Sharp-eyed Hinternet readers will agree, we’ve been slowly rolling out a respectable poetry series here. And so far we’ve been fortunate to feature three very interesting poets: Maria Theresa (of Dimes Square), Maxim Morel (of his father’s loins), and Julia Ostrowski (of Milwaukee). Since starting, I’ve been proud and pleased to relay our readers’ praises back to the artists themselves — that is except for Julia, who remains somewhere on the coast of Turkey, where the internet is spotty and the Mediterranean shows blue and ancient ruins surely seem more real than this etherous, vaporous, nonlocal...
Anyhow, the Editorial Board has been chasing me up for a few months now, trying to get the series going again — even going so far, at one point, as to send several large French carrier pigeons across the Channel to pester me while I worked on my dissertation (and they really were large, mind you — each one of them a firm, hale scion of that famous Maginot Generation of French messenger birds). But at last I’ve finished my work, and taken down the ineffective scarecrows from my roof (well, technically they do work on corvids, the taxon of their intended target), and I’ve started in earnest on bringing more poetic voices to these off-white digital “pages” we call The Hinternet.
Yet as I began to reach out to more and farther corners of the globe for our poets, I couldn’t help but think how much I’d love to get our first feature, Maria Theresa, back for another round. As Hinternet readers will, we hope, remember, the New York poet of that grand, metonymically Hapsburgian nom de plume, is a woman uniquely resistant to the need for approval or an audience whatsoever. In fact, when I reached out to her to tell her the fine things people said about her first poems, and how we’d love to have her back, she said a number of obscene things which I will not repeat here, and begged me never to ask her to abandon her principles again, “until I’m dead and buried and my true life’s work is done.”
This “true life’s work”, of course, is an ongoing translation into English of the canon of the obscure Danish Jewish philosopher and mystic Jakob Meier (1899-1943), something that has only been partially attempted once before, and then only on a single work, the man’s unclassifiable and incomplete last book Mod en hellig metafysik [Towards a Sacred Metaphysics]. When I asked Theresa just what Meier’s work might have in common with her noted obsession with the poet Marianne Moore, she fervently declared “nothing” and proceeded to answer every email I sent with selections from her translations, sans comment.
Well, we went back and forth like this for weeks, until she finally responded to my (10th? 11th?) email, with the following message:
Alright, you know what? I’ll do it. Last time. You’re gonna get the last poem I’ll ever write — and that better satisfy you. Cause I’ve had enough, you got it? Enough. I just want to be left alone to commune with my beloved Marianne and translate the holy Jakob and not have to be bothered with you internet writers and your little schemes and your novels and your hot takes and your dreams of a new bohemia. I’ve had enough of that. I’m living the true bohemia. Even as we speak—I’m living the bohemia of the soul. It has no latitude, no longitude. It is not geographical. It is a department of the mind and of the body. You’re all Neo-Romantics these days, right? You guys won’t shut up about it. Luddites and Blake-ites, building your shrines to drowned poets and pale, tuberculosis-ridden goth-boys, right? Well, I’ll give you the poem for that—I’ll give you a poem to say enough of that nonsense. You guys want Romanticism? It’ll take a lot more than a few essays. You’re gonna have to hike the fucking Alps for it; you’re gonna have to contract venereal diseases, and die stupidly on battlefields in Greece, and take enough opium that the oppressive weight of Ancient China crowds out the visions of dead children from your sooty English brain! Until then, enough! Here’s your poem. Now let me be.
Enough
Enough of this terror, genuflection, airs,
agents disguised as awe across patient landings,
these hatreds nestled and bursting with promises,
bloody flowing, growing abscesses of knowledge—
enough of the pain, fast karmic retribution,
a sweet masochism, down the side of your white
jeans, incandescent in the morning the bloodhounds,
tailors, pagans, hoarders, jurors, sword swallowers,
huge hungry dollops of anger you swore were
the prostitute’s paid price for the promise, the blood—
enough of your karma, your college, your sin,
who contort all seraphim to nude pastel swinging,
sad junked-up urchins, trust-funds undulating,
portraits of paintings of tables of air—
enough of the hand-wringing, fate-loving demons
of reality’s tusk, industrial goblins
who tremor and sulk, or else their quick children and
babysitters, the evening standard, the trolley
car problem across the Delaware now ringing,
all angels, holding court on the priapism
of erstwhile gigantic cretins of Space—
enough of your sauna-rot eons, heat rising
to choke up the ivy vines running, green calyx
pipers or jesters of traits, poor women,
sticky men, in bordellos of hanging bodies—
enough of your prism, your sheer fine-print warning,
your cupboard, your forgotten plates stacked, writhing, there:
preparing the palms for the steel crooked reader,
the rod and the staff of the sadist’s high time,
you love and love slowly and lose and lose quicker,
complaining of the nighttime’s dark yucca turning,
the habit you’d shake, for euthanizing Time—
enough of the yearning, the seared snake pit seasons,
the burning of the sun streaking high on my tongue,
which you call heat lightning, rare like the tobacco,
the ceaseless bottle of chivalry carousing
like doddering fathers, and mothers delighting
in the waste of their sons, cool elegant blisters,
punk rock from the curtains, the divinest of flings,
heavy sex in the evening; saints, jewels in the room—
enough of the holy bones of just vultures,
that jut and consume all my cruelest rust rising,
the serviceable hard-on, slick on the sunset,
and readymade furniture for the hangman’s prow,
the sick duet of vomitorium candor,
and cigarettes ashing out now on the floor—
enough of your credibles, false possibles, ifs,
they stick on the ceiling and drift there complicit,
your gravity’s hair tie, knives racked on the dashboard,
proposing to wrangle things strange as man’s fate,
finally committing transference to the moon;
depthless biblical jet set, calculated and turned
to the forces of prime empathy, the gloaming,
the careers of our saviors in buildings so tall,
skyscraping their way to Nirvanas of muslin,
silky the way they conduct all their trades—
enough of the bodies, the sellers, the takers,
every prostitute’s man or white wisher confirmed,
you pound out my teeth with a cool crusted razor,
and flip them for coins in cool fountains where
Romans dip furiously, splash the wave over,
this era surfs dumbly, curiously benign,
while pagodas of memory burn in the sludge fire,
and all you can do is stamp your ticket twice—
enough of Occam, of activists, purloiners,
more mystical cubings of petrol you’ve tossed in
your fuel fire, your crude crystal, yes, and your painting,
book-burners today look like ones still insisting,
on clitoral thrusting and huge eager kindling,
the ketamine rush and the gap between acts—
enough of no futures, of pasts unrequited,
pursed lips and side-eyed and still wandering the hills,
Egyptian saddles, Hail Marys of locusts,
which turn out the barn again, in search of dry ice,
I see now how moored in the halo I’ve been,
Since you came here at dawn, read, and suffered my age—
enough of the cable, the preachers, the proper,
the blue in the blue jeans, fake colorized print,
star-speckled and standing alone in dead airways,
nesting the crux of poets’ ridiculous pomp—
enough of winners, takers, demonstrators,
the field where you pique on a wave of blank joy,
no rebellion jumpstarts from tea leaves or choosing,
no Sturm und Drang, nor these heavenly ballplayers,
nor choirs of seashells, nor shingles hung Southward—
enough now, enough; some take quick to the sea,
and light candles, and rest in the deep part of we,
you shine awfully sounded, bells rung in the night,
enough of the outside, now inside’s the light…
 | A guest post by
|