Reading C.D. Wright’s 40 Watts While passing : VIKING HORIZON, OLDENDORF, ADMORE SEAGUARD
After a broiling day under the Pandanus tree at Alma Bay, I’d scored pages of commentary on 40 Watts, but that night the pages disappeared into my sand cabinet. They resurfaced months later for my morning commute, but disappeared again into the foam of tote-bags, sunglasses, random files before I settled into my seat on the Sealink ferry to Townsville. Overlays of notes on Reverdy, and marginalia from Bauchlard’s Poetics of Space, reminders to seek out Wright’s manifestos, tagged in my sun faded ink on golden ledger paper streaked with green welcoming horizon lines – ditched in some transient slag between three-month’s breakfast and bedtime. I scraped so much in my backdrop to gather the courage to decant Wright’s sculptural, quiet, powerhouse poems in 40 Watts: gone. So. What now. Bachelard in Poetics of Space writes “When two strange images meet, two images that are the work of two poets pursuing separate dreams, they apparently strengthen each other” (p 57). His analogies of houses, nests, the striking of image against image as a hall of mirrors, a type of printmaking through time’s dream-work are a permission. It always seemed vain and sideways to write “a review” and include oneself, but all writing includes the self. The self is the reader upon whom a writer imprints. What other self is the self to consider.
1. I spurred the ritual. Elphin bones – a light salt dust along the gulch. She said “she kept boarders kept hens” (“Poem with Some Water Damage” page 20). I heard a cock-crow over dryline over eucalypt beyond palm; she pointed up the vine strangling tree fern.
2. Before noon a pair of kerlew trade places over the two-egg nest “they would stay /inside the glass house on the lake / not see the black snake stretched / over the road not see the horse/ and rider disappear into the drenched/ tones of foliage…” (“Poem With Undergrowth and Two Figures” page 5)…
3. though that was far beyond the paddock where she lay now breathless among the reeds. I. recorded the dream about the red cedar house. I swam through shallow reefs in a storm to reach the sink, to stand in the. kitchenette without walls…“peeling the label from her bottle / hungry but not touching her fish … (“Cafe At The Junction Poem,” page 3).
4. And of course Levis’ (from Elegy) came to stare through my reading glasses with me. His/her each word a wound. Her each poem naming itself gauze. His each elegy naming itself stitch. Each blister a monument. What am I/you left with until each poem is each moment is each other. I/you held you/me in the wake-water’s stone undulation, sand plugging the throat… “she turns her head in time to see a flat iron float through an open window” (Poem “In Which Every other Line Is A Falsehood” page 29)
5. while “one whorl of wood lets him feel invisible as if on metal wings” (“Pure Sensation Poem” page 18) and on each raw edge of a titanium pickaxe, lilies open. dusk’s crossroad. First there was snow. And then, there wasn’t.
6. A storm filled the Bower’s barn-trough, a grey species of bachelor buttons strewn in a basket – the first time I saw a butchered hog head in wheelbarrow. Maybe it was also a:
“Poem in Which The Lover”
wakes in darkness of morning
and visits the water
lowering his glad body
onto a rock
the spiders rearrange
themselves underneath
(page 11)
7. Maybe it is the defined thing. The awakening, what Bachelard wrote about memory and image. Or was it haiku. Or was it a print press. Each poem manifesting: image, past poems, other’s past, time presses the lock, we get in the wheelhouse.
“Poem With Evening Coming On”
A dog has appeared at the gate
For the second day in a row
Against a dirty peach sky
A single car wobbles into the sun
(page 1)
8. Or a more personal dialect:
“Rooming House Poem”
From the dusk’s long windows
The boy follows the man
In the felt hat walk briskly toward
Daddy Joe’s bond and car lot
(page 36)
9. A horse’s aura ages the amber lamps in the barn dull. “The room itself anonymous/ no object is mundane” (“Poem Starved for Music” page 38).
10. Outspoken father you lay now in unspoken plots of grass – an unnumbered hookie board “out of the pool hall’s green light/ into a plashing crescendo of blades” (“Poem In Which Blood Flows” page 8). Knife edge fields rust stammer.
11. If you are deported check the entry point, though I will follow you into the caldron age, remind yourself I am not coming, there is no one’s weapon to spare, and in parts of this now, you are much among the wicked; remember “you have a beautiful white dresser/ a quilt made by hand and a cat” (“Poem of a Houseboat Stranded in a Field” page 12).
12. Step lightly along the spillway, the black opening among the spell of mown grass where deer lay as rosette silhouettes in ash light, the city thin the snow as wide as starline along the hill –
“The fire is dying/ the fire is dead…” (“Poem Waiting For Sleep” page 17)
13. Tree-drift as a petrified diagonal of sky across the heath. Yes, she let the flame die —ember death and slowly smoke dead —iron poker and bellows brighten the hearth into the shape of an orange tanker, a wormhole between hemispheres, and I can not bear to share with you the “Poem With A Missing Pilot” without sharing the whole poem of the “Poem With a Missing Pilot”:
A piano is being moved
by someone not listening
to the rain from one end
of the room to another
a stale cigarette is filched
from uniform before
the parakeets are let go
(page 33)
14. Linen beneath embroidered silk she spells strata with her fingertip across the window pane “she is telling her husband that he is dead/ and he is telling her he is no such thing” (“Poem With No Up Or Down” page 27).
15. You could see it in the set of his shoulders “he smiles as if but is not breathing” (“Day Old Widow Poem” page 10).
16. (“Poem Taking Place Before Lights Were Electrified” page 6): “I watched the man who just shot him/ walk the puncheon floor” – as if he burst through the garden’s wooden border surrounding threadbare sepals; his pinkish eyes poke up each spring.
17. “If she leaned over far enough/ her hair hung over her knees/ she hears shadflies hatching (“Kind of Blue Poem” page 13). Her pockets filled with tourmaline. The wars ended.
18. I lived with you (despite the accounts of your false surname) without ever knowing your name. Across the field, the russet horses suggest a different fate from your injury. They are host. The shoulder of the bay mare is a space where within where a chisel engraved a circuit board, and along her withers: outer wires, straw and telephone cord catch in her teeth. In attraction, I loved. Far from the house quivering with winter. … “the folds of a dark brown dress/ the knuckles of a hand spent in dishwater…” (“Poem In Which Her Mortgage Comes Due” page 34).
19. Lichen and Queen Anne’s lace, a sash of greenness upon his chest, he waded out past the village hills. You could remember “they swore allegiance to the women who bore them/ they cursed the women who bore them” (“Country Station Poem” page 4).
20. You could remember a “blare of sudden color among coats/ moving at odd angles in a plaza” (“Downtown In January Poem” page 37).
21. I wanted to find you among the fields of hyssop. I wanted to find you in shadow splayed across the gorge. Sparrows spiraled through your skin. The sargent tossed a match into the greasy-grass to surround and protect himself in fire; ore deposits scar the hill —old crosses where their bodies lay in capture —“we are already in position/ in the upper branches/ for a backdrop her sheets wrinkled stiff on the line” (“Her Toes Poem” page 16).
22. This incident was made confidential as were “the snake-infested woods/ the high-voltage fence/the big-stripe inmates” (“Back Forty Poem” page 35).
23. Bauchleard in Poetics of Space writes: “ Here is Menard’s own intimate forest: ‘Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade…I live in great density…Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage…In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.’” Mid Song of Solomon (2:10–11): “My beloved spoke, and said to me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, the winter is past.” Mid Light Bulb Poem: “my beloved are the words / of the rambler / if not the words of substance / the snow smeared across my front / warm to the touch / though we remain separated / as if by a chair / and I am unwilling to read ahead” (“Light Bulb Poem” page 2).
24. With satin ribbons I tie a bundle of prayer cards, parchment envelopes, and victorian letters. The parcel slips those strings like a noose into a snare of staghorn coral – cinder waves fatten the night and quell the shoreline; “well a great many things have been said in the oven of hours we have not been shaken out of the magnolias today…” (“Poem Without Angel Food” page 39).
25. And this was not failure; I was protected for a message; to place photos upon your coffin; I was left to remind you; I remembered your touch and untouch “I recall sitting on my bed in my flame-proof gown/ every morning I had to jump aboard/ my suitcase to get it to close” (“Amarillo Poem” page 7).
26. It was danger, my demon, it was a trinity in the wavelengths, a pattern of completion “your life blew past as a shirt off a line/ but then turned and turned again/ O archangel of the mirror” (“Poem of a Forest of Clouds Sweeping By” page 40).
27. You tattoo a channel of water on your forearm, blood surges beneath water’s galaxy of whales “a violently blue sky” (“Poem with A Dozen Cherries On A Ledge” page 24).
28. It was a time we sat on our jet-skis waiting a wave to wade us into tailspin. We heard the undertow moan. It was the time we “stopped getting the bottled/ water then the paper cut off/ the phone stopped buying/ sunflower seeds…” (“Poem With A Dart of Color” page 28).
29. We tasted “ripples and snags on a compound word such as horsehair/ or cottonwood/ on the meaning of the color yellow/ it must be Sunday” “(Poem with a Cloudburst” page 9).
We said forest assassins set tripwire upon the frost, the settling shuck at sunset, sound as a creeping tiptoe over floorboard. You stayed with the woman, the risk. But only as declaration, only as honesty.
30. I know three voices to the east were pale against the bunkhouse echos; the settlers were calm, steadied against boulder, against arrow, “I know I know this much/ hair is hair a beer is a beer/ is a beer and the next thing/ crazy is as crazy does” (“This much I Know Poem” page 14). Having no one, you belong to water’s terror, a depth taken by tide – a convergence wherein sea rips marrow from wave. The plank led you down the gully and lifted grit from your eye.
31. Nothing. simple: the house burning down, someone watching you cook dinner. In the stairwell-trance the boy shines a flashlight in “all directions” and “moths flutter” over his mother’s shoulders (paraphrase); you ask me if I am in a trance in the “Poem in a Trance” (page 32). You hold no convention. No translation.
32. For grief’s careful telling of one’s name is love in clumsy dialogue. For “I have seen such things as they occur/ in some remote and improbable time with my eyes shut…” (“Outlier’s Poem” page 15).
33. When I think of Norma, my “Norma,” I think of “Dog Put Down In Fall Poem” (page 21), but my “Norma” was a person.
34. And there are those too brief to be loosened. They stand not among the soldiers: “Poem With A Dead Tree” (page 22),
35. “Poem From Pearl’s House” (page 23)…
36. Where “she hears a small splashing memory/ of when cherished sound of him” (“Water Baby Poem” page 25),
37. And each poem is a “Poem Missing Someone” (page 26).
38. The foresun closes a domestic door. For the bodies brought home were still homeless. O this close you understand the flame as confession “the overbearing smear of greens/ then an unmarked lane of poplars/ a man on a bench…” (“Soldiers’ Home Poem” page 19)… you didn’t like the tiny stars stained on his teeth or the sand’s anchorage in his hairline or the sidewalk cracks upon which plastic telephones once clicked among glass and metal booths.
39. When I clunked down on the reciever my “hands as heavy as rocks/ in the pockets of a Goodwill coat/ kicking up leaves…” (“Poem From The End Of Old Wire Road” page 31), I was thinking of you as a saviour, for in the battle you found yourself in the small trench, found yourself alone with the second spirit; your companions turned their backs, and your commands were sometimes carbon.
40. Well W. C. Williams, yes, “So much depends on a red wheelbarrow covered in rain water,” and C.D. Wright, so much depends on a
“Poem With A Girl Almost Fifteen”
a name is scribbled over and over in a notebook
a nest set fire to
larvae chew wool in a drawer
the hen rides her shoulder
to the mailbox
(page 30)
Revedy suggested there is a stacking of houses, and a poem is a town built shingle on shingle.
Her language is a banging door, a stack of pancakes on a Petri plate, moss grown corners in a horror movie, a sparse invention, mutable polka music in the dancehall, fever risen to the rafters.
How else may this other waking feel.
