A tarn is a lake
is a deep low place in a high place
is a secret name
for someone
who is always someone else
we stand behind our product
we stand behind our names
and move them around
a name is a mirror
but a mirror is a name
you know yourself by, who,
a mirror is a question and a name always seems to be an answer,
is it, the glorious peach trees oozing darkest amber gum
whether or not there are peaches on the tree
a lake in the mountains
a boat on the lake
a man in the boat.
the lake is in China
the boat is on the lake
the man is not Chinese
who knows what a man is
he comes and he goes
something about him is always far
A man in a boat is no age at all.
So say a poem is a poor man’s open-heart surgery
or no
A poem is the archeology we are taught by stones
no
A poem is the blood from the stone
a poem is mountain milk.
So one writes poems the way one studies a lake,
that is, with half an eye on those pine trees over there
where there might or might not be an otter working on a freshwater herring
the kind called alewife
that have no husband
but most of the time just waiting for the sight of the water
to calm the surface of the mind
enough to shut up the clamor of palaver
or a poem is something said by someone with nothing to say
someone who is always someone else
Why can’t a poem just be a naked woman?
Because no one is.
It is written: the nakedness of woman is the deception of God,
for the body is built around its Secret,
which is the Secret of God,
and it cannot be shown
however hard you look
but when you look very hard at a poem
you see what is not there
or only a little bit there
like a named woman
of whom you have heard
or a named man
you met on the elevator
but don’t remember
only the name.
The name is a lake in which its person drowns.
But “to remember something is to make it somehow a part of the present and thus unreal,” says Borges (or Norman Thomas di Giovanni says he says). Since the real is all that has been said, spoken into place and forgotten, forgotten into being.
No lake, no mountain, just a name.
Nomen numen.
The name is a deity, the Romans said. The play on words, which is a play in words, is more than a play. The name is the god, but the god is also the name. To call a god by name is to invoke the god’s numen, power, the godness that soaks the world with that sudden quality of places and persons we call ‘numinous.’ The numen is there, the nomen has been spoken. The old linguists tell us that our word ‘god’ itself comes from some archaic verb for crying out or calling, so that god means: what we call out in fear or praise. Lord, hear our prayer. Or Joyce said, perhaps more literally than he knew: God is a cry in the street.
But Tarn is also a département in France, where Albi of the martyrs sleeps, whose Gnostic beauties persist in NT’s work.
For Tarn has that rarest of sensibilities: an austere sensuality. So views the object of desire with the yearning detachment of a geologist catching sight of a syncline across the valley.
Or a tarn barely glimmering in the twilight.
And he, in this respect most like the French poets who are his secret kinsmen – Claudel, Segalen, Cendrars, Auxeméry – is most at home in traveling. He is someone who has had to go there, stand on desert or mesa and understand the place by being there.
(Not he a Hölderlin, who found his Hellas only in his soul’s swaggering rhythms of ode. Or me, for that matter, for whom all geography is in my own body. Or in hers.)
Tarn goes there, has to know what it is to be there. Our own word ‘be’ is two words in many a language (neighbor Spanish for one), an essentialist meaning (as, to be Irish) and a stative one (as, to be hungry, or to be in Philadelphia). Tarn like a good Mediterranean intuits that to be is to be somewhere.
The earth shares her identity with him, and so we are.
December 2008