Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Liz Howard

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Howard, Liz, 1985–, author

  Infinite citizen of the shaking tent / Liz Howard.

  Poems.

  ISBN 978-0-7710-3836-5 (pbk.). – ISBN 978-0-7710-3837-2 (html)

  I. Title.

  PS8615.O91154 2015 C811′.6 C2014-907898-6

  C2014-907899-4

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014920839

  McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  o ownership of the material elements of self

  to toss down a dish-cloth and open a river

  JOANNE ARNOTT, “dream of fine houses,” A Night for the Lady

  rendering the implicit explicit is the cognitive form of fate

  PETER SLOTERDIJK, You Must Change Your Life

  To connect is so unconquerable a citizen only a gift may vibrate.

  ERÍN MOURE, “My Volition’s Faint Trill,” O Cidadán

  so violent an ecstasy

  PAUL LE JEUNE, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Disclaimer

  HYPERBOREAL

  TERRA NOVA, TERRAFORMED

  NEURAL CASCADE: A CHANDELIER OF FOREST BONES

  STANDARD TIME

  LOOK BOOK

  BOREAL SWING

  STANDARD TIME

  1992

  A WAKE

  DEBARKER

  THINKTENT

  EPILOGUE

  SOME AMERICAS

  REDRESS

  STANDARD TIME

  OF HEREAFTER SONG

  PROLOGUE

  CONTACT

  A RUDE INSCRIPTION AT THE TOP OF HEAVEN

  HENCEFORTH, THROUGH THE FOREST

  TENDER PATHOS: A DENSER, BLUE VAPOUR

  BIGGER THAN

  EVERY HUMAN HEART IS HUMAN

  SKULLAMBIENT

  ANARCHAEOLOGY OF LICHEN

  WATERSHED AND SHIELD REMINISCENCE

  FORAMEN MAGNUM

  STEINIAN APHASIA

  SENTIENT: AN ORATION

  PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

  HYPERBOREAL

  NORTH BY SOUTH

  STANDARD TIME

  BILDUNGSROMAN

  REVENANT: LOSS

  REVENANT: MISREMEMBERED

  REVENANT: HEAVEN

  APOSTLE OF DOUBT

  RING SAMPLE: ADDENDUM

  BINGO RIOT

  Anishinaabemowin Glossary

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:

  to crack the sky open this caustic history his horse fell down its bank

  To most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the printed page, you may choose to decrease the size of the text on your viewer and/or change the orientation of your screen until the above line of characters fits on a single line. This may not be possible on all e-reading devices. Viewing this title at a higher than optimal text size or on a screen too small to accommodate the longest lines in the text will alter the reading experience and may cause single lines of some poems to display as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

  HYPERBOREAL

  TERRA NOVA, TERRAFORMED

  Spent shale, thigh haptic fisher, roe, river

  delta of sleep-inducing peptides abet our tent

  in a deep time course, in Venus retrograde

  we coalesced into the Cartesian floral pattern

  of heritage where I hunt along a creek as

  you pack bits of bone away within a system

  of conservation the site was discovered

  during construction of a new venous

  highway for stars birthing themselves

  out of pyroclastic dust and telepathy

  in the time zone of some desperate hour

  when all our exits are terraformed

  Sons and daughters of the liberal arts

  all my life has spurned a desire for more than

  a power line of injured transistors

  fetal alcohol syndrome, oil drums sunk

  to the bottom of every lake, the aurora borealis

  an overdose along the magnetized pole

  what we are offered in lieu of a soul

  another paper cut of lambent plasma

  thickening the wound bed of release:

  O creek, bleeding hills, census inveterate

  let me sleep five more minutes just five

  minutes more before we default on

  eternity

  NEURAL CASCADE: A CHANDELIER OF FOREST BONES

  Maybe I do know you

  extensive avenue of faux moss

  vault of photochemicals upended

  on the civic leash

  mesh of resin

  a conduit

  of skulls suspended

  by reason

  a jawline fracture throttling canticles in cedar

  doubtful oxides sweating it out

  in the pineal apartment

  of our common water

  this forehead

  a portent

  for dendrites

  brain treaty

  of sap, black sap

  deep-sea atoms

  irrevocable, leaking

  what we can barely recall

  a pine marten’s sacrum hanging

  its bowl of quiet from a birch

  to recognize the night inverted

  as in: I is unprovable

  what is the best

  of these to be

  believed

  had you arrived

  wearing my face

  in a hail shower

  the heavens

  might’ve anchored

  my bad shoulder

  to the floorboards

  with adrenaline, a hare gone

  to rut in the reverb of

  precognition

  let me live

  STANDARD TIME

  In our woods: hemodynamic snow

  a terrarium of lung-fed prosody

  tucked inside a small body of rusted air

  Our throats flecked with pyrite and broken glass

  swift foxes, insulin pumps, pink cyclical rivers

  know the jet stream to be a Sanguine

  Melancholic in these days of warming

  dark stars for lease in the divisible world

  at all hours culling a distemper of infinity

  Our screen test could be anaesthetic

  lest my mother speak of the man who held

  a gun to her head for an evening

  In everything now, a gelatinous spill of best practice

  could our late mouths ever know such a green word

  as vertigo, vertigo, the rush of the vertical

  It’s ours.

  LOOK BOOK


  Over there on the green

  lawn under a sick pine

  is the body of the bird

  his plumage blue when

  I go to look at him and

  wonder if he’s dead but

  his chest sort of heaves

  so I bend down closer

  look how the breast

  of the bird splits open

  and a fist of maggots

  spills out on the grass

  a necklace of sticky

  pearls in peristalsis ribbed

  and shining in the July

  light invertebrates that

  form an anecdote before

  I go back into our clapboard

  house to look at the Sears

  catalogue and dream

  I am a girl posed into

  happiness look at me

  here now in this new

  dress I’ve bought with my

  own money at age twenty

  in the city when the cops

  question me I flash my

  passport thinking of

  lichen inching down

  a branch of a tree over

  the town river when I was

  small and somewhere my

  birth father is drunk and

  homeless, half-mad when

  the cops ask for his name

  he’ll say, December

  BOREAL SWING

  My mother hunted moose

  as a child my grandfather taught her

  how to field dress a bull:

  make an incision from the throat

  to the pelvis

  the abdominal cavity emptied

  haul him up between two pines

  the body inverted

  antlers almost grazing

  the soil

  each hind limb leashed to a trunk above

  to allow the flesh to cool

  then she’d climb inside

  the open chest

  fix her toes along the ledge

  of two ribs

  and with a kick to the bull’s left shoulder

  he sent her

  swinging

  STANDARD TIME

  The total psychic economy shimmers

  a latent mouthpiece of maple out in the field

  anthropologically, this voice in its hollow

  All night the blood moon measures the dilation

  of your pupil, pinprick or dinner plate

  in this plenum where our attention fails to die

  A positive outcome, music in the unfinished

  basement, a purple curfew for causation, the reply

  a sinuous window of dried moths over the harbour

  Exercise in temperament pitched back over

  the clouded bathroom mirror transiting near to silver

  almost female in a song of Velcro afterbirth and gravel

  In our settler dreams Plexiglas teeth were stuck in the hide

  of the ravine, a freeway of copper wire and sugar bush

  metabolics, Copernican limbs, mercury in the water

  Little silver pills tracing a path through the lake bed

  of submerged logs to a trap of currents under rock

  all our odd love and petrochemicals

  Not otherwise

  specified.

  1992

  This is our welfare half

  a duplex with mint green

  siding shrugged between

  rail yard and main street

  logging trucks and trains

  shake the foundation so

  much I mistake them for god

  forever it is winter mom

  dissolves into mentholated

  smoke and Coffee-Mate at

  the kitchen table painting

  orcas and nor’easters in burnt

  umber and verdigris until

  the fuel we burn for heat

  dissipates I find

  my brother sitting

  blue-tinged in his crib

  mucus freezing to his

  tiny upper lip come

  spring he gets up on two

  feet to press his left hand

  onto her canvas leaves his

  mark in the sky just over

  where a suggestion

  of light snuck out

  through the rippled

  storm cloud a copper

  coin shining onto where

  the waters calm at a

  distance from the

  anonymous

  shore

  A WAKE

  Your eyes open the night’s slow static at a loss

  to explain this place you’ve returned to from above;

  cedar along a broken shore, twisting in a wake of fog.

  I’ve lived in rooms with others, of no place and no mind

  trying to bind a self inside the contagion of words while

  your eyes open the night’s slow static. At a loss

  to understand all that I cannot say, as if you came

  upon the infinite simply by thinking and it was

  a shore of broken cedar twisting in a wake of fog.

  If I moan from an animal throat it is in hope you

  will return to me what I lost learning to speak.

  Your eyes open the night’s slow static at a loss

  to ever know the true terminus of doubt, the limits of skin.

  As long as you hold me I am doubled from without and within:

  a wake of fog unbroken, a shore of twisted cedar.

  I will press myself into potential, into your breath,

  and maybe what was lost will return in sleep once I see

  your eyes open into the night’s slow static, at a loss.

  Broken on a shore of cedar. We twist in a wake of fog.

  DEBARKER

  I just want to go back

  into the bush and eat

  more blueberries

  growing wild as she

  drops me off at the lumber

  mill I’m fifteen and a janitor

  cleaning out the urinals

  at the debarker I find

  pubic hair the lumberjacks

  have left long barbs curled

  to “put me in my place”

  debarker: where they

  keep the machine that

  cuts the bark away from

  the trees years ago my

  blood cousin fell in

  and emerged skinless

  that was before this brain

  sprouted from my spine

  in an allegory trees

  would be distributed

  evenly throughout the

  narrative in a gesture

  of looking back over

  my shoulder as mom

  pulls away from the

  yard I have on a hard

  hat that is orange and too

  big over my weird bleached

  hair I have only the same

  rag for the toilets as the

  dishes when I look up the

  sky is obscured by smoke

  I can never tell what

  they’re burning

  THINKTENT

  I am my world. (The microcosm.)

  – Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Hospitality: the first demand

  what is your name?

  the city bound me so I entered

  to dream a science that would name me

  daughter and launch beyond

  grief, the old thoracic cause

  myocardium: a blood-orange foundry

  handed down by the humoral

  anatomists and to not be

  inside my own head perpetually

  not simply Wittgenstein’s girl

  but an infinite citizen in a shaking tent

  If you are in need of an answer

  consult a jiisakiiwinini

  scientific rigour

  psychoanalysis

  the unconscious a construct

  method amphibious

  of two minds
r />   that’s the translator

  her task to receive

  the call that comes

  down the barrel

  of the future

  all of us a congress

  of selves a vibrational chorus

  I know myself to be a guest

  in your mind a grand lodge

  of everything I long to know and hold

  within this potlatch we call

  the present

  moment

  If I speak of the night

  speak its illicit cerebrum

  of branches and back seats

  speak beyond our future

  a thinkable urn

  my empirical training

  my non-status brow ridge

  indivisible and glistening

  every time I tease a thread of being

  from its moment in standard time

  let’s elevate the coordinates of distress

  take it all in

  I’m all in and over the limit

  the limit, the eliminative, the lumens, the mens rea, the loom

  to be a shopkeep in the showroom of nouns

  what to purchase and what

  to disavow

  speak with saffron

  speak of just the small bits, atomic

  speak of the inevitable curve in the data

  all foreclosed upon and glimmering

  like a good bitch in the brine of night

  I haven’t nearly enough heat here

  in this stakeout

  the sky died and I’m its anima in the pitch thickets

  I have fingers with which to squish

  pin cherries and rosehips

  dogwood, I have begun

  to hear a rosary of pure tones, the colony

  hear its call toward disorder

  citizens, I have never

  been dishonest in my horror

  the underclass of our era

  a requisite paternity test

  dominus

  in excelsis

  Our foisted self-addendum was called against our lack

  of surprise

  everything that always happens

  as it happens to you

  in the soiled ledger of our days I know you know

  we are forever evident

  in our swampy coda of tending the land

  is the land is its own belonging

  to itself

  In a laboratory of thought

  lifting paper cups of black foam

  up to our mouths

  without cameras

  everything becomes the fringe

  of our interior

  affect is an aid to cognition

  shameless in its missionary

  position of standard time

  Another day unmoored

  from its twin

  hysterical

  about music

  our ontogeny

  an iterative gasket

  I knew it as a sphere

  flinched in my portal vein

  thickening and bleating and posturing

  all that happened upon the digital

  sidestep

  the distinction