{"id":397,"date":"2017-01-05T14:18:20","date_gmt":"2017-01-05T20:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thespectaclstg.wpengine.com\/?p=397"},"modified":"2019-07-17T14:16:14","modified_gmt":"2019-07-17T19:16:14","slug":"ten-remarkable-interpretations-by-lyn-hejinian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=397","title":{"rendered":"Poetry by Lyn Hejinian"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Ten Remarkable Interpretations<\/h4>\n

1
\nI\u2019m not too old to dance meadowlarks: great punctuation
\nlocks in black and blocks, crepuscular and vain the sun
\nin its descent. \u201cYou kicked up dust\u201d
\nof which the Ural mountains are but dim reminders
\nthrough a wooded alley loud as if disturbed
\nin the unbuttoned fog that grays a pedestrian\u2019s silhouette
\nwhile the passport picture reaching out to me is true or false
\nto tetrahedral nation-states dead in winter water, enzyme ice.
\nI cannot fear to be forgotten
\na child born another book the dust at dusk
\nof skilled sculptors whose cities sink
\nthe swollen toad, her pride
\nflamingoes, lilies, and boy flowers
\nthe center of a blue-black vault, history on it, an apron.<\/p>\n

2
\nLanguage is a victim of its own success
\nwhile into the carriage comes a louder lyric me
\nof which the Cockscomb Mountains are like apples rotting in the dust
\nthat none of us would be content with
\nand a caterpillar\u2019s cud to chew
\npoor tucks can kill, pour tanks, and call.
\nPeople are forced to live, work, yearn with bourgeois linearity
\nto change this nerdy life upon row upon row upon row
\nof the river pulled further and further apart
\nunder the unswallowed elegy of a collared stork.
\nThen productivity as reproductivity ends. Motion
\ngets immobilized by perception into things perceptions get
\nbut perception gets it wrong
\nis language. Let\u2019s use it.<\/p>\n

3
\nDoing is highly thought of and frequently abandoned
\nas at a bus stop beside a stunted gingko, and time is tossed
\na laundry pile large as the crown of a tree
\nor the gravid animal of Pythagoras, and every mathematician dies
\nwhile runnels vacillate or do nothing astrophysically speaking.
\nLet\u2019s go for eggs and to the bakery.
\nMy kid wants to be a puppeteer.
\nBut someone must polish glass and since then the refugees weep wax
\nand travel over agate pastures and gag.
\nBut we have to trust philosophy\u2014and deny the property
\nwhere depiction most perfectly depiction depicts.
\nIn a faux chateau of finance the proposition is a picture
\nof corn cakes, last crumbs, weapons passing from hand to hand.
\nLet\u2019s rest. Life is fast. As the city rat, resuming, says: \u201cRudeness is rude.\u201d<\/p>\n

4
\nIt can be argued from horseback\u2014the horse a ruby roan
\nas night falls on the shores
\nbefore an infant knows of time\u2014
\nthat there is something in mathematics
\nshorn of ideology. I propose too that there are many things
\nwith their capacity to collide or combine with other things
\nin the vicinity (that gravitational field of monsters)\u2014
\nand budding dust small flies: they totter.
\nThe public does not need to be convinced.
\nAn idiom like Kierkegaard on Halloween
\ngathering twigs and fathering eggs while a stunted thorn
\nfrolics in the shade now dead
\ninconsistently down the large white sea
\ndoes what a poem does, making itself understood.<\/p>\n

5
\nEvery situation can be taken as subject to a proposition
\nat stake at this stage of the state. Rejection of a context
\nneed not be of one\u2019s own hoeing
\nof the sun, one\u2019s head a building site. Say I rode in on a vicious mule
\nsurrounded by leaves under the northern star, the eternal conflict.
\nSay I beat my brow and only put on shows, withered
\nwebs, a rigmarole, an atrocity to which I\u2019ll give no words. I refuse it
\nrepresentation. The janitor is innocent, autumn is ill, and cruelty
\nis the rule. I swear you\u2019ll be my father until I die
\nfrom a flea bite or while beating a metal drum, eating honey and corn
\nlike a girl again with an umbrella under a redwood tree
\nwith all of which I am in a certain sense one. The roof
\non trust of hover can\u2019t render love pathetic. I claim too much
\nand yield to the Bighorn Mountains of which the truth of history is but an indifferent silence.<\/p>\n

6
\nBecause we refuse to personify the gaping east or deformed west
\nor cranial north or sacrificial south we must accept this box
\nand these panoramas to which we were led through sliding doors
\njust as certain Alpine cliffs reproduce the \u201chead\u201d variants of Mayan \u201cscript\u201d
\nwith an impersonal cluck to the jeweler.
\nWherever a human is to be found, there you will find
\noccupation, a skyscraper, a 9-foot copper weathervane, imperial pickles
\na force plundering an unarmed ceramic bowl.
\nUrban greenbelts lift a feisty allegorical vegetation in human voice
\nabove an opium fish, a dime in cinders under the wind
\nand there are wealthy men, skin not yet charred. They are popular
\nas hardware, music, poached eggs, modesty, multicolored snapdragons
\nand the alphabet sacrificed in times of need. I live under the authority
\nof a stucco beehive and a soldier says affectionately to me, You there!<\/p>\n

7
\nWe think, we approach, we exist
\nsweep and speak, on ziplines or not.
\nSayings spread as amusements for children women and men
\nby pony-poets, beetle-poets, crow-poets
\nare voiced by the words themselves and not by anyone speaking them.
\nI dab fingernail polish on six croquet balls.
\nWhich of the names of Hercules do you hear and in which of your ways
\nof which the hill behind the soldier bathed in sweat is like a general\u2019s nose
\nor the yellow bowl upturned beside the kitchen sink after I wash it to dry.
\nIt\u2019s now a wedding finch a reference to whistling rain
\na great honesty in the far sacerdotal south.
\nDo they piss on the spider,
\nthe aged face of the great organizer on slender evidence,
\nthe rising sun that hangs a puppet from my hands?<\/p>\n

8
\nThe mountaineer rappels at midnight the wall a wall
\na wall a woman recalls: a contingent object\u2014it might never have existed
\nthen you look at your fists and there are the letters o
\nin admonition, odor, foot. A dog shakes premonitions from its coat
\nlovers of time\u2014time of all kinds\u2014
\nwinged insects, mosquitoes mostly but also moths.
\nWelcome, unwelcome, buffeted? Who can make durable wax?
\nWho can knot? The baker is a man and brutalizes wheat
\nand all attempts recall a textual residue of celebrating rats
\na game of backgammon with dancing kissing getting drunk
\nhugging singing crying when we were leaving war
\na stumbling block reconstructed and constructed
\no xank history thistle e tspung hatchet
\ncorvid head over human heels, facing a direction wrong or right.<\/p>\n

9
\nPity combatants on the line who self-concretize, becoming paving stones
\nbut I say too loudly that of which I don\u2019t know how to say enough
\nborrowing transcription from a local pebble held in a palm
\nfrom which a puppet tugs as if pulled by the revolutions of the planets
\nMercury Saturn or Mars over nearly twelve and a half million days
\nmarking time, which is the subject matter of history
\nin which the sun itself bakes the bread then drawn from the oven
\nand cooling under the proprietary nakedness of the caustic trees.
\nSo, asked a bee of experience, \u201cHow is it that umbrellas are raised
\nagainst the future of the sun?\u201d Remnants of the past
\ndon\u2019t expect us, remnants of the past didn\u2019t foretell us.
\nOur songs are sonically shattered over shortwave by a scop
\nsinging the praises of his patron, the racist acquitted\u2014he nods
\nand flees the derelict pattern.<\/p>\n

10
\nPeople work under the clouds and are direct
\ninheritors of the things that happen every twenty days.
\nWhat saddle do we use? A wolf has been caught
\nand it sweats. My own sleeps do not unfold in easy procession
\nwhich is called lustrous, erect, major, and will in some field cease
\naltogether. Then tell me what you have to say.
\nThe chains obey, the dogs piss under glass, voracious
\nfish leap from the beams, we do arbitrary things\u2014appear
\nand disappear as leonine as dogs. The first person
\nis made for oneself, denizen of a cult or rubbish heap
\nready for the evening show in the cavern of centuries. The second
\nis made for you, a respectable human of greenish hue.
\nWe had a drink and it cost a house
\ninto which we moved, music coming from stone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n

Lyn Hejinian is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which is The Unfollowing<\/em>. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, where her academic work is addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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