Now viewingLobby

Alexander Bilzerian · poems in five rooms

AfterManyDays

Twelve poems arranged in five rooms: the mouth, the record, the constraint, the lecture, and the still life. Enter by silence; return by line.

Enter the exhibition
Wall text

Alexander Bilzerian’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Threepenny Review, Lana Turner, Liberties, Spectra Poets, On The Seawall, @christianbok, and The Mathematical Intelligencer. The author is grateful to the editors of these venues, who gave the work its first rooms. Impasto received a Best of Rattle Award.

The exhibition takes its title from Well, by way of Ecclesiastes: cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days. Twelve poems hang in five rooms; four are on loan to the journals that will publish them first, their walls holding their places. Begin wherever a door is open.

Room I

The Mouth

01 Signal — 02 Tongue

Two poems where language enters the body: a device, a throat, a border, a daughter learning how to say where she is from.

“The device was body-borne”

Still the thumb’s press fires and the signal climbing the median nerve’s white corridor through the carpal arch past the wrist’s pulse-point where she’d press her lips for fever (and he was small and the world was only her hands and the bread just browning and the call’s first syllable ascending from the minaret into pre-dawn lavender) doesn’t know the hand is vapor now the wrist is nothing now but climbs on faithful through the forearm where she’d circle oil each morning on the copper of his skin after the bath her thumbs’ whorled pressure which was the first language he’d learned for love and still the truest — on past the elbow’s crook where he leaned whole summers watching Nadia pass below (the green of her eyes the green glass beads at the souk the dress the exact lavender of that same hour and he never said her name aloud not once though it was always in his mouth the way the bread was always in the air) — and on up through the shoulder where his father rested a hand once and said the word for brave — and into the throat where the prayer he’d said that morning still hummed its last syllable which was the first syllable she taught him her mouth making the shape for his mouth to follow the way she shaped the dough before the oven’s heat could take it — the signal climbing the brainstem’s stair arrives at the place the brain was
and finds nothing and doesn’t stop because signals don’t know to stop they weaken the way a voice across a field thins
The throat is a country and the tongue its only passport. For twenty years he carried the question across the soft border of his palate and brought back the answer, sticky on his teeth. Interrogator and detainee met inside him the way two rivers meet inside a third that is neither. The word for water in one mouth became the word for water in the other only by passing through the wet dark of his. He learned to hold a sentence the way his grandmother carried coals on a shovel from house to house in winter, cupping the live heat from her own breath so her breath would not kill it, and he did this in rooms whose windows had been painted over, and he did this in the back of trucks, and he did this at checkpoints where the dust laid a second language on everyone’s lips, and afterwards, having set the day’s freight down, he went home and sang to his daughter in the older tongue, the one that did not have to pass inspection, the one whose vowels were the shape of her mother’s name, and he believed—this is the part he cannot now unbelieve— that two mouths could share one sentence and the sentence be a kind of mercy, that a bridge was a bridge and not a throat a man could be fed into, and some of them learned his name, and some of them meant what they said, and the paperwork was real, and the list was real, and the helicopters were real, and the not- being-on-them was also real, the not-being-on-them was the realest thing,
and now in the house in the lane behind the market where the neighbors have begun to look at him the way you look at a door, deciding whether to knock or break it down, his mouth is closed, the mouth through which for twenty years one country spoke itself into another, and in the next room his daughter is practicing. She is saying butterfly, she is saying Wednesday, she is saying I am from, and he can hear her shaping the shapes he taught her, tongue to the ridge behind the teeth, lips just parted, the small held breath before the voiced consonant, and he stands in the doorway where she cannot see him, and he does not tell her to stop, and he does not tell her to continue, because the mouth that carried the word for twenty years has no word for what he would say to her, which predates the mouth, and she is saying father, and her mouth is open, and his mouth is open, and no sound comes, and she laughs at her own mouth, because the word came out crooked, and tries again, and the house holds them both inside its listening the way a throat holds what it cannot yet swallow or say.
Room II

The Record

03 Well ○ — 04 Cold Cure ○ — 05 Burned — 06 Gall ○

The documentary room: wells, chambers, files, fires, and testimony. Some records remain closed until their journals open them.

On loan

Opening in The Threepenny Review

This frame is reserved until first publication; Cat. 03 returns to view thereafter.

On loan

Opening On The Seawall (ronslate.com)

This frame is reserved until first publication; Cat. 04 returns to view thereafter.

Charles, I wrote your name.
I wrote it in the car on K Street with the engine running, folded it into the plastic bag with the others, & crossed & handed it to the hand already reaching, & the door closed behind it, & I crossed back, & drove to the office where your file was open & closed it. What I mean is I closed you. Ordinary. Clean. Nothing showed.
They train you to say: the man you meet is the country. The country is a room. & I was the room.
Ten years. You took no money. You walked in. You believed there was a wall between your name & theirs. The wall was a man. The man sat across from you in Paris & asked after your daughter, the one starting school, & you told him & he wrote it down.
A quiet word, a door held open, & you understood, because by then a man knows what the open door is asking him to do. I know what was done. I did not think of the door. I thought of your hand crossing the table, pushing the names toward me, trusting what it saw.
Your name was a folded slip. I carried it in one hand. Your trust was in the hand. Chuck — & somewhere it is morning where they keep you, & you have grasped it by now, & you are learning the walls, the door that only ever closed behind you, the light that crosses the floor and how long it takes. & I know the room you are in. I am the reason you will never be shown it — & even now, Charles, saying it, I am the one talking.
On loan

Opening in Lana Turner

This frame is reserved until first publication; Cat. 06 returns to view thereafter.

Room III

The Constraint

07 Sokushinbutsu — 08 Never Blessed — 09 Alone

Formal constraint becomes ethical pressure: lipogram, univocalism, proof, repetition, and what a poem can exclude without erasing.

Through hollow straw, my ghost of air still flows— I sit in loam. I swallow urushi’s black. To burn this body down is all I know.
A thousand days on bark. A small gong shows I’m still a man upon this dying track. Through hollow straw, my ghost of air still flows.
What want, what doubt I had, I burnt. And so I hold my mudra, still. I won’t turn back. To burn this body down is all I know.
My hand can’t lift to ring. My blood runs slow, now salts to frost—a cold that will not crack. Through hollow straw, my ghost of air still flows.
You’ll find a body still, and all aglow, a hull of skin, a dry and holy sack. To burn this body down is all I know.
Now pull it out. I’m still. I’m glad to go— a rind, a saint, a form that won’t fall slack. Through hollow straw, my ghost of air still flows. To burn this body down is all I know.
Curator’s note

These two constraints hang facing each other: the first refuses the letter E entirely; the second admits no vowel but E.

Seventeen Septembers: the tender swept the cleft where vestments shelved themselves, where vestments shed. The Regent never entered. Her sentence entered — Wedge. Edge. Ember. Stem.
She knelt where Beth knelt — hem pressed between serge, lessened flesh. Eleven teeth she kept — her secret crescents — fever-rendered, felt whenever she swept, bent, knelt. Censer-sweetness entered, then flesh-stench: wet serge, swelter, neglect.
Wrens nested. Bees dwelt. Bell — then bell. Then — where ember-gems were shelved: Teeth. Seven. Greened. Beth’s. Where flesh never entered, flesh enters.
She knelt. Extended herself. Held them. Beth’s seven. Her eleven. Never even: nevertheless, nested. The Regent’s ledger: seventeen gems. The cleft’s secret: seven teeth, eleven teeth. Teeth exceed gems. Where gems rested, flesh enters.
The sentence the Regent rendered: Bed-wetter. Endless fever. Never blessed. Beth’s teeth rest where gems rested — lessened flesh rests where Beth herself never entered.
The tender presses her crescents, then hem. Seventeen Septembers. Seven. Eleven. The center held — sentence-entered, tender-kept. She kneels. She sweeps. She keeps.
Kolmogorov’s Zero-One Law: Proof by Poem —for Andréi Nikoláyevich Kolmogórov
Since the events are independent — each one self-enclosed as each birch along the winter road at Komarovka, holding its circle of shadow on the snow, answering to no other — and since the tail keeps only what persists when every finite beginning is stripped away, then any tail event belongs, for every n, to the field spun from the n-th onward, and so stands free of the first — the second — each beginning, stripped in turn.
And since independence requires only finite subcollections — yet is verified for every one — the freedom is total: what agrees on every finite intersection extends across the field entire — and so our event is free of all the sequence can engender —
yet it belongs to the very field it cannot touch —
independent of itself — its probability, multiplied by its probability, equals its probability. A number that is its own square is zero, or one.
Alone,
allone in the old tongue — all one: what survives every beginning was certain before the first toss — or was, from the very first, impossible.
Outside, the birches stand alone at Komarovka, each one holding its own shadow, each one answering to no other, and not one of them wondering whether the forest exists.
Room IV

The Lecture Hall

10 The Antichrist Lectures — lights down

A dark lecture hall for argument, quotation, address, and the violence of public speech.

How much time do we have? That’s always the question — the one the disciples fumbled on the mount, the one my portfolio answers nightly in its decimals.
I’m the managing partner. I have come to talk about the Antichrist.
I find I must begin with blood. Not mine — let the record shimmer the way Wanaka shimmers at the bottom of the world, where I keep four hundred seventy-seven acres for the view: the lake says nothing back and I have bought that silence.
You want to know what evil looks like? It looks helpful — while the patient does what patients do in the quiet of the thing withheld from her.
The girl with the sign — she’s, what, nineteen — she’ll age. She’ll sicken. She will come to me or to what I’ve built, and I will not refuse her. That’s the product.
Death is an engineering problem. My Nicene Creed, minus the dying: the flaw, the architectural flaw, in the first design. Christ should have pivoted.
Could you not watch one hour?
In parabiosis the young rat and the old are sutured flank to flank — two bodies, one pulse — the bright blood ferries its undamaged signals through the silted channels of the old, and the old rat quickens — sniffs, remembers — the coat regains its sheen, the whiskers orient toward the sound of feeding in the next cage over — and in the studies they don’t publicize, the young rat thins. The young rat dims. Its coat goes coarse, its open eyes lose the sheen they had before the sutures married it to what was already dying, and what was already dying flowers, for a time. I have read those studies the way you read scripture.
My father hauled uranium — Namibia, the flats where dogs obeyed in German and dust came home on everything he wore. It was already in his blood. They called him The Gestapo. He could not refuse the name. Names come from outside, like weather — you stand in them or you don’t. I chose mine.
Sometimes a man speaks so long about the devil he starts to glow.
I named it for a reason. No reporter has had the nerve to finish asking. A palantír inside a palantír, each showing the user his own eye.
We scaled it. We put the eye on a dashboard.
They named my father and he wore it. Now I do the naming. I have called them legionnaires of the Antichrist — and what does that make the man who says it? Not the one who stands against. Just the one who stands.
How much time do we have?
In the second study they sutured three — young, middle, old — a living gradient, a chain of blood: and the youngest seized within the week, its small heart stammering against a debt it had not taken on but could not stop repaying, and the middle one went blind, left eye then right, as if the seeing were the first thing the blood decided to rescind, and the oldest thrived — swiveled its mended head toward the sound of a feeder clicking open, the sound a lock makes when it opens onto nothing — nothing in, nothing out — and what’s inside has learned to call that safety.
He left me a dog — my uncle, dead at fifty-five, unnamed — German shepherd, wide-skulled, inherited, and I named him for a philosopher: we are thrown into being without choosing.
The dog didn’t know.
He followed me from room to room and slept beneath the desk, his breath against my ankle while I moved money somewhere else, and he died in the garden while I was on a call and the housekeeper found him and I didn’t go out and I finished the call and I closed the deal, and that night I sat with the body and thought: this is loyalty — it just stops — and I buried him beside the fence and did not mark the grave because naming is what you do to things you intend to use.
In the garden they were told to watch and they slept.
The young rat thins and the old rat flowers, the fontanelle closes over its one soft pulse, the skull becomes a perfect private kingdom and the blood between them darkens in tubing no one comes to clean.
The eye inside the eye inside the stone looks out at what it built: the lawn, the deal, the dog still warm beside the hedge — and calls it good.
How much time.
This old rat lives a little longer.
Room V

Still Life

11 Impasto — 12 More Salt Than It Says ○

Memory as object: paint, road, salt, witness, distance, and the stubborn material fact of what remains.

The trees have taken sides— left bank, right bank, leaning into silences that will outlast us.
The road goes toward that salmon-copper slit where the sky shows it has been wrong about something it will not name.
◊
My father drove toward dying the way you can see where Kansas ends an hour before you reach it.
I was in the car. I was the car. I was the distance opening between us, no matter the speed.
◊
She painted this with a knife. I need it to be a knife— the whole arm behind it, shoulder torquing into the stroke the way you throw your weight into a goodbye that won’t stay said.
The paint is thick enough to dig in and find another sky beneath, older, just as unconvinced.
◊
I keep looking for the figure, the walker, the witness. No one.
The painting will outlive me standing here, wanting it to show me his car cresting the last visible hill, to show me the window still partway down, to show me his hand lifting once from the wheel.
◊
It shows me a road.
It shows me where the road runs out of light— not all at once, but by degrees you keep mistaking for almost.
On loan

Opening in Rattle

This frame is reserved until first publication; Cat. 12 returns to view thereafter.