Endarkenment is the Mother of Beauty: on Michael Palmer’s “A Dream of Sound Inside the Mountain" [by Susan Lewis]

In his most recent book, Laughter of the Sphinx (New Directions, 2016) Michael Palmer gifts us with his characteristically spare and muscular lyricism, as rich and musical as it is bleak. In the meantime, each passing day of the contemporary world’s real-life “endarkenment” seems to validate the prophetic echoes of this book’s sobering lament. Consider this one:

 

A Dream of Sound Inside the Mountain (after Anish Kapoor)

 

It is too brief this life inside the mountain
where headless horsemen sing
fevered songs

of self and war
When did we first notice
the trees of mottled bone,

when first hear
the cawing of crows,
contention

of the orchard orioles,
the sleepers’ echoing cries,
rehearsing their final words,

resisting final dreams
(These dreams were mine
and not mine

say the walls of stone,
walls of the poem)
Hedge-crickets sing

and the white whale
its whiteness sings
in the stone dream

and the lost hours have each
their silent song
in the heat of bee time

and the shock of desire
those times when time is not
and the endlessly shifting stones

carelessly speak
and rain floods the rutted roads
It is too long

this spiral life
It is too brief
How the wind and light pass

through our bodies of glass

 

The first thing to do is listen to this “dream of sound.” I say listen, because this poem (along with the others in this book) is a song. As such, it makes use of rhythm, a variety of sonic effects, and even – perhaps especially – silence, in order to underscore its inextricable relationship to sound, and therefore music itself. Some of the poem’s silence issues from its use of the line break, such as the weighted gap between the first and second lines: “It is too brief / this life,” an irrefutable assertion which is later mirrored, challenged, and echoed: “It is too long / this spiral life // It is too brief.”

In this poem, as elsewhere, Palmer probes the dialectical tension between interdependent opposites. Here, a synthesis emerges from the tension between song and silence, to propose a “silent song.” Likewise, in “[t]his life” within these “walls of stone, // walls of the poem,” headless horsemen (the folkloric ‘dark men’ who kill by stopping, and by naming) “sing / fevered songs / of self.” In this poem, their (deadly) song is the poet’s song, which destroys even as it creates — singing its own silence.

As always, Palmer’s prosody is gorgeous. Consider the sonic stitches linking “brief,” “life,” and “fevered” in those opening lines, the opening and terminal “f” sounds bringing to mind the exhalation of air from dying lips. Or the assonance and alliteration in “rain floods the rutted roads:” those three “r’s” interwoven with the sprung rhyme of “road” and “flood;” the terminal “d’s” in flood, rutted, road weighing down the phrase with the inevitability of endings. Or the third stanza, in which the long “o” in “crow” and the short “o” in “contention” bud out from their secondary position within the hard “c’s” that contain them, to ripen into the internal rhyme of “orchard” and “oriole:”

the cawing of crows,
contention
of the orchard orioles

Woven into this lush sonic tapestry is Palmer’s erudition, which situates this particular attempt to grapple with mortality within an established and persistent artistic conversation. Consider the ekphrastic project of the poem itself, setting “this life” within the harsh and isolated cone-shaped prison of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture, “Large Mountain.” Or the poem’s engagement with that iconic Romantic take on mortality (and one of the pinnacles of musicality in Anglophone verse): Keats’ “To Autumn.” In Palmer’s poem, we hear “the cawing of crows, / contention / of the orchard orioles” instead of Keats’ “twitter of swallows.” And the great Romantic’s vine-wreathed cottage is supplanted by a stone fortress rimmed with spikes. But now, as then, “this life” winds down too late and too soon, “in the heat of bee time,” while “hedge crickets sing.”

This poem also recalls Wallace Stevens’ immortal line from “Sunday Morning.” Here, death and beauty are paired in “silent songs,” “trees of bone,” and crows and orioles (from the Latin, aureolus). The use of paradox generates ironic distance, even while it binds “dreams [which] were mine / and not mine,” “these times when time is not,” and this “spiral life” which is “too brief” and yet “too long.” The echo of Melville also haunts these verses, in which “the white whale //. . . sings /in the stone dream.”

Arm in arm with the iconic work it invokes, this poem’s mournful beauty brings us face to face with a harsh world — ours — in which not only poetry, but life itself is the white whale we can’t help chasing, until “the wind and light pass / through our bodies of glass.”

 

The Laughter of the Sphinx

by Michael Palmer

New Directions (2016)

Paperback 

ISBN

9780811225540

$15.95

Comments

[Thomas Sibelius]

Thanks for sharing the amazing post. I love you, poetry gods.