My last poetic endeavor, The Scaffold in the Rain, a collaboration with Sean Ali, used his paintings as a structure around which to hang my words. Watching them, reading, decay around his images — words that became the scaffold under which the work itself is felt to rise up — brought to mind a gothic steeple, which Osip Mandelstam described in his manifesto “The Morning of Acmeism,” as stabbing the sky in outrage, because it is empty.

As Notre Dame burned last year in a Western uproar, a parallel silence was made clear in the face of otherness and — by apparent comparison — its seemingly quaint variety of suffering: the image of a Palestinian woman grieving, embracing and guarding an olive tree, whom settlers intended to uproot; or the astonishing number of species, not untold, but overwhelmingly unnoticed, gone extinct due to human consumption, waste, and neglect in the past half-century.

The speechless interruption of the existence of these gone-unspoken-for-by-human beings — in contrast to the outcry afforded the Western cultural symbol of Christianity that is Notre Dame — was called to mind to me by Jerome Rothenberg’s poetic account of his visit to Treblinka, which he documented in his 1987 masterpiece, Khurbn — an empty field with a few picnickers, in which the stones were rowed — in its own sharp contrast to his experience of the tourists flooding Auschwitz during his visit there. It spoke of all that goes unspoken, unnoticed, and forgotten in dailyness.

To Paul Celan, poetry existed solely in relation to the time when it was written, rather than in general relation to a feeling of Time. This todayness — its Meridian, its dated- ness — Celan spoke of alongside another aspect of poetry: its essential darkness.

Mandelstam — whom Celan thought of as a brother, though they never met — called for a greater love of the existence of a thing over the thing itself. It was the survival of the word toward which he directed his own life; the continued existence of his poetry.

These poems do not attempt to represent the poetic conditions of these two great masters; rather, they pay homage to those interconnected poetics, by virtue of their todayness, situated as events.

These are my events, for better or worse. If a poem withstands the voice, I have succeeded. If one can pick up the flayed branch and examine it, after the way has been cleared by machete, then the poem has an afterlife. If there is a poise with which these words unfold, it is toward the unknowable: breakable, brittle, bare.

Eliot Cardinaux
May 31, 2019