I have left myself out
though I understand
come spring
such grammar tricks
will no longer work
Dear Seth
Yesterday was Thanksgiving
and for you Hanukkah
At dinner
with acquaintances my joke
about terminal illness did not go over well
and the small spark I’d hoped to kindle
in myself went dark
Of the many
things I miss about your company
today most keenly I think
of us laughing at death
knowing
and not minding that death laughs back
Dear Seth
I love your long-standing appreciation
for the Voyager mission
whose equipment
is now very old
When I imagine the adolescent you
delivering the science fair spiel
I picture the body as you now
reproduced
at a four-fifths scale
the way they used to paint the child Christ
before looking more carefully
at the actual young
Neil Armstrong died
the same day Voyager finally reached the limit
of our solar system
as you know
Thanks to him we better see
how to go about painting the moon
Dear Seth
I am still thinking about space
For a long time they did not know
if Voyager had crossed the heliopause
and we lived
in the strange interim
of an event perhaps having occurred
in the uncertainty of something
having happened
without knowing what
It is like wondering which body part
has begun to kill us
Chris is very worried
about his eyes
his mismatched pupils
but I think and say they’re probably just fine
Dear Seth
Now Chris is visiting you
in Northampton and the house around
me exists
just one room at a time
Nelson Mandela has died
The radio
can think of little else
You would not believe my pride
at having shoveled the driveway
My shame
when I fail
to start the fire
I am actually
alive inside this mythic air
a child assigns
to the time
before its birth
Were there a proverb for this week
it’d go a little like
He who lives
inside a snowglobe always drowns
Dear Seth
Watching Frances Ha the other night
I fell into the panic of my old New York life
with all its drinking
and so little money
Representations of debt terrify me more
than those of sickness
I would love to draft a chart
of my heart rate when reading Madame Bovary
Last night success in building the fire
and Chris has come home happy
as I knew
you would make him
The first night he ate
fried chicken and you ordered pork chops
and these are real plates of food
that make me feel strong and alive
If only
I could think as tenderly of myself
as I do of you and of my former selves!
but this is not the case
and therefore not a part
of the everything that we still call the world
like the soot on my hands
the voice on the air
or the desk where you sit again today
Dear Seth
I was going to say the alphabet
is perfect but I think I mean sufficient
which is better
is enough
In my sleep I did something to my back
and here at 5 am I am up
trying to think
of a word
that brings nothing else to mind
Dear Seth
We are in the new year now
hello
In the last days of the old one
the doctor told us hard news
and my mind excluded
most other thoughts
so when the idea
to make that joke about your book came to me
I was grateful for the visit
And it’s true that almost nothing is better
than the movies
Philomena American Hustle
or a series is good
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
On New Year’s Eve a new test told us
we’d all probably be okay
I did not know
when I began I’d fill these poems
with so much information
which saturates
my life
Some people see information
as that which cannot be predicted
the break
in the pattern
It is still snowing
I’d like to know how this year
will break me
Dear Seth
I have been thinking
about the department stores
of our previous century
how they enchanted us
with stacks of televisions broadcasting
novel images of ourselves
walking through the store
I would wave and jump
I’d never heard of nonchalance
but now there is no place
that does not see you
and we have learned to act naturally
all the time
It’s not that we forget
the camera’s there
It’s that we struggle
to recall anything else
Dear Seth
Chris has a terrible cold
and is still sleeping
while I awoke
stupidly early once again
I am dissatisfied
and therefore with myself
Today I think I’ll take down
the pine wreathes
and garlands
I will finish up shoveling the drive
Tomorrow the baby hits the size
of a banana
which reminds me
to buy some for Chris
(He is crazy for bananas)
I want them to make him feel well
Dear Seth
Last night we tried to go see Her
but after dinner the snow sent us home
and here
before dawn I am up thinking of how much
you love the Celtics and Moby Dick
One August we ate
birthday cake in Herman Melville’s barn
Your stomach
is as weak as your heart is steadfast
Henri Bergson says the comic stems
from a certain absent-mindedness
At your house
when we would watch a game
I’d amuse myself pretending to forget
there was a ball
but your understanding
travels broader
and more deeply
You read the bright screen
as a whale would read the swells
Where I see a general blur you see particular shapes
and this is why the game to you must be called tragic
It is too early to go find regular paper
so I am writing this
on the back of a letter
from BlueCross
BlueShield
No action is required on your part
Poem for Bill Cassidy
Already I have confessed
the whole alphabet
under my own duress
I came back again to try
a lamentation
perhaps to put out
a match on my wet tongue
It goes out and I
do not go with it
There are marks
I find hard to erase
▴
But think how grand it would be
to glide as casual as the sun!
shining
light in mild trapezoids along
the floor or hill
For that kind of work I’d need
the most expensive dresses
Among this and that I also lack money
So I will occupy myself
with keeping bees
or whatever
Is there a name that makes honey
I will write it
I don’t care
I’ve done worse
▴
Last night apparently a sunset
I missed
Instead I received some light instruction
Imagine pink imagine pink imagine orange
I can pronounce it
but I do not understand
How do you say over
How do you say again
They put the sun back
in the ocean where it’s kept
▴
I will consider this milk
I mean confess it
I’ll spit it out
▴
A green thought or a mind of winter
Had I either one I’d gladly put it out
I swear I’d plate it!
But I have only
this green tongue this wet mouth
There’s no detaching them
and look it’s back
the sun
▴
You know how indigo
the word
threatens always to tear off
into its pieces
When you die
that’s the first thing to go
I am guessing
You’d have to ask Bill
Hey Bill
where you are
do you see letters
How long do we wait before we say
there’s no reply
given how slowly
these black words will drift to reach him
given all this thick light
given how time
Notes and Acknowledgments
The epigraph to this book is taken from the second poem in W. S. Graham’s sequence, “What Is the Language Using Us For?”
“Disintegration Loop 1.1”
I wrote this poem over several weeks, waking each morning and playing William Basinski’s video of lower Manhattan, recorded during the last hour of daylight on September 11, 2001. The accompanying music is a “decaying pastoral loop Basinski … recorded in August 2001.” While the music and video played across the room, I sat in a chair with my paper and wrote for the full hour. Or rather, I sat for an hour and wrote when it occurred to me to do so. The poem is full of lines and ideas from friends and books, for whom and which I am very grateful.
Thank you, Jess Fjeld, for telling me about looping and conflict resolution.
Thank you, Robert Kaplan, for introducing me to the history of zero.
Thank you, M. NourbeSe Philip, for creating Zong!, and thank you, Cathy Park Hong, for alerting me to its existence.
Thank you, Jen Bervin, for catching “loss / loss” in your Nets.
Thank you, Sylvia Plath, for the “light of the mind, cold and planetary.”
Thank you, William Carlos Williams, for seeing “the bomb is a flower.”
Thank you, Wallace Stevens, for placing that jar.
Thank you, Matvei Yankelevich, for bringing Alexander Vvedensky’s minutes and confusion into English.
Thank you, Alvin Lucier, for sitting in a room.
Thank you, Ted Hughes, for remaking Ovid’s tale of Echo and Narcissus.
Thank you, Anne Sexton, for watching “the lights copying themselves, / all neoned and strobe-hearted.”
Thank you, William Shakespeare, for “all our yesterdays.”
Thank you, Dana Inez, for reminding me of the geometric definition of “center.”
More than anything, thank you, William Basinski, for your music.
“Vernon Street”
According to the March 10, 1896, notebook entry of Alexander Graham Bell, the first words to be spoken and understood over the telephone were in fact “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.”
“Elegy for Neil Armstrong”
This poem was created by erasing a transcript of communications between mission control, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin during the first moon landing. I found the transcript in Things Working, a book in the Penguin English Project published in 1970 and edited by Penny Blackie. As here, in the original pages the text appeared in white against a black background.
“How Long Is the Heliopause”
“We’re so happy our paths have crossed” quotes a box of Nature’s Path Organic Heritage Flakes I bought and then ate.
“They say it is hard to believe / that when robots are taking pictures // of Titan’s orange ethane lakes / poets still insist on writing about their divorces” refers to one of Christian Bök’s tweets from September 8, 2012. Many of his tweets begin with the word “they.”
The lines about “The cat who may be alive / or may be dead” are based on my misunderstanding of the philosopher David Lewis’s paper, “How Many Lives Has Schrodinger’s Cat?” as explained to me by the poet-philosopher Larisa Svirsky.
“Some Glamorous Country”
The title of this poem borrows from Frank O’Hara’s “Ave Maria.”
“Keep in Shape”
This poem refers to a passage in the New Testament (John 8:1–8), in which Jesus writes on the ground of a temple. It is the only story of him writing instead of speaking aloud. The King James translation renders it thus:
Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.
And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.
And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,
They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.
Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?
This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
“Poem for Bill Cassidy”
Bill Cassidy was a poet and my friend. He died in 2011.
“A green thought” belongs to Andrew Marvell.
The “mind of winter” and the “green tongue” belong to Wallace Stevens.
▴
Thank you to everyone mentioned above, as well as to Michele Christle, Christopher DeWeese, Lisa Olstein, Emily Pettit, and Suzanna Tamminen, for whose careful reading I am grateful.
Thanks also to the editors of the following journals, where some of these poems first appeared: Barrelhouse, Better, Burnside Review, Colorado Review, Everyday Genius, Fanzine, LIT, Mead, Octopus, and Poetry.
Thank you to Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Emily Pettit, Guy Pettit, and Dara Wier at Factory Hollow Press, for publishing some of these poems in the chapbook Private Party.
Thank you to Christopher Louvet at Floating Wolf Quarterly for publishing Dear Seth as an e-chapbook.
▪ Hea
ther Christle is the author of three previous poetry collections. She has taught writing at Antioch College, Sarah Lawrence College, Emory University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she received her MFA. A native of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she now lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she is writing a book about crying.