Poem by Gershon Maller for Sophia…
Gershon Maller, dear friend and mentor of Sophia, has had a poem dedicated to her published in Text: https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/23503-text-poetry-april-2021
Sophia, who shared many long conversations over good coffeee with Gershon about Plato and poetics, Wittgensgtein and Wallace Stevens, language and meaning, events from history or all things otherworldly, would be delighted!
To be a poet, Sophia said in a poem she wrote as a 13-year-old, is to be “a verb in a world/ Of nouns.” This was the grammar of being she lived vividly in every perception, in every thought, in every moment of her too-short life.
The hours she spent discussing philosophy with Gershon still, it seems, “spill light” into the world…
CHIASMA OF BEING
For Sophia Nugent-Siegal
1. Cleaved by light
are beings made from syllabi whose
copular verbs breathe vowels alive
as if there were a primary aureole
where I, as subject in this opening
clause, simply appear; brain, by noun
modifier or phrasal bit, imagines limit,
not feel what moves invisibly toward
first thought just before this sentence
began, aeons ago, in dream space; there
more strangely true by hollow name,
my verbs will not parse future or past
but pout a cough to throat-clear meta
speak; for games anew, I like to play.
2. You & I the game,
livestream the second series in full view
seeking the mojo artefact who, conscious and verbal, zooms across screen
like a poet in search of microphone, and whom I, as first pronoun
elect to haiku my faux trope; for my world of words mirrors
yours by mixed metaphor, a matrix
It aligns even as I picture
larynx & brain sound as verbs
in silence we tango
across-space
images erasing
seem to speak each other
never answer points of light . . .
as feelings,
where pain can click-bait life like eye hooks; perhaps I could know your pain
not mine, or shrink a cloud of unknowing into drop of reality, like the sharp
taste of tamarillo, a sense we share in fruit of quavering noun
as your eye follows mine over the edge
3. The treachery of images
forming in your mind appear along this line as easily
the world once seemed to Alice through her looking
glass; think of Magritte’s illusion ‘this is not a pipe’
to picture a word game or redux esoteric personae: (1)
The Lion Who Never Learns to Speak
The Beetle of Pain in Private Box; or
The Duck-Rabbit-Duck, to flicker
your eye of perception on-and-off; we make-believe
names are things,(2) as if a bug crawled in the letters
of ‘beetle’, or a large cat prowled in ‘lion’; we do not
see the world in its idea;(3)I could no more peel from
a strawberry its taste, like a membrane, than my eye
strip after-image of sun from flaring nuclei.(1)
4. Elegy for X
Silence follows my introspection
into flux, but fallen into words
returns me to Adieu; I never depart,
my meditation arriving nowhere; as if
being were more than gem of cutglass
verb; I close my eyes, thoughts recede,
imagine falling into heights of aural sky
I breathe the body of air who breathes me,
and withdrawing from mind, quell
its chatter to find an innocence, other
than the death of a forgotten child
we abide as we can in her shadow
any moment is aubade to spill light into
my room; I thrive in beauty of that terror.
1 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
2 Borges, The Golem
3 Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
TEXT Vol 2 5 No 1 April 2021
General editor: Nigel Krauth.
Creative works editor: Anthony Lawrence