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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819571014 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/08/2012 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 180 |
| Sales rank: | 926,649 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
PART I TOPOI
TO SEE THE EARTH BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD
People are grabbing at the chance to see the earth before the end of the world,
the world's death piece by piece each longer than we.
Some endings of the world overlap our lived time, skidding for generations to the crash scene of species extinction the five minutes it takes for the plane to fall,
the mile ago it takes to stop the train,
the small bay to coast the liner into the ground,
the line of title to a nation until the land dies,
the continent uninhabitable.
That very subtlety of time between
large and small Media note people chasing glaciers
in retreat up their valleys and the speed ...
watched ice was speed made invisible,
now — it's days, and a few feet further away,
a subtle collapse of time between large
and our small human extinction.
If I have a table at this event, mine bears an ice sculpture.
Of whatever loss it is it lasts as long as ice does until it disappears into its polar white and melts and the ground beneath it, into vapor,
into air. All that once chased us and we chased to a balance chasing back, tooth for spear,
knife for claw,
locks us in this grip
we just now see
our own lives taken by taking them out. Hunting the bear,
we hunt the glacier with the changes come
of that choice.
Topoi
1. MORNING
The year and its
as like as eggs,
the days
in their crates of season
we break open
and the yolk
of fresh sun we scramble
the runny light into
a firm
break
of the night's winter
helping of the fast.
* * *
Yellow dishes—
forsythia
set out for the early
meal of season—
sit the house yards
the town
parks down together
to this spring as
to a table
all set
in order just
So
good to see
you and
your way found
back.
* * *
The arriving coats of smell
are hung in the air, butt-smacked and
oiled babies of moment;
and years of taste as touch
hug the senses
to the living;
sweet sour bitter salty
some never experienced
again, the gloved fingers
of bananas so briefly kissed
with ripeness; fruit,
grip-shaped thought
brought to the tongue,
the finished taste
of words, an aftertaste
of silence, the morning glories we haven't tasted yet
* * *
life, as lasting as any one
sense, a taste
a sight, an orange mix
of kiss with sweetness
for the moment
it exists, finishes and
is swallowed, is also those
who finish hungry or starve
to death which swallows;
the final stage of rattlesnake bite
is yellow vision,
light, then you both go out.
Fear, to the tongue, is metallic: I tasted
a copper penny it could have been
a one-time and final, incomparable
—How does life taste
to one condemned
in that cup this morning? —
flash of a taste;
a touch's backbeat, that single shake
in the whole
coital dance that whiff of?
a one-time and final taste
taste this morning
2. DEEP TIME
Where trees are a sky
whose spider web
radio antennas?
search receives
the rhythmic static
of cicadas,
a song arrives
that died leaving
seventeen years ago.
Deep cumulus leaves—
whose cloud and Milky Way
are green,
and heard but unseen
insect star births
have yet to reach us from —
refract the sun
-light filtered
through to brilliant spiked
explosions of nova
in this hiss
that one
day our own
insect sun will make
in deep time into deepsong.
3. PLANETARIUM
A child already an old man sits in a rocking chair in the yard facing into the shadow side of four elms down the end of the block.
He's heard but hears them for the first time as the cicadas he's looking for just one bowing its wings with its legs as he's been told they do he wants to see.
The sun lowering on the opposite side of the trees pierces through burning open holes in spaces brilliant prismatic explosions.
He thinks this is how cicadas? sound speakers look hooked up to the sky through the trees refractive, light show to the music & this evening is their show
the cataclysmic novas nebulae
4. LUNAR ECLIPSE
You?ve seen only a planed circle of moon,
the white wafer; the low sky's flat penny grow into that dime, flipped in the turn taken by the earth,
until you see what's won from behind its veil of brightness by the lunar eclipse
a red marble,
a pinball of blood and it's your shot, a ball of red clay before its pinch into a bowl,
what I want to say and its look that far away from it.
I want to say it suddenly turns three dimensional with shadow shaded in at the drawn earth-curtain's darkening;
and that darkness makes shape-informed light clearer rounding out midnight, and moon,
once it is that lighted ball,
falls above a night now floored with depth so dark above you you can feel the feet and meter fill with time. New Years confetti each speck's fall a galaxy ago back into space.
Space back into space restored beneath the moon to here in the shading of eclipse. The distances.
We have to feel the spatial in what we see to see clearly the eye measure in hands and feet;
as when we kiss,
distance disappears, our eyes close,
and we see bodily
in raised detail a measure deepen into our world in each other. And what we are in the shadow the world makes of our love, by this earth shine, we see
ourselves whole, see in whole perspective.
5. TOPOI
The plane begins its descent into Newark from the west at the Delaware Water Gap; the whole width of the state of New Jersey is the base of a triangle underlying that approach to its point.
Geography test, problem off the wall to the ground, whole highway systems unfold again below, the maps we rode. But at what point did we become so familiar with
such long perspective we could look down and recognize the pile of Denver by the drop off and crumble of the plate up into the Rockies,
or say That's Detroit! by the link of lakes by
Lake St. Clair some thirty-thousand feet above Lake Erie while just barely spotting Huron on the horizon?
Some earlier hunter had a similar picture in his head for getting around, and what he saw seems map his feet figured what a Boeing 757
picks up and puts down pacing off
my passing through the world by air.
But we've seen the ground ball up into one step and stand on nothing else, our footing in the vacuum, diminished sky of solar space.
Yet we haven't seen again his vision, haven't yet dreamt from it even such map as he had hunted by; we haven't seen answered from that garden's gazing ball whether there is direction after all the dream-lines
have been hunted to circumference. Like trained bear dancing on a circus ball, we look down, our feet in a step from which there is no step off,
this footprint all of step ever taken.
The hunted step, kept far and fast enough away from the hunter to keep the distance of its life,
shortens to none between them or is that
shit outcome stepped in, become their one,
in perspective, step from which there is no step out of.
In that sense of 'the surface over which a phenomenon exists,' the earth is the footprint of life.
Gaia's gravity-swayed steps take on orbit,
we in the tropic of balance, in a basket on her head, a blue wrap of sky, sun ripens the thin rind of the plane to home.
Sweet fruit of the journey, of all journey,
fruit of all step home is the sweet fruit that is all of step that is ever taken.
The earth is all of step ever taken by most of us, we think; but the aisles of air we walk about with the seatbelt sign off hang off our backs angel's wing or motion
lines such as drawn in cartoons or the tesseract of four dimensions. Cube sunk in a square of space,
sunk in a space of time. Our cubed world worn as a helmet among
strung dimensions far distant enough to see the ball that all our ways are woven from:
sand, the lens grinder's patient hand, sore elbow, head in the stars, he looks down at his feet. Sunk in time,
the footprint of life is death, the grave there is no step out of, the compost earth.
The earth is the footprint of life.
6. MANY LOCATIONS
Many locations now are ahead of humanly possible without conduct through a technology;
we live not yet caught up with ourselves, the landings offset by foot pace their space-time for ground transportation.
Unlike stars whose fact is a presumption of departure or arrival other than in lived light, we're less than when we are.
We?re dated within histories of make in order to be made whole;
we body age in our times? prosthesis of achievement as our time;
as our years, our state's moment,
a birth condition, enlarges or wastes us,
the long sentenced swing, instantaneous.
7. THE $$-MEN
The bus as technological magic shoes, the plane, a flying suit not in the style of tights and cape, more comfortable,
but shared, like the chevron of flying geese shares in that wake the one at the point makes;
we support our super powers flapping almost in unison, our money down.
8.
The instant though, is ours: Euclidean point without space, taking place as from.
If it were location, anything there is not the point.—It is
position in relation more to other yet-positions more
one that is everywhere nowhere until pointed out: we have no point until we have to
see say where how far another is to or from us
continuously renewed: Call me.
The call made is also in its way how point also has to be limited
& in limiting ... challenged ...
What are you doing?.....
always in process; point
is lived.
9. OLD DEPENDENCY
Sun-like,
a satellite passes overhead between the least imperious hours
of 2 and 5 am.
A signal picked up from Colorado beams a setting for the time
in Chicago back to earth.
My watch sits meditating, on the sill,
faces out the window at tonight's
radio sky.
It is built for a connection I am not that it passes on when I aim at it
my time pickup
eye the set I need; and off the knees of its clasp wristband folded underneath,
a timing sun's worshipper—
since I?ve forgotten how the sunrise set men's cycles — listens to its crystal
break time down,
its atom tune the seconds ... Our body's band to the watched face of the sun,
who tells the wake and sleep,
comes in the style of our skin. That close a melanin-melatonin connection. Yet here's an inorganic
jewelry
connecting a crystal oscillation through a radio wave in orbit to
setting itself to set my day.
Gemstone cut music on my arm as if intravenous, cesium vibration, piped
aortal
broadcast, drum hour to my heart,
let this renew an old interpretation
how we could talk
to rock, listen to plants explain in the stomach what membranous
exchange
is the dawn star with ear of corn;
the watch, its passage, and waking flesh working to live in time.
10. PROTO-PYRAMID FIGURE
Re-noticing the lines of the furrows he had plowed each the same space apart
nearing together on the other side of the field he felt the figure
of the eye through a road drawing away perspective disappear to not yet seen
those lines of the ground his bargain for their food with time kept uncrossed:
he noticed their opposite come here At the end of the day out of the clouds
The furrowed light turned over dark lined up and came together in the blue
behind a field of sky he could see across see the road
of where things come from the mountain to the sky they must go up and down
11. WHAT WORD
The fat spoiled cat of fish, the carp, pampered in the garden pool, surfaces: a bubble in the level lines of a purr.
The mirror water vibrates: the mouth's breath,
a spoken surface as thought, a soundless word balloon of concentration breaks.
The spoken world rubs against you to own you as,
as the cat does, one of it. A placement.
Your smile, your pool of sight touched awake.
* * *
The wakened world's submarines
—our ideologies? spoiled fish —
lift their scale-less indulgences
that our intelligence lays on the tongue of the silence of death, this dragon's breath freshener of nuclear fire —
And one of these lozenges, we find out this morning, may lie open at the bottom of the sea smashed burst bubble of our technological meditations;
and all that is surfacing may be our leviathan of threat to each other we recognize — this caught breath almost a silent language among us.
* * *
And what has the bubble burst out with on its breath? The wakened world.
All word of the living as any longer one of
it is tethered to this brought to the surface,
mouthed breath-clapper in a metal bell,
like the earth's resuscitant bubble of atmosphere,
balling yarn of the planet's one held breath rolled ?round in as spoiling a lap of orbit as any swaddled garden pool wove of our meditations and sun-like surfacing thought.
And the burst bubble of that concentration? —
What is the open it touches against us?
What claim of we as one of do the dead bring up even lifted in a joined arms of states?
Bast, the feline brush by of that cartouche of breath is the hope of life sucked back into the born flesh.
word bubble breath break that wakens ... and we would rise
...
All connection to us is made surface to surface:
microscopic through into,
telescopic out; matter surfaces as some tympanic resonance, word snares on breath, the touch on press
...
The pool of a dead face doesn't stir.
There is no longer even a level rise or fall of balance.
The oceans of the time men don't exist include only a drop that we do and see
above them another ocean's spray of stars.
WE LOOK AT THE WORLD TO SEE THE EARTH
We look at the world to see the earth,
at the silver, pedestal-ed globe to see the grounds,
we see what we?ve done with it, what it has to do with, we see our face bent to a surface;
but what of the world is seen in looking at the earth any more than the world's measure of minute to a rock looking, but seeing gets a return begets return gets returned:
the rivers come back, the salmon
We look upon the world to see ourselves in the brief moment that we are of the earth
a small fern in a crevice of the cliff face
to see ourselves in the brief moment that we are of the earth
to see the earth before the end of the world
the world is mortality, the earth goes beyond us is the ours of cosmos is our hour of cosmos
PART II THE WORLD, THEN
ABOUT WHAT's THIS
That railroad man from the song where his head was laid
'neath the drivin' wheel
'n his body never was found
stood up, or rather, bodiless,
seemed to levitate
with the driving wheel balanced on the top of his head like a hat, a plate —
"What's this all about?" I asked.
— or an aureole, a glory.
"What if we need a new technology for glory?" he said, "—not the old smoking weeds and blood sacrifice ... and hearing voices in them. More sense
than I make." about what's this all about. Actually working.
The World, Then
The world then was made up of the same pieces that turned into what we have now,
pieces the same that nowhere took any of what then I thought was the world and world to come that came
about: A now. I don't know what I thought that put the wrecks of the past back in effect.
as if in progress back in service. We think somewhere between right and understanding
we never supposed there'd be this wrong. About this.
...
Facing up to the night sky is way off is a vertigo of falling up off the face of
not so much the earth's off into space as off any hold that was ourselves together in what balance lasting in the stars.
See
through the bore column of straight up to the end of the stars —
That we could be lost that deeply that we could lose all of thus far by this far our moment here's far
off.
...
We see the farther away the more distant as the deeper into time: backwards up to here how far come.
but time's direction farther equal this far goes through town its whistle is this minute crossing and its wall of boxcar all our view.
That lonesome whistle silence of
stars through here sees this—
how you pull this minute of your sleeve off inside out then reach in the past pull the future out again, in these two distances, your same unthinking arm of the galaxy through time.
Undoing or one motion through The Milky Way folding its complexity? The dark drawer.
It's over our head But (a small thing) lose your balance, you fall into that dark shirt never pulled off your head.
...
A haze you can't see by the sky bright sunny day has —
only by distance. See light apotheosize its pale up horizon. the zenith's white
depth lit. But we have on and beyond our hands to the sides a day narrowing to
the density of point and penciled vanishing the old "thin air" thickened dark accumulates aerial perspective.
the view through the atmosphere is trickier on the slant as it sights through the bend of the earth.
the curve collected layers deepen the heavens' obscurant nothing of nothing there.
We'll trip over the mirage as easily a distance as over something here in this dark
...
He wore his glasses
as if bags beneath his eyes were
stuffed with
his reflection of the lines and the shown light
at just the right angle
on them in them
but the point where what is written about
lies
where whole heavens fall into
question in his eyes
Excerpted from "To See the Earth"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Ed Roberson.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
<P>TOPOI<BR>To See the Earth Before the End of the World<BR>Topoi<BR>Morning<BR>Deep Time<BR>Planetarium<BR>Lunar Eclipse<BR>Topoi<BR>Many Locations<BR>The $$-Men<BR>The instant though, is ours<BR>Old Dependency<BR>Proto-pyramid Figure<BR>What Word<BR>We look at the world to see the earth<BR>THE WORLD, THEN<BR>About What's This<BR>The World, Then<BR>The world then<BR>Facing up to<BR>We see the farther away<BR>A haze we can't see by the sky<BR>He wore his glasses<BR>The wall stores<BR>As if all physical display were not that<BR>For all the questions<BR>help / answered with<BR>More than a few seconds after<BR>Teapot Boiling, How to Begin the Day<BR>a clay pot arrives at the table<BR>Clock death on every corner<BR>A wall turned in the fever sun<BR>The flies cleaning their multiple eye<BR>the split in the head<BR>With bushes for thick glasses / But we can see<BR>A thin line drawn on the morning<BR>"There are things that I would otherwise..."<BR>Distance works<BR>spiral galaxies<BR>the level/ some people<BR>A swaying path<BR>The red spot on two mating cranes<BR>Stopped against<BR>The lathe that turns the necks<BR>A cloud is whatever it is<BR>A lamp's fingers<BR>Its 93 million miles •Inside our moment<BR>CHROMATIC SEQUENCES<BR>Chromatic Sequences<BR>Form in early movies – What Color<BR>we were not seeing movement – about the trees bending<BR>Chromatic Spatiality – the spaces of color<BR>1948: Art and Third Grade – not in the Folkways Collection<BR>Darkly<BR>The Metaphor of Impressionism – your skin<BR>advances in latitude – The still green latitude<BR>What the Tree Took, On the Table<BR>Drawing On What is There<BR>Question to the Director<BR>Architectural Drawing<BR>Architectural Program – travel structure<BR>The building is up<BR>the list of if<BR>Profit Fulfilled<BR>Man with Three Degrees •PLAYGROUND AND PARKS DEPARTMENT MUSIC<BR>Egg Gatherers<BR>War Song, Child's Flute<BR>This Year<BR>Nothing New<BR>New World Orchestra<BR>Song<BR>New World Orchestra in the Market of the Weavers<BR>American Jazz Quartet<BR>piano: In the Lobby<BR>bass: Urban Specific<BR>sax: Pick Him Up<BR>drums: Tithes for Charity<BR>Summer boats, migrating<BR>Sight Read on a Couple Stars<BR>(Ring!...)<BR>Transit Authority<BR>Nine Chicago Poems<BR>Flock Life<BR>Nolan, Riding the Bullet Train<BR>Relative Time<BR>Gauntlet<BR>All At Once<BR>Machinery<BR>Centripetal Force<BR>On the Sparrow: No Blame<BR>Sfumato<BR>Playground and Parks Department Music<BR>OF THE EARTH<BR>A Low Bank of Cloud<BR>Watching for the Ancestors<BR>Of The Earth<BR>Song to Anubis<BR>Road Ikon<BR>Run<BR>The Heavens<BR>The Original Deed<BR>Chorus<BR>Tribal Tag<BR>Boy God Quetzalcoatl Water Shape Stood<BR>Last of the Bush Baths<BR>As a tool of the landscape… / (staying in school)<BR>Feast of the Missing<BR>Imponderable Thirst<BR>Psalm (a line-singing of)<BR>Flight Record<BR>At the Top of the Chain<BR>The Bird That Walks on Lily Pads<BR>Earthenware<BR>As at the Far Edge of Circling<BR>A Slim Volume Taken into the Provinces<BR>Empty Sky</P>What People are Saying About This
“Ed Roberson’s labyrinthine, syntactically double-jointed lines work at a nervous, disconsolate pitch, peculiar insight and curious angle at the forefront of the tutorage they bring. His most compendious volume to date perhaps and certainly true to its title, To See the Earth Before the End of the World moves in many directions, often all at once, a 360-degree jitterbug waltz of a book.”
"Ed Roberson's labyrinthine, syntactically double-jointed lines work at a nervous, disconsolate pitch, peculiar insight and curious angle at the forefront of the tutorage they bring. His most compendious volume to date perhaps and certainly true to its title, To See the Earth Before the End of the World moves in many directions, often all at once, a 360-degree jitterbug waltz of a book."—Nathaniel Mackey, author of Splay Anthem
"Ed Roberson's labyrinthine, syntactically double-jointed lines work at a nervous, disconsolate pitch, peculiar insight and curious angle at the forefront of the tutorage they bring. His most compendious volume to date perhaps and certainly true to its title, To See the Earth Before the End of the World moves in many directions, often all at once, a 360-degree jitterbug waltz of a book."—Nathaniel Mackey, author of Splay Anthem
"In this dreamy collection, human features stand out as distinct then blend into the nature of the world surrounding them. We can't always tell plant from animal from mineral, and Roberson reminds us that in the end, as in poetry, such distinctions are moot."—Camille T. Dungy, author of Trophic Cascade
“In this dreamy collection, human features stand out as distinct then blend into the nature of the world surrounding them. We can’t always tell plant from animal from mineral, and Roberson reminds us that in the end, as in poetry, such distinctions are moot.”