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The End of the Age
"And the new age: how few steps are left to take
for the ever-developing machine of the body
before we get there. The distances are very big
but crossable, given merely a life that could be counted out
in simplest arithmetic, though it would have to last
longer than the universe, they say, is going to."
for the ever-developing machine of the body
before we get there. The distances are very big
but crossable, given merely a life that could be counted out
in simplest arithmetic, though it would have to last
longer than the universe, they say, is going to."
- GenresPoetry
52 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2000
1 person want to read
About the author
A.F. Moritz
43 books18 followersA.F. Moritz has published more than twenty collections of poetry as well as important works of literary history and numerous translations of Latin American verse. A leading figure in the literary life of Canada, he has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a major award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Two of his most recent works have reaffirmed his reputation: Night Street Repairs (2004) received the ReLit Award and The Sentinel (2008) won both the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Toronto.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 18, 2022
It's no use your saying, "I'm giving you your freedom",
when all you can see is one eye shining, never moving,
in the dark of the back of the cell: one purple ring,
a pulsating as of a thimbleful of acid in the light
from the door you've opened. Or maybe it's just an injury,
a shadow, on our own retina, dimming in the blackness,
never quite gone. It's no use standing by the steel door
so long rusted shut, that you forced
with a cry as of a murdered crow, a hoarse
noise now flown to its freedom, but still imprisoned
in your terrified memory's ear, slowly fading there.
It's no use your standing aside. A gift is defined
by being accepted, and no one wants
to brush past you into the night, to owe you anything.
* * *
City, net
of almost bodiless signals
and of words, touches, if I wander
the sexual trace
implicated into numbers, squares, insubstantial
cubes,, then scent of smoke and urine
blown from behind a mirror,
and laughter of men pounding a pit
in the concrete at night,
going down, wielding lights,
flicker in me, as a mind
flickers in its world, its thought.
A remote and dead magnificence
that conquered the grass
and cut its heart out on an altar
comes over me. It dies
in expectant returnings
of a rabble of still stricter gods,
invisible,
without much taste for blood,
from the eastern garden.
* * *
An age of anxiety was ending
and at dawn the people ate and drank abandoned
in the empty shadow of the hospitals.
No disaster would bring the past again. The dead
were gone. I dreamed the other children
in a howling pack tore away from me,
and we were left alone, the girl and I,
six years old, and we took off our clothes
and played in the bushes at the water's edge.
Airy touches in the sky, white emotions,
floated eastward toward the storm. The she too,
my last god, went home. Years later
I saw her in the hotel she runs,
fully in the midst of enjoying death
as a grown woman dies it, and she told me:
"This is the divinity I consent to.
I keep busy but still hope, still try
to feel the clouds, and bodily pleasure
has almost broken me at times
and drowned me. But I came back again,
though as if chewed by a stony tide,
and what is left still carries me to the next
tremor and I don't decide whether love's task
is fear and sadness, or forgetting."
I remembered then the bare centres of our bodies
and the relentless tiles and the grinding
of brawny metals that broke and built grew senile.
In the air around us was a new man or woman
all light, all calculation,
being assembled, free even of its own
filthy memories, such as this city as my dreams
keep bringing it back: life still made of cells
and in each the person struggling to be content.
* * *
You are singing alone before the crowds, before
the many arrive, first poet, your primitive
and repetitious epic. Canto follows canto
with scarcely a pause, each brief, identical, and simple
as simeplest song: "Enjoy your desire." Enjoy, you too,
being losst as you are for this moment in this silence
of your dead of a season ago, and your yet unborn.
The armies of your kind have not awakened, no beloved
exists yet to hear the music of your legs and come
to mate you with her body, so that soon when you die
eggs of your loneness will wait a further summer.
* * *
No one could find a single word to attach the free electron. Then they noticed
visible things too avoided their language: a blue Adirondack chair on a warped paintless pier,
ocean on the beach, and the wind, foam of another sea, burning in the treetops, that other shore:
such things fell on their eyes and fell to the bottom of their skulls
and never mixed with the words already lying there. "Like oil and water," they said -
the only poem they remembered, printed in seven million blended colours in the one book
contained in their library night and day, always and everywhere, power and crypt.
when all you can see is one eye shining, never moving,
in the dark of the back of the cell: one purple ring,
a pulsating as of a thimbleful of acid in the light
from the door you've opened. Or maybe it's just an injury,
a shadow, on our own retina, dimming in the blackness,
never quite gone. It's no use standing by the steel door
so long rusted shut, that you forced
with a cry as of a murdered crow, a hoarse
noise now flown to its freedom, but still imprisoned
in your terrified memory's ear, slowly fading there.
It's no use your standing aside. A gift is defined
by being accepted, and no one wants
to brush past you into the night, to owe you anything.
- Freedom, pg. 7
* * *
City, net
of almost bodiless signals
and of words, touches, if I wander
the sexual trace
implicated into numbers, squares, insubstantial
cubes,, then scent of smoke and urine
blown from behind a mirror,
and laughter of men pounding a pit
in the concrete at night,
going down, wielding lights,
flicker in me, as a mind
flickers in its world, its thought.
A remote and dead magnificence
that conquered the grass
and cut its heart out on an altar
comes over me. It dies
in expectant returnings
of a rabble of still stricter gods,
invisible,
without much taste for blood,
from the eastern garden.
- Night Street Repairs in Mexico City, pg. 15
* * *
An age of anxiety was ending
and at dawn the people ate and drank abandoned
in the empty shadow of the hospitals.
No disaster would bring the past again. The dead
were gone. I dreamed the other children
in a howling pack tore away from me,
and we were left alone, the girl and I,
six years old, and we took off our clothes
and played in the bushes at the water's edge.
Airy touches in the sky, white emotions,
floated eastward toward the storm. The she too,
my last god, went home. Years later
I saw her in the hotel she runs,
fully in the midst of enjoying death
as a grown woman dies it, and she told me:
"This is the divinity I consent to.
I keep busy but still hope, still try
to feel the clouds, and bodily pleasure
has almost broken me at times
and drowned me. But I came back again,
though as if chewed by a stony tide,
and what is left still carries me to the next
tremor and I don't decide whether love's task
is fear and sadness, or forgetting."
I remembered then the bare centres of our bodies
and the relentless tiles and the grinding
of brawny metals that broke and built grew senile.
In the air around us was a new man or woman
all light, all calculation,
being assembled, free even of its own
filthy memories, such as this city as my dreams
keep bringing it back: life still made of cells
and in each the person struggling to be content.
- The End of the Age, pg. 22-23
* * *
You are singing alone before the crowds, before
the many arrive, first poet, your primitive
and repetitious epic. Canto follows canto
with scarcely a pause, each brief, identical, and simple
as simeplest song: "Enjoy your desire." Enjoy, you too,
being losst as you are for this moment in this silence
of your dead of a season ago, and your yet unborn.
The armies of your kind have not awakened, no beloved
exists yet to hear the music of your legs and come
to mate you with her body, so that soon when you die
eggs of your loneness will wait a further summer.
- Night of the First Cricket, pg. 37
* * *
No one could find a single word to attach the free electron. Then they noticed
visible things too avoided their language: a blue Adirondack chair on a warped paintless pier,
ocean on the beach, and the wind, foam of another sea, burning in the treetops, that other shore:
such things fell on their eyes and fell to the bottom of their skulls
and never mixed with the words already lying there. "Like oil and water," they said -
the only poem they remembered, printed in seven million blended colours in the one book
contained in their library night and day, always and everywhere, power and crypt.
- New Freedom, pg. 42
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