Poems For The Magnus Archives

[Icon: picture of a spotted owl perched on a telephone wire, with another wire behind them, framing them.] Collected poems paired with episodes of The Magnus Archives. Not associated with TMA, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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For 183: 'Prisoners', by Denise Levertov

Though the road turn at last to death’s ordinary door, and we knock there, ready to enter and it opens easily for us, yet all the long journey we shall have gone in chains, fed on knowledge-apples acrid and riddled with grubs.

We taste other food that life, like a charitable farm-girl, holds out to us as we pass— but our mouths are puckered, a taint of ash on the tongue.

It’s not joy that we’ve lost— wildfire, it flares in dark or shine as it will. What’s gone is common happiness, plain bread we could eat with the old apple of knowledge.

That old one—it griped us sometimes, but it was firm, tart, sometimes delectable …

The ashen apple of these days grew from poisoned soil. We are prisoners and must eat our ration. All the long road in chains, even if, after all, we come to death’s ordinary door, with time smiling its ordinary long-ago smile.

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For 015: 'Fermanagh Cave', by Sherod Santos

An emerald dungeon’s blacklight glow glimmered in the deeper reaches where my son and I could hear the slub of water riddling through the muck.

We’d stumbled on it following a stream, his first cave made stranger still by a chill that closes on the goblined heart of a boy inflamed by stories where

gnome-clans hoarded underground bone-shard, mandrake, monkey gland, and eel. And so, grave Hansel paying out his last scraps of bread,

he inched inward looking back and gathering himself as he devolved step by step along the wet-ribbed walls, the omphalos seepage of a subterranea

that dreamed us into its kingdom come, where like some secret dreams make known the burnt-punk smell of marijuana cluttered up the air,

and just beyond, just close enough to see, a spur of light that like a dwindling eyemote disappeared. Then the sound a human soul makes as it slips out

from the throat. Composed in darkness, my son’s hand closed on mine. I bent to whisper we could turn back now, but his voice was there before me saying,

“Something’s here.” And something was, something that in that instant rose, and moved off from us, or drew up close. In either case, my son came to me

almost weightlessly at first, then hungry for what was filling up my arms, the startled, upriding bodyweight of a boy I’d never before felt rock

so solidly into the place I was, blind and hunkered in the earthen air. I held him only a moment there. We didn’t speak. And though the wheeze

of his breathing must’ve stopped my ears, for weeks to come, settling him back to sleep at night, or waking him from some troubling dream, I’d hear

the soft concussion of an outsized heart- beat I could not decide was mine, or his, or the stranger’s I had brought us to. Or if what happened would happen again,

years from now, when he is grown, and I have grown newly strange to him.

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For 133: 'The Cave', by Paul Tran

Someone standing at the mouth had the idea to enter. To go further

than light or language could go. As they followed the idea, light and language followed

like two wolves—panting, hearing themselves panting. A shapeless scent in the damp air …

Keep going, the idea said.

Someone kept going. Deeper and deeper, they saw others had been there. Others had left

objects that couldn’t have found their way there alone. Ocher-stained shells. Bird bones. Grounded hematite. On the walls,

as if stepping into history, someone saw their purpose: cows. Bulls. Bison. Deer. Horses— some pregnant, some slaughtered.

The wild- life seemed wild and alive, moving

when someone moved, casting their shadows on the shadows stretching in every direction. Keep going,

the idea said again. Go …

Someone continued. They followed the idea so far inside that outside was another idea.

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For 193: 'Twelve Questions', by Bhanu Kapil

Who are you and whom do you love?

What do you remember about the earth

How will you begin?

Describe a morning you woke without fear?

Tell me what you know about dismemberment

Where did you come from/How did you arrive

Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

What is the shape of your body?

How will you live now?

What are the consequences of silence?

How will you/have you prepared for your death?

What would you say if you could?

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For 188: 'London', by William Blake

I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro' midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

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For 137: 'Channel Firing', by Thomas Hardy

That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No; It’s gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be:

“All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christés sake Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them’s a blessed thing, For if it were they’d have to scour Hell’s floor for so much threatening….

“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if indeed I ever do; for you are men, And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again. “I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,” Said one, “than when He sent us under In our indifferent century!”

And many a skeleton shook his head. “Instead of preaching forty year,” My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, “I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

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For 114 (again): 'Childhood', by Maura Staunton

I used to lie on my back, imagining A reverse house on the ceiling of my house Where I could walk around in empty rooms All by myself. There was no furniture Up there, only a glass globe on the floor. And knee-high barriers at every door. The low silled windows opened on blue air. Nothing hung in the closet; even the kitchen Seemed immaculate, a place for thought. I liked to walk across the swirling plaster Into the parts of the house I couldn’t see. The hum from the other house, now my ceiling, Reached me only faintly. I'd look up To find my brothers watching old cartoons, Or my mother vacuuming the ugly carpet. I'd stare amazed at unmade beds, the clutter, Shoes, half-dressed dolls, the telephone, Then return dizzily to my perfect floorplan Where I never spoke or listened to anyone.

I must have turned down the wrong hall, Or opened a door that locked shut behind me, For I live on the ceiling now, not the floor. This is my house, room after empty room. How do I ever get back to the real house Where my sisters spill milk, my father calls, And I am at the table, eating cereal? I fill my white rooms with furniture, Hang curtains over the piercing blue outside. I lie on my back. I strive to look down, This ceiling is higher than it used to be, The floor so far away I can't determine Which room I'm in, which year, which life.

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For 145 (or, for Agnes Montague): 'Morning In The Burned House', by Margaret Atwood

In the burned house I am eating breakfast. You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast, yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against  the bowl which was melted also. No one else is around.

Where have they gone to, brother and sister, mother and father? Off along the shore, perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers,

their dishes piled beside the sink, which is beside the woodstove with its grate and sooty kettle,

every detail clear, tin cup and rippled mirror. The day is bright and songless,

the lake is blue, the forest watchful. In the east a bank of cloud  rises up silently like dark bread.

I can see the swirls in the oilcloth, I can see the flaws in the glass, those flares where the sun hits them.

I can’t see my own arms and legs or know if this is a trap or blessing, finding myself back here, where everything

in this house has long been over, kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl, including my own body,

including the body I had then, including the body I have now as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy,

bare child’s feet on the scorched floorboards (I can almost see) in my burning clothes, the thin green shorts

and grubby yellow T-shirt holding my cindery, non-existent, radiant flesh. Incandescent.

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For 149: 'Of The Empire', by Mary Oliver

We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

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For 147: 'The Cobweb', by Raymond Carver

A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck of the house. From there I could see and hear the water, and everything that’s happened to me all these years. It was hot and still. The tide was out. No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing a cobweb touched my forehead. It caught in my hair. No one can blame me that I turned and went inside. There was no wind. The sea was dead calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade. Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath touches it. A fine thread. Intricate. Before long, before anyone realizes, I’ll be gone from here.

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For 033: 'Sea Calm', by Langston Hughes

How still, How strangely still The water is today. It is not good For water To be so still that way.

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For 016 (or, for Season One Archivist): 'Night Bird', by Danusha Laméris

Hear me: Sometimes thunder is just thunder. The dog barking is only a dog. Leaves fall from the trees because the days are getting shorter, by which I mean, not the days we have left, but the actual length of time, given the tilt of earth and distance from the sun. My nephew used to see a therapist who mentioned that, at play, he sank a toy ship and tried to save the captain. Not, he said, that we want to read anything into that. Who can read the world? It’s paragraphs of cloud, and alphabets of dust. Just now a night bird outside my window made a single plaintive cry that wafted up between the trees. Not, I’m sure, that it was meant for me.

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For 168 (again): 'There', by Langston Hughes

Where death Stretches its wide horizons And the sun gallops no more Across the sky, There where nothing Is all, I, Who am nobody, Will become Infinity, Even perhaps Divinity.

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For 106: 'A Man Said to the Universe', by Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.”

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For 067: 'First Kiss', by Paige Gilchrist

He brought another girl to the windows. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. - William Shepherd, eyewitness to people leaping to their death at the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire

And wouldn't you, if you were a girl who knew it was your last day and you'd never had a first?

If you'd never, in the air thick with fiber dust, done more than share a glance. I always ate

my apple wedge and bread on my lap, fast. We were always pushed to get back to feeding

collars and sleeves through the machines. Back to bending over our part of the mad clack under

strained light, the grind of the cutters, the heat, the smell of each other. The day the stink of burning

scraps exploded into flames, hell pressed in. The doors were locked-- we could burn to death

or fly. Oh, why not call it flying? Why not take a chance. When Teddy took my hand to help me to the ledge--

it sounds silly, I know-- but his palm felt like the petal of a daffodil. It was early spring. All winter my limbs

begged to run full of sap. And so, at this last, I wrapped my arms around his neck and rose to my toes

to meet his lips, to feel that press, just once, before I stepped out into the sky.

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For 159 (or, for Peter Lukas): 'Alone', by Edgar Allen Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring— From the same source I have not taken My sorrow—I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone— And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone— Then—in my childhood—in the dawn Of a most stormy life—was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still— From the torrent, or the fountain— From the red cliff of the mountain— From the sun that ’round me roll’d In its autumn tint of gold— From the lightning in the sky As it pass’d me flying by— From the thunder, and the storm— And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view—

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For 001: '[Night, a street, a lamp]', by Aleksandr Blok, translated by Dimitri Oblensky

Night, a street, a lamp, a chemist’s shop, a meaningless and dim light. Even if you live for another quarter of a century, everything will be like this. There is no way out.         You will die—and start all over again, and everything will be repeated, as of old: the night, the icy ripples on the canal, the chemist’s shop, the street, the lamp.