Epilogues: For T. S. Eliot

June 7, 2012Changming Yuang

Just as both God and Devil are man’s incarnation, so are Heaven and Hell both man’s construction.

I
From the front yard of a melodious morning
From the busy road of a sweet Saturday
From the moist corner of a heavy march
From the back lane of pale winter
We have come, here and now, all gathering
In big crowds gathering in big crowds
Gathering in ever-bigger crowds gathering
For the boat to cross the wide wild waters
Before the fairy ferry is fated to fall
Under our feet too heavy with earthy mud

II
You may well hate Charon
But you cannot help feeling envious:
That business of carrying the diseased
Across the River Styx is ever so prosperous
The only monopoly in the entire universe
That has a market share
Larger than the market itself
Daydreaming, on this side
Of the river, how you might wish
To be an entrepreneur like him
A success American dreamer

III
Flying between sea and sky
Between day and night
Amid heavenly or oceanic blue
I lost all my references
To any timed space
Or a localized time
Except the non-stop snorting
Of a stranger neighbor

Then, beyond the snorts rising here
And more looming there
I see tigers, lions, leopards
And other kinds of hunger-throated predators
Darting out of every passenger’s heart
Running amuck around us
As if released from a huge cage
As if in a dreamland

Tagged as: changming yuan, poetry, t.s. eliot

  • http://rosenzweigshmuesn.blogspot.com/ daniel imburgia

    I appreciate the poetry posts here (I sometimes grow weary of political theologizing, which can just be a form of hifalooten bickering). But poetry can be experienced, as Heidegger, that great philosopher of poetry preached, as “the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is.” Of course, poetry is still language and so it can also be a site of the expression of power/knowledge; but the very structures of the language of poetry can cause us to experience meaning in ways that challenge the power dynamics of linguistic meta-narratives and maybe allow us to break free of them, if only for the space of the poem. As Winnie the Pooh put it: “Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.”

    As I wrote earlier today, Heidegger once thought that maybe poetry could redeem language, save the world, save us? But there at the end, as he just sat quietly in the back of the cathedral at mass every sunday, leaving early without consuming, consummating, the Eucharist, acting as if he was watching a play by Muller or Beckett where “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

    Of course, by that point he knew that he had made terrible terrible mistakes, but by then he had lost faith in language and so he refused to speak anymore. Still, he came over and over again to witness the washing of the hands, the bread held up, the wine poured out, the priestly prestidigitations, the ringing of the bells, but he never stayed long enough to see whether word could become flesh and blood, or whether language was no more the “house of being” than a church was the “house of God,” whether silence was only the dead space among signifiers, an arrangement of the dark voids among signs and symbols. Or if, as the speaker of the poem suggests, ‘as in a dreamland, as we lose all reference to day or night, time and space,’ and we come to see language itself as ‘a hunger-throated predator running amuck around us.‘

    Great poem, Obliged.

    • Jacob Michael

      word

  • http://twitter.com/poeticjason Jason Cormier

    Absolutely wonderful

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