Chipman Hill, October Seventh

Moment: in the gravel pit I step outside the stream of time

and it collapses all around me, like a lawn chair

or a neutron star, turned inside-out by its own gravity.

Here,

all calendars are overlapping:

the cycles of ascending and descending.

Now, on Chipman Hill, October Seventh

(an arbitrary mark in the Gregorian)

I stand atop the lid of the reservoir

where once I stood before, begging the gates of heaven –

no, rather, the gates of Time

to let me through –

perhaps they did. Perhaps at a moment

of imperceptible discontinuity,

the lightning split me like a hazel twig.

You see the yellow warning signs?

CONFINED SPACE DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PERMIT

         and: DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE AREA

They do not jest.

The one who enters has overstepped the margin

of what is knowable to us. The one who enters has torn the page of the atlas and the calendar.

It is not even terra incognita; there is no latin script or compass rose

to name and orient its Nothingness. Past

the last gasp of semantics, the contortionism of Is

and Is Not – a remoteness

of suspension bridges lost in mist –

How am I to know

if I got through?

Love is a way of knowing, has its limits

like any instrument of measurement --falls victim

to the vicious parallax that obscures planetary movements, love

is a language we must learn to speak though the sense of each word is always incommunicable

and we live in a state of constant mistranslation. Where is the end of this, my love

My love, is there no other side of the suspension bridge obscured in mist,

is there no comatose blur into unconsciousness

that unifies and resolves?

The polarity of looking-in-your-eye becomes unbearable, as it

darkens with the night and leaves me astronomically

alone: is there no window

where the mirror shatters, is there no quadrant where the asymptote

impossibly transgresses arithmetic? I think if there were no measures of location,

no time or space or other dimension to define us, I think

if there were no words or anything

but the image in my dream

the song I sang up on the hill

when all the dandelions bloomed around me – surely

I crossed over then, surely

the Cartesian plane collapsed

for an instant, and left me dancing

with relativity – –

                   I crossed over, and I left me here.

Limbs, hair, heaviness

     the body like a bowstring trembling with

         the violence

         of what it has just flung out from itself,

                                            the insomniatic

         wild-eyed frenzy of such impetus.

A kind of exorcism, amputation

as if I have split the world in half

as if I have split the atom

dawning comprehension

blinding me – the love of extremity

is the veiled wish for death. The absolute love

is apocalyptic fire. The lover

                                is a shelter

and a veil.

The absolute love: electrocution

          the lover, nonconductor:

WARNING DO NOT ENTER

          the film reel's terminal overexposure

          the iconoclast, the deconstruction

The lover is an eidolon, the lover is a phenomenon

         (imprisoned as I am in the observer.)

On Chipman Hill, October Seventh

the view opens to me. (It could have been any other

umbilical marker, any other centre

of infinity – ) All calendars overlapping: and I,

at the juncture between

watch the mushrooms burst through the fallen leaves.

The leaves are moments,

fallen to the forest floor, fallen irrevocably through the bore

of the hourglass. The shed skin of the year

becoming translucent – lacework, lamellae

becoming momentless, becoming timeless: becoming palimpsest

rendered obliterate. The absolute memory

becoming oblivion. The love of extremity.

You can arrive at the same point

both by addition and subtraction: you can arrive by remoteness or by too-closeness

to where it breaks down. You can travel in any direction

on a spherical surface, and you will make your way round

to it: on Chipman Hill

the eternal moment – where we found us

when we left

our selves – walking along the path amid the last periwinkles

merely two bodies in impossible motion.

Notes to this poem:

'the love of extremity' is stolen from Milan Kundera

'impossible motion' -  see the Fletcher's Paradox

3. (Arrival)

This is the arrival in the moment:

that rain, long ago, on the surface of the pond

pockmarking its tiny astroblemes. I thought they looked like light bulbs breaking

but it's hard to convey their essence as I felt it then:

a momentary disturbance in a smooth plane

yet not only this – as a syllable on my lips

is not only air set a-tremble.

I thought it was so strange,

to see them leap like that for a moment before sinking, bloom

their atomiceggshelltulips above the water,

and in the same instant

shatter.

So it is when you leave.

I get out of the car, and realise I am standing downstream

from the place where the stars relinquish their ribbons of light

quiet as leaves trailing from

riparian willows

into

the river that goes and goes. We wondered where

that starlight goes when it is gone, that night

we stayed up late, and skirted syntax like a pier

before the sea's unintelligible

overexposure.

Long

        gone,

                long

                       gone, the very syllable

stretches out its arms

and gestures to the sky – the V

for valedictory, of geese. Points on

and on, like damped harmonic motion

diminishing endlessly, yet

never growing null – that water, is it still

ringing with the rain? That train you took, why,

it is still approaching. But no, somehow I've jumped like a skipped stone

and the second hand has slipped also, a heart murmur, leaving no sense

of the space it has travelled through.

The only tangible

is arrival. The stars are above me. I wake

with the feeling of falling. The same feeling, when I hold a millipede in my hand

curled limacoid and paleozoic – that queasy nosedive, that travelling

at the speed of light, as geological aeons

squeeze claustrophobic into the nanosecond.

How it

torques the inner ear and nauseates, how it makes one

gasp for breath!

Sometimes when I sleep beside you this abrupt

aterrissement will grip me, as the astral body

(or whatever you should like to call it) is wrenched from its cool timeless space,

as if from underwater, fingers webbed still with vestigial knowledge.

I feel I am a pilot in an impossibly small plane

descending quite swiftly toward the Siberian tundra

yet not so swiftly that I do not have

one infinitely elastic moment, extending

long enough for my heart's clockwork

to approach singularity. Look,

there's Kamchatka, there is Sakhalin

there is your funny permeable skin

filled in cartographic detail with pores and alveoli – there are your eyes,

blue crater-lakes that touch volcanic blackness. There, your collarbone juts

its asymptotic mountain range – there is the stunned impact, almost seeming to jump

for a moment, like drop of rain above still water.

The pilot knows nothing of terminal velocity, nor

the measurement of time. He simply feels

the absurdity of the ground –

this alien planet, this lover breathing in

sleep!

Here I am, close enough to you

to pick the sleepy-seeds from your lashes

and yet our eyes glance like billiard balls:

the gentle click

of glass on glass, far more tranquil

than the meeting of two planets

but less satisfying, for the reason that

there is no lapse in basic loneliness.

I think, how did I get here?

           The dreaming-time

is our native element, we move in it with grace.

The people there all seem familiar, they glow like paintings by Chagall

with the inward luminescence of childhood memory.

I met a beautiful woman, with red hair and a gap in her teeth

and I told her I wanted to love her... she lived far away from the town

at the lakeside under a row of elm trees. Her skin was soft, and her eyebrows pale as milkweed.

Beautiful, beautiful, overwhelmingly her beauty subtracted me

from myself and for once I was happy. She never told me her name, and perhaps

she has no need for one. The dream-people are like mermaids, for whom names

are useless appendages, soon sloughed away. The same goes for shadows, and faces

and footprints, for alphabets and shoes. I did not at first understand this,

and felt scared to see the emptiness of their mirrors,

which are lookouts upon Nothingness made visible.

I met a boy, in another dream, and I knew him though I didn't remember him.

He was like something out of the archaeology of childhood, but he took my hand

and didn't once blame me for how far I'd wandered

to arrive again like a tired girl on a train, her hair the colour of dust, smelling of old lovers.

Still I could not remember his name and he teased me for it, put

strange syllables in my mouth and jumbled them with feigned seriousness.

If I see him again, I will greet him properly

knowing that nothing is as it seems.

Our eyes will meet

like raindrop and lakewater.

In dreams, I am descending but really travelling upward

into the gravel-pit incubating its purple eggs --

the nebula, nest of Pleiades.

Under the shadow of pan-thalassic seas,

the viscous flow of energy through matter...

I am rapidly expanding out

and at the same time spiralling into myself:

the levels of organisation shift and change,

patterns of chaos in a kaleidoscope.

This is the form, not particle

but wave – the Aborigines knew it, calling time a snake

undulant with muscle, rippling sigmoidal

through space, leaving

squiggles of musical notation on the blank desert sands.

Music, after all, is the clock's precursor

– and while the clock splinters time, to conquer it –

the song measures elapsed movement with its very silences,

and it cannot be divided any more than water.

I sing when you're gone. I sing when letters

are too much like exoskeletons or beads of glass,

reminding me of nothing so much as my loneliness. Do you hear it, stretching in the lacunae?

The filament, fine as spidersilk, suspended from moment to moment – the exquisite suspense,

like a tight-rope act, when we expect the next note to fall

indivisible as a dewdrop from the bloodred twigs of trees

in February, putting out their

gemmules of punctuation and pause. The sap will be rising then, ophid in the limbs.

The song is what flows through it

slow in the winter, just a drip—

drap—drip, from the eaves, sound of stillicides.

The winter is a long silence, inviting

radio static in the brain

the way blank seashells call forth

projected mermaid voices from their emptiness, sounding always to me

like a lament – though perhaps I am wrong

to interpret such pure concavity as the hollowness

(by definition melancholy)

of bell and gong.

You are gone, and my song

expands into your absence

in the underpass, when the train has passed

echoing

            echoing.

Notes on Arrival:

astrobleme: crater left by a meteor

atterissement: landing

Aborigines:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime

stillicides: droplets falling from eaves