The Cloud Corporation

Home > Other > The Cloud Corporation > Page 8
The Cloud Corporation Page 8

by Timothy Donnelly


  CHAPTER FOR A HEADREST

  The flat base, the straight shaft, the neckpiece

  curved to accommodate the head, the wood

  type indeterminate; often funerary, possibly

  an item of everyday use; as early as the First

  Dynasty through the Ptolemaic period, little change

  in three millennia: let the barge push . . .

  When the mind refuses to stop expanding

  arguments between itself and the particular

  instance into a single, half-articulate drama

  about the self and all the wearing it must suffer;

  when they call on me—and they will—

  through the workweek, on speakerphone

  deep in the in-box or underground wandering

  beyond the far the balladeer called fond—

  tell them this: that the infinitesimal portion of the blue

  planet’s mass that answered to my name

  wanted never to drag its ass out of bed again.

  Lost aptitude for the throng and being

  thrown through the clear-air turbulence of it.

  Found hospice in some box of frozen music.

  Found the deity who, intent on disappearing,

  assumed the form of an invisible giraffe

  then hid itself beneath a pyramid of glass

  whose airtight walls fogged up in response

  to the deity’s breath, a development at once

  revealing and occluding our last known whereabouts.

  (Or, to be brief, although brevity was never

  what we were after after all, tell them pigeons

  have awakened my head at the horizon’s chrome-

  spattered lapis—and it can’t be reached.)

  IN HIS TREE

  They are untold: the advantages of entangling

  oneself completely in a place like this, up and beyond

  all chance of discovery, here where untold means

  not in the dark, but numberless, numberless not

  without number, but many—and if I sit in the dark

  now and wait without number, the difference is

  I do it voluntarily. Not the way the yellow leaf

  is chased by another but the way the word yellow

  can be drawn by hand through the same pond

  air and then across an open page. Here the one keeps

  evolving into the next, like listening into seeing

  thin layer after layer of nacre affix to (to whelm)

  the body fastened to sleep in the heart of a pearl.

  All afternoon a feeling needed to be described to me

  before I knew what I felt. The very terms of this

  predicament had disqualified me from the honest

  work of that description—prior to my knowledge of

  how could I describe a thing?—while the whole

  burden of assigning the work to a desk not my own

  promised nothing but to deepen the predicament’s

  bite in my perception, and having watched hours

  and even days turn out largely perceptual in the end

  I would observe at this crossing no fast distinction

  between seeming to be worse and actual worseness.

  But an object absorptive of all my attention, a thing

  outfitted with otherworldly fire, set to consume

  more than I could ever feed it, might so completely

  overtake the mind that there would be no room

  available for feeling and therefore neither cause

  nor way to describe what just wasn’t there. And so

  I set out to find that thing, drawn down by an under-

  water instinct true to the warp and weft of a small

  false deafness, locked deep in the blue-green private

  compartment broken up into shifts and strung in

  accordance to the wiles of arachnid light, a light too

  truant from its source to reflect a compact back

  with fidelity: the sun its half-remembered lozenge

  trapped among the birch. Everywhere suddenly

  rivalingly glinting like a new place to contemplate.

  Cobbled paths linked by garden bridges arched

  over the pond’s narrows and ambled on to unusable

  amphitheaters brightened by mats of continuous

  aquatic vegetation: primarily macrophytic algae

  fringed in eelgrass, coontail, and the American lotus

  rising a child’s height above the water’s surface.

  Suspended in the air on a firm stalk the enormous

  round leaves shaped into bluish, soft-sided cups;

  if floating, into plates; if emergent, they were as yet

  unopened scrolls, a history of the pond’s bottom

  unnoticeably written on them. Portions of the lotus

  interknit beneath the surface provided habitats

  for invertebrates not visible from bridges: cryptic

  rotifers and hydras, the larval and the nymph

  incarnations of mosquitoes, beetles, damsel- and dragon-

  flies fast as horses as adults, but in their youth

  sustenance for numberless fish, amphibians, reptiles

  and all the fervid waterfowl whose bills plunge

  upward and down with untold destructiveness.

  And I could tear my eyes from none of this, probably

  because the mind kept seeing more than an eye

  or kept wanting to, detecting in what it landed on

  what it didn’t see but knew, sensing the relation

  between things present and between present things

  and those remembered or supposed: humanity

  in the park’s stonework, messages raveled in

  long bolts of music stampeding from the ancient

  calliope at the heart of the carousel, and the future

  bound in decay. A lost past beating in sago palm,

  the hagiography of red caladium, and the resistance

  to deterministic thoughts on identity implicit in

  ten skipjacks convulsing from the shallows at once.

  Always a stuntlike communiqué in the loop-the-

  loop in which wind blows a paper cup across macadam,

  deep in a mushroom, and in 108 sunflower faces

  turned to face the setting sun, its diameter spanning

  108 times that of the earth, here where we in turn

  invest in 108 feelings: the first 36 pertaining to the past,

  as many again to the present, and as many again

  trailing off into the future, each coruscating dimly

  as daystars, or as stars at night through exhaust, each

  known by its own appellation, each with a unique

  list of probable causes, cures, and a prolix description

  reworked as history determines what we can feel.

  All afternoon a feeling needed to be described to me

  but the wording only veered it nearer to the word.

  Or even just to check on it would change the way I felt.

  Furthermore it constantly underwent self-started

  evolutions I pretty much never managed to observe:

  fluctuating on like a soft shifting mass, yielding

  instantly to pressure and engulfing any object senseless

  enough to have trusted in its surface, incorporating

  whatever it can into the grand amalgam of itself

  discovering itself and finding everything perfectly

  indispensable and pointless as the rowboat comparison

  builds for the landlocked hydrophobe in all of us.

  Nothing terrestrial could be equal to a force like this.

  No leathery general could ascertain its stratagem

  squinting through binoculars across the scorched sands.

  The TV might be getting warm, but police hounds

  can’t track it down because it smells like everythin
g.

  To surrender to it means you taste its invincibility

  deliquescing in your dune-dry mouth, its properties

  becoming yours, as when vigilant in a cherry tree

  one converts into the branches, the drooping downy-

  undersided leaves, the frail umbrella-like flowers

  and impending fruit, until you forget what you were

  watching for to begin with, the need to know now

  culminating not in dominance, not control, but liberty.

  CHAPTER FOR NOT DYING AGAIN

  After will in the shape of an Egyptian plover pries me

  loose from the teeth of a crocodile methodically

  dozing in the netherworld’s plug-in sun, I will come

  back to you, World, wholehearted for the real, having

  fed too long on its substitute. My lungs will plump

  in actual air, my skin will pink, I’ll be gone one minute

  back in it in the next, and only half abashed as you

  start ribbing me to death for thinking death could ever

  be able to keep us from devouring each other when

  even we can’t stanch it. Archetypical picnic blanket

  flattened in the dappling by the sun-flecked creek.

  In an eyeblink, I’m all over it. You bring me: livestock

  cut in portions, herbaceous intoxicants, a snowy mountain

  peak made visible as the cloud cover thinks itself

  over and dissipates. Tuna fish and breakfast flakes,

  the lawn clippings’ secret heat, bees in the foxglove,

  celery, and 14.5 pounds per square inch of air pressure

  here on land (a little more at sea). I bring you: room

  and board for your infinite bacteria, parasites, and viruses.

  Moreover, history has proven me your last available

  amanuensis many nights, transcribing your vibrations

  into jingles into morning. Times when I grow weary

  of English sentences—the way they keep on insisting

  something is something else, or something is doing

  something to something else, or to itself, or nothing—

  you let me hum. I’m humming now, counting the hours

  until the plover carries me back in pieces in its beak.

  Since my death, I’m not so anxious anymore. I can wait

  like math on a damp day: my lone solution imminent

  in the storm. But to have lived in you as I did, truly lovingly

  despite big differences, should guarantee my passage

  won’t be long. Make it happen, and whatever you need,

  I’ll be there for you, you know that. Even if it kills me.

  HIS FUTURE AS ATTILA THE HUN

  But when I try to envision what it might be like to live

  detached from the circuitry that suffers me to crave

  what I know I’ll never need, or what I need but have

  in abundance already, I feel the cloud of food-court

  breakfast loosen its embrace, I feel the shopping center

  drop as its escalator tenders me up to the story

  intended for conference space. I feel my doubt diminish, my debt

  diminish; I feel a snow that falls on public statuary

  doesn’t do so sadly because it does so without profit.

  I feel less toxic. I feel the thought my only prospect

  lies under a train for the coverage stop. Don’t think I never

  thought that way because I have and do, all through

  blank October a dollar in my pocket back and forth

  to university. Let the record not not show. I have

  deserted me for what I lack and am not worth. All of this

  unfolds through episodes that pale as fast as others

  gain from my inertia: I have watched, I’ll keep watching

  out from under blankets as the days trip over the

  days before out cold on the gold linoleum behind them

  where we make the others rich with sick persistence.

  But when I try to envision what it might be like to change,

  I see three doors in front of me, and by implication

  opportunity, rooms full of it as the mind itself is full

  thinking of a time before time was, or of the infinite

  couch from which none part, and while the first two doors

  have their appeal, it’s the third I like best, the one

  behind which opens a meadow, vast, and in it, grazing

  on buttercups, an errant heifer with a wounded foot,

  its bloody hoofprints followed by a curious shepherd back

  to something sharp in the grass, the point of a long

  sword which, unearthed, the shepherd now polishes with

  his rodent-skin tunic, letting the Eurasian sun play

  upon it for effect, a gift for me, a task, an instrument to lay

  waste to the empire now placed before me at my feet.

  NOTES

  THE MALADY THAT TOOK THE PLACE OF THINKING refers to a photograph taken during the My Lai Massacre (1968).

  THE NEW HYMNS is for Dawn Marie Knopf.

  BETWEEN THE RIVERS is indebted to Philip Steele’s Eyewitness Mesopotamia (2007).

  CLAIR DE LUNE adapts Queen’s Counsel member Philippe Sands’s 2006 misquote of a statement made in 1946 via telegram by US diplomat George Kennan: “The greatest threat that can befall us as a nation is to become like those who seek to destroy us.”

  FUN FOR THE SHUT–IN takes its title from the last chapter of Make and Do, vol. eleven of Childcraft: The How and Why Library (1972).

  THE CLOUD CORPORATION’s fifth section reworks several passages from H.L. Mencken’s “The Cult of Hope” (1920).

  CHAPTER FOR BEING TRANSFORMED INTO A SPARROW, like the other “Chapter” poems in this book, takes its title from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

  THE LAST DREAM OF LIGHT RELEASED FROM SEAPORTS is composed of words selected from successive pages of the USA PATRIOT Act (2001) and from Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” (1975).

  NO DIARY’s italicized phrases are taken from chapter 8 of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The poem also borrows from the concluding paragraphs of Arthur Schopenhauer’s 1851 essay “On the Vanity of Existence” (R. J. Hollingdale, trans.).

  POEM BEGINNING WITH A SENTENCE FROM THE MONK’s title refers to the 1796 novel by Matthew Lewis.

  THE RUMORED EXISTENCE OF OTHER PEOPLE is for Brett Fletcher Lauer.

  THE NEW HISTRIONICISM adapts a medieval Irish anecdote as translated by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson in his A Celtic Miscellany (1971). It also adapts a passage from the Rule of Saint Benedict (c. 530).

  DREAM OF ARABIAN HILLBILLIES is composed of words selected from successive pages of Osama bin Laden’s “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” (1996) and randomly from the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies, Paul Henning’s “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” (1962).

  TO HIS DETRIMENT adapts a few passages from Andrew Brown’s translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Memoirs of a Madman (1838).

  DREAM OF A POETRY OF DEFENSE is composed of words selected from successive pages of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1821) and randomly from The 9/11 Commission Report, sec. 13.5, “Organizing America’s Defenses in the United States” (2004).

  DREAM OF THE OVERLOOK cites a few passages from Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson’s screenplay of the movie The Shining (1980) and adapts a few from Edward Schils’s translation of Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903).

  HIS FUTURE AS ATTILA THE HUN’s last sentence alludes to a fabled event in the life of Attila as related by Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776).

  THE CLOUD CORPORATION

  Timothy Donnelly’s first book of poems, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, was published by Grove P
ress in 2003. He is a poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

  ALSO BY TIMOTHY DONNELLY

  Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Mary Jo Bang, Lucie Brock-Broido, Robert Casper, Richard Howard, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, and especially Brett Fletcher Lauer and Lynn Melnick for their invaluable input and support throughout the writing of this book. Tremendous gratitude and thanks also to Matthew Zapruder.

  Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the editors of the magazines in which versions of these poems first appeared: American Poet: To His Debt; The Awl: Antepenultimate Conflict with Self; His Future as Attila the Hun; Boulevard: Advice to Baboons of the New Kingdom; Through the Wilderness of His Forehead; The Canary: To His Detriment; Coal Hill Review: Dispatch from Behind the Mountain; Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art: Chivas Regal; His Agenda; The New Hymns; The Night Ship; To His Own Device; Columbia Poetry Review: Fun for the Shut-in; Crowd: The New Intelligence; Critical Quarterly: No Diary; Denver Quarterly: Chapter for Being Transformed into a Lotus; Chapter for Breathing Air Among the Waters; Chapter for a Headrest; Fence: His Excuse; Grist: The Journal for Writers: Explanation of an Oriole; Montezuma to His Magicians; Gulf Coast: Fantasies of Management; His Theogony; No Mission Statement, No Strategic Plan; Harper’s: The Cloud Corporation; The Iowa Review: Dream of the Overlook; The Rumored Existence of Other People; Jerry: Dream of Arabian Hillbillies; jubilat: The Last Dream of Light Released from Seaports; The Malady That Took the Place of Thinking; Team of Fake Deities Arranged on an Orange Plate; Lana Turner: Chapter for Not Dying Again; In His Tree; The Literary Review: Chapter for Being Transformed into a Sparrow; Maggy: Poem Beginning with a Sentence from The Monk; Memorious: Partial Inventory of Airborne Debris; The Modern Review: Dream of a Poetry of Defense; The Nation: Clair de Lune; The New Republic: Chapter for Removing Foolish Speech from the Mouth; The New York Review of Magazines: Chapter for Kindling a Torch; The Paris Review: Globus Hystericus; A Public Space: Bled; The Last Vibrations.

  Many thanks to Christian Lux, Barbara Thimm, and John Dilg, the publisher, translator, and illustrator, respectively, of Die neue Sicht der Dinge: Gedicthe (Luxbooks, 2008), in which some of these poems first appeared. Thanks also to Hand Held Editions for printing the book’s title poem as a chapbook. Thanks, too, to Kristin Norderval and Ensemble p for setting “Clair de Lune” to music.

 

‹ Prev