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HUMAN HOURS
Also by Catherine Barnett
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced
The Game of Boxes
HUMAN HOURS
POEMS CATHERINE BARNETT
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2018 by Catherine Barnett
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
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Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-814-3
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-866-2
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2018
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934481
Cover design: David Wells
Cover art: Eve Sussman
Contents
The Amenities
En Route
An Apprehension
The Light from across the Fields
The Skin of the Face Is That Which Stays Most Naked, Most Destitute
Forensics
Epistemology
Still Life
Landscape with Borrowed Contours
Lyric and Narrative Time at Café Loup
Accursed Questions, i
Appeal to Numbers
Comic Morning
Idée Fixe
Essay on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Son in August
Lore
The Necessary Preoccupations
The Art of the Security Question
O Esperanza!
Accursed Questions, ii
The Humanities
Calamity Jane on Etsy after the 2016 Election
Another Divine Comedy
Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World
Metaphor on the Crosstown
Summons
The Sky Flashes
Origin Story
Central Park
Accursed Questions, iii
Pain Scale
In the Studio at End of Day
433 Eros
Uncertainty Principle at the Atrium Bar
Uncertainty Principle at Dawn
Beckett on the Jumbotron
Prayer for the Lost among Us
The Material World
Eternal Recurrence
Accursed Questions, iv
Amor Fati
HUMAN HOURS
The Amenities
Enchantée, says the key in my hand.
When I try to turn it, it turns to sand.
Time is an upgrade, says the front desk,
reserved for our most valued guests.
Time is an anemone, says the new hire.
Enemy. Amenity. Profanity. Dire.
Whatever you’ve forgotten,
they provide. Loved one,
plotline, packet of minutes?
Glass eyes, false teeth, all sleep is gratis.
How sweet
we look in our hotel linens.
En Route
Alone in Siena, I bought a bottle of elixir,
Elisire di S. Caterina.
The basilica was closing, though the lights
were still bright in the side chapel,
the marble chapel where Catherine’s head
is mummified, set in a scalloped case,
behind a grille, under lock and key,
far from her body still buried in Rome.
For a few minutes I stood there,
trying to understand. Was she art or fact?
The man next to me was running his fingers
through his hair. Breathing.
Volatile organic compound poorly lit
beside the gilt reliquary.
It seemed like the right time for resolutions.
Patience, urgency, forgiveness, acceptance.
Elixirs should be kept in clocks.
Made of bergamot and fumes,
this one spreads furtively across the dawn
and burns when I drink it down like spirits.
An Apprehension
Ten below, high of zero, 4:11 p.m.
flashed the alarm panel’s handsome blue touchscreen.
Without commotion or fire the afternoon
passed slowly, full of promise,
then disappointment.
Without heartbreak or break-in.
For company I had Kafka on my lap
and Qolsys vibrating lightly against the wall.
4:34 … 4:35 …
There are all sorts of creatures in the world, I read,
wretched, limited, dumb creatures
who have no language but mechanical cries.
I stood up and stretched.
Face to face with Qolsys,
I peered into the sensors, into the little hole
of the siren, and touched up my lipstick.
Maybe I can ask Dave to come back, I thought,
Dave from Royal Security,
Dave with the smoky brown eyes,
maybe he can help.
I took off my slippers,
my bargain-basement bra, and danced.
Silence. Not even a mechanical cry—
I wondered if the fault were mine.
Maybe I miswired the hard data?
The soft data?
Maybe the poor thing simply had no loins.
I opened the window.
Window opening, said Qolsys
in a deep male voice.
Outside there were heavy birds
weighing down the winter trees,
heaps of them in the gloaming, almost purple,
waiting for what, who can say?
I shut the window.
Window closing, said Qolsys.
It was a start, not so very different from others of my species,
narrating events as they happen,
I’m coming,
I’m coming—
I opened the window again,
letting the cold air press across my wrists,
the back of my neck, my lips, hoping
at least the motion detector, inside,
or the birds, outside,
would respond to the scent that pulsed there.
You will not go unsampled! I heard the birds say.
Be mine! I heard the trees say.
I could have turned down the sound,
I could have shut the window,
but like a darkness slow
ly advancing,
like winter lightning,
we are drawn together.
The Light from across the Fields
Past the laundromat and the empty church,
down Cedar Lane to where the road peters out,
I drove into the woods and there it was,
shining like the human mind.
Under it was an old car I’d seen parked
at the Quiet Man Bookshop.
So it was his light.
Are you moving? he’d asked once
when I came by his store with books to give away.
Lots of people ask me that,
I don’t know why.
Are you moving? said the cashier at Marshalls
when I rolled my cart up to the counter
with four new pillows
and what looked like a man thrown inside.
The mind, yes, is always moving.
Tonight everything in the world
seems to be asleep except that light,
that light and this blanket slipping to the floor
as if it, too, wants to run off somewhere.
The Skin of the Face Is That Which Stays Most Naked, Most Destitute
But it’s in perfectly fine shape, the face in the mirror said—
When I first acquired you, yes, ok, years ago,
on a lark, and you were just something to wear then,
to the store, or the park, not alone in the dark.
Forensics
For a few years I studied the faces of malefactors and con men.
The quick zigzag of the colonel,
for example, who took pictures of himself
in his victims’ lingerie.
I was mesmerized by such dioramas,
having fallen in love with one once
a long time ago,
and can still picture the vermillion border,
the lips and hands that debouched right into me
who must have wanted to be misled.
Now my eyebrow is perpetually raised,
I can’t bring it down.
I changed lovers,
changed the lock on my front door,
locked the car where there were no signs
of intrusion other than my missing clothes
and the passenger door left open
on the city street where I’d parked.
Only he and I had the key,
which is lost now
and cannot be duplicated.
Do not resuscitate, I say to my mind.
Do not duplicate.
Dupe, we say as verb and noun.
Sounds like what it is, what I am—
I hope the city where this happened
has filed the truth somewhere in its archives.
Who’ll tell the other stories?
Not I, say the lampposts.
Not I, say the dogs.
Not I, says the I
who’s scanned everything
and scanned the scans onto memory cards
and locked the memory cards in a safety-deposit box.
I did it late at night
as if I were the criminal
and maybe I was, and am.
Often I dreamed he dismembered someone,
hid her in the walls,
and in these dreams I was participant and observer
as I am again now, dreaming of writing this.
Epistemology
Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle,
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate,
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love.
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.
Still Life
Could it have been the doctor’s kind manner
and eyes that distracted me long enough
for him to lift the rubber tube from the metal tray
and ask me to lick it? Which I did.
For a moment I thought that might be it,
fiber-optic laryngoscopy was like oral sex
on a very thin penis with a camera for a head,
painless, until without explanation
or forewarning the doctor slid the tiny camera
up through my nose and down into my throat.
Holy fuck, I said, when I saw the screen
where the origins of the self were splayed.
Hadn’t I wanted to be known like that?
Seen from the inside, lit from within
like the intimacies of L’Origine du monde,
a painting I love because it makes
beautiful what I’ve mostly kept hidden
in shame. Cunt, some of you have called it,
or God, pulsing there in the small gilt frame.
Landscape with Borrowed Contours
If you’ve got it, flaunt it,
said a t-shirt my mother gave me,
but what did I have?
Tiny batteries in my breasts,
which hummed along, expectant.
I did and didn’t want to grow up
and into a woman
so I tore pages out of Mademoiselle
and the monthlies we found hidden
under our fathers’ medical journals,
photos I studied as I cut out a CV
of eyes, mouths,
legs, hips, lips, nipples.
What did I have?
Farrago messages,
tomboy’s body, irreconcilable gig
of what it meant to be “liberated.”
More nipples than clouds, more clouds
than faces, more faces than mothers.
I worked my way around each silhouette,
made a collage,
and shellacked the whole rig with glue
until it crazed, an amateur’s map
once but no longer kept pinned
beside the full-length mirror
out of which unrecognizable landscape
I sometimes stare.
Lyric and Narrative Time at Café Loup
Has it passed quickly or slowly? the young women asked
with eerie timing—
At exactly that moment an old astonished cockroach
crawled out from the spring salad laid before me
and walked like a creosote angel across the white cloth.
The women must have seen me blanch or the waiter
sweep clean the table with a piece of fresh warm bread.
What was it? they asked,
What happened?
What was it?
The most pressing questions are naive.
For example, who invented hours? Who stole the hair from your head?
Whenever I see a bald spot I want to shout a little,
in praise. Such ephemera between my salty legs—
Time is one part of the body that never gets washed.
All those moments between the neurons!
Where are you going? the women asked, though I’d hardly moved.
Where are you hurrying to?
&nbs
p; Accursed Questions, i
A doctor suggested I spend four minutes a day asking questions about whatever matters most to me.
Four minutes, that’s how long it takes to boil an egg, get from 96th to 42nd on the express train, initiate an irreversible apocalypse.
How do I get out of here? is the question my father asks most frequently. It takes him three or four seconds to say the seven syllables, there are frequent glitches in his speech but it’s a perfect mantra.
What next? and Jackie? are his other inquiries.
Jackie what next Jackie what next Jackie—
If you count repetitions, they add up to at least four minutes.
At dinner I asked my mother which wh-question she’d keep if she could use only one, and she said why.
I remember when she first told me she reads the obits to see how old people are when they die. A young man was recently in love with her, but she stayed loyal to my father, who’s lost his memory. He doesn’t ask who we are but often he wonders if we have something to do with him. Oh that’s grand, he says when I explain who I am to him, and he to me.
Each time I read He will never ride the red horse she describes I feel sad until I remember the red horse is the sun, the same sun that will rise too soon tomorrow morning right here over my left shoulder.
My son is sleeping on the couch with all the lights on. Nothing bad can happen.
How long does it take? he says in his sleep.
Lying together a friend and I tried just to speak in questions. It was as intimate a way of passing time as any, except sex, I think. He asked why I have two empty glass bowls on the bookshelf. I didn’t answer because I was only listening.
When my son was little, they were filled with Halloween candy.
What is an ending? the students sometimes ask. Ah, the answer to that question brings the priest and the doctor running over the hills.
Maybe best not to ask when will what take whom where and to do what.
Human Hours Page 1