Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent
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
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to crack the sky open this caustic history his horse fell down its bank
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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
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