“APOPHRADES” AND OTHER POEMS
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APOPHRADES
Freud says when you go to bed with someone
you are really going to bed with their parents,
and they with yours. It’s like this sometimes with poems, too,
even if you are only talking to yourself
about drinking a particular cup of coffee on the bow of a ship
as the island where you spent a few happy moments of your childhood
condenses from the mist, and how the wind there, on your face,
feels like your lover’s hair will feel when it falls over you,
first in the deck chairs on the balcony overlooking the harbor
and then later when you come up behind them in the kitchen
only to find they are reading Rousseau of all people
(and him going on about the restorative power of botany),
the lightness of the laughter between you, then, and of the hair,
all of it a piece with the wind and your memories of the future—
even then a gallery of others who have written similar things
assembles at the margins of the page in groups of three or four.
Seated as at a nightclub or an audition, they gesture and stage whisper
and give off an air of skepticism if not disappointment,
so before they can ask for the check or say, finally,
“That was great, we’ll be in touch,” you attempt something
more adventurous, like adopting the perspective of a dog
who brushes past you on deck while you are drinking the coffee
and thinking about the island. He’s a Husky, the dog,
and now that travel by sled is a thing of the past,
he knows the psychic burden of a heroic race reduced to cathexis,
a mere object of affection with all that objecthood entails;
even such a flourish, however, may be insufficient
to hold the interest of this crowd — one of them is roaming around,
another reading the newspaper — so you move on to the boat,
a diesel ferry half-full of station wagons that served, during the war, as a hospital,
how while it watches parents raise children to the lenses of the tower viewer
it thinks back to soldiers stretched out, blowing smoke,
tan limbs and torsos striped with gauze and tape,
and sees a vision of its own end, rusting in the mud off Arthur Kill,
while the squealing children who ran all over it decide it’s more convenient to fly.
Things are a little quieter now that death is involved.
You consider the water under the ship, and beneath that the inlet floor,
carved by the Pleistocene (from pleistos, “most,” and caenus, “new”
— because even Lyell underestimated the age of the strata)
as it froze the oceans into great ploughs and furrowed itself over millennia,
a making which brings into focus the great chasm one needs cross
who would bequeath something to time when time has everything it needs.
Silence now from the margin. Are they asleep, embarrassed, or waiting
for confirmation of a boundary that will allow them to affirm
that what they have heard has taken place?
Do they remember there was even a crowd listening to the first speech,
when we sang out to one another through the trees?
Was it their own words you spoke back to them—
their lover, their dog, their ship, their glaciers—
words they inherited, but thought they discovered in experience?
One feels it is impossible to say.
IMPASSES
Lights go on, send X tons of insulation
off the roof. Emergency is all around,
like no emergency at all: work to eat,
buy the time of those I never meet
from those who take, then buy the time of more.
Float on, pious little signs, to the very limits
of each yard. I’ll just have another
so as not to think of what was bred for love.
Here you are, trying to make it
incrementally better, and all I want
is to spend a little less time pointing out
the hopelessness of the situation.
Keep your memo about corruption
that’s been commonplace for years,
your speech on the latest outrage, the boy,
the crying mothers, the wax figures of officials.
Keep your ethnography, too.
When moderation descends on us
like a mountain peak at once visible through cloud
or a nineteenth-century town stretching its legs
along a riverfront, expectant and smokeless,
when one longs to be at rest long enough
to see such a picture without wanting to discard it
as the falsest of all idols, remember, then,
the world passes through experience
and emerges upside down. “Camera” is a room,
film a skin or hide, words, too, surfaces we rub
to develop heat in another place, inside.
There is no mean to see, gentle friends.
Give me all the virtue that you have,
just not virtuously. For a time, some of us
chased cormorants with slingshots, chanting, undressed.
If only the doctors and nurses were here,
we could lock them in their cars.
If only the files had not been burned,
we could scatter them again to the winds.
NEWS
I heard today that someone killed poetry.
Not like the last time, by firing squad, young men sweating through rifle sights.
Or the time before that, with a bomb strapped to the tailpipe.
Not like the time that someone slipped poison into the wine before the dessert course.
Or a pearl-handled knife to the throat. (That one I remember the most.)
Gas strangled it. Clubs bludgeoned it. It wore cement shoes. For centuries they burned it at the stake while singing.
Before that they stoned it, or tore at it with their own bloody hands.
I had difficulty understanding why this time would be different. Poetry lives long enough for something to kill it.
Now they have strafed it from a helicopter, or blown it up with a rocket fired from another rocket. Now they have carefully administered an injection.
Even these cowards, and the cowards who write checks, the cowards who merely turn on the lights — we, too, have our turn to play killer, to play at killing.
Until time sweeps us into the gray corner of a ruined museum.
Until time shows there is poetry in even our blank deaths, & thus so much more in the death of poetry, which has now again been killed.
V. Joshua Adams is a poet, scholar, translator, and critic. He teaches at the University of Louisville.