Words beyond light

Literary Review, Wntr, 2005 by Michele Leggott

take my hand

in April 1930 Marlene Dietrich arrived in America soon she was staring at a chalked sign saying North Africa while Josef von Sternberg fiddled with gels and gauzes and the whole studio was called in to help her say I don't need any, help this is the opening shot of Morocco on the Paramount lot Dietrich floats down on Hollywood in a dress like jessamine all late afternoon and flawless embouchure in a moment someone will be charmed at that height: me, I just want to waltz with you in the Sleepless City a few months earlier in Manhattan the young Andalusian poet Garcia Lorca was having visions of New York exploding under the pressure of its own phantasmagoria it was, he said, a city of death and falling towers he adored its musical black heart and wrote a famous book before sailing to Havana in the spring of 1930 where he was photographed wearing a white linen suit in New York he also wrote a filmscript called Viaje a la luna and gave it to a friend, the Mexican painter Emilio Amero the script is an avant-garde cabaret about apocalypse and love it has 72 scenes which is the number of letters assigned to the great magical name of God the 12 words of the name are vocalised by the angel Masmariah who stands before the celestial curtain raising the dead and is known as the Angel of Rain

Lorca in New York was visionary and maybe saw that he would soon be dead he also watched angels flying overhead at dawn on their way to Paradise he was another who needed no help to read the sign

a dark suit and bow tie

walking into Small's Paradise Club he drops to his knees when she sings Now you've got me going Arbole, arbole he prays What are you going to do? in the sky there is nobody asleep nobody nobody nobody is asleep Is it up to me? is it up to you? on a knife-edge of snow they carve two names kisses tie their mouths and the ferryman whispers: whoever this pain pains will carry pain forever !Alerta! !Alerta! !Alerta! from their tongues will come the invention of the bridge and tin bell vines trembling on rooftops against tambourines struck at first light over the East River he tips a little hard water over his shoes and the scorpion claws of the sun slip off enraged ants will throw themselves on the yellow skies another day we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead now he's an automatic teller pouring into her hands Mannahatta butterfly

emptying his breast pockets as they twirl in the big room blind with tears and the words find their way in a lunar halo to her lattice of bones and sweet milk they are unique (One) they are generic (Two) a pair of thieves a loop in time (Two Three) his love is a waltzing ribbon in the murdered city floating to the moon el tisu estremecido de ternura she cries out as masters of the claw and the thunderstorm drive to the airport together

empty, midnight stations

did they have songs for this? our festival day people jumping, burning there were calculations for everything our festival day fighter planes screamed low overhead their seconds our seconds their minutes our festival day couldn't tell whether they were friend or foe in the hours of their days in the weeks our festival day outran the black cloud of their months and years all our circles our festival day spent the day in a line to give blood drawn up and calculated and sung to bring us our festival day Meketre's boats sailing on the river of death here where the rain has stopped at last our festival day Hatshepsut's sphinx for the touch of sightless fingers

and we walk down the bridge into Manhattan our festival day the temple of Dendur bought and sold over the sea look at the locked green gardens outside City Hall our festival day Ishtar's bow bent against the Hesperians then take a train uptown to dry out at the Met our festival day providing also shelter for her fleeing children

in the footsteps of Orpheus

no way of knowing how poetic fact will deliver the parts of itself confetto e confetto nor how one who believed in walking would become a figure dissolved in rain I reach out and you are there

the music is sad but you hold me and we dance

there is no laughter now but we dance two who love each other and a world that dances palmarosa the saddest song in the empty streets and two dancing call love wipe out death? so much death? we dance where we walked in the city of dreams we dance over the bridge where we laughed in the summer storm hold me, hold me tight and tell me it's almost dawn

who but a poet would script a prophet's lines?

the Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti was deported to a labour camp in the mountains of Serbia in the spring of 1944 the guards took away everything flashlight, book so he wrote in the dark feeling his wax over the poem shorn of its crown of accents in September the camp was evacuated 3200 men began a forced march north and west they were weak and many died or were executed when they couldn't walk any further at a dam near Abda on the West Hungarian border

Radnoti and 21 comrades were shot by their guards the date was probably 8 November 1944 twenty months later the bodies were exhumed and in the pocket of the poet's raincoat were found ten poems dated July to 31 October they were written into an address book with the stub of a pencil for you one of them says I have walked the full length of the soul all the diacritics are in place