This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

The floor of the upside down

106 T H I S C O M P O S T perceived objects. To see the stars, to be looked at bythestars, is to be penetrated and illuminated by starlight" (Persistence of Memory, 63). To encounter light at all is to be consumed in its enigma, time, to see the world focused back at us like a wide flower: river, vascularlightning & leaf-vein. The condition of this consumption is mortality. "After a long time of light, there began to be eyes, and light began looking with itself.At the exact moment of death the pupils open full width." The floor of the upside down Predation has its solar remainder: Only the sun in the morning covered him withflies Then only after the grubs had done him did the earth let her robe uncover and her part take him in RobinsonJeffers documents a late encounter, "Vulture," in which the bird of prey sizes up the aged poet and savors him for another time. "I tell you solemnly / That I wassorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes— / What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life after death." And what else could this be but Hart Crane's visit with Melville's tomb, T H E F L O O R O F T H E U P S I D E D O W N 107 The calyx of death's bounty giving back A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, The portent wound in corridors of shells. Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil, Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled, Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars; And silent answers crept across the stars. The stars speckle the sea surfacewith the patterned stencil of an answering report, while the nautical depths perform another labor: ... anything nature puts in the sea comes up, it is cornucopia to see it working up a sluggish treadle, from a ship's hold to the truck which takes it to the De-Hy to be turned into catfood, and fertilizer, for nature's fields afternoon Manatee of my mind? Rock picture of a beast? Lausel woman, holding out a ladle?Actually sluggish treadle up which nature climbed Wet white body dried Old picture Andromeda awash Norn nurse waitress. The "great mother" is not apersonage but a nest ofdeposited urges, aport ofaccess to the underworld signaled by the herm, its stones like magnetic embers of afinal mappa mundi. "Work the old images from the hoard, / el trabajo en oro that gives wealth semblance / and furnishes ground for the gods to flourish." Masa confusa. 108 T H I S C O M P O S T The pageant, growing ever more curious, reaches An ultimate turning point. Now everything is going to be Not dark, but on the contrary, charged with so much light It looks dark, because things are now packed so closely together. We see it with our teeth. Workers on the real guide the threads, sort the grains, bind the seams. Heraclitus is distantly signaled there where Olson sees him disappearing into the ability of humans to know themselves as their own matter—Heraclitus among the few who acknowledged asworkers the sleeping and the dead ("Even sleeping men are doing the world's business and helping it along"—which answers in polyphony to another adage, "We assume a new being in death: we become protectors of the living and the dead" [Davenport translation,22,31]). "Be the Oedipus of your life and the Sphinx of your tomb," a spirit-medium told Victor Hugo, indicating the dual creative labor of life ventured in poetry by day and by dreams in sleep. All night long I was a Eumolpidae as I slept putting things together which had not previously fit The work of the dead and the sleeping is the work of discerning the bottom, the earth as ground of the upside down or inside out, as vowels and consonants are ambassadors of arrival and departure: upside-down trees and sky,shadowy, at the bottom other step-stone holes in the world. Zukofsky derives his poetics in "A"12 while mourning his dead father and marveling at language, That closed and open sounds saw Things, See somehow everlastingly Out of the eye of sky. T H E F L O O R O...