THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS: TAMAS PANITZ

5 POEMS by TAMAS PANITZ

Ode to Marie Laveau

Caiman walk in the liver’s dream

up stairs of missing waters

the atoms at last have agreed to work

Hiram was Hydrogen exalted brother

wearer of all clothing more and more.

Let talk reach its terminus

where the unformed lends its edge.

What good is blood if the second comes first

the priestess asked, vervain and vetiver

don’t tell anyone what you choose

for third, a personal door to be free of your desire.

Listening to Bruckner’s 5th

Only a pythagorean could dress as the gate empty through it

always toward danger the keen edge of being teethes

up the Tiber philosophy is about trespassing where you are

because words are slow and the heart hammers fast

but some day they must meet, Jack said, patient. 

Bruckner’s flutes

flowers 

long as breath

along the tape

a keen eyed Indian he was never safe from lions.

Hear the trees decide to sound their brass.

A busy hand keeps your minds free.

My tables tremble with the voice of angels

who do not themselves disturb the air.

The divine surrounds itself with deceit.

A flower growling in your mother’s photograph

nothing is different but gradually new animals

these first geese ever coming or going

it was quieter we could communicate from anywhere

just seeing to say, remember, all of this for you.

Maze of the Horizon

A long line of words the horizon shuffling about at the doctor’s door

who watches all long lines from anywhere until they supply their cure

turning on themselves note the sense call back an order it must have known

the girls push their wheel barrows when do we ever get to know

under the shadow of the margin trace the furrows back to sin and then light

the long teleology of lives rays from the line of lines that purifies

Dido is Hannibal my father had wet hands elephants on the alps

it’s hard to see much when you’re busy doing

order of the spell we’re in can’t see how we’re spelled

waiting to learn the present tense the humble means of chaos

when you kiss me like Mary with your Aramaic lips O hosanna

here’s a long bold line that toils and flowers from the center

I can hear the horse in the chair the snipe sing in solid plaster

put your foot through the wall and feel its wet unmade continuo

of course the margin starts anywhere moveable evil idem-itas identity sameness

the trick is to think back back back and suddenly it’s over

fish falling from the light and no other god around my dear

just a panther circling in the dark we are ever closing in on rest

fervid center of bone closer becomes thick green its vapors  I near in delusions

Kant you rat I neared the line came in the thick with delusions and I let go the rope

but that was much later they ring the gong and maybe it’s later again

they ring the gong maybe it’s now he’s coming the scribe starts a fresh line

the bronze waves of gongs roll back and make to shatter the margin

as if the margin had never been o read from the fair silence my friend

we’ll know what to do looking back we’ll ride the beast that is itself the end the sun.

After a painting by Louise Smith

How long have you waited 

to make me see this by accident

the way the moon is always between 

any number of stone stoplights.

The ground is covered with math like that

in this city built of seeing

under the sky in a blue cross

between your two hands. Tau,

the third thing,

between us too, that makes the whole

Kether, crown, completion.

They say Qabala came from the Greek

but Qabala is not scholarship.

The book that matters is being written still

and today the great polymaths 

of Renaissance systematic science

have finally begun 

to speak themselves in paint. 

What they always meant but couldn't

say, the name that calls her back

because this is the name she left

sign and seal she sailed out from under

on smooth Aegean, Atlantic, bathtub

to mysterious Greenland.

Atlantis was in Chicago all along,

the salt of her primordial sea.

The Nine Lives of Island Mackenzie

He gouged his claw deep into the tree.

Eight lives left. He marked.

He did not like to look at it.

It is better to pore over the sea of death

and there give out one’s own, he thought:

reap tangential blessing.

The release opens through her of the light

an influx in the mistress below.

She said, go down and tell her her secret name.

The light her other face opens in life

both wave and particle.

He ate a sea anemone and a crab.

Because he didn’t like to look at it he went down

and called Persephone by the secret name of Love

to release and follow her living beyond life.

Beyond?

If the story was about a man he would have burned

black cats until sunlight, a reductive horror

in the other world, the mind works hard

by waste and excrescence to people.

The bridge turns through her face and expands

each ray turned back through the other.

Because the story is about a cat lost at sea, Mackenzie

made designations ate fish for breakfast. 

Christ was already there, and Captain Jupiter 

could not be the hero of this story for divine Justice 

for his being English.

So christ was the cat of this story, very very alone on the island.

Because a cat is two swords running each way 

through the crucible of the narrative, the spirit 

beyond death forged me for his noble companion.

Together on our islands.

We are very very alone and his suffering ours

from an authority within in his mind of Pan.

Captain Jupiter is a toothless old hick.

An insurrectionary imagination takes the empty

beaches. Walk out from the temple.

Past the end of the world.

The Island spoke: “Behold,

this is the floor of my house.”

Then in the jungle Mackenzie felt at home

and the living things were all permitted

their own voice.

But the crocodile has no voice. I mistook it for a rock

until it opened its head to the sky and was hollow.

Christ thrust in a shipwrecked attaché case

and saved himself.

She came out of the sea.

He could smell her island in the heart of the jungle.

He followed her scent.

In and faster than I grasped I rushed along 

and her scent would not notice me.

Stepping lightly on my paws

in her lap onto her hands where they rested.

Where I will die.

In her lap unnoticed the emperor

and I fell through the air a scream tightened 

up. Her enraged popes

full of her against me.

She said: You will die.

She loved Captain Jupiter.

And Mackenzie did not notice me, as Rilke said

are we present at all in the world of a cat

even as we co-inhere the characters wear 

the stations of a narrative in a single plant, rhizome 

of transformations, a drifting association of birds

in the serious hands of the wind.

She was an older form of death the only death 

but he had followed her in the guise of Love

moving because she moved into the destructive impulse 

that stood as a point in the darkness 

giving the darkness dimension.

She threw nuts at him from great distances.

A painful vestige of one’s Creation:

Captain Jupiter is in the mind,

and she loved Captain Jupiter.

Vita:

From the little I’ve been able to discover about the life of Ursula Moray Williams, author of the “children’s” book, The Nine Lives of Island Mackenzie, three biographical details stand out: she was locally admired “for her many acts of kindness and instinctive christian faith;” she “organized riotous parties for the Puffin Club;” and was influenced early on by her uncle, the publisher Stanley Unwin. Unwin published, among other things, Tolkien’s The Hobbit and may have been friendly with the other Inklings (I don’t know, though it may well be known somewhere). Her story has the simplicity and rightness shared by that circle, especially in Charles Williams; or of an attentive listener to the world that had just produced Freud, Oswald Spengler, Rudolph Steiner, etc, all aware of their place within an emergent world-age. I would somehow add her voice with theirs, though she is their younger, not German, and perhaps addressing us through a different colored telephone.

*****

Tamas Panitz is a graduate of Bard College living in Hudson NY, where he edits The Doris magazine with Billie Chernicoff. He is the author of Blue Sun (Inpatient Press); Uncreated Mirror (Lunar Chandelier); and The Way of the Tower (Metambesen). He was born in Hungary, where as a child a snake once wrapped around him, and then went its way.