The Nine Senses

Melissa Kwasny

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781571318329
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie américaine

The prize-winning author of Thistle shares "a quietly magnificent collection of prose poems" that explore how we connect to the world around us ( Orion ). Drawing inspiration from the work of Rene Char, Melissa Kwasny presents a new kind of prose poem in The Nine Senses. These experiments challenge the way we read sequentially, making each line equal to the next as disparate figures and topics appear side by side: Dylan Thomas, Roman water lines, Paul Celan, Shirin Neshat, anti-depressants, Buddhism, William Carlos Williams, Trakl, cancer, Beckett, Pound, Breton, the Iraq War, telekinesis, clairvoyance, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Yeats, among many others. Through it all, Kwasny asks how we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are? As bromides and aphorisms degrade, we are left with startling new realizations. Obliquely touching on the cancer of a friend, her own troubled relationship with her father, and the break-up of a nearly thirty-year partnership, Kwasny also questions mortality, temporality, and eternity. Kwasny then abandons abstraction with some very direct poems about her own cancer and diagnosis.

VI.

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The Empty Inn

In my childhood, I would have called these walls plum, then perhaps claret. Plush and horsehair of Victoriana. A well-appointed inn that smells of rats. In the back of which the moss-girl sleeps alone, rises alone, dresses in the silks and satins she has come to favor underneath her wool, now that she has grown. Her face still and round as the lake. She sits in the abandoned restaurant, knitting and unraveling a scarf, unable to choose between two almost identical greens. What color would I call those walls now? Ten years ago, or maybe yesterday, she left the beds to their chenille. The half-used bags of flour, the grill left unclean, the flies that hatch and seed the floors and sills. Imagination, my child. Surround yourself with the good as if you had a child growing inside you: wool and lakes and wild apples. Find a corner to accumulate in, like the snow. As if any minute the owner will make his way back again.

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The Watchful Child

My first name came out of a book or a cloud or a sound pleasant to my mother’s ears. The second is my father’s and doesn’t suit me. The third ties me to the dead, is folded in their cloth. People of the cloth, aren’t we all so? My fourth name is translated. Here, the leaves block the road. Our names change, but with sidebars, the way we like them. (The barter-work later will come.) What is a raddled moon? Reddened. What is a ribbon bird? Eye shadow. Namesake: to dress up the little girls like the sky. Which is glossed with distance, twilight, blue flax. Which is objective, removed, and often directionless. Like many people today, I’ve spent the day in a car, exchanging money for dubious goods and services. Don’t you think, if you were dying, you wouldn’t do that? I keep talking to my names, asking how best to serve them. As I have begun talking to everything.

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The Angel Applicant

title from a painting by Paul Klee

White umbel of dogwood, blue flax that closes in the heat—I say them to ward off the suffering of my father. Who taught me complaint, who was never grateful. We drink champagne with bitters. Your father called you jewel. This evening, the sky changed every few minutes: rain, then dark, then silver. What I mean is that no one blames the sky. I have kept my past close, a quiet between friends, asking: How are you? Do you feel loved enough? Always ready to applaud deviation. The birthday chain of events. The hopscotch grid of chalked dangers. Daughters in rows, in the pulpits, like the furred antennae of moths. Don’t you have that, too? Don’t you, my brethren? The sky unfolds in perpetuity. The earth is rose-dipped, red green. If I close my eyes, it will soon be over, I learned in the family, in the factory.

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Thin as a Rail

Everyone taken care of this morning, everyone tender and lost. The lonely boy down the road who flirted with men is now a frail adult. Though his rickety pride still surfaces, stirred by the sight of the creek where he grew up, the flagstones he laid with his brother. If I look for him, he’s everywhere, too fat, or else rail-thin like the shorebird whose body is so compressed it can hide among the dense grass and reeds. In May, I was burning with fever. In June, I had the spells. Why we are always ready to accept the worst: because we want to take it in and care for it, too. The man in the courtroom, after his daughter’s murderer admits guilt, goes berserk, lunging and punching, trying to kill him. All day, the television replays this. What is important to say to one another? This is what happened to me. I was a child and did not speak. In the end, I was too much for everyone.

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De Profundis

Holy brothers, your dark leprosy is echoed in the sparrow-flecked fields of late November. Moleskin of the hillside. Yellowed velvet of the lawns. And the mill-stream, which I borrow from the poet Trakl. There are those of you, like him, who threw yourselves in front of stallions as children. There are those of you born into serial pain. There are those who run from the room where something unspeakable has occurred. Into the woods where the traitors’ bodies hang. Visions of the presidency: our mad renditions. Why him and not me? Why me and not you? The have-a-heart traps we can’t seem to enlarge. How to sing you back, wounded soldiers, to the power and dread of earth, which is divided into the hidden and the revealed. There is a light that fails in my mouth, Trakl wrote. It is a poetry that does not seek to rise. Oh, mother who bears the child in the white moon of ruin. A string of blue globes shining down his spine.

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Inventing a People Who Are Lacking

If I could think of the earth this morning as coffee-stained, but bright of leaf where there is hay and fern, subtle and boyish in its reserve—not me, but close to me—then perhaps I could be more compassionate toward men. Surely the earth is genderless. Like the kitten I found, hermaphrodite, its balls not yet dropped, its back rough and lined with summer felt. There is a mountain above me, which I have learned to call the sky. What it would mean to begin talking into its image. That it is not too late, that we are here, and charged with helping? The artist, closer to the autistic, the schizoid, the infant, in her oceanic connectedness to the world, is not “patient” but “doctor”—if we follow Deleuze. The world with its endless set of symptoms. Like a full moon, its plaster punched in. When I came upon the old cemetery, its tablets thin, I sank perceptively into it and that seemed wrong. We have lost the ones who weep, the lonely ones, who are on the other side. So far from home they might forget they have one.

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Talk to the Golden Birches

Emissaries, but of what? Peppered with mold and myrrh, clawed like cloud-strips, they grow in the copse on the hill. The first one I find, lying on its side, the next half-covered with moss. Gilt, adjective, their colors of gold. Gilt, laid on the surface. Gilt, young female swine. There is a surprise in every forest. There are many etymologies to cross, and directions, not paths, to decide on. Satyr, black mushroom, sticking its foot from the grave. Tree fungi, so stiff they won’t tear off. Before the hieroglyph was deciphered, it was thought of as a language not to be read but revealed. One had to be initiated to understand it, to pick through the litter at its feet. To tip the cereal bowl of breakfast stars. The river is wind-pocked. The leaves brew a tea exactly the same color as the bark—metallic, tin snipped and rough. “Where did November come from?” How old is the soul? Worn out, gouged with display. Our dear exotic companion. Marked by public tragedy—those who locked hands and fell from the towers—and the private: those who looked away.

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Talk to the Water Dipper

I heard it fall and then its shuffling in the unburned paper of the last fire. Do you have a story about a chimney and a bird? Because here I am in a forest, and it is just before dark. I was afraid to open the door. The woman who has lost her memory says that she doesn’t like it here, that there is no one or no place to visit. She wishes the furniture weren’t an art piece. She wishes she weren’t always bored. Is there a higher power / there is a higher power reads the plinth of the sculpture on the path, but to me it is too simple a question / answer. In the life of the water dipper, that was probably the only time it would be inside the house of a human, which must appear like a giant trap with upper reaches. Everything must seem square and, thus, wrong. No fly throughs. No under-things and bridges. Nothing to eat either, all jar. But it must have liked the stove door that opened of its own accord to a world beyond all previous measure. What did I mean there? Not in the way it does, mimicking the stream. A myth—but that’s the rub, something...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Also by Melissa Kwasny
• Dedication
• I.
• II.
• III.
• IV.
• V.
• VI.
• Copyright Page