Anger a way of holding on. When contact or reconciliation does not work anger becomes the stand in. The person that we are angry with is alive to us still, even if they are no longer living. In this way letting go of the anger does not mean giving up on an injustice. It means accepting the way things are. There is so much I don’t want to be. So much that I resist. Turning from anger—I don’t want to perform this here.
Okay being broken. I wait until the day is almost done to write that. The child, the parent, and the adult: the child demands, the parent forbids, and the adult decides. Unless I am remembering that incorrectly.
To judge and to blame is neither the province of the student or the master. When anger blossoms it is a return in its own way.
Close in anger. When he speaks I often become angry. And it is not because of anything he has done or said to me. It is because he reminds me of someone I was once close to—and via his speech I am returned to them.
HAVING IT REALLY GOOD
I want to write a poem called “Having It Really Good” about having it really good
and getting caught in it like webbing—how I deflected whatever you said—
at the end that’s how we talked, as if playing a game of tennis
a careful game between two people who couldn’t figure out a way to get off the court
now I want to recognize what belongs to me and what does not, want not to move forward
slashing defensively at every advance before I even know where it is going
want to cultivate openness want to imagine a light, an exchange—
only after it ended could I ever imagine it
during I was too afraid to know that I was, now I am stubborn—
the game was never that careful—in fact I think we hurt each other
more than is usual—we were so frustrated, knowing our ideal
angry that the other took it from us—having it really
full stop, holding onto it—believing in what it was
not what it could be
or was not
LYING LOW
Sweep, fold—lying low
brings surprising fortune
after it happened I stayed up north
did not tell the group chat
fried discard in skillet
sourdough killed in the freezer
at Christmas tried to revive it
fed it flour at regular intervals
if you consult the I Ching often
eventually you get your answer
following for dishonourable reasons
becomes the path is strewn with blessings
it rose, at most, a centimetre
by then I had given up
dishes multiply with surprising haste
I am only flipping coins
I MISS EVENTS
after you left the reading a woman
turned back to us
(by chance I was standing closest)
& accused you of stealing
the coat—she’d had the same, disappeared once
it came from a boutique in Roncesvalles
little known
(few could afford to)
her favourite,
beloved statement she’d thrown once
on a bed and forgotten about
& that night in Kensington
it had returned on the wing of the thief
your innocence could not enter her
convinced no poet (or friend of one)
could afford it—now it walked out again
& I was stuck explaining
that it had never come
AFTER LEVINE
What does it mean to write
a poem that is angry? Little fox
raising a stone to his head-height
threatening lords and ladies
on the path. This morning I rose
into a feeling, a kind of dampness
despite the nice weather, a cold
dark cloth draped over my head,
stuffed in my guts. Last night,
in haste, I pulled open a bag
of chamomile, spilled its seeds
over my cup, drank it anyway,
without filter. Nothing angry there.
Except my haste was to avoid
another feeling. I knew what
I was brewing up. Knew what
was coming, or wasn’t. What
would not. Oh to feel as clear
and sharp and sure as I felt
overlooking the old streetcars,
certain it was a crime to be made
to clean up a mess that wasn’t
mine—my earliest memory
a toddler’s anger, mildly Byronic
I sometimes think—the self-
importance, someone who doesn’t
know the world is any bigger
than what he is able to see. Doesn’t
understand that the injustice
doesn’t extend beyond his self
DOMOVOI
Helpless I watch the sun trace
across the asphalt—my voice speaks
when they are sleeping—
they do not know why I beg for bread
and salt—what feelings
are mine and what belongs to them—
when I arrived it was without
blood of chicken or goat—they did not sprinkle
the four corners of this one bedroom—
didn’t speak my name or say their prayers—
let the dog disturb me in his haste
to shout at the glass—he is
the only one who knows—snarling,
suspicious—the fur raised
around his slim neck—should feel
instead weight beyond cunning—terror—
what he cannot know—what,
if abused,
could destroy him. Sometimes pain is felt
in one place but found elsewhere—
sometimes the sun when it moves
becomes something living
I WILL GO WITH YOU AND I WILL HOLD YOUR HAND
to reset I used to go to the art gallery, search for a painting that would arrest
no specific feeling—I wanted to be either surprised or held
I’d carry a little notebook with me and sometimes leave my phone at home
or else mostly ignore it or only take pictures—now M
wants to go to the art gallery. we all do. I told her this afternoon
that I was running towards the blue, an imagined blue screen that hung in front of me
like something I would never reach—the Aegean, I said, mourning
the dead recast as heroes, or not heroes exactly but figures of tragedy, ancient
consequence, betrayed mores—I’d downloaded the audio from a movie that I’d watched
the previous night, listened to it with headphones—she said in her next message
that my voice sounded different than it did elsewhere—
I liked what she said, more alive to itself, something like that—while she searched
for the word I thought immediately and without hesitation it was “open”
something that in this quarantine I have sometimes struggled to do—
tonight I read a book that surprised me, then I got out of bed to fulfill a promise
I kept making and breaking—to smoke weed on the back deck
let myself feel or concentrate on the action—to take deep and slow breaths
back in bed a sound is coming out of my throat
except it is noiseless—full and round and like a kiss on the neck
Susan Stewart: “in listening I am listening to the material history
your connection to all who have been impressed upon you
living or dead, the voice as with the eyes holds the life
of the self”—as we move from one app to another you say
imagine this is the part where I am inching my chair
a little closer, ordering dessert—I have become used to
pacing my apartment, dictating to some future version
of yourself—maybe like me you play the voice notes several times
both because they are long and because it is easy
to get lost in the trail of your materiality, caught
in your impressions’ grooves—and once sent rarely go back
as if what is before us is all that is living, what will be caught
and rendered and cut off, mingled with the sound of your dogs
coughing, the streetcar, music playing gently in another room—
I know these rooms now—the kitchen, the red room, and
the bed—Stewart again: “the voice in poetry is the voice
of the lover”—she tells a story about a man who smashes rocks
on the weekend (amateur geologist) and gases butterflies
in cyanide, an unknowing tribute to his grandmother’s lover
who in a concentration camp broke rocks and died
by gas—how we return to what we don’t even know
—what is yours and what doesn’t belong to you—at a funeral
a distant uncle or an older second cousin, this was eight or nine
years ago, said my voice was like that of a doctor, which I took
to mean: cold, circling—a history of this—but now realize
he didn’t specify—a voice can mean many things—who did
I love, how did it come to me, what was impressed, what was I
wrestling with, what did it mean, and what do you hear now
A GEOGRAPHY
meditating felt like I was pushing through sludge—some final
resistance, some difficulty—held in the body but not in the brain, or
in the brain but bodily—passing their house, desire to explain—
what needs to be explained?—light of the sun on the facing buildings,
neighbours passing in and out, with groceries—on the front lawn a sign
free, cat deceased—easier to throw out than have to speak
to the street, to keep record—what needs to be explained, what needs to
illuminated, what needs to be brought—what is the new responsibility,
what is carried—how can I be sure that what is called up in me is only
muscles or footsteps, vibrations and jarring—something apart from love
apart from desire, apart from need? know now I’m drawing a boundary:
at the conclusion of this poem whatever it is will be released
