Blue Dwarf

by Karl Gluck

Mandala

(In 1991, the Year of Tibet, monks in New York City created a mandala, an intricate diagram of their vision of the world in colored sand over a period of two weeks. When it was done, they dumped it into the East River.)

They put the temple here,
Next to the cemetery.
They put the school by the forest,
Next to the temple,
Next to the school,
Next to the cemetery.
Life was serious but not too heavy.
The feeling was hard to describe.

Then the hammer fell.

Only pictures remain:
Soldiers, guns to enemies’ heads.
Bullet gone, blood following.
The world dies,
the dead haunt their killers.

They put the temple here,
Under the eighteen levels of heaven,
In sand blue the color of passion.
They put the cemetery here,
Yellow the color of worms.
The school, the stream,
Red the color of anger
And so on.

The world they made is dead,
Slipping into a polluted river,
The monks in robes of cotton
Torn apart, sewn together.
A rainbow of sand
Floats on the river.
Long live the world.

The beautiful Technicolor world
Of blue, red, yellow, black,
Our thangka tapestry world,
Hanging on some god’s wall.

The higher power’s coffee-table
Board-game world,
Of smiling corncob people,
Toothpick and pipe cleaner buildings,
Laughter hanging in the air.
Carried away by crabs.
Dispersed by currents.
An offering to fish.

The world is dead.
Beads of sweat form
On tropical conference room foreheads.
A bottle of tear gas breaks a window.
A distant God puzzled
Over two negatives that won’t come up positive.

The world is dead,
The stream pollutes,
The temple empty,
The school children sleep.
A woman moans in childbirth.
A moment of pain, exhausted smiles.
Her baby screams,
Open mouth hungry,
Scared of the taste on her tongue.

The world is dead.
Long live the world.

Faith, Lonely

Leaves God
nameless,
worships everything,
makes incense from Tumbleweeds.
Turns your house into her candle,
your heart into your match.

She wanders
with a ball bearing rosary,
sprays the air with chintamani
and turns rusted steel into lapis lazuli.
Swamped by the cries of brothers and sisters,
noble sons and daughters, surrounded
by dirt, concrete and brown grass—
she can smell it dying.
Her eyes have long ago glazed over
from her solar flashbulb mind’s eye glow.
She believes she can build paradise.

Tells herself
all she needs is discipline.

She doesn’t need your God,
your Jesus, your Allah.
She’s gone beyond Buddha.

She draws symbols in the sand,
explains her visions to passersby,
massages their auras.
They call her insane.

They throw her out, beat her up,
scratch the blisters from her skin.
She takes another turn on her ball bearings,
praying to herself.

She needs more compassion.

She tries to smile, puts on her black,
sits silent and covers herself
with words in chalk like,
“I REFUSE.”

All she needs is a dose of patience.

Faith, lonely, walks the streets,
knowing she’s in for a long trip.
Maybe thick soles are all she needs.

Most of all she needs to need,
she’s sick of needing,
but she walks on.

Goodbye

All my words have gone out
like fireflies and porchlights,
my daughter home now,
long past midnight.

All my words have burned,
carborated, exhausted into grey,
noxious monoxide clouds,
leaving me coasting down
a long desert hill
into hell-hot oblivion.

And again I stumble upon the end: red ink
war blood all spilt out
to thankless lovers, fiancées,
and my poor grand aunt stuck in Minnesota,
mailboxes flapping in a dust storm.
I have learned to live long
on the river of silence
I now send to you.

An ocean of thought dried up.
Now that the waves have stopped,
no longer gulping the sting of salt fumes,
my feet can now grip bottom.
Dead Sea, farewell, rest in peace.

Every page has turned to ash,
stirred by the breeze of slamming doors.
The telephone so silent now,
a dry pole struck by lightning outside.
Hopeful, free of humid,
moldy, unsolved arguments.

Forgive me friends, relatives,
lovers gone awry (no need to cry),
everything's depleted:
Big Bang, pinwheel, orgasm,
fireworks done, petered away,
come and gone, over and out.

All my words have gone out.
Ten thousand stinging arrows
fall harmless, null and void.
And God has gone back to former purity
to what it was, before the Word was born.

Vigil

The sound of the desperate, meticulous
bookkeeper in the pale, dusty office
one floor above me cuts well into the night.
Sweaty brow twitching,
flooded by rows and columns,
a fat blunt pencil is all he’s got
to drag through red and black.
The obnoxious chatter of an ancient adding machine
brings up a different total
each time he pulls the lever
that barely fits his hand.
At 4:00 a.m. I think I hear
an illegal alien breathing heavily
on the other side of this wall,
hand on a pistol and the shadows
of window blinds crawling over spiderwebs
on the ceiling as unblinking
headlights swim by outside.

An hour later I am jolted awake
as a rice farmer collapses
half-way around the world,
somewhere in Myanmar or Laos
exhausted midday with
a baby on her back,
baggy pants gray as mud
in the stinging monsoon
riddled by the sharp green
of new sprouts.

Then towards dawn I swim like a whole
floating through white clouds
in a sky of quartz that stretches
to the bottom of the ocean.
I see fish die in an anemone’s mouth.
Tickled by the balloon trails
of diver’s bubbles skimming
over Spanish ruins,
I watch the birth of whales
far beneath me, grateful for a change.

ALL THE MORNINGS OF THE WORLD (To Karl)
by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson

I begin here because it was New Year’s Eve, the eve of new beginnings, the year was 1992 and we spent that New Year’s Eve together. I don’t remember how it came about that we spent it together – we were friends, not necessarily ritual New Year’s Eve friends, but at the time we saw each other frequently, shared our writing, talked about our lives. That night you came to my apartment, we most likely ate something, we drank wine, I have polaroid photographs of each of us with a wine glass in our hand. After eating and drinking we went to a film. It was at the Quad Cinema, only a few steps away, the film was All the Mornings of the World based on the book by the French writer Pascal Quignard, and directed by Alain Corneau. For me the film was a profoundly aesthetic experience, for you not so much. We came back to my apartment afterward for another glass of wine and then you went home. I seem to remember the mood of the evening being one of optimism—about our lives, our writing, the future.

We met several years earlier than that New Year’s Eve – sometime in the very late 1980’s – it was at the one of the open readings in the back room of the cafeteria Windows On The Village located on 6^th Avenue and West 11^th Street. Windows on the Village later became the restaurant French Roast.

You were Altan Ogniedov then. You wrote as Altan Ogniedov. He was what you called your alter ego. It makes me think of the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, or more accurately Pessoa’s semi-heteronyms. Semi because while Altan was not you, he did not differ much from you; he was what Pessoa would have called “a mere mutilation of you.” Altan Ogniedov was Russian. It’s true that someone else might claim a Russian alter ego, but Altan Ogniedov was absolute. Karl Gluck had been a student of the Russian language, Russian literature, was fluent in Russian, had a Russian soul which had one day materialized as Altan Ogniedov. You said Altan Ogniedov was born after your disastrous love affair with a woman who lived in Moscow. You also said: “Mr. Ogniedov occasionally makes his presence known in Mr. Gluck’s life, forcing him to break into tears at work (as a translator for Russian immigrants and social workers) and at other inopportune moments, as well as occasionally writing a poem in Russian for Mr. Gluck…”

Not to be forgotten: You were also fluent in Chinese.

We talked about Buddhism. You were a practicing Buddhist. We talked about your family. You always spoke gently about your family. You told me about something you did annually with them, your parents and your brother and sister, it involved being in nature, something with plants, or was it trees, perhaps beekeeping, though I think not beekeeping, I wish I had it better in my mind, but I see you walking in procession on your annual mission together in some forest: your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, you. We talked about your cerebral palsy. You had what is called a mild case; it manifested only in a limp and also in a limpness in the way you used one of your arms. The cerebral palsy had created sadness in your life. You attributed it to your tendency to melancholia.

Time passed. We saw each other less. You always sent a Christmas card. Sometimes we talked on the phone. You told me you were unhappy. In your poem “Two Faces of Insomnia” (written by Altan Ogniedov and included in your first published collection Phantasmagoria) you say: “Because I have been falling all night…” You were falling.

But then something happened and I heard you sounding happy. It was the birth of Vivian. Your daughter. I remember your voice when you talked about her. You said she did the Buddhist prostrations with you. She was what, two years old, three, when you bowed to the Buddha together? I have been thinking lately, when I think of life and being human, what it means for a person to know they are loved by a parent. Vivian can know without question that you loved her absolutely.

The last time I saw you it was three years before you died. You had come to my reading. The next day you sent me “The Vivian Poems.” You wrote this note to me in your email when you sent them:

Yes, I know #5 needs some re-working, but not now. At one point, I was planning on writing a whole book of Vivi poems. My life is not over yet, though. I hope I may still get to that.

I am thinking again of the night we went to see the film All the Mornings of the World. In the French Tous les Matins du Monde. At the end of the film, and in Pascal Quignard’s novel, the title is extended, explained, as spoken by the character Marais: “Tous les matins du monde sont sans retour… (all the mornings of the world would never return).”