TERRAFORMING HELL a Project Presented to the Faculty Of

TERRAFORMING HELL

A Project

Presented

to the Faculty of

California State University, Chico

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

English

Fall 2016

TERRAFORMING HELL

A Project

Matthew Paul Stephens Skripek

Fall 2016

APPROVED BY THE INTERIM DEAN OF GRADUATE STUDIES:

Sharon Barrios, Ph.D.

APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE:

Jeanne E. Clark, Ph.D., Chair

Sarah Pape, M.F.A.

PUBLICATION RIGHTS

No portion of this thesis may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner unacceptable to the usual copyright restrictions without the written permission of the author.

iii

for Shelby jag älskar dig

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the guidance, support, and friendship of countless peers. I cannot name them all, but I am thankful for their influence on my work nonetheless.

Dr. Jeanne Clark, I thank you for your friendship, enthusiasm, and for encouraging me to continue my poetic experimentation. You were always ready to offer reading suggestions that were exactly what I needed to read at the time. You are a true master of your craft and share your boundless knowledge with utmost expertise.

Sarah Pape, your introduction to the world of literary publishing through

Watershed Review and both AWP conferences we attended has given me hope and drive for my future as a writer. Though my formal academic journey may conclude for now, the written world never stops pushing forward. I am proud to be a part of this effort.

Thank you for being a friend and mentor.

Dr. Geoff Baker, Dr. Robert Burton, Dr. Tom Fox, and Dr. Kim Jaxon, I thank you for encouraging me to move beyond the written word to explore what lies around and beneath a text or concept. Through you, the invisible becomes visible.

Tim Hayes, Nick Monroe, Jill North, and Kris Wheat, were it not for your friendship I would not have had the endurance to push through this program to its conclusion. You were always prepared to discuss academics and even more prepared to not discuss it at all. I do not make friends easily, but your persistence, compassion, and affinity for beer and companionship has made you all a friend for life. Deal with it.

Nathan Sandoval, Amanda Haydon, Eric Dunk, and Stephanie Evans, or more succinctly the English Graduate Student Council for 2015-2016, I thank you for reminding me that organization is essential for effective leadership and that some important meetings simply must be held off-campus.

Several writers, educators, and acquaintances including Daria Booth, Kyleen

Bromley, Jason Deane, Brittany DeLacy, Dani Fernandez, Bob Garner, Gina Hiner,

Javier Lopez, Megan Mann, Athena Murphy, Zach Phillips, Amanda Rhine, Luke Scholl,

Marta Shaffer, Michaela Sundholm, Phone Vang, Charles Walker, Jeremy Wallace, Rissa

Wallace, Natalie Windt, and so many others that I simply cannot name all of you. You are what made my experience at CSU, Chico so fruitful and memorable. Thank you for your influence and all my best to your future endeavors.

My parents, Paul and Carol Skripek, their furry beast, Joel, the Randall and the Johnston families, I thank you for encouraging me to pursue my dreams no matter how long it takes to achieve them.

Shelby and Cosmo, I thank you for making every day worth waking up for and worth remembering as I drift off to sleep. I love you both.

Lastly, a huge thank you to Stan Upshaw for seeing the undefinable something in my earliest writing even when I did not. I would not have pursued this without your influence. Thank you, friend.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Publication Rights ...... iii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Abstract ...... ix

CHAPTER

I. Terraforming Hell: A Critical Introduction ...... 1

II. Terraforming Hell ...... 17

Ars Poetica ...... 18 I wake up to headache...... 19 Guillotine ...... 20 Five Notes for a Widow from Her Lover Lost to War ...... 21 One Year Waiting ...... 24 After a Dream in Which Everything is Ashes ...... 25 After a Dream in Which Everything is Ashes II ...... 26 monochromatic engraving: an ekphrasis ...... 27 The Poet Stops to Drink Kvasir’s Blood (or, The Mead of Poetry) ...... 28 Lessons in Quiet Passing ...... 29 you: a poem in four triplets ...... 30 Fictions ...... 31 Hel, Having Been Thrown to Niflheim, Finds Herself Alone upon an Endless Expanse of Ice ...... 32 Understanding Hyperborea and the Northern Winds...... 33 After a Dream in Which European Mythologies Prove Tender Bedfellows ...... 34 The Last Bloom Falls from the Oaken Throne ...... 35 In Defense of Giants ...... 36

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October 1995: Cascade Mountains, California ...... 37 August 1995: Landscape with Mosquito Lakes ...... 38 Landscape with Fish: An Absurdist Inversion ...... 39 After a Dream in Which a Red, Crescent Moon Appears to Be Lying on Its Back ...... 40 November 1992: Norway ...... 41 After a Dream about Dolmens ...... 42 After a Dream in Which the Moon Swallows the Ocean ...... 43 April 2015: Landing in Phoenix ...... 44 Approximating Lust ...... 45 The Portal, The Well ...... 46 Untitled ...... 47 Like Little Full Moons ...... 48 Terraforming Mars ...... 49

III. Works Consulted ...... 50

viii

ABSTRACT

Terraforming Hell

Master of Arts in English

California State University, Chico

Fall 2016

Terraforming Hell is a collection of poems that explore the dark terrain of reality, the fantastic, and the rift that lies between. It traverses the æther and the dreamstate.

Some poems find their footing in the natural world while others walk beyond it. Like skeletal remains, these poems are spare in structure and ask readers to bring their own interpretation of the details to each work. These poems are meant to encourage reexamination of the familiar so new ideas may take form. Here, nothing is static nor concrete. The purpose is redefinition.

TERRAFORMING HELL: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

My earliest experience with poetry occurred during adolescence. For a high school book report I’d chosen to read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, a decision spurred by my interests in science fiction and astronomy. My initial reading was, as most adolescent experiences, incomplete, but a particular chapter has managed to remain at the fore of my mind for over a decade. “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains” tells the story of an automated, robotic house. Each morning, it prepares breakfast for the resident family to ease them into each new day. It’s a typical trope of robotics in fiction that their intention is to simplify the lives of humans they’re programmed to serve without question, but Bradbury pushes this idea to encompass the frailty of human existence in contrast to the unerring consistency of mechanical automation. It comes to be understood that the human inhabitants of the house have long since been obliterated by the thermal flash of a nuclear weapon. The house, seemingly unaffected by the blast or the absence of the family, continues its unaltered daily routine until the entire structure is destroyed by an electrical fire. It took several years to realize why this chapter, out of everything in

The Martian Chronicles, is what regularly cropped up in my mind when I considered

Bradbury or his work. While taking an undergraduate course on the subject of poetry, I gained an understanding as to why it never left my mind. Simply put, I liked the

“inhuman” poetics reflecting a world that is no longer driven by humanity itself, but rather factors outside their control, indeed acting beyond their presence entirely. Prior to

1 the electrical fire, the house reads out a single poem meant to ease the long-deceased children to sleep: Sara Teasdale’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (166-172).

“There Will Come Soft Rains,” taken from Teasdale’s 1920 collection Flame and Shadow, explores Earth in a post-human context:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools, singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone. (49)

There it was. It seemed Bradbury had worked from Teasdale’s poem and crafted a story that turned her poetic masterpiece into a fictional account of the real frailty of human existence. Borrowing from Bradbury’s inspiration, I too decided to work from Teasdale’s

Flame and Shadow. It became the first poetry collection I’d ever sought to own in an effort to understand her poetic sensibilities.

Teasdale’s work in brevity and lyric has become standard within my own practice in the craft. The way she captures simple, sensual ideas within each rhyming couplet in “There Will Come Soft Rains” serves to unfold her conception of Earth’s indifference to the presence or absence of humanity. Her goal is not to eliminate

2 humanity from her work, but to question overt notions of greatness that often feel all- encompassing in contemporary society. It is a theme that maintains its relevance to this day, highlighting how universally applicable her poetry has remained in the century following the publication of Flame and Shadow. “There Will Come Soft Rains” maintained such an impact on me that I sought to imitate her ideas when I felt the inexorable itch to try my own hand at poetry. What resulted is “The Last Bloom Falls from the Oaken Throne.” It duplicates Teasdale’s rhyming couplets and post-human imagery:

The last bloom falls from the oaken throne Where the breeze once sang a mirthful tone

And the yews swayed with life, thriving and hearty, And the stone cliffs rose, brooding and mighty.

The moss once rode over sunwarmed soil Where the wildflowers danced in a spirited coil,

But as clouds gathered and the sun sank below, A darkness swirled up to consuming shadow.

Now fallen from memory the frosts came to ponder The ashen spires of weathered elm and alder,

Of a petrified kingdom ensorcelled by gloom And an oaken throne adorned with a single bloom.

By comparison with contemporary poetry and my own later work, the poem is primitive and the form painfully archaic, but it is the first poetic work of which I remember feeling proud. It captures a cinematic quality essential to my poetic cadence, largely due to long lines situated in couplets. The intention is to encourage readers to slow their progress through the poem as to take in details more thoroughly (though the effectiveness of this

3 early drafting tactic is up for debate). It also helped me understand some fundamentals inherent to effective poetic composition. In her book The Dream of the Marsh Wren:

Writing As Reciprocal Creation, science writer and poet Pattiann Rogers writes “that any good and valid poem is an experience of its own, an experience of words and sounds that shake the body and stun the senses, a real experience in the real world. […] It has being, a time and a space of its own. It is not simply about a human experience, it is a human experience” (24). By this argument, the shaping of readers’ senses in a logical, contained manner is key to the experience of writing successful poetry. “The Last Bloom…” weighs heavily on imagery, understandable as most of my own literary interests do the same. By drawing elements like the “oaken throne” or “weathered elm and alder” into the work, I was seeking to prime readers to invoke their perception of trees, the smell and look of them as well as wood’s inherent representation of age and the passage of time. To me, trees are sensually deep objects and it was my intention to grant this perception to readers as well. With such subject matter so deeply ingrained in the fantastic, it helps to ground readers with familiar, real-world objects.

Writing “The Last Bloom…” also taught me the importance of reading drafts aloud, allowing me to connect air and sound with the written work. In effect, it is a translation, but one of medium. Rogers addresses this in talking about a professor, John

Neihardt, she had as an undergraduate: “[Neihardt] was the first person I’d ever heard read poetry the way it should be read. He chanted. He intoned. He sang. Hearing him read, I understood that poetry is essentially, and above all, music” (10). It comes as no surprise that pieces of “The Last Bloom…” were drawn from the lyrics of a symphonic

4 heavy metal album that was in regular rotation in my car stereo at the time of its composition, specifically the term “ensorcelled.” This came from an effort to be as bombastic as possible while remaining coherent to readers even if the latter proved to be somewhat of a failure.

Based on my early poetic efforts, one of the first books suggested for my consumption is a collection by Scottish poet Robin Robertson entitled Swithering. It has become a tome of poetic masterwork from which I continue to draw inspiration, especially in terms of finding music within a well-crafted line. Where Rogers helped me understand poetic fundamentals, Robertson put them into practice in a manner that closely resembles my own poetic desires. As I’ve come to understand it, his talent lies in finding moments in life that are so fantastic and emotionally loaded that they feel inherently poetic and expressing them with curated brevity. Occasionally revisiting

Robertson’s text has yielded further understanding of his craft that was previously outside my comprehension. An example is a poem entitled “Myth”:

This morning, in bracken beyond the east field, I find the blown bulbs of sunset: on the wet lawn, after the snow, the snowman’s spine. (40)

What begins with an acceptable description of a green Scottish day turns abruptly upon readers. The last line is something I’ve come to think of as “the snowman’s spine,” a final line/statement/thought that is visceral and unnerving. It wrenches readers out of reality

5 for a moment, forcing them to confront horrors of their own conception. Robertson is a master of juxtaposing the bizarre in opposition to the tamest moments and enhancing them with the brevity of the piece. I sought to replicate this idea in a poem, “Ars

Poetica,” about a poet experiencing haunting inspiration while alone on a hungry night.

This is the final stanza:

As stars press heavy on the cabin his heartbeat seeks to drown out the skitters and the gnawing.

In his dwelling in the deep woods, the poet is confronted with an anxiety that manifests as the night attempting to swallow his cabin, already having sunk its teeth into the roof.

The safety he sought in solitude instead produces a waking nightmare of his own creation. It takes him out of reality and into the fantastic where his fear is a bedfellow to his creativity. It highlights the burden of the creative process whereby simple, oft-ignored atmospheric events like a gust of wind are no longer passing occurrences, but demand to be understood and expressed by the writer. While I don’t normally choose to involve myself in my writing (or admit to my presence), it would be dishonest to say that the poet in “Ars Poetica” is not a surrogate for myself. In this case, I attempted to codify one aspect of my struggle with anxiety by merging it with my own invocation of the fantastic and the bizarre. Robertson and another poet, Tomas Tranströmer, provided the vehicle by which to do so in the most satisfying manner possible.

Tranströmer, a Swedish poet, directly inspired my idea for the carnivorous night in his poem “A Winter Night.” The first stanza of the poem reads (as translated by

Robin Fulton):

The storm puts its mouth to the house and blows to produce a note I sleep uneasily, turn, with shut eyes read the storm’s text. (68)

I fell in love with Tranströmer’s personification of “the storm” the first time I read it. He delves into Swedish myth and daily life with the same set of tools, producing poems that exemplify the difficult dance humanity does with nature when living in a place as far north as Sweden. There is also the implication that “the storm’s text” can only be “read” in the limbo between sleep and wakefulness when interpretation is in a state of flux.

Simultaneously, Tranströmer, a career psychologist, seems to be commenting on the amorphous logic of the dreamstate as much as he is the storm itself. It has helped me to understand how to open commentary between nature, humanity, dreamstates, and how effectively one can be used to interpret the other. A five-section poem entitled “Winter’s

Formulas” details this hardened union between the two. This is the final two stanzas (as translated by Patty Crane):

The bus crawls through the winter evening. It shines like a ship in the spruce woods where the road is a narrow deep dead canal.

Few passengers: some old and some very young. If the bus stopped and switched off its lights the world would be obliterated. (29)

I find myself constantly enthralled by the effortless manner in which Tranströmer expresses the sheer darkness of a northern winter as though the Swedish populace are constantly living on the edge of extinction. In “Winter’s Formulas” the power is wrenched away from the people, granted to the headlights and the road locked in a struggle between existence and annihilation. Here, Tranströmer finds a harmony that

7 exemplifies how best to invoke nature in a superior tone to how humanity is often represented in poetry. Since I’m typically averse to blatant themes of human-centric relationships in poetry, it is essential to find different ways of connecting with readers. I want to invoke similar emotional responses, but without all the baggage that comes with writing strictly from a human perspective. Tranströmer accomplishes this by infusing inanimate objects, like the bus, with human qualities. “Winter’s Formulas” is a textbook example of this effect.

The idea of reading “the storm’s text” asks readers to think of nature in terms of composing its own poetics. On the surface, nature is undiscerning and unfeeling, but it is rife with emotion and it persists no matter the opinion or stance of the humans it acts upon. Within my poetics, I typically evoke winter as an emotionally rich season as it captures a cold, unfeeling, dark lust for an honest, difficult life. I suppose my attraction to poets who also show inspiration from the darker climbs of the year stems from related theatrics, such as death, solitude, and pines slightly listing in the windswept rains. An experimental five-section narrative piece titled “Five Notes for a Widow from Her Lover

Lost to War” delves into this idea by exploring the emotional retribution of a widow following the loss of her husband to war. This is the final section:

When only silence remains, hear the moon sing hymns of farewell.

Her pale voice walks as rain across a vale—

The implication here is that time passes and old wounds, though always present, will heal. I experienced some difficulty getting the overarching narrative across during early

8 readings, though audiences lauded the cadence of the piece even if it was difficult to follow. To remedy this problem, it seemed the simplest solution lay in changing the titles which had always carried that same dialect as the poem itself. Returning to an old adage,

I needed to “hold the reader’s hand” if I was going to show them something fantastic.

Spurred by the suggestion to examine David Wagoner’s “The Shooting of John Dillinger

Outside the Biograph Theater, July 22, 1934,” I’ve found a balance in experimentation with narrative titles which allow me to situate readers and offer context before beginning the poem. An example is a poem entitled “Hel, Having Been Thrown to Niflheim, Finds

Herself Alone upon an Endless Expanse of Ice:”

she wanders north through the night, whispering hymns to desolation

and the moon, a tipped crescent, has wept stars upon the sky

The poem itself provides few details in its brevity, but it is assisted by the narrative title creating a specific framework for readers. While it helps to have knowledge of Norse mythology, it is not necessary to be familiar with Hel and the realm of Niflheim, but rather simply that a goddess figure has been forced to live upon the mythological equivalent of the deep Arctic. Upon recitation, the poem received a more positive

9 response than my previous works of brevity with uninformative titles, inspiring me to reexamine the titles of my other works.

The opening poem in Terraforming Hell, “Ars Poetica,” was initially drafted under the title “The Poet,” While evoking some of the felt ideas I wished to express, the title felt misguided upon revision. The poem is not necessarily about “the poet,” but rather about poetic inspiration, thus it was changed to “Ars Poetica.” As ars poeticas are a longstanding tradition in the poetic craft (the term is attributed to Horace), the poem is intended as an example of my poetic themes within the following collection.

Other beneficiaries of titular revision are my “dream” poems. These were hamstrung by their experimental nature of being drawn from morning records of my dreams. Outright stating that such poems are derived from dreams in their titles allowed them more autonomy as individual works. For example, “In Ember’s Glow” is based on a dream in which all the lands of earth have turned to ash. After changing the title to “After a Dream in Which Everything is Ashes,” the poem felt properly framed in a lucid state.

This allowed for felt ideas to be approached as dynamic images rather than narratives comparable to other poems in Terraforming Hell.

On the subjects of titles and dreams, Terraforming Hell as a collection takes its name from personal musings on the subject of writing about dreams. As dreams are often not a habitable place, it became imperative to find a poetic approach that approximated the unlivable dreamstate, or for comparison’s sake, “Hell.” What resulted are the “dream” poems which, like other worlds, take special care to approach with the intention of protracted interaction. “Terraforming” felt like a suitable comparison as it is

10 the process by which an unlivable place is made livable. It is also a homage to The

Martian Chronicles, where author Ray Bradbury details a fictional account of the trials by which mankind comes to live on Mars only to discover that to be a Martian, one must simply feel a greater connection to Martian soil than that of any other world. I attempted to capture this feeling in “Terraforming Mars:”

home is in the lungs we breathe only the air brought with us

martian soil fine as graphite stirs in the stellar winds

we are shy so shy we leave no footprints

in natural light we turn cyclopean blue we disappear

One of the pivotal moments in my growth as a poet occurred during a graduate course in literary theory. Assigned a piece by Russian theorist Victor Shklovsky entitled “Art as Technique,” I came to be familiar with the subject of “defamiliarization,” or the inherently poetic practice of presenting ordinary subjects for which audiences are familiar and making them strange to force an audience to reexamine their accepted notions toward the subject in question. When Tranströmer writes that the “storm puts its mouth to the house / and blows to produce a note,” he is treating the sound of the storm outside the house as being produced purposefully for musical effect rather than as a

11 happenstance interaction of architecture and physics. In short, the house becomes the instrument, the storm the musician. Similar to the concept of “the snowman’s spine,” defamiliarization adds the effect of invoking sensibilities of the fantastic adjacent to reality. Shklovsky might describe the purpose of this as being “a means of creating the strongest possible impression” as this was his overarching definition for the purpose of

“poetic imagery” (776).

Brevity is essentially the reinforcement of the effect of defamiliarization.

Shklovsky quotes fellow theorist Alexander Veselovsky as stating that “a satisfactory style is precisely that style which delivers the greatest amount of thought in the fewest words” (777). Such a thought explains not only the power behind Robertson’s invocation of “the snowman’s spine” but Tranströmer’s “storm” as well and serves to further my own understanding of my preference for brevity within my writing. An example of this is

“Like Little Full Moons,” a four-line poem:

all of us bathe in quicksilver while sightseeing in Galileo’s dreams.

The notion that the undefined “all of us” might bathe in toxic liquid mercury, or

“quicksilver” is absurd when approached literally, but it is used metaphorically to describe the euphoria of scientific discovery. One does not simply “sightsee” in the dreams of another, but take the astronomic research and records written by Galileo’s hand and one can venture through a facsimile of his thoughts and postulations (or for poetic effect, his “dreams”). The effect of the poem is enhanced by its brevity. Even this paragraph-length explanation has the result of altering the magic I attempted to capture in

12 so few words during the poem’s composition. While this is far from a perfect example of

Shklovsky’s purpose, it does represent a turning point in my own poetic development. Up to this point, I had little vocabulary to delve into poetic theory in any kind of universally accepted dialect. Assigning terminology to personal practice helped to garner deeper understanding of works I have long admired such as Robertson’s “These Days.” Here are the first two stanzas:

The vessel he has carried for so long is split; his eyes have run out of light, and are looking beyond us to the far distances, the simplicities. My own eyes star.

His great priest’s face taking on a cast, becoming immemorial, a man becoming something else: a ruined shell, a wasted king amongst the debris, a mask. (44)

An idea as simple as describing the living body as a “vessel” and the dead corpse as

“debris” goes a long way to describe the haunting efficiency with which Robertson employs defamiliarization in his poetry. The speaker’s eyes do not water, but instead

“star,” reflecting the “far distances” upon which the dying figure is focused. Ultimately, all that remains is “a mask,” the face the speaker assigns to the dead, his body now in ruins. In my own work, I sought to employ similar techniques in “you: a poem in four triplets.” These are the last two stanzas:

you are the bats after starvation insects popping like ice under a lover’s boot

you are the pines outside the door trailing long shadows like mourning veils

As I mentioned previously, nature provides all the emotional relatives one could need to express human feelings in extrahuman terms. In this example it is employed in two manners. The “long shadows” cast by pines to defamiliarize the appearance of a funerary procession, and the “insects popping like ice” to describe a feast for bats in fantastic terms. The entirety of this poem is drawn from a larger work, but the four ideas I chose for the poem all resonated at their most efficient when employed in brevity.

I have had some work arise entirely unbidden from dreams, but the majority of my poetic inspiration comes from research. An advocate for this approach, Pattiann

Rogers has this to say on the subject: “I find that most research, even the slightest, opens doors of thought for me and offers new, evocative, and interesting vocabulary” (42). I have heard dissenting ideas toward research in the past, usually around the belief that it alters one’s natural progression of thought, but it has typically been my approach, especially when working toward a deadline, to write from research. I suppose at least some part of that comes from my interest in science and experimentation. Even if the sciences aren’t the field I currently pursue academically, their motivations persist and crop up in other aspects of my life and writing is no exception. In the poem “I wake up to headache,” I invoke research into one of my favorite poetic subjects; space:

I wake up to headache after Brian Teare

& her planet & air, but I’ve grown tired of her rhetoric her Valles Marineris

this disagreement, the separation between lust & fuck are cosmic platitudes

& panspermia is tiring the way you carry water to soil spilling over burial grounds

reveals myriad dead gods & stale echoes of machination she leaves doors open

& ghostmoths scatter leaving vomit, viscera, a ceaseless migraine

It is my intention to express the separation between two figures as the expanse of space between two planets, specifically Mars and Earth, with “Valles Marineris” being a canyon on Mars and “panspermia” being one theory as to how organic life on Earth came into being (organic matter carried to Earth via meteors). The effect of defamiliarization within this poem is how it alters the distance between the figures. Clearly the physical space between them is not cosmic in scale, but emotional distance, being an abstract state, is not finite nor easily expressible in classical terminology. It is a felt idea and it is my intention to express it as such, hopefully in terms that are new to readers.

I have a lot to learn from poets like Tranströmer, Robertson, and Teasdale, but as I seek a conclusion to this introduction, so too do I seek new directions and new authors to inspire my future work. As always, a work of poetry is never “done,” but rather reaches a point where it grows beyond the writer, capable of standing out on its

15 own and, simultaneously, making room for new work to take root. This quote, appropriately from a work of Tranströmer’s entitled “Morning Birds,” often reminds me of this immutable fact (as translated by Robin Fulton):

It grows, it takes my place It pushes me aside. It throws me out of the nest. The poem is ready. (79)

TERRAFORMING HELL

Ars Poetica

The poet wrote of the sun pressing its teeth into the earth, called it a new day or anvil sky in a draft on a bar napkin.

Monday morning, he plucked it, wadded and fetal, from his pack, smoothed it along a desk’s beaten edge and left it out to sun—

In the middle of winter, the poet bound himself in an afghan to stoke the oven, which yawned and sketched embers into a timid darkness.

As stars pressed heavy on the cabin his heartbeat sought to drown out the skitters and the gnawing.

I wake up to headache after Brian Teare

& her planet & air, but I’ve grown tired of her rhetoric her Valles Marineris this disagreement, the separation between lust & fuck are cosmic platitudes

& panspermia is tiring the way you carry water to soil spilling over burial grounds reveals myriad dead gods & stale echoes of machination she leaves doors open

& ghostmoths scatter leaving vomit, viscera, a ceaseless migraine

Guillotine For what hath man of all his labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath labored under the sun? -Ecclesiastes 2:22

Under broken skies, roads like withered arteries spill their brine.

In the city, she carries the crown tells him this is how the future starts.

Rain falls sharp, filling the chasm in his flesh.

Incisive, his eyes fix on a god between the pavers.

Five Notes for a Widow from Her Lover Lost to War

Far from home you would have said, where the silent gods reign.

Steeped in the scent of burning flesh that weighs like chains, such that our flight is slow—

No sovereign, no crown, no daylight nor dawn.

My thoughts to the river when we were younger, and you, from the mirror surface, would rise, baptised and crucified, to receive the fog-dressed sunlight. As dusk crawled to the shore, we would watch the trees in the distance, cloaked in black time, stand like sentinels— and together, we whither.

III

After the storm, I found you, and in the absence of the loon’s cry, I carried you home.

With each mourning step, your moonlit eyes watched the earth turn beneath us—

For we are of soil, of stars, of wings, beating unseen.

You tied our mountain within my blood, and leaving it, leaving you, left my veins feeling open and pressed in the vice of winter. These cratered plains, dusted in ashes and grieving, hold no promise of home, but in the light of the pyre, I can see our coming shore.

You are there, wind-dressed and hooded, still but for the air that dances a halo of frost above your head—

When only silence remains, hear the moon sing hymns of farewell.

Her pale voice walks as rain across a vale—

One Year Waiting

still will I wait when winter comes in her pale gown to walk upon these silent woods still will I wait when spring rises in her viridian veil to nurse the fawn upon old soil still will I wait when summerisle is cloaked in shadows of the sun and children dance in the old gods’ reverence still will I wait when autumn mourns in bloodred loss and the sun bids this land farewell still will I wait for your return still will I wait at light’s end

After a Dream in Which Everything is Ashes

Diremption comes as a scythe upon stygian clouds.

Half-lidded and crouched, we invigorate these slumbering woods.

Night turns her grimoire and time besighs to shorthand scrawlings.

And we fall, like ashes, in quiet absolution.

After a Dream in Which Everything is Ashes II

Luna seethes beyond, leaving the sodden brook alight, a mirror for maleficent spires.

Diabolists wander, silent, still, invoking their majestic tome’s essence with malignant, ancient tongues.

And I, frostbitten lonely and transfixed, do quill nocturnal hauntings, stygian grimoires.

26 monochromatic engraving: an ekphrasis after Dark Vision by Norma Morgan

a funereal sky how like the chasm the empty throne the still gaze a slow pull of ink and grain awash with salt and shadows this is the door the strait its yawning silence scratches time in graveled layers balanced on meditation a quiet bleeding an empty plain forgets how to give chews the sky teeth on the horizon worn by grinding a consumption painted white asks for new scars we follow the tomb’s lie we hear the body knocking at the lid

The Poet Stops to Drink Kvasir’s Blood (or, the Mead of Poetry)

The poet drinks between breaths, deep honey, still crot.

The poet astride a rucksack, burgeons peerless knowledge.

The poet rises, eyes ascend, one more mountain this day, one more mountain.

Lessons in Quiet Passing

our daughter is trailing snakes from her bedroom does she remember throwing the blue tarp over the snow? look, winter is sleeping does she remember the killing jar in the kitchen window? the lessons in quiet passing? does she remember the housefly, stigmata on the needle? an antenna protruding just far enough to commune with God?

29 you: a poem in four triplets for S.

you are an autumn encrusted light perched between undusted peaks you are the chest, a swallowed air drawn in with fervor like water to a drowning you are the bats after starvation insects popping like ice under a lover’s boot you are the pines outside the door trailing long shadows like mourning veils

Fictions

The crags on the shore look like faces of old men, stormblown, shouting incantations toward the sea. On lurid nights, the sand turns black with battered basalt under a pale wash which, in moonlight, looks like a mass of weathered hands clawing at the granite walls of hell. You would wave your long fingers toward the moon like panicked earthworms and we would laugh at their misery. When I was young you would tell me that all stories are fiction and, when you left, you would be no different. So on a night where dun stars flicker like distant candles, I imagine you soaring overhead, owl silent and arms outstretched to catch the katabatic winds as they push down on the howling rocks and the rabid surf. Is it profane to say that these nights, black as a vacant chapel, smell of salt and small sex? I dream of your dust, your perfect occlusion of space, your taste like sand and iron and blood as a mixture of longing and regret, and the fervor of your flesh comes soaring back like spent pages of a hollow scripture.

Hel, Having Been Thrown to Niflheim, Finds Herself Alone upon an Endless Expanse of Ice

she wanders north through the night, whispering hymns to desolation and the moon, a tipped crescent, has wept stars upon the sky

Understanding Hyperborea and the Northern Winds

Even giants gather for warmth.

After a Dream in Which European Mythologies Prove Tender Bedfellows

Stained in static night, the menhir stands where the plains draw pale and we lay down the faun.

And a satyr sleeps in a portal tomb, issuing dreams in lucid waves of sanguine and sallow.

And a wraith heaving ivory stills a wrestful tempest air.

The Last Bloom Falls from the Oaken Throne after Sara Teasdale

The last bloom falls from the oaken throne Where the breeze once sang a mirthful tone

And the yews swayed with life, thriving and hearty, And the stone cliffs rose, brooding and mighty.

The moss once rode over sunwarmed soil Where the wildflowers danced in a spirited coil,

But as clouds gathered and the sun sank below, A darkness swirled up to consuming shadow.

Now fallen from memory the frosts came to ponder The ashen spires of weathered elm and alder,

Of a petrified kingdom ensorcelled by gloom And an oaken throne adorned with a single bloom.

In Defense of Giants

leaving behind mammoth bones the giants go iris picking

October 1995: Cascade Mountains, California

In the autumn birch of youth, you climb to watch the geese in formation traverse the nearer hills, away from the discipline of clouds. In patience, snow begins to fall silent as apparition. You and gravity, in perfect balance, cling as leaves to the pale branches.

It is not hands that hold you, rather the waking air on columns of trembling white. And before the thunder, you tune the limbs like wrists of a ghost.

August 1995: Landscape with Mosquito Lakes for my parents

The treeline just above the water, and again in reflection. My sister catches the only fish. We name it Fred. My father teaches me about braided fishing line, but the fish here are small. An afterthought.

The green-roofed cabins look lonely, their bones exposed, but in photos they are alive, they are dancing.

Landscape with Fish: An Absurdist Inversion

We pull them from the lake one at a time. Each cast, one resigned fish.

The sun sinks over the mountains. Minutes dissolve to hours. Days to weeks months years

Until the sun is whirling overhead Until it becomes one blinding gash In the sky, day and nightdaynightdaynight.

We toss the fish in a pile that rises, rises Over the treeline and the mountains themselves. The pinwheel sun only a memory.

Beneath the fish I think of my bones and organs Part of the fishmash.

Here at the bottom, We are all the same pink in the darkness, Pushing together upon the earth.

Atlas crumbles under the weight Of my children, their mouths agape, Eyes pressing from their swollen heads.

After a Dream in Which a Red, Crescent Moon Appears to Be Lying on Its Back

A horned moon looms ablaze through a cloak of apparition-mist.

Beneath this altar of oak my presence is unsought, yet I must still my thundering heart and rest my steel upon the soil.

I am bone-weary and sleep lingers like a wraith, but I must tend to these wounds that redden in silent blossoms, each gleaming in her lunar fire.

November 1992: Norway

Kristian waits for the bus. Bundled mannequins drift by, their eyes on rails.

In a café across the lamplit roadway, cardboard silhouettes lob conversation over plates, over candles, over each other, assembled in a tidy row of frosted panes.

An old woman shuffles near towing a young boy. Taking a step back, Kristian considers his mudded boots, thinning jeans, long hair. She passes. The boy, hand in mouth, looks up at him, up at the shapes on the bus sign, then back toward space.

Kristian, too, looks toward space. Finds a pale crescent veiled in fog. Considers home for a moment, but pushes it away.

The bus comes, he departs with it. His mudded bootprints, however, Remain where they fell.

After a Dream about Dolmens

Dolmens, towers of weathered stone and ceaseless time, washing vomit, elk’s blood, and sour sacrifice, filling the still night where the giants rest watching stars fill a distant abyss and a fire, dying as dusk carries away in slow disapproval.

In the deepest dark, wags of feast and grunts of hammered loins cast shadows like spilled entrails painted and scrawled in fists and prints against elusive sleep. On the soil rests breath and blood, but these have washed in the endless march of time.

After a Dream in Which the Moon Swallows the Ocean

The Serpent Witch rises, a dire moon her face carved in agony mouth howling a ruinous omen

Ghost drone haunting she drags the sea by a strand of vortex to her insatiable maw—

We watch, wail among tears why, why does she take the ocean away?

April 2015: Landing in Phoenix

from above swimming pools like sequins dance in the desert light from above mountains pale, supple rise and fall upon the heaving earth from above rivers jagged as lightning spill their current for all of us

Approximating Lust for S.

The way we laugh about our deaths and you ask me which of our parents should take the cat fills me with such a walled heat it is as though I am a blade in a furnace, singing, ready for the anvil.

The Portal, The Well

her bed is cold, which is to say the house is cold with no one to tend the wood stove we would tell her her father watched from the trees she would fly up the hill and return empty just missed him next time, yeah? we would tell her how the moon likes children little girls with no parents it preys at night keep the curtains closed take the sawed-off to the wardrobe don’t sleep we told her about the well the portal at the bottom how her father watched from the reflection how happy he must be down there with oak leaves that drift silent as bodies

Untitled For all who used to be / And now are / In the dark -Ulver, Vigil

remember her arms wide as cathedral walls clothes that fall like sleeping ghosts flesh read like braille her dust lulls rocks and trees to sleep wolves roam like shadows outside the portcullis of her ribs

Like Little Full Moons after Troy Jollimore

all of us bathe in quicksilver while sightseeing in Galileo’s dreams.

Terraforming Mars after Ray Bradbury

home is in the lungs we breathe only the air brought with us martian soil fine as graphite stirs in the stellar winds we are shy so shy we leave no footprints in natural light we turn cyclopean blue we disappear

WORKS CONSULTED

Works Consulted

Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. Print.

Robertson, Robin. Swithering. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006. Print.

---. Slow Air. Orlando: Harcourt, 2002. Print.

Rogers, Pattiann. The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation.

Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1999. Print.

Shklovsky, Victor. "Art as Technique." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and

Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.

776-777. Print.

Teasdale, Sara. Flame and Shadow. Hamburg: tredition, 2012. Print.

Tranströmer, Tomas. Bright Scythe. Trans. Patty Crane. Kentucky: Sarabende Books,

2015. Print.

---. The Great Enigma. Trans. Robin Fulton. New York: New

Directions Books, 2006. Print.