Robert Lietz
SEASONS AMONG THE TRIBES (5,6,7,8)
For the Bosnian
resistance
The quoted material in section 7 is borrowed from a New York Times column, "Out There: Berlin," by Melissa Drier. The speaker is Markus Stolz, a Berliner who promotes fashion events and participated in the first Love Parade in 1989. Further allusion is made to "The Dying of Sarajevo," a New York Times Magazine feature by Jon Jones and John F. Burns which depicted Sarajevo's devastation and the heroics of Vedran Smailovic, a member of the Sarajevo Opera, who played his cello in the streets despite the imminent danger, that he might honor these who died during the siege.
5
Is this what we remember asking for?
These hearts, just below the tingle
of the lightbulbs, like advancing asterisks? These afternoons, like a labyrinth
stretched out, concealing the coastal routes, the blues of western distances?
Coincidence cannot explain these comings to. Lyrics percolate. And
the stillness forming in the gunner's throat speaks for the many dead, the
many tears
before the window miniatures, a man at risk, as if he's sought the subject
out,
striking pacts for his great-grandchildren to finsh. What should we, in
our electric
opulence, expect? Shells again? And voices, more marvelous, more strange,
confecting to
one glow,
a mischief in live air, sharpening trajectories, repeating the orders now,
as the shells
persist, and the noise of shells, like a libretto for exhaustion? Would
something
like a poem bear plague? Bear the looks of streets, like sonatas perishing?
I strain to feel
it. And he, the first son of the family to be schooled, he samples the dream's
worth,
the inscrutable and compelling tesserae, the walls of tools and all the
human costs, a
smile, surfacing Rust Wednesday light, that bursts like kingdoms come, alike
in light
and in affecting shade.
And which, dear Lord, of the many revelations, shall now be heard
and now be
understood? And which shall speak, and which shall be believed, no matter
what becomes,
shall sit in the same place, dip in the one bowl, songsters and murderers
alike, a people
lightning enters and inspires? A people traffics in first words. And smoke,
wind-woven
where they speak, falls over them and stays, a people packaging their lives,
revelling for
earth and for excitements of rotation, their souls like ghosts of products
once desired:
2 weeks of flour to last a place besieged! And these, in covenant, in concentrations
of new
music, they look ahead to us, through smoke that falls, that stays then
clears between the
tree crowns and first stars, the stars, like slivers, a little too severe,
repeating the range
they'd learned in a physician's
syllabus.
6
Could we ignore events, bring hardness
to account, expecting, goodness knows,
of this exceeding confluence, of kids, blue-lipped and shivering, this city
brought
to long-lived peddled scrap? A cellist now accompanying that sear, that
freeze
might well imagine men with last names like his own, searching the mounds
for clues,
the tractored mounds and layered snow
for innocence, the yawning barns
for words a people dropped from conversations, getting the moods if not
particulars,
staring down the feral looks of circumstance. He plays his heart for these,
without
a chance he might astonish now, against the friction and ventured force,
remembering
the hands of women, hardened to deal scraps, in briefs of song, such hands
as lightly brushed at matinees, finding the words that seemed to prophesy
starlight,
beginning with once and dusk, selections of cuisine, as evening stars showed
through,
beginning with the soups and fingers reasoning short change, the looks of
new-come
leaves, in darkness now the more unfriendly and more cold. He feels Time's
pinch-grip, a
man
broadcast against impersonation, declaring himself the weight, the lightness
now
and now another kind of imminence, carting his poorer loads of stone,
that he might play the likes of these, endure the grey and consequent malaise,
the odds on character, this phenomenal
and this bled sky, to which
an eye adjusts, like any accident,
reappearing with eclipse.
7
Reason enough to think of marsh geese
whispering, to remember body love
and the amusements of the body, a people with loveliness to pay, with kids
of their own at large in night-vision arcades, obliged, obliterating,
their hands gone on to primary engagements, to suites of flame, to simulate
such ruins as now permitted to our cameras.--More at stake, we think,
than arrivals and routes home, than hands, submitting now, or waving
the smother off, this lingo neutralized, bringing the stage-lights up, showing
the March-lit willows, more eerie
with storm gone.
Additions of piccolo, of solace, accuracies of bass.
"What the kids are saying is extremely existential, cool and
calculated, a countdown in
their heads. You see some in gas-masks. It's the apocalypse as accessory."
And now the symphony premiers, despite
the emphatic calendar,
to get a people out of barns, a place in shape for living in, the neighbor
graves
in shape, as if it were not alone the solitude or funky new designs,
alone the music for getting stories told, that leaves men scavenging
among the panels and ancient beams, or dredging at creek-lines, seeking
evidence,
and not alone the storms, more suddenly
on us, the shingles
more dangerously adrift, acquainting
the tribes with tasks, and turning
the tasks to sortings out.
8
The evening sky bleeds west, declining
over blocks, over homes raised up
in the thinking of sad women, in the hearts sparked now by currencies and
task maps.
Buzzards circle over all they've seen erupt, a huge and wheeling snarl
bending private time, eyeing the brown
and lingering ice, the clues they find
in the shade side of the ditches, as if hard were not enough,
the exhausted barricades and snow-fencing had not locked the image in,
the weight and decibels, the wine spilled now by these inexpert servers.
Wheeling above a people collar-caught and spun, the birds have lived
more mercifully, wheeling over these,
brought out by the bowed strings
and now by these more restless entertainments, pecking among the geese
pecking at the city's rim, among the facades brought low, until another
face reflects,
observed on the curved glass of the antique display, reveals the meaner
scripts, the
parabolas,
swaying away then home, winding away again among the shadows of what ought.
Odd,
and earlier, and understood: they burn horizons out, and skies, like ceilings
of intent,
display material fatigue, lost as the waters slip, and the white words,
more bloodied now,
and now pursued on the most ancient intercoms. Blown down, rained on,
and left to drape the hedges, old flags invite the eyes to summary, to spoilings
after all, the feel of sticks, inviting a drummer on, inviting the brigands,
smartly placing
pot-shots out of foliage, and descending now among the fingered scraps,
the percussion foundering, leaving
this soprano, following the cellist's
lead, together standing, one
against it all.
For John Stewart