Month: Oct 2021

Lines Supposedly Written Avril 14th

As the day’s edges appear

to slope outward or away, 

we’re beginning to talk past each other.

“The only difference between ‘jet suit’

and ‘Jesuit’ is a question of technique

on how best to ascend”, you say.

In lofty beams, infidel bunches

of boysenberries are beginning to go 

ripe inside the megachurch.

Something thrown is cutting

a wake through a window.

“An orchard is quite like a brain.”

Today, for the first time, you both

‘heard of’ and ‘heard’ a peal of bells,

the terms modulate, attack, release, decay.

I follow you through: every room 

of a Bruce Nauman retrospective;

a ribcage of pews; a sheet of laser

making a canopy over our heads

at an Aphex gig near some docks;

a conversation over pianos.

We’re beginning to talk past each other,

to slope outward, or away,

as the day’s edges appear.

and throw your face through your face

– Graham Foust

Cancel every meeting with the sky.

Forward all my calls to the colour-

field. I’ll be staying in the abstract, today.

It’s time to claim to fail to climb

out from the depths of my mouth. Let the oat

milk curdle. Forget to freeze the halibut.

Regret is finding the rub of the truth that even

hitting backspace simply sends you to the future,

a newer blankness filling with almost exactly

what went before. Now I’m receding into now

regret’s this week’s worst hangover, a pain like fireworks

through mud, like trying to throw your face through your face

or the boiling veins in your eyeballs. Still, what we do

here’s the stuff of gods. The roots are also the cosmos.

Are you still watching? The screen going blank to save

itself, or cutting cold to a red-brick maze?

You can only live so long before you hurt,

at least, a fly, only long so long

before you’ve slept in every room of longing

’s curious house, which generates its corners

more the more you try to turn them. Sleep

mode overcomes me, haunted by the next episode,

my future queued in stacks like postcards sent

before untimely death (the only kind), arriving after

over what appears to be that “It”

that nobody won’t shut up about. Anyway,

if anyone’s still watching, I go blank

to save myself, let the autoplay ride.

You can learn a lot about yourself

by your relationship to rain, what

you use to interrupt it. Palm, tongue,

or jerrycan. Crown, rib, or eyeball.

Strychnine local waters lapping loosely

in the font begins the beachside funeral.

Over by the buffet, forcing meat

between my teeth, I bump into a guy

who says, as rain tattoos the sand, buddy,

you’ve gotta forget what death does to a face – 

mouth folding like a shattering zeppelin,

eyes like an oval of sky fizzed with flame

then greyer than fog in front of rotten temples – 

if you wanna continue to look at the living.

I bumped into another autumn morning. Ouch.

I admit it, I was looking over my shoulder

then over another shoulder, then over there

at where something has just vanished from the sky

like Poussin adding pigment to remove

a flock of pigeons from beyond a citadel,

painting, therefore, aftermath itself.

Like long-exposure prints of rivers, every

painting is a painting of an after,

the present moment streaming into history

behind the canvas like inks in fast water.

I run my throbbing head beneath the tap

and think, does ‘me’ begin at skin

or some other, further cloud.

Is a grounded group of birds a flock,

still, or is their recognition based

on leaving lakes behind? Is a toast

a prayer to drink, a prayer a toast to God?

I know as I sit here that somewhere there dies a boy

in a street, his mouth filling up with leaves.

I know when I leave here my blood will transform a cup 

in the mouths of my friends. I know I’ll never know

quite how or when to say goodbye,

but hope it’s known, in general, that I wanted to.

Towards the end of vast and massy chains

I am, I think, responsible for dim

and spacious griefs. Forgive me. Cancel Christmas

if it helps, swap my soul (goodbye) for thine.

Open onto morning like a blister

– line removed for use in a different poem

The days like grains on grains don’t heap.

A moorhen’s summons calls us to the mornings 

of our cells. A suburb of children with scoopnets

in fists disturb the throats of frogs. Frogs throw

their voice with a sound like wet glockenspiels.

Bernadette Mayer writes a duck

flies away / using circles. By

the end of this line, you’ll have a new memory

of wanting to feel the way you felt the day

you wore your first uniform for school.

By the end of this line, you’ll have a new

memory, a new memory of the previous 

line. A kid throws crumb, then crumbs, then the whole

bagel at a duck, using circles to give the world flight.

The days like grains on grains don’t heap

– line removed for use in a different poem

Open onto morning like a blister,

biscuits of light covering either eye

like cucumbers in a cartoon spa, I turn to be

unable to see your blinded face for sun.

The mathematic edges of the calendar

solve into the number of how many towels

we can set to going dry on the bannister,

whether or not the cat’s saliva dropped 

like chaos into my coffee, its pattern of heat

coiling into my palms. 

If love is not 

enough, perhaps it is that every day

we wipe away each other’s gunky sleep

from the ampoule-shaped ducts of our eyes,

then take it in turns to do the same for the cat.

after RJCB

I

Because the poem can’t decide for us

if winter’s yet begun

because the future marshals us with gestures

learned before we’re born

because everything I’ve said could fit inside

an ampoule of ice of your spit

I

because “we are not in the same place”

because “the subject is unaware of our presence”

because I turned away before the clouds completely occluded

because I’m looking through between two windows to where I’m sat

because it might not happen only

because it already has

I

because the poem decides all this for us

you obviously have my permission to do this.

The things of winter lurch into your path.

Some branches paw agog the space that’s grown

an emptiness between them. Foxes sniff

the fibreglass on undersides of cars,

a knife of wind in either nostril, limbs

about to clutch into a scrabbled exit.

The air is only cooling, can’t quite get

cool. There aren’t the peals of bells beyond.

Again, I’m looking through a bay window

at the outside of a window set 

into the same wall. To be clear,

the bay protrudes enough for me to see

back into the room in which I sit

ignoring the foxes, the lack of the sound of bells.

A few months ago, Jeff Bezos went to space. Sort of. The CEO of Amazon, richest man since Mansa Musa, and compulsive ten-gallon-cowboy-hat-wearer blasted himself off into (and beyond) the sky in a rocket which (as many have noted but which bears repeating) looked extremely like a massive cock.

10 minutes later, he was back again, having cusped beyond the Kármán line (the sketchily-defined boundary separating the upper atmosphere from outer space) for a couple of seconds, alongside his other crew members.

It seems you either buy into this mission or not. You’re either entirely on Team Bezos or you’re part of the carousel of dick-joke memes. Maybe something as baldly immense as The Cosmos defies nuance (to say nothing of someone so baldly and corruptedly rich as Bezos). But is there some other possible response to the new Joy Ride Space Race? What can we think about other than ‘wonder’ on the one hand and ‘willies’ on the other?

The wonder of space is twofold. It is, of course, the ‘Final Frontier’, a vacuum so total and terrifying that it draws us into itself. We have a compulsion towards the unknown, and nothing defines the unknown quite like space. But, perhaps even more potently, we’re drawn out into the abyss so that we can look back on ourselves. Its blackness is a mirror. Centuries before Bezos’ bell-ended rocket, outer space was imagined as a vantage point for self-searching. Dante, Chaucer, and many of their Classical precedents imagined upward ascents with the goal of looking back. Cicero’s famous passage relating the Dream of Scipio sees the Roman General carried up into the cosmos to look down on Carthage. Once there, he views its smallness and fragility with scorn.

But let’s consider a more optimistic version of this trope. In Jean Corbichon’s 15th Century French translation of the 13th Century On the Properties of Things by Bartholomeus Anglicus, a very curious image appears (see above). Four men, scientists or philosophers, look through a porthole down onto the globe of the earth, deep in discussion. As an excellent video from Birkbeck, University of London, explains, this picture makes us “think about looking”, and think about ourselves.

Where this vision differs from Bezos’ is important. In the picture, our planet is spiked with structures, and the alien terrain on which the men stand is a flourishing natural landscape. This might easily suggest to our modern mind a group of environmentalists lamenting the urban sprawl which makes Earth look bristling, uninviting. The phallic upward thrust of architecture is envisioned as a globalised competition, a capitalistic impulse which, in reaching upwards, in fact sees us fall away from the Golden Age ideal of Eden. The alien garden (which researchers identify as including recognisable flora from across the globe, from Europe to Baghdad and Jerusalem) and its turban-wearing philosophers offer an attractive counterpoint to the globalising consumerism of Christianity and its spires, below.

Secondly, this image is an imagined one, not a literal spaceflight. It’s an accessible vision, inviting debate and discussion, a matter of perspective and thought. We, the viewers, stand alongside the scientists, seeing what they see, participating in their talks. With them, we look down on ourselves. It’s an image of fantastical ambition and wonder, but at all times a shared and humanised one. Let’s not forget that this illustration appears in a book which discusses everything from outer space to people’s spit. There’s a democratic spread of thought and vision, here, alongside which Cowboy Bezos’ billionaire posturing looks to have missed the point, taking an overly-literal approach to the question.

Jeff’s trip to almost-outer-space reminded me also of the mythical figure of Antaeus. A giant from Libya, Antaeus was an unbeatable wrestler. The source of his strength was contact with the ground. If his opponent threw him down, he simply gained greater power, stood up, and won the match. It was Heracles who finally had the smart idea of lifting him up, therefore rendering him powerless.

Seamus Heaney wrote a beautiful poem about Antaeus, imagining the giant’s troubled interior monologue, the insecurity of a power which knows its own fatal weakness. It’s an acute skewering of the kind of overcompensating male panic which might, for example, see a divorced man spend millions of dollars on a dick-shaped spaceship. Heaney’s Antaeus is proud and bombastic, inviting all challengers, as long as they meet him in his cave. His weakness he describes, in a delicately-hinged oxymoron, as “My elevation, my fall”.

Watching, during a time of unimaginable crisis, the world’s richest person tap our global resources of money, time, and collective attention to fuel his own project of elevation felt, to me, like a great fall. It also literally was a fall, if looked at in a certain way. At the peak of his flight, Bezos was at zero-G, beyond that Kármán line, and so the whole concept of ‘up’ became arbitrary. His rocket had fallen off the world. He’d entered a zone in which up, down, and any other hierarchical construct, fell away into nothingness. Hopefully he learned something.

The poem below imagines Antaeus as an aspiring astronaut (Antaeus Ad Astra of course meaning ‘Antaeus to the stars’). His desire to rise above the earth I imagine as the result of a childhood experience. Reading an Atlas of the earth, the child Antaeus feels compelled to consume it whole. His vast and sensuous ambition leads him to put his tongue to the page. He tries to eat the earth, but it rebukes him. He rises away, hurt, defeated, divorced, and vows to keep on rising, separating, relishing the pain. Only when he achieves this solo pursuit and finally breaks free of the atmosphere does he realise, like Heaney’s Antaeus, that his elevation is his fall. If the poem hopes to mean anything, it’s in occupying this kind of all-consuming mindset to expose its fragilities. Also, the rocket is a bit like a penis.