Listening
Years of that poem with the horse coin stuck on the tongue to death… years of that poem on the wall
& what distilled was
appetite.
| X | X | X | X |
Here is a problem, four singulars set apart. And
where the decay was most intense on the inside it would melt the snow on the outside of the body: And —
year, year, year, year. (Melting, all.)
And poem.
Dark moon rocks took my friend’s place. Now, they
speak, freely.
Now after delays,
now as child shadow sleep wraps them around
in Jean Valentine’s ocean. And now the gun
on the ocean floor … happ … happens. And finally
the world.
—after Frank Bidart, Stan Brakhage, Jean Valentine
for PS
Impasse
The idea cracks open. It is this new sieve the wet air pours through. Now breathe …
…
Strips of wet cloth wrapped your thinned parts. Through the pores in your hair water filtered into your brain. Winter arrived, you started living by a schedule regimented tightly, with no room for error.
So how did you leave there, get here?
It was a familiar idea — of a castle,
black stone, in a rural vale, many entrances, each with its proper guard. What became fascinating this time — the particularity of each guard, the spellbound
quality of an attention as it rippled. This dissolved the fortifications in a biological haze. It struck the haze down, the idea dissolved with it, & with it the larger idea
it sat in — of a certain Europe, gothic with hemlock, Christian over sprawling hills.
As spectator, you found a way out. You are sitting now
head in hands in a green room with a potted shrub & a teacup. In the middle of the cup a bare, crimson spadix, sudden guest, looks at you through the pollen.
Most dissolving maybe were the splinters of glass in their eyes, differently colored in each &, in each, vision wrapping differently around the brittle edges, forming its beam …
In that one soft, optimistic. Like melting sugar.
The possibility arises. A sound out of the wet earth trammeled by sheep, a sound that decomposes at eye level into sonorous material, a “pure and intense sonorous material that is always connected
to its own abolition.” You demand a different training.
—after Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature
Royal Entombment
The king who has betrayed every other king — he has fled into the red trees.
We give thanks for his survival.
Three summers later the mimosas bloom — we sit next to one,
on a Spanish terrace. I bring you the gift I have pulled out of death —
a cold block of porcelain clay, melting slowly in midday sun.
Things? Things
are never elegant, no, but sometimes
space is
scalding. We give thanks,
then, for the perforating heat.
1 thing — the block, dissolving, reveals a page woven of lace, full of holes, I am uncertain
ever you will write on it. 1 person — black hair on the chest, angling towards the decisive spot
in the courtyard, through the crowd, pushing towards us.
Around these singulars — the space
stunning. Most stunning — not the space between but
a space overflying each of the instances.
After the poems of sensation — after poems of involution, incision — after
poems that were persons, loneliness, phosphorus seeping into long bloodlines —
the extreme poem of space.
The other side of reading, the difficulty, the impatience in the act — if it is anything at all it is,
a trace of undiluted space. Sudden silence bearing through the wall of our joint mind with heat,
carrying directions to and from a source.
It’s that — when the door closes, I do not know which
side the person is on. Which side the non-person. Not that I want to be certain — no, not certain.
—6/13/23, for YW & JP
Yongyu Chen lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and their poems have appeared in journals including Chicago Review, Lana Turner, & Poetry. Their first book of poems, Perennial Counterpart, was a winner of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize.