A milestone publication of the late Christopher Gilbert's poetry, with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes
Lord, the anguish of my Black block rises up in me
like a grief. My only chance to go beyond being breach—
to resist being quelled as a bit of inner city entropy—
is to speak up for the public which has birthed me.
To build this language house. To make this case. Create.
This loving which lives outside time. Lord, this is time.
—from "Turning into Dwelling"
Christopher Gilbert's award-winning Across the Mutual Landscape has become an underground classic of contemporary American poetry. Now reissued and presented with Gilbert's never-before-published last manuscript written before his death in 2007, Turning into Dwelling offers new readers the original music and vision of one of our most inventive poets.
A milestone publication of the late Christopher Gilbert's poetry, with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes
Lord, the anguish of my Black block rises up in me
like a grief. My only chance to go beyond being breach—
to resist being quelled as a bit of inner city entropy—
is to speak up for the public which has birthed me.
To build this language house. To make this case. Create.
This loving which lives outside time. Lord, this is time.
—from "Turning into Dwelling"
Christopher Gilbert's award-winning Across the Mutual Landscape has become an underground classic of contemporary American poetry. Now reissued and presented with Gilbert's never-before-published last manuscript written before his death in 2007, Turning into Dwelling offers new readers the original music and vision of one of our most inventive poets.
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Overview
A milestone publication of the late Christopher Gilbert's poetry, with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes
Lord, the anguish of my Black block rises up in me
like a grief. My only chance to go beyond being breach—
to resist being quelled as a bit of inner city entropy—
is to speak up for the public which has birthed me.
To build this language house. To make this case. Create.
This loving which lives outside time. Lord, this is time.
—from "Turning into Dwelling"
Christopher Gilbert's award-winning Across the Mutual Landscape has become an underground classic of contemporary American poetry. Now reissued and presented with Gilbert's never-before-published last manuscript written before his death in 2007, Turning into Dwelling offers new readers the original music and vision of one of our most inventive poets.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555979065 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 07/07/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Turning into Dwelling
Poems
By Christopher Gilbert
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2015 Estate of Christopher Gilbert IntroductionAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-906-5
CHAPTER 1
This Bridge Across
A moment comes to me
and it's a lot like the dead
who get in the way sometimes
hanging around, with their ranks
growing bigger by the second
and the game of tag they play
claiming whoever happens by.
I try to put them off
but the space between us
is like a country growing closer
which has a language I know
more and more of me is
growing up inside of, and
the clincher is the nothing
for me to do inside here
except to face my dead
as the spirits they are,
find the parts of me in them —
call them back with my words.
Ancestor worship or prayer?
It's a kind of getting by —
an extension of living
beyond my self my people taught me,
and each moment is a boundary
I will throw this bridge across.
I. FIRE GOTTEN BRIGHTER
Resonance
In a back room
upstairs crouched over crystal
set, the dark headphones a cap
worn to finish the circuit.
Touching the quartz, a wave
would roll its clear tongue
against the windows, the dark
midwest faces came looking into —
spaces struck deep in the bone.
And I pulled the cat's whisker,
rolled the coil in hope,
from my hands a phoenix fluttered —
the lid of teenage body
a throbbing shell at sea.
Listening, I could hear
the whole Black house was music;
my brother playing Wes Montgomery downstairs
on the turntable, a lost double
octave rolling round through the air.
Pushing
Me and my brother would jump off the porch
mornings for a better view of the cars
that raced around the corner up Olds Ave.,
naming the make and year; this was '58
and his voice still young enough to wait for
how I'd say the names right to the air.
Cold mornings in Lansing we'd stop the mile
to school in the high-priced grocery nearly there
and the owner, maybe a decent White man
whose heavy dark hair and far Lebanese look
had caught too many kids at his candy,
would follow us down the aisles and say,
"I know what you boys is up to, big-eyed
and such, so you better be going your way —
buy something or else you got to leave."
We'd rattle the pennies we had and go
but coming home buy some nutchews to stay
and try his nerve again, because we didn't steal
but warmed ourselves till Ray would ask me why —
till, like big brothers will, one day I guessed,
"Some things you do because you want to.
Some things you do because you can't."
In what midwest warmth there was we'd laugh,
throw some snowballs high where the sun was
breaking up the clouds.
And, Yes, Those Spiritual Matters
Elegy for Robert Hayden
Whisper it,
"Oh Hayden,
he can do energy."
The words breaking in flower,
the breath on things
wearing bright new clothes.
The drums, bells, gods
in poemstate, speaking —
or hushin' each other.
The goofy dust
he threw in our tea materialized into
a story the class choked on.
Whisper it as he saw it —
intensely, the material part of being
is style.
Summons the Gabriel
half of him, the silent
leftover talk in your head.
Marking Time
for Freda Robertson
Jogging out in the morning
against the few high clouds the blue
sky is a memory like a sheer silk fabric
held so far back I can't see through it —
when I breathe the new air my body
is young all over, a smell reminds
how the two pear trees are white
again, their flowers ephemeral
as the words I recite to pass time
in repetitious wheezed breath —
squirrels, blue jays, downed trees for markers
to say how far I've gone, to be used
in their brief names to crowd my mind
with anything I can count on.
Today as I struggle against the wind
up the hill I watch a small butterfly
wavering with spread wings, and remember
dreaming of my sister who called
last night when I was sleeping, and how
twenty years ago she gave me
from the held darkness of her brown palms
a black butterfly with yellow specks.
What it was she said is immaterial,
there is the gesture though:
and watching a bird overhead fly
past the disk of sun, there is a flaring
shadow fanned down from above
that flickers like a rustled page
with a poem on it; it is that quick
flute darkness of a sister's voice
a brother will hear in his heart
when he's breathing deep enough.
Muriel Rukeyser as Energy
She knows the resonant dark
and she won't be bound.
She goes into.
A darkness has to touch,
and she wants to be exact.
She knows about the burning.
Her history is binary —
one of her hands is ash.
She's always being born.
She doesn't look away;
her sex is coming forward.
Ask her if there's laughter.
The frog in her head is jumping.
Myths arise where it sets.
She rides a flying horse.
It's red; she's stroking its neck.
She praises where it sweats
because the horse is available,
because it is required;
she loves its rascal mouth.
She wants to celebrate.
You know her reaching for words
and arranging them as fruit
knowing there is war,
and cities rising and falling, and
a river flowing with at least one shore.
She is the speed of darkness —
witness her mystery, not her gown.
As she tires, as she dies,
Aphrodite is getting smaller
but she's also burning hotter.
She is the dark one
and she won't be bound.
She
for Carolyn Grace
When she sits at the kitchen table
while she talks her hands seem to balance
in the air faithful at the level of
her words; she is careful what she says.
The morning sun through the window strikes
her skin, shows how the faint lines in her
palms will come to deepen like corduroy
cloth to fit the weather of her age.
Still a young woman, she has to work
the graveyard shift, sleeps what is left,
then wakes to get the kids to school.
It must be morning when she dreams.
Peering into her coffee's surface
she looks back from its depth, her hands
caught holding an implement, a fossil of
her life: Alabama born, feelings
huddled north, these steel cities this cold month,
her dark soul twisting into fingers
whose motion at this brown angle
is the slow fall flight of leaves through time.
And she rises with the gesture, and
the oil in her hands is necessity's
sweat: each hand on the tabletop
a work cloth rubbing the other fine
wooden one.
Time with Stevie Wonder in It
Winter, the empty air, outside
cold shaking its rigid tongue
announcing itself like something stone,
spit out, which is still a story
and a voice to be embraced.
Januaried movements but I hear a tune
carries me home to Lansing.
Always waiting for signs of thaw,
dark nomads getting covered by snow,
our parents would group in the long night —
tune frequencies to the Black stations
blasting out of Memphis, Nashville,
still playing what was played down south —
Ray Charles, Charles Brown, Ruth Brown, Muddy and Wolf.
The tribal families driven north
to neighborhoods stacked like boxes —
to work the auto plants was progress,
to pour steel would buy a car
to drive hope further on down the road.
How could you touch, hear
or be alive; how could anybody
wearing our habits, quiet Protestant
heads aimed up to some future?
This was our rule following —
buy at J.C. Penney and Woolworth's,
work at Diamond Reo, Oldsmobile, Fisher Body.
On Fridays drink, dance, and try to forget
the perverse comfort of huddling in
what was done to survive (the buffering,
the forgetting). How could we not
"turn the head/pretend not to see?"
This is what we saw: hope screwed
to steel flesh, this was machine city
and the wind through it — neutral
to an extent, private, and above all
perfectly European language
in which we could not touch, hear
or be alive. How could anybody
be singing "Fingertips?" Little Stevie
Wonder on my crystal, 1963.
Blind boy comes to go to school,
the air waves politely segregated.
If this were just a poem
there would be a timelessness —
the punchclock midwest would go on
ticking, the intervals between ticks
metaphor for the gap in our lives
and in that language which would not
carry itself beyond indifferent
consequences. The beauty of the word,
though, is the difference between language
and the telling made through use.
Dance Motown on his lip, he lays
these radio tracks across the synapse
of snow. The crystals show
a future happening with you in it.
Fire Gotten Brighter
Remember that memory.
In this dimness when the sounds I make
are foreign, my home is not my own
when I think of another winter
and the distant whiteness of its walls —
when even the sun seems set
outside the world. In this dimness
the edge of things removed
to thought the numb call touch,
remember that memory —
the young black self
the whole black body painted hot
by the fresh orange scene in the basement
of our old house when I was nine.
When it was my turn
to keep the fire going while my family slept —
my father off divorced somewhere, my older brother resting
after work, and what shadows hovered at the fringe of light
spilt from the furnace's mouth —
I struck my shovel in the flame,
had its intensity
its heat travel through a vein in the handle
to a part of my head.
The coals gotten smaller, brighter.
Out of that fire, my frightened shoveling in the night
now a framed power, that young effort
made a little orange scene
kept the whole world excited —
gathered near its center.
In this dimness where I can't tell
if my longing is my own, it is gotten winter.
Above me I watch a jet
that be's perfectly still, yet gets so distant,
goes so pointless. I could take a plane,
fly from here to somewhere small
till I'm ashes of myself —
but everything burns repeatedly
or keeps burning. Remember that memory.
I am dark with effort, back at my mother's house
someone's thinking of me, an old and smothered flame
gets waked, and it warms the gap
between image and real light.
II. THE MOMENT GETTING SO
Now
I park the car because I'm happy,
because if everyone parked we'd have a street party,
because the moon is full —
it is orange, the sky is closer
and it would be wrong to drive into it.
This is the first day of summer —
everyone is hanging out,
women walk by in their bodies so mellow
I feel I'm near a friend's house
The small white flakes of the headlights
sweat for a second on the storefronts.
In the windows, darkened afterhours,
a reflection stares back
looking more like me than me.
I reach to touch
and the reflection touches me.
Everything is perfect —
even my skin fits.
Hanging out,
the taillights of the turning cars
are fires, going out —
are the spaces of roses flowered
deeper in themselves. I close my eyes
and am flowered deeper in myself.
Further up the street a walking figure
I can't make out, a face
behind a bag of groceries, free arm swinging
in the air the wave of a deep red
fluid shifting to and fro.
At the vegetarian restaurant
I see it's Michael the Conga Drummer —
been looking for him 2 months.
He asks me, "What's happening."
I love his fingers.
When we shake hands I mix his grip
with the curve of my father's
toting cantelope in the house from the market.
We are two griots at an intersection.
I answer him in parable:
the orange that I've been carrying
is some luminous memory, bursting,
bigger than my hand can hold,
so I hand him half.
Exactly Passing Through (Horn Player)
The need we have to deny the way things have to be
more than themselves. Otherwise, like the air moving
from room to room, things outgrow the terms we have
to contain them in. Otherwise we would feel our bodies
as abandoned places and our deep caresses as hollow rubs.
Yet right now I hear the chive stretching in its planter
on the windowsill, and I will go outside to see its purple
baby blossoms falling and the ideal blue air dissolving
into the skyline, into the hard blue uniform of the cop,
or the wild eyes of the lost boy, and I won't suffer.
The horn player on the corner up ahead understands
as though he has a seventh sense where everything matters:
the stalled red car, the girl learning to ride her bike
one-handed against the traffic down the street,
the Irish Setter howling, and that siren slowly pulsing.
The tune he is playing is hassled but a perfect line
of speech (which doesn't mean that you can hear it — yet).
This corner is part of his flesh, new cells he connects
into one piece. And what he is he is as by-product
in what he plays, the incidental seed which gathers
the nearby rain which happens to swell in August. Music.
Such a swelling so as I get closer the terms I use
to assert us, imperfect though they are, are gestures
toward a future perfect body. Meaning there is a connection
between what I say and the way we will be in the world.
Perfect as though I am saying, Blessed Other Come Closer,
as a wholly new animal awakes shedding what it knows
to simply become another presence among things, disclosed
and passing through first one surface and then another.
Awaking as, Oh God, being in this scene together
our attention is blue-insistent and forward-looking,
a kind of sky which has gained a way of being inside
its wholeness — not ideal nor abstract but exactly
what is happening.
Semiotic Function
Over the course of the month
her belly expands; 5 pounds of water
pressures itself against me
when I pull her near and am drawn
towards her.
Our bodies laying together,
two objects in the room
reaching for that moment when
they fuse again, like everything
in motion in itself. Like our words
rushing forward to connect so deep
who can say where they come from.
"Do you really want to?"
she says. "Men are afraid of women
on the rag. Why be nice
to hide how you feel."
Does it matter that I want to?
What I do I don't know
more than that single act
when I hug the flesh
of her stomach, or hang onto
the swell of her hip.
There are questions I can't answer
as: "when the tide comes in
what wild fear it might hide
is reason enough
where motion is concerned?"
Kite-Flying
June at Truro Beach the joyous bathers,
specks of jewel fallen along the sand.
Walking near them there is this polarity —
their lives the way stars hold to the sky.
The morning sun chuckles across wave-tops
weightless as warm breath; we watch it float
like holy stone skipping toward Gennesaret.
Against the wind the kite quibbles and bobs
in our hands mad as any tethered bird —
it thinks it is a gull and wants to be with them.
And we are molecules of air, heated up,
spread in this big lab on the beach to launch it.
Every dream is a moment of freedom
and for the while when the kite goes up,
chest bowed forward, our thoughts race ahead
like anything light enough to fly; so crazy
holding the line, my one arm raised ready to flap
and wing, forgetting the kite has limits, and we
will suffer the air between two beached stones.
But what does the impulse know when it rises
up the nerve to the head? That it is —
whether body or thought is needless conclusion.
Today the gray haddock are utterly silver.
A naked girl rides by on a dripping horse.
Every line of words we say is radiant floss
let go.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Turning into Dwelling by Christopher Gilbert. Copyright © 2015 Estate of Christopher Gilbert Introduction. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf 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
Contents
Introduction by Terrance Hayes,ACROSS THE MUTUAL LANDSCAPE,
This Bridge Across,
I. Fire Gotten Brighter,
Resonance,
Pushing,
And, Yes, Those Spiritual Matters,
Marking Time,
Muriel Rukeyser as Energy,
She,
Time with Stevie Wonder in It,
Fire Gotten Brighter,
II. The Moment Getting So,
Now,
Exactly Passing Through (Horn Player),
Semiotic Function,
Kite-Flying,
The Surviving,
Touching,
Listening to Monk's Mysterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters' Hair,
III. Horizontal Cosmology,
The Backyard,
The Moment Getting So,
Fetish,
Saxophone,
Speaking Things,
The Facts,
IV. Beginning by Example,
Beginning by Example,
Blue,
Beginning by Destruction,
Beginning by Value,
Like,
The Directions,
Any Good Throat,
Charge,
Edges,
V. In the Mutual Landscape,
The Clearing,
Glimpses,
Pitch,
African Sculpture,
Theory of Curve,
Lottery,
Chosen to Be Water,
Glimpses of Power,
Enclosure,
How the Stars Understand Us,
Kodac and Chris Walking the Mutual Landscape,
Saturday Morning at the Laundry,
CHRIS GILBERT: AN IMPROVISATION (Music of the Striving That Was There),
You, the Piece That Was There,
I. Steps and Transformations,
Blues/The Blue Case against the Lack Of,
The Art of Improvisers,
Joseph Walking Light's Way Out of Time,
Soweto, the Present Tense,
The Atmosphere,
The Turn,
Bad,
On the Way Back Home,
A Passage,
Tourist,
Watermelon,
Getting Over There,
II. Witnesses of the Striving That Was There,
Willie's Fake Book,
Pleasant Street,
A Sorrow since Sitting Bull,
Absentee Landlord,
The "The",
Andy Warhol's Marilyn as Nigger,
Wall,
Straight Outta Truth,
Zeus Getting the Last Word,
A Woman's Boat Adrift in August,
Beef (with Symbols),
Untitled,
Society's Heroic Underdogs,
For Instance, Genealogy,
Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation,
Metaphor for Something That Plays Us: Remembering Eric Dolphy,
III. Into the Into,
Turning into Dwelling,
Signature,
Into the Into,
Notes and Sources,
Acknowledgments,
Afterword by Mary Fell,