Prose Poem

Kora in Hell: Improvisations II

II

1

_______________

Between two contending forces there may at all times arrive that moment when the stress is equal on both sides so that with a great pushing a great stability results giving a picture of perfect rest. And so it may be that once upon the way the end drives back upon the beginning and a stoppage will occur. At such a time the poet shrinks from the doom that is calling him forgetting the delicate rhythms of perfect beauty, preferring in his mind the gross buffetings of good and evil fortune.

2

Ay dio!

Pallinode, Book 1, Section 7

Helen achieves the difficult task of translating a symbol in time, into timeless-time or hieroglyph or ancient Egyptian time. She knows the script, she says, but we judge that this is intuitive or emotional knowledge, rather than intellectual. In any case, a night-bird swooped toward them, in their first encounter on the beach. To Achilles, lately arrived from Troy and the carnage of battle, this is a "carrion creature," but Helen would banish these memories. She says she is "instructed," she is enchanted, rather.

Phrases

— — —
When there is only one old man on earth, lonely, peaceful, handsome, living in unsurpassed luxury, then I am at your feet.
When I have realized all your memories, — when I am the girl who can tie your hands, — then I will stifle you.

When we are very strong, who draws back? or very happy, who collapses from ridicule? When we are very bad, what can they do to us.
Dress up, dance, laugh. I will never be able to throw Love out of the window.

Handwritten Preface to Reverse the Book

1 Reverse the book in duration. What does that mean? I am writing to you. These notes now when it’ s too late.
2 If the cyborg you read about in bookstores is an immigrant from Mexico crossing into the U. S. beneath a floodlit court, then mine is a Punjabi-British hitchhiker on a JI visa. This is tunneling as seen from a satellite — sort of concave warp in the dirt of the line.

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