Anne Waldman
WRITING ON WATER WITH ARTICULAR GLYPHS
for Bernadette Mayer
(with homage to painter Pat Steir)
The sun on falling waters writes the text
Which yet is in the eye or in the thought
It was a hard thing to undo this knot
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Blue River and Rainbow Waterfall” artist calls it
The color of sand the color of
glory to heroes of the old texts
Enheduanna & women of Mesopotamia
3400-2000 bc are here, their cartilage
And cylinder seals continue their Grecian urn-turn
Sea anemones arrive, are here
&
Treads are here
breaks
rain
brooding all here
Chromosomes are here
And neurons jump
The prerequisite of any layer
Of accretion of time
or chemistry
Of thickness of pain of heart’s blood
rainbow that is myriad
Rain bowing to the weight
arc and muscles of naming, action
& swerve, are here
The crash the roar are here
An onomatopoeia of silence
welcome here, are here my brood
What is the realm you were O sister,
O sybil, majestic star?
vehicle?
Imagine a natural world
Imagine
underwater consciousness
the flow of that & an intermittent
“reset consciousness” motif
leaping again. Imagine
(Caged, one thinks to give thanks to filaments of the wild child
who started to hear water crash at the start
in pearls of sound
& built her own smithereens)
In relation to her it was a tower of Babylon
Heave of the red
& hidden green starting to coast
The coat is here
The turning of primary and secondary colors
in a wealth of numbers is here
Gradations of scale, as well, here
Haunts of the inner art
& think of you lying in bed
wondering how the paint will bring the night down
We’ll leave it to the weave of fingers of ancestors in trance,
Restless artists in the lament: mercy and longing.
ANNE WALDMAN is the author, most recently, of Rues du Monde, English and French (Apic Press, Algeria 2024); Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House, 2023), a memoir with poetry, essays, and interviews; and Para Ser Estrella a Medianoche, English and Spanish (Arrebato Libros, Madrid 2021). She is co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat 2022). The Grammy-nominated William S. Burroughs-inspired opera and movie, Black Lodge, with music by David T. Little and libretto by Waldman, premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022. Waldman is one of the founders and a former Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, and a founder of the Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she is the Artistic Director of the annual Summer Writing Program. A new volume, Mesopotopia, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2025, in addition to the album Astral Omens (Fast Speaking Music/In Earliest Morning).
