Michael Heller

WITHIN THE OPEN LANDSCAPES

words for the etchings of Jane Joseph

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1.  Doesn’t the picture say

no room in this world for anything more?

If you desire to add something,

you must begin again

and make your own world,

including what has been missing

from the very beginning

of the world.

You must make an enormous effort

to leave this world for that one,

something like dying, if not quite.

Each world is so complete,

terror and emptiness

accompany every effort to leave it.

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2.  Black parts of things

keep the eye centered on the dark.

At least one can see

a bit of upstanding twig

leads to the branch,

leads along the branch

until the branch

foregrounded before flowing water

invites a sojourn past woods and house

along its banks.

Clouds are always on the move,

and suggest the weather’s alterations.

Darks do no more than keep the eye

centered on the dark.

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3.  When the things of the world

are so carefully depicted

—when we see such things—

surely we surrender a little, giving

ourselves over to the thing seen.

I have heard others speaking

of the tree’s treeness

or an object’s being.

I have looked,

and each time I experience something

–my own disappearance,

my own failed going-out

to meet the tree,

to meet the object.

Nothing coming back.

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4.  I can love a picture

but only if it doesn’t love me.

I insist on boundaries.

I can hate a picture

without it hating me.

I don’t insist on boundaries.

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5.  The branch of the sycamore

forks two ways,

one limb sort of down

and flat across the paper,

the other making an upthrust

so powerful it begins

to curve back on itself

as though the light was the light

of a nourishing self-regard

and the wide-spaced faint scribble

marks that go near the vertical

were the accidental pleas of space itself

warning against hubris.

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6.  So many bridges, foot, railway, auto,

each obscured by the surrounding designs,

are mythologies of difficult contact.

Or child’s stories where ogres

are secreted in dark patches under pathways

by which we connect.

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7.  The daffodil hangs its heavy blossomed head.

Wordsworth has shamed you.

And Eliot made the hyacinth

the flower of rebirth

into death’s blossoming

You are lone upon the heath.

You are between realms,

between cliché and astonishment.

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8.  And let the picture transform you.

Let this thistle put on its fiery fall color,

and let its bunched tufts

resemble a wrathful diety,

and let the corolla be a necklace

of enlaced skulls, and let homage be paid

by the ground underfoot,

its otherness crushing

ego’s unreasonable hectorings,

and let the mind never rest

in the false nirvana of vegetative happiness,

and let the bumble alight,

thick-dusted with the pollen of awareness.

Before You Go

Thoughts inanimate, stumbled, spare, before you go.

Folded memories, tinctured with despair, before you go.

Two lakes inside a jar, before you go.

Flame illumines fitful lie, before you go.

Furtive then morrow, nevering now, before you go.

Lacerating gap, stippled rain, before you go.

Anger rubs, raw ’n’ sweet, before you go.

Never seen the other side of sleep, before you go.

Nothing left for, not yet, grief, before you go.

A slope, a map, insistent heave, before you go.

Stone & stem, nocturne, leap, before you go.

Compass made of bones & teeth, before you go.

The wind up acts, delirium’s beast, before you go.

Spilt quell, impatient, speaks, before you go.

Rippling laughter, radiance leaks, before you go.

No place, no sound, nor up, or down, before you go.

Smokey, swollen seeps, before you go.

Tossing in tune, just like last night, before you go.

I’m nowhere near the fight, before you go.

Nothing to make it right, before you go.

It won’t congeal, no more deals, before you go.

Hope a fence, well’s on fire, before you go.

Slammed when you don’t, damned if not, before you go.

A hound, a bay, a hurtled dove, before you go.

Coriander & lace, stickly grace, before you go.

Englobing trace, fading quakes, before you go.

Devil’s grail, face of fate, before you go.

Suspended deanimation, recalcitrant fright, before you g

Everything so goddamn slow, before you

Take me now, I’m feelin’ low, before yo

Just let me unhitch this tow, before y

One more stitch still to sew, before

Calculus hidden deep in snow, befor

Can’t hear, don’t say, befo

Lie still, who sings this song, bef

A token, a throw, a truculent pen, be

Don’t know much, but that I do, b

Two lane blacktop, undulating light

Oona Ratcliffe, Heartspring the wreckage (diptych), 2008. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 168 Inches. Courtesy of the artist

Paolo and Francesca

after Dante Alighieri, from Canto 5, second circle Inferno, “La Bufera” –
the whirlwind where souls reside whose reason was overwhelmed by desire.

Smitten, I began: “Poet, I would speak
with that pair who go so lightly there
together on the wind.”
And he said: “You will see
when they come a little closer, ask
by the love that brings them on, they will come.”
So, when the wind swept them near us,
I raised my voice: “O breathless spirits! come,
talk with us, unless another forbids it!”
And as doves whom desire has called,
with wings poised and resolute, borne by their will,
come through the air to their sweet nest,
These left the company where Dido is
and approached us through that wretched air,
such was the power of my soulful cry.

Oona Ratcliffe, Hippies in the dust, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 84 inches. Courtesy of the artist

“O kind and gracious being
who visits us in this perditious murk,
we who stained the world with blood,
If we could pray to the lord of the universe, we would,
to grant you peace, since you have pitied us
in our sad perversity.
Whatever you please to speak of or to hear
we will hear and speak of with you
while the wind, as here it is, is still.
The place where I was born sits
by the shore where the Po descends,
to be at rest with other lesser streams.
Love, that wakens quickly in the gentlest heart,
seized that one through this beautiful form
which then was torn from me – and manner still offends me.
Love, which excuses no one loved from loving,
fixed this man’s charms on me so firmly
that, as you see, they haven’t left me yet.
Love brought us together to this death:
Cold Hell waits for him who spent our life.”

Oona Ratcliffe, Voracious, 2008. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 84 inches. Courtesy of the artist

These words carried from them to us.
And when I heard how doomed these spirits were,
I hung my head and kept it so long like that
until finally the Poet asked what I thought,
And when I could answer, I began: “Alas,
how many sweet thoughts, what great desire
brought them to this sorry place!”
Then I turned back to them and said:
“Francesca, your suffering makes me cry,
and I pity you terribly –
But tell me, in the days of those sweet sighs
how did love concede to let you know
your dubious desires?”
And she said: “Nothing is worse
than recalling the happiest of times
in utter misery; your teacher knows this well.
But if you really want to learn
our love’s first root, I will tell
although my misery in telling will be plain.
One day for pleasure we were reading
how Lancelot was struck by love.
We were alone and somewhat careless.
But as we read our eyebeams often met
and our faces lost their color.
One part alone was enough to undo us.
When we read how that lady’s lovely smile
was kissed by such a lover,
he, who is forever inseparable from me,
All trembling kissed me on the mouth.
That book and whoever wrote it was our Galeotto.
That day we read no further.”
As the one spirit spoke,
the other wept, so that, pitying them,
I fainted as if I were dying,
And I fell as a dead body falls.

1982/2009
for Oona Ratcliffe