By: MARK SCROGGINS.

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Introduction from the Author:

When I began Zion Offramp in the summer of 2015—at first without title, then under another title best forgotten—I knew little of where I was going, only that I wanted to attempt a poem of substantial length whose modular or serial structure would allow me to explore as many forms and idioms as caught my fancy, and whose freedom from predetermined narrative or discursive direction would open it to all the contingencies of history, attention, and affect that might attend the period of its composition. The “Zion” of its title is neither a historical nor a geo-political entitle, but a residue within me of the Protestant hymnody of my childhood: it bears comparison, as an essentially aesthetic, aspirational edifice or community, with Blake’s Jerusalem, Yeats’s Byzantium, or Baum’s Oz. The poem’s soundtrack and formal models are the oneiric, polyrhythmic, carefully calculated onslaught of Miles Davis’s 1973-1975 septet and the subtractive hauntology of King Tubby’s dub remixes.

Zion Offramp 1-50 was published in 2023; Zion Offramp 51-100 (asemic dub) is forthcoming. Sections 112 and 119 were published in 2024 as the chapbook forage acanthus. The two sections presented here, composed at the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, will be included in the final volume, Zion Offramp 101-150 (rock honeycomb).

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Zion Offramp

116.

We are offered a tour of the shiny
new Chabad Gaza, just at dusk,
sunset multiplied across the water’s
seasonably tranquil waves. Maps
have been redrawn left and right,
hatchets have been buried, sometimes
with less enthusiasm than hoped.

It was hatred, really, that kept us
going down all those long dull days.
We had reluctantly signed away the names
conferring individuality—Childe Harold,
Gunslinger, Pascal Wanderlust—and, realizing
love was too thin a myth to bind us,
embraced a beautiful unifying animus.

The condition of memory is hatred, a rare
and expensive pigment: it stains the canvas
through, over time shifts color, may lose or gain
intensity, can never quite be extirpated.
The Recording Angel, once as human as you
or I, has nothing on the ever-accreting
archive of embarrassments and cruelty.

To read history “against the grain.” To read
history at all. I have much to answer for.
The foxes on the hill, the raccoon scuttling
around the dumpster, have their tenacity
of claw and sharp white teeth. The music
is history remixed, which no longer echoes
down the fluorescent-lit tunnels and holes.

Sifted and leavened, bread of space
and reconciliation. Season’s last ladybug,
fled fire or cold. Crawls like a broken beast
last week of always a century, dropped beat
smooth inflection along the ribcage, surface
papery water-damaged. The flyers didn’t
do justice to the real thing, its whiteness.

Distant napping, distant waking sounds,
scratches and rustles of rich discomfort.
The cut worm, despite its ever-amiable
nature, neither forgives nor forgets the plow.
“To do ill in return” printed at the foot
of the register receipt, beneath the time
and date, over a frieze of smiling icons.

Are these my wisdom texts, the bit about the stranger
in the land, about the eye for an eye, about
smiting and beating small as the dust—
about mercy flowing like a river? They read
me right to left and back again, their shares
bite deep in my back, furrow the soil of scattered
flesh: odds and ends, gobbets and orts.

Speak plainly at least, use words for their right
meanings: even now a little child is trapped
under the broken sift of a building, bombed
with my and your money. That is realer
than all my petty angst and mortifications,
that makes the season’s turning colder
even than our metered mechanical glee.

This chilly morning offers cold distances.
The new beach condos rise up and build
themselves on the other side of the world.
Someone laid a grid, a lattice-work
over the old familiar picture: your job,
like paint-by-number, is to fill each tiny
space anew: here are the paint-pots.

117. Instructions to a Painter

i.

Begin by copying the photograph. Blow it up

if you like, print it out, draw a grid

over it: then painstakingly, with a carefully

sharpened pencil, transfer the image

to your support, your ground. Shade, bring out

the curves and contours. Draw over

it in sepia ink—a fine, fine nib—closely

hatching the shadows into thickets

of dense, interwoven line-work. A soft

eraser will remove the graphite, leaving

only the ink, stark brown against

your white support. Now it is dry,

clean, ready: now you can dip a fine brush

into thinned gouache, aquarelle, even

bright oils, and begin coloring.

Or begin

from scratch, from the blank canvas,

streaking or saturating it with whites,

grays, mossy light blues. Make it

a smoky curtain through which the objects

of the day only dimly suggest themselves,

or a cloudy backdrop before which shapes

thrust themselves into view: geometrical

abstractions, unplaceable whorls of flesh,

jagged outcroppings of bright metallic

gold. The spaces offer themselves to be filled

with the hand’s gestures and coils

and couplings, the brush’s caress and the hard

stroke of the palette knife, folding

the buttery pigment across the canvas,

its nubbly, regular grain.

ii.

Draw the model posed before you—
the pose will only last five minutes, or half
an hour, or as long as it takes for you
to capture it. The flat belly and hard pectorals,
the high, small breasts, the gracefully curved
abdomen, the swift flight of the turned
neck—under the harsh fluorescents,
the warm glow from one side, bringing out
the lines on the face, the folds of the flaccid
stomach, the concavities on either side
of the taut buttocks—the charcoal stick
may break between your fingers as you try
to trace the calves’ angle, but work
the line with the stub, grinding it into
the paper, smear the blackness with your thumb
or the frustrated heel of your hand—
the curves are out there, tense or relaxed,
recursive or expanding as if to infinity—
the laborer’s muscles or the desk-worker’s
weary sprawl, all making a harmony
of meandering, never-straight lines, planes
and swellings, highlights and tender shadows—
your only remit is to follow them, carry
them—howsoever—from the open depths of air
onto the newsprint’s implacable flatness—

iii.

This book, she said, is a catalogue of ornaments,
and this a handbook of proportions: the body,
by convention, is parceled out into heads—
eight hands is the accepted “heroic” height,
seven and a half more ordinary. Two heads
from crown to nipple, another to navel, another
to pubic bone, the halfway center of the body.
All this is useless unless you’re able to see
the figure before you. This book, which is still
being written, is a catalogue of colors, each
minutely distinguished from its neighbor, named
and described, each given its proper history
and multifarious lore. Each color demands
its proper handling, from the lively joy
of magenta to the poison of yellow ochre.
Your eye can never be too sharp discriminating
one from another, in telling a dusky
labial rose from the reddened pucker
at the corner of a frightened eye.
And here, she said, is the biggest book
of all, a handbook not of techniques
but of instructions. Its pages,
which at first sight seem crowded
with directions and suggestions,
will fade the closer you study them,
until it’s nothing but a blank volume:
and you are alone, naked
in your own color and line.

iv.

A catalogue raisonné of sketches and paintings,
abstract, rectilinear, mostly white-on-white
with some passages of pear gray and very light
pale indigo: colors sourced from the usual artists’
supply houses, or at a pinch from a craft
or hobby shop, or even the local stationers.
Her working notebooks—quite separate
from her sketchbooks—are remarkably
comprehensive and detailed, scrupulous:
every step of each work has been recorded.
One canvas was primed with fourteen coats
of titanium white gesso, each sanded
before the next, till it shone with a glasslike
hardness. Only then did she tape off
precisely a square in the center, and glaze
it with another fourteen coats of thinned
white oils. She was, she said, whitewashing
her own soul. 

♦

MARK SCROGGINS is a poet, biographer, and critic. His poems have been collected in Damage: Poems 1988-2022 (Dos Madres, 2022) and Zion Offramp 1-50 (MadHat, 2023); Zion Offramp 51-100 (asemic dub) is forthcoming. His The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007) was widely reviewed. He has written critical monographs on Zukofsky and the on the British fantasy author Michael Moorcock, and his essays and reviews have been gathered in three volumes, the most recent Arcane Pleasures: On Poetry and Some Other Arts (Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour, 2023). His edition (with Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas) of Addendum: The Uncollected Louis Zukofsky: Poetry, Prose, and Drama is forthcoming. He is currrently writing a group biography of the Objectivist Poets.