Charles Tarlton: "A Rock in a Jar"

      

While I work on my next artistic post, I am posting another poem by my husband, this one otherwise unpublished. I think it relates to Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar, which is, in turn, related to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn."  Stevens, Helen Vendler wrote, was answering "a vow to stop imitating Keats and seek a native American language that will not take the wild out of the wilderness" (quoted by Antonio José Jiménez Muñoz, University of Oviedo, http://www.academia.edu/7357036/Wallace_Stevens_Anecdote_of_the_Jar).  Charles Tarlton, whose narrator has, for the moment, "taken the wild out of the wilderness," says that his own poem came about because he dreamed of a rock that was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. And says, now, that the poem may be about how difficult it is, and how scary it is, to change your whole view of the world.

 A Rock in a Jar

            1

your eye catches it

(unexpectedly, a straggly fugitive

detail amidst the forest’s

disarray, illogical and off-hand)

in a glimpse of sun down through

a brushy filter of pine.

just a small irregular rock,

glassy blue, and subtly blurred

below the currents of a mountain

creek, somewhere off the road.

not at all auspicious, this rock,

water pocked and angular,

the underside a flat polished

mica sliver of sky, grey

on the upwards. A rock gone

unnoticed other than obliquely

by the odd skittish deer come

for a drink, or raucous blue

jays stirring up a bath.

now, visualize this rock

in the palm of your hand, destined

for the jar of souvenir seashells; 

see reflected in it now

your own curious glances,

the backdrop of sky and cloud

you’re standing in.  It goes

in your pocket, clicking up

against a penny and a quarter.

once home, emptying your treasure

on the kitchen table, you laugh,

remembering the little rock,

and drop it in the jar

of seashells. It alters everything;

its mirror refracts the crowded

seashore contents of the jar. The shells

roll over and roll their eyes.

           

2 

“every vacation from now on,”

you’d said, on that last day at the beach

“we’ll come back here and add more

seashells to the jar. A sort of observance.” 

notice the clumsy, lopsided

collisions of the rock against

the smooth parabolas and ampersands,

the swirled edges, and thin ridges

of the lustrous shells. Turn the jar

in your hands, and the tumbling

upstart rock reveals the graceful

seashells to themselves.  Mother

of pearl discovering its reflection

in the watery isinglass;

the rock wears their likenesses

disguising the dissonance.

            3

the red and yellow kitchen walls

awake and crowd the scene;

a roomful of common objects

strategically pinpointed like 

the sectors of an artillery map,

imagined ribbons stretched,

and fastened to thumbtacks,

the battle of ontological

vectors. New truths revolve

in the room, the jar and the rock

and shells arc along the compass,

projecting, as from a disco ball,

the center out to the periphery.

the increase of distance

and of angular rotation throw

rock and shells lewdly

each against the other.  They exchange

expectant kisses in the jar,

the jar caresses them.  This dumb

subversive rock has brought

the windows in, and with the windows,

trees as well as sky.  No glass

confines its movements, the rock

sees at the speed of light.

with the seashells in the jar,

the jar centers the kitchen,

surrounded by yellows and reds,

the colors spreading inward and out;

the rock greedy, the rock coquettish,

looking past the kitchen

and its own projected kitchens

into the trees and clouds. 

what does its cold eye remember? 

            4

not ever being born, the rock

knows nothing about ripening,

or the fluctuations of growth emerging

ahead of the blood’s vulgar spurts,

but only sameness, always the one

thing. The water lay over it,

beyond the water, light and dark,

blue sky in its stillness,

clouds slow, white or gray,

and glaring sun. The rock had no

organic roots, no family; it was a chip

randomly broken from some larger rock.

memory was of no consequence to it,

nothing grew or passed through it.

geometry and physics were its genesis,

whose Forms are over and over

seeded, crystallized, and dumbly cleft

(no massif could ever conceive, gestate,

or bear pebbles in its image.  No boulder

promiscuously unrolls

green tendrils to bind itself

to the fence.  Now, the rock finds

itself transmuted; it can smell the ocean

on the shells, the hints of flesh

in the wet jar, a salt-sea stink

unknown amongst the magma and things

that have simply boiled and cooled

from which he came.  A real novelty,

this rock, burly adjacent

to the daintier seashells

exhibiting traces how they once

were hinged to allow life to pump

in and out, wherein they could hide

from the light itself, or wear rings

marking how they grew, were used,

and had aged.  The rock cannot grow,

but only be worn down, roughly gouged

across its glassy eye, or broken.

past the shells and the kitchen 

implements, the rock records the sky, 

exploring how to seize the garden,

and bring it all in, to catalogue

the exuberant and unfamiliar

flowers, combing the saw-tooth

of picket fence for new theorems. 

Gathering as it goes along,

it wants to teach the shells more

than the walls, to reveal the widening

circumstances a propos themselves,

to show them to the moon.

5

nothing waits behind these

reflections but impenetrable

crystal; how a little rock contains

the world.  Everything adds up

—shells, walls, windows, trees,

fence, clouds, and the sky,

and as far as the eye can see

into the little retina in the jar. 

but the rock still knows nothing.

no time passes there, though movement

and stillness come and go and rest.

inertia, wound up or disengaged

like a broken watch spring,

metes out random, uncalibrated

distances and speeds.  Time

should be able to record

something meaningful.  All the things

inside and out are sizing

one another up according to weight

and their proximity;

they go fast or slow, eagerly

waiting (or tense with dread)

for something to come around

again, make any of it matter.

we will keep vigil out

our windows, throw one another

censorious looks, tragic

to comic, in the to and fro.

scenes projected on the rock’s

cinematic surface need more

than what the reflecting

unreflective little rock has

so far been able to deliver us. 

            6

a lonely pine tree

on a hilltop miles away

resists the gathering leer

of the rock (circling birds, warm

air rising, housetop TV aerials,

and wood smoke in streaks above

the rows of chimneys partly obscure

the tree’s conical shape;

its millions of needles cannot

be seen at all; they will not

project on the rock’s tiny screen).

in true synthesis, large

is found in small, complexity

hides simple, and distances

obscure reduction.  Up to now,

fine coincidence of angle

and light defined the standpoint

of the rock; the seashells were

perfect, too, companions

in illusion, motionless, solid,

yet happy to pass through the glass.

but, we have not been scrupulous

enough about cupboards

or picket fences.  We ignored

the obvious limitations of the rock’s

field of view in the excitement

of shattering boundaries.

everyone’s eye had overreached; 

with these troubling observations

we have a turning point.

the story’s true; the last rays

from reclining Helios (not even

a rock can look straight

into the sun) cool obliquely

off the white paint of the fence,

cool flames in the window’s

bold returning stare. The shells grew

anxious. The walls come in close.

“Everything is just an idea,”

thought all round. The rock failed

to hold the fractious light

in lifelike image, the beholder’s

visual cortex reduced to changing

photons into bare neural impulse,

making inferences from what

others had said they’d seen. 

distant objects are, perhaps, best

drawn, then, in the mind’s eye.

to enter into the cave of the mind,

the world must become a dream.

rock walls intrude uncouthly,

but interpretations and design

are dreamed. No properly

animated rock would continue

to prefer geometry to process,

or give preference to sine

and cosine once he’d known

the asymmetric shrubs and crooked

cupboard doors, or the fine

irregular squiggles rough soles

have randomly scratched on

the checkerboard linoleum.

the rock is moving on just so,

abandoning straight lines

and perfect parallelograms, isosceles

triangles, regular zigzags,

and logarithmic curlicues. 

“Let the the rock be sentient!”

the audience chants.  “We need a thinker

to imagine needles, who will

let us see their impossibly

excruciating distant thinness.”

            7

pondered deeply, our thinking

reveals it lineage in flesh, 

how it was always birthed

behind closed skulls.  Along

the atom-to-atom circuitry, chemical

reactions pile up, a cluster

here, a sinewy string of connections.

absence and presence, stuff

cluttering the doorway, well-lit

garden gates and pitch darkness. 

such a lot is going on.

shadow and light play

in tangles over the retina;

synthesis-choosing metabolic

pathways down the cell-morass

of nerve and cerebral fluids. 

isomerized draperies of purple

and violet, waving rods

and cones, linked beyond wet

surfaces, bravely running

neuron rapids to the cortex.

it is all the same with seeing.

clusters of electric charge

positioned like infielders

on the trusting retina, where

the brain extrudes part of its inward

workings to the outward

like a hernia; just so that

inside and out connect

on the mica layers of our rock’s

eye, on its flat reflecting

side.  It picks up light waves

and reworks them. If a hair

is missing from a well-known

ear, the conceptual apparatus fills

it in; the same with pine needles.

the general idea spiffs up

the fragmentary thing. Experience

makes metaphors from our

stimulated nerves and the secretions

washing in waves over brain

cells. Changes of temperature

and the rhythms of discharge

turn into hatred, logical relations,

a bad chill. The scientist probes

the one, devising machines to manifest

the unseen goings on, the poet

dresses up in the tattered others,

rummaging for lacey brooches and

sepia albums with dried flowers and

obituaries cut from old newspapers.

            8

the rock as poet, poetizing

rock (to complete the metaphor) 

simulates without within

in both the crystals of its micaceous

window and deeply in the hard

granite below.  It can conjure

what collides, rework whatever

dances on its screen.

it can make corrections

in obedience to theory where

observations might just not

confirm specifics.  All this was

expected from the start,

the careful reader will allow. 

we were always looking through

the rock’s eyes. Now the pine needles

are displayed fo r all to see. 

the jar reaches round to caress

the seashells, the seashells

rub up against the glass,

each other and their reborn

hero rock.  The rock makes and shows

movies on its little screen;

the camera dollies and tracks

in an ever widening gyre.

until now no one had noticed

a defect in the mica, on the lower

left-hand corner of the little

squarish mirror, just a tiny chip

that marks a blind spot,

a hole in the rock’s retina. 

it shows up as a blur on the edge

of the closest huddling mollusk,

causes a bend in the third fence

picket from the left, but goes

unnoticed up in the clouds,

where details roll, spread,

and swirl anyway.  Anyway,

it’s just a quirk that makes

the rock’s world entirely

the rock’s own; the rock’s theories

are rock theories.  Undeterred,

the rock detours around its chip. 

            9

now, we have humane intelligence

performed by a reproducing rock

picked up from a brook where

it had tumbled, probably,

for several lifetimes.  It can

see anything as far as

there’s good reason to see,

though an imperfection

nicked into its glassy edge

drives the eye to replicate

the error in each successive

scaling; progress and increase

are thus bought with ever

magnified distortion.

the goal was, absolutely

from the start, to see the swirls

etched in the pearly core

curvature of seashells in the jar

and then reflected in the shape

of the assembled stars (maybe

to discern the milky-way, and

with it, God’s own plan,

in the nacre inlay mirrored

in half a clam).  What the rock

lusted after was much more

than merely sight and sense;

it now sought a knowledge,

some certitude how everything

was governed, how each and every

part imbued the whole.

in the passing of Time,

the immense distances reaching

always toward us, fold over

themselves along a fault line,

a cosmic curtain wafting

in celestial breezes.  Undulations

fan out from the center

to the edge, from large and near

to small and far, and the reverse,

exhibiting the infinite

in all its insignificance.

to the rock, what’s happened

might all have been predicted;

the shape of the world resembling

familiar whorls inside familiar

seashells. All worlds grow, the gods

from rows of planted teeth;

everything unfolds until it

runs up against our stone

idiosyncrasies—our philosophies

will then certainly mount up.

            10

The Philosophy of the Rock, I

this rock considered farthest worlds

subject to its mirror, they could be

dragged into the jar, put under glass. 

remote was just another instance

of close by.  If it fits into

the mirror, how strange could

it be, how hard to understand it?

the shells themselves had never

moved of their own accord; sometimes

the jar was jostled or revolved,

and shells appeared at odd angles. 

the rock’s sweeping gaze edited

the jockeying calcite matrices

composing tableaux framed to

show only their very best sides,

oil on water spreading rainbows

of soft violet, blue, and pink.

when the sun stood just above

the picket fence, and the rain

had gone, the rock could paint seashell

patterns in the sky, could imagine

clouds as trompe l’oeil bowls

of fruit, could fashion mythic war

chariots, the mirages

of their steam-snorting horses

quivering in a rising patch of pale blue sky.

in the rock’s mind the world

gave up its secrets in the mirror,

what the mirror could imagine.

from familiar to odd and weird is farther

than the distance traveled back,

when we hold our discoveries in old

cloth sacks sewn from common

knowledge.  Nothing was entirely new.

blue light off the pretty shells

bent oddly as we know (don’t forget

the imperfection on the mirror’s face,

that unseeing smidgen), so the farther

away it surveyed, the farther the rock’s

estimates were off.  The larger errors

presently began to haunt the intimates

within the jar.  No shell was long

allowed to mean just what it meant.

shells became embodiments of vaster

implications; they wrongly stood

for more.  The rock could not turn

to face away from any blemished shell, 

could not ignore an imperfection

(it was powerless in that regard;

it could not move nor could it see

just how it wrongly saw), so it read

less meaning in the places its own

reflection spread.  Those sad stars

received the names of lesser deities

     —panic, narcissism, cupidity. 

in the rock’s garden, they were simply

moved into the shade, where

they vied with dying lilies.

             11

The Philosophy of the Rock, II

there are two senses, the rock

avers, of center; the jar

that holds the rock and the rock itself. 

the rock contains the world,

and the jar holds the rock,

but cannot hold the rock’s roving

eye. Knowing no limits, the rock

imagines also God in two persons,

one that does, and another

that makes possible. The rock

is the moving center,

going where it sees things

on the cracked, distorted glass,

inventing fabulous objects

and creatures, three-winged

blackbirds pecking insects

on a twisting fence, or rooftops

droopy in the center, bowed with

imaginary weight.  The jar is

the center that holds still.

what moves, is then moving

around it.  See it and you are

justified and can understand

how to drag objects under the lens

and read out the name of each --

“fence, flower, shell, cloud, star,”

edicts from proclaimed divinity,

vain and arrogant, insisting

Time and Motion owe their Being

to its Will (the rock in the jar).

no other Genesis is countenanced.

word gets around—the Cat is out.

the fence was created for shade

infrequently dappled in dark

and lighter stripes along the flowers;

the flowers were born from the need

for a capricious yellow

offered up to the rock; the clouds

and the stars among them sing

a music silent in the yard,

heard only by the rock itself

within the jar; the cracks are plastered

up with mysteries.  “listen. . . .“

the rock begins to hum,

some excess energy blows as wind

through a whistle-notched reed,

hardly audible at first, but soon

a rattling is noticed among

the seashells, sending brittle echoes

along the curved glass of the jar.

the table sways in sympathy

and the whistling, ever shriller,

passes through the windows to the yard,

past the fence, into the waiting sky. 

as if the world had been tapped

like a tuning fork, the pitch

infects glass, rock, wood, plant,

and stars.  They squirm in oscillating

rhythms—No one can sleep.

            12

the action in the jar intrudes

impossibly into your own restless

tossing in the noisy, jar-shaking

night.  Culpability awakes and wakes

you and in you, makes you stare

into the blackness.  The night

hangs slack in the windows,

but the rock glows in your mind’s

eye, threatening reason

and routine with its anarchy.

“I’ve got to put it back,”

you whisper, coming up from sleep.

“Something’s very wrong.”

“Put what back?” your wife wants to know.

“The rock,” you whisper, “the rock I stole

from its place in the stream bed.”

“Oh, that’s silly; go back to sleep.”

instead, you get up quietly

and dress.  In the kitchen everything

is still.  Some invisible token

of calamity remains, but you can’t

be sure.  The whole room,

the windows, and the yard outside

are holding their breath.

you pick up the jar, walk to the sink,

twist the lid, and smelly water

pours through your fingers

along with seashells, till you have

only the rock inert, so small

in your hand; it goes into

your pocket and weighs a ton

by the time you’ve hiked

and found the pool.  The exact

desecrated site discovered,

an obvious hollow the size

of the errant rock in the sandy

bottom of the stream.  Surrounding

rocks gape blindly, oblivious

to dull shapes and shadows,

waiting in perpetual obscurity,

dead to the spreading dawn. 

you go down on one knee to refit

the stone, face up, like a glass eye

in its socket. It barely glances,

but you catch the wet suggestion

of yourself as the rock sees you. 

the fracture on the layered mica

surface twists your cameo,

making your right eye enlarge fiercely;

then it’s gone.  The tumbling

stream rolls the rock over

on its face, its unseeing granite

backside facing upwards now.