Jigsaw Puzzle

TLS 5543 – 4
“an apparent real life collector...who collects stray jigsaw pieces, found in the street... He doesn’t actually do jigsaw puzzles; he just collects pieces... One day he may turn them into a work of art.”

He keeps his eyes on the ground and a glassine envelope
in his wallet, just in case. In spite of the odds,
which are stacked against him, he has found twenty-two pieces.
The first one, a four pronged shin,* dirty and delaminated,
discovered him in Leipzig,on his eighth birthday,
in the street outside the charred remains of the old synagogue.
He put it in his pocket, nip’nei tikkun ha-olam,**
and when the Waterguard asked if they had anything to declare
he gripped his bag with white knuckles and remained silent.
A random collection, someone observed, unaware
of the dreaming girl with her hands full of music
and a jigsaw puzzle tucked under her arm pausing
in front of the statue of an immigrant violinist
in Townsley South Dakota, or the woman getting out
of a car in Duncombe Place to take a bag of old toys
into St Wilfrid’s. He had not seen the small boy clutching
a parcel cross Charlotte Square on an autumn afternoon,
on his way to his grandmother’s or the careless brush
of a sleeve in the Jardines del Buen Retiro.
The world is compromised in more ways, large and small,
than we could possibly face and the universe
hurtles towards its own inevitability.
November dusk. Through one window he sees how the dripping branches
gather the fading light, through the other the glitter
of the Christmas decorations already up in Oxford Street.
He draws the curtains, remembering and forgetting
with one instinct, and rearranges the translucent sleeves.
A bisected circle containing the words Fleche D’Or,
a small flame, innocent enough in the right context,
a man’s outstretched hand, a scarlet geranium,
Danzig ist Deutsch under the tail of an eagle,
the Mona Lisa’s left eye, but not one bit of border
which he takes to be significant. How would one begin?
He practices patience, the contentious virtue.
He is waiting for one more piece.

Artwork - Four-pronged Shin by Bill Meyer, 2004
*The thirteenth-century Kabbalistic text Sefer Ha Temunah, holds that a single letter of unknown pronunciation, held by some to be the four-pronged shin on one side of the teffilin box, is missing from the current Hebrew alphabet. The world's flaws, the book teaches, are related to the absence of this letter, the eventual revelation of which will repair the universe.
**Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase that means, "repairing the world." The expression is used in the Mishnah in the phrase mip'nei tikkun ha-olam "for the sake of the repair of the world" to indicate a practice which should be followed not because it is required by Biblical law, but because it helps avoid chaos.

The Blue Moment

TLS 5554 – 7
“The Blue Moment”

In the free fall into darkness there is a pause.
Husserl claimed that out of the whole that is given us
our attention chooses a part and takes it
as an object in its own right. For instance,
the blue of the evening in which you stand,
on the cusp of night, on the cusp of winter.
The raw light of November has faded.
The shadows, stretched so long across the grass
at this same hour a month ago are gone
and the sky, deeply, perfectly blue,
casts its colour everywhere. According
to his theory, “is” predications are
implicit existential generalisations.
This evening is blue
would mean this evening has a blue moment.
This man is alone
would mean something else entirely.

Divagations

TLS 5542 – 24
"divagations"

It was October
and the light under the trees was liquid honey,
the road a rustle of desiccation and denial.
Backtrack a bit.
When was the last time you met my eyes?
In geometry the tangent to a curved path
is a straight one that just touches it there
under that little leaf lime– sub tilia -
divesting itself of what?
But I digress.
It was October
and those leaves left to the season blew golden,
glowed like sun in spindrift in the clear autumn air.
For whatever reason, roads diverge.
Sidetrack a bit.
When was the last time you touched my hand?
In logic an argument is cogent
if the truth of the premise renders
the truth of the conclusion probable.
Otherwise your guess is as good as mine.
But I wander.
It was October.
The wind under the trees was plangent and cold
and the road a dark line running out of sight.
Begin here.

Bringing in Firewood

TLS 5459 – 22
“Spiders generally get a bad press.”

I noticed a spider on one of those
cold mornings in October before the
killing frosts, clinging to the underside
of a piece of wood, guarding the silken
bundle of her nest, a tenuous remit
of death everlasting, and her only bequest.
She stood her ground, knowing, or not knowing,
that her time was almost up, and I,
with a winter’s worth of warmth to choose from,
laid the log aside and thought – how readily
we acquit ourselves, how easily
we’re impressed - that I had done my bit.

Once the fire was lit and the flame brisking
in the stove I saw out of the corner
of my eye another small spinner
retreating over the bricks from the heat.
Too late for a well placed stick to do the trick
there was nothing for it but to reach in
and pluck her out – a heroic arrest
that cost a few hairs on the back of my hand
so fine I hardly knew they were there
until they singed and stank and made me wonder
what incinerated arachnid would smell like,
assuming it would register at all.

Flaubert's Vigil

TLS 5557 – 15
"a kind of cultivated desiccation"

He was reading Montaigne.
She was laid out in her wedding dress
with white flowers in her hands.
Tuberose, perhaps,
to mask the smell.
Methane, cadaverine, putrescene.
A seasoning to her sweetness.
The flies buzzed.
Her husband was grunting and drooling,
consoled by sleep.
The priest was snoring.
Decay is retarded by cold.
He turned a page with stiff fingers.
Study and contemplation
are a kind of apprenticeship
and resemblance of death.
The words made him shiver.
His breath hung in the air.
The stars, he wrote later,
shone,
calm shimmering radiant eternal.
Her pale face likewise.
Her back, unknown to any of them,
was already livid.
In the absence of a pump
the blood drains downward.
The stars, he did not write later,
shone
impassive and detached.
He leaned out the window
and closed his eyes
anticipating the beautiful
the inevitable darkness.

Mrs. Delany's Geraniums

TLS 5546 – 17
“collaged from dozens of exquisitely drawn botanical studies”


It was an accidental juxtaposition
that inspired her,
one of those moments when the world
slides into focus -
a red geranium on the windowsill,
a sheet of red paper on the table.
Her own blood on the blotter was not so quick
as what her scissors cut –
the petals falling from her blades
so faithful to what the eye sees
instead of what the mind knows
her visitors believed
a breeze must have blown them there.

If Not, Winter

TLS 5551/5552 – 3
"An appreciation of her characteristic patterns of mind"

If, you said
and there were endless summer days
in your ellipsis
your implication
the work of a moment
your face
complete corroboration.

If not, winter -
a morphine induced sleep with no pain
a long cold emptiness
and no guarantee of waking.
Life is framed in the material conditional.


I had chosen the above quote from the TLS to work on this past week and was wondering whose mind I was going to spend some time wandering around in when a copy of Anne Carson's translations of the fragments of Sappho's writing, called "If Not, Winter" arrived in the post and provided an answer. I decided to work with the title fragment and try to construct a poem around it. The original fragment is below.

]
]work
]face
]
]
if not, winter
]no pain
]


In her introduction Anne Carson says "I have used a single square bracket to give an impression of missing matter, so that [ or ] indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of letters not quite legible somewhere in the line. It is not the case that every gap or illegibility is specifically indicated: this would leave a blizzard of marks and inhibit reading.Brackets are an aesthtic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record of it. . . brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure."

My own intention was simply to incorporate the words provided, in the order they were provided, into something new.