/ Author Photo by Carlos David
Flash Light
How, hiker, pick out a route
that ascends from the human body
to the rest of the universe
Work up from twig to worship
of the tree god, irate sea to total
emotive range the ocean evokes
Most literal level to smell of smoke
seasoned especially to advance
a single question? From the path chosenComes the valley of association,
non-place in the throes of active combat.
Associations cohere there, bodies cannot
And if our nightmare is a culture
inhabited by post humans, the hand
holding the flashlight shaking heavily
Then this sleepless sleep,
on borrowed horses,
through storms of solitude
Exists as to shift the underlying
set of pornographic practices.
Echo, here you are, again
The denser your truth
the more emotion in the trace
and every defeat, internal.
Are we the hopeless
or the ones
who give hope
The clumsy key
to the senses
or the river’s
Glassy surface?
It makes no distinction
between music and language
This noumenal thing
that talks to itself all the time
yet practices infancy’s politesse
All the while dwelling
in the tents of these rhythms,
now full of speech
Now quiet as an apple.
Time is (not) something objective
and natural. They (don’t) have more of it
In the neighboring cottages. Also
a more ample alphabet
promises more than ours can shape
And some alternative negotiation
in which lyric and libido exchange auras
amidst low chuckles and playful vows.
It is said that after a huge oak goes down
hit by a lightening bolt
irony goes out of fashion
And a theory of resistance is custom designed
for the lion, for the fox, for the ram:
a flag draped over a porch…
An overpowering discourse
is not a discourse
and a threadbare discourse
Is something a child learns
to believe in
only very slowly.
Early
Filled with reverence for what is wide and clear around the face.
Informed in the ways of these rapid mammals, conscious of the blood.
Early in the late.
Early, early, early in the late, and the late itself, early, early, in something else.
The stone deflects everything but the second it is seen in, and is neither early nor late.
The stones in the stream barely delay the water on its course.
The water is hurrying. The stones are already smooth.
Early,
though the dearest of mantras lie discarded in the drizzle.
Early,
each figure leading to an ethical impasse in the absence of anything but figuration.
Early,
and image has installed itself as golden calf, and there is no alternative.
Luster inherits the earth, skin’s resins and resonances: the body breathes. This is good.
Early, so early I want to remain asleep, so early I’m engulfed by my own immense effort to think of anything but sleep. This is unfortunate.
Early, yes, but not too early for strife and the vicious grind of war.
Fuzziness of morning.
Reverence.
Why an “ear” in “early”?
Water that is permitted to hurry. The permission ours
only in the abstract.
Early in the late, anguish overlaid on something coltish: tragic optimism.
Early as the first axe, late as a disposable camera: the tools of writing.
Early, as when a ghost looks into the mirror in the morning and sees a god, as when a person looks into a mirror and sees a ghost, as when a god looks into a mirror and sees an animal.
The word grips Necessity as if it were not a word.
Early, very, very early…
spellbound in
the incomplete dawn.
Two poems / Leonard Schwartz
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KLIMAAKSJON / NORWEGIAN WRITERS´ CLIMATE CAMPAIGN // NWCC 