Dance Card by John J. Parman

Dance Card

John J. Parman

Preface

We live bodily and imaginatively as both participants and observers. These two standpoints pose a dilemma like quantum physics and Buddhism: how can we live committedly and yet contingently, accepting that what seems solid or continuous is fragmentary or ephemeral? If we sometimes glimpse the heart of a given situation, what we take away from it is inexact and malleable. It's out of mind and then it reappears, its meaning varying. Poems mark how we take it in again each time it comes to mind, every sort of feeling arising, often incongruously. Dance Card alludes to the way affinity and randomness conflate, and also to a deck of cards, hopefully unmarked.

First Cut

1. Dark, blank, cold, hot—peril where light casts no glance or overwhelms. Great flags and portraits hang in squares, the names and phrases said over and over until apostasy hears a loosened song, finds its tongue. A distant square grows ever smaller. Names lose potency in proportion, states waving their banners, iron grips rusting in place.

2. They wield language like a sieve, push it through until it bleeds, a sieve like a cloth or a funnel, language a flag they unfurl to obscure. They know a sieve's a trick, three cards, a mark. Only fate gets respect: tag on a toe, blood dry on a floor or a sheet. They sense it comes back to one from the start, marked.

3. In France, in bed; in bed thinking in French. France a state of mind; a place my mind returns. "Beloved, you've fled," it doesn't say but knows. We were all workers once in life's marathon. Why France? Why French? All domestic, how desire took us and then left off. Yet they seem right. A borrowed land and tongue console us.

4. You take your aching residue and write it out. How it spreads: you read it aloud; it inches through a crowd of hearers, just as blind poets' chanting in the market ended up in kitchens, whispered in hallways, bedrooms, the baths. When first the danger of ink and paper, words declaimed to oneself and overheard? Write them down, say again who longed for whom, whose hand grazed fingers parting lips. Small and jealous gods find this an affront. Better then to write in silence, conjure how it was, set out those times of taking, the five lovers or was it seven? At night the count blurs but dreams retrieve them, one, two and many, as each child asserts.

5. How is it that Naples is a realist city? I grind my realism and press the boiled water through it. Through windows the progression repeats itself. The orbs repeat themselves. The balcony's enveloped in the city's deepening ochre haze as the poet looks out or, from a ship, looks back and sees it. How often blood figures in rituals ill-timed or accidental, unpropitious, separate from, dogged by, fleeing from or turning back to confront, as if the gestures were different from each other, exclusive of each other, as if they brought Rilke closer, further away, or roughly the same distance. Prodded memory plagued him with recurring thoughts, as if they could be rewritten. How would he start let alone end? A serpent's head pushed in: would it be like her two soles pressed? Who's bitten and why? What antidotes are close at hand? Fictions imagine but realism hears her coloratura.

6. In my ideal poet's world, great whites, coyotes, and lions still stalk those who are insufficiently in awe. The dacha has no fear of a blaze in rain, only of a wind-pitched tree. Seismicity remains, the ground cloven somewhere deep. My ideal poet puts down her pen, stares outward past a reflection ghosted now. Lights from a distant house invite the terrors of speculation her mind unravels, like a novel tragicomic in the brevity of its plunging trajectory. It's cold, she thinks, sun vanished, a fire warming scantly.

7. We always measure how far we came and how we missed our meeting points, markers in love's promising exchange that fall away with its demise yet form a sensory chorus line viewed offstage. If we look back, there's more of it now, a territory we claim as ours, having left our mark or been marked by it in turn. We bear these marks, tattoos life inked, evidence of space traversed, time given.

8. On the cigarette package, Krakatoa looks benign. I smoked one once, clove-flavored. Now they're banned. Horace wrote an ode lamenting how he was two-timed, comparing the aftermath to a half-drowned sailor drying soaked clothes in a temple near the sea's glitter, close to where he first set out, as if an Argonaut, Argos where the women were, the sky so fair, the wind so good. My Krakatoa: on the card I drew, the tower sheds its head.

9. I wonder about the indigenous. It's said they came here first, then others were found layered below them. Did they cast wary eyes on these newcomers who were taller and wilier? Trace how bloodlines alter, the genes forming an ever-greater mix that says this one was seduced or taken, children bearing varied signs in some sense, yet she loved them, though they preferred painted antelopes to her bracelets, tooth pendants, red hand prints—things their children saw as hers, taken up to rebuke their elders' bristling feral pigs painted in proto-realist style. Every season's a little different. She barters sweet melons in late summer, wary of these others and yet their neighbor.

10. Melons ripen. High summer. Grammy wears that bracelet and tends us. On the walls Pa paints pigs. He wants game. This like that. Grammy speaks a broken tongue Pa understands and we do too despite speaking as we do. She is who she is, Pa says, life rough and she raised all she whelped. Plants her melons, beans when pigs are scarce. Foraged in my beds, she rails. Pa's spear reclaims them.

11. Thrown over, the way a steamship is rolled so the plates slide and waiters laugh. Pain's what their eyes reveal, how we grasp at solidity despite our roiled planet. Time's out the window. Each mind tries to tune itself.

12. Draw down the moon, a witch's trick, as she drew her reluctant suitor in, an end forestalled, but then there was the garden he tended, roof, much else to fix, kitchen for impromptu feasts. I did not know or only knew bits and pieces. For days I have barely stepped out. Work is a garden that must be tended, turned over lest days lie fallow, water stagnant, the buzz arising from such small ponds, but too cold still and my friend is dead, so soon after her.

13. Are Angels eunuchs? Is their rebellion due to desire, the way celibates betray the vow and rationalize monstrosities? At the altar they don't bat an eye. Are there women smooth as marble, as Ruskin imagined?

Second Cut

1. Trouble's out stalking, women say, or it arrives soon after church, sin ablaze in its addled head, a gun or two in hand. Biases mount up like the gum cards boys collect with some idea of future value, the way emblems on jackets give a certain swagger to the wearer. Men mostly, swaggering, a few women standing by or spouting the gospels the radio spits out or making their way alone, white and Christian, possibly pagan, sewing runes on men's collars as their substitute for history.

2. A while ago, you sent a photo: you two. He seemed older, like a still from a film, light in its bisexual state, like those cars floating on the tsunami. (The drowned, even the dogs, sought out the living.) Your father feels confidence in a daughter whose nature will accrue. Because of this you stow your every last dream up ahead. And sometimes you write. The years pass, letters from you these brief scraps of here.

3. One form of freedom is to walk around naked or, as one woman did here once, iron on the back deck in underclothes. Poetry gives her other garments, a lyre that plays itself or speaks softly as she moves the iron back and forth across whatever she'll put on next, a party to go to with her producer husband as she makes her way through spring in California exile, Paris far, far away, but this is freedom, too, provincially speaking: frighten the bourgeoisie as they cower on their Birkenstocks.

4. I compose constantly as a hotel manager might or a curator noticing a distant frame’s slight tilt. Outside are versions of distance. How distant should we be? Another left off some years ago, that place defined topographically: far away. And you, closer in time and space, composed this small and boxlike universe, savory in look. Sumptuous is an aesthetic too, stripped down, laid out one last time. We were born for this.

5. Regrets lie around the house like cats seeking moonlight instead of sun, rub against our minds. My friend, crying as she talks to me, recounts tragedy: it's all forward in this world and yet she always ends up walking it back.

6. Like Mahler, he said. I try to imagine based on flimsy or non-existent, let’s face it, Mahler's a mystery, but this was his reference. I met her twice. "Occasion it," he said. "Coming or not, to wait for it's a mistake." Then he tried to do it, annoyed when lines sat blank, unspoken. "Poem?" their child asked. Got it.

7. Attached and detached and attached, this cycle without destination, memoir’s impulse to drag it out onto paper and look at each one on its own, conflated and separated. They shake their heads but he’s unmoved. Shake and move they did, remembered, reasons to resume the chase, scramble for a taste of that good thing, a banquet and then the bill, the reckoning, blind he was, then he saw and heard clearly. The road, stepping in and stepping out, the Fates with their contagion, the mind snapped open by the drop to nowhere, falling down into consciousness, a cycle with no sequels must be home, he thinks.

8. Erasures of a different kind, genders blur, synapses whir, the most orchestral, capable of timbres, hallucinations, sleight of hand and eye, seas undreamt of yet dipped into. Each smudge haunts me, holes dark as gravity, worms in time looping back to remarry past with future, if only—but wait! These smudges seem a border or a line of smoking pots amid her splendor, for love is wreckage from close up, beast with two backs, frogs croaking, the bats all swoop. (In darkness save a window, she came, I noticed, a mind the one and only, the only.)

9. Death might mean another thing, a critic said, thinking of Keats on how women come in bed. He might be on to something, this critic, led by lines of displacement: supposing that wed or not we’d rather fuck at points than be dead. Blue curtain, brick wall, sheet on which she bled are so many photos one could take in flagrante. Immortal lines are on lips after, or hummed, how she came in bed or on it, was wrapped up in the diffusion her body felt, overwhelming all the rest. Her lover had half an ear cocked for the jealousy threatening to harm him nigh. He hadn't smoked since twenty-one, but now he reaches for a cigarette as the pace slackens. Threats by telephone, threats by email, proxy, they wear like infections, low-grade yet fatal.

10. Break in bloody nights: they withdrew. Linked women. Naked, one of them caused scandal. Her flesh, womanly, was meaning-laden. Some object but these things evolve.

11. The architect walled others off, except his son, and his patron and patroness. In a dream, he heard the words leapt and wept. Awake, he thought not auspicious, I guess, but the court must be served, something's amiss. Summoned to see her, he heard her confess. Lust gathers like a storm and if a kiss signals it, immortals have other means, things that mortals, even a king, might miss. Thus poisoned, the sun god's daughter careens. I must have him! she declares. Make it so! So much skill. Set within, the goddess leans into his heft. Her vessel takes the fellow, snorting as he mounts, and then her bellow.

12. In my dream, my trim instructor morphed suddenly into a heavy, door key in hand to lock me in. I woke and gazed at dim five a.m. In the sequel, women appeared. They spoke of their oppressors, expected, frequent, unwelcome. Yours was singular. Ours are not. Hercules is still some distance from David, vanquishing a foe. Two heroes in this meeting place, one hard, one buff. Men gather, attracted by the iconography. Elsewhere, frescoes and mosaics invoke the sea, the harvest, fruit, prostitutes, and rites of spring. I missed the plaza on my walks. I saw the bridge where Africans sold knock-off purses, Hadrian on one end in his castle, a man left bereft. I missed this passion in my earlier life, was its object once, unexpected and without consequence, unlike my dream.

13. We're like weather, blowing hot and cold, female and male. There's no helping apparatus and a man in a dress is who he is to passersby, whereas a woman: there are exceptions either way, drifting through or tight-roping pole to pole, tricky if you meet on the same highwire, but then we make it work, don't we?

Third Cut

1. In the grinding house of prose, words arrive squealing, are herded and hooked, lifted aloft, their necks sliced open, bled. A dangerous business to be taking up, your long polyethylene gloves on, caps and long coats, boots that glisten, thick lenses encased in rubbery frames. Books arrive in slabs, the ink still red and wet. At night, I read them with a knife, sliced thin as skin felt between tight borders. Decades pass but I still read by touch.

2. A piece of you, a piece of me: we must be locked together in some sense, rutting dogs bewildered by aftereffects. Of no import, negligence merely and yet each one's like a narrow line of acid in my brain. (Possible?) Every single particle of us washes up and I lean down to look again. How shining they are, pooled on asphalt.

3. "Je vois, par taches." Cézanne anticipates the knowing of afternoons' half-lit rooms, northern hills dissolving into westward orange, hills compressed as viewed, window-framed, houses lit up, domesticity revived at day's end, the shower, the walk, the train, all we knew still here despite the disappearance of the rest.

4. Wandering in my torn coat, saw fragments on the ground. Dreamt I found Walser’s jacket where he left it, a sister’s gift, loden and few signs of wear.

5. Even a small crush is too much, voices rising and everything obscured. The platform’s worse. I wrote poems on trains when I could sit. A lyric suggests singing. Buskers use boom boxes then pass the hat. Rarely truly more than moves. No one was there filming except in my head. An artist played “The Goldberg Variations.” Gould hummed as he played, a notorious eccentric at the piano, possibly sick of it, the audience sent away. No crowd for him. I liked her balcony, almost a room, no view except the car repair and the sideways look. I remember it, every book. But this was later. Recently, I dreamt of her old place, but another in her bed—reasonable, since she’d moved. It was white instead of black. I took the bus, 41. I wrote no poems as I rode. They followed me, masking as prose, ending on a Zurich terrace and later, when she laughed scornfully in a café, I wrote this too. By then the humming stopped.

6. Titan laid low. a critic prowling. Even their art merits no thought, it’s said, the houses, marriage sterile. Dinner parties are cited, guests appalled. At Sam’s Grill, a funeral deconstructed: brought them together, quarrels alive, but soon they'll be gone. A jackal tears at an old beast's thick skin. At MoMA, their names evidence their largesse. Flecks of skin mix with pigment, viewed closely. Walking I saw his vault through the glass: gold or jewels, stock certificates imperviously stored. Lenin in Red Square, Napoleon in the Invalides lie as quietly. No jackal or animus harries them.

7. Paralyzed in a way. They go off to mass. “It will be sung,” she said. Laundry’s dry and folded in this material world. Songs pour from the box, season appropriate. At the funeral, Heaven was invoked, life eternal. Like here, Swedenborg noted, only it goes on and on, a telenovela of good and evil. Banality, Arendt wrote, like buskers on the train, murdering time to make a buck. A waiting game, I read, imploding as they will, which were mighty, and so, we wait, avoiding vodka, living on to reap what rattles east, soothes envy knowing they will fall just as Marx wrote. Even the pope struggles to pay his bills. Those choirboys seduced, lawsuits— wives to keep them honest or at least more honorably corrupt is our answer. No Prada slippers, no monkey business. “It will be sung.” Laundry’s dry, folded. Materiality brought us here, stranded but we do our best with it. Abandoned, we embrace it, tell you what the news is. “A bumpy year” to everyone. Vodka and a chaser, the usual denials. Mass is over. Hope your husband’s better. The prince is crimson, so Wills then.

8. Fiction is memoir is reflection filtered through time or by it. I have a first line. Let me begin. Memory is a mirror and a lens, a notebook with small sketches I drew incoherently, a terrace where threat of offspring arose, a leitmotif of horizontal life. I had a first line. Began again, only didn't, every one ending, but how they unrolled, stories each of them, poetic material. Poetry has a blurred precision, a watch you reset every morning, remembering who was touched, the call-and-response way you moved toward her like a flame.

9. How like they are, Einstein thinks, tracing a curve. Much the same, he theorizes, as the sun’s acting on all that passes. Gravity sits by placidly, a science of its own, round as an apple. On the bench a man rehearses lines to set the women desiring. Affect finds its way through space-time, a moon pulling tides and floods. They listen but they fail to fall. Gravity, grown old and gnarled, knows something about falling. Schopenhauer has the last laugh.

10. Facts open out to poetry, as they will. Wave and wave and wave and wave: what terrors, then, in the depths? Feet dangle, a phrase set loose, drifting toward a made-up abyss. A pen thrown sticks into a wall, nib and all, or penetrates the heart. Fifteen feet of grey cartilage, teeth visible in shallow water; grown men postpone their exercise. Don’t surf! (My whole life has been like this.) For years, I dreamt their dark shapes shot sideways in the rolling surf. The air is warm, not like here, black forms evident from above.

11. Am I to inch sideways? I slip into convenient openings like gates ajar that give a glimpse of a garden house, or slip out, find a new way through it, whatever exactly it is, a wall of stasis. Walking methodically around two to tread the boundaries of a world shrunk to its agoraphobic present, I am content, in between the time of then and the time of therefore. Not touching, aware of an outline that could be a city or a mountain. Leaning down, I hear the stones that ought to line the streets, dead names speaking of their presence.

12. Somewhere I read how lines of philosophy crash into other lines. The language Yeats used floats through, also Heaney—both dead but still recited in people's heads, or even aloud. I found a poem earlier in the I Ching, almost an aside, left casually as if a sage marked a place with it and went off to have dinner. I left it there, waiting to be retrieved. The lines walk in from every quarter asking to be set down, and the words appear, whispering their provenance or mouthing it silently, not that I'd notice, would I? Not much poetry in my head, despite a good memory. What stays with me is the resonance. Modern not postmodern, I suppose, to want that frisson, although I get it from my friend's falling-snow account of what seems to be a child who died.

13. In my dreams I take on no personae other than my own, yet found myself on a bus that became a train, pouring a bowl of water into a sink that emptied onto the floor. A woman befriended me and followed, despite crowd, confusion. "Look, there's Henry with Mr. Bones, flesh and ghost, alive and dead at once!" Just like depression. If I suffered from it, then any means would probably do to get me out of my wretched self. Poets are not celebrities, shining up their CVs. writing out their warnings. In dreams it all arises, including old Mr. Bones, Henry in tow.

Fourth Cut

1. The language poets use and how it reads or is heard, not least in the writing of it, read and heard as an action like a kiss and its resonance, a window shaking from the wind, a passing truck, ghosts felt sometimes rising from these pages. "Why did you have to ruin it?" Questions like this drift in from distant Iowa, posed rhetorically. Sometimes you have to ruin something to decide on its reality. Youth is illusion mostly, and then a discovery: who sidled in from three hundred lives? I set the cards out on the table yet again. I apologize in advance for a randomness that comes with them. My apology rings hollow, I imagine, the Fates just an alibi. Surely a card up a sleeve, sleight of hand? Despite their accusations, I never cheat.

2. Your letters go unread, but their phrases recur. Sometimes at night the moon angles and I want to tell you. “Gather all of this and bring it with you.” If I brought up journeys out of turn it was because they weren’t the same alone. Lately, I remembered how it was, the conversations in between. If they could happen in their own world, separate from every other, then the sign would point there.

3. Memory, the title read. Noticed a cleft almost hidden amid his tropical points of reference. Nominally he was in his dotage, yet the flame still lingered: an oceanic concubine fingered in moonlight, her moaning against the buzz of whatever the lizards failed to cull, an art to the one means he still had left. Thinking back, it seemed almost comical to be reduced to this trick, how it was in youth when some brazen schoolgirl, languid then leaning back, lips parted her skirt hid, feels his fingers' brush, gasping as she does, riding his hand's mix of slow, fast, a lull.

4. A shock. Or is it whispered? Evening clothes, it was said. This mystery, how it melts in metaphor and yet persists glacially, also melting now. Light cigarettes, lift drinks. Both touch the lips, scorch a bit going in or down, yet their effects accrue, a truth we'll deny until we can't. Art for art's sake, for culture: armies march for this? Is this what we stake out, this fence with missing slats, thin dogs nosing at them indecisively? Whispered or does it hiss offensively, a clenched hand and an orange haze recalled, sinking? Gravity's unceasing despite accruals and denials.

5. A terrace operetta: love is like Chekhov’s gun: act three or five, a shot is heard. Bang! The dog is briefly deafened. He barks. The chorus sings. ‘Oh!’ from one wall, but no one answers. (There is no answer, one notes.) Yet the question vexes. Love's illusive, its quantum form evades scrutiny. The dog runs in circles, chasing it. Look, it has it in its teeth! But no, the scene has changed: one damn thing after another. Between the sexes, a scrim or a curtain they sometimes lift. What you thought you saw wasn’t, it was some other thing. Wrong is how it boils down; whatever you felt was love’s facsimile— a scrim, a crime, a good time. There is no truth, only sound mixed with movement, only heat and rivulets. Love was there like Chekhov’s gun: "Oh! Oh! Oh!" One forgets, another dwells, the dog is briefly blinded. He cries, the chorus silent.

6. In Eva’s wonderful poem the god expresses impatience. His father was subtler, though, coming on as a swan or a bull, drifting golden, theatrically lit. Seed wombs, found continents— reason enough for subterfuge. They remembered him fondly, wings, horns, spangly things, and how they cleared a path for him who took their measure in long crescendo, not like those ordinary men, offspring sweet being half of him, their beauty.

7. Sometimes you come back to me. Not just because one of your signs appeared, a fuller image with its connotations. Long time, I thought, and all these things accumulate, not in drawers or shelves, not put away like clothes sometimes are when we can’t bear to cast them out. There’s no room, no house, no field, nothing that contains you, only possibility's left, as vases in their beauty define volumes meant for a bouquet's stems, or as glass jars envelope the summer's bounty, laid away against tomorrow.

8. To go where poetry occurs. (I paraphrase. Conducive to it, he meant.) There’s a muse on the sofa behind me, one leg crossed or reading a book or looking at my friends’ artwork or at nothing at all, thinking how the gods come through, how far she is from the mountain where they gather. We have Mount Tam, and I think she wandered in from there, skimming the bay with her toes as sailboats passed, captained by whoever’s out these days—it used to be lawyers, teeth set to win the race. Tech moguls supplanted them. No poetry there, she thinks. I’ll keep on a line to that window looking out at Tam, to the one who often has me on his mind. A muse likes that in a man, to be watching for her where a hillside rises, look in wonder.

9. Midas got a bull. It was white. Wasn't offered back. Poseidon cursed the sun's daughter, fixed her lust. Must have the white bull! Architects practice these black arts. Got her wish and had his offspring. The story grows complicated. Betrayals. The moral: white bulls are bad luck and yet a good fuck. Poseidon no doubt foresaw it.

10. A god may take umbrage, a slight— a white bull is typical. Gods won't leave it alone. Architects give dreams form. How like a cow then was her bed. Estrus, a perfume, registers across species, but sometimes it's genes crossing: bull's head, man's torso. Waiting. Cows take time. Sweet time. Sweet. All said and done, she savored it despite the damage.

11. Immortal yes, so I can see destiny given form and space. Too soon gone, so I imagine it, oh cradled one, asleep now to rest a mind life overflows. Suitors will call you in time, their allure, beguiling tone, mortal fires sometimes raked, the fires others stoke, the rivers women bring, their mystery. Carried along, those months of arising that courting sparks. If I'm present, you'll hear me in the blessings on their lips, lights flickering on the water when the lanterns float by.

12. My friend recounts her adventure. My mind is filled with thoughts, although she notes her story ends, momentarily at least, in safety. Keep us safe, I ask God at night, this personal God known since childhood, present with his Son, with angels, one particular saint. "At 70, I put the woman problem in a drawer," the French architect told the young, attractive gallerist. I understand his impulse to halt. Or rather his impulse to shift her to another plane, less incendiary. We emerge somewhat torched but also brought the gasoline.

13. Remembering walks taken, sometimes accompanied, the sight of dried thistles in the dead of summer, field of horses, the lower gate ending temple grounds, a barrier for novices. We were novices once too. There’s an element of this that makes it possible. It drops away and the walks cease, gate breached or car gone, love gone or fleeing. I took refuge in a friend or two, no novice now, a kind of sage only, old enough to know the knowing’s past, this mystery I left unresolved, left remembered and remembered. You scoffed at this, but it comes to mind.

John J. Parman is mostly in Berkeley, California.