The White Stones by J. H. Prynne

Author:J. H. Prynne [Prynne, J.H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-980-2
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Aristeas, in Seven Years

Gathering the heat to himself, in one thermic

hazard, he took himself out: to catch up with

the tree, the river, the forms of alien vantage

1 and hence the first way

by theft into the upper world—“a

natural development from the mixed

economy in the drier or bleaker

regions, where more movement was

necessary”—and thus the

floodloam, the deposit, borrowed for

the removal. Call it inland, his

nose filled with steam & his brief cries.

Aristeas took up it

seems with the

singular as the larch

tree, the

Greek sufficient

for that. From Marmora

And sprang with that double twist into the

middle world and thence took flight over the

Scythian hordes and to the Hyperborean,

touch of the north wind

carrying with him Apollo. Song

his transport but this divine

insistence the pastural clan:

sheep, elk, the wild deer. In each case

the presence in embryo, god of the shep-

herd and fixed in the movement of flock.

Wrung over the real tracts. If he was

frozen like the felted eagle of Pazyryk,

he too had the impossible lower twist,

the spring into the middle, the air.

From here comes

the north wind, the

remote animal

gold—how did

he, do we, know

or trust, this?

Following the raven and

sniffing hemp as the

other air, it was

himself as the singular that he knew and

could outlast in the long walk by the

underground sea. Where he was as

the singular

location so completely portable

that with the merest black

wings he could survey the

stones and rills in their

complete mountain courses,

2 in name the displacement

Scythic.

And his songs were invocations in no frenzy

of spirit, but clear and spirituous tones from the

pure base of his mind; he heard the small

currents in the air & they were truly his aid.

In breath he could speak out into the northern

air and the phrasing curved from his mouth

and nose, into the cold mountain levels. It

was the professed Apollo, free of the festive line,

powdered with light snow.

And looking down, then, it is no outlay

to be seen in

the forests, or

scattered rising

of ground. No

cheap cigarettes nothing

with the god in this

climate is free of duty

moss, wormwood as the cold

star, the dwarf Siberian pine

as from the morainal deposits

of the last deglaciation.

Down there instead the long flowing hair,

of great herds of sheep and cattle, the

drivers of these, their feet more richly

thickened in use than

any slant of their

mongoloid face or

long, ruched garments.

With his staff, the larch-pole, that again the

singular and one axis of the errant world.

Prior to the pattern of settlement then, which

is the passing flocks fixed into wherever

they happened to stop,

the spirit demanded the orphic metaphor

3 as fact

that they did migrate and the spirit excursion

was no more than the need and will of the

flesh. The term, as has been pointed out,

is bone, the

flesh burned or rotted off but the

branch calcined like what

it was: like that: as itself

the skeleton of the possible

in a heap and covered with

stones or a barrow.

Leaving the flesh vacant then, in a fuller’s shop,

Aristeas removed himself for seven years

into the steppes, preparing his skeleton and the

song of his departure, his flesh anyway touched

by the in-

vading Cimmerian

twilight: “ruinous”

as the old woman’s

prophecy.

And who he was took the

collection of seven

years to thin out, to the

fume laid across where

he went, direction north,

4 no longer settled

but settled now into length; he wore that

as risk.

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