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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE uglyducklingpresse.org
UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) K AT E C O L B Y
UGLY DUCKLNG PRESSE
UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) The Return of the Native © Kate Colby, 2011
First Edition, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011 ISBN 978-1-933254-77-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data THE Colby, Kate. The return of the native / Kate Colby. — 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-933254-77-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. PS3603.O419R47 2011 811'.6—dc22 RETURN 2010051410 O F T H E Ugly Duckling Presse at the Old American Can Factory 232 Third Street, E002 Brooklyn, NY 11215 (www.uglyducklingpresse.org) NATIVE Distributed by Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org)
Ugly Duckling Presse is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.
Design & Typesetting: Don’t Look Now! Type: Gloucester, Gill Sans, Garamond Cover Printing: Ugly Duckling Presse Cover Paper: Fabriano / Tiziano Printing & Binding: McNaughton & Gunn
Thank you to the editors of Coconut, NO: A Journal of the Arts and Shampoo, in which sections of this poem first appeared.
UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Inevitable Movement Onward {1} The Morning and the Evening of a Day {3} Firmness Is Discovered in a Gentle Heart {6} Rough Coercion Is Employed {7} Sharp Words Are Spoken and a Crisis Ensues {9} A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion {11} Humanity Appears upon the Scene Hand in Hand with Trouble {14} A Conjuncture, and Its Result upon the Pedestrian {16} A Lurid Light Breaks In upon a Darkened Understanding {19} She Goes Out to Battle Against Depression {20} A Face on Which Time Makes But Little Impression {23} Through the Moonlight {27} The Two Stand Face to Face {29} Queen of Night {30} The Dishonesty of an Honest Woman {33} The Custom of the Country {36} My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is {40} Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black Morning {41} A Coalition Between Beauty and Oddness {48} The Figure Against the Sky {51} Perplexity Among Honest People {52} Those Who Are Found Where There Is Said to Be Nobody {57} An Old Move Inadvertently Repeated {59} The First Act in a Timeworn Drama {61}
UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) The Inevitable Movement Onward
So, he laid down his hammer and he died.
A world is peopled with Xs for eyes
and gotten away
with toll taken late and just as soon assigned to last year’s bottom line.
Pioneer Days one pays to pan for gold—fool’s nostalgic pay dirt trumps being played
triplets with your left hand two-timing with your right.
Sky-high and hand-tying green’s fee of the strapped ways and means overseeing trustees I don’t ever want to see this world again—not with these eyes. a yonder —LALITA MADHAVA DAS that’s rather more yellow
let mellow if anything other than fangled.
UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) The Morning and the Evening of a Day Plucked from rolling pie-cart at the roll call—
to want Slowly grows to take the hoary morn this role of fingered frost and fill it infection spread across the wavy windows. say throwing Wessex back on the wheel so the product becomes its packaging. A fingerprint burns in reflexive research for identical snowflakes, the invisible seam of this sugar-egg landscape
before it clouds over
again with sanded banks and frozen ruts in the mud
a dampened thud on the slumping stoop
a bit of movement in the bowels of the morning’s historical romance
say something starring Depardieu.
My non-dairy creamer is clumping your coffee
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) my coffee- functional duck boots, mate clouding your cup o’ bug juice, boiled dinner my coffee —wouldn’t mind at all (adopted (abandoned my mind running off at the mouth highway right blinker while things crust up in its corners.
blinking Is it geodesy or stick-to-itive local parsimony, my practical and the sky is as round as the rest of it. Congregational education in always putting to good use The grist mill ground away with the water the drippings. source dried up pipes This old thing? jazzy track at the Post Road Payless— A stopper chain Hey Jude, rust stained, so you’re chipping away that stone dust in your nose strip it. isn’t really real, but at least you can feel it. In decline an ancient line I’d like to be at home of in a truck backing up rethinking in the morning, the sound better leave it of salt on the road, in the mud room. the bottle rolling around in the back
to have like lichen reciprocal sense of my own
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) Firmness Is Discovered in a Gentle Heart Rough Coercion Is Employed
And just for the record Cart has overtaken horse this is not jazz but light and is now overturning over the lip of the black hole—suction required trot trot to trot trot to stick to the side, a centrifugal ride It’s all downhill from here.
The Gravitron Things that didn’t antecede —Turkish Twist? their names were made and meant the fist to be made ready I will shatter in this unblinking mirror. all colors already discovered, a county of traces on wayside signposts.
A taste of fame and of a sudden all those years suck down the drain in retroactive assignation
in a role like a ring too big for the finger
as slipped on retro-spected, checkered past and kinged by retracting escape ladder
climb up into a narrow window and draw the blinds behind you.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) Trees on tiny offshore islands Sharp Words Are Spoken and a Crisis Ensues with theoretical leaves
and all the things that can’t happen History loves company. simply because you know they can’t. Old soldiers lie only six inches under. The sky is white Spoon up next to them with the kind of lightning in two-player games of that always strikes at least twice sardines—turn the key and hail the size of the holes and close the can behind me. in your windshield—stopping you dead your tracks Keep your distance; I am wrapped in a paper bag the sound of a rock or raft with tax-free rocks and salty rims around which water laps at the wayside Stateline Liquor Store. bubbles in hard candy [We will not be undersold!] that cut your tongue and make your candy How a life taste like blood takes on a life its very own. a plastic Adirondack chair.
Can’t resist one last I’ve beeped back up into round on the house stomping grounds: boot- and every single time. scrapes, stoops I’ve tracked all over the house
have to cough just to feel my own soft interior walls
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) buzzing with darkness A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion and wheezy insects soughing in the trees peters out pre-dawn To move and into the hollow so to see feeling of fall. the medium in a moment. Sleepy seeds crusting the corners of my eyes Home is where the head is dusk breaks scarlet taken. sumac, bayberry, bittersweet scent of Lying back in a warm bath my waxy wick: waiting for the water Autumn Mist to get cold in a gradual disambiguation— a security blanket to bleed out into. dear amphibian, never mind the slow death, To write only to have only jump at the sudden. thought of something (or the opposite) Now back in the technicolonial color of my youth—bitter blue an empty packet of sweetener juniper berries (in case of emergency) crushed between fingers
My dead are where my lands lie buried lackluster pewter, umbrella tines, rusted between the Hilltop Steakhouse and Suffolk Downs tins of powder Colman’s Mustard. and never to regain the ground A frowsy form at the bitter end we’ve turned into. of cross-continental continuum— power lines and cloud formations
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) Harley Ds and E Clampus Vitus bubbles for your own chapter saloons, bee-stung barmaids time in fin-de-siècle-reminiscent pantaloons being; holding your breath is not slapped-on bumper regalia the same as not breathing. of entitlement: supporting our troops on a run for a roll of electrical tape My epistemological pace car lapping me— [You break it, you buy it.] give a vigorous scissor kick, touch my finger to the mirror [Check your alignment.] to live within —screaming big rigs— a finger-licking inch of your own life [How’s my driving?] (but don’t fall in!) to the Winnemucca Flying J. Now I’m just dating myself. Over title I’d take the chain on my stopper, my own corroding string of beads and couplings and what goes out with the bathwater.
Were I to reside in a sugar egg, snow-white landscape of pure analogy
shiny schist sidewalks with adhesive safety of slip-proof daisies.
Uh oh, non-dairy overload— put your face in and blow
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) Humanity Appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble then prick your finger just so you can suck on it. All is safely gathered in I’ve seen my own murmuring heart stone walls will wind being monitored around and through it the skip drained veins in my signature’s one man’s hands dotted line. his own land effaced and lichened (Hurling my plates at the wall— ways of life. the pain- Such description precluding the instant written drip, breathing turns to bone, bleached skeleton—any story deep unlearned is as real as that in circular which swings in its stand surface aspiration in the examination room You won’t feel a thing. nervous tissue I’ll eat with my goddamn hands!) paper light A man ain’t nothin’ but a man [If you lived here you’d be home right now.] tooth and nail. When who’s there lands before the knock
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) A Conjuncture, and Its Result upon the Pedestrian But a barn is nothing but a barn is nothing if not site- specific—around it cows Foggy haloes fade lie down for coming rain into day breaking at the Little House on the Prairie House into dark the Future Farmers of Everything
a broken leave a greasy patch on the Plexiglass, silence is scratch-ticket ritual of local entitlement whirring. to the wheezy harmonica Were pudding to sputter dragging down the highway— at the end of a poker, hangdog soundtrack were woodlanders wooding, of second generation would be so sweet without twice removed from layers of the land my downwardly mobile window. and the kinds of things contained in silos: Some things pre-exist their purposes: supposed wheat and the world’s undoing
prefab vernacular architecture, a man-made winter universally unflattering fashions, stirring in your cup, interiors designed before ground my deliquescing pot broken, insulation blown. my slurring serial signage screaming (I’m taping syntactic paint chips to the wall [This Space Available]
my tonal continua that leave a lot Pretty, pretty porcelain Tom to be determined by the color wheel.) who’s not whitewashing the pickets and why, all fill-in-the-blank as can be
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) milk-fed and creamy- A Lurid Light Breaks In upon a Darkened Understanding thighed, sleepy pie- eyed sweetie, time and edition This time you’ve been provided with a playbill: limited American heritage figurine. John Henry is the Strings Jude is the Bassoon I can make of you This evening Jude will be played by the Flute everything you are, The Wolf is the Contemporary everything I need The Hammer is the Strings to say is seared in This evening John will be playing the Strings lazy cattle brands The Drill is Non-Dairy is the Wessex is the Horns The Murmur is the Bird, the Flute Old West pan and pickaxe, The Bird is the Bassoon stocks, speckled pots, The Clarinet is the Reservoir (not yet formally introduced) painted ladies, fringy lampshades The Triangle plays the Grist Mill is the Ping in the procession The Strings are the Strings and are writing the score identity’s event horizon Who is the Jazz? (There is no jazz.) ingesting everything The Strings are Jack and Tom and also me that falls within an inch of my life The Stopper plays Tambourine, rattles its Chain The Bass is the Hum and the Halo and the Wolf whither my body and the hole meet my body and the drain coming through the wry. and my home the metronome the native trope The West is the West is the Egg plays Sue is the Bassoon Hi, I’m Sue. I play the Bassoon. And that’s History on the Oboe, wailing What don’t mean a thing goo goo ga joob
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) She Goes Out to Battle Against Depression dead red roe of delicacies-in-the-rough
Hey Sue netted: the sea you’re decamping and hey, me and what gives in too easily, too, I’m in it like institutional toilet tissue for a more innocent time. I only want you Lost ground is gathered just so and that repeatedly and clumsily bundled we fall down bent and kissing. in the gloaming—then there was space and I was in it. To be a ranch hand Now I’m a blind bat rebounding scratching at the land from every over there where trampling the sage I have or haven’t been. sweet smell of not right now To return in time for rutting season— distant wincing cracks receiver of calling dampened by velvet nap, and response, the tinkle of felt-covered a comfortable pew hammers hammers over the murmur of my valves and with you and with you time is innocent, it’s me and also with you that’s merely aspirational this is how we gather together. a gasping pod beached on progress This is God’s country, made of molehills made of mountains red shell cracked, and what takes root with rail towns, dead feelers—no, unquestionable stops along the way
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) wheat from chaff A Face on Which Time Makes But Little Impression curd from whey
distinctions reflected in hay- The terminal annual Independence parade gathering methodologies, gathers at the grange, whether stacked, rolled or baled— kicks off with a half-staff flag-raising.
those things in the world called “otherworldly” An empty resonant ping against pole and the frequency with which they are found— in time to memories made at last I’ve got you, but now dead (feel my bones) you’re breaking up before they’re even formed, fossilized
bellied-up to a bottomless or written in stone, stiles pint of pick-your-own berries. are wiped clear from the map, backtracking dotted lines I am your dollop of non-dairy topping, through every blooming pasture. pie-faced Kilroy peering backwards over a wall Head soft with nostalgic watching our wake construct, a thin-skinned wonder what it means fontanel fusing— to have been or to wish Finally, only walls to have been will remain to arrange was here. an inland sea of fluoridation to reinforce the teeth.
Fleshy water lilies entangle the ankles, give a pleasing, plastic-y slap to the surface.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) But close your eyes and visualize forward and turn how birds will fare at the wind farm with the right hand round an endless canon of shifting grounds. uplifting flurry of blade to wing. [If you lived here you’d be home by now.]
Bunting undulates down Main Street. What’s been laid to rest is being amended, all premonitory frissons rendered false A disincorporated town prepares to be drowned the hollow clack of skeletons in the breeches of forebears Eskimo kissing with their cavities worn with the spun drag of yesteryear. perennial daisies push up ditches, expired petals over-arching The ever-embattled mill around in the understory one. two. of the forest, fiddleheads stop. plant unfurl though dank, dead leaves feet. jam butts into one (where my undead would lie buried). last twenty- one gun salute A reel as seen through windows, cold night Smoke curls as through teeth, air remembers billows in beds of bulging me to my bones lilies, velvet pistils my head to the snow thrust and staining the silence on my radi- petticoats of Prescott ladies. o my flimsy castle made of candles Time has come, now with said longevity of spermaceti honor your partner, complete the square and prepare for the reel—
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) my stopper chain made Through the Moonlight of smocking, chicken salad. Let us always be about You say you prefer to take to be leaving your fiddle with a little more squeak one another for the evening
but I wouldn’t come to your house uncurl my fingers and kiss and put my dirty feet all over the furniture. the center of my palm
feel the chemistry
I bleed so you can see yourself in it.
Slowly rowing through water lilies, a lady reclined at the end of a better century
begging you, please don’t rain on my tracing paper.
Living in cities, architectural moments when you become the space that the body contains —feel the physics— and shrink with me under my para- pluie of bent tines.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) I’d like to be the hairdryer The Two Stand Face to Face trained on the pipes in the freezing ceiling of your cellar You’ve heard the horror stories to go ahead and sell the substance about swimming in quarries even if the shadow isn’t budging. at night, floating in the deep, Sluggish bees in late season cold water on your back suckle empty soda cans. hear the dead smell, in waves cracking at Haul-About Point.
Chisel chinks in the granite, small shrieks of steel on stone
the Pleiades is a fist, unclenching, their bodies are never found.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) Queen of Night With charcoal and tracing paper we rub against the graves
On some hallows’ eve, all Smiths and Bishops a hollow half-light, before the inscription the last of the leaves is effaced by another in umber clumps hundred winters. on fistular trees. Can’t see past Anterior sinus spectra my own traced of caraway, clove and wintergreen— turkey hand fumous memories at the tips of desensitized tongues. throbbing embers
My recurrent yearning for the tried and true woo woo pheasant feathers. old-fashioned confections more easily reducible to category of “food”: As lichen grows rum balls, ribbon candy, only on the north sides of trees my second emblematic ice-box cake. I think I know an arrowhead I am a record, not broken, from a common stone chinks, steam just needing its needle; drills scream a dog, forever circling the space I plan to occupy. but bloody light still gets in around the fingers. And away we go, hounding the scent of woods (whose In your old English woods?) through wide-eyed wood furniture finish and what we believe is a glade, still stars move to the burial ground by the name much faster than you of the number on the stake. cast no shadows it is always noon
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) in the basement The Dishonesty of an Honest Woman of the natural history museum. In the half-light of the entr’acte, We are staging a fight a synopsis and historical context: with chalked sticks where I would get a long walk or be gotten to on a short in a dusty blue fourth wall ring stabbed gently around the heart. virtual coins behind virtual ears
better hock that ring and live with it.
Beneath the reflective surface, I am breathing through a hollow reed
dancing with the mic stand squealing the needle
on the side of the sewing you don’t see
where the work happens.
My crafty sampler of secretly discontinuous, tied-off threads
poor relations claiming kin
the linchpin of my lexy cotton gin.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) Trophy wives a piece of work with younger, better-looking husbands maybe lace works either way Rochambeaux of equally impotent elements figures. curtains. magic cups upended over nothing.
We are formula-fed babies with breath stolen by our own cradle-capped contemporaries
buddy breathing mist on the mirror
the sound of the metal ball rolling at the bottom of the paint can.
So, please help yourself to more of my zero-sum foodstuffs: fatback, hardtack, pepperpot—do the math
net-net-net negative.
What hath my golden calf wrought?
unimproved means unimproved end
just think what with your pretty face
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) The Custom of the Country In sum, I am one of the many desiccated ends of An Indian giver of borrowed time things in the crisper (would that I could undo the idiom) would-be home-bound foundling or on winter mornings heat rises in the nave, with a cornerstone supporting stirs the devotional hangings. umpteen other houses
Lick the spoon then redo the math— and the brighter the light the deeper the shadow what our maker doth guarantee: death (someone has peed on the seat). and mnemonic taxonomy Methods of momentary marking and at a price in Uberville: buying titles, that’s hard to beat. lunar real estate, in situ citation
King Philip Called On Forty Girls Singing Go thou my incense upward from this hearth— Whose King Philip? learn to layer, Whose thin crust? let out hem, wick from the wax Whose worthless wampum jack, live with it. under whose cup? Learn to like it: Chief Sachem Construction Paper Quiver eating snow, taste of space, some shadows are shaped empty uncaloric like people. ice-cream headache.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) The fifth caller will receive What a girl is made of: the reason for which he’s calling lunchmeat, Fudgesicles, everything which has happened. Sanka with sweetener, non-dairy creamer (Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts—) the frangible gum Unhasp the casement, drop your locks that comes with your trading cards. from an embattled tower of self- reflexive psychobabble When all is said, done, and DIY is not enough
save yourself, chase there are rows of backs your own ambulance of heads, flickering
with your hand draw your hand Another pearl for my string and vice-versa and shake— of what gets in under my skin I am my own spit sister, surrounded with secretion— as Frankenstein is often rub it confused with his monster till it begins to glow The wind, indeed, seemed made for the scene an old moon as the scene seemed made for the hour. everyone’s already seen, but searches for Every Good Boy Deserves themselves in, anyway. a bigger piece of the piano bench— roll up those sleeves and get into it.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black Morning
These same thoughts people this little world. On top of the wold, above fires expiring in quavering embers, commemorative cinders, snuffed out by their own attendant gently settling soot.
Jagged digits finger in from the periphery, freezing ponds, panes, the eye of evergreen needles, crackling Sterno, expectant chafing dishes.
We gather together in hot spots, cold places get even colder, we are suction countering suction, the sound of the finger sliding between chords, the sound of falling snow.
The self-same flakes make sounds of scissors snapping at random but always the same
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) rap of the knocker muffled [Bridge Freezes CAUTION mummers mumming Before Road]
ringing ringing Put your face right up next to the globe the sixth caller will not hang up see unwound cassette tape empty-handed snakes along the sidewalk, the frozen grass is glittering I demand my consolation prize! with forever silent sonic code
my pocket full of proverbial rye contaminants you’d rather keep out of your sources for the birds some dumb joke [Beginning No Salt Zone] I don’t even get but I’ll take it The walls wind up so long as it from the reservoir to the road, once meant something continue on the other side. A jack-knifed trailer. for a song Everybody’s died. a skeleton tee-shirt. So, turn it over and shake, now everybody This microphone makes waves, rehash the blizzard of ’78— ear-popping Eustachian sensation it seems this rag is meant (tap tap. can you for drier eyes than mine. hear me now?) The Nth annual follies unfold Tracks played backwards with ribbons a-flutter, another and what you hear there. dragon slain, princess saved.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) (Pete’s pulled the stopper what you see shoved the threat down the drain.) depends on the speed of your wipers.
Tikki Tikki Tembo They’re turning on one another in the chase, is drowning in the well with a great defensive shedding of antlers
Wee Willie Winkie indifferent to the poachers in his moth-eaten nightgown who’ve repaired the White Hart, anyway, to put away Jack Sprat’s dead wife leaves the world approximated food only half-digestible. you can eat forever— hydrogenated cottage pie, And who’s the lass behind the mask? chicken fingers, curly fries.
Hi, it’s just me, In the end, everybody dies, my own girl-next-door everybody’s resurrected year over year we respectively see redskins, reddlemen, same difference— while I’m down here same rosy x-ray vision. Look Peter, at the bottom of the well, watching the bucket bang back up without me. locking the wolf away locking yourself away Echoing sound of Soupy: come ‘n’ either way, you’re stuck, splayed like a gnat in the paint git it, get up, shut up on the Don’t-Fence-Me-In Fence and eat your dinner, young lady—
a cardboard coffee tray break bread, jam and a dozen Munchkins hand down throat
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) and reexamine the willfully indigestible. Squinting through freezing windshield, the wipers define the field— We gather together this squeaky container on a carpet of historic patterns, with this noxious blue a Greek key, half doubling back fluid, I am on itself, quietly taking over the world. swastika and hound’s-tooth.
I’ll edge up next to the hearth, climb right inside the screen and look back out at you
through diamond-shaped panes
what is written on the wind: nostalgie de la boue, an ethereal plastic sack whispering
thank you thank you thank you You will eat what I put in front of you.
In new-fallen snow the objects below headstones like teeth making it digestible.
I think I know my own reflection watch my head fill up with snow.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) A Coalition Between Beauty and Oddness It’s just another manmade day on the road, a piecemeal food pyramid In winter, walls fade of cream-like injected centers, up into woods numbered colors, x-plus-one and the reel runs backwards. bottles of beer.
Indian corn, rows of rotten There are birds up there (began to sing). teeth, dendritic trees reach out fruitlessly, cast no shade, The world is so much older here. the lichen has a field day in the cold, hard light. I’m all dolled up in my foul-weather gear, searching the palm of my hand for a gale Exhaust curls like dirty cream from muffled tailpipes. take preventive measures of motion
Riding in the way-back, sickness: a steady eye an extra-retrospective on the wavy horizon slack flag advantage of vanishing impotent spinnaker point being behind you. stupid whirligig—
At the end of the day How many ships would this face sink? at the edge of our head-lit halo restless specters curl from their graves depends on the relative emptiness of the hold backlit mist looks like rain on the volume of what will flush into its own the mind makes up most of it, anyway. with the purported coriolis effects of your powder room.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) Always swim parallel to the shore The Figure Against the Sky
and try to forget everybody knows My airy osteo- porous bones there’s a hole in the bottom of the sea. a bird, a shell contain the sea or the sound of it
and the kind of cataracts you can see through.
On the other side of Dead Man’s Curve a word whose non-existence ruins all the others.
The chevron-shaped wings of frigates
the back of your hospital gown
flapping
on the line in the wind my skin is shaped like tee-shirts.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) Perplexity Among Honest People weeds, creaky digits finger in through the cracks in the cobbles The good people of Prescott will not take this standing up, their doubling dice are counter-weighted hold repeated town meetings in chairs another yellow stain pervades affixed to the floor like theater seats the yellowed tavern wallpaper.
stripped of leaves, the tapped In a last unplanned Parade of Horribles trees are indistinguishable. they set their spokeless wheels to the ruts
Things run backwards: taps as the bubbles that cling is played at the disinterment to the sides of your cup give themselves over when bodies are borne one after one, they are teeth rattling like desiccated leaves to the site of the future born-again babies, redemption center. new bodies to which their very own names The retractable map is rolled, packed haven’t yet clung. into a layer of civilized sediment (Endow a star in my name, a parfait stick another feather in my headdress: a trifle co-opted macaroni, a pancake breakfast American Chop Suey.) a self-storage national treasure. From the air you see roads, from the woods, the walls, They plant rows of the crumbling foundations butts on barstools, can’t go home, sensation of teeth so go to seed in your mouth
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) the slop in the saucer You are not who you think and it’s critical that we apply the sound of sparrows the right name to the principle. smacking into glass Tutoyer me, the faceted plastic fluorescent covers slam your dice on the bar in the basements of faded institutions. just who do you think you are, We circulate in closed systems John, Tess, King Philip? of common tracks and breathe the hand-me-down air with pink I become my milky stockings plastic sacs from Chinatown— at every April’s Cerealia, our rattling, insufflating lungs, a pole dance for May Day— our last-ditch divisor by which we have gathered here together. do you read me?
Say sister, can you spare I’ll endow a chair some air? Our gasping with my not-taken married name lips kiss the ceiling then sit in it.
conducting signals Baling wire. With barbs. with our cavities, Things by way of which our rotten fillings we gather or are snared, the harder you struggle strangers tuck tags the more entangled you are back into our shirts my syntax sucks (the tiny curls and knots at the nape…) like quicksand
Just shut up and nobody gets hurt. a risk-averse, televised Guy Fawkes bonfire.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) You are all going Those Who Are Found Where There Is Said to Be Nobody to have to come with me, please, scrape your soles Settle in for the winter before entering. of our disconnect— lips cracking, cheeks packed Mind the threshold with packing peanuts, and the doorstop moth balls, walls of cedar. and the slackened weather stripping. Go home to papa, Peter; the place is erupting Welcome to my humble with pustular fungus, mudroom maquiladora little deaths of used-up leaves where I in-source my labor believe another offshore home you I build for myself me inside of the world Rabbit is asleep. drowning where my reflection used to be So, never mind the corkage fee, things afforded by technology. where I dress and redress We draw in from the periphery myself for dinner. like slugs to beer, the sky is so much closer here.
I’m Little Devil Doubt running with an egg in a silver-plated spoon
lying through the nose- bleed section of history
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) [Please wipe down machines after use.] An Old Move Inadvertently Repeated
I apply my squeegee to the fog-free mirror Here, take it. You can have it. The embroidery hoop haven’t seen you in forever outside of which I work, darn everything strains of for want of larger holes. the recessional— Backed up against flush the pipes, a bundling board retire the greens keeper, of increasing proportions scrape the windshield grinding my teeth and look alive, people kicking off the covers, shallow sleep of being the arch should peak above the pupil. not marriage material.
To climb inside the vitrine, gather together the glass flowers I want to break between my teeth, hear shatter in my head—
How will it end? With neither a bang nor a whimper but a weary, insistent banging.
Three cheers for Mrs. Bradford—
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) She fell over the side and died. The First Act in a Timeworn Drama She fell back over the side and died. She leaned back over the side and died. I will die with this hammer in my hand. You gave us quite a scare. Making drip castles of sand I return as Martin Guerre. one. two. My tiny plot one. two. I hoe and harrow again and again if you can’t see to see each time my mirrors what I might grow there. can’t see you
this is just another test of the system.
Now who do you think you are, Tom—foolhardy, predatory lender of reflective emergency blankets
while I root around in coin returns, collecting the off-shot of others’ cut-off conversations
I see through you
take a hammer to what I presumed was a hollow figure only to discover the creamy center.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) I am only the projector on which the plastic transparencies are stacked
forever seated at the kids’ table with a broken elastic party hat
at an ongoing Annunciation with the figure coming in frontways from the side
not abiding the rules of the rest
forever fail my road test
[Blind Drive Ahead]
borne again all over again.
Whether Lent or Advent the crèche is set up the calendar’s windows opened onto sweetmeats of a much bigger picture that never coalesces but returns every year a little frayed, yet serviceable.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) NOTES
10 Italicized line adapted from a statement 28 “I sell the shadow to support the substance.” attributed to Sioux Chief Crazy Horse: “My —Sojourner Truth lands are where my dead lie buried.” 37 Italicized lines from Walden, Henry David The Hilltop Steakhouse and Suffolk Downs Thoreau, 1854. are a kitschy restaurant and a dog racing track located in Saugus and East Boston, Mass., 38 “The wind, indeed...” from The Return of the respectively. Both are prominent landmarks Native, Thomas Hardy, 1878. on Boston’s Route 1. Between them one passes through Melrose, Mass., which is home to the 38, 40 “Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts,” Colby family cemetery. I’ve never been there, Troilus and Cressida, IV, v; “These same thoughts but since I was a kid, have always pictured my people this little world,” Richard II, V, v. These elders buried behind the enormous illuminated quotations appear on a pair of stained-glass green cactus at the Hilltop. windows in the home of Sarah Winchester (1839-1922), heir to the Winchester rifle 23 Prescott was a small town in central Massachusetts fortune, in San Jose, California. that was dissolved along with three others in 1938 when the Swift River Valley was drowned 59-60 Soon after arriving in the New World, William to create the Quabbin Reservoir, which is the Bradford’s wife, Dorothy, fell from the deck of primary water source for the city of Boston. The the Mayflower and drowned. buildings were razed, the cemeteries relocated and the towns’ inhabitants required to disperse with little or no assistance. Today, remnants of roads, walls and cellars can be seen from the air or when the water level is low.
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UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011) UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE : Digital Proof The Return of the Native by Kate Colby (2011)