New Poetries VII

by Michael Schmidt

  Subtitle

  The poem keeps away when I can’t see or there’s nothing to see

  We were looking at what seemed to be nothing,

  which was, in fact, nothing, gradually and suddenly gone,

  fascinating the way footage of a car-crash is fascinating,

  or the wrongful demolition of a hospital, beautiful.

  There must be a better word for just exactly the wrong

  word for ‘accident’, or ‘the almost complete absence

  of light from a room lighted only by the static from

  a television set’, waiting to be found and used –

  more or less visible – in the retranslation of a film

  in which the English from the mouths of the protagonist’s

  enemy’s goons can be seen, as if intruding on itself,

  surfacing too quickly to the surface of the screen

  with the almost complete absence of its retranslation,

  an always-certain interruption of an interruption.

  What if that sky’s a ceiling? That ceiling, a window

  not quite closed or opening? What if What if that sky’s

  a ceiling?’s a ceiling, but might as well’ve been clouds

  emerging from, or falling behind, a sky full of clouds?

  I was surprised to feel guilty, if guilty; ashamed of my

  shame, if shamed. On the air I recognised a word

  in Czech, left untranslated at the bottom of the screen,

  appearing in italics as it was, its meaning lost, assumed

  or untranslatable in kind, kind of non-existent, like a sky,

  painted or projected on an off-white ceiling. After

  the dust cleared, the buildings resurfacing as a wave,

  dormant for miles, resurfaces towards a peopled beach,

  the room, more or less visible, seemed to slowly sink,

  us still looking at nothing, and then nothing again.

  Sonnet

  Eating at a restaurant where the food was all described as young and tender,

  you said that you had ‘absolutely nothing’ to say, chewing chewing-gum.

  Without looking at each other, I said, ‘Did I ever tell you,’ (knowing

  I hadn’t), and proceeded to tell the same old story, except that I couldn’t remember

  it properly, thinking for a second that it might have turned out differently,

  which it didn’t, which isn’t to say I’d change a thing, trying to decide what colour

  I’d call the ceiling if forced to call it a colour. On/After the day it happened,

  something moved in the darkness and I stamped on it, all morning.

  What would it feel like to undergo electrocution? What was/Was that

  a hovercraft? Dissecting seafood, you explained how if you walk behind

  someone on a deserted street you only have to quicken your step slightly

  to instil fear in the person that you’re following, or about the developing

  technological capabilities of rendering the artificial ‘real’. ‘When you empty

  water into a vessel and then shatter the vessel the water stays, just for a moment,

  where it was, no longer slightly different from itself.’ Was that blood

  in the mayonnaise? I thought. Was that window blue on purpose?

  Like a thought cut into speech, or black line next to nothing, everything echoes

  and then the echoes meld, like unwittingly walking into a place you’ve just left

  and not realising it’s the same place, or knowing why you’ve chosen to go in.

  Can’t you see a face? Can’t you catch a brief glimpse from a passing train,

  like the trains you can’t see in a Hopper painting? On / Before the day it happened,

  we watched that episode of The Sopranos (1999 –2007) where Tony dreams

  he’s running from an angry mob and ends up riding on his horse inside the house

  he used to live in with Carmela. You laughed the way you laugh when you’re

  not really paying attention, so I imagined you getting shot in an assassination

  meant for someone else and went upstairs to hold on to the bathroom railings.

  Without looking at each other, something moved in the darkness. Without saying

  anything, I thought for a second that it could have turned out differently.

  Kopfkino

  I felt lonely, like I’d missed the boat, / or I’d found the boat and it was deserted

  Like the moment between knowing you might nearly jump

  and actually nearly jumping, I considered half-undressing

  an imagined Joan of Arc, approaching to the stake with faceless

  soldiers and a crowd of muted children like the children in the foreground

  of a Lowry painting. The only thing she could get through to me was,

  It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens,

  which, in the circumstances, we all agreed was pretty funny.

  It was one of those rare experiences where you move into rain that’s already

  falling somewhere else. In another place, but a place exactly the same

  as this, I thought about the bit in Fargo (1996) where Steve Buscemi gets

  stuffed into the wood-chipper until only his feet are left, imagining what that

  must be like those first few seconds you’re alive, and whether you’d bleed out

  on the snow or just lose consciousness immediately, the way some people

  suddenly lose consciousness when a rollercoaster hits a loop-the-loop.

  Standing before Manet’s Execution of Maximillian (c.1867) in the National

  Gallery – damaged into sections pieced together on a canvas in the 1990s –

  I watched the shooting in full view, despite the missing fragments on the wall.

  The Emperor clasped the hand of his companion as an officer, hardly visible,

  signalled to the firing squad, vanishing behind a stage-effect of rifle smoke.

  I decided that it was the best painting I had seen for a long time,

  despite having seen it before somewhere, and missed it.

  Someone laughed the kind of unexpected laughter that occurs

  when you realise how ridiculous it is that you’re disposing of a body

  rolled inside a Turkish carpet, or hacked-to-bits and wrapped inside

  a plastic bag to keep the blood from spoiling the upholstery in your car.

  I could see a kayak heading for a hurricane, which was annoying

  because I was in the kayak and I couldn’t swim, or think of how

  to get myself to shore. Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering –

  and it’s all over much too soon, I said aloud, which was annoying

  because, in the circumstances, it would’ve been a lot funnier

  if there’d been someone there to hear me say it. I could imagine

  swirling around, not sure what it was that would actually kill me

  but certain there’d be no way out of this one. As everything refocused,

  like only realising that someone has left a room when they re-enter it,

  it was late afternoon and the sun was in my eyes so I hadn’t seen anything.

  Viewpoint

  In Rear Window (1954), Alfred Hitchcock suddenly looks at us

  through the glass frame of an apartment penthouse, somehow

  somewhere other than behind the camera’s lens – viewed from

  the perspective of James Stewart’s binoculars – all but invisible

  to anyone who doesn’t know it’s him. Always make the audience

  suffer as much as possible, I thought, rains beginning on the roof.

  From up here I could see a skydiver looking backwards at a plane

  as if it was falling away from him and not the other way around.

  The air was the same temperature as I was, still breat
hable and

  warm but lightly thickening with something else, like vapours

  pouring slowly from a car’s exhaust. Away to the right I swore

  I could see the monstrously reclining figures of a sculpture park,

  misshapen and decayed, the stones displaying marks left by

  the hurricanes of several years ago. Around the moment of

  deployment, the parachutist feels a brief instance of shock

  between the pulling of the ripcord and successful opening

  of the main canopy. Convinced the mechanism has finally

  failed, he tries to recall a succession of emergency techniques

  before – at last – the canvas swells, jerking freefall to violent

  and relieving halt. Throughout the film, a pianist composes

  a song called ‘Lisa’. His voice is never heard, appearing only

  in long shots through the window. He seems to live alone but

  for the brief appearence of the filmmaker standing several

  feet behind him, winding an old clock on the mantelpiece.

  In the Funhouse

  In Superman: the Movie (1978), Superman turns back time

  by flying backwards round the globe. We see a rockslide

  happen in reverse as Lois Lane emerges from the sinkhole

  she’s been crushed to death in, meaning that she never died

  at all. In the Funhouse, a mirror shows me stretched, my head

  caved in, the sole survivor of some hilarious near-fatal collision.

  Halfway down an artificial indoor beach (running along a back

  wall painted with what looked suspiciously like the Normandy

  landings: upturned bodies on the sand, bits of bodies in the sea,

  the constant sound of waves and cartoon screaming and explosions

  coming from a speaker hidden somewhere in the ceiling) I wondered

  if my limbs had returned to normal. The floor began to move in

  circles at different speeds. The walls pressed slowly in around me.

  Next door, a neon light shone on a plastic Christopher Reeve.

  I made my hand into a fist and thrust it out in front of me which

  did nothing, which didn’t surprise anyone in the room, which

  was only me, which didn’t surprise anyone in the room. Crawling

  through a tunnel on my hands and knees, I imagined Superman

  saving me in a succession of perilous displays: trapped in the back

  of a mechanically compressing car on a junkyard conveyor belt;

  falling head-first from the topmost floor of a collapsing holiday

  resort in Spain; cocooned in ropes and laid out on a railway track

  by thugs. As I emerged, I was suddenly reminded of a scene in

  a film, though couldn’t remember which scene, or which film.

  Evening in Colorado

  Something unwinds and breaks, spilling glass across the room.

  It takes time to establish that a thing’s not there – noise, stars,

  excitement, grief – like the shutting-off of certain lights.

  I remembered having been to Florida as a child,

  but could only really summon up the glare of heat on roads,

  a beach, and a skyline of durationless hotels.

  We had a rental car with cruise control, which I remember

  thinking drove itself. But now from up here I see everything,

  the city like a signal on the verge of fading out.

  I drank a bottle of ‘tropical’ flavoured liquid and sat down

  on the bed, thinking about my brothers – thousands

  of miles away in several directions – staring through

  the window at a bright display of grand pianos,

  an old cinema, and the empty space a building used to be.

  A group of children ran around through jets of water.

  Something unwinds and breaks: like a morning? silence?

  cables? arms? During the night I woke up to an accident

  and lay there motionless beneath the ceiling fan.

  I–5 North

  who is more naked / than the man / yelling, ‘Hey, I’m home!’ / to an empty house?

  About an hour from Los Angeles we pass the spot

  where two weeks previously I’d seen the aftermath

  of a collision. Two firefighters were joking

  around, spraying suppressive foam across

  dark patches of earth that had until recently been

  on fire; the whole thing seemed meticulously staged.

  In a photograph a man is washing blood away from

  fish. A heavy knife is in the sink. His hands are

  sticking to the insides of his latex gloves.

  The sun grinds landscapes to a halt. It strips them

  bare and crumples them like fabric, which sounds

  like something Robert Hass would write.

  Another picture shows a broken statue.

  Large sections of the stone are missing so the stone

  beneath becomes the statue’s surface. The figure

  looks deformed, like she’s been caught in an explosion.

  Out to my left, the orange groves give way to

  massive oil fields; the lakes resolve a contradiction.

  Driving back down to the city from

  Sequoia National Park, I saw we must’ve passed

  by the collision site again. I’d hoped that this

  would turn itself into something that felt more

  profound, like stepping into water

  the same temperature as air.

  Jet Ski

  Emerging switch-eyed from the undergrowth

  into an evening that has just arrived but where there’s still

  and mainly light, at least for now, withdrawing like receding rooms,

  the trees losing distinction like the faces in a crowd that’s running

  to or from an incident you haven’t yet heard news about,

  or single voices drowned out in a vast simultaneity of voices,

  we see a guy pass on a jet ski, and I wonder what

  he’s thinking, if he’s happy, where he’s going, or whether

  he’s forgiven himself, truly, for the thing he’s most ashamed.

  Each thought feels like the answer to a question that

  I’ve not been asked: the images of solar flares; religious

  martyrs’ final words; the knowledge that you’re not where

  you’re supposed to be; another world, a bit like this.

  As if to say, Well, what did you expect?, shrugging off

  each revelation like a soothsayer who knows he’s right,

  the jet ski rider disappeared into the mists across the bay

  from us. I felt an urge to drop my things and go, to follow

  him and start a new life in the sun, hearing his voice say,

  That’s what I did, Baby, and look what happened to me, the wake

  waves of his jet ski gently lapping on the pebbled shore.

  A Few Interiors

  This time we’re seeing from a hiding place,

  pointing stuff out – the window, heater,

  Boston fern – in the interior, which is a picture

  in the corner of the room, a bit unfinished,

  as if an upset woman might burst in holding a letter

  any minute now. The walls are white,

  like a museum. There’s ivy growing out from

  not the top shelf but the next one down

  and water in a half-drunk plastic bottle on the desk.

  Within the water there’s another image of the room,

  reflected, bending at the sides. You can’t quite see it

  yet because we’re standing too far

  from the door, not entering for fear of

  causing a disturbance. In the reflection

  there’s a third person as well,

  but when I turn around the
y’ve gone

  which is a joke I’ve played on you before.

  The house is built among some pine trees

  that are being cut down to make timber frames.

  You sometimes hear a rifle going off

  some miles away, which is a deer shot through

  the neck, or just some people

  killing time by firing hot rounds at the air.

  Tonight there’s an eclipse, but it’s too cloudy

  out for us to know. Instead, the empty

  stairwells and the armchairs start to creak.

  Divining through the long grass on the island

  we find bone. Perhaps, you say, the bone’s a sign,

  a way of answering a problem that you’re spending

  your days struggling through. Back in the kitchen

  it looks strange among the cutlery and tiles

  and I resent not knowing which part

  of which animal it shaped so throw it out

  after a day or two.

  A man arrives holding a lute.

  The young girl sitting takes a glance in our direction

  but there’s no way she can know we’re here.

  When she turns back her face is difficult to read,