Another note on process...
Certain kinds of poetry have always read to me like ultra-concentrated prose, and “The Lacquer Men” is definitely one of those examples. This afternoon, I’ve been writing some (completely NON-CANON) prose to whittle down into the last section of the poem. I thought it might be of interest to post it in this intermediate form, so that you can compare with the finished product. Keep in mind that these are very loose notes. The sections in quotations are from “Sonnets to Orpheus” by Rilke (trans. by Norton). Anyway, enjoy!
“Real singing is a different breath. A breath for nothing. A wafting in the god. A wind.”
“The breath that takes no heed of you.”
The grief-stricken old man sat on the flat terrace of the sacred hill, the other mourners gone—the bank officials and the Guard officers; the ballerinas and the racing drivers, the Archtrustees and the journalists—all those supplicants who had made their bread at the altar of the deceased while he lived. The old man watched the City lights come on like stars.
The river was a black cut along the darkened wrist of Konstantin’s vision: its form as solid as ever, its dream one generation further faded into night. The nymph had departed. Not looking back, it led no one by its freezing hand. Its body was in the ground. There was no one left to bury.
“Set up no stone to his memory. Just let the rose bloom each year for his sake.”
“He comes and goes. Is it not much already if at times he overstays for a few days the bowl of roses?”
The old man clutched the letter in one hand and a match in the other. The stars, watching from their fixed paths above, would be the only witnesses to the pyre upon that fresh-turned earth.
“Going to bed, leave on the table no bread and milk; it draws the dead.”
He dropped to his knees, in the echo of the others, and whispered the words he’d never said, although his eyes had mimed them in their selfish grief. Long they’d passed in crowded halls, the old man’s pride offering only silence and disdain for the transgressions of the listing wreck.
“His voice never flags in the dust, when the godly example grips him. Everything turns to vineyard, to grape, ripened in his sentient south. Not mold in the vault of kings gives the like to his praising, nor that a shadow falls from the gods. He is one of the staying messengers who still holds far into the doors of the dead, bowls with fruits worthy of praise.”
We wander through the world, lying our bodies down and calling it building. But from the moment you set your light foot to the earth, you created with the easy flip of the wrist; the delight of your smile.
“Only Lament is learning still; with girlish hands she reckons night on night the ancient evil. Yet suddenly, aslant, unpracticed, even so—she holds a constellation of our voice into the sky, unclouded by her breath.”
When you were young, you called up the world from your fingertips and danced beauty into being. How did you imagine such radiance, without a model to gift you the likeness, to teach you the steps? Who was it in the void, begging you to give them life? In every person on whom you laid your gentle hands, you cradled an unseen spark. You fanned it into flames—blowing tender breath—until what had been invisible burned so bright it blinded the world. You taught me the taste in my own mouth; describing with courage as I nibbled at life; drawing more from the second-hand impressions as they passed through your lips than I had registered in my blind consumption.
“Full round apple, pear and banana, Gooseberry… All this speaks death and life into the mouth… I sense… Read it from the face of a child tasting them. This comes from far. Is something indescribable slowly happening in your mouth?”
You named the world, trying on each other's faces. But creation is easy for a god. What about a man? Can he exist and create?
“Girls, you warm, you silent girls,
Dance the taste of the fruit experienced!
Dance the orange. Who can forget it,
How, drowning in itself, it resists
Its being-sweet. You have possessed it.
It has been deliciously converted into you.
Dance the orange. The warmer landscape,
Fling it out of you, that the ripe one be radiant
In homeland breezes! Aglow, peel away
Perfume on perfume! Create the relation
With the pure, reluctant rind
With the juice that fills the happy fruit!”
You gave of yourself until nothing remained but their bitter demand. You sampled what you wanted, but—wanting nothing but to sample, died of thirst, dry ash in your pleading mouth.
“All the sharp stones they flung at your heart turned soft on touching you and gifted with hearing. In the end they battered and broke you, harried by vengeance.”
The old man tried to keep from weeping as the letter’s edges curled, like the fingers that once had played in his hair, or the muscles at the edges of the indefatigable smile.
City forsake the heavy price of godhood, too great a burden to overcome—the pressure of ten thousand eyes. They demanded the basest of performances from the most capable of actors. Was it any surprise he had relented?
“Again and again, interrupted by darkness and downfall
It gleamed of the earth. Until after the terrible throbbing
It entered the hopelessly open portal.”
How did he resist so long? When the violence came, it sprung from dark ground like a bottled geyser. It had been absorbed in the shadowed corners of sparkling parties and in the dancehalls of forgotten men. So terrible was its cruelty, and yet the old man couldn’t shake the saturation of the thing he’d once felt for their author. That creature had been so full of life: unsullied by civilized excess or casual violence. Where did he go, when the rest of them were left with only the memory, clutching the bowl of roses? The old man had no claim on courage, incapable as he’d been to reach into the void; to draw the lost soul back, before history had claimed it irrevocably for its own.
It was a soul that ought to have known no master. But falling under the yoke, why had it pledged its service to the worst among them, with their sticky veneer—oxidizing, yellow and oily; tobacco patina in the onrushing smoke of time?
History, duty, arrogance, dull excess; air, water, plateen, and power; currency; exhaustion—the Lacquer Men. They called him toward the water’s edge.
You were a dead god, bypassed, echoing in creation… But not this creation. You pulsed with the vigor of the dead, unsullied by claws that tore at the grass, disturbing in the spring our comfortable minds—a memory of fragile beauty, doomed to winter violence.
Not even plateen could hold the weight of so heavy a heart—but there was music as it snapped, descending through the branches—
The old man grasped the burning paper in his open palms, scraping the tilled ground, dragging the dirt willfully under manicured nails. Hadn’t he lived the same wasted life, lacking only that wraith’s honest vigor? That nymph—a cold reflection of the image in plateen—had taken on with a boundlessness that recognized no fear the world that they had made; the crown they’d set at unsteady, childhood feet. He’d been the hero they had fashioned with their own hands, even as they mocked him.
The old man tore down the hill as best his legs would carry him; past the hollows where the children played; past the smoothed stones where music played at twilight and fine words were conjured for an eager audience. How many times had he coveted the doomed actor’s performance, offering not one thunder-clap of applause? He’d never closed his eyes or turned away, merely withdrawn the arms that might have caught a lonely tightrope walker—transfixed by the electricity of an inevitable fall. He flew down the grass, arms and chest spreading open for the waves.
Sinking to his knees by the river, he was sure he saw that prince’s face, as delicately rendered in mothlight as it had been one teenaged night, desperate in a Paris garden.
A waste of potential; Floating on an inevitable tide; Bobbing at the shore of a topless city…
The grease on the water, the gloss on the paper, the projecting coating on crystal plateen. The timeless sheen of marble…
The cycle in and out; of sweet young men with blushing cheeks, of water and air, power and sand…
The nymph who looks back; the fruits of the dead—miming history, untethered from your brothers on the bank…
He recalled that visage, mid-confession—tear-stained—the proudest of the host, pleading for mercy, twisting through the endless sky, careening toward advancing ground. The still lips seemed to mouth the words to an indecipherable song, so ancient that the old man felt their meaning in his bones, inaudible to deaf ears. He lay down at the river’s edge and wept. The barge drifted past, and he grasped that ghostly hand. The pale creature’s eyes opened for a moment—as clear and unburdened as they’d shone at seventeen. With a gasp, the old man drew in a lung full of water. He sank into the current; washed up among the reeds.
