The Math Campers

by Dan Chiasson

  ALSO BY DAN CHIASSON

  Bicentennial

  Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon

  One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America

  Natural History

  The Afterlife of Objects

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2020 by Dan Chiasson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Chiasson, Dan, author.

  Title: The math campers : poems / by Dan Chiasson.

  Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020005027 (print) | LCCN 2020005028 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593317747 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593317754 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.H54 M38 2020 (print) | LCC PS3603.H54 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020005027

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020005028

  Ebook ISBN 9780593317754

  Jacket art from the collection of the author

  Jacket design by Kelly Blair

  ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  for Frank Bidart

  Contents

  Bloom

  MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY?

  I Euphrasy & Rue

  II Q & A

  III The Math Campers’ Masque

  IV Over & Over

  Coda: Stonington

  THE MATH CAMPERS

  Bloom (II)

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Bloom

  Mural, David Teng Olsen, 2017

  Through his eyes I see in the dark.

  I see through change the static.

  Night says to day, You do you,

  then emerges bright as a peacock,

  its black drapery embroidery

  smiley faces looking vaguely smashed.

  Day had a state-of-the-art screen

  accentuate each pixelated daisy.

  You could kill the backlit spectacle

  and use it as a mirror of the stars

  or take the comfort on its merits.

  Tomorrow will be worse, it cooed.

  Dave put a feeding tube up where

  the sun don’t shine, the moon

  going, Did you have to? Did you?

  then smiling to show it didn’t mind.

  Louis had the breakthrough moment

  on what looked to be a pizza slice:

  It’s the cover of your book, he said—

  Dad, it’s the cover of your pizza book—

  Must We

  Mean What

  We Say?

  A Poem in Four Phases

  She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.

  HENRY JAMES, WHAT MAISIE KNEW

  I

  Euphrasy & Rue

  —the day my eye flew all the way

  what could I see with my vanishing eye

  myself looking up in wonder or

  was I the woman standing next to me

  it was impossible to say

  it is impossible to say

  where faraway was or why

  we care O nigh and distant cam

  held in my palm now landing

  in the open zone it measured

  in the open zone it measured

  face-to-face: we are not strangers—

  HE TOLD ME, at sunset, this October, he picked some Nippon daisies, the last flower to flower, a verb named for its noun.

  He said what might have been began to come around again. He said the neighbor lit his house on fire, then blamed a meteor.

  He wrote:

  “The neighbor named his source.

  It overflowed the sluice.

  It was the nightjar’s voice.

  It was the daisies before frost.”

  He wrote:

  “Another brief, interminable.

  Another bombshell:

  a burnout blamed for the fire

  the neighbor set!”

  The Perseids rejoiced, then shot themselves. A source confirms: it was “a silent suicide.”

  He wrote: “Binoculars superfluous: / we saw it with the naked eye.”

  He was writing on the edge of an emptiness, where everything buzzed and beckoned him forward.

  It was a strange time in the country. Distrust reigned.

  He distrusted his own distrust of distrust, and so went out into nature, to study things up close.

  He wrote: “Confusion in the hive. Nature / Locked the door on her darlings.”

  News reports confirmed: “They shivered and pled and prayed / And died and were ploughed under.”

  He was writing an autumn journal, he wrote, because in autumn everything abundant was dying. The old themes had “proven true.” A source confirms.

  His own death and the death of everyone he loved confronted him on his long runs at dusk, in the woods.

  He went into nature, to make a pinprick of his eyesight. He focused on small blossoming things and magenta berries at the end of fall.

  Lines of poetry came into his mind as he ran: The tangled bine-stems scored the sky. An artery upon a hill.

  It may just be my mind, he thought. It may just be my mind. He wrote: “It may just be my mind.”

  He wrote:

  “In the branch overhead,

  the nightjar,

  the manic neighbor,

  told dirty jokes.

  Mothers moved their babies

  to another tree

  alarmed to see

  how far he had fallen.”

  He remembered the morning of the eclipse.

  He wrote:

  “The sky was impossible,

  then our heads turned.

  The noon midnight came

  it came to us one by one.”

  He viewed the Druidical majesty of the eclipse from the stone steps of Memorial Church, and it was then, a source confirms, that he knew all about New England.

  A tour group passed:

  “That is the—” [points to the sky]

  “There is the—” [squints]

  That is the eclipse of the sun as seen from the middle of a thriving city, an ancient city in the new world, from the porch of spirits and the vault of sorrows.

  “The new and missing stars,” he wrote.

  THAT FALL, he had been invited to live, for a time, in a famous poet’s apartment, among the books and objects that the poet had left behind when he died. The apartment was on the Sound, on a little V of land with rocky beaches and foggy moors, high up where the steeples and cupolas were his neighbors.

  He described the light as it moved from room to room, across an eccentric palette of colors from flame to teal to cherry.

  Then the d
arkness took the colors away, in the same sequence, flame, teal, cherry, and this happened every day.

  He could read about these walls, those colors, that light, that dusk, in the poet’s poems. Or he could put the poems down and look at the walls, or run his hands up and down the walls he’d been reading about all afternoon and ever since he was young, when the poet was alive, standing where now he stood.

  He wrote: “I met him only once, when I was in college. He was elfin, skeletal, kind, flirtatious. His mind operated almost apart from his strange body, like a drone piloted by a faraway stranger.”

  Now the drone flies through time, not space. Its controller, long dead, still flies it over our heads.

  A source confirmed: “His body was a stick insect, but his smile flashed the news of immortality.”

  Pick a flower, they said. Then choose an emergency.

  He chose a daisy and an earthquake.

  We had daffodils and cardiac arrest, they said.

  He was struck.

  Now pick a flower and a war.

  The correct answer was tulips and Vietnam.

  He wrote:

  “In the cellar near

  the bulkhead door,

  where the darkroom

  chemicals were stored,

  there I discovered

  the chamois uniform

  my grandfather

  kept as a souvenir.”

  The correct answer was violets and Korea.

  He was struck again, and his right cheek exploded upon the blow.

  He had been a child only yesterday. He still had scrapes and cuts from playing on the cellar floor, where the darkroom chemicals were stored.

  He’d been a child long ago, in a place he described as snowy, with many junipers, and many mysteries, in the aftermath of something so awful nobody would tell him what it was.

  The answer was hyacinths. He had hyacinths.

  He was given tea, then praised.

  He was a child still. That afternoon he explored the cellar where the darkroom chemicals were stored.

  He unpinned a medal from the uniform, and wore it, a corsage, on many snowy afternoons throughout childhood, in front of the mirror.

  The correct answer was violets and World War II.

  Half in, half out of my dream:

  deer wander in a bright auditorium.

  They are serene until they’re seen

  when they bolt and scatter, looking for cover.

  I stand totally still on the half-court line.

  Then I move, and the deer go berserk.

  A doe just split her head open

  when she rammed a cinder-block wall.

  A fawn pulls all her fur apart, and gags

  on mouthfuls of hide she can’t spit.

  I see the hunger in their stenciled ribs,

  the furniture inside their skin.

  And then I’m spared, alone in bed.

  I’m forty-six, a trespasser

  in my dream gym. The deer are children.

  I’m the Maypole they dance around.

  He wrote, “In my dream, I am in an elementary school. There are deer all around, looking for food. They are licking the linoleum floor and biting the wooden risers. I am standing completely still, terrified of startling them.”

  He patrolled the Sound in his mind, counting the buoys as they bobbed in the tide.

  Every buoy was an age he’d been, every age he’d been could be found among the low-lying hulls and docks, dusk settling down, the long, empty sidewalks leading to nowhere, leading to water….

  Nine and thirty-one were side by side. They shared more than he had known: the correspondences were hidden under the heavy cover of chronology.

  His life, he wrote, was not a line.

  His life was not a ladder.

  His life was not a long walkway leading to nowhere.

  Here, side by side, were sixteen and four.

  He wrote:

  “The crickets made the silence sing.

  Partiers scrimmaged on a pier.

  The Sound echoed a bottle smashed.

  High up, all night, I reran sixteen.”

  HE WAS WRITING an autumn journal, he wrote, as a bridge across time. He wanted a bridge across darkness.

  He needed a string to hang his moods upon.

  On his daily drives, he used a GPS that could tell him, up ahead, where the broken-down cars were, or where he would meet the police, facts about the traffic as it lurched and settled, lurched and settled, lurched and settled, into, into, itself.

  His journal, he wrote, was his GPS: it showed him what was up ahead by measuring what was still behind, and figured the difference, and measured, and to some extent determined, the path he needed to travel.

  He loved how, when he drove, time and space became a single entity, with the GPS locating discrete episodes, however minor, in his future.

  Or not minor.

  He asked me my happiest memory.

  I was eleven, this was before my father died. Not long before.

  We’d gone up to the farm for the weekend, I was eleven, it was before my father died; we’d gone up to the farm for the weekend, I was fixated upon the things I’d brought along, been allowed to bring along. It was before my father died, not long before.

  I was eleven. My mother was parting and braiding my hair in the back seat of the car. We were not far from the Canadian border, where the landscape flattens again.

  He wrote: “When you told me about your mother, I pictured a pragmatic woman with abrupt, decisive manners, a kind of commander, a person of high Victorian morals, and rigid New England habits.”

  By the end of the long ride, I’d finished my book. In my childhood, I told him, all I did was read. I had finished my book and dreaded the weekend without the next book in the series, which I’d forgotten at home.

  Time sharpened suddenly to what was happening to me in that moment, first X, then Y, so horrible, such an exposure to death.

  “Like a mirror with my face painted on it,” I wrote.

  When we arrived at the farm, down a long gravel driveway, past the barbed-wire sheep pasture, we scattered to our bedrooms, mine on the third floor.

  I found, in the third floor hall, a waist-high bookshelf full of books I had not read.

  I was eleven, this was before my father died, not long before.

  Sitting in a swivel chair, high up above the Sound, he found an old book by Jules Verne on the study shelves, From the Earth to the Moon, and spent the long morning reading.

  If you want to make it to the moon,

  not halfway, all the way;

  if you want to see

  the tininess of all of your obsessions,

  loyalty, et cetera, a speck;

  not halfway, all the way;

  if you want to see

  love exposed as a perspectival trick;

  worthwhile, worthless, what you loved—

  not halfway, all the way,

  a triviality—

  then mind what name your master gave.

  Bobbing lifelessly beside the story,

  halfway, not all the way,

  you stand for [ ]

  He wrote: “I am working on a poem based on a Jules Verne story about a voyage to the moon, where a mascot, a dog ominously named ‘Satellite,’ is found dead on board the space capsule, his body dumped into space and forgotten; until the end of the tale, when poor Satellite is discovered to have loyally accompanied the spaceship, bobbing up and down, lifeless in darkness, inert in the enormous cold and loneliness of space, all the way to the moon.”

  The blank kept getting filled in and deleted. The final line, he wrote, was “The neither-here-nor-there which buoyed me.”
>
  IT WAS ALREADY NOVEMBER when he wrote again. The first frost ruined all the Nippon daisies, and spoiled a single holdout bright-pink starlight hydrangea.

  He had arrived at a trio of symbols: the drone, which he associated with the imagination; the GPS, which connected time and place, and suggested those few places in his childhood that remained, to this day, unchanged, and which he visited when he too wished to seem unchanged after so many years; and the buoys, which bobbed independently as aspects of symptoms of the greater force, call it God, call it the ocean, call it chance, the buoys which drifted this way and that, amicably, like stars in the night sky.

  The drone, the GPS, and the buoys, symbols which he said would tie his book together, ways of understanding himself in the enormity of time, his book only a sliver of the slightly larger sliver his life represented.