TIMOTHY DONNELLY
The Cloud Corporation
PICADOR
FOR LYNN MELNICK
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again.
CONTENTS
1
The New Intelligence
The Malady That Took the Place of Thinking
To His Debt
The New Hymns
Between the Rivers
Clair de Lune
Partial Inventory of Airborne Debris
Fun for the Shut-in
Chivas Regal
His Excuse
Fantasies of Management
The Cloud Corporation
2
The Night Ship
Chapter for Being Transformed into a Sparrow
To His Own Device
Chapter for Breathing Air Among the Waters
The Last Dream of Light Released from Seaports
Bled
Dispatch from Behind the Mountain
No Diary
Epitaph by His Own Hand
Poem Beginning with a Sentence from The Monk
His Agenda
The Rumored Existence of Other People
3
No Mission Statement, No Strategic Plan
The New Histrionicism
Montezuma to His Magicians
Dream of Arabian Hillbillies
Chapter for Being Transformed into a Lotus
Antepenultimate Conflict with Self
His Apologia
To His Detriment
Chapter for Kindling a Torch
Explanation of an Oriole
Bulletin from Under the Bed
Dream of a Poetry of Defense
4
Through the Wilderness of His Forehead
Globus Hystericus
The Last Vibrations
Chapter for Removing Foolish Speech from the Mouth
His Theogony
Tiberius at the Villa Jovis
Advice to Baboons of the New Kingdom
Dream of the Overlook
Team of Fake Deities Arranged on an Orange Plate
Chapter for a Headrest
In His Tree
Chapter for Not Dying Again
His Future as Attila the Hun
1
THE NEW INTELLIGENCE
After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful
fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked
back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence
humbler than the one left behind. A door without mystery,
a room without theme. For the hour that we spend
complacent at the window overlooking the garden,
we observe an arrangement in rust and gray-green,
a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent
movements some sentence might explain if we had time
or strength for sentences. To admit that what falls
falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular.
That the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten
comes to boss the world around it, morbid as the damp-
fingered guest who rearranges the cheeses the minute the host
turns to fix her a cocktail. A disease of the will, the way
false birch branches arch and interlace from which
hands dangle last leaf-parchments and a very large array
of primitive bird-shapes. Their pasted feathers shake
in the aftermath of the nothing we will ever be content
to leave the way we found it. I love that about you.
I love that when I call you on the long drab days practicality
keeps one of us away from the other that I am calling
a person so beautiful to me that she has seen my awkwardness
on the actual sidewalk but she still answers anyway.
I say that when I fell you fell beside me and the concrete
refused to apologize. That a sparrow sat for a spell
on the windowsill today to communicate the new intelligence.
That the goal of objectivity depends upon one’s faith
in the accuracy of one’s perceptions, which is to say
a confidence in the purity of the perceiving instrument.
I won’t be dying after all, not now, but will go on living dizzily
hereafter in reality, half-deaf to reality, in the room
perfumed by the fire that our inextinguishable will begins.
THE MALADY THAT TOOK THE PLACE OF THINKING
When I close my eyes its voice insists we’re close
to solving once and for all and with panache
those mysteries to which we’ve been applying
ourselves so much these days, almost to the exclusion
of all that I had taken to be the case, factwise.
There had seemed to be only one world to adhere to
but now I can see how there really isn’t any, just roads
with signs directing further, towards and away
from the same humiliating noplace you already are.
These mysteries will be solved not one at a time
but in a slow, general unfolding along the lines
of the magnolia, and trying to rush one solution by prying it
open will compromise not only this solution but many
if not all the others. I’m not that person anymore
with his hands immediately all over the magnolia.
I’m not that other one either, stomping off sorry
he doesn’t understand. If it looks like I’m thinking, I’m not,
I’m waiting, and I can wait forever to find out why.
If it looked like I was sorry to look at that photograph
of women and children shot down by an American
battalion on a bright clear day in March, look again:
with no world to adhere to, there can be no photograph,
no women, no children, and certainly no battalion
shooting when there was nothing there to begin with.
TO HIS DEBT
Where would I be without you, massive shadow
dressed in numbers, when without you there
behind me, I wouldn’t be myself. What wealth
could ever offer loyalty like yours, my measurement,
my history, my backdrop against which every
coffee and kerplunk, when all the giddy whoring
around abroad and after the more money money
wants is among the first things you prevent.
My phantom, my crevasse—my emphatically
unfunny hippopotamus, you take my last red cent
and drag it down into the muck of you, my
sassafras, my Timbuktu, you who put the kibosh
on fine dining and home theater, dentistry and work
my head into a lather, throw my ever-beaten
back against a mattress of intractable topography
and chew. Make death with me: my sugar
boat set loose on caustic indigo, my circumstance
dissolving, even then—how could solvency
hope to come between us, when even when I dream
I awaken in an unmarked pocket of the earth
without you there—there you are, supernaturally
redoubling over my shoulder like the living
wage I
never make, but whose image I will always
cling to in the negative, hanged up by the feet
among the mineral about me famished like a bat
whose custom it is to make much of my neck.
THE NEW HYMNS
They all begin by commanding you to praise
things like sea-thistle, pinecones, a crate of tangerines
stacked into a ziggurat like one you envision
ticking under overgrowth, ancient and counting
down deep in the tropics until at last a certain
heavenly alignment triggers doomsday, what then?
To think nothing might feel good for a time, the way
walking can, just moving around, turning
right whenever you happen to, heading along
toward nowhere in particular, getting there almost
without really trying or memory of where
you started out from, much less how you’ll ever get back.
I don’t want to have to. I don’t want to have to
locate divinity in a loaf of bread, in a sparkler,
or in the rainlike sound the wind makes through
mulberry trees, not tonight. Listen to them carry on
about gentleness when it’s inconceivable
that any kind or amount of it will ever be able to
balance the scales. I have been held down
by the throat and terrified, numb enough to know.
The temperature at which no bird can thrive—
a lifelong feeling that I feel now, remembering
down the highway half-hypnotized in the
backseat feeling what I feel now, and moderate
happiness has nothing to do with it: I want to press
my face against the cold black window until
there is a deity whose only purpose is to stop this.
BETWEEN THE RIVERS
Maybe there’s a stage in wakefulness like standing up
on a rooftop I’ve never quite been able to figure out
how to get to, and it’s from this stage that everyone
keeps shouting at me saying look how beautiful the day
turned out after all, how in the distance the enemy
battalions are surrendering, and not a cloud in the sky—
what was I so worked up about? The villagers below
raise cattle, sheep, and goats; grow barley, wheat, flax,
and produce distinctive pottery. Pistachio nuts thrive
in the irrigated gardens of our city, as do pomegranates
naturally rich in antioxidants, which protect the body
from free radicals’ interference with normal cell function.
Observation confirms that our chief building material
is mud brick left to bake in the sun, and with reason:
both mud and sun prove plentiful year-round, and the bricks
excel at keeping out the heat. A large harvest of reeds
drawn from one river to roof our houses also provides
long-lasting baskets, cradles, musical pipes, and the wedge-
shaped stylus with which we write on soft clay tablets.
The clay is taken from the other river. Writing comes from
our accountants. Hunting for food continues in the wetlands,
the forests, and the mountains, but in the walled cities
on the plains, it has become something more of a ritual
display of bravery, affluence, and the favor of the gods
who are the subjects of the greater part of all our artwork
along with warfare, mythic beasts, rulers, and palace life.
And yet here we find a fragment of glazed earthenware
depicting a simple mountain goat, and here a young archer
wears a headband, a richly decorated tunic, and fine sandals.
Such archers are known for shooting arrows backwards
and with great accuracy from the saddle, even at a gallop.
That figure of a winged bull with human face was given
a fifth leg to provide the creature with a sense of motion.
Our massive step pyramids—representative of mountains—
can be seen from a great distance across the flat landscape.
At the top of each pyramid rests a temple glazed in indigo
where the gods are known to dwell. Here is the river from which
we crawl, there the next into which we one day dissolve.
Music marks state occasions and serves to glorify the gods,
but the villagers enjoy non-ceremonial strains of it as well.
No one can be sure what sounds our instruments produce,
but we have theories about scales and tuning, astronomy,
mathematics, geography, which gems to wear to ward off
sickness and which to protect against thunderbolts and spirits.
When you see the king depicted balancing a basket of clay
effortlessly atop his tranquil head, this means it was he
who built our city’s walls and many sparkling temples.
We have come into contact with other peoples through trade
and migration, but mostly warfare. If we are remembered
as cruel, ruthless warriors, were we not also scholars, restless
artists and lovers of art, obedient citizens, builders of cities
unmatched in magnificence, pious worshipers of the gods?
To the left and right of the city gate, a beneficent winged genie
holds a large pinecone used to sprinkle a blessing of water
on the heads of those who enter our city. Is it not reasonable
to suppose the same blessing is bestowed on those who leave?
CLAIR DE LUNE
We revolt ourselves; we disgust and annoy us.
The way we look at us lately chills us to the core.
We become like those who seek to destroy us.
We push ourselves into small tasks that employ us
unrewardingly on purpose. We tire, we bore.
We revolt ourselves; we disgust and annoy us.
We rent ourselves to what force will enjoy us
into oblivion: wind, drink, sleep. We pimp, we whore.
We become like those who seek to destroy us.
We cat-and-mouse, roughhouse, inflatable-toy us
in our heads’ red maze, in its den, on its shore.
We revolt ourselves; we disgust and annoy us.
We take offense at our being; we plot, we deploy us
against us and flummox; we wallow, we war.
We become like those who seek to destroy us.
If in triumph, our defeat; in torture, our joy is.
Some confusion so deep I can’t fathom anymore.
We appall ourselves; we disgust and annoy us
into those we become we who seek to destroy us.
PARTIAL INVENTORY OF AIRBORNE DEBRIS
Small wonder I recoil
even from my own
worn image looking back
where I always find it
looking like it’s trying
to warn me something
unspeakable is coming:
Item. I stand before me
in a haze where people
can be made to want to
make people stand
precariously on boxes,
arms wide open, strange
hoods pulled down
over human faces, little live
wires hooked to various
parts of the bodies
ridden on like donkeys,
smeared in feces, stacked
one on top the other
for a photo to prolong
the swell an accomplishment
like that engenders.
Item. What kept us from
discovering our selves’
worst wasn’t the lack
of evidence so much as
a failure of delivery, a kink
the push in technology
we’ve all had a hand in
one way or the other.
Item. Looks like anyone
can be led as soon astray
as to slaughter, disappearing
down the long ill-lit
institutional corridor
misadventure unfolds
one synapse at a time—
and to presume immunity
may be a symptom.
Item. In time I begin to
lose sensation, thoughts,
I’m not complaining,
dropped a sedative in
tapwater and watched
its demonstration on
what we have in common
with a sunset, gradual
change and all the rest,
difficult to paraphrase
to be honest but I’m not
complaining, it’s like being
detained indefinitely
but with three meals a day
on a tropical island!
Item. Looks like what’s
done in my defense, or in
its name, or in my
interest or in the image
of the same, no matter how
distorted, fattened up
for laughs or plain dead-on,
connects to me by virtue
of an invisible filament
over which I can claim
no know-how, no management,
no muscle to speak of
(anatomical or spiritual),
what can I do, I can feel it
tugging again, what have I
done: rotisserie chicken,
homestyle gravy, mac
and cheese, a hot biscuit,
sweet potato casserole—
admit it, I’m on the fat side.
Item. As when a putz
collapses to the dance hall’s
floor and the pianist stops
his performing mid-
waltz, always an angel
in a large brown gown
bends over the slowly
reviving body and says
Don’t stop Paul we need you
now more than ever,
whereupon Paul, without
much thought, without
the burden of thinking,
sits back down, picks up
where he left off and plays.
Item. Or say a dream wolf
found my room by scent,
entered it, climbed upon
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