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
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
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.