From Speech’s Hedge Where the Honey

Eli Gottlieb and Peter Cole

1. Speech’s Hedge

where the honeyed
combs of light resolve

onto a couch’s blue upholstery,

shifting with wind:

like spirit
flinching in thinking

as though in a gem,

or Byzantine dome,

but the onlooker backing off—unsure to his day.

And orange
slits of escape nasturtium
jutting his
Persian wall of withdrawal.

Not images served,

but shards of an image—
breakage’s throne—

reflection’s
text as homage,

recording the thrusts of linkage attempted,

as place curiously home.

Nerve bridles
before such a future floor

as though in the spooked
childhood house

forever     on the wooded hill:

planks
giving way to the story below
and basement finds—

the trap of stairs

and libidinal
swill of spiral
unknowing

or a corner turned

onto the
bevel of weakened roof

forced by fear to climb—

for the forecast view to the jagged city,
small       in the distant haze …

Hives of midday light

through a window’s invisible weave—

and a barely registered

breeze
on the skin,

lifting attention—

annealed,

ornamental,

2. Lips for an Ethic

Idols that eyes
model in mind
border a common space
of sound,
and the sound, in turn,
a feast where meaning roots
or lapses,
lips for an ethic:

an offering of every man
of willing heart,

of beaten work—

for the light.

Make all things
the book of subsistence
advised,

in accordance

with the pattern shown you
there—

whose ground was the ground
dust of eaten gold

of beauty diffused through the dwelling
denied—

through clasps and loops of blue,
through cups and knops and buds,

the altar acacia covered
  with brass for the body
       and gold for the soul,
           to be borne by
rings cut like a lentil
(or food for a liver,

shame to them clinging like fat upon it,

and its lobes coiled
           like the serpent memory rides.

3. “So the Soul …

“… without extending and living in its object, is
dead within itself. An idle chaos of blind and confused powers.”
—Traherne

This was love in the day—

the eyes’ ray along
an iron rail
laced and white as the park
brides in their hopes and veils

guiding my climb through the air

toward the bolted
double doors
and rooms below—

Siennese, or like Escher
—so as not to slip,
over the landscape of kingdom and savior—

of blood in the alleys and open sewers,
of summer flies and trash,
or Melville’s wash of bone—

and hyssop fields overturned,

or bulldozed
groves of olive;

a fortress of knowledge and tact
on a far off hill …

This was love
in the will,

the eyes’ line along
an iron rail
laced and white as the bride’s
prospect and veil,

guiding her climb through the air.

4. For One Who Would Fall

A prayer for reduction,

or release through the opulent vision
of vermian scarlet and purple
and insult blue:

a sign

to rinse him of signs

or hollow a place in the day
for mirrored sight to enter,
and exit not as meaning
but set against nothing seen

—by which the world is hung—

in relief,
like a kite:

a seat of mercy, with hammered cherubim facing:

a prayer for construction—or recalibration

—for one who would fall
 from fealty to light.

8. The Music Room

Vaulted study arches,
ersatz Spanish chairs,
and drinks
on a brass tray cut with tracery,
bluing,

talk like laying a tune on the air
of Gould’s contempt,
latitude, career,

eyes catching
the courtyard hibiscus,
a square
where roses for the child were uprooted
and sand put in,
comments on friends,
family and failures
of nerve, the pauses

bent toward hope
and loyalties evolved,
giving out,
not in,
discussing indulgences,

virtue and applause,
the cowardly purist,
the flexible hero

the tomb of reason
and the graveyard of things:
splitting the hair and not finding a thread
—response to the needs of the soul,
so that I go blindly
as though pursuing
the beauty of something before me
but unclear—

not to spotlight alternatives
but to resist by form alone the course of the world
which permanently puts a pistol
to people’s heads.

Better colorless than crude.

Where is my music, where—
of Sion they used to sing—
and how should one intone
in an alien land the sweetness of air?

Remembrance of what is good
arose from the changes of things,
and I saw that the good which was past
hadn’t been pleasure but pain—

and things which were far away
by dark for dread were sung.

11. (Tuning) Hooks

All the little
links involved,
my non-existent
psalter said—

all the little links involved
would rot away
in precious time

and leave a taste
in thinking’s air
a shape impressed
like loops and hooks

in precious time

and ingrown love

all the little
links involved

like must on feeling’s tongue,

like must on feeling’s tongue.

12. The Poem Up There

“Ornament is nurse of pride.
Pleasure measure love’s delight.”
— Anonymous, in Dowland’s Songs or Airs

Nursing pride

in pride of place,

        a trope’s
loop of
central occasion—
        equipment
(a slap in the face
      to patricians of theme
and persuasion,

or civil (Horatian)
representation.

Unlaureate:

the poem up there

in the air of

      any beholder:

the painted vase
a useless favorite
aunt bequeathed,
accessory,

and not our cup
of tea,

—her dominance—

defined our living
(warmest) room

in time,

   defines my life

with wife and loving

abstract lack and decor—

not cure—

the offering of sweet
savor exceeding prayer—

in the volume of splendor
I read)

   To forge links
          and make light,

like Law,

defines a practice.

20. Into Delphinium

A psychomachia
for mercurial things,

for future affection and faith
in speech’s reflection of Eden’s bequeathal
or reef-like thrust—

which further a
soul’s landscape
into delphiniums’
white and blue through dusk,

or black-eye’s
blue by night,

by day on a bench
(by blankets of infant’s blue-eyed-leadwort backed)
a man helping a
   beaten-up beggar
      with a sandwich
under a Syrian pine        and scarlet
woodpecker gash and black/

defining a slum’s

slow retrieval

maybe to gentrification,

like kindness weakening
into a fear of its lack
or possible rival,

against a thought in executive heads,
and one’s own ear—

was ex-post-human

unmillenarian

Spirit War for Survival.

Afterword

“No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine,” wrote Herman Melville on his trip there in 1857, “Particularly Jerusalem. To some the disappointment is heart sickening …” The poetry of Peter Cole might be considered an elaborate marginalia to this diaristic comment of Melville’s, marginalia wherein optimistic disillusionment, or religious realism, takes shape.

Following out a poetic hunch, Cole first went to Jerusalem in 1981, to study Hebrew. For the better part of the next seven years, he stayed there, while the bulk of Hebrew scripture and literature crashed full-tilt into the wealth of Western—and particularly Middle English—poetry already in his head. The encounter produced a buckling upward and within, and several years later his first book, Rift, a collection of planar asperities inscribed on the ground-zero of Judaism. Words in these poems were “denatured” of their habitual associations and raked up into vast lexical spires and belltowers that rang with a music new to American poetry—equal parts Louis Zukofsky, August Roebling and something else entirely. His project was abstract, even devotional by nature, yet the poems were starkly sensual. Both in its serial poems and the more traditional constructions, Rift worked the emotionally charged spaces of betweenness—those that elude us between Scripture and spokenness, loss and gift, eye and world.

When he returned to America in 1988, Cole carried with him the Jerusalem landscape and a honed slant on Hebrew, and in the best Diasporic tradition, created a Sion of the mind, dispatching his thought and feeling all the way back to eleventh-century Spain, the golden age of Spanish Jewry under Moslem rule. It was in San Francisco that he began his project of translating, in the deepest sense of that fraught word, the poetry of Samuel Hanagid (993–1056 AD), a writer of notoriously knotty and glorious Hebrew, who has always loomed large as one of the great untranslatables. The resulting manuscript exhibited a kind of transhistorical perfect pitch, but it was an act of salvage as well, rescuing someone so intricately barnacled with the paraphernalia of Academe that he was in danger, in the various extant translations, of never being “seen” by readers of poetry again.

Speech’s Hedge, his latest book of poetry, bridges that project with his return to Jerusalem in 1992. Grounded in his immersion in medieval Arabic and Hebrew poetics, the poems have a newly relaxed amplitude, sounding within a wider range of variation. In the beautiful title poem sequence, short canto-like lyrics climb upwards along a fifty-page spiral armature, seamiessly conflating background and foreground, commentary and invocation, and producing a charmed relativity in the head of the reader, in which unlikely juxtapositions abound. In a conscious echo of the medieval Arabic tradition of inlay, quotations are laced throughout, from sources as disparate as Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams, Arnold Schönberg and the eighth-century Arabic poet Abu Nuwas. The key issue of ornament is explored directly, and psychological sense is released into the figures of the work, spilled, reconciled and gathered back.