Eugene OstashevskyEnter Morris Imposternak, Pursued by Ironies
(Poems 1-6 of 12)1. What are we to do with our banality Our banality, our banality What are we to do with it Early in the morning; at noon; in the evening; ever Perhaps we shall convert it to poetry Have beauty absolve us Or let us perhaps flag the coordinates Of our neurotic and calculated motions How difficult these decisions How difficult our banality What are we to do with it Do do do
2. When Morris Imposternak throws his round shield Down during, say, the battle of Philippi or something Who knows what poems, what true propositions Will rise out of the sticky, fragrant loam? If he were a monist philosopher, His principle would be monism, But it's hard to believe your own thoughts And phenomena can be so distracting ... And books can be so disheartening ... And anything can be just so anything: Thus Russell developed his theory of types to get rid of the Village Barber Paradox, But who cares about the theory of types? What's really interesting is the Village Barber Paradox! Or take the phenomenon of love: He felt such tenderness towards you, That writing "tenderness" I sigh "Alas, poor Morris!" Yet, since no one from the scientific community has ever explained love to everyone's satisfaction, Scientists fall in love or do not fall in love Without any of them really knowing when they are in love or not, Whether they are in love or not. This is true. It is also true That where there's tenderness, there's suffering: Hence when we say that an elbow is tender, It means we have a booboo, And money, announcing itself as "legal tender," Causes suffering, but in such a way as to absolve the beneficiary thereof from responsibility therefor. Look at the sea! Don't you think that the sea too suffers When it pulls up its skirt at low tide And shows the varicose veins, the ingrown hairs, the splotches Along its cold, pale, swollen, hypertensive leg? It is possible that ideas don't suffer-- Such as the idea of suffering, for instance,-- But we are not ideas, are we? Morris Imposternak, at least, is not an idea.
3. When Morris Imposternak fell in love The woman he loved didn't love him in return And so he picked up a violin and said: You, violin, respond to my imprecations Because as an inanimate object you have no choice Play to me, violin, of the amaritude we both know You, because you are not alive I, because I am not loved We are alike, you and I We can't change the world we can only make noise The violin played That is, its strings pushed the air to and fro As Morris Imposternak remembered how he made love To the woman who did not love him Even as matters stood, the look of her eyes had made him forget himself That is, forget he was Morris Imposternak The violin played Outside, buildings crowded together And passersby passed whose figures resembled figures such as the Russian Λ All life is real life, the violin played And the amaritude of Morris Imposternak Became set to music Blessed are those who love There are so few of them, almost everybody Blessed are those who are loved There are so few of them, almost everybody How sad there is no one-to-one correspondence Between these two sets
4. Paysage en hiver Trees exist To remind us that we too are nature, We think. We are wrong: Trees exist In themselves And she exists Thus: separate, Autonomous. The sound Of her breathing Is not a bridge. The landscape Of her sleeping Is not a bridge. She is A world but not Your world. Your world Is not your world.
5. Morris Imposternak will not write his love Because doing so would plunge him into the epistemological quandary Whether his really is a love Or self-deception seeking to reproduce by deceiving another Even if it is love For the machine Of the body so graceful in its awkwardness, For the shock of black curl over the shame, for its drunken smell, For the long-fingeredness of gestures, for the nervousness, the impatience with which is said, "Nu, Yallah!" and yet how the eyes eradicate loneliness, Make him an integer, the beneficiary of a non-aggression pact with himself, Make him seen-- What of it that those eyes now integrate somebody else Won't it be cruel to try to saddle them with yourself Don't they deserve a more realistic stab at happiness Morris Imposternak will not write his love Because she said, "You treat me as a blank slate For you to hang your imagination over" And had there been any music there, it would have climaxed right then But there was no music anywhere, anywhere in the world, no music Since music also is conscious Of the face it makes in the mirror Caught as it is between exploitation and triviality Write not wrong not, Morris
6. Do not love It is possible that nothing is true anyway That we live in a forest of begriffons And that even we ourselves are begriffons, it is possible That I am not saying what you think I am saying And that you are not hearing what you think you are hearing, But that we are scratching and howling on a branch in the dark To signify our loneliness and desire for mice and other delicious vermin. Do not love For when you pop open a human being All you find is forty feet of intestine And how lovable is that? Being a body is an indemnity and an indignity It sags over time like a deflating balloon If it toots your horn to embrace something that eats at one end and excretes at the other, Why stop at people, why not direct your emotions at cows? Do not love For love will come to grief And if it doesn't come to grief, it will come to grief anyway Since one of you must die first What is the point of anything when everything has an end? The world is like The fiddling of a deaf musician in an empty room He finishes, bows--to whom?--and modestly leaves And then there's silence. How is the silence afterwards different from the silence during?
Eugene Ostashevsky is the author of Iterature and Infinite Recursor or The Bride of DJ Spinoza, both from Ugly Duckling Presse.
