A Mask of Motion

by Lyn Hejinian

Genres: Poetry

31 pages, Chapbook

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Lyn Hejinian (born May 17, 1941) is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980), as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000).

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A MASK OF HISTORY

Would, he said, that my uncle
of poetry. Of any art, indeed!
- The fact is, I should say that he stood
to repeat in great detail
turned slightly toward th outside
that he might keep balance, on the stone
wall, and paraded his ideas
to all of us who would listen.
- An anecdote and a history
the rocks. He the partaker
hefted the green. The growing
emotion, that wouldn't remove
an hour, and then another, on order
to strain what he could believe
I care for my own and am never beholden
the brush the bush beside the flower
mar the granite island in the shade
the fish and lily pads. Turtles
not a moment wasted
and minstrels as a run into history



MASKS from A MASK OF MOTION

The Unknown
The Left Out
The Mysterious
The Holy Possibility


1.
I'm confusing two different stories,
she said; I know I'm mixing them up.
But somehow, strange as it seems,
completely unrelated events can
interwine in my memory and then I
see they had something in common.

This is: your luck and my birthday
 your money and my purse
 you honey and my sweet


2.
the figs
of flirtation

it's fun

Ah, my sweet

To think as to love is to dance around
sex to music. There are "bison, horses,
and oxen in the central chamber; deer,
mammoth, and ibex in outer areas;
rhinoceros, lion, and bear in the farthest
recesses."


3.
The children each took a piece of coloured
chalk and began to draw on the cement 
courtyard. Where the drawing of one
crossed the drawing of the other they
ignored the shift. The resulting con-
figuration was confusion, but they
ignored that to. It was colourful.
They were a mystery to each other, still,
just as they were a mystery to themselves.



___________________________________

yours is the eye painted perchance
bring on the prose fruits

yours is the oval palm
the pleasing
the passion 
the posed yard

someone sings of the purple waters
 the green
 the cobalt
 the ochre
 the brown potatoes



FIGURES FROM DAMAGED BOOKS

the heroes
are older

 //

In these places, prompted to speech, even yesterday the
cups and bowls were on the table, tattered as they were
by the furthest water. By the door the trees hand. Love
drives wishes as wishes drive love, and there are only as
many facts as there are fictions, both driven before the
same breeze. A fiction is a made thing that's recognized as
such, and a fact is a made thing that is not recognized
as such.

 //

these are the reasons and the songs
 a knife
 of thirst and sex
 a kitten
 a kid
 a kite
 a kitchen
I would have leapt off the rock, if I could, and landed
across the valley in step with my own walking.

 //

When my eyes have no strength
 I am old
When my legs
 and particularly walking downhill
 just as the knees
 and the calves
When even the seasons are tremulous

 //

Bring on the barking dog, the setting sun, the growing
trees. What is blue continues, what is red subsides. Our
creeks are cold, our wines have no limit, our heroes are
without fall and our children without winter. Here are the
milk goats, here the bay horses. The soil is black, the fruit
red or yellow or orange or purple as the plums.

 //

Elephants and bears are both beautiful animals - as
beautiful as horses and tigers.
Horses, tigers, elephants, bears.

 Pigeons
 Mules
 Whalles
 Turkeys
 Giraffes

 //

The limpid seasons
bring unbroken rain.

 //

And there is no way in which I can describe to you the
sensuousness of the words and ideas. The rounds and 
peaks of them, their surfaces and interiors, give me the
greatest pleasure. It is not unlike the pleasure one feels
when one thinks of an old friend, one who remains both
familiar and mysterious. Similarly, I love the idea of the
Unknown, offering as it does to my mind a sense of almost
religious Possibility.



MASKS from A MAST OF MOTION

1.
once when the minstrel was an historian, he
a lion among trees
a mother o' faces
the movement of the eaters and the feeders
what had happened. You have only to believe


2.
She says to him, Hold the baby, Sweet
Horn, the stairs are steep. The news
is good. The road has risen up and
hours wrap around the house the arbor,
the oaks, all in good time. The entire
family in their boots and shoes is
standing and talking together around the
fire in its place, awaiting the roast,
the potatoes, the hospitality, or
something akin.

"We will have a room built up for you
in our new domicile and set apart for
your especial use; and more, we will
see that you have a fresh-laid soft-
boiled egg, toast, and tea every morning
and a little ride in the country whenever
you feel like indulging in rural 
observations."


3.
The dog was tied to the tree
wearing the grain of the floor
out of the sun. Fed by a darker stream
the unusual green of the sky
And Time an invention
here are the lines not afraid of
pulls back the sweet bark 
and flows over
better
eye-legged
afternoon. Drowsy


4.
Behind the mask
is the face of change.

It is a sense rather than a science, just as the beast of
courage bites the breast of fear.

I lay my leg out.

The mask of the sad one
is the suffering bear.

The mother cat
eats
the blood, the still-born
kitten, and the shit 
of the live ones.


5.
the dust is a red vegetation
I am here for kisses
into a few notes, I thought
of stone. An the red walls
in the fields to which I would come
if stated at all
of the yapping distances, the extended return


6.
There is on ancestor I have refused to acknowledge, he
told me. They say that he was challenged to a duel in San
Francisco and, arriving at the scene drunk, he took a look
at the weapons and ran, and he was never heard from
again. He couldn't have been the man they think he was, 
the genealogist I hired in Boston. He meant it and he
laughed.


7.
We don't interpret the facts; instead, I think,
the facts emerge from our interpretations and
we foresuffer the past.

Some nights the owl sounds like a puppy.
did finish reading the book and then said
I have now to tell you without foolishness
of the three pines along the ridge that guard
the dirt road, and the snag that is their
grandmother.

Tucked therein, just at the trees
this is the plain mask of history.

Read the full text here: eclipsearchive.org

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Something so gentle as the syntactical lesions of Lyn Hejinian's Seventies writing with on the one side the verse line, and on the other the normal random variable of a conduction into the sentence:

the dust is a red vegetation

I am here for kisses

into a few notes, I thought

of stone. And the red walls

in the fields to which I would come

if stated at all

of the yapping distances, the extended return
["Masks from a Mask of Motion"]

As she will go on to say, this time in a prosier line: "We don't interpret the facts; instead, I think, | the facts emerge from our interpretations and | we foresuffer the past." She had just got done telling us, in "Figures from Damaged Books": "A fiction is a made thing that's recognized as such, and a fact is a made thing that's not recognized as such." Hejinian's pressure throughout on what the gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler described as The Place of Value in the World of Facts looks ahead to this "foresuffering" just as that normal random value.

This chapbook, nine poems, written, one might guess, contemporaneously with Hejinian's founding of Tuumba Press, that printed inaugurally her own http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/THOUGHT/Thought.pdf in 1976, open up the pastoral surrealism of a late war generation [b. 1941-1951] poet, beyond the flex of her slightly older Burning Deck imprint-mate, Mark Strand.

There are deep fish, dangling lights,
There are swift birds, the size of a thumb
There the old man, the worn tooth,
his neck like a turtle's
and the old woman, she loves her children, Lordy,
with one eye as white as a star

You feel in this both the random value, those syntactical lesions, again, as well as the flex against a canon of nursery rhyme, the ordinary enchantments of mother goose. I write this on a day Marjorie Perloff's obituary appears in The Times, and it's Perloff's noise, the laying on of the vanguard's greaves and breastplate, that is precisely what's missing, not that it's missed, in Hejinian's writing through. Lyn never laid on the mantle.

[Linita · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Love drives wishes as wishes drive love, and there are only as many facts as there are fictions, both driven before the same breeze. A fiction is a made thing that's recognized as such, and a fact is a made thing that is not recognized
as such."