Such Regular, Irregular Weather
Count to ten. Count to ten
again. "We start every sentence
with the word ‘I’.” “That’s just
the age we’re in.”
Your breath was enough
to know you were beside yourself,
the way the sky greens before
a storm, the smell
changing. Once,
she told me it was the worms
emerging with maw agape, and later,
both halves went on wriggling.
Sidewalks Pollocked
with what was once buried.
I still don’t know enough to say otherwise.
“We start every sentence with the word
‘I’.” “That’s just the age we’re in.”
Virtuous dove in knee high
water. Every living thing
hoists its narrow shot at survival.
Worm weather. Two impossible howls,
thunder and its high-heeled hallway. I light
two candles when one would do — we
being the ones who go on burning,
racked with belief.
This week I’m still thinking about a few themes I touched on last week: the first storm I’ve experienced in a while and the criticism book I mentioned, Immediacy: Or the Style of Too Late Capitalism. Albeit dense and wonky, this book identifies a handful of cultural trends in a way I find provocative. Without getting too far into the argument, I was struck by the data it provided around two key points:
how so many books written today are written in the first person, and
the percentage of successful books that are memoirs
There is a rampant “I-ness” in this observation, something that probably inspired the lines of dialogue in the poem above. Weather is a natural parallel to culture, both being “in the air”, so to speak.
I also recently listened to a conversation between Robert Macfarlane, Guiliana Furci, César Rodríguez-Garavito, and Cosmo Sheldrake in Emergence Magazine. It’s a beautiful conversation about authorship, rights, and interspecies reciprocity. I was particularly struck by the audio clip at the tail end of the podcast, the audio following where Robert says:
[…] I thought it would be appropriate for us to leave with the voices of the forest as the last voices that you’ll hear. So I think we’ll end on a recording which begins in the soil, very subtle sounds, you’ll have to lean your ears in to hear them, and then expands outwards back into the many voices of the forest.
This is likely how the worm weaseled its way in.
With gratitude,
Such a fantastic poem. Upon initial read, I was floored by some marvelous lines “high-heeled hallway” (we had a particularly busy thunderstorm here the other night and that really nailed it) “worm weather”, “every living things takes its narrow shot at survival” (10/10), “two candles when one will do”, and the closing line which ended with “racked with belief”.
Briana and I have been discussing the individualism of our era, particularly as it relates to public health (for HHS-related reasons). I find myself so guilty of an individualistic mindset at times too, asking myself what collective action looks like versus the time it takes to invest in things I care about making. And it all feels like we participate in a fractured sense of community. Capitalism drives us to the easiest forms of entertainment and preoccupation, time and time again, and it’s just so easy to disconnect into it.
Within the poem, the storm metaphor was quite apt, and I loved the green imagery and how it reached to being beside oneself.
Similar to the recent travel poems, the ending line put in a mood of yearning for something that was absent. I loved the place it left me, and it ties in well given the themes within the poem.