The Interregnum (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)
1
How’s the poet’s plight to be matched?
What manner of correspondence will do it justice
And suffice as nothing else has
Since nothing else has resulted in
The machinery of eradication?
Tear the heart out
Don’t leave it where it is
Tear the heart out
And squeeze every ounce of blood
Squeeze every ounce of quivering life
Out of it before tossing it into the fire
Loving and seeing what this love is
Reeling from the effort of loving
And having acquired a modicum of familiarity with it
Having more than an adequate knowledge
Of the working fundamentals
It’s time to tear it out it’s time to dismantle it all
Don’t leave any of it where it is
Tear the heart out and dismantle the rest
And squeeze every ounce of blood
Out of the heart before tossing it into the fire
How’s wailing and railing against yourself profited you?
How’s sulking and stirring
What is a cauldron of the grimmest misery profited you?
And what of the obtuseness and disorientation
And the general and the particular heartbreak?
And what of the entreaties and letter writing
And oath taking and morbid visions
And all the unnatural ends to match which you’ve considered?
2
All that one reasons and tells oneself
And all that one fails to reason and tell oneself
Which is by-the-by transformed
Into the scratches and rattling of remorse
There are then the recriminations of the self
The self-defeating and goading and the taunting
And the accusations one notices in the eyes of strangers
Is this then one’s reward for loving and seeking love?
Is it one’s reward for seeing angels in the mire
And in moonless nights
And in the shadows of doorways
And boarded up and fenced derelict buildings
And abandoned warehouses and early Sunday mornings
And frigid and dark Monday evenings in the dead of winter
In cities and towns one’s passing through?
Does love match the superlative imaginings of the heart?
Is love to be the glories beyond the heavens?
And is it the quicksilver collected in the poet’s eyes
And stored in the poet’s embraces
And mixed to saturation in the poet’s words?
Tear it out if it is
Tear it out before this love
Has sentenced you to a ghostly life among ghouls
Tear it out if it is
Tear it out before this love
Has ruined every waking moment
And repudiated your efforts and oaths and promises
Tear it out before this love
Has moved on and you’ve turned into a pillar of salt
And must witness the flight of this thing
The flight of this ornament
The flight of this curse
Which had belonged to you
Which you’d looked after and guarded
Which you had persuaded yourself was yours to keep
This love which passed through stages
And one Thursday afternoon emptied itself of all light
And there was nothing but a shapeless night ahead
A night that was neither a bird nor a fish of the sea
But was a watery construct soundless one moment
And deafening the next
Hours weren’t hours and light wasn’t light
And the sky was gone because the heavens weren’t the heavens
Black days weren’t black days
The eye adjusted itself to a chaotic scene
Alive with demon creatures and foul vegetation
And deafening sounds
Love had dissipated and turned the ordinary
Into a cursed landscape
There’d been a shift
There’d been the equivalent of a sigh
The equivalent of a single breath
But the shift had come and gone
It had occurred and left its traces
Turning the ordinary and familiar
Into a cursed time and a cursed place
Turning the mundane into a monstrosity
Turning the norm and the banal into a phantasmagoria
It turned everything into questions
It turned everything into doubts and accusations
3
What did the black wings of this cursed time make you?
What manner of metamorphosis have you endured?
What type of horror and dread
Do you anticipate from day to day?
Where does love end and death begin?
4
The poet’s plight is the poet’s choice
It’s his affliction and his misfortune
It’s the magnetic indicator in his heart he heeds
The poet lives and dies in his love
The poet has cast aside all the vestiges of faith
And it is the absence of faith that is his undoing
He’s lost his way without faith
Flesh and bones and promises and words and four walls
Are clues to the impermanence that is living
And the impermanence that is loving
The poet refutes logic and refutes obligations
The order of things has been turned on its head
And the poet has abandoned himself to the mystery
Of becoming another person in the flesh and soul
And in the eyes and words and caresses of his beloved
And in agreeing to this pact the poet triumphs over the banal
The poet triumphs over himself
Having vanished and erased himself in every way
In the love of his beloved
He’s been after an elusive image
An image that was either too many things
Or not enough of anything concrete
And there were occasions when there was nothing to see
And nothing to feel and all effort was futile
And the poet was left to device something
That would convey him across a divide without parallel
A divide without a corresponding symmetry
And what the poet crafted was an incongruous testament
Of the deus ex machina variety
To a perilous and self-betraying single-mindedness
He’d gone about it with stealth and ingenuity
It was the image of his beloved he’d burned
On the walls of his heart
His resolve was a combination of madness and fever of the soul
Having sided with the invisible and the improbable
And on his knees he swore to himself and to the heavens
That he wasn’t returning to the drudgery
Of living moment to moment in winters of bleak deprivation
And endless identical days alone frigid with loneliness
He’d endured the death of the heart
And saw and felt and counted himself dead
One of the dead among other dead in a river of death
He’d been left in that state deprived of light and warmth
He’d been so long neglected that his soul
And his heart forgot the whimsy and exaltation
Of hearing words and listening to the quiet in the night
And the humming of the slow dawning day
With its secrets and recesses and apertures and solitudes
He couldn’t rightly tell whether he was in a desert
Or at the bottom of the sea
He couldn’t rightly tell whether he was dead and buried
Deep in the cold earth layered with loam and vegetable matter
Or drifting on angel’s wings across a firmament
Of stars and vast spaces visible and invisible
Waiting to be named and charted by a crazed cartographer
The poet had discovered something he hadn’t sought
Something he hadn’t planned for
And that wasn’t entirely familiar or entirely foreign
His grief and his love and his hankerings and his madness
Were to be recognized and catalogued
And ridiculed as lurid heathen and pagan prayers
From earlier and darker harum-scarum ages
As the great blooming flowers
On long and tangled thorny vines
Spreading in every direction
Seeking light and warmth
And the moisture and shapes and memories of phantoms
And the memories of hidden and forgotten days and nights
Long and tangled thorny vines
Spreading in every direction
Seeking the definitive unknown in riot
And copious abundance lost to the eye
And lost to all memory
Somewhere are to be found the long and tangled
Thorny vines which traverse myths in conspicuous garb
And otherwise traverse incognito great forests and swamps
In adamant pursuit of the improbable and fantastic
And the beautiful and the perfect
Seeking the one true artifice of love
That words can neither define nor express
And that words aren’t meant or designed to encompass
When and for what reason
Did the poet turn into tangled vines
Neglected by time and condemned and abandoned
By the pragmatic man
By the principled man
By the common man
By the proud plebian of the ages
With his bank savings and his homes
And his television sets and his two-and-a-half children
And his backyard pool and back and front lawns and gardens
With his cars and his plane tickets
And his matching kitchen cooking sets and silverware?
5
If it begins here
It also ends with me
There’s to be no new mathematics of color
No new calculation to transform the past
Into what it was not because what happened then
Is exactly what occurred then
Revisionism won't change an iota of the picture
It’s as complete now as it was then
Although I couldn’t have foreseen that back then
6
The music played on the radio and she was laughing
I said lots of things keeping a finger in my mouth
And she laughed
And when I remembered the time I said goodbye
She said nothing and watched me go
She watched me from the bed
As I got dressed
She watched and waited in silence
The only activity from her end of the room
Was when she shifted from the right elbow to the left
And when I was ready and at last slipped into my overcoat
And grabbed my cap and bag
I felt foolish stating the obvious
But I did announce that I was ready to leave
And nothing happened then either
She didn’t shift or sit up and she still wasn’t talking
It was quite ordinary in some respects
The novelty was gone from most things we did together
There was no incandescence
Or congeniality to speak of any more
The minutes and the hours were as trivial
As what we could manage to crowd into them
But there might’ve been something else at work
I wasn’t seeing and wasn’t hearing in her voice and words
Something I hadn’t reckoned with
but that might’ve been present that very evening
Since she’d contrived the outcome
Or what turned out to be the outcome
That’s how I remember her that evening
That’s what I’ve dredged up since
And from the bed she glared with disinterest
She watched me with a stranger’s eyes
And she didn’t follow me down the passageway to the front door
I unlocked the door and waited
And not a word reached me from the bedroom
7
How’s the poet’s plight to be matched?
What manner of correspondence will do it justice
And suffice as nothing else has
Since nothing else has resulted in
The machinery of eradication?
Tear the heart out
Don’t leave it where it is
Tear the heart out
And squeeze every ounce of blood
Squeeze every ounce of quivering life
Out of it before tossing it into the fire
© J. Noya 2006
How’s the poet’s plight to be matched?
What manner of correspondence will do it justice
And suffice as nothing else has
Since nothing else has resulted in
The machinery of eradication?
Tear the heart out
Don’t leave it where it is
Tear the heart out
And squeeze every ounce of blood
Squeeze every ounce of quivering life
Out of it before tossing it into the fire
Loving and seeing what this love is
Reeling from the effort of loving
And having acquired a modicum of familiarity with it
Having more than an adequate knowledge
Of the working fundamentals
It’s time to tear it out it’s time to dismantle it all
Don’t leave any of it where it is
Tear the heart out and dismantle the rest
And squeeze every ounce of blood
Out of the heart before tossing it into the fire
How’s wailing and railing against yourself profited you?
How’s sulking and stirring
What is a cauldron of the grimmest misery profited you?
And what of the obtuseness and disorientation
And the general and the particular heartbreak?
And what of the entreaties and letter writing
And oath taking and morbid visions
And all the unnatural ends to match which you’ve considered?
2
All that one reasons and tells oneself
And all that one fails to reason and tell oneself
Which is by-the-by transformed
Into the scratches and rattling of remorse
There are then the recriminations of the self
The self-defeating and goading and the taunting
And the accusations one notices in the eyes of strangers
Is this then one’s reward for loving and seeking love?
Is it one’s reward for seeing angels in the mire
And in moonless nights
And in the shadows of doorways
And boarded up and fenced derelict buildings
And abandoned warehouses and early Sunday mornings
And frigid and dark Monday evenings in the dead of winter
In cities and towns one’s passing through?
Does love match the superlative imaginings of the heart?
Is love to be the glories beyond the heavens?
And is it the quicksilver collected in the poet’s eyes
And stored in the poet’s embraces
And mixed to saturation in the poet’s words?
Tear it out if it is
Tear it out before this love
Has sentenced you to a ghostly life among ghouls
Tear it out if it is
Tear it out before this love
Has ruined every waking moment
And repudiated your efforts and oaths and promises
Tear it out before this love
Has moved on and you’ve turned into a pillar of salt
And must witness the flight of this thing
The flight of this ornament
The flight of this curse
Which had belonged to you
Which you’d looked after and guarded
Which you had persuaded yourself was yours to keep
This love which passed through stages
And one Thursday afternoon emptied itself of all light
And there was nothing but a shapeless night ahead
A night that was neither a bird nor a fish of the sea
But was a watery construct soundless one moment
And deafening the next
Hours weren’t hours and light wasn’t light
And the sky was gone because the heavens weren’t the heavens
Black days weren’t black days
The eye adjusted itself to a chaotic scene
Alive with demon creatures and foul vegetation
And deafening sounds
Love had dissipated and turned the ordinary
Into a cursed landscape
There’d been a shift
There’d been the equivalent of a sigh
The equivalent of a single breath
But the shift had come and gone
It had occurred and left its traces
Turning the ordinary and familiar
Into a cursed time and a cursed place
Turning the mundane into a monstrosity
Turning the norm and the banal into a phantasmagoria
It turned everything into questions
It turned everything into doubts and accusations
3
What did the black wings of this cursed time make you?
What manner of metamorphosis have you endured?
What type of horror and dread
Do you anticipate from day to day?
Where does love end and death begin?
4
The poet’s plight is the poet’s choice
It’s his affliction and his misfortune
It’s the magnetic indicator in his heart he heeds
The poet lives and dies in his love
The poet has cast aside all the vestiges of faith
And it is the absence of faith that is his undoing
He’s lost his way without faith
Flesh and bones and promises and words and four walls
Are clues to the impermanence that is living
And the impermanence that is loving
The poet refutes logic and refutes obligations
The order of things has been turned on its head
And the poet has abandoned himself to the mystery
Of becoming another person in the flesh and soul
And in the eyes and words and caresses of his beloved
And in agreeing to this pact the poet triumphs over the banal
The poet triumphs over himself
Having vanished and erased himself in every way
In the love of his beloved
He’s been after an elusive image
An image that was either too many things
Or not enough of anything concrete
And there were occasions when there was nothing to see
And nothing to feel and all effort was futile
And the poet was left to device something
That would convey him across a divide without parallel
A divide without a corresponding symmetry
And what the poet crafted was an incongruous testament
Of the deus ex machina variety
To a perilous and self-betraying single-mindedness
He’d gone about it with stealth and ingenuity
It was the image of his beloved he’d burned
On the walls of his heart
His resolve was a combination of madness and fever of the soul
Having sided with the invisible and the improbable
And on his knees he swore to himself and to the heavens
That he wasn’t returning to the drudgery
Of living moment to moment in winters of bleak deprivation
And endless identical days alone frigid with loneliness
He’d endured the death of the heart
And saw and felt and counted himself dead
One of the dead among other dead in a river of death
He’d been left in that state deprived of light and warmth
He’d been so long neglected that his soul
And his heart forgot the whimsy and exaltation
Of hearing words and listening to the quiet in the night
And the humming of the slow dawning day
With its secrets and recesses and apertures and solitudes
He couldn’t rightly tell whether he was in a desert
Or at the bottom of the sea
He couldn’t rightly tell whether he was dead and buried
Deep in the cold earth layered with loam and vegetable matter
Or drifting on angel’s wings across a firmament
Of stars and vast spaces visible and invisible
Waiting to be named and charted by a crazed cartographer
The poet had discovered something he hadn’t sought
Something he hadn’t planned for
And that wasn’t entirely familiar or entirely foreign
His grief and his love and his hankerings and his madness
Were to be recognized and catalogued
And ridiculed as lurid heathen and pagan prayers
From earlier and darker harum-scarum ages
As the great blooming flowers
On long and tangled thorny vines
Spreading in every direction
Seeking light and warmth
And the moisture and shapes and memories of phantoms
And the memories of hidden and forgotten days and nights
Long and tangled thorny vines
Spreading in every direction
Seeking the definitive unknown in riot
And copious abundance lost to the eye
And lost to all memory
Somewhere are to be found the long and tangled
Thorny vines which traverse myths in conspicuous garb
And otherwise traverse incognito great forests and swamps
In adamant pursuit of the improbable and fantastic
And the beautiful and the perfect
Seeking the one true artifice of love
That words can neither define nor express
And that words aren’t meant or designed to encompass
When and for what reason
Did the poet turn into tangled vines
Neglected by time and condemned and abandoned
By the pragmatic man
By the principled man
By the common man
By the proud plebian of the ages
With his bank savings and his homes
And his television sets and his two-and-a-half children
And his backyard pool and back and front lawns and gardens
With his cars and his plane tickets
And his matching kitchen cooking sets and silverware?
5
If it begins here
It also ends with me
There’s to be no new mathematics of color
No new calculation to transform the past
Into what it was not because what happened then
Is exactly what occurred then
Revisionism won't change an iota of the picture
It’s as complete now as it was then
Although I couldn’t have foreseen that back then
6
The music played on the radio and she was laughing
I said lots of things keeping a finger in my mouth
And she laughed
And when I remembered the time I said goodbye
She said nothing and watched me go
She watched me from the bed
As I got dressed
She watched and waited in silence
The only activity from her end of the room
Was when she shifted from the right elbow to the left
And when I was ready and at last slipped into my overcoat
And grabbed my cap and bag
I felt foolish stating the obvious
But I did announce that I was ready to leave
And nothing happened then either
She didn’t shift or sit up and she still wasn’t talking
It was quite ordinary in some respects
The novelty was gone from most things we did together
There was no incandescence
Or congeniality to speak of any more
The minutes and the hours were as trivial
As what we could manage to crowd into them
But there might’ve been something else at work
I wasn’t seeing and wasn’t hearing in her voice and words
Something I hadn’t reckoned with
but that might’ve been present that very evening
Since she’d contrived the outcome
Or what turned out to be the outcome
That’s how I remember her that evening
That’s what I’ve dredged up since
And from the bed she glared with disinterest
She watched me with a stranger’s eyes
And she didn’t follow me down the passageway to the front door
I unlocked the door and waited
And not a word reached me from the bedroom
7
How’s the poet’s plight to be matched?
What manner of correspondence will do it justice
And suffice as nothing else has
Since nothing else has resulted in
The machinery of eradication?
Tear the heart out
Don’t leave it where it is
Tear the heart out
And squeeze every ounce of blood
Squeeze every ounce of quivering life
Out of it before tossing it into the fire
© J. Noya 2006
posted by Jay Noya at 4:06 PM
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