raw clogs of its warm cotton in the horizontal thorns;
white pools held awhile in field workers’ eyes before the night
crawled down inside them like a fiery academy, circled, and settled there;
a series falling back towards the dark of staggered crescents green and blue
as the jade bandlets worn across the baldness of Mayan kings; the thousand
swarming wings of birds, in life and feather, bone and scuff and ancestor image;
the calls of frogs, cicadas, minks, otters, sweet martens and the hard-breathed elks;
dry rain in summer; the black telephone and its white pole; the polypores; the oak-wilt;
the microscopic car-race hurry; the froth and many-bubbled discharges of the worms;
ejaculate on leaf-brinks; blood-pulse lilac in a bruise; wounds the depths and dimensions
of elevator shafts into the warrens underground, flowering pink with cunicular irises;
he, trenched in her undercoat, beneath the tree-arches of Paris; beneath the tree-arches,
her hand spooling, planet-round, the dark hair and skin that clothes his skull; in Russia,
beneath tree-arches, flash of streetlight on the kitchen blade, wash of red and then an ending;
full-grown men boxed in flock-walled rooms, eating peri peri hot sauce from the jar
and the land about the houses (a ball of matter with no brain) lit up and webbed
like a sound that overlaps with others: echoes and diminishes and grows.
The Alternate Librarian Going Into The Void; Making My Dream Body Want, Like Alcohol, To Return To Budapest
BT Joy
Three weeks after the librarian’s husband died in Spain
her alternate told me that she was going into the void.
I was library teaching then and so she had to ask:
Have you ever been into the void? to which I said No.
After that I sat; read Kafka’s characters struggling with the law
and observed— not looking— the slow stone-in-pool like glow
of ripple-sound from the good class who read senior texts
as predictable as Wuthering Heights and To Kill a Mockingbird.
It was an afternoon— a Friday— in late August and I was snagged
somewhere between age and the deep, younger, shimmering story
of where I’d been; what I’d done and what I’d taken with me. Caught
on the brink where knowledge gives in to nothing and the alternate
librarian humming through the walls in the void as she moved the books
from Spain to Montenegro; thought better of it and moved them back again.
And the room around us all, and probably too the void, growing yellow
in the swell, noon heat that August pours on wheat stands and on trees.
We all as wiry as the hair-growth still on the chins of saint-kings two days
after their deaths in the 12th century of the world; back when whispers came
like wind and carried whole personalities heavenward like paper shred and flung.
How two mornings later, after reading Faulkner the night before, I didn’t wake
to the sense my life’s been wasted or half lived. But instead in the dream
I was traveling through a small provincial town— then Spain— then Montenegro—
then again the green river-bridge across the Danube and the lemon citadel on the hill;
again the vivacious people drinking wine and playing, on the decks and cables of the span.
I give my poets a lot of freedom when it comes to the artist features; I offer suggestions but would probably accept 500 words about why the word "porch" is important if the artist felt that it was the way they wanted to be portrayed to our readers. After I accepted BT Joy's "Some Things That Are The Case" into our July issue, I jotted a few things, notably how a Glaswegian across the pond found out about our infantile magazine. When Joy submitted the first draft of this write-up, I had just hung-up on the phone in my office after speaking with a young man who worked at The Church of Saint Maira delle Grazie, where The Last Supper is housed in Milan, booking two tickets for my boss's visit in September. I was already dreaming of wavy haired men named Giancarlo when this piece took me even deeper into my reverie of ladybugs and villas. I am at once so grateful for the creative nonfiction that my poet was able to incorporate self-analysis and wonder into. I'm telling you, something about European men.
Xoxo, Bee Walsh, Poetry Editor
The cannonades don’t stop in Civitella and it’s something like soft thunder in the distance. I’m thinking about how the Abrahamic religions always address their devotions upwards, to the sky. Earlier I was discussing the possibility that the pre-agrarian societies of the ancient Near East may have been sky-cultists. We know that the hierarchy of the oldest semitic pantheon was headed by a sky god, Ilu, and that Ilu is a cognate for the polytheistic creator deity El, for the Hebrew term Elohim and for the Arabic, Allah. It’s not strange then that now, dead in the summer of 2014, a township of Italian catholics should be attempting to communicate with their own pantheon of saints by shooting into the clouds. As a Scotsman who lived in London for a number of years the metaphors of direction have always been a fascination to me. I can’t count the times, in bars in Brixton or Camden, when a friend has accompanied the question: “are you going home to Scotland?” with a single finger pointing upwards at the ceiling; as though maybe Scotland wasn’t to be found in a northernly direction, by bus or by train, but was, instead, a mythical kingdom that existed somewhere above our heads.
From our religions to our barroom conversations we’re like Br’er Rabbit inextricably tangled up in the black ooze of the linguistic tar-baby of metaphor. When we say heaven or Scotland we point upwards. When we say the future we point ahead of us and when we say the past we point behind us; though the Classical Greeks, being less arrogant, knowing that the future was largely unseen, would have done the exact reverse. When you say you’re grieving you’re really saying you’re heavy. When you’re enthralled you’re in slavery. If sinister is a negative word it’s only because the left hand is in general weaker than the right. Poetry doesn’t release us from this entanglement with metaphor; but, at its best, it might turn those thrashing ropes of frightened tar into coloured ribbons in the ribbon twirler’s hands.
My poem ‘Some Things That Are The Case,’ featured in RP&D Society this month, attempts to coax metaphor down from the clouds and get its feet planted back on the ground. Metaphor isn’t imaginary. Metaphor is a statement about things as they are. It isn’t fanciful. It’s observational. It isn’t sublunary. It’s terrestrial and even chthonic. The purpose of metaphor is, to paraphrase Rumi, not to spin you some exotic yarn, but to give you hard cash in the hand. Metaphor, therefore, can’t be fuzzy or inexact but must, in fact, be entirely accurate; as accurate as change from a fifty-pound note or the wording of a legal contract. Metaphor is a species of truth and reality. However, in the modern materialistic, or rather abstractist, sense, we tend to disqualify metaphor from the general category of concrete reality for its failure to meet certain completely arbitrary criteria concerning solidity, visibility, repeatability, consistency etc. We forget that this appraisal of metaphor’s legitimacy is to, as Joseph Campbell says, read the metaphor as prose and not as poetry, in terms of the denotation as opposed to the connotation.
In ‘Some Things...’ you’ll notice that there’s no perceivable barrier between observable physical reality: “redcurrants/ June moon” and metaphorical reality: “before resurrection/ like a wasted life.” After all, why create an artificial barrier when none exists in nature? The poem soon begins to explore the metaphors of Vedic and later Hindu philosophy, particularly reincarnation, as well as the metaphors of Islam, particularly paradise. Religious language is almost entirely metaphorical. To some modern minds this statement is irreligious and points to religion’s redundancy in an increasingly scientific world. I hope what’s come before will convince you that this is not how I intend the statement. If religious language is metaphorical it’s not because it’s inaccurate (in places the great wisdom traditions of the world are astoundingly accurate) and neither is it because religious language, as some apologists may argue, is representative of an earlier stage in human development. No. Religious language is metaphorical because the spiritual realms, bodies and energies it engages with are not cognitive in nature, have no set conceptual categories and cannot be understood in terms of denotation. It’s what Jesus said of the Kingdom of Heaven in the Gospel of Thomas:
It will not come while people watch for it.
They will not say: Look, here it is! Or: Look, there it is!
But the Kingdom of the Father is spread out across the earth
and men do not see it.
Poetry is a way of seeing and, also, a way of discussing what we’ve seen. It’s essential to a good cartographer to take accurate measurements of the strictly physical dimensions of a geographical area and to use strictly denotative words to describe the topography: hill, mountain, stream, river etc. However, it’s no less essential for a good poet to take accurate readings of the subtler dravyas and to express, through connotative metaphor, the similitudes these experiences hold with experiences within our conceptual understanding. This, metaphorically, brings water back to the village.
It’s in this slightly esoteric mood that I choose to close ‘Some Things...’ Being a high school teacher myself at present, and specializing in English for my sins, I know just how many jaded seniors ask irritatedly for an account of the point in poetry. Of course they’re really asking for a rational and scientific account. The last two lines of ‘Some Things...’ comment on the inability of any educationalist to express the meaning of poetry in these terms. Poetry is its own language; and all the myths and metaphors of the world are its separate dialects.
In every city you’ve visited along the way a different scent lay down like pine-trees lay their heavy scent in rain. You ask me why I’m obsessed by writing; and this is the reason: I am a perfumer trying hard with all my life to capture…
