Mountain West Poetry Series

Derek Henderson

• Publisher: Center for Literary Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781885635402
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The poems in Derek Henderson's Songs are "translations" of a film cycle of the same name, shot by American filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933–2003) to document his and his family's life in Colorado in the mid-1960s. Where Brakhage's films provide a subjective visual record of his experience bewildered by the eye, these poems let language bewilder the space a reader enters through the ear. Henderson tenders the visual experience of Brakhage's films—films of the domestic and the wild, the private and political, the local and global—into language that insists on the ultimate incapacity of language—or of image—to fully document the comfort and the violence of intimacy. Songs expresses the ecstasy we so often experience in the company of family, but it just as urgently attests to ecstasy's turbulent threat to family's stability. Like Brakhage's films, Henderson's poems carry across into language and find family in every moment, even the broken ones, all of them abounding in hope.

SONG 1

Portrait before the eyes, everything true in the lens. Her hands meet and equal. Serenity at the appearance of edges. Serenity was there before the eye roamed and is still here before the eye. Transparent storm door: the hand knows the window’s evenness in a broken door (where the door broke it opens in a line, slow and bending), how the hot window cools, how the eye beholds and opens, how all’s gone gummed up, gone human. Farther off, gathering in the heat, tinny like the doorbell’s admission of American width, even there the eyes seem hidden in unwatchfulness as night begins to freeze, the window ledge begins turning to the ground, and the warm house makes a ceremony of its windows leaking heat. Ceremony is birth, heat dies in the window and cools off an inhabitant or two, the children run out of doors into an early-21st century, seeming to shine. In song, I become lyric heart, so, transparent. Singing meets up in the eyes in the knowledge that broken things abound in hope, the present is always beginning, an according, hoofclicks on the rooftop in June; how do we make the words? We wait. Song one is turnkey, tissue, a white yard, more American ground. Ground glass so far is heat, new working of heaven, identified and met in a snowy landscape, a high line bounding heaven. The eye grows an egg- like vault, swarm of fact in the heat, overply, heat fleeces the window with frost.

Portray the woman’s reader, hands full of pearls, her silence is the product of her silence—she sails through a quiet house. Transparency colors everything: windows signed with breakage, the door is here for anyone, its clean lines, its billowing openness, its wooden lintel. Through the window a terrible image: stepping into the marriage chamber is Cain, dominating the solitude of night, this version of night —windows distribute starlight, the room fogs up its windows, the windows turn to paint an American scene outside, miles of newly planted rows turned towards the house. The first song is the window’s song, too transparent. The song ends with someone tapping at the angles of the window’s construction and the broken apple on the sill is fate’s presence, branches outside are over everything, are ridiculous, a porous cover, just so. The first song is torque, matrix, water, roadways in May, completely American. A glass by the bed protrudes and announces water, the exact sound of a saint’s passage through the room. The sky outside is huge, a complete frequency of color, there is color sitting by the window, a nightgown lain over a chair beside the window.

Pour out in the face of this mess of words. This hand is a word, cornered into writing all this shit out. To be anything before writing it is to be a thing in words I hold as ramiecation, ruination, home. Transparency flies laughing: under this window is breakage and shit—real shit, cat shit (buried far below, waste lining the yard, killing trees)—This window so streaked with blood hangs before my house and through it all I can see is America showing up all the same, warts and all, night blasted in the window, leading me to all the steps I end. A house with windows is portent of war, windows open onto America stretched to dearth, fully dried up.

This first song stretched too thin already, a tiny candy sucked into transparency. This lens bends everything to smallness, halves our search into breakage, is held up too openly to unopening skies, the stars all hidden, Eoors turned up, kisses hesitant, built on words and words only,—what else can be so immanent? I lied the erst time, I am made of tissue, a yard full of trash and weeds, fearful, always an American trying to get a leg up. Protrusion is my cup, my hateful elling up —I am a word that knows its own saying and is lost in all its shifting land, the sky could care less. I am huge with August, too full by half with scorn, overplied, seen in my window, writing this:

Retrace each letter of the woman’s name. Lay miles of ink to zoom us to the occupations of bared engers. The serenity of this woman rises into the serenity of place, a calm house. The eye glides, acetate its fluid cone, its aperture: the window was erm before its breakage—the window becomes terrible in the eye as image in the camera’s opening, American symbol married in a visionary mouth, night foreseen, foretold, the window blank in its material, carried across, the camera is a useless window, the window keeps the hand spanning from its wrist in this American picture of distance and lack of presence. Nothing can occupy this zone like I do, the window my song, quiet, transparent. I lack a place to rest, lack something so quiet as the angel my eye already promised in the changeless tissue of breakage, the present falling oe the boughs —I reach to it, burn for it, I cap myself oe, whatever. This place is taken away, a missed kiss, a full yard, I am completely American. The glass protrudes and stops quickly, establishes stoppage to identify sand ’s passage—water-clock, too, a grand plan fully blown and frequent as St. Vitus’ Dance. O, this layer is true, ene layer of flesh.

Try this again: impulse to speak gives pause to thought. As much as I occupy my space I am still, a tiny seed. The quietness of my thought comes up against the hum of space, the quiet house. Thrown from the transparent flow: yes, this is surely a breaking through (other things are pulverized, flow is not a straight line, not a constant wave, I swear)—and, this will be terrible to sum up in one sight, placed in the house locked and wedded to some pervasive American symbol of loneliness in expectation of night; and yes, this will be a branching out at last, the house will be so sought out, it will become a thing to sing about, an acme that cannot be put in print or English, or in the tight historic teeth of last year. Nothing will sing more than the words spinning about, sweet, transparent. I can say at the end: I heap up talk, the shit that spills out the mouths of angels, concrete as it figures itself out before its eventual brokenness; it is built and it is here and it is a done thing—the boughs let off cherry blossoms behind me, they cut into the new-built house across the way, this hum is only this or that possibility, and what is done in the boughs cuts the season off, discards tomorrow’s snowcapped mountains; the first ceremonial turning of the key shows the new carpet already sullied, the boulevard behind more complete than the American dream that paved it past our house. We’re calling a small war—I see you through the mean glass, gross and staring back at me, identifying yourself as me on the toilet, a saint passing back and forth to human. I’ll be grand as I wash dishes while I look back at you watching TV, I’ll see my self reflected in my window, in yours, in the window’s reflection, in your TV, in my own admission of my own body.

Try the motherly speech again. Hands full of seed. The mother’s silence follows alongside the silence of the whole story, of the last home left to us. Everything here is seen flying through everything else: windows and doors (the traffic of people, their collisions and straight lines, their stopping, their fleeing) — the window is a terrible imagination of creation married to the house, admitting a dead-ended Americanness, a penetration of loneliness instead of night — the window’s black mirrors throw the room’s light back at me, the house full of windows to use, windows firm against breakage, the hand reaches out and closes them to open them up — I am an American poet miles away, subject to distance. One open window is song, is lyric, sweetness, transparent. The song ends on top of a mountain of angel stuff, structured in the middle of breakage, made presence, bent, cut, almost razed,

like this: The first song is cut short layer and fulfilling yet

SONG 2

Wind as possibility. The mirror is clear image and color on the horizon is blur: movements of apparent light climb below Earth in the window

Wind stabs below lifts and shimmers the blood lifts off the horizon’s table the camera sings has swung down the land holds over windows

The wind pulverizes me. I’m a rascal who shimmers in my own imagination and the heat of the season sullies me and makes me useless as the horizon always is—distant and hopeful only. Shift between the machines of my image and the machines that take my image. Earth opens up, furious, a window to itself.

Wind pulverizes. Risk scalds in the glossy shimmer before the eye and heat waste their sullen stretch to the horizon. The mouth scintillates, machine of photographic impulse. T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• SONG 1
• SONG 2
• SONG 3
• SONG 4
• SONG 5
• SONG 6
• SONG 7
• SONG 8
• SONG 9
• SONG 10
• SONG 11
• SONG 12
• SONG 13
• SONG 14
• SONG 15
• SONG 16
• SONG 17
• SONG 18
• SONG 19
• SONG 20
• SONG 21
• SONG 22
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS