Mina Loy & Arthur Cravan: "Letters of the Unliving"

The following poem is one that never fails to penetrate me completely, no matter when or where I encounter it. It is of course Mina Loy's final farewell to her lover Arthur Cravan. Arthur Cravan. One says the name and then the tongue just stops dead. What is there to say about that strange creature...part Dadaist poet, part boxer, part con, part P.T. Barnum...all sociopath most likely. And God and all his trippy minions help her, Mina Loy fell in love with him. Permanently in love.

And he disappeared. Probably lost at sea off Mexico, but of course with a man whose life was "sheer fudge," to borrow from James Russell Lowell, who could believe such a simple ending? Certainly Mina couldn't, for she returned to Europe to obsessively search its jails, taverns, morgues and cemeteries for years, and later continued the search in America. She became rather a living embodiment of La Llorona ("The Weeping One"), that frightening creature of folklore. Loy never ceased scanning the horizon for his return.

This poem is where she finally articulates the aporia of vanished love. The poem is almost Shakespearean in its tone and masterful logodaedaly. What a moving kenning she crafts in "husband heartsease," and how perceptive to see a lover as "Ego's oasis." And that other kenning which arrives so perfectly as essence is evanescing: "cloud-corpse." And the Dickinsonian splendor of absent divinity as "an unanswering hiatus!" She creates a dignified superstructure in this dual elegy which allows for what might elsewhere be excessive; that is Loy's particular gift. Even the title, "Letters of the Unliving," is ambiguous and cruel. It's not titled "Lettters to the Unliving," though she is speaking of Cravan now. Yes, she is looking at his long-ago correspondence at the beginning of the poem, but the poem soon evolves into a meditation on what it is of the spirit which survives in writing written or even writing unwritten. She foregrounds the fact that it is she who is "unliving" ("No longer any you as addresser / there is no addressee") as much as the disappeared, and that it is she who is somehow speaking a posthumous poem.

I'm taking this from the Noonday The Lost Lunar Baedeker, and I have to share Thom Gunn's blurb from the back of this, just because it is so charming, so funny and true. He wrote "Mina Loy has finally been admitted into "the company of poets," the canon. As if she cared." Buy this book if you don't own it. Yes, she is often fey, and often spacey, but she was an innovator, she was in Europe at the right time to assimilate that richly-freighted wave that was rapidly becoming the literary future, and she was gifted enough to forge the moments that stay alive for centuries as poetry.

Enjoy the grieving...


       Letters of the Unliving


The present implies presence
thus
unauthorized by the present
these letters are left authorless--
have lost all origin
since the inscribing hand
lost life -- -- --

The hoarseness of the past
creaks
from creased leaves
covered with unwritten writing
since death's erasure
of the writer -- -- --
of the lover -- -- --

Well chosen and so ill-relinquished
the husband heartsease
acme of communion

who made euphonious
our esoteric universe
Ego's oasis
in the sole companion.

As erst my body and my reason
you left to the drought of your dying:
the longing and the lack
when the racked creature
shouted

to an unanswering hiatus
"reunite us"

--- --- --- till slyly --- -- soporose
patience creeps up on passion.

while the exhilarance of youth
dwindles until out of season
and agony
ends in an equal grave
with ecstasy.

An uneasy mist
rises from this calligraphy of recollection

your documented terror of dementia
due to some merely earthly presence

This package of ago
creaks with the horror of echo
out of void

the bloom of beloving
decoyed
to decay, by the finger
of Hazard, the swindler

The deathly handler
left no post-mortem mask -- -- --
only a callous earth made mouldy
your face excelling Adonis

Posing the extreme engima
in my Bewilderness

Can who has ceased to be
Ever have had existence

No longer any you as addresser
there is no addressee
to dally with defunct reality

Can one who still has being
be inexistent?

I am become
dumb
in answer
to your dead language of amor

Diminuendo
of life's imposture
implies no possible retrial
By my so now-while self
of my cloud-corpse
Beshadowing your shroud

the one I was with you
inhumed in chasms,
craters torn by atomic emotion
among chaos

No creator
reconstrues scar-tissue
to shine as birth-star.

Only to my sub-cerebral surprise
at last on blase sorrow
dawns an iota of disgust
for life's intemperance -- -- --

"As once you were"
with-hold your ghostly reference
to the sweet once were we -- --

O leave me
my final illiteracy
of memory's languor

my preference
to drift in lenient coma
an older Ophelia
on Lethe