Eighth Sky

By Michael Palmer b. 1943 Michael Palmer

It is scribbled along the body

Impossible even to say a word

An alphabet has been stored beneath the ground

It is a practice alphabet, work of the hand

Yet not, not marks inside a box

For example, this is a mirror box

Spinoza designed such a box

and called it the Eighth Sky

called it the Nevercadabra House

as a joke

Yet not, not so much a joke

not Notes for Electronic Harp

on a day free of sounds

(but I meant to write “clouds”)

At night these same boulevards fill with snow

Lancers and dancers pass a poisoned syringe,

as you wrote, writing of death in the snow,

Patroclus and a Pharoah on Rue Ravignan

It is scribbled across each body

Impossible even to name a word

Look, you would say, how the sky falls

at first gently, then not at all

Two chemicals within the firefly are the cause,

twin ships, twin nemeses

preparing to metamorphose

into an alphabet in stone

St.-Benoit-sur-Loire

to Max Jacob

Source: At Passages (New Directions, 1995)

Biography

Michael Palmer was born in New York City and educated at Harvard in the early 1960s, where he encountered Confessional poetry. His opposition to Confessionalism found root in a developing poetics when he attended the landmark 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, a three-week gathering where he met Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Clark Coolidge. Correspondence with those three poets greatly influenced Palmer’s early development . . .

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