The Forest Logic

For Jane Mead

 

A shadow is an area

of opacity in a radiograph,

a train in arctic night,

the fugitive that is harboring

you –

 

liminal animal –

 

the projection of a future

made of uncollected signals

from the underworld side of –

 

walking in the thousands

over mall parking lots, through

the penumbral light

of unhealed suburbs

from which have come animals,

as if from a fire.

 

 When you were a child

the maple tree at the crossing

asked a question. The maple,

with its gift for aftermath.

You began to write it down,

the question and the story

of a silver-braided chain

of fields around the bay.

Tidal fields. Unknowing,

you sued for passage,

and

 

light’s broken vocal cord

 

was an early love poem,

built on wilderness logic,

or an anthem so pure

it could have no end,

that would leap through a door,

an equinox door –

 

Now the road

is dark dust, leading out of the fire,

through shadow-crossings

where as a child

you were sent off to school

on the curve of

some old morning –

clear –

 

the vineyard daughters

ripened in luminous corridors

on brown hills, their vine-bodies

grown heavy –

 

in distance-changing diamonds,

volumes, dark and light –

and chain link,

chain link–

 

transmission towers,

wires, pale moon,

the silver petals of a city

 

float among

brown grasses –

 

We are going inside it

to write poems

 

of empty stadiums and deserted streets

and how we used to sit together

at the boundary of sign language

and smoking, until we lay down

beneath the trees. The riverbank

was a notebook, the river a story,

and we imagined ourselves

inside a very large poem

and with our bodies,

as if we were a fable

a history of bloodlust

had thought up.

 

It is healing now,

you can touch its face.

It is unhealing now,

don’t –

 

I would like

to sell you

an insurance policy:

a service agreement:

a sharp blade of grass:

 

a cemetery ride

in a burning

ocean –

 

clear –

 

Each morning

a train departs toward blue arctic light,

and the government of signals

along the light-edged sea,

the government of time

and dark gray hills

is real.

Outside the window,

she gathers speed, the penumbra daughter

in the dawn-lit infrastructure,

flutters

on pipelines and bridges,

across the braided iron cables

of her narrative poem

that will end with your fugitive blood

being assayed for iron and carbon

as it crosses the roads

and ice-bound signal towns

flashing against the snow –

 

to write poems –

 

of a year of no dream, when

the leaf-thing on the ground

is not the leaves on the ground,

and miles of shining memory

hold millions of conchs because

the tide is partial, the shore

torn away, and the moon

brightens like chemical in a forest

of obeisance-for-pleasure –

 

don’t touch –

 

The penumbra daughter

in full migraine carries a spectral

light across the ice to the glacial water,

where she begins in sonorous tones,

then in growls and animal screams

to arc wildly between the undersky

and the twilight mountains,

twisting back and forth

between them and sparking

in her mouth:

a narrative poem:

 

  A girl lies down

beside a forest pool.

She is or is not sleeping.

In the radiologic woods.

Inside the forest logic

her hand moves, touches

the physical water

that forms unstable

dyslexic and shining

girls who bear her back

into its surface

that is a green analysis,

that is a happiness –

 

of glowing trees,

and dull rocks and brown

fallen leaves –

 

the poem

roots and flowers in her mouth –

 

and a green lysergic light

speaks to a man and a woman

and a circle of beasts

from the air above a forest pool:

“Here you may leave an image

that will one day change the world.”

 

While the angel looks at them,

they are copulating in the shape

of a crocodile, and the animals

watching them

have human faces –

 

this is the image

that is held inside

the fugitive bodies crossing

the fields of no dream,

entering the portals of a city

to write poems –

 

of glass-topped towers

in violet dusk and the eclipse child’s singing.

People are uncommonly beautiful

in the poem –

pressed to a shadowing field

to see the child in the rags of his ceremony

grow faint, to hear the plastic child dissolve

the dark field with his song –

when the sound-light

drains out and the crowd

scatters in the minutes

of its chaos along

the quays –

 

domes and palaces

aphotic statues

with vacuole eyes

dead meadows

the sparking

electrostatic

sky –

 

lunation, mote, beetleweed,

disembodied corporeal globe, subject field,

wandflower, balance beam, universe,

soundbox, field of study, logical implication,

coltsfoot, love, everlasting-

ness –

 

from which the narcissist,

the dictator

distills his dark tear

of rage –

 

A mesh of fjord-light

on a cove, and vacated bodies

wash up all night in tides

on the pornographic shore,

beaten and hemorrhaged,

and the penumbra daughter

memorizes with her hands

their dead, their empty hulls

before

they sink

and run

down veins of bright sick gold,

iron ocher, anthracite

into the pure-black tumors –

 

unlighting –

 

On the boundary

of sign language and smoking

we sit and watch the shadows

of springtime clouds

drift on the river. And then we

lie down and make love

under the trees,

as if we were a poem

a history of bloodlust

had thought up –

 

lightning

flashes on the jewel-grade

refineries –

 

touch, and

it is the valley,

and it is the wet skin,

it is the valley of –

 

chain link –

 

the equinox daughter

runs along tree lines and roads –

as the fugitive bodies are being

assayed in the shadows

for ore –

she runs along

the light-dredged sea,

and spring is suddenly on hillsides

topped by silver branches

and conifer green –

 

where she enters the blood –

 

in rays of Venus, you are near.

You wear the heavens like a belt,

and I have seen you. Beyond the hill,

whale shadows breach the silvery waters.

Others with heavenly voices sing

in modes of direct address

a song composed in segments

like your body that has

the legs of a moth and its dusky,

scalar wings.

 

At the crossing, the maple

asked its question, and we began

to write it down. We believed

it was an early love poem,

with a wilderness logic

so true it would have no end.

Now the road is dark dust,

leading out of the fire

to a bus stop where –

 

you were sent to school

on the curve of some old morning.

Raise your hand if you have questions.

Raise your hand if –

 

in a country of shadows,

gravity forests

hover in carbon light –

I would like

to sell you

 

lightless figurines

 

the deer

the fly

the fox

 

the bear

the otter

the lynx

 

the crow

 

I would like to sell you –

 

I, I, I, I

 

a cemetery ride

in a burning

ocean –

 

clear –

 

she gathers speed

as the white, vernal hilltops

above the leafless trees

and the ice-clear water are being

plucked on one string, now,

and the deep, green-yellow-green

of her breath, and the sun,

and the sound and brilliancy of insect noise

are held inside the frame

of sunlight and thinking

of the time that light has traveled

to be a human voice on

this estuary glistening

with songs and water and war.

The cranes have their place in it,

plenary, and the bare trees,

and the stones by the shore,

and the green submerged water-rocks

vibrate as she passes through

the arctic night with her finite action

of remembering the waves.

And the air is new breath,

or there are three new planets

narrating the sky, or her voice

is a sponge in which our hair entwines,

and this place has a power in it,

of shadow and light in micron flux

that is lived through the passage of birds

and the new smell of snow,

and the forms of white mountains

pull gravity to them in the curving

space inside a skin, where a body is being

printed in possession of its happiness,

with a symmetry of green

and blue waters arranged as cubes

and given to the fugitive

to keep.

We Nomads of Lyric

The voices you hear no longer come from things, from a poem by Oscar Milosz^*. As a kind of hearing. The elegy of the voice, the elegy in the audible. Of audibility. This child is meant to be heard and not seen. It is in that sense inside out, though what can perhaps be heard is the plangency of a voice as it attempts to locate itself. From the outset, a wilderness logic entwines, lyric and mutually inductive, with the child. The tension is lyric, the attention is lyric, it rides lightly upon the rhythmic waveform of an urgent and always diffracting voice. Sometimes the waveform is a train. Sometimes an ocean. Sometimes it is a lullaby, one that induces a state of suspended belief in which it can wander, in which it may arc across a landscape or between the surface and the depths. It can be wandered away from, perhaps back to. When it is a river, it flows through a city, and the city is reflected in its surface, as are two anonymous lovers. It is a nomad of lyric, and it has no power, no place, and is never a truth, though perhaps it is in some sense a history.  I is nothing to it. I is diffuse, contingent, the product of a debased mythic substrate. There are giant cylindrical storage cells along the river – you’ve seen them. She, the penumbra daughter is at work there. In the twilights they contain, in the twilights of a planet’s energy, she is a shaded region around the total shadow of your body, and she is struggling, striving, with a pure, metabolic unselfconsciousness, to filter the pure black carbon tumors into light. You (whoever you are) are the direct object (but never the subject) of that labor. The child can even draw the narcissist, the despot into the aura of its possibility. Chain link. You and we and they become entwined at the instant she, the equinox daughter, fully alien and distilled from penumbral shadows, metastasizes in our blood. Chain. Link. To a future, to a fugitive, to a parallax, to a planet, kinesthetic in its life-dream and its death-dream, vibrating like a dragonfly’s wings at the open aperture of our hearing –

* “H,” The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry, tr. David Gascoyne.

Walking Through a Forest Door (Notes on Process)

This poem began as a collage, an attempt to stitch together a collection of fragments that were generated in Geoffrey Nutter’s Wallson Glass poem making workshops. Working with material collected over the early months of the Covid pandemic, as life was closed down and various predations beginning to announce themselves, I began to hear in those fragments notes of longing that brought to mind my friend, the late poet Jane Mead, and her work, and my ongoing sadness for her, I began to hope that I could realize in it a sense of direness combined with natural connection – a soulful and healing connection – that I’ve always felt strongly in her poems. Time went by, I set the piece aside, and when I revisited it, I found that the life I’d felt in in those first fragments was, to paraphrase Jane, unequal to its longing, so I began a process of re-writings and re-imaginings and that have, I hope, resulted in something that Jane, who I imagine as the daughters in this poem, would see as an echo of and a tribute to her and the spirit of her work.

Many thanks to Emily Wallis Hughes for her encouraging and collaborative help in putting together these text and audio versions.

Cort Day is reading Awakening the Spine by Vanda Scaravelli and Dante’s Divine Comedy.