Buber 11

You take the photograph you have, not the one you wish you had, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld. A line as slippery as the damp spider web that frames my cat this morning. Line, that is, between wisdom as cover and as intensity. The You knows no system of coordinates, though web gets closer than the army you have. There’s violence in the web, when it works, but that’s not all. Is the web a system, or the poetry that can kill a man (Stevens)? Beauty systems sell; poetry does not. One designer told me the covers were worth more than the poetry contained inside them. He could make money doing this. Not all money is dirty, after all, if it buys you butter and bread. Eggs have gotten so expensive, they’re being shipped to the mainland. A remembered egg yields less than the poem I use to recover my memories. I wrote out of a fascination with what is remembered, then forgot what I’d written. To go back is to remember the man who sat in our living room, top hat keeled over behind him, the time 3:30 p.m. He was tall and gnarled, like a tree, his knees like knots on the trunk, bark peeling, an exquisite haunting held beneath. The reds and greens seem prophetic in a backwards kind of way, like the book of Mayan prophecies he brought us, foretelling a future he wouldn’t complete. Make his memorial of eucalyptus scent, an aide to breath, before the harvest into glass jars.

The tree moves me to elegy, though I and Eucalyptus still meet up. We’re occasionally You to one another, at least Eucalyptus is to me. The individual You must become an It when the event of relation has run its course. But how do I define the course of this relation, or its end? Release the yellow measuring tape and it swooshes back into its metal housing. If tape is memory, then its absence must not be. He inhabits tree, inhabits park, inhabits poem, inhabits me, like return. Translate Pound translating a dead language. You might get “flyin’ kine Nikes,” or you might not. The mouth of the Metro opens to receive us; being inanimate, it doesn’t speak, but our shouts and our shoes offer it sound. If there’s an escalator, it breaks; if it breaks, someone opens it up, scab folding back like bark, and adjusts its mechanism. “I am a broken man,” a poet writes me. The tree is broken, but it stands. Your nobility is not mine, but I see it as I approach, Eucalyptus gleaming black in the light (when there’s light). He insisted to us that he was African. No hyphen home.

--in mem. Ikeolu Clinton Terrell, with thanks to Nathan Kageyama for the Pound translation.