The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out
Page 5
like bitumen itself, applied to render darker tones or an emphatic
tenebrism, imparts a velvety lustrous disposition,
but eventually discolours to a black treacle that degrades
any pigment it contacts. Details in sections of Raft of the Medusa
can no longer be discerned. In 1816, the Medusa’s captain,
in a spasm of flamboyant incompetence, ran aground
on the African coast, and fearing the ire of his constituents,
refused to sacrifice the cannons. They turned on each other,
the 147 low souls herded onto a makeshift raft cut loose from lifeboats
of the wealthy and well-connected. The signs were there,
risk/reward coefficient alive in the wind, the locomotive,
small tragic towns left for work, where the only thing manufactured
is the need for work. Foreshortening and a receding horizon
include the viewer in the scene, should the viewer wish
to be included in the scene. One can’t be sure if the brig, Argus,
is racing to the rescue or departing. It hesitates in the distance,
in its nimbus of fairer weather, the courage and compassion
of a new age onboard. Géricault’s pyramidical composition—
dead and dying in the foreground from which the strong succeed upward
toward an emotional peak—
an influence for Turner’s Disaster at Sea, the vortex structure of
The Slave Ship: all those abandoned, where is thy market now?
It’s difficult to imagine everyone saved, it’s unaffordable. Waves
disproportionate, organized in depth, panic modulating
the speaking voice. The situation so harshly primary and not beautiful
when you don’t go to visit the seaside, but the seaside visits you,
rudely, breaks in through the basement, ascends stairs
to your bedroom, you can’t think of it generally then. The constitution
of things is accustomed to hiding. Rearrangement will not suit us.
Certain low-lying river deltas. Island states, coastal regions—
floodwaters receding in measures like all we haven’t seen the last of
reveal in stagnancies and bloat what’s altered, as avernal exhalations
of mines and flares are altered but don’t disappear. Still,
iceberg season is spectacular this year, worth the trip
to photograph in evening ourselves before the abundance when, aflame
in light that dissolves what it illuminates, water climbs
its own red walls, vermilion in the furnaces.
PROSPECT
Connected by disposable needle
and tube to a little of this life, a little
of the next, the IVAC complains when its delivery
is interrupted, drags me through an inland sea
up to the human purview: inconsolable
parking lot, aircraft on final approach
above embers of the city that expire
with the dawn as though oxygen’s run out.
Workers once banked coals in ashes
leaving for the fields,
the wars, a comfort for those able to return
if they could not. Grief isn’t columnar.
It spreads and soaks into the land,
becomes the land. My experience
will prove pointless as any tool used poorly,
the river in its doorway smoking
into cold white air, into the opportunity
of a level place in which to change its state.
MUSEUM OF THE THING II
And now the objects recur. Chief interests
of their divine secular lives no longer
idle. Thought anticipates them, but they aren’t
hindered by it. We have them
in common. They don’t aspire.
Appearing in priority, category, scale,
they make possible a world
that does not appear. Arguments favour
their existence. In the rosary of a city block
I find my childhood. I give it away and I keep it.
We were destined for each other, I could learn
from their experience of time
if I could learn. The objects do not defer,
but express themselves as constancy
inside which a seeming shines, surprising
our judgement with affect. We who arrive
from nowhere in our monotony
of psychic instability, our fragility
and immaterial intuition, contrast sharply
with their variety and richness, plurality
which is the world’s first law. Antecedents
and survivors, they are faithful
to our purpose. In them, pretense does not inhere.
If we are deceived, the error is our own.
RURAL CONFLATION SONNET
Pea weevil as eye-headache.
Barbed wire, smart casual.
Four-stroke my electronica.
Clay mud my hospital.
Rattlesnake as concierge,
Lanius, campaign of enemies.
Axe to kerf in contemplation.
East wind my ibuprofen.
Distemper. Disambiguation.
Red oxide as verdigris.
Monsanto our atelier—
From the inside, it dresses me
In esters of phosphoric acid.
The Psalms, a field of grasses.
FOR THE SKI JUMP AT CANADA OLYMPIC PARK, CALGARY
You grew into your destiny
in the city’s northwest, overlooking
a gas station, the KOA, a few acreages maybe
on the earliest suggestions of foothills,
we hardly remember what that was like.
It was before I was born into
what I think of as my life.
Development has flooded the scene—
Victory Christian Fellowship expelling
exhaust, a warehouse vaguely Bauhaus,
reservoir of modern open homeplans
risen nearly to your base.
Each time I encounter the same place
it’s different. The adjacent new
community of Crestmont tries to act natural
leaning on the hill, rife with claims, wearing
last year’s colours in its awkward
final construction phase. In 1988
some people who’ve bought its houses
weren’t yet alive. For them
you might as well be a product
of erosion. A natural event, without promise,
defined according to what is most durable
about you. Does it matter to us
if we’re outlived by a minute
or a thousand years? I’m not saying it should.
You strayed from insignia,
from the party of the symbolic imagination,
and no one noticed. Hung with ads now,
the odd corporate zipline. Tourists
on the observation platform observe
the accelerating ritual of supply
and demand. A view makes us feel young.
Ideal conditions are a memory that pains
even a Finn. Competitors and their equipment
have evolved, old ratios are untenable.
You’ve outlived your design.
Would need to be retrofitted for safety
and who has that kind of time.
AGAINST LYRIC
Asked for the eight hundredth time that day
if one has remembered to lock the door.
At least, it’s not unlike that.
Something contrived from lime Jell-O and Sprite—
coloured marshmallows
suspended like pronouns—
and called salad. Odd, that an excess
should produce such hollowness, tin bucket
&nb
sp; racketing down the endless metal staircase within.
Odd my irritability in its fullness should arise
from a poverty of spirit. I could not enjoy
marzipan, either. Half sugar, half
ground sweet almonds, or the cheaper substitute
potato flour, it inhabits as poems do
shapes of pigs, houses, geometric figures,
fruits whose seeds in nature house
the toxic compound also present
in the bitter almond that flavours it—
your apples, plums, and peaches, stones
and wilting leaves of native cherries—
who count among their symptoms
gasping, the staggers, depression, and death.
Wheeled out on special occasions under
gold-plated anniversary clocks, gilt-
frame mirrors of the commemorative industry,
heirloom burnt-matchstick crucifixes. Faces
around the holiday table chronically etched
in memory’s iron ferrocyanide. Churchill
Chelsea Blue Willow dinnerware. Reflection—
there’s no solace in it. Because
some of those faces have ceased to change.
Because, now, they will never change.
SPIRAL
You said a storm makes a mansion of a poor man’s house.
I wonder if you did so to make the best of living where
it always blew, the maddening wind that messed up our ions
and made men want to fight. Now you have no house.
There’s no need. The cure took the good with the bad.
Who cannot escape his prison but must each day rebuild it?
For a year rather than drink we smoked and went to bingo.
It was like working in a mine, the air quality and incessant
coughing, bag lunches, good luck charms, the intergenerational
drama. It’s not my place to say what changed.
You hadn’t developed around a midpoint, and fell to the side.
A part remained exposed. Still, you were kind—
unusually so, it seems to me now, for someone with talent.
But loneliness expands to fill the void it creates. To plot against it
was to plot against yourself. You felt the effect of the whole.
When the mind is so altered this resembles death, but it is
not death. Then the faint trail ran out and you continued on.
The night you’ve entered now has no lost wife in it, no daughter,
no friends, betrayal, or fear; it is impartial, without status.
I would like to think it peace, but suspect it isn’t anything.
When our friend wrote you’d died I was on Skye,
where the wind in its many directions is directionless
and impossible to put your back to. He said you’d been living
rough for a while, he wouldn’t go to the wake at the bar,
it was too much sadness. That day I’d walked the beach,
picking up shells, their spirals of Archimedes and logarithmic
spirals, principle of proportional similarity that protects
the creature and makes it beautiful. Sandpipers materialized
through tears the wind made, chasing fringes of the rising tide.
At first there were two, then three appeared, but when I began
to pay attention I realized they were everywhere.
MAN IS A RATIONAL ANIMAL
It was the same life, more or less,
yet suddenly a flight itinerary represented
the most tangible indication of my fate.
From the air I saw mountains, forest,
lakes in which dissolved the notion
of ownership, and the sweet little Beechcraft
wagged its tail on landing
in a crosswind. My fellow passengers
claimed their long guns, carried them in cases
like guitars out of the terminal.
Darkness accompanied the second segment,
the Dash 8 traversing the southwest
in high cloud and swinging out over
the Atlantic. Lights might have been
ships, or islands, towns someone
from there could identify. But I wasn’t from there.
Where land ended
and the water began was indiscernible,
though I was not afraid. Because I didn’t know
what I was seeing.
THE LIVING OPTION
Having crawled from the desert
of the 1970s already greying a little, impatient,
with physical inconsistencies, crying
bosons and fermions, crying out
the four forces, calling the unified
from the unnamed wastes, it saw in our homes
a vacancy, began repurposing the furniture.
Already it seems never to have been otherwise.
When I think of it my atoms are as the weakening
euro, the housing bubble, too many parts
in search of the one part, it’s a joke.
It’s a giant scientific instrument outside Geneva.
An argument that knows not me
or my siblings, that has no dominion
over me yet enters my thinking
and undermines it. Then all of my theories
seem raised by the state, fearful,
acting out inappropriately.
I went to see you
on an airplane and on an airplane
was I medicated amid the transatlantic
generation and its complimentary
beverages. People of the light
flying over the living waters. My body,
belted in, a joke, and the heap we call
a mind also, each atom an engine schematic,
a backup system sequence or a prayer
from childhood though I’d lost my faith,
that’s how weak I am.
But in the cockpit, threefold,
the Great Invisible Virgin Spirit was incorruptible
in my sedation and in the cabin
the new cashless society
and off the wings degrees
of freedom.
No patterns emerged
between us, it was new
each time, each event its own, with fresh
odds. We honoured the principle.
Though our creditors didn’t see it that way.
They filled our past
with their notices. Their notices
were our bridesmaids. When I think of it
all my atoms are past-due notices
but with the option to consolidate as one large
debt. The market writes its autobiography
on minds and bodies, my own and those
of my siblings. Are we not innocent
with respect to it? Our credit rating is
a joke, our homes venture with us
through the rental agencies.
We went west
before the west dried up. Between Calaway Park
and Dead Man’s Flats the cumulonimbus
extended their funnels, melancholy
and inquisitive, they love
the earth so much. Long-haul truckers,
shepherds of product, blew past
on deadline into the storm, tweaking
in their cabs, each cloaked in his machine
with a handgun for an angel
in the lots and roadside pullouts.
If you can’t see it, it has
the advantage.
If you can’t see it,
it’s philosophy. A game between us
and the nature of things. People of intent in the valley
of the shadow of. One hundred metres underground,
a divine heart races in the apparatus
and soon we will hear its voice. It will speak out
from the invisible orders not as an attr
ibute,
a quality or quantity, but a truth perfected
in all the ineffable places. A live
hypothesis. A supersymmetry.
Is it possible to love something like this?
I prayed it might happen to me.
NOTES
“Fables of the Reconstruction” is the title of R.E.M.’s third album.
The title “When Asked Why He’d Been Talking to Himself, Pyrrho Replied He Was Practicing to Be a Nice Fellow” is adapted, along with a line in the poem, from Diogenes Laertius’s Life of Pyrrho.
The World of “The World” is a cruise liner of 165 luxury apartments owned by a community of residents who live on board as it continuously sails the globe. The poem also draws from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
“Rothko via Muncie, Indiana” includes lines quoted and adapted from a letter written by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb to The New York Times in 1943. The poem was inspired also by Middletown, a 1982 documentary series set in Muncie and produced by Peter Davis.
“I Let Love In” is the title of a song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
The title “All That Is Certain Is Night Lasts Longer Than the Day” is from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, translated by Michael Hulse.
“Forty” is for David Seymour.
Since “Life Is a Carnival” was written, a third member of The Band, Levon Helm, has followed Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. The title is that of a song by The Band.
“Roof Repair and Squirrel Removal” contains a line from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
“Lord of Fog” includes a phrase from Shakespeare’s Richard II.
“Darklands” is the title of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s second album.
“Spiral” is in memory of Jim Coates.
“The Living Option” adapts a line from William James’s “The Will to Believe” and uses a refrain from “The Second Discourse of the Great Seth,” included in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the editors of the journals and anthologies in which these poems, in earlier versions, first appeared:
Poetry
“Bitumen”
The Nation
“Ode,” “The Corners,” “Trouble Light”
Riddle Fence
“Rental Car,” “Fables of the Reconstruction,” “A Western,”
“Affirmations,” “The National Gallery,” “The Living Option”