Americanization of Amusia via Russian Onegin

London’s dandy—Onegin’s shaper-dresser,
professor, overseeing handler.
—Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, 1.V

The advent—Epiphany of the Dark.
—Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, 6.XXI

Empires always PR-ed themselves
as golden times of PEACE
even when or if—war
was their bread and wine.

“They make a desert and call it peace”
(ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant)
in casting his eye on the spoils and shards,
Tacitus already remarked famously and dryly,

speaking via the persona of Calgacus,
a Scottish chieftain addressing the troops:
empire achieves dominance
through destruction, theft, and slaughter,

and then calls such crime and doom
liberty and peace—even reign of law—
when supposed souls invert and mock
Heraclitus’ old adage—

that, if “water” is to be death of the soul,
then a dry soul is the best—
Empire demands—the egos,
having shed the soul

like a bride’s cathedral train,
turn—as if under a malefic gaze
of Medusa multi-serpentīna—
and become withered, desiccated,

and cruelly so—like Onegin,
inside out—dryly ossified
as lifeless stone (6.XLV, 7.XXII),
and such stones—cast and assigned—

in lieu of souls—“growing cold and hard
and stiff as stock—in deadening fashion,
and in that morass, all afloat” (6.XLVI).
It’s the “peace” where “the poet’s

dead, and no one recalls him” (7.XIV),
and what passes for poetry—
and not less—if composed,
secreted by the Jungian—

“language died” (8.XIX),
“friendless and estranged” (8.XXXII);
for it becomes “the agony
of hollow sequence” (8.XI),

which is to say, “losing
the language of the gods” (8.V).
Thus we live, as Pushkin foretold—
“and the presage—secret message” (5.V)

in that “strange freedom and peace” (8.XXXII),
in “stately orchestration
of oligarchic converse…
with imported rout” (8.VI-VII)

where the order’s pivot, spinning pin
is “a monster of the gens Satanic,
a Demon of the [modern] dream,
[someone like Pushkin’s] Onegin” (8.XII)

and where people’s miens
are masks and these are covered
with ciphers—imprecations,
prints of the dark and shadows

and hellish fiends and powers—
the underworld (3.XXII)
which Jung with Freud prescribed—
as the prose of now-ordinary devils,

installed instead of sublime
poetry and songs (3.XIII);
and “this mental fog enwraps up,
each moral being put to doze

so that evil traps us—and the fog—
that’s the triumph of British Demon-Muse” (3.XII),
“a trance coopted” (3.X) under which

“all men are zeroes, and the units

are ourselves alone—all else
only instruments and tools” (2.XIV).
And such egoism, “panacea,”
is a cast, a figure deadlier and colder

and more soul-destroying
than the Ghost of Death (1.XXXVII-III)
which is prima facie odd—
that such “souls”—

souls without character and crux (7.XXII)
are as bad to intellect as they are to heart…
But—no wonder—since this order
is made of perfidy and treason

where all betray all and where
“what we ourselves betray
deceive us in turn” (8.XI);
and since there is no wisdom

and no rhyme, no reason
since “the soul had perished
long time ago” (7.II),
there’s no stop to this either—

this world of unrestrained betrayal
of what is good, beautiful, and holy
is the Lethe’s nether world of souls,
made “hermetic” as in “closed and dumb” (7.XI).

It is a world and order whose “law
is to share—in promiscuous fashion” (8.III).
As Onegin, the accessory-legislator,
speaking via Pushkin’s voice, decreed:

“On such indifference, such forgetting
we all must build—foes, friends, and loves
the voice of soul stilled” (7.XI).
And so it seems that this late Empire

reduced all and every divination
to Hexagram 12 of I Ching,
all down to Stagnation,
to the Dark Side of Peace,

to the times made like Paradise
both of Earth and Heaven—
except here they are hurled apart
to make an ensuing void.

The great had left, and the trite
invades what was left behind,
and the below and the above
can no longer meet,

and the inferior collects
rewards denied to the good.
It is a time of void
that calls sickness good

and health is a threat
for which it finds no use;
“attention turns to the quick fix,
the instant celebrity, the fad,

the one-nighter, the current buzz.
No room for depth—only strange
legends, bas-reliefs, dead poets,”
drowned in amusia, tone-deaf noise.

Surely Somewhere on a Nameless Dusty Turkish Hill One May Still Happen upon a Muse in a Peplos Pinned

Trekking through Anatolia’s goat-rugged tracks
one finds many a ruin of ancient towns
strewn across the rocks amid tufts of grass,
long already stripped of any gushing fount

and roofs, or bared, unburied marble statuettes—
while, in the heat, strumming cicada gangs
hoot and toot their horns and restless legs
in cacophonic orchestras that drone just right.

And here and there and with a bit of luck,
you could find a pillar or a lonely door
with no walls sidewise for wings left,

but I still see a flap of red or deep violet
at those shoulders pinned as she pats
on the temple taut-out tambourine…

What of the Souls Unattached Either To Music or to Beauty or to Love? Shells of Complete Antimonies

 

Under the tympanum sunk-reliefs
people pass but no longer understand
what those gestures mean or represent
as if someone took out of their crania
those eardrums needed as much now
as then to hear what gods have to say.

Why, there the figures rise only so slightly
from the backdrop that would be
otherwise all flat like lines and lives
not ruffled by a frothy beat or tone.
And yet how the flocks of passers
oddly resemble what they disregard:

an image sporting a minimal depth,
holding on to safety that stays low
not to risk a skyward climb,
bending their heads into the height;
and thus a view just somewhat up
is lost to those fast and weary eyes—

not unlike a chance to catch a soul
when she’s lurking nearby—
but then it goes, and she sinks
below and behind the plane
of that ever-moving now—
and just like that

some timeless god might have
surfaced and even held out
an index finger to be gripped,
and thus pointing at an arch,
a window, door, and entry
into what has paused inside.

Just like the marble columns
that served as glossy strings,
fastened and attuned
between earthlings and the sky;
but what a freedom we got now—
flashing: “No strings attached!”

Whether Live or Dead Still Enmeshed in Life’s Blue Nymphaea Caerulea Weave

 

The dragon, the unseen,
comes from the lily’s
pristine, polished cup.
And the cup?

It swims atop
aquatic black
curtained in the dark,
with the bottom

giving in to muck,
as one can see
in Maya iconography
from Herbert Spinden’s book (1917).

And the lilies’ pad—
not unlike a wicker fan,
even a wrap of cracking egg—
that loops and knots

the passage, rushing
through that which is not,
and which only
what never ends

can unlock—
that one should call
with the name of life,
winding in and out

through the coils
of knowing
that rises and ebbs
for the mortals like a tide.

Everyday I Pass by Those Fragrant Lilies The Same Question They Would Pose to Me: “How Far, How Deep Can You See Through Us?”

On the way to a coming sheer form
as if in nothing more than unwilled
and downright absentmindedness,
trees around us have begun to drop
their summer dress—dot by dot—

and each bead, a dusk-dyed leaf—
so paltry, erratic and slow
as if all such furtive disrobe
needs to pass unnoticed,
no word to divert the fall.

But in the marsh below the bridge
sweet-scented lilies do still bloom
like petalled rhombi clad in white:
once pollinated, the growing fruit
would descend back and out of view

for its underwater maturation.
“I thought that was the color
you were then having on yourself,”
Lensky once said to his will-o’-the-wisp.
“Oh, no, I never wear that!” she avowed.

But there the efflorescent white fragrance
both still floats and stays—while skyward
extending so many of its unlocked arms,
disclosing in them starlike golden eyes,
singularly fixed and cast in a clasping charm

and ineffable spell they themselves have become.
And so—almost like women and their mirror meet
and each—each other’s prompt reflection—
are by the other—overcome and shocked.
Thus a butterfly of gaze is caught—

by its own beauty it’s never seen before.
For some it is the surface that draws them in
and does the work with the lines and shine;
for others, not as many though, it’s the depth,
and for fewer still—no fore, no back evermore.

Why, O why, did gods need to dole out the look
of hermaphroditic benumbing narcissus
to a man it killed, but to women they gave
hermaphroditic water flowers
and Nymphaea’s looks men then put
on top of their temple pillars?

Winsome Marks of Vixen’s Language’s Tongs

You poaching vamps and vixens
with eyes of a closing falcon
and paws of a cottony cat, do tell:
how does one learn your magic spells?

Where others need much thought
and a diet of long hard study,
by heart and instinct
you already know stratagems

of seizing victims by surprise.
And when you wax an eyeful,
you blind his pupils with your shine.

Lastly then you coax and prize
where to land your winsome mark,
once you ply your language’s tongs.