Errant

by Gabriel Levin

Overview

Errant, Gabriel Levin's sixth collection, opens and ends with invocations: of Venus at dawn and Hesperus at dusk. The book's day takes us on a three-part planetary journey. 'What Drew Me On' is inspired by Tamara Rikman's free-floating works on paper and by Plato's image of the music of the spheres. Ghostly pres¬ences are evoked in several poetic forms, including terza rima for the poet's take on image-making down the ages. 'First came sooty beings shinnying up walls.'

There are elegies to the cineastes Abbas Kiarostami and Chantal Akerman, as well as translations from Greek and (in villanelle form) from the Medieval Hebrew of Avraham Ibn Ezra. There are aubades, lyrics, and a sequence arranged in short-lined triads of psychic retreat in Jerusalem. The wanderer picks up where he left off in earlier books, striking out from home, conjuring Sa'adi's Gulistan or Nasir-i Khursaw in Cairo; pocketing bits of obsidian on the island of Melos, paying homage to Yannis Ritsos in Crete.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784106355
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	04/01/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	262 KB

About the Author

Gabriel Levin was born in France and grew up in the United States and Israel. Errant is his sixth collection of poetry. He has translated from the Hebrew, Arabic, and French and has published a collection of essays, The Dune's Twisted Edge: Travels in the Levant. He lives in Jerusalem.
Gabriel Levin was born in France and grew up in the United States and Israel. Errant is his sixth collection of poetry. He has translated from the Hebrew, Arabic, and French and has published a collection of essays, The Dune’s Twisted Edge: Travels in the Levant. He lives in Jerusalem.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Obsidian

Pressure flaked, crested blades, dark, amorphous – with no crystalline structure to speak of – ridged

debris, strung along the shoreline in gleaming ribbons where water scours

the lithified volcanic ash and the shored-up, three-masted Barbarossa points the way up

to the old quarry deposits,
crosshatched in drab prickly burnet sleeping the summer months away.

I've pocketed the knapped mineral, smooth, lustrous as the Theotokos in her silver-plated

armour with only the face exposed to the halting gaze – and lips – under the pendulant, low

wattage in the oil lamps – how your light probes inly, my little, glassy nodule my core, my fracture.


Alba I

Qu'ieu vey l'alba e-l jorn clar

When she kicked off the comforter and tugged the window open, a querulous flock of scavengers crash-landed en mass in the neighbour's yard.
  He rolled on his side to shut out the racket and groped back to the vacant scenery, though soon enough they'd upped and gone
  and staked their ground further afield – the gray-hooded ones.
There's no telling what was lost in waking with no one left in the clear day.


Reading Nasir-i Khusraw

for Eric Ormsby

Between plum and cherry tree a tourbillion of gnats: winged, predicative, a slipknot of twilit ciphers. The garden holds untold promises as I step over acrid cat-droppings raked into baby mounds to peer at the dwarf princess lilies. Jurjani solicits manifest tokens of the tacit world, and you,
  O subtle expositor,
proffer Kan! (Be), delighting in the fruit trees planted in tubs on the Cairene rooftops.
  How the seven lights burnish the underleaves,
while the bulbul (here I go again) blurts out, 'Begot,
begot, begot.' In this land of unlikely likenesses I like to think of you reconciled to the multiple,
the one-by-one natty raking-in of joys, no-see-ums nipping at my earlobes with a vengeance.

* * *

Why this measure of dust and water, darkness and light wherever your peregrinations bear you along? The moon bobs up like a gourd over the Haram – jot it down in your diary,
876 leagues away from home, east of the great river –
its light acts like water moistening the dry parable with the dew of sense.
  Floats over Silwan in a pinafore. Like the Sodom apple it dusts the valley with its smoke and ashes. Pale fruitage.

  First rains pelt the yard in due season,
even the midges scramble for cover as I fetch back indoors your Twin Wisdoms,
lest the shower smudge its pages, between reason and revelation, muffled fireworks, and from the foot of the mount neither cloud nor quaking.


Atropos

The fowl of the air deadeyes its prey in ever-tightening circles, while you brush by us with your bobbins

and threads. Snip. Snip-snip. Risen from some finer dust than ashes. Cumbrous, for all your airs.

* * *

With one jab of the clawing machine down comes the edifice, crash crumbling around its ghosted

tenants: intact, unaccounted for: toasting each other – if only they had voices – across the pit

rock-drill, bone-meal, no skin off our back, thick as thieves in the fallout, ho-ho, hosanna in the highest.

* * *

I'd watched from my perch the burdened lorries churning up the ramp, and felt the circle tightening

and on the hilltop Ice Palace the skaters knocked against the railing, and knocked again in their turnings.


The Shoulder of Hinnom

1

When the skies clear I can hear the secreted birds fidgeting in the forked pine branches blurred in the puddle, and behind me a long, straggling line is leaving the white brick Mandate cinema –
the lives they'd seized on rushing past them shine in their eyes as they make for their cars,
key-rings at the ready: and the Sabbath siren

goes off even as the rains leave off, and with a shudder of their feathers the birds forsake the air.
It doesn't seem fair walking these precious few steps to look on over the shoulder of the wadi,
the raindrops off the streetlamps sending off sparks across the watershed, Sultan's Pool inked in,
small finds coming to light when the skies clear.


2

The wadi beds drain their small finds where the creviced cyclamen hoards its flame: one twisted nail, bottle-caps mistaken for coins, toe-pried and tossed into the nettles, not the grit-brushed galloping griffin signet, go on then, skirt the burial shafts, past Thighbone's Edge, following the rockface veining, eyes peeled for what the rains might leave encrypted in Hinnom's lap,

a pair of high wire, gray hooded crows have you covered
(wouldn't you know it) this side of Gehenna, keep walking as they watch your back, round the bend, past the mudslide,
button-eyed marigolds under the ruined barrel vault, not the spindled glass, nor the rolled-up fiche-size benediction in beaten silver,
but sutured skies over potter's field,
the almond trunk

lashed to the overhang won't bale you out, torn blossoms on the gravel path, crushed bird's mandible, not the verdigris cache, cist or hollow for fibula or alabaster dish, but a scraping wind where the scarp sheers and scraps of litter swirl round your feet, open-air fiend,
what's that stuck to the thorn bush?
Mke hs fce shn upn us, Selah.

3

Think back on the little threshing floor:
how the east winds stung as the chaff fell and scored the crinkled soil on the orphaned hill, and the thrashing in the mulberry leaves stirred the heart so, and the young ran through the breaches when the shadow figures scaled the wall, scarcely more

real than the tales clocked at nightfall:
lay down, lay down your doll-eyed charms as the cock crows – Gallicantus! – and brings the house down. Lame and blind, imagine how the scales dropped from our eyes like sheaves to the sickle's stroke, and light poured into the clearing where we held our ground,
clairvoyant as the salvos shook the mount.


Alba II

Tugging at the blinds she caught sight (so she thought) of a flurry-tailed thing that shot out from under the pickup
  though there was no telling in such a place – foreign to all accounts – and only he knew what had been wrought
  to the form stunned under the wheels a lifetime ago, how the thing fought in the mind for air, and died.


Hellas

i.m. S.H.

How it dips its feathered oar in the slipstream as we're ferried across the straits, latching its eye on an airy morsel tossed from the deck and snatched in its crackerjack bill. One last sidelong glance – fore and aft – and it veers off from the wake the ferry churns swinging round to dock.
It's a toss-up which way to turn once we've found our land legs. Unscrambling the signs

gets us only so far. Can't we just knock about the place a bit? Have a heart. A room, a bed,
a meal to chase away the fumes from the crossing.
The House of Proclus couldn't have stood far with its abraded reliefs – you know the sort:
hands drawn in filial grief, barley cake offerings,
a serpent lured out of its omega coil sips at a foaming bowl. Dew of the vine.


After Avraham Ibn Ezra

(1092–1167)

My coat's a sieve to sift barley or wheat.
I spread it over me taut as a tent in the pitch dark.
How the astral bodies shine in defeat!

From within I spy Selene on her beat,
the Pleiades, and haloed Orion making his mark.
My coat's a sieve to sift barley or wheat.

I'm fed up tallying in rain or sleet its chinks, jagged as saw-toothed gashes in bark.
How the astral bodies shine in defeat.

No thread can hope to patch up indiscreet rents and gaps in the weave, unworthy of remark.
My coat's a sieve to sift barley or wheat.

A fly coming to rest its stringy feet on my coat will surely regret dropping in on a lark.
How the astral bodies shine in defeat!

O God, in exchange for these tatters treat me to a robe of glory, customized, nothing too stark.
My coat's a sieve to sift barley or wheat.
How the astral bodies shine in defeat.


for Tamara Rikman

for Tamara Rikman

1. The Vision of Er

What drew me on in my own faltering summoned in due time to rise from the damp meadow

the journey begun? The unfolding ambit a whiplash of looping paths, quick vanishing sightlines

I knew not whether earth or air cushioned my walk and plodded on, but whose words – 'the stars shine

through the holes of my cloak when I spread it out in the pitch dark of night for shelter' – had wandered

into my mind, the future more vivid (if true I shall be humbled) a sieve to sift wheat

or barley, while on either side scratchmarks, indigo dimples beckoned, and I thought I saw a canister

floating above me like an asteroid, or was it a trapezoid?
Stenciled shapes, charcoal fisheyes, a column

of light, more radiant, purer than cloud-borne Iris spanned the heavens and plunged to the sea-floor

* * *

Get a move on, I told myself as iridescent light blebs rained on the limewashed field, the slant, stippled plane, cutting a paper trail, dark, snaking footpaths for one lately snatched from the pyre, unfettered

setting out to a place of forks and windings chalkline byways, groundless vistas – 'with no thread to mend its gaps' – once again lines flung back at me from light years away I, Er, of the tribe of Everyman, lately revived,
am cradled in a ark of unborn song, swaddled in my overcoat: 'Oh god won't you exchange it for a robe of glory?'

* * *

Gazing up after another day's crossing I beheld light beams fastened like a ship's undergirders

that kept the constellations from dispersing where the Spindle stretched from bottommost heights

and all the orbits rotated on their axes
'How so?' I shook my head, chalking the tongue-tied

wonder with a free hand, peeling the coalface skyways back, 'How so?' hook and staff darkly

lucent, the huge whorl, hollowed and scooped enfolded, one hoop nesting within another

airbrushed, spangled, changing gears, in reverse orbit to the Spindle that spun on the knees

of Necessity, and a Siren leaned over the rim of each orb releasing one sound, one note as the spheres

whirled in concord with the Fates, Necessity's daughters – Spin Twist, and Sever – singing of what was, is, and will be ...


2. Again Placing the Patterns

Who would have believed your return.
The terraqueous globe ringed in florescent green –
but there you are, making fresh tracks

on the still wet ground, dappled with anticipation, casting your lot with the wind-buffeted silver bush (Calocephalus!), the diamond

frost, the wavering stem of the wand flower paying out, winding you in, dawn lifting the urban drek around you in its rubbery arms

sticking its sticky fingers into bills raw with song, dawn walking you through the Way of Seeming as you rub your eyes

and fix your gaze on the ruinous splendor taking hold of the dangling, aerial roots sucking at light dawning

* * *

These are the materials to construct your inflammable bark and hoist the shroud of being: paper, scissors stone – Weigh anchor! My bantam weight anima, my feathery trespasser
– off you go now over ignitable, rag paper seas of fancy – how many knots have you chalked up, akimbo, atilt afore mast, my tangled, runaway shadow on your maiden voyage
(every voyage a maiden)
Stone. Paper. Scissors. Sing

* * *

when you lie down and when you rise up from the bed of leek green and rapeseed of red hibiscus and slaked lime

whiting, of Tyrian dyes secreted by sea snails – argaman
and tekhelet – when you lie down and rise up, unpicking the blue

from the white, the sun at its zenith, and the sea's polished mirrors leveling the city on its mounds, and you behold neither

sun, nor sea, nor mirror nor anything other than them.

* * *

I wasn't familiar with the Hebrew for rhombus and heard
threatened

  rather than suit of diamonds
  when you spoke of
  its emergence, the words

barely distinguishable in my ears, but hadn't it nonethe-less suited us,

  to speak of the need
  to ward off the slant, nagging
  threat of losing
  it?

though I wish I could say where it lodged,
tucked under the temporal lobe?

The pituitary gland?
  Hai ben Yaqzan –
the Living Son

  of the Wakeful – surmised
  what ever once occupied the cavity
  of the heart

he'd removed from the dead doe who had nurtured him was It,

('where had it gone,

through which outlet of the body had it taken leave?')
  Did you know

  rhombus once stood as well
  for a whirring
  string instrument
  used in

the ancient mystery cults called in its day a bull-roarer?

  Might we have come
  a full circle, did the oblique
  figure portend more

than meets the eye?

* * *

Again placing the patterns of life on the ground before us
(this is Er speaking) far more numerous than I might have imagined

how were we to read the lots flung at our feet? How choose from the sundry shapes, free hand cut-outs: what lives, what tyrannies

what strange, earthly comminglings; penuries, riches, whether whole or atomized lives stunned to a standstill, and those that kept running on ...

stared back at us with mimic force. Had I been there, or not? Everyman.
Winged out-of-the-body, I'd watched my betters

draw their lots. Swan. Nightingale. Lion. Eagle. Ape. And the wiliest of them all, alighting on Nobody lying in some forsaken

corner and minding his own business, told the poor fellow he alone had been chosen to step into his skin.

It's a hazardous business choosing a new life. Keeping your eyes fixed on the just calling, undaunted by the undisclosed

brushing against the daily, unfinished spectacle, for it will save us if only we believe it, and we shall safely cross over.


3. Bel Imago

First came sooty beings shinning up walls
  gulls on the look out low-circling the grotto
  off port Levanzo, the Paleolithic shoals –

then came the potter's shard, the calcined logo
  life cycle spindly sparring partners, crooked up
  or flat out, sow and reap, and ready to go –

then came the hand-coiled, fretted drinking cup
  the gift, the barter, the lingua franca
  celebrants, rounding the cape in festive getup –

then came the wheel-made Lady of Phylakopi,
  tubular priestess in polychrome
  O unearthed bel Imago, bel Alpha –

then came (under the hippopotamus) full blown
  in the papyrus thicket a little man with straw
  blond, sticky hair, punting his reed boat home –

then came winged gigantism, leonine maw
  or else the kilted procession, minuscule frieze
  on the cylinder seal, part of the jigsaw –

then came Kouros stepping into the light breeze
  on the road to Thebes, dimpled under-lip
  softly beveled in a smile meant to please –

* * *

then came birds to peck at will-o'-the-wisp
  grapes clustered on the plate, uncanny likeness
  for the famished, before spitting out the pips –

then came tall tales apace on a broad canvas
  in manifold drafts where anything goes
   (see how they dash into the arms of trespass) –

then came bawdy scenarios, household curios
  the reading of bridal mysteries below hot
  thinly smoking fumaroles as the cock crows –

then came aureate Byzantium, shot
  through with semblances, ivory caskets, vellum
  and tesserae, all is theosis, or else naught –

then came the arabesque in rapid-sum
  defile, out of Arabia curling round the heart
  of every dome its calligraphic rerum –

then came the stonemason wheeling his cart
  of grotesqueries, grimace of faces under
  the weight of a capital, rent apart –

then came silent vows, and nothing (sweet plunder
  of faith in Assisi, preaching to the birdcovey
  of little sisters) short of wonder –

then came portraiture in full dress, spurred
  on to strip the heart bare, the dark surround, glaze
  upon glaze probing the gaze, undeterred –

* * *

then came a window onto a prospect, haze
  lifting over cypress and stream, and deep within
  a birth foretold, the betrothed in a daze –

then came the Campagna, a rustic inn
  sunlight washing over the nut-brown brokendown
  aqueduct, taking the long view in –

then came costumes, Odalisques, token
  charms, a blotchy palette soaking up the bustle
  in the souk, as tonalities beckon –

then came the plein-air ramblers to rustle
  up the show, chemistry kit for a paint box
  sunburst and vapor in atmospheric tussle –

then came the toss up: how outfox
  the rule of thumb as the eye beat a path
  across the abrupt divide, pine and rock –

then came the sleepwalkers: in wrath
  tearing down the scenery, and opening wide
  their mouth and eating all they found to the last –

then came belle Imago once more with the tide
  lapping full fathom as she put forth
  her phantom hands and said: paint the dark side.


4. Light Years

Shake, press down, watch color appear.
Hadn't I read in Benjamin how parables bud into a blossom like the margosa outside your window or unfold like a paper boat into a flat sheet of paper, to smooth out and decipher in the palm of your hand? The margosa with its bitter bark, though now it's the steadfast almond blossom palming off its knaps and petals on the road to the coastal plain – shake, press down, and watch color appear, read the instructions in small print, but when you pick up your terra cotta marker, it's not like you're asking 'What does the man behind them mean, the one who blows the trumpet?' or, 'Why all the citations

anyway, don't you have a mind of your own?'
A snarl in the traffic I can't see the end of drives me out of the bus crawling down Ibn Gabirol and onto the street: if you strip away the scenery,
one prop at a time, what's left for the eye to latch onto? I loop around the mover's van blocking the sidewalk, sidestep a bulging carton

crayoned Handle With Care: nothing, it's like the inside lining – Benjamin again – on the nether side of that 'nothingness,' feeling my way around the furniture, I recognize the neighborhood by now, the park, the kiosk, and, yes, a scatter of margosa trees and in the distance the tapering casuarinas we're always mistaking for pine,

it too imported from the subcontinent, when would that have been? Prussian, cerulean baby blue, an ever-errant azure, a Jonah-thriveand-perish-in-a-day blue, is it any wonder your precursors clambered up drab, unlit stairwells with their portable easels to take in the rooftop view, light needling the solar

reflectors, bouncing off the mounted water tanks, and hadn't it been the same with you, no sooner back in town , you'd found a poky rooftop shack, and, undeterred by the vroom
of the jumbo jets low-flying overhead, scrawled
SUMMER IN TA arched over the sleeping figure scribbled in black and just a daub of yellow.

The girl etched in the rays of the midday sun in a billowing dress swinging on a trapeze outside a turreted, walled city (circa '65), is back in her natal city, built on soft, red hamra soil.
And it's not like you're asking, 'Are those wings etched into the copper plate? And is that the head of a dog in the right-hand corner?' as you shake press down, and watch color appear from the tip of the jumbo, garden craft marker, and the possibility of a new clarity hangs in the air where a child leaps once, twice, thrice, to grasp the hairs of an air root dangling out of reach as I cut across the park, the point is beside the point, a little to the left, dark dwindling to a vanishing point beyond which the city

encrypted a hundredfold, stages its own vanishing act, folds into itself, blossom to bud, in reverse slow motion, and the garden paths unspool in the concourse of the mind, and there you are two flights up, the streetlamps lighting up the margosa –
purged by fire before descrying the stratosphere and Ibn Ezra's cloak hardly bearing the weight

of a fly, through which the stars pulse, recall your own charting of the heavens with drawn blinds and swift, random strokes in our sublunary world.
Light years, light years! Gauging the distances, how your body tracks the stark, emerging shapes down slanting without mercy from nowhere, and the line whirls you round as you enter the current.


Snow in C Sharp Minor

Perhaps I too shall write a little research in snow as you did ( when was it, '75
in NY?), moderately sober in my house slippers in the East

and since neither prophecy nor reward brings the sapling fruit tree to its knees, I must slip outdoors and shake its powdery sleeves free

of the lightest of encumbrances

then waddle-hop between boot track sink-holes back in, bright flakes evanescing in the chill night air – slow, but not too slow in a singing style

perhaps I too am a snowedupon islet in Jerusalem, snapping out of it to shut the rattling window,
as if all possibilities for pampering had been – but aren't these

your words? – sealed off.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Errant"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Gabriel Levin.
Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Epigraph,
Acknowledgements,
At the fourth watch extend,
Obsidian,
Alba I,
Reading Nasir-i Khusraw,
Atropos,
The Shoulder of Hinnom,
Alba II,
Hellas,
After Avraham Ibn Ezra,
What Drew Me On,
Snow in C Sharp Minor,
Someone Knocks at the Door,
And Cush,
'To Each His Chimera',
After Simonides,
Death of a Cinéaste I,
P*aR*D*eS*,
Death of a Cinéaste II,
Outtakes for Ritsos,
Alba III,
'As Light Makes Both Itself And Darkness Plain',
Follow at a clipped pace the dry,
Notes,
About the Author,
By the same Author,
Copyright,