THE HINGE And while walking home I saw that the book I held displayed four objects on its cover: the skull of a horse, a tree with its roots intact, a flying song- bird, and a woman in outline—all placed in these exact positions on the book-front with intent, an intentional arrangement, which tipped the hand of an unknown artist who hoped the selection and shape of objects would give the book something similar to “meaning,” or perhaps in a moment of sentiment the pattern of four objects was intended to have reached out, to caress my face or tousle my hair like a new, young, overeager lover whose affections I could learn to return— but this is the hinge the poem swings on, and the trick of objects in space; I trip over myself to find a sequence of events which we would term “experience”—but what if the sequence had not been arranged or planned; it came together by pure chance, and so I mistrust objects, whose lives (yes, lives) are arranged by chance and seem to cry out a mantra: I’m not nostalgic for a world of continuities, but I’m not afraid of it either— it’s the supreme fatalism to take one’s chance, the book and the imaginary lover whisper in tandem; the truth is that I suspect objects arrange themselves, even the images of objects— objects on the book cover, in art, in real lives are free to quiver as birds in the hollow of a rock and sink into the soil, and to choose their position and angle on a canvas—imagine a farmer who picks and hoes her field all spring, who plants seeds or potatoes in April, waters and weeds the rows only to find come autumn the plants and dormant mounds of soil have rearranged themselves (as if by strange, earthly magic) and now lie in positions that surprise her, perhaps on the roof of a shed, or moved to smooth over a nearby creek bed, not out of malice or mischief but of an object’s desire to change places with another solid entity regardless of the practical need for a harvest— if this were a narrative, one anecdotal fact would be followed by another, and many together would make a story—yet looking back to the haphazard cover of my own imaginary book, I have never found facts to be orderly (least of all the unsettling pairing of horse-skull and bird, which co-exist neither as symbols nor as signs, but only as if each were a rare metal mined for an alchemical ritual) and I read as if any narrative were composed by a roll of dice as a nod to chance, as if in their deliberate bouncing each die taps out a message: “What you call experience is as likely a sequence of happenings whose order discomforts you” and even the metaphor of rolling dice seems too small or too predictable; we should speak of 1,000 dice tumbling down onto a tabletop, an avalanche in miniature, rolled, if it seems possible, by pairs upon pairs of hands until the torrent has ended, each die has chosen a number; then someone, a narrator, could step in to order and explain the fullness of the mess— although “fullness” is not the right word, it has too rich of a texture; the plastic click of imaginary dice on an imaginary table could only make a thin sound, reedy even, jarring as the hollow click on tile or wooden floors of a white-tail buck who has wandered into your house right now, in this real world, tonight, and stands confused in your kitchen or your un- cleaned bedroom, wondering what need exists for this much privacy, for this much individual room in a space formerly known only as “nature”—imagine the buck treads from room to room, pokes his muzzle in a pile of laundry, and so leaves your house; the individual room, he has realized, resembles the individual line in a poem: a way to preserve privacy, a way to channel energy from private to private space until some dynamic part runs over; when the individual line ceases to have energy for me, I usually break the line there while at other points in the poem lines seem to break themselves, as if under the building pressure of their own great weight … which can only be the reason for roots and branches on the cover of the book in my arms: each growth of the illustrated tree forms its own lines, arguably parallel in structure, gesture, direction, and made of similar wood, but differing somehow in intent: some rise while the rest sink under soil—but surely the intent of objects lies out- side of my understanding, and trees have unknown contingencies I would lack the grounding to imagine: the amount and directional flow of groundwater, levels of decayed organic matter in soil, saturation of earth and the depth of bedrock far beneath the topsoil; the prevalent winds and their average speed in all four seasons; on top of this you have the whims of trees themselves, their own acts and foibles: the preference of one for nutrients in foliage while another prefers to press its roots through decaying animal bodies———I’m not asking if we can mimic or become trees; not asking “Is the man a bird?” “Is the man a tree?” but hoping to make space in the poem not for ambiguity—which always finds a way in through the cracks—but for these words and letters, dots of ink and reams of paper, to bring all their own knowing to bear, while I sit on the side- line, having a beer or a sandwich and watching as whatever we call “know- ledge” is created on the page—think of an orator who clears her throat to speak, to say, “Only listen to the cracks and texture of my voice, coming from these specific lungs, and the air which my tongue, cheeks, and lips shape”: she begins, and her address has an improvisatory note as if it were beautifully cobbled together by dozens of actors—the woman and the parts of her body—and so it is her silhouette that rests on the book cover, the fourth peculiar image, her hands held high in a persuasive pose—and I feel no surprise at this discovery although, if truth be told, I have known the silhouette’s origin all along— but the irrevocable just happens whether or not it’s known in advance, and then there’s the separate question of whether not-knowing or know- ing would change the outcome of a set sequence of events (say, the specific form of an outlined body on the cover of an imaginary book)——so I picture myself returning home, setting the book on its shelf, taking off my shoes and jacket and relaxing, pouring a drink or making a cup of tea; the evening is strangely relaxing like a woodcutter eating bread in a solitary wood: an image designed to calm one’s mind or excite a humble passion for the domestic and the private—appropriate, then, that it’s the woodcutter who eats alone, a solitary reject from the poem’s so- called cast of characters, perhaps even the sinister (though introverted) villain of the poem or the dismal figure at its not-quite- center; you feel your stomach tighten and your throat con- strict; he both compels and frightens you with his violence to trees—trees, which have been made into books for decades and are now found in dwindling supply, so our wood- cutter sits as both savior and scourge in the world of books … but isn’t the axe itself also deserving of blame or praise? as the agent who bites into the tree and begins to render paper—maybe the woodcutter only approached this forest to hear the song of the woodcutter women and the axe began to chop on its own—unlikely, I’ll admit, but otherwise what roles are left to play by axe and book alike, other than those of false passivity—— and these objects pass through time and remember, too; how else could we invoke rock memory, water memory with a straight face?— and I see no contradiction between praising the memory of objects and mistrusting their contingencies, like some medieval fear that suspicious persons turn into animals at midnight; the fear that the boundary between man and beast is thin and perm- eable by unknown agents: perhaps a specific alignment of planets and moons, or a change in the spiritual breeze, a dancing ring of fairies deep in the forest— and if none of this happens I can at least admit that things aren’t supposed to happen according to plan and thus when they do it’s a small dislocation in the universe— on the shelf, the book has shifted its spine and so I straighten it: the object will be stable for a moment, but beyond that another willful tremor could topple both shelf and book, kitchen table, chairs, sofa and desk, a cacophony of glass and silverware tumbling from ceiling to floor … “the world is not ours,” says the woman outside my window—and I nod, and I nod, and feel as if the ground begins to lift. NARRATIVE
You awoke, dressed and confused, of course, on the beach while above you a single bird sang from the branch of an evergreen—a sound which, to your ringing ears, seemed out of place; perhaps the bird had known you would wake here and came purposefully to find you, or else the bird could have been blown off course by a storm and arrived in this tree on this beach purely by coincidence———so you sat up, brushed sand from your hair, and searched towards the trees for a lost pair of sunglasses, only to remember that you exist in a space, hemmed in by other trees that are called “real trees” and whatever experience you had passed through or were about to pass through could likewise be called a “real” event, although taking a moment to reflect before forcing yourself to stand up and walk forward, along from the sandy dunes, you recalled a thin memory near another tree planted with roots in the ground, perhaps a nearby trowel and a parent or child further off to the left————— as if you had spent your life wandering confused among forests, some murky, half-lived dream in which you played every role: parent, child, perhaps tree, maybe even the trowel that the child used to dig holes in damp, loose gravel, or the half-smoked cigarette the bored parent puffed at before tossing it away, out of the child’s line of sight————— and this wispy character you dream, remember, or imagine, but whose inner thoughts become more real to you every second, wishes that the vacation they have taken the child on could have gone otherwise, that the two of them could have seen the southwestern deserts—but here they are, stuck in a foggy forest near a playground, as the child asks to hear a certain narrative and the parent replies, “I have told you before, the story: How a bag of oranges has dried up and the fruit is now as husks…” or is it you who has told this story before, or who has been told it enough times that the space between telling and hearing loses its shape; these two ways of grasping at narrative conjoin in your mind as you press forward along the beach, noting with disinterest, as if your body were not your own, the pleasure of sand grains between your toes and rhythmic slaps of waves coming in— but nature is a distraction; you thought you saw a familiar face in a crowd four hundred yards away and you press towards this hint of familiarity with a single- minded focus, although the beach seems to lengthen with each half-stumbled step you take, and the face you once hoped would be familiar is now farther away and more alien than before … you would not be surprised to find that you’ve been walking, in fact, on a treadmill with sporadic handfuls of sand tossed on the track by the hands of un- seen tricksters; perhaps even the sea- gulls and crabs are in on the prank——and the waves may not be real waves at all, but a few shallow inches of water rolled towards you again and again, like the water in a kiddie wave pool that a machine crests shore-ward until it is turned off, drained, and left for the night—or, worse, the waves you see may be something like a projection splayed out on your retinas and cast from an unseen light, so what you take to be real, tangible, empirical is more like hallucination than perception … perhaps your trust in nature has been misplaced, you realize, and the system you called “natural” is more like a network of connecting functions; you glance back to the trees and see vivid green sunlight that was profundity is now invested with linkage, the grass, invested with linkage, the whole sky, a tainted link—— not that discrete nodes and linkages can’t be profound, but still, it’s un- nerving to discover pseudo-technological connection where you expected to find … nothing, only the slow processes that you believed had shaped the physical world but now came to doubt, unless at the bottom, some rhizome structure forms the very linkages which connect the forces and workings of nature———by now, you are far across the beach from where you began, and the face you thought you would recognize turned out to be the face of a stranger, although one uncannily similar to a man you met many years ago: brown hair, blue eyes, glasses, the sort of face that could belong to any number of acquaintances; exhaustion had caught up with you, so you angled your path inland, back towards the trees and looked for a patch of color, but from something longer than flowers, something purple——— but the earth is tired of comparisons and now no colors quite look alike, each tree shows a different tone of green, or yellow, red, orange, and you spy fine differences between the most similar shades; grains of sand possess subtly different hues from one another, as do flying water drop- lets splashed up by successive waves— you look and realize you are surrounded by differences; nothing is the same and even similarity seems like a fleeting concept … of course the earth dislikes comparison when to compare has become impossible, when a category like ‘color’ is too naïve, too optimistic or normative; there is no more ‘color,’ only crimson, rose, lavender, periwinkle , and you look to the trees which again surround you to see that their up-thrust shapes resist categorization; no two tree trunks follow the same almost-straight line; pairs of needles or leaves seem similar at first but you soon spot the overwhelming differences and realize that no leaf can convey the intricacies of any other, which, as cliché as that statement may sound, is another way of saying that the small engine which chugs along to create the natural world has never made two of the same object————you sink down to recline with your back against the trunk of another evergreen, close your eyes, and breathe slowly to calm your pound- ing heart and enjoy the breeze … so you look at the swerving coastline and think “I should find pleasure only in the straight line. I should cut out all curves and melodies. I should think of the effect and should find pleasure…”—and you do feel pleased, or at least something like it, although the shoreline does not straighten but, through your closing eyes, looks more rounded and contoured than before; the sounds from birds and the tide change too, both are leaving you now, and even the trees may vanish, the sand on the shore itself start to flow out to sea, you believe. LANDSCAPES
Think about it, imagine it, let your mind displace itself to any land- scape of your choosing: the sight is not one you have seen arranged in this order before; it’s what you cobble together from dozens of weekend trips to the country, visits to an uncle’s or great- aunt’s backwoods cabin somewhere between Gunnison and Georgetown; perhaps the view borrows from fields and gullies you walked through years ago, the river winding through foothills down to the mellow woodland lake, the crests of a dozen snow- capped mountains sus- pended at the far side of your private horizon … the place hasn’t vanished, but the angle of time that became what you laughingly called your “experience” is gone— so you misremember the places you have never been, violently tear at the thought until you’re left with a bleeding collage of memory … or is the situation more complex? think of a cartographer at her wooden table, who must make a map to mimic landscapes she has never seen—she picks up pens, she shades the oceans blue; land, green, topo- grapy displays no favorites although whatever doubtful “integrity” nature itself possesses is surely altered by its transition to the flat space of maps: the names of seashore towns run out to sea, or maybe towns and names are, alike, invented— and our cartographer is a genius at mimicry and subversion, at making images that resemble but do not represent genuine geography— a misplaced mountain here, an altered river to its east, a fabricated town north of them both … but if tonight you were to drive to where you thought these parts of landscape did not exist, you might find them, in fact, present and having been in their place for decades, leading you to wonder if the map or the landscape were wrong, or how one can exert a potent coercion over the other … while truly neither can be “wrong,” as if her maps deliberately lied or the physical world set out to disfigure it- self by building degrees of difference between landscape and map———but we are not idiots; we have been to school, and the world is many, we have learnt— so from the many-world we draw or build our own images of mountains and grasslands, and happily agree that every possible map describes in exact detail some possible configuration of landscape, just perhaps one that hasn’t been discovered or viewed from the precise, correct angle yet: the clouds look fresh today, to the south a field of pineapple grows, rows of imagined trees line a real high- way; everywhere you look, the earth makes its maximal effort to … what, exactly? to produce forms, to evolve slightly shorter beaks on slightly larger birds, is this all? I suppose. But how many small changes in a landscape are needed to justify a new map, a new paper or digital projection, set to mimic an arrangement that may only last a few short years?—as if any change were in itself an aesthetic betrayal, to turn away from a close friend, the friend who best mimics your own idiosyncrasies, who can present your succinct portrait to a curious and admiring public, while you portray hidden depths of their so-called person- ality … ; and this is why, when you and I finally look away from the landscape or map that has held our attention and look back towards the cities, we whisper of our shared dislike of mirrors, and the backwards men and women inside the glass who are only one false step away from leaping out towards our unprotected eyes and throat; of course we want our reflection to be clean as wood as it issues from the hand of nature, but even a single mirror will double the number of people in this room, will render them perfect but inverse, the tricks of multiples and geometry that nature has aimed to master for centuries— but nature’s one mistake has been to add new materials, to add complexity to its equations and algorithms, then turn against its own products when they are not as proportionate and exact of a replica as an undressed man before a mirror … new biology has clogged the system, nature thinks to itself, and votes in a draconian approach: to kill its own imperfections; so the small creatures who dwell between blades of grass or at the bottom of the ocean live their days in a land- scape of terror, in which any creature could destroy, kill, harm, or maim them like a poet smudging out a poorly shaped letter or parenthesis— think of a cave diver, crouched in the dank belly of some claustrophobic cavern who thinks to herself, having been brought this far by nature, I have been brought out of nature, and nothing here shows me the image of myself, nor is she shown alien or ancient images; the submerged cavern hosts no cave paintings or irreverent graffiti drawn by bored teenagers in a moment of lust or anger (and who, being 15, could easily discern the two?)—so the diver real- izes that being outside of nature means being outside of the rightful realm of images; watery walls shift and swim in the beams of her head- lamp but never resolve, never cement enough to suggest a human or animal form—which is the great pleasure drawn from viewing clouds as they drift between shape and shapelessness—but the cave is utterly inhuman, and the diver cannot bring herself to imagine that its wet walls and floor have any qualities other than their sodden reality; pretending that she lays on her back beneath a canopy of palm leaves and swaying coconuts would be impossible; pretending that a hammock swings lightly from between two up-thrust stalagmites is laughably naïve: the place resists images—— soon all sense of reality outside the cavern fades and both nature and image seem inconsequential; this place becomes a landscape full of an original chaos but not in itself divine, as divinity links too neatly with the willingness to accommodate or admire a certain “beauty” from jumbled collections not considered an image … think of the detritus, the insect swarms and shrub clippings outside of our own front door if you want a glimpse into the immediacy of nature; although you and I both know how easily we came to believe alluring fictions about the natural world and to leave unquestioned the ambiguous motives of animal and plant alike: the blandly manicured grass itself could hold hidden malice, a lust for blood or blind hatred of its forced uniform appear- ance, as grass seems obligated to play the part of something you’d call “surface,” an unwilling mediator between lofty trees, clouds, bicycles, telephone poles and the earthy secrets of rock, soil, and clay; think of landscape like this: the balloons drift thoughtfully over the land, not exactly commenting on it; this is the range of the poet’s experience, which means that although neither poet nor poem can trace or even reach down to touch the landscape, both author and text remind you of the pleasure that can be taken by lightly skimming over the tops of pine trees, nearly snagged but at last swerving away, or by catching your reflection—dis- torted as it may be—in the smooth surface of a rural lake—and so pleasure, then, may be the outcome of land- scapes, the modern pleasure of hovering just above that forever untouchable object whose artifice (an open secret which nature makes no effort to hide) only increases your joy, since touch would somehow prove it real, somehow prove the landscape pedestrian, so it should always lie directly over the next rise, the next mountain—— out of habit you glance nervously at your watch, while at the same moment, in a park across the street, a child lifts up his cheap camera to take a photo of a picturesque copse of trees and the craggy peak behind it—he lifts the camera to his eye as a pair of sparrows circle and play among the branches; he thinks that each bird brushes in a fulsome way against the fulsomeness of nature and snaps the photo——but one of the sparrows flies out of frame just before the shutter clicks, so the image is incomplete, only a partial rep- resentation (and the other bird that escaped the photo, does it still exist in a space devoted to the liminal, the not-quite-photographed, or has it been cut out of the world of images?)— but the boy doesn’t realize the photo’s imperfection; he won’t develop it for several days and will have for- gotten that a second sparrow ever flew beside the first; he will have forgotten that a landscape is not what you saw but what you tell your- self that you remember having seen … a sort of binding up of words and impressions, parts of daily experience bundled, tidy, made singular, simplified and secure in the adding up of all things into a block of hay from which no strand is permitted to extrude———————and so the bird is forgotten, maybe to its own benefit as it beds down tonight in a bush near your house, outside of images, as if it had withdrawn itself from whatever pool of visual fragments we use to piece together landscapes, away from mirrors and the prying lens of the camera, silent and content with its paltry meal, this insect, some water. |
THE HINGE Connor Fisher download The Hinge as a PDF ©2018 Connor Fisher All rights reserved Epigraph Chapbook 006 |
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NOTES:
In these poems, italicized lines indicate quotation. Writers quoted in each poem are:
“The Hinge”: Lyn Hejinian, Ed Dorn, Armand Schwerner, John Ashbery, Jackson Mac Low, and Alice Notley.
“Narrative”: Barbara Guest, Diane Wakosi, Clayton Eshleman, and Robert Kelly.
“Landscapes”: Jennifer Moxley, Elizabeth Bishop, Laura Riding, Charles Olson, A.R. Ammons, Nicolas Pesqués, and John
Ashbery.
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Connor Fisher lives in Athens, Georgia. He has an MA in English Literature from the University of Denver, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is working towards a PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. His poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Volta, Rain Taxi, Dreginald, Word for / Word, Tarpaulin Sky, 32 Poems, Typo, the Colorado Review, and 7x7.