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Garrett Kalleberg
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Malilenas (2005–the present)
Malilenas developed out of notebook I called Numerological Notebook begun in late 2005 in despair about money, love, the war—. Malilenas is a series of 47 numbered poems with various links and doublings played out in a (for me) more intimate space of rhetorical turns.
For ten years, begining with Limbic Odes, I’d been thinking about a kind of poem I call an ode, or dialectical lyric. This thinking, oriented towards a kind of string theory of the poem, always seemed to leave a remainder. Poetically, Malilenas is an attempt to work through the remainder.
* * *
2.
A sentence of from now on.
At the end of which a period of endings.
A prisoner,
a prison, and
a notebook—
to extort ambiguity out of language
as payback for taking meaning out of life.
Look,
I double my take and
twin my desire
in case I lose one, but how
escape? the imaginary, captive
of imagination, the real
a hostage of reality
and meaning, the qualitative appearance of significance
or value,
not the passion of bodies, forever over and over,
not the pain of the body, for Saturday take away Friday,
not the suffering of dividended bodies, for love and money.
* * *
14.
The hard share and necessity have
bloodied my lines with the blood
of other people’s words. No easy share
in joint misery snatched
and dispatched by hands
penned behind the back.
No easy trick.
No easy way out, violence
voiced by pens
gnawing into
our little notebooks—Sorry
we are that we can say no more.
Sorry, blood, sorry salt,
the language spent in excess
It’s always about the money.
Sorry spittle on lipstick of spasming lips,
Just go. The language spent in excess
even the breath broke
look
a poet’s corpus.
A palaver cadavers.
* * *
20.
A good notebook is the mother of the muses.
The notebook is the mother.
The writer who keeps a lover, the writer in love,
is one who cannot give up happiness
or the satisfaction of days that are really days.
And the lovers that succeed one another.
Dear Notebook,
I give up. I forfeit. I
in resignation forswear, I
in resignation abandon. In resignation
I let go, lay down, in resignation
cast away, aside, behind me. I cast off
to the dogs, to the winds I capitulate
my capitals and my lower cases
of the lower lovers and the higher lovers
and all the relative others turning
in their levity and turning
in gravity. Cursive
mothers in levity father
words in gravity good
notebook in levity
blessed.
* * *
29.
For gain of insight I invested all I had
in yet another insight, no end
to the riches of labor, as long as I live.
So I’ll give you some time
in as much as I have time to give.
And someday meet again as strangers
with no end to beginning
past the future become bad timing.
And wait.
Wait, save yourself, or
save me, though I don’t bank on intention
nor trust in guarantee
nor agree on what things mean
in case, number or gender
meaning
well
with what I had.
Not an easy loss
not much at all.
I’d honor a debt in seeing to another’s interests
dishonored by the other’s interests
but now I am off the grid, column row and cell.
Free? to my credit, all my riches
are immaterial, no matter the mind
minting counterfeit affections
enough to buy a treasury of trust
whose notes bear no significance
compared to what buys a glass of beer.
Free? at least within the
measure of the poem even then
something to pay for.
* * *
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