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The World Returns Again

Daniel Borzutzky




1.    Repair

Sing this: the right of refusal

Write this: the right of refusal

Breathe this: the earth, terrified by a world impoverished by the negation of the right of refusal

Hear this: the mistakes living in the earth

The whisper of:

Mountains tossed, trees ravaged and stripped of green

A desert of dried-up bodies

Dream this: Dried-up dolphins in a desert of dried-up bodies

Dream this: Of course, there is a voice

It says: I am the voice of restoration

I am the voice of repair, but I am absent and I will not come even if you invoke me with all the right prayers

No, it’s not what I want

Hear this: You would be better, human, if you were scattered far across the sky

Painblankpainblankpainblank

it’s like your body
It’s your body
It’s like your body
It’s your body

It has no restoration

It welcomes you even in death

And even in death you look surprised

You are like the Gods, you are guilty
Of cutting throats
bombing rivers
Disappearing birds, butterflies, seas

Yes, the vision is evolving

See this: The sea has taken your head

These are your bones

They are in the mud of the flood

The earth you step on bends over to expose the debt it owes to the financiers

It pays with wolves, deer, coyotes, squirrels, rabbits, chickens, children

It pays with blood, limbs, glaciers, waves, stones, bees, children

Write this: I would rather be: ignorant, pregnant, a seed, or, a voice that hates its echo?

See this:

I see you, I howl you, I shake you

Write this: For a few years I went savage and when I returned everyone was talking about quote unquote    Irons in the fire

Interlude

I have set my eyes on not capturing myself 

Painblank

But my color is gone

My house is dark

My Gods are too tired to help and forgive

There is always this and a little bit of that which gets in the way

Shhhhh  Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh

There is this and there is that 

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

There is something frozen here

I am surprised by the obstacle course of grief you arranged out of my voice

Limb by limb the evergreens are falling

There is a horrid poison in the shallows

The fatal chill of restoration

Hear this:

Shhhhhhhhhhhh

It’s a secret agreement ...

Somewhere we are devoted to love





2.    Metamorphosis

I took a document of death and crossed out all the names of the murdered

The names of the murderers did not appear on the document of death and so I could not cross them out

There were other things that appeared on the document of death

Coordinates, deserts, shacks, prisons, barracks, cars, rivers, basements, gardens, morgues, street corners, shops, bridges, mountains, rivers, etc …

There were dates and I took all the numbers and added them together and then I touched my body to make sure I was still alive and then I wrote this

Shhhhhhh

Write this:

In this room where I spend all day reading documents of death and trying to write about death you see I am stuck in a purgatory of documentation everywhere I look there are names being crossed out the dead speak to me through their absence I do not know if this is what I signed up for when I agreed to become a poet they accused me of violence porn and I broke down in tears because they could not understand how the bodies I had lost were stuck in the words I could not write 

And so I went back to being absent

I went back to hiding in the blacked-out letters and every once in a while I read The Metamorphosis by Ovid and I wrote down the fourth, seventh, and twelfth word from the first line of every page and with these words I wrote a poem for fifteen days, one for each book of The Metamorphosis, and it kept me for fifteen days from not thinking about painblank the way I normally think about painblank

I spoke to no one for months and instead I read books about death and metamorphosis and statistical analysis and this is how I came to write this poem

For instance the goalkeeper dives to one corner during the penalty shootout on the majority of kicks though most of the goals scored in penalty shootouts are kicked down the middle




And I thought why does the goalkeeper always dive to one corner when the majority of goals are kicked down the middle and a voice said think about it think about it think about it if you don’t move and the ball goes in the corner what will they think of you if you don’t move what will they say about you if you look as if you haven’t tried to move they will call you lazy they will say you don’t care enough

I thought about this a lot         I thought about the art of not moving

and I decided that I would devote the rest of my little life to the art of standing still when every voice in your head is telling you to fearlessly dive into the corner





3.    Song

AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH

AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH AND DEATH AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH

AND DEATH AND MONEY DEATH AND MONEY DEATH AND MONEY DEATH DEATH

DEATH AND MONEY DEATH AND MONEY MONEY MONEY DEATH DEATH

MONEY MONEY DEATH DEATH

MONEY MONEY DEATH DEATH

MONEY DEATH MONEY DEATH MONEY MONEY DEATH DEATH

BREATHE……….

Repeat after me

CAPTIVATION

DISAPPEARANCE

CAPTIVATED

DISAPPEARED

CAPTIVITY

DOCUMENTED

Breathe breathe breathe breathe

AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH

AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH AND DEATH AND DEATH AND MONEY AND MONEY AND DEATH

Breathe…


THE QUESTION WE INTEND TO ASK IS WHAT IT MEANS TO LIVE IN A CAGE AND HOW IS IT THAT WE CAN ESCAPE FROM THIS CAGE IF ALL WE SEE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CAGE IS A CAGE THAT DOES NOT LOOK LIKE A CAGE I MUST RELATE MYSELF TO SOMEONE I WITHHOLD MY BODY THE WAY A HUNGER ARTIST WITHHOLDS FOOD FROM THEIR MOUTH I CONSIDER WITHHOLDING TO BE THE MOST IMPORTANT FORM OF ART I CONSIDER SHRINKING TO BE AN IMPORTANT FORM OF ART I CONSIDER DISAPPEARING TO BE A FORM OF ART I AM PRECISELY NOT MYSELF WHEN I AM MOST MYSELF I FUNDAMENTALLY LACK RELATION I AM INTERESTED PRECISELY IN THE BLANK SPOT ON YOUR SKIN I AM INTERESTED IN THE AESTHETICS OF THE BLANK SPOT ON YOUR SKIN LIKE MY FATHER I HAVE AN UNRULY PATCH OF HAIR NEAR MY EAR MY INSTINCTS TELL ME THAT IT’S SAFER TO REMAIN UNSEEN I LIVE A LIFE THAT IS DETERMINED BY OTHER PEOPLE’S DESIRES

                                          WHAT AM I?

                                                                 OR….

                                         WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS SONG?




4.    Reading Duino Elegy 8

I too have looked into the open with everything but all I saw were

bodies overboard limbs veiled by fish I turned inward and everything cried death

then everything cried love and I could not get untrapped from my freedom

In the Eighth Elegy, translated by A. Poulin Jr., Rilke writes:

we know what’s out there from the animal’s face for we take even the youngest child turn him around and force him to look at the past as formation not that openness so deep within an animal’s face

I too have looked into the open with everything and all I saw were weary bodies, penetrating and pale, though with a certain power

Occasionally, I saw an ocean creature with tentacles

I saw an ocean creature with tentacles whose vice is the desecration of state and capital

Rilke says that the free animal always has its destruction behind and God ahead and when it moves it moves towards eternity like running springs

I’ve read this line fifteen times today and despite my suspicion of my elevation of the secular I still don’t care about the eternal which lies ahead

instead I feel most drawn to the destruction the free animal leaves behind

I can’t help it I see myself crawling back towards the destruction

crawling slowly crackled by grief or by poison

you have a lonnnnnnnng form, a voice tells me, you possess a long form received in birth

the voice enjoys telling me about my long form

and I think about a body I love that disappears into the wind and reappears into the sanctuary of a home with the most peaceful windows and doors

It is always World, writes Rilke, and never Nowhere without No

it is always world, I write, and we are always body and never nobody

we are always thing and never nothing

the main horror is the idea, the word, the body, the breath, the ongoing nightmare of an infinitely regenerating absence

as a child, writes Rilke, one may lose himself in silence and be shaken out of it. Or one dies and IS it. Once near death one can’t see death anymore

because too many things keep getting in the way of our ability to see death

like PAINBLANK PAINBLANK PAINBLANK

and silence and its impossibilities

and guilt and the sadness of the bodies we leave behind because

as Rilke writes in Duino Elegy 8 (translated by A. Poulin Jr.):

no one gets past the other and the world returns again. 





Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024), and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024) and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the American Literary Translators Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún.



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