Autobiography 2 (hellogoodby)

By Michael Palmer b. 1943 Michael Palmer

The Book of Company which

I put down and can’t pick up

The Trans-Siberian disappearing,

the Blue Train and the Shadow Train

Her body with ridges like my skull

Two children are running through the Lion Cemetery

Five travelers are crossing the Lion Bridge

A philosopher in a doorway insists

that there are no images

He whispers instead: Possible Worlds

The Mind-Body Problem

The Tale of the Color Harpsichord

Skeleton of the World’s Oldest Horse

The ring of O dwindles

sizzling around the hole until gone

False spring is laughing at the snow

and just beyond each window

immense pines weighted with snow

A philosopher spreadeagled in the snow

holds out his Third Meditation

like a necrotic star. He whispers:

archery is everywhere in decline,

photography the first perversion of our time

Reach to the milky bottom of this pond

to know the feel of bone,

a knuckle from your grandfather’s thumb,

the maternal clavicle, the familiar

arch of a brother’s brow

He was your twin, no doubt,

forger of the unicursal maze

My dearest Tania, When I get a good position in the courtyard

I study their faces through the haze

Dear Tania, Don’t be annoyed,

please, at these digressions

They are soldering the generals

back onto their pedestals

for A. C.

Source: The Promises of Glass (New Directions, 2000)

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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