Sight Map: Poems

Sight Map

ne w califo rnia p o e t ry edited by

Robert Hass Calvin Bedient Brenda Hillman Forrest Gander

For, by Carol Snow Enola Gay, by Mark Levine Selected Poems, by Fanny Howe Sleeping with the Dictionary, by Harryette Mullen Commons, by Myung Mi Kim The Guns and Flags Project, by Geoffrey G. O’Brien Gone, by Fanny Howe Why / Why Not, by Martha Ronk A Carnage in the Lovetrees, by Richard Greenfield The Seventy Prepositions, by Carol Snow Not Even Then, by Brian Blanchfield Facts for Visitors, by Srikanth Reddy Weather Eye Open, by Sarah Gridley Subject, by Laura Mullen This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, by Juliana Spahr The Totality for Kids, by Joshua Clover The Wilds, by Mark Levine I Love Artists, by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Harm., by Steve Willard Green and Gray, by Geoffrey G. O’Brien The Age of Huts (compleat), by Ron Silliman It’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974–2006, by Leslie Scalapino rimertown / an atlas, by Laura Walker Ours, by Cole Swensen Virgil and the Mountain Cat: Poems, by David Lau Sight Map, by Brian Teare Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, by Keith Waldrop

br ian tea r e

Sight Map

Poems

University of California Press

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2009 by The Regents of the University of California For acknowledgments of previous publication, please see page 85.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Teare, Brian. Sight map : poems / Brian Teare. p. cm. — (New California Poetry ; 26) isbn 978-0-520-25875-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-25876-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. PS3620.E427S55 2009 811'.6—dc22

2008021098

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z 39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

If transcendence exists between us, if we are visible and invisible to each other, the gap is enough to sustain our attraction. luce irigaray, To Be Two

for Kerri & Darrell

But where is the bridge placed—at the end of the road, or only at the end of our vision? Is it all bridge, or is there no bridge because there is no gulf? charles ives, Essays before a Sonata

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Contents

40:57:54 n / 76:54:35 w Emerson Susquehanna

3

To Be Two 10 Lent Prayer

16

As If from Letters of Surveyor Samuel Maclay To Take the House Out of Doors 24

42:53:6 n / 71:57:17 w Embodiment

29

Morphology 30 Theory of Trees

38

Spirit Photograph

40

The Word from His Mouth, It Is Perfect 42 Long after Hopkins

44

19

pilgrim The ravine a canoe, Errant.

49

50 51

A type of spine.

Ash, birch, beech, pine.

52

53

Errant : Reply.

As being is to begin.

54

55

West to dust.

To drag about, to torment, to wallow, Devotion,

56

57

37:48:9 n / 122:15:4 w Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus Thoreau Etude Genius Loci

61

67 69

Abandoned Palinode for the Twenty Suitors of June An Essay to End Pleasure

Notes 83 Acknowledgments 85

80

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Emerson Susquehanna

i. “When we have lost our God of tradition

Not thaw brought to the river— thought, long winter a surface that holds no current or image. And there’s language laid down like that, mind locked in a long walk through the chill of a single word, and there’s cattails fraught where water’s not any longer, and God ’s a pall called down to mind the meaning given a life. Once thought the word makes mind too small like Bible-colored Sundays all study and chalk and exotic potted palms dotting a holy land entirely crayon and the lavender mimeographs leave on the hands. The word God has always been my mother’s fingers separating my sister’s hair, three strands gathered in a braid so tight white at the parted dark roots stood out, word

3

a migraine in its wake, word endured alone in a room. Shades drawn over pain, word’s a mind’s light ingrown, caught, nitid knot snarled upon itself . . . Subzero, months from thaw, we walk—o trees, trouble, tremble at the roots of being, underneath, under laws, the order of things so deeply a violence and unnumbered like the snow.

4

ii. & ceased from our God of rhetoric

But I don’t know their names—rust worked under each wing like sweat lunettes; synthetic silk crest stitched to a white head; small gears completely grease preening ash, mechanical sheen of oil, charcoal—only this description eats and screams squanders territory. What use is it to see? Faith the world is knowable? 5

There are ways to understand and none is living or lyric, limp or stutter. If I send a letter (this sudden utter other means than speech) when I don’t know to love language other than to run a larceny all machine and godlikeness, gear and hinge, pocket watch, tiepin, money clip and wing tip, my father’s 6

impostor I am then, my words a mere guess at what isn’t. It isn’t mastery I’m after. It’s certain other terms than my own I wait for. For instance : birds without names fly anyway ceaselessly up the ladder cast from visible to invisible—is it it only seems there’s a way to know the way?

7

iii. then may God fire . . . with . . . presence.”

And you can never catch it nor make it still and so it is like thought in this or weather that you might live within it or by its constraints but never touch it— and there is the sorrow it will never know you though you feel all winter the shiver of how it never hesitates in touching you. Or, said another way : it snowed all day and into the night. The view developed slowly like a photograph in a bath of chemicals— what began as white grew whiter by virtue of contrast until it seemed overexposed 8

so little shadow was left like a sentence revised too often. What happens is the mind travels outward because it wants to be the soul it has heard tell of. Nervous work like a bird—sky and power line, garbage can, underbrush— it goes to them; it intends itself toward oily black seeds toward reflections in ice and in glass and it goes to the wind and is shut out which is no one’s home. Ever leave-taking, action is its only description : each shadow on the lamp-lit street seeming to rush—molting out of itself— each upward to snow— multitude of hurry, confusion—midair to meet the idea that made it—

9

To Be Two

i. Certainty

Between two who love each other there is no room for doubt. Each breath freezing : fixity is altogether [ [ ] falling further [

] text. ] farther

alone, I had thought : Subtext, what is the fabric of estrangement? A veil between what is and what I think? I.e. : I can say what I like [

].

I ask the barometer falling, Fahrenheit as it charts [

] disappearing : what fact

will the water hold as I walk? Sleeping is [ ]. [

] was an error

I can’t bear. There are propositions I love with certainty and knowledge, both : absolutely, in the dark, this hand that thigh to thigh touches mine is mine; the memory of fucking [

].

Believe again this notion of my voice, what it is to touch me. I ask because this 10

is [

] walking [

[

] the river [

] falls inside it, [

]

]. Ice

is a skin that can’t bear touching and weather deeper than feeling : [

].

I don’t own any farther than guessing what I have recorded : what’s called emotion, or [ ], a form of a failing of certainty. The world is [

] thinking. I remember the veil,

the sum of uncertainty. “I once knew” isn’t sentimental; it’s eaves, ice. What I know glitters in error’s margins [

]

and descends intently. “Touching you I know I [

] you,” you [

]. What you said

like snow holds my footprints : I will watch [ ] where I’ve been to disappear—

11

ii. The love poem

: is veil, thin as breath : freezes and holds what is. : finds itself afraid. : is itself far more. : is subject. : marks the line. : can say “The river slips shut,” says the world is the totality of facts, swallows the known sum down. : is the cause of distemper? : is the ear put in fear; is an island of light; is a statement of fact. : can’t touch, can’t— : is the ability to know. : touches mine; is mine; is it certain? : can’t find you. : remember? 12

: isn’t speaking this. : can’t write itself, though. : shifts and clicks. : is an error. : can’t speak in a form. : is more accurate. : is called intellect. : is what I confuse with what is torn, but not sundered. : isn’t a lie, and it is split like everything is mica-fine in silence. : is how. : won’t be lost. : falls for as long as . . . : will walk again in thought.

13

iii. The Veil

Between two who love each other is a veil, thin as breath. There is no room for doubt. Each breath freezes and holds what is freezing : fixity is altogether every text, finds itself afraid of falling further and has gone farther, is itself far more alone than I had thought. Subtext, what is subject is the fabric of estrangement : a veil marks the line between what is and what I think. I.e. : I can say “The river slips shut,” can say what I like, but what I read says the world is the totality of facts; I ask the barometer falling, Fahrenheit as it swallows the known sum down, charts the mercuric disappearing, what fact is the cause of distemper? Will the water hold as I walk? Sleeping is the ear put in fear, is thick arras or ambsace, like an alcatraz is an island of light across water. “There was an error” is a statement of fact I can’t bear. There are propositions I can’t touch, can’t love with certainty and knowledge, both. Is the ability to know, absolutely, in the dark, this hand that touches mine is mine, thigh to thigh touches mine is mine, is it certain? The memory of fucking is nothing if it can’t find you. Please, believe again this notion of my voice; remember what it is to touch me. I ask because this isn’t speaking; this is a kind of walking to the river. A letter can’t write itself, though a life can, and snow falls inside it, hissing. Ice shifts and clicks, is a skin that can’t bear touching and weather is an error deeper than feeling : I can’t live like this, can’t speak in a form I don’t own any farther than guessing what is more accurate : I have recorded what’s called emotion, or what is called intellect is a form of a failing of certainty. The world is what I confuse with what is called thinking. I remember. The veil is torn, but not sundered : the sum of uncertainty. “I once knew” isn’t a lie, and it isn’t sentimental; it’s eaves, ice. What I know is split like everything glitters in error’s margins, like ambivalence is mica-fine in silence and descends intently. “Touching you is how I know I love you,” you said. What you said won’t be lost like snow holds my footprints : I will watch what falls for as long as it takes for where I’ve been to disappear—will walk again in thought. 15

Lent Prayer

The way prayer is root to precarious : two crows creep the steeple. Not winter not spring. Given a chance a season out of season will write bastard pastoral, elegy full of errant splendor and spent sheets of sleet, rain all spondaic and unrelenting. Pallid nouns look familiar but they’re dead : after thaw, after crocuses, even tulips : new snow, and robins caught on a border without name, lost to a scrim of frost, dozens dead, each a lace of lice. The way soul has no certain etymology, how weirdly what’s rootless goes wrong-like, fog erasing syntax that holds nouns in the sentence called landscape, looks like : streetlight tree snowdrop stray-cat tow-truck leaves sidewalk snowmelt : except what’s visible shifts, wind arranging things, the neighbor’s lit window gone down the block like a dog off its lead.

16

But all the small-town lights have left for the Susquehanna where they lean over water and rinse longbilled birds into shallows, cattails that shiver the river like quills sunk in dark ink. If I bring to the banks what nouns I’ve found, what of it? Clean of scene they shine in the mind like fish flick water open, switchbladequick : weathervane horse-cart milk-pail police-tape farmhouse snowplow : if I put them back, I’ll hate the tableaus they make : cows crapping in crabgrass; on Market Street little flags flapping; or two Amish girls pressing curd through cloth; dirty water. It’s written : the opera house burned in 1906. What is it goes on living

17

in a town like this, between penitentiary and nicotine, the way form lives on in both feign and fiction : arson or accident, the plaque says this is the original cornerstone : because the root of error is wander who wouldn’t want out of a town so wrong? The current’s fed under the bridge like fabric to a sewing needle, each light a small satin boat stitched slow in folds. Who wouldn’t want to go to them, the lights? As prayer is route to precarious, the river trembles on its treadle.

18

As If from Letters of Surveyor Samuel Maclay (Spring, 1790)

sent for you last week a swansong white flowers on whitewater

dogwoods

weather continues

. cloudy but little rain

intelligence

with its attendant circumstances embarrasses me much no word

. from something to do patience exhausted dear shaved myself and then returned

the word

. pluvial

the maple a map

of the river’s tributaries glistening province of inquiry

rinsed

.

19

my black nets set past cattails dredge drawn up leaves alluvium

grasp and clatter

. of crawfish

all hunger

could gather this morning I saw a deer fording the river

. to a small island I felt unable to work full proof having nothing the mind destroys everything

careful

. the world is the river brims roads go

first the few

. under but this is a letter the shine of water on nouns let it be remembered 20

weather

. I made a plum pudding in a bag as fine a one as I ever ate this with a dish of tea

. concluded the month of May to spend the morning baking bread

things

obliged

I admire their industry

. water folds the arms of a host of brown coats whitely into each elbow

shine worn

. I write I fancy I hear canoe poles returning this not only keeps me uneasy for the moment but in pain

.

21

of word

in consequence as I am in want I imagine your letter corn stubble troubling the flood fields

. no geese riding the river’s stir and fervor what you sweep from the porch pine needles berry

. stains click of seed birds leave I leave you too

husks

and send what facts I can

things

sunken road

. refracted

bent branch made heavy

with wet black bark a clot of leaves plain and waterline my loneliness

.

22

flood

a season when the bank’s given the river rising everything it had here I am in country unsettled without either

. canoe or horse in it

a field remarkable

for the great number of bones found I write to report

. they all appear in good humor

23

To Take the House Out of Doors

The fading taste of his fingers means travel. Where bedsprings coil their only noise repose keeps a list : for the lip a chipped cup; the hand a kettle; his tongue three kinds of steeping : jasmine anise mint. Your mind rid of nothing is the one thing you love : the field in which chamomile; the river a breadth in which breath crests a white feather. You think the way tulips mate the colors of bees— by anther, by stamen to your mouth the lured world at brink. Milkweed is soft as semen; a kiss a chair in the grass; to fuck

24

a bed crowning the cherry; his love is to take the house out of doors. Where will it go? One way out of town, traveler. No one sleeps on a bridge.

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Embodiment (White Birch)

how a birch shirks its skins : strange grain of the language of prayer : to disturb words addressed to where God is is what writing is : alphabet alive beneath the alphabet so far into whiteness each mind to itself creation come crawling matter out of nothing : always longing inquires at the threshold a question unanswered : not skin but the look of skin : what once overheard the talk of God became matter : ask the birch did the soul have a choice :

29

Morphology (Field Guide to the Ferns)

i.

Eros where rain weighs most—shift of his ribs, spine

. bent—leaflets arced on an axis—your mouth the ground

. he took root in.

30

ii.

To remember see : “Interrupted”—

. his mouth—

. “Smooth Lip” or “Wooly”

. the way a fern’s name interprets its structure :

. you had a different nipple.

31

iii.

“Netted Chain” is an organic syntax. Is one kind of sentence—

. did he put his fingers there?—

. “Venus” is another. And

.

32

iv.

“Fragile”—rhizomic spreading beneath—you lay down;

. “Male” fiddleheads furred and pale—

. it wasn’t long before—

33

v.

pinnate—

. penetrate.

34

vi.

Eventually you found yourself on the page : “index

. of anatomy”—see : venation—how there’s a language describing entirely :

. tongue—see : how willingly you brought your body to him

.

35

vii.

(see also : “Hart’s Tongue”)—

.

36

viii.

how there’s a method entirely the end of love : how willingly

. a shape takes the name it’s given by the observer : a description of what feeds on it.

37

Theory of Trees ( White Birch)

if narrow if limbs white, also are given skin cousin to paper

. must thought be brought closer be invested mind clothed wholly in action : writing my companion color : my paper

. dress : a warring of time, garment of spar spent in rending

38

. embodiment : awful beautiful : neverlasting

. is form home if form gives damage

. hospice : who was I : whose limbs were mine when error entered flesh

39

Spirit Photograph ( White Birch)

It was you who brought rhetoric to the tree : fallacy’s five kinds of pain. Argument, traveler, carries you where? First

. was whiteness borrowed from light. Second : a skin wholly incident, whose only home is being

. looked at. It isn’t beauty, its second name (paper) third, or fourth : pinkish underskin scored with short parallels, like prayer is made to know order or a God

.

40

not present at the creation of longing. Tearing back the bark you made there a fire to heat the sentence until meaning relented, ash

. the syntax, ash the fifth you lent it, which is metaphor which is nomenclature, bark backward curling as if you knew words from

. damage. If only it had been real fire you stole from the dictionary of agony : of five kinds the sixth is not knowing the difference—

41

The Word from His Mouth, It Is Perfect

as when afterward blood returns its stir to the ear though his salt still haunts the mouth it is said God spoke to matter during creation what was asked of it and what sound came after what remains remembered in flesh of such speech is it longing is the birch its shape curled bark a presentiment of pain its whiteness is it that of skin vacant as the place he’d taken among fiddleheads

42

surely alone is the reliquary I take to the river’s ruined mill the town bell tolling eleven is the bones I keep behind words’ closed carved doors if matter is the first martyr there is nowhere left to go hear me my way alone I bequeath to the compass each step hedged between hours I leave a lily carried for the marriage of what turns away

43

Long after Hopkins

Nothing at dusk, lord, but dust and road to keep it. The field kneels under white pines, umbra the edge to whom this is addressed : a mind part fern, part birch : two turkeys slowly S-ing their necks through inflorescence, arrangement more precise than what light leaves fields : painterly flowers more color than picture, more words for color than tint : alizarin or violet, you could write goldenrod, write cornflower, but Queen Anne’s lace still hems the low horizon. Faith, what is it abides, what’s left of pastoral but unreality. Ask artifice. Ask ornament. Go ahead and ask : what principle animates the natural : owl pink Lady’s Slipper orchid white-tailed deer woodchuck :

44

is it only what’s visible that’s knowable. Twenty dandelions gone to seed; tent worms slung in the articulated tree; what’s tiresome : mind unanswered, writing to supply scaffolds to hold up scenery, nothing but queries and plywood, string strung to a high struck bell auguring : it’s too late to see a third turkey left headless, wreck of feathers the owl scared, scattered in grass—

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pil g rim

A pilgrim, where am I? In the shadow of death. And in what path am I journeying? In the path of error. And what consolation do I have? That which pilgrims have. hildegard von bingen, Book of Divine Works

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The ravine a canoe, wind narrows its deep creek current through, carries the landscape forward, into disappearance. Boulder to dust, keenness of no use or latitude. The path follows far as the vanishing point. Wind’s edge, the map ends here.

49

Errant. Lost to document and topography, you ask : what logic have I followed, is it mine, is there elsewhere I might go : but sleep is a kind of English : constantly, no answer.

50

A type of spine. From fetal to unfurl, ferns. Upturn, the path among boulders breaks its fever of mosquitoes. The pond lists with pollen. At bank a tipped birch soaks its silver sidelong in the water that holds what, goes where, and nothing, nowhere are answers you’re ready for. Ripple. Midge. Gelid nebulae of frogs’ eggs.

51

Ash, birch, beech, pine. Among them, understory where ferns forest the floor in miniature. Seeds reel down from a supreme unraveling. Upwards, fungus terraces the trunks; lichen further whitens blanch; the path doesn’t end here, disperses where forked infinitely. Lent to the lingering shapes of trees, death lives an other kind of life.

52

Errant : Reply. You are here now infernal beneath the meadow’s far hem : do you want it to go on, this life a screed of signs, this struggle under the slumber of everything : you have tunneled this far : there is, isn’t there, a language entirely wakeful, you ask : because all you left behind has dreamt of it

53

As being is to begin. Laid down among the signs a self assigned. Decided it was only ever upward unto nothing, grass and wildflowers, each stem the very thread of trembling, as little weight as color on the eye. There was an order you could choose to enter, another, in doing so, to leave. You were, as before a river or tree decides to branch.

54

West to dust. At the crossroads, digitalis quickens its cups. What in wind to hold, to home, what to house you now? Call back walls, the black slate roof, the locked door that answered your name like a key. Asphalt westward is wet, and longitude, and summer is everything is a noun is touched by water, being led—let it—latitude, curving over, along, farther, away, a way west to dust.

55

To drag about, to torment, to wallow, roots of the sweet word I trammel : valka, he’s gone, fucking someone else. Nothing goes by luck in composition, not in this city of four kinds of sleep : ends, ended, will end, will have ended. Lake water poised at the lip of spillage, each image trembles as it’s written.

56

Devotion,

vovere, vow, yes, forms repeat themselves so : cars daily traffic streets whose shape the lake dictates, my thighs open like a fan against heat. Day after day the notebook also, the dirt in the path so packed it shines. In any weather you’ll find me kneeling.

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Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus (Lake Merritt)

I loved him, but not without ambivalence when he pushed inside me, desire and fear two men kneeling, one over the other, their hands locked. By the lake I walk inside memory of his movements inside me, and it is this fullness most resembles my experience of God. What could have been waves instead tick—walled halted— against brick. The lake water ends with an i in it, slip lisping to lip and, stalled, it sticks. I try to keep it here—the lake and its description— before it becomes metaphor, the poem referring to water raising into significance a resemblance between the lake and metaphor. High sun banishing clarity beneath a surface nova-ed white, the lake interpreted 61

is no lake at all, and the waves no longer waves, the shoreless shore, and the poem, the prayer the impossibility of emptiness : being fucked is a version of prayer : I desire something neither received nor seen. Even the lake is an interpreter, the sky here a sargasso of glass here a hot ripple of tin, there the pale pink pattern called mackerel, and birds disturb interpretations I in turn have interpreted. The lake water ends with an i in it, slip lisping to lip, and, stalled, it sticks : there’s nothing I can do about loneliness except watch it flare, metaphor in the landscape by the lake I walk inside memory of him moving

62

inside me, and it is this fullness most resembles my experience of God. What could have been waves instead tick—walled, halted—against brick. And even the lake is an interpreter, sky here a sargasso of glass here a hot ripple of tin, there the pale pink pattern called mackerel, and birds disturb interpretations I in turn have interpreted. The lake water ends with an i in it, slip lisping to lip, and, stalled, it sticks. The walk home begins as imagery that leaves everything out, though an image becomes metaphor if I choose : blue heron at the spill gate; wind’s whitecaps; fog negating the clocktower; a man in black, his back to me, rowing past buoys; and it is this last image, slow slur over the surface the neat wake the boat leaves, in which I invest meaning. I try to keep it here—the lake and its description—before it becomes metaphor,

63

the poem referring to water raising into significance resemblance between the lake and metaphor. I left him by underground, left the city that stinks, rain coagulating crusts left for pigeons, a lost dog’s lost flyers leeching red ink into gutter water, junkie cursing her dead mother, “Fuck you man, the bitch is dead,” left her and her bedroll and her hands’ gnarl of scars folded, doubled over. High sun banishing clarity beneath a surface nova-ed white, the lake interpreted is no lake at all, and the waves no longer waves, the shoreless shore and the poem, the prayer, the impossibility of emptiness waiting at the gate, at the door, while walking up the stairs toward his glance and nonchalance, the unmade bed, while we argued and made up, undressed and fucked and bed, stairs, door, gate I was already gone :

64

the walk home began as imagery that left everything out though it’d become metaphor if I chose : blue heron at the spill gate; wind’s whitecaps; fog negating the clocktower; a man in black, his back to me, rowing past buoys; and it was this last image, slow slur over surface, neat wake the boat left, in which I invested meaning. I tried to keep it there— the lake and its description—before it became metaphor, the poem referring to water raising into significance resemblance between the lake and metaphor. When is it the mind turns from perception? I left him by underground, left the city that stinks, rain coagulating crusts left for pigeons, a lost dog’s lost flyers leeching red ink into gutter water, junkie cursing her dead mother, “Fuck you man, the bitch is dead,” left 65

her and her bedroll and her hands’ gnarl of scars folded, doubled over. High sun banishing clarity beneath a surface nova-ed white, the lake interpreted was no lake at all and the waves no longer waves, the shoreless shore, and the poem the prayer the impossibility of emptiness : when did I turn away, when did I substitute the word prayer for fucking, when did he begin to leave? while I waited at the gate? at the door? while I walked up the stairs toward his glance and nonchalance? the unmade bed? while we argued and made up, undressed and fucked? and bed? stairs? door? gate? He was already gone.

66

Thoreau Etude (Lake Merritt)

Ghosts of commerce, of loneliness, buildings embark in the waves of the lake in a wake of lights where insurance—its lit silver insubstantial— promises nothing but neon in triplicate : crest, trough, fat signature listless in flat-water. What you thought was promised wasn’t. Downtown flares, fulminous acetylene crash and ashen skyline asymptote : gull wing and gasoline, hunger cry and truck

67

bed : an economy endless as bill boards’ utopia replicas : “the heavens hang over them like some low screen.”

68

Genius Loci (Oakland)

Make it the place it was then, so full it split vision to live there in winter so late & wet abundance toppled toward awful—birds of paradise a profusion the ripe colors of anodized metal; in gutters umbrellas smashed like pigeons, bent ribs bright among black slack fluttering; camellias’ pink imagoes dropping

69

into water & rotting, sweet stink— & did not stop : the inundated eye, overpopulous urban eye, the whole place, to look at it, was a footprint in January : everywhere cloudy water rising to fill in the outlines, & meanwhile indoors differed by degree alone : without love, loosed from God,

70

there were lovers & touch rushing in to redraw your boundaries constantly because it was a tune you kept getting wrong, the refrain of what it meant to live alone, months of that and then

. sudden summer, sheer release, streets all cigarettes & sashay, balls-out tube tops, low-riders & belly fat, the girls on the block all like Oh no she didn’t, and girl, she did, she was mad skills with press-ons & a cell phone telling him where to stick it, a kid on her hip, just like that, summer, sheer beauty & lip gloss that smelled like peaches, & you going to the store for whiskey

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& condoms like everyone else on a hot, long afternoon so long & hot it would just be sunburn to walk anywhere if it weren’t also a pleasure, thoughtless & shiftless & horny & drunk, just someone thinking summer wasn’t up to anything deep, & lo, there he was, his punk ass pink as a Viking in a tight wifebeater & lingering by the public pool, drinking beer so sly it didn’t look illegal, & he wasn’t a good idea but did you have a light? & it seemed the whole summer went like that, taking fire out of your pocket & giving it away, a ditty you could whistle it was so cliché, like the numbers they gave you after & you never called, the number of swollen nodes of the kissing colds you got & later the number to call to get tested, the number of the bus to the clinic, the number they gave you when they asked you to wait, the number of questions asked, number of partners, number of risks, number of previous tests, the number of pricks —one—to draw the blood, the number of minutes you waited before results, & then you decided you had to get the tune right, the how to live it so it doesn’t kill you, to take a number & wait in the long line of the city’s bankrupt humanism like the bus that never comes no matter how long you wait, & the grocery bag breaking, & if you were going to sing that one, the one that sounds like all I got is bruised tomatoes, broken glass & dirty bread & no one waiting at home, would you

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. start with genius, as in, the spirit of a place?, & small, as in of the back, wet in heat & the urge to touch him there, skin just visible between his jeans & t-shirt, to see if he’s sweating, to see if he feels what you feel?, & if he does, is that all the spirit the place will give,

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a small thing shared, just a phrase, not a whole song, but something to build on?, & if it isn’t bread & if it sure ain’t tomatoes it isn’t empty, is it, like the signage you walk by that fronts the Lakeside Church of Practical Christianity, hawking a knowledge of God so modest it seems trivial?, & it isn’t ever, is it, the how to live it so it doesn’t

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kill you, the where to touch it, the when will genius sing your name so it sounds like a place you can live?

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Abandoned Palinode for the Twenty Suitors of June (18th & Sanchez)

It wasn’t that the sidewalk offered admonishment : Stop thinking about sex. It wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. It wasn’t the right time of year. Late spring rode low on the hips, season long as the inch between his t-shirt and jeans, long as a city block : the whole street lived there whenever he walked by. It wasn’t that his room was small and faced traffic, that in his city there were five useful verbs : unbutton, unbuckle, kneel, open, come. You were learning to read your body the way he did : a possible series of entrances, a fathoming of how deep the material. What it means to be entered by a man : an image is the stop between uncertainties. How, his cock inside you, his face displayed meaning where before it had hid inscrutable and where, afterward, his frank gaze would close again, a camera’s aperture. Perhaps after all that was the real thrill, the click of capture, your image folded in on itself. No matter what pleasures, 76

what promises, your image—not unlike eucalyptus, gingko or bottlebrush, trees without fruit that lined his street solely for ornament and shade—was but shape he’d pause beneath briefly, considering. And his body, his image, what were they to you? Alone, you’d remember his upper lip’s deep dip, his clavicles, their dark lunettes deepening as he leaned above you, bitter chicory of his beard, the briefs he preferred to boxers. A series of lessons in how to read differently, he was tutor to below grammar. Your language was changing. Unbuckle : a bell rings with its tongue. Unbutton : as plush is to push. Kneel : boot cut. Open : the moment before ink touches paper. Come : would you give it back, his image? Walk back past flyers tucked under wipers, the row of glass a stun of sun, to meet yourself before meeting him, afternoon gathering its proffered romance and ass, the backward glance that said yes? What would you give up to remain as you were, a visitor at the corner where cautious and carnal cleaved and the florist’s window disgorged a forest of orchids? You would 77

leave yourself uncoupled, untouched, mouthing nouns all flowers—now round, now sharp—bachelor’s buttons, mums, agapanthus, protea, poppy, in order to stop among certainties, imagery of pansy and lavender, but you could never again give it up, how to pleasure changed language : floribund, its inflections those a throat loans moaning, “o” the low notes bowed strings goad : now gorgeous, now cat-gut guttural, all adjective : rapt, rasped, you went down on his language, didn’t you, wet to the root each uttered word of the twenty suitors of June? Viking beard, shaved balls, recurved cock, rancher’s hands, scald scar, Zippo, whiplash, fifteen cigarettes, the one without money, without tears, whose mother called, whose armpits you promised you’d put right here, four shots and a hard-on, pool cue, nightstick, handcuffs and rubber boots, taxi, patio, barstool, bedroom, you fucked them all— he didn’t mind being plural—and you, in the center of your life, finally changed, both within your language and without, 78

as light tilted, slid summer-wise and cormorants returned the span of their wings to hang black over shining buoys, waves’ crests wind-snapped like the slack in flags. Beside the lake you paused, briefly, considered the shape his image took in the look of things. Bird : bone enough. Wave : ephemeral’s shell. Spindrift : to return to air. Air : to lean into lean, lengthening shadows of after afternoon, how weirdly the planet slanted toward solstice.

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An Essay to End Pleasure

By each inadequate window in the dark low-ceilinged house; by the river spiked with ice; on the bridge from town to county; at the market where Amish sold pretzels and cheddars, cheap toys, greens, headcheese and livers; along snowed roads slow to the mailbox; after floodwater took the curves toward the highway; I waited and he never came. Downed, crested, covetous, birds rushed what the river left the last crust of snow : plume, leaf, branch, pod, silt, thistle : they browned in thaw, softened in dirt. I waited past thaw, after ground and riverbank took the water back; the walk dotted with cherry blossoms, when I left I wrote : rain’s noise to flush weight of camellias, scentless as birds, from the bushes. Downed, they brown, soften in the dirt. May 80

turns fog on a spindle : thread to bind recent greenery to background : sewn woods wild as backs of tapestries. The voice grows archaic with noticing; the mind, precise. A new kind of bird feeds at the river : think of weeks the eye will take to count its feathers; years the mouth will wait to drink what small air from its bones— and now, here, March turns fog on a spindle : what comes to the eye comes as light after winter has washed its white sand at least twice, as if ornament could adorn the worn shore of the ordinary : goose shit on the lake path, a flotilla of plastic bags in waters currents carry under the city. We come back to this : as if inevitable, the sheathed cock; as if necessary, the thighs part; and the mind divided : his mouth here, then there my hand : meanwhile the eternal internal ache relaxed past pleasure stammer 81

stammer my mouth apotheosis precious. But it is all dear : the thread that binds recent greenery to background, kisses tentative, pressing, each to sustain a pattern, the sewn woods wild as backs of tapestries. Watching the work of his pale skin gather, gooseflesh where my mouth just was : we are as much as we see : the voice full-throated with noticing; the mind precise. How the mouth knows what the eye knows : egret, heron, bittern, grebe, gull, coot, cormorant, scaup, mallard, but friend, a new kind of bird feeds at the lake : think of weeks the eye will take to count its feathers; years the mouth will wait to drink what small air from its bones. 82

Notes

What follows is mostly recognition of what I’ve borrowed or outright stolen. All etymologies are from the Oxford English Dictionary.

40:57:54 n / 76:54:35 w “Emerson Susquehanna”: The title of each section is a portion of a sentence taken from Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Harvard University Press, 1982). “To Be Two”: The title is taken from a book of the same name by Luce Irigaray (Routledge, 2001); the image of the veil between lovers is also hers. A few phrases and some examples of language games concerning certainty are taken directly from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (Harper & Row, 1972). “As If from Letters of Surveyor Samuel Maclay”: The poem borrows directly from Maclay’s Journal (Wennawoods, 1999), which he wrote while he was surveying the west branch of the Susquehanna, near Lewisburg (which was then Derrstown) in central Pennsylvania.

42:53:6 n / 71:57:17 w The “white birch” series responds to Gennady Aygi’s poem “Birch at Noon,” from Child-and-Rose (New Directions, 2003). “Embodiment” responds to Brenda Hillman’s assertion, in “First Tractate” from Death Tractates (Wesleyan University Press, 1992), that “The soul got to choose. Nothing else / got to but the soul / got to choose.”

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“Morphology” owes a tremendous debt to Boughton Cobb’s Field Guide to the Ferns (Houghton Mifflin, 1956); the nouns or phrases in quotation marks are actual names of ferns found during hikes in New Hampshire. “Theory of Trees” is a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 1865 journal in A Hopkins Reader, ed. John Pick (Oxford University Press, 1953). “Spirit Photograph” refers to the nineteenth-century practice of attempting to capture, via photograph, evidence of ghosts, such as ectoplasm or the possession of mediums during séances. It’s dedicated to Laura Larson. “The Word from His Mouth, It Is Perfect” refers to the Gnostic creation myth that it was in fact the speech of God that formed matter. The title is taken from a Manichean hymn in Barnstone and Meyer’s The Gnostic Bible (Shambhala, 2003). The opening of “Long after Hopkins” ghosts the opening of Jorie Graham’s “Imperialism” in The End of Beauty (Ecco, 1987).

37:48:9 n / 122:15:4 w “Thoreau Etude”: The final three lines are from Thoreau’s A Writer’s Journal, ed. Laurence Stapleton (Heinemann, 1961). “Abandoned Palinode for the Twenty Suitors of June” quotes graffiti at the corner of 18th and Sanchez (in the Castro of San Francisco) and was triggered by the legend of Stesichoros’ palinode, as recounted by Anne Carson in Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998). Also: the phrase “an image is the stop between uncertainties” is taken from Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (New Directions, 1961). “An Essay to End Pleasure”: Again, some phrases are from Thoreau’s A Writer’s Journal.

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Acknowledgments

The following appeared, sometimes in different versions, in these journals, with many thanks to their editors: 26: “Morphology” American Poetry Review: “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus” Bayou: “Embodiment” and “Thoreau Etude” Blackbird: “As If from Letters of Surveyor Samuel Maclay” and “Lent Prayer” Bloom: “Genius Loci” Crowd: “The Word from His Mouth, It Is Perfect” Gulf Coast: “Abandoned Palinode for the Twenty Suitors of June” and “An Essay to End Pleasure” Hotel Amerika: “To Be Two” The Literary Review: “Spirit Photograph” and “To Take the House Out of Doors” Pool: “The ravine a canoe,” The Seneca Review: “Emerson Susquehanna” VOLT: “Long after Hopkins”

“The Word from His Mouth, It Is Perfect” was reprinted in The Gertrude Stein Awards (Green Integer, 2008). Many thanks to Douglas Messerli for selecting the poem for inclusion. Gratitude to Jeff Maser, and especially to Jason Davis at palOmine Press, for a limited edition chapbook, Pilgrim, in which all the poems of that section first appeared. Further gratitude to the editors of the New California Poetry series and the staff at University of California Press, most especially to Rachel Berchten and 85

Claudia Smelser, whose intelligences patiently and sensitively shepherded this book into being. There are many to whom I owe thanks for their direct support of and belief in this work: Rick Barot, Gaby Calvocoressi, Joshua Corey, Susanne Dyckman, Cynthia Hogue, Laura Larson, Jane Mead, G. E. Patterson, D. A. Powell, Jaime Robles, Margaret Ronda, Reginald Shepherd, and Jean Valentine. & there are two whose editorial suggestions concerning this manuscript were irreplaceable: Elizabeth Robinson and Kerri Webster. But the largest debt of gratitude goes to the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts, without whose generosities this book would never have been written.

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