}} And All the Bells Were Ringing by Marc Vincenz |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










And All the Bells Were Ringing by Marc Vincenz

            To live in a soulless society is worse than to live in church.
                            —Marie-Louise von Franz

            (i)

She remained heartstruck
within a city that sleeps
with its mouth gaping wide.

            (ii)

She wanted to return
to the rapture of her past
and that immovable source of light.

            (iii)

Had she searched for the water
within the glacier?
behind the railway tracks?

            (iv)

Had she truly betrayed her demons?
She told him her unconscious meant
for her to make a faux pas.

            (v)

Had she given up
her commodity fetishism
and her gorgeous nothings?

            (vi)

She knew she once lived
on the moon
when she faced her universe within—

            (vii)

but did she remember
before her blood was warm,
it was cold, amphibian.

            (viii)

O to be that tabula rasa, to be dreams
flowing into those
wide-eyed waterworks.

            (ix)

But what, she asked, is the source
of a dream that teaches you
to follow your own inner star.

            (x)

Mother had told her: to understand, stand
on your head and descend
to find the mystical waters.

            (xi)

And still, as if infected by gods,
her primordial laughter
sweeps us off our feet.

            (xii)

The many who are one are the one who is many
and nobody can say where man ends
and woman begins, she said.

            (xiii)

We must supply the world with spaghetti, she said.
A modicum of fanciful structure
in a carbohydrate that grows on trees.

            (xiv)

Then, something about a number
that would take
an eternity to calculate.

            (xv)

And what of those patterns singed into the synapses, and the instinct
that rubs out the mind, a simplistic structure under-
lying the most ancient forms through time.

            (xvi)

And those tales of a hero,
models for growing
deeply old.

            (xvii)

Right now, the only thing that’s playing
is her background muscle
clenched like a fist.

            (xviii)

You know the odds
are insufferably low
against them meeting at a time like this.