Fathoms Of Sky, After Reading 'baudelaire' By Delmore Schwartz - Ars Erotica, Eroica, Poetica Alive In Refrain Only Poem by Warren Falcon

for Viren

[excerpt re: Delmore Schwartz from wiki pedia: 'Schwartz was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, where he also grew up. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when Schwartz was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him... In 1930, Schwartz's father suddenly died at the age of 49. Though Harry had accumulated a good deal of wealth from his dealings in the real estate business, Delmore inherited only a small amount of that money as the result of the shady dealings of the executor of Harry's estate. According to Schwartz's biographer, James Atlas, 'Delmore continued to hope that he would eventually receive his legacy [even] as late as 1946.'']

'underseas fellows, nobly mad, we talked away our friends.' - Robert Lowell, from his poem 'To Delmore Schwartz'

'Schwartz was so isolated from the rest of the world that when he died on July 11,1966, at age 52, of a heart attack, two days passed before his body was identified at the morgue.' - wikipedia re: Delmore Schwartz

'the world is tref [not kosher] and grief too astray for tears.' - John Berryman, from his poem 'Dream Song #149' for Delmore

'I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me.
I write from a café near the post office' - Delmore Schwartz, from 'Baudelaire'



1

Delmore, confessional, what?

no mother claimed you at the end

no friend either whom you perhaps

lost, neglect overdue come to exact

poetic portion, your itinerant passing

a ward of city and state, you-not-you

wait for reclamation overdue, an

uncashed check for three weeks


you spent yourself on words,

noble enough pursuit, no rebuke

for your priorities though maternity

or fate (maternity IS fate) perhaps

did you end in the end no doubt

this massive mother complex could

not, would not, be worked through

via poetry or booze or rooms chosen

in which to scribble and scribe what

was, as you said, heard in your head

or wherever such are heard


2

ignorant bird on the escape now makes a music at any rate


(as the mourning dove an hour ago

singing on the other side of pane)


knows when to tone in tandem to

poem same or similar each one little

inflections familiar to childhood fields

felt not seen, heard not named, as

if improvising those few notes available

to doves for late afternoon sun blocked

by curtains green, green too my room

10 years now forced upon me filled

with poet scrip -


'green how I want you green'1

'not my hands but green across you now1

'When green was the bed
my love and I laid down upon'1


these and more pay no rent, if only

pages were money then but so many

dusty pantheoned singers hand

wringers bringers on of harbinger

tone dawns/dusks what rusty radiators

here might also in their own way

suggest as their heated season

nears end, and mine,

what may be known if ever known,

of afterglow surmise when third

snows in fever weeks give surprise

for never guessed Bestowal


3

Delmore dead of ennui, of duende,

of innuendo and let us not neglect

madness nor deny its gifts if gifts

there are or were but hunger stirs

the bottom with no regard for the

personal yet each argues/pleads

their edge of which all shall over

spill, or leap, but I now palaver

begging the point but I know of

such as did you begging tight

fortune for dollars


4

'If all reality is taken only as it is given in the immediate impression, if it is
regarded as sufficiently certified by the power it exerts on the perceptive,
affective, and active life, then a dead man indeed still 'is, ' even though
his outward form may have changed, even though his sensory-material
existence may have been replaced by a disembodied shadow existence.
Here — where 'to be real' and 'to be effective' amount to the same thing —
the fact that the survivor is still connected with him by the emotions of
love, fear, etc. can be expressed and explained only by the survival of the
dead.' - Ernest Casirrer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Vol.2: Mystical Thought



Delmore, far-from though you are,

a young very tall lover visits late nights,

betimes glad son of sikhs no longer sikhs, or so
they think, who dwell beside Pulaski's draw2, it
groans by day and night lifting divided weight heavy
to sky what silently floats under and through; their
dreams, he reports, are haunted, something pursues
them from the old land

'You are the new, Bapila, ' he says, his name
for me which means vessel, keel, boat, container

Rather, I am slain, say I,
apostate, not by Prophet's
hoarse jawbone but one
curved as antler curves,
nuzzles a throat entire

As I fade he rises a new
moon sharply dividing dark
from distance, there is no
confusion of which I am
when Lady Day3 sings

'I'm a fool to want you'

of empty space full-parted,
'staked, ' says sickle moon,
'confuse my bone, his, rather,
equine angle bright, pressing

close to

parchment and stubble,

rest o rest sigh

upon my rubble

feel your swallow

(a sudden other bird)

each breath a rosary'


India's God-son thin legs
entwine, 'swans, whose
toes are sparrows, ' he
teases whose laughter
deep is demise black as

his eyes

'what can hollow a man
to crepuscular, ' asks
sickle moon,

'No. To bone. No,
what is it makes me
more the shallows

but still all water,

makes me shadow
but all the realer,

alive in refrain only? '



how assorted birds and the sparrow constitute Heart's aviary

how Billie's staggers ever wager skin memory at odds with hestition

how this 'music, ' even yours Delmore, 'fathoms the sky'4



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Footnotes:

1 quotes in order by Federico Garcia Lorca, Richard Hugo, John Weiners

2 The Pulaski Bridge, a draw bridge in New York City connects Long Island City in Queens to Greenpoint in Brooklyn over Newtown Creek. It connects 11th Street in Queens to McGuinness Boulevard (formerly Oakland Street) in Brooklyn, NYC

3 Billie Holiday.Also known as Lady Day.Jazz vocalist Billie Holiday was born in 1915 in Philadelphia. Considered one of the best jazz vocalists of all time, Holiday had a thriving career as a jazz singer for many years before she lost her battle with substance abuse.

4 Charles Baudelaire.A French poet, 'his most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) , expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets...He is credited with coining the term 'modernity' (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and art's responsibility to capture that experience.