice.
With no difference between voice and body. Thus Hayden plays his saxophone in the Hotel Europa Regina. Strangeness spills from his mouth down the golden curves of the instrument, from afar it bites through skin and organs, appearing from the bones. It appears without puncturing anything, transforms the air into ecstasy, the reed, the voice, as if repositioning itself, pledging itself. Keys. Reed. Eyelids. Voice. Keys. Mouth. Voice.
The streets are so narrow that two people meeting at the same time must exhale to slip by. Only the smell and the voice keep it all in check. Exhausted from wandering, we come for the third time to the same campanile. A curving with no way out. Without shaking the mortar, a woman’s voice penetrates the brick wall. A lonely melody. Then a brief plucking of strings and the awakening of no one.
The frequency by which the universe oscillates. Now caught by the contrabass. If I turned up the amplifier’s volume a little, the membranes of the speakers would burst like the membrane of my right middle ear burst when I dove. The voices were calling me deeper. And there, at the bottom, lay a black box, perhaps an old transistor, a black hole that transmitted nothing, a passage where every melody, even angelic ones, disappears.
The most horrifying moment, when I was three years old and first heard a recording of my own voice. I covered my ears and threw myself screaming to the ground. I was dissected like some thing, turned inside-out to the world. And the whole world, strangely dead, slipped into me. Neither wailing nor covering my ears could prevent the violence of this act. I still hear its echo in me. Keys. Mouth. Voice.
The inscription You are what we once were
The inscription You are what we once were, you will be what we are above the entrance to the crypt of the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini church on Via Veneto. The chandeliers made from tailbones, the arches from skulls, the wall ornaments from sternums and radii, the passages from pelvises. Mark Twain was appalled by the poetic consciousness of the Capuchins, who disassembled the bones of their deceased brothers. They actualized transience more than any art, conveyed that we are all merely the mechanisms of mortal hours. One day the skilled hands of some clockmaker will take us apart, irrevocably driving away the present, creating a safe, reliable time: it was and will be eternal, without a friable present. Are letters bones? Along with what is most unprecedented from the fading past, in this poem everything will occur.
There they were, classified into their final place, as if they were just born from fantasy, not determining the gradient of the past. In a small side hall of the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution in the Jardin de Plantes, the specimens of rare and extinct species. A panda and lemurs, a pinned butterfly, a Tasmanian devil, the last white Chinese tiger. The silently staring witnesses of something that was. Something: the paradox of visible disappearance.
The spiral staircase in the studio of Gustav Moreau refuses to leave my memory, this metaphor of poetry as the art of naming endings. Below the canvas with Hercules, who in the middle of a harem gloomily ponders how to both consume his prize and, in one night, satisfy all fifty daughters of King Thespius. On the stairs, a couple of lascivious figures trying to bite the tongues out of each other’s mouths. Above, an altar without a church, where a three-part structure appears again. At the top, Adam and Eve, summoning the snake. In the middle, Orpheus, who summons the exhaustion that comes from singing. At the bottom, hard at work, Cain ruminates, murders Abel.
Over two hundred years have passed since the Cimetière des Innocents was moved out of central Paris. Its soil, rich with worms, was thought to be first-class. A fresh cadaver could be consumed in just nine days. Then the bones were removed from the soil and a new grave was dug in the same place. For many years, the remains from this and other Parisian cemeteries were moved on carts, at night, into the catacombs. It was appreciated when a skull fell from a swaying cart. The children who found it at dawn finally had a toy fitting for the contours of their lives.
Through speech, the name attached to a poem fades more and more. This paradox was already known by the troubadours and was later repeated by Dante. The body of a loved one disappears more and more into the marvelous skeleton of syntax: “quel sieu bels cors baisan, rizen descobra e quel remir contral lum de la lampa” (to dig out her beautiful body with a smile, to kiss and view it in the glow of the lamp). Who are you, Ayna and Aina, who peer at me from my blindness, warming my palms in this poem with a lantern at the dark crossroads? Do not tell anyone, I love you and I ordain you to speak through my disappearance.
I wake up without my right hand
I wake up without my right hand. A strange hand beneath my head. It just dangles when my left hand lifts it. Two hands, I have the living one, the dead one has me. Then blood pushes the end through the veins, spills it through the body. The boundary of belonging blurs, but only briefly. As if the circulatory system were an ancient, undeciphered language. Who guards its code? The hand slowly squeezes me, finger by finger, into a fist.
The right angel amid hundreds of marks, the only figure among letters. First, the salesman stamps its wings twice on the article about the right to unannounced military intervention in crisis zones, then a third time on his palm. When I pay, he wraps the stamp in used newspaper, but how am I to take the angel from his palm? The pale blue indigo of the angel’s trumpet on the stamp announces the edge of my presence here. Everything that has ever taken possession of me has been tossed over this edge, into a chasm. My life is waiting for a shining midday, when the bones strike the bottom and I burst like the letters of an unknown alphabet.
Our bodies are only vague metaphors of some initial fissure. But the first division must happen somewhere. If I could see without vision, perceive without senses, move beyond flesh beneath transparent skin, think without meaning—would I transcend the lapse of the mysterious bond between a language that designates and a name that never speaks? From somewhere a shadow creeps into this poem. No one cast it. But from where and for what this firing squad, an instantaneous silence and a shot, even though it says nothing?
The left angel. I caught sight of it only after a month of sleeping beneath its face. In the studio, the architect had kept part of the old beams of the monastery, where executions had taken place during the revolution. The spirits of the dead keep walking the corridors. I wake up, but not completely. I look around the ruins of my dreams, from which I was taken. One of the spirits guides me to a pair of leaf-colored stains on an old beam, the shadow of an angel with a trumpet. The fissures announce time as recognition of what is shrouded. Time, which will have to occur again and again, the absent participle of the future perfect tense.
In the fifth week of pregnancy, an embryo measures a good four millimeters. The placenta looks like a tiny bubble. In it, the shadow of a grain. I try to visualize cell division, growth and the stages at which organs, eyes, both arms, fingers develop from the gametes. In the fifth week, all this is only bare possibility, a plan inscribed into an embryo. A bare, still unmarked temporality. But a heart has already formed, already beats. Here, imagination ends. What command selects a pair of cells to begin a regular beat? What possibilities are concealed by the particles, which my language calls negligible? Isn’t every diacritical mark, every dust particle, every fleeting thought potentially the heart of an embryo? And what does this mean for the poem, the bearer of messages?
Slovenian writer Aleš Šteger has published seven books of poetry, three novels, and two books of essays. A Chevalier des Artes et Lettres in France and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry book, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European authors, the 2007 Rožanc Award for the best Slovenian book of essays, and the 2016 International Bienek Prize. His work has been translated into over 15 languages, including Chinese, German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. He has published four books in English: The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 as a Lannan Foundation selection and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award; Berlin, a collection of lyric essays, appeared from Counterpath Press in 2015; Essential Baggage, a book of prose poems, appeared from Equipage in England in 2016; and the novel Absolution, which appeared in England in 2017. He also has worked in the field of visual arts (most recently with a large scale installation at the International Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India), completed several collaborations with musicians (Godalika, Uroš Rojko, Peter N. Gruber), and collaborated with Peter Zach on the film Beyond Boundaries.
Brian Henry is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Static & Snow (Black Ocean, 2015). He co-edited the international magazine Verse from 1995 to 2017 and established the Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2015. His translation of Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 and won the Best Translated Book Award. He also has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices (Harcourt, 2008) and Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers (BOA, 2015). His poetry and translations have received numerous honors, including an NEA fellowship, a Howard Foundation grant, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the Cecil B. Hemley Memorial Award, the George Bogin Memorial Award, and a Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences grant.