John Bloomberg-Rissman
Totally Entirely Quite Completely Not At All
The alarm: 6:10 a.m.
The last few minutes
Of a Bach double concerto
Then a smooth low masculine voice
“The oboe and the violin …
“Intimate conversation …
“One bites one’s nails …”
Sometimes words deserve
Their bad reputation
His are screens
Padlocks
On the doors of perception
Wittgenstein:
“Whereof one cannot speak
“One must remain silent”
(Emphasis mine)
The muses of translation say
No work today
It’s Sunday
The rain has stopped
The masses will be clad
In all their raging glory
Get ye gone, lad
(Give me a moment
To throw on some clothes)
To Hartpark with ye!
Being outside
Takes the top off the box
Allows Adelshoevians
To get a little bit crazy
Take the topiary
At the Knuffelberg Gate
A thirty foot high Queen of the Night
(Mozart borrowed her “Der Hölle Rache”
From a local folk melody)
Take the Luttelmeer Figurines
Ninety-nine foolish faces
Carved from petrified wood
Along the lakeside promenade
Ninety-nine nineteenth-century cats
That ate the canary
An entire Nadorpian Parliament
On parade
At the south end of the Luttelmeer
Just past “Poet’s Hill”
Is the rose garden
With its thousand different blossoms
Today the Thérèse Bugnets are blooming
The Thérèse Bugnet
My wife’s favorite variety
(Brief pedantic digression
Here’s something Georges Bugnet
The creator of this rose
Said
That bears remembering
"In these times of horribly devastating wars it is a comfort to be able to work with the beneficent creative Power that some call Nature and some call God meaning after all the same thing. The same unfathomable Entity.")
Or take the microwave tower
Disguised as a tree
I call it “the lone sequoia”
It stands on the artificial island
In the middle of the lake
Take the two tiny hairless children
Wearing mouse ear headbands
Toddling past
Tied to their father by a leash
Take the tilt-up concrete slab
By the Afgelopen entrance
With the four squares cut out of it
Each square surrounded by a frame
The Painting Wall
“Look! With all your eyes! Look!”
So reads the little brass plaque
Quoting Verne
Or Verne-as-quoted-by-Perec
A young couple lying on the grass
Snuggles like spoons
Oblivious to the rest of us
“It’s primal in the park”
Their love’s the force
That greens the trees
That strews the path
With piles of crunchy fire
That covers those piles
In turn with snow
Til winter lifts
And trees regreen …
It’s the Prime Mover
“The beneficent creative Power that some call Nature and some call God”
Behind the rose garden
The Buis-Hobby Museum
Two new exhibits are on
Fluxus Redux
The Nature Of Nature
I visit the Fluxus show first
Adults look puzzled
Walls echo
With the glee of children
The first room holds the bed
From the famous Montreal Bed-In
A sign taped to the blanket says
CLIMB IN
VISUALIZE PEACE
(I WONDER IF YOU CAN)
It’s not really Fluxus
But it’s sadly relevant once again
(Not that “the war” ever really ended)
In the second’s a performance
Of Alison Knowles’ “Fist-Grip”
A black curtain seals the third
I approach
And peer around it
Suddenly a big young man
Shoves me in the back
I stumble blind into the dark
As my eyes adjust
I notice a small lit square
About two by two inches
On the floor in the far corner
Bending close I read
“Totally Entirely Quite Completely Not At All”
In the fourth room
A class of schoolchildren
Performs Ben Vautier’s “Faces”
(“Performers grimace at the audience, making faces and vulgar gestures until the audience expresses protest”)
For their less-than-amused parents
And underneath it all
The nails-on-blackboard
Low white near-subliminal sound
Of someone skating on thin metal
“Quite a workout for the head”
Says one bemused matron
The Nature Of Nature is different
Soothing music of raindrops
Videos in which they star
As slow-motion dancers
I am not moved
On the way out
A surprise exhibit
A little show
By the young American photographer
I met in Stad Geest
Half a dozen photographs
In which form and content
Sing the same tune
“A Printmaker’s Hands”
Covered in ink
“When The Levee Breaks”
Taken in the middle of a storm
“Red Door and Passersby”
(The marriage of Barnett Newman
And Gerhard Richter)
“Phoenix Fields”
Shot from a plane
A surfer at Mavericks
Watching unbelievable waves
From the safety of the shore
A frightening photo of a dancer’s feet
He nailed it
As they say
Of a gymnast’s landing
I’ll have to write him
As I exit the Knuffelberg Gate
Another surprise
Someone I know
Lexia Merline-Lou!
Page is enrolled
At North Sea University
(Can eight years have passed so quickly?)
Smiles and hugs
A dinner invitation
Haze to the west
Adds a hundred colors
To the sunset
But the sky’s not as wild
As the flyer I’m handed
Crossing the Samuelsplein
On my way to the restaurant
Announcing a performance
By The Antinucleons
At the flyer’s foot
I make out these words
“We wanted to stay human!
“Totally Entirely Quite Completely Not At All”
I fold the flyer
And put it in my pocket
(Their work could be interesting)
It’s a Japanese restaurant
Its name translates as
“Winter – Falling Snow”
Inside the door’s
A photograph
A little shack in a January forest
Beneath it in calligraphy
A poem by Ryokan
Treats the same subject
“No one knocks at this hermit’s hut
“He clears his mind of shadows
“Big moon rising in their place
“How good to see you”
A fish tank separates the entry
From the dining room
One pink fish is dead
No sign of the Merline-Lous
I name them to the maitre d’
Who murmurs their regrets
“They’ve been called to the palace”
“A cultural emergency,” I joke
My drink is on the house
The Antinucleons go on at midnight
At The Column With A Palm-Leaf Capital
Act One: a local band
“Skull In A Handcart”
Their singer is tongueless
“Dada lives!”
Screams a kid next to me
The opening lines of “Le Bateau Ivre”
Are tattooed on his arm
The Antinucleons
Three young women in false beards
Who spend two hours plucking every hair
Their only words are spoken
As the lights go out:
“Do you love me now?”
Early the next morning
Just before dawn
I fall into a dream
A beautiful woman says, “Discourse
“Is not what I need”
There’s nothing sexual about it
We’re somewhere familiar
Almost but not quite
Lula Cay in the Tropides
Walking down a street
Carrying string bags of vegetables
Home from Central Market
She says, “You are looking
“For a dream-motif
“And you don’t even know it”
Someone outside the dream
Calls my name
I jerk awake
No-one
Around 11:00 the mail arrives
Two letters
One is from the Merline-Lous
Explaining last night’s misadventure
I call their hotel
Lexia says
“We’ll rendezvous this evening
“I promise”
The other letter’s from Borul
Suggesting emendations
To my version of his Memoirs
Which are harder than hell to “English”
I don’t want my words to be screens
I want you to see right through them
Grenadine Szorora: Some Poems
Introduction
She leads me into her kitchen
Seats me at the table
Puts water on to boil
The table is bare
Except for an egg
One lone egg
Brancusi’s Beginning of the World
Steam squirts from the kettle
In advance of the whistle
Clouds in the kitchen
Clouds in the sky
Sky seen through a dirty square of window
When tea is poured and served
She hands me several pages of blue-lined paper
The kind kids use in school
“My daughter wrote these
“Before they took her”
She scares me
Her voice is almost a thing
“I was born on a warm day”
I was born on a warm day
In the 20th century
I crawled under a table
To escape the bomb
Later I learned they spoke
Machine language
A continuous lament
One zero one zero one zero one
My century discovered
The musical uses of soap
I mean
Medical uses of soup
I mean Man Ray “made dada
“When he was a baby
“And his mother
“Roundly spanked him for it”
The new book
On animal philosophy
Have you seen it?
I am waiting to use the first word
“Why is there something”
“Why is there something
“Rather than nothing?” he asks
A philosopher’s question
I decide to play along
“But isn’t something mostly nothing?”
“I’ll be Dr Johnson,” he laughs
Then raps the table
“Does that sound like ‘mostly nothing’?”
It sounds like a drum
I catch the waiter’s eye
“Due cappucini, per favore”
“Now that sounds
“Like a line from a song”
“You’ve heard my entire repertoire,” I say
My cell phone rings
I raise one finger
“Hold that thought”
“You ask about love”
You ask about love
I open my umbrella
When it rains
You ask about fear
I close my umbrella
When there’s sun
You ask if I have a theory
About these things
I’m recovering
From third degree burns
Here is my house
You say
Here is my house
Here is my window
Here is all my dirty linen
That is your bed
I say
And the verdict?
And the sentence?
“There are six holes”
There are six holes
In this sentence
There are six holes
In this question
There are six holes
In this poem
This neck holds up
This head
This hip has a twin
This house smells of death
Said the grandmother-woman
This table is empty
Said the grandfather-man
This sentence is all commas and periods
Said the girl-child
It makes no sound
“Shadows change shape”
Shadows change shape
That’s how she tells time
When shadows change shape
They make no sound
Is she the only one listening?
This house is all commas and periods
There are six holes
In this house
Why won’t the shadow
Sing a song?
Why won’t the liar?
Why won’t the house?
“There’s a circular stain on the table”
There’s a circular stain on the table
Where a pot with a dead plant sat
I finally threw the pot out
Now I sit and admire the stain
It’s my work of art
There are scissors on the table
I’ve had them for years
The black paint on the handle’s
Half worn off
Now I sit and admire the pattern
The black paint makes
It’s my work of art
My broken watch is on the table, too
Another work of art
I call this assemblage The Civil War
I hire roaches to stand guard[Note: I was asked to translate these poems as part of the international human rights campaign to free Grenadine Szorora. They appear in the order in which I was handed them]