The Far Mosque (2 page)

Agnes Martin

Wetten to work here seen against the sky sandscape sandbox silent

Alone mind unleashed mouth a close open cave stone breathe

Stone whiten away sharp sky edge dusk blend down dark self edge

Thrown aloft five birds little surface wind lettered and fettered

Distant sounds littered across thoughts sounds blanked pulled taut

Spun thunder then well spread encumbered better window bitter

Sun wind whispered winter went indigo wild wick lit wend home

Sleep-written swept sweetly remind here my mend here my mind

Hear sweep music slides fabric oceanic oh shine year light shine

Year come time ear tie signs and sing why think river open heart I

Cornflower cowslip field wind settled across year sound thrown

Settled to end hear whittled to wend—

Travel

Soon to leave

Soon across the water

Prepare the white clothes

I will not plan the painting

But travel—the trees—

Looking out over the roofs

Rather lay paint directly on the canvas

Kate writes from Paris, in smoke

I can't respond but pack

The painting is not finished until the original idea has been

Taken down from the walls

All the paintings

Enough nomad, move through “soon”

Move through

Obliterated

   
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Night Boat

At some point in the calanques above Cassis

You were told by Mister Stevarius the Belgian Fire Eater

Fallen down the mountain the lights of the night boat to Corsica

Disappear the rock of Cassis, thrust out into the sea

That there would be a moment at which

The road to the temple of the sun threads its secret way

From the violent tongue of the third calanque to the rocky alcove

Where the cliff-climbers muscle their way up, unsupported

You would no longer hear

Everyone is talking loud

The schoolteacher from Aix is drunk

And the accountant from Switzerland

Calls the German a bastard for not sharing his coffee

There you are on the night boat, hungry

Fire on the surface of the water

Letters collecting in the groundswell

You will not hear

On the beach of sound, waves roam back to open sea

Close to the surface the sun's setting pools orange

An opening of light in the sky

A stripe of rubble you've never seen before

Unfurl your hands to say:
You will no longer here

The trees are rapt with silence

The burning bird settling in the rocks

Stand ever among the broken vowels:

You will no longer hour

The silent groundswell, the swell of silence.

Train Ride

We take a compartment. I draw the curtains and shut the door so that

other passengers will believe the seats are all filled and leave us.

This rudeness is against my cousin's instincts, so I let him take the

backwards facing seat.

He says it is the proper way to view the landscape.

That night in Aix-en-Provence we won't be able to find a hotel, and the

hostel will be closed.

We will spend all night in the public square, reciting poetry to one

another, and receiving gifts from the late night locals.

Flowers, drawings, hot pastries.

This moment now gone.

I time everything to that current of lapse.

No absent time.

Even in deep space, there are particles of dark matter that do not add to the mass of the universe.

Versions of the story wither over sacred fire. A prophet's willingness to be blind.

We travel alone all the way to Marseille. Or: while my cousin uses the bathroom, two girls come to sit with me.

We have to switch trains at Dijon. Or: we never make it as far as Aix.

The source of a vision only a priestess getting high on fumes.

Snake-licked. Shucking off the old skin.

Blessed be the undone version. The train actually stalls on the tracks for several hours, during which we contemplate returning to Paris.

It might only be a condition of the window-glass that allows me to see the subtle ridges and gradations in the clouds, the swirling depth of the sky.

A Cézanne painting on the cover of
The World of the Ten Thousand Things
is so deathly unfinished it looks nearly transparent. Pencil marks on the canvas.

Later, in a vestibule between cars, the Provençal sun setting, I catch sight of the book's cover in the reflection of the window.

Flooded with bright orange and yellow the painting completes itself.

Is that all: a quest for fulfillment satisfied by the correct conditions? In this case, supposed chromatic equations of the southern skies—my cousin explains it: yellow in Arles, green in Aix, purple on the Côte d'Azur.

Later he will return to Paris, and I will hike alone to Ste-Maries-de-la-Mer where Magdalen supposedly washed ashore with her servant Sarah. Their bones are in a reliquary in the church.

Yet another church miles and miles to the north and east of here continues the story: Magdalen left her servant and traveled inland with the gypsies and died there.

Another set of bones in that church.

Unlike in mathematics, every quadratic equation in history does not necessarily have an equivalent modular form.

Small handfuls only create an impression of a manageable amount to hold. For example, I have left out the wild flamingos, a subtle swipe of pale pink along their pearl-white bodies, flying across the road; also the horse-back ride through the swamps of the Cammargue, the hours I sat in the small shack in the bird sanctuary, the black-clad gypsy woman I saw in the market.

In the gypsy fortune-telling book, past and future shuffle and re-shuffle.

As our journey progresses we do eventually open the curtains and the compartment fills.

We eat the previously unmentioned camembert sandwiches.

We won't arrive in Aix for several more hours and don't go on to Cassis for four more days after that.

Where, in another four days, in the mountains above the city, tired and out of money and ready to go home, we will meet Mister Stevarius, the Belgian Fire Eater, and everything changes.

The Studio

Great northern window and sheets of light.

Wine has evaporated in the glass, leaving a burgundy crust.

How shall I find you?

Rotted fruit. Skulls.

Paint marks on every table and chair.

How shall I find you?

The Cemetery at Montparnasse

Each stone is speaking in tongues:

Mon travail est ma prière.

One of the dead is born in my birth year.

An open mausoleum, empty of urns.

Blue sky seen through the shattered window.

Near the gate Sartre and de Bouvoir buried in a single grave.

Scattered across their cenotaph an alphabet of stones,

dried flowers, museum tickets.

All prayers to our passing.

My stone-tongued mouth.

My work is my prayer.

Rouen

The cathedral ruined, smoke-charred, empty.

All the stained glass replaced by clear panes.

Somewhere in the garden, unmarked

among weeds and branches spiring skywards,

the grove where Jeanne was burned.

High above the floor in the spaces of the roof,

on a catwalk, a worker cleans the windows.

Somewhere in this cathedral dark stairs lead to that place.

Through the dark-blue window it's 1942:

the war has come to Rouen.

Ravens swoop down.

All the windows shatter.

Chunks of roof breaking off—falling—

The floor littered with prismatic rain.

The statue cracks to rubble on its pedestal.

The chapels on the south wall shudder.

One after the other collapse to dust.

The nave creaks and pitches, rising and keeling

atop the flood of light.

Every saint's image has disappeared save one:

Ste-Catherine being stretched on her wheel—

Her stone arms alone hold the long south wall.

Who is the brave one? Who has been called?

Harmony unbuckles as Jeanne turns her head to answer.

The long walk goes through shadow and arch to the garden grove.

The music is snapping, thread by thread.

The statues are all missing from their pedestals

The garden has grown apart from the gardener

The famous woods torn up by tempest

I am no longer that tempest

I will no longer look up and see the absence of trees

This is not a descent into catacombs, an inevitable combustion,

a darkening into blindness

Rather it is an approach on knees towards true sight

Departure

My last evening spent wandering along the docks.

By the foot-path, great iron rings.

Here is where the boats moor when the water rises.

The clouds gather themselves tightly together

as dervishes do after a period of whirling.

This should be a black and white film,

where I am the only one left,

sitting in front of the café,

waiting for the rain.

Briefly the sun pierces the clouds,

casts eerie shadows.

The water glows white.

My little cup glows white.

Letters in my bag for mailing.

Starlings clamber on the depot roof.

The sun dips into late afternoon.

For ten years I could not see.

Two boys are stacking rocks on top of one another.

I close my eyes and listen to the falling.

What about yesterday and the day before that?

Carry what you can in your hands. Scatter the rest.

The Year of Summer

You came down from the mountains to the shore with your father's voice ringing in your ears, saying over and over again the call to prayer.

The stairs leading down to the water are cracked and marked by awakening.

Awakening in the south the morning sun shines lemon yellow for eleven months, the leaves of the trees telling a book of eleven dreams.

In this book, the sky is sometimes lavender. In this book are colors you have never seen before.

In this book is the taste of white peach.

The blue-black sea turns milky under the noon-sun.

In the twelfth dream your father whispers your name into each of your folded ears.

In the year of summer you came south into a city of yellow and white, and what was told of this city was told in trees, and then in leaves, and then in light.

Journey

The wind over open water: sharp howling.

Guitar strings breaking.

Solstice having passed days longer now.

Beach aria.

Synaptic dysfunction or syntactic exuberance.

A small figure on the deck looking out across the blue-black.

The years since then drunk and unforgiving.

Wild roses crawl through the rough plank balcony.

Drinking bitter coffee on the terrace.

Weeks after that, alone in the vast public square.

Watching the crowds board the night boat back to the mainland.

Years later another journey you won't take.

Where will you now journey.

For a day.

Sounds of water.

You will sometime soon say:
I am coming home now.

And not mean it.

What in your life have you meant.

A little inn perched in the hills above Calvi.

The cloud-sheathed cold.

Cold falling into the steep streets of the city.

You are still there.

Tissue-clouded moon swells above the blue-black.

A terse, obscene, spattering of stars.

A blue stone, fastened with a leather strap, cold against your chest.

Closing your eyes at the beach, listening to the rocks being piled, softly clacking against one another.

Another music for you.

Will you fall?

The wind presses against the portholes.

They rattle slightly in the night.

Rolling sound of rain pouring into the sea.

Wreaking the sound against sleep.

Waking with the light, the drunken year sinking.

   
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