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Down Here
A trilogy of poems about living and breathing in a strange world.
20 pages, Unknown Binding
First published March 1, 1999
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October 4, 2014
The long-awaited conclusion to my trilogy of longish poems!
I hear the yawns from the yawning void.
In the hierarchy of Goodreads users poets plugging their self-published chapbooks have got to be near the bottom. I understand this, but let it be known that I am constitutionally incapable of plugging myself. It is ethically, spiritually, and physically impossible.
That said, I am proud of these poems, and as next to no one had read them until Matt recently did (he's actually the only person who has read the third part) - 13-14 years after they were written - I am happy to have a legitimate reason to revisit them, as well as very grateful that someone has enjoyed, and even benefited, from reading them.
Though I have long been intrigued by the idea of trilogies - how the parts interact, how they arc from one part to the next, how they can be viewed as three works and as one (calling to mind the mystical notion of a trinity), etc. - I did not set out to write a trilogy, but once I had written the first two parts and saw how they might fit together I set myself the task to write a third that was somehow a culmination of the first two.
And I did it quickly so as not to get in my own way while doing it.
And I titled the trilogy Here as it is a chronicle (of sorts) of what it means to be here in this predicament we call life.
There is an implied journey occurring through the three parts - from early childhood where "poetry" is a natural occurrence (The Toad), to more self-conscious poem-making (The No Tour), to a combination of naturalness and artificiality (Down Here). This journey is also a journey toward self-actualization or self-integration. Along the way this life, the here where we all live, is seen as a sort of prison or confinement - a place we never consciously entered and a place that offers no escape. Yet the desire to "escape" remains...
Escape what? I'm not sure, but to become completely one's self, to self-actualize, will surely offer a clearer perspective on the problem, so that becomes the goal.
But along the way towards that goal it becomes clear that some form of submission, however self-actualized one is, is the proper path, since satisfying answers are not forthcoming. So the question becomes - submit to what?
In my narrative this "what" becomes a "She". Not a specific woman, but rather a kind of feminine principle that "knows" intuitively how to negotiate the "here", the "prison", we find ourselves in. As long as we can tolerate and follow her wildly unpredictable nature she will take us where we need to go.
The journey, the search, becomes a learning experience in how to submit one's self to a power or a force that is not completely known, in how to become a passive recipient of knowledge that allows one to actively negotiate the prison, and as this happens it is discovered that this prison is not as constraining as initially thought, which is a kind of freedom.
Though we can't escape, freedom is possible.
I hear the yawns from the yawning void.
In the hierarchy of Goodreads users poets plugging their self-published chapbooks have got to be near the bottom. I understand this, but let it be known that I am constitutionally incapable of plugging myself. It is ethically, spiritually, and physically impossible.
That said, I am proud of these poems, and as next to no one had read them until Matt recently did (he's actually the only person who has read the third part) - 13-14 years after they were written - I am happy to have a legitimate reason to revisit them, as well as very grateful that someone has enjoyed, and even benefited, from reading them.
Though I have long been intrigued by the idea of trilogies - how the parts interact, how they arc from one part to the next, how they can be viewed as three works and as one (calling to mind the mystical notion of a trinity), etc. - I did not set out to write a trilogy, but once I had written the first two parts and saw how they might fit together I set myself the task to write a third that was somehow a culmination of the first two.
And I did it quickly so as not to get in my own way while doing it.
And I titled the trilogy Here as it is a chronicle (of sorts) of what it means to be here in this predicament we call life.
There is an implied journey occurring through the three parts - from early childhood where "poetry" is a natural occurrence (The Toad), to more self-conscious poem-making (The No Tour), to a combination of naturalness and artificiality (Down Here). This journey is also a journey toward self-actualization or self-integration. Along the way this life, the here where we all live, is seen as a sort of prison or confinement - a place we never consciously entered and a place that offers no escape. Yet the desire to "escape" remains...
Escape what? I'm not sure, but to become completely one's self, to self-actualize, will surely offer a clearer perspective on the problem, so that becomes the goal.
But along the way towards that goal it becomes clear that some form of submission, however self-actualized one is, is the proper path, since satisfying answers are not forthcoming. So the question becomes - submit to what?
In my narrative this "what" becomes a "She". Not a specific woman, but rather a kind of feminine principle that "knows" intuitively how to negotiate the "here", the "prison", we find ourselves in. As long as we can tolerate and follow her wildly unpredictable nature she will take us where we need to go.
The journey, the search, becomes a learning experience in how to submit one's self to a power or a force that is not completely known, in how to become a passive recipient of knowledge that allows one to actively negotiate the prison, and as this happens it is discovered that this prison is not as constraining as initially thought, which is a kind of freedom.
Though we can't escape, freedom is possible.
July 27, 2012
Down Here is an elusive and disquieting work of art. Ending the trilogy that began with The Toad and The No Tour, Down Here mixes the organic with the mechanical, the light with the heavy, the beautiful with the ugly. Down Here is a living, seething, poetic construct; it consumes, it violates, it simmers. There are no childhood laments (The Toad)—the entirety of the poet's early life seems to be kept at a distance here—nor are there are any noticeable constraints or ordering sequences (The No Tour); instead, the feelings that permeated the last two volumes are muted, diminished, mixed. From the opening stanza, we're confronted with something unusual:
was this choice made to
be in this to be in you to follow
you here where was I in this when
I chose or when I saw of when was this
when you pulled me in was he there too
In this stanza, we encounter something elemental, something sexual, something direct. Though the poet is asking questions, there are no question marks to be found—the lines go on indefinitely, gliding past the limitations of any caesurae. Blurring at the edges, they blend into each other. Questions become assertions, become raw statements.
Immediately following this first stanza comes a peculiar couplet that will soon become a refrain:
never entered
no escape
There is something profoundly disturbing in this, yet when I look at the individual lines (and how they fit into the poem as a whole), I don't see anything that's necessarily dismal or demoralizing. Still, they provoke a strange feeling of uneasiness; something endless and corrosive is roiling beneath an outwardly calm plane. But if we look closely, the plane is cracked, and the cracks are growing. Take the last part of the second major stanza, for example:
What is that what
What that what was
That what was is
Is is this
She this is in this dim is
It gets late early down here
Turn in a tunnel of a leafage release
He what is that sees she in he
Fur falls to first poet potent see
He sings his her into her he
Then further falls to dim in she
She in dim down there in she
I dim idea
Dim in me
This stanza introduces capital letters into the poem—something that the introductory stanza ignored; the couplets are also all lowercase. I assume this was done to call attention to them, to keep them in focus, as they are often the most direct and important parts. It's also worth noting the transformation of the What into a She. A singular metamorphosis of the poet's questioning occurs. It takes on a physical form. Something to lust after, something to follow anywhere, even down there. The aforementioned cracks continue to widen, allowing a small amount of light to shine on some of the more ambiguous happenings recorded in the text. The poet's spare, bleak, and extremely guarded verse begins to expand outward from the third stanza on—it's as though for the first time, the text is able to breathe:
This house is reverses of
reverberation. None do turn about
or put up mentions that cease to shake the place.
She goes to the window.
Wouldn't you offer a place of rest?
The road has become long and dusty.
The road has become here.
At last has become here.
At last here her.
This litter has monstrosity. No sneaking up
or lifting the veil, you would only find more.
I found lost. This darkness becomes me. Does she
look out or in? She looks.
You are a give to her. Trees either side to a tunnel.
Black stages of passing through.
I never knew curtains that knew, and she asks.
She is ask. She does none. This house has become a spread,
what kind of you are you? Wavelets at the beckon.
To please the expand he knits through the carpet
of a circle trance. Roomy hollow less machines. What hum
of what under or to down there meticulous.
The sound of start does mourn to endless,
morning twilight of a mimed perspective, lines
intimating immortal ash of here
aching from the hover of her flame.
One is struck at once by the poem's apparent lack of any discursive or anecdotal thread. Seemingly disconnected and unequal verses follow upon one another without the assistance of any immediately visible logical links. By virtue of its isolated quality, and of the distance that it cultivates, each line is removed from any necessary context outside of the poem. Hence, whatever meaning a certain line may have, other than that of the most limited (self-)referential kind, must derive its function from within the poem. In spite of its disjointed appearance, Down Here has both formal (logical) and substantive cohesiveness. At times, it takes on the structure of a musical composition,—a composition that takes us directly from the unpunctuated overture to the silence that prefaces the first couplet; from there, separated by a brief pause, the second couplet. Following the second couplet (these couplets prove to be a vital construct within the poem), we are led into the third stanza (or movement); the text becomes less personal and more mechanical, more precise:
in now no out
known only in now
Trellised points of view conducive to guesses
The seasons wade out into the cottage slumps
Ignorance beneath the tables
She supplies the vintages of trespass
Irreducible codes spill into nameless disparate pores
We stumbling the road
He is a collection whose synchronicity I pacify myself into
Spread of mismatch
Upthrust contradiction
His tunes from holes the inverted drainage of attempted catch
She neither weighs nor involutes her sorrow
As if I suspended from profit spinnings of demise
The persons of this impossible
Link to once hovering covey of hushes
Necessitating fastings of weird
Cogs in the poly-periodical blood
Lamp thrust overhang
She and he become me momently spaced in gel
Dewy crystal was suspension
Oval intersections of teeming
The concentrate to become my morning juice
Territory of her
Compass of him
The organic has been almost completely replaced by the inorganic, the mineral, even though it seems to have sprung directly from the most rustic places, the most nature-dependent (the "cottage slumps" buried by the relentless cycle of the seasons). It's interesting to note the variations in the spacing throughout this book. Like what was noted above, I assume that it too was intentional, as it allows certain stanzas to stand out (the vast majority of the text is single spaced, however the above passage was double spaced, and happened to mark a transition from the organic, confessional beginnings of the poem, to the steely second movement with its bone-bleached economy and recursive motions. The childlike wonder of The Toad, and the "self-conscious poem-making" of The No Tour is washed away, leaving behind a distinct heaviness, a kind of cynicism that only comes with age and sadness.
The "burdened trees", the "lethargic ribbons", the poet "tied to time", waiting for her return, all the while being subject to (or searching for) "barbaric visions". A primal vision of sex and the stages of reproduction comes along with the image of the "belly doors". The last three lines of the stanza briefly return us to the light:
Long ago she wore the diadem, now
the rolling plum mobile does hurry her along,
parting of the grasses and the fables of fade.
The poem moves slowly, gathering itself; the poem is wounded, the poem is on its last legs. Following two short prose poems about deer and sponges (and another couplet), another change occurs: the stanzas fall away, creating four sonnets, followed by another couplet:
all is out
in this in
The stores he brought from beamy vaults
holding far into the down here his dish
come to glow, thin diaphanous expansion.
She rings ripe with her own, restively settled
into elusives the deer tune to. No juice
from there could lure her plummet up, his plums
a tune of mirror in mirror with lamp
between, no legless crawl in there,
no mandrake lesson. And I less than a kiss
at the limit of her grime. She the mulch
of all punctuation, the mulch of obscurity
curing courses of clean, weaning us
from tomorrow's noon, bringing us
calm and treacherous greens of swoon.
You two are a gradual, or an instantaneous
I can't reflect, tremors
of a modest banquet of renewal. Only once
is an impossible, the approach, flush
with dim inscriptions of a note, pleases
with its limitless integrations, cupboards
styled by aromatic clippings
of nearly forgotten time. You two have known.
Of what I too know but that space
rarely enters, like the blue evocation
of moment's dawn it suffuses, but the lingering
becomes a substratum snapped
into finer fragile. You two have passed through
and separated on the other side of my search.
What absence of link or projection
from the stomach between you two delivered
these plentiful intrusions? Severed
and several, impacted by,
a youth's collision, was it he who,
unprepared, leaped into exclusive transmission,
so wasted you? You do never know, you do,
or waver you reachless to our etching. He
whose stupendous evolution furnished
his ingenious house, did he compass
your unmentioned magnetic? You two did you
set afloat intimacies of disjunct? Unscaled
and misled sublimes? transcendencies stripped
of the weight of now, deflated so and so on?
But what has occurred must have,
in the everlasting honors
of the subterranean grope, relinquished
perch, sustained at the edge
and the favored flesh of now. You two
have never known for now
the dense of static expansion
has become a one and only spinning coin
of self-perpetuating pleasure. You two
at the length of ten thousand lasting sponges
tipped at the reach of a longest arm
have become a curious circuit, a tuned string
of dressed and dressed again voltages
linking free with a central beguiling fire.
This couplet immediately follows:
all down here
no there at all
Though we are confronted with an enigmatic (perhaps unknowable) He and She, the single vague persona of the poet-narrator draws the various threads of perception into something of a whole. Even so, we are left with many questions: who is She? What does the poet want with her? The fact that he (the poet-narrator) remains shadowy and anonymous complicates matters. Is he at all different from He—the He who is pursuing [the] She (the object of desire)? Is he envious of this other? Is he merely pursuing himself? The following stanza describes a scene completely overtaken by a fog of an almost supernatural thickness. There is an anxiety is this writing that is not present anywhere else. There is but a single instance of departure or separation (from a woman, from the body, from the self, etc.), but this departure or separation reverberates throughout the whole text, and imbues it with a haunting sensation of loss and/or mourning. The separation (exaggerated by the fog) leads to injury:
Cloisters of bruise
[...]
We three one we three
Not even in but through and through
We are this
This art we
What passages of ceilinged suchness
This world is so much of us
The poet describes Down Here as a combination of naturalness and artificiality, but that only grazes the surface. Down Here is primarily a mechanical/artificial poetic construct that imposes itself upon the natural, on what lives and breathes and fucks and screams. There are times, however, when it seems more like an organic construct being pushed through the inner workings of some vast, indescribable machine. Images of childhood and desire are fed through and pulverized by rods and cogs, all clockwork, steely and unfeeling. I would agree with his (the poet's) saying that the poem depicts a journey of the Self, a journey toward self-actualization and/or self-integration. The Here in question is the world. The world that comprises both the natural and the artificial. The Here represented is a prison. Something that we are born into, something that we must die in. There is no escape. But sometimes light shines through the bars or whatever cracks we've widened with our hands. In the poem, it is not only the "I" that is in pain; if we look carefully, we find a nature in pain, a nature suffering:
Surge of tidal moans
Shifting rooms of ride
[...]
We curve into cramped enclosure
sponge subtle stuff
Where merge we into motions of mention
Oceans of infinite intention
Bruised behemoths of beach
Where the weedy barnacles and bathes
No we no three no one
This world is no such of us
Of cloisters lost and losing
So much of us
Sown much
All mulch
The world (nature) eventually ends each life. Even though it sustains and nurtures it, it must consume it at some point, and in this act of consumption, returns it to form. Many years ago, when a certain person died, a person who was very dear to us, I spoke of it (what had happened) in passing with a friend; I asked where they thought the dead person had gone, and my friend said, to the sky, she went back to the sky; she said it clearly, abruptly, as though it were a fact. Down Here views our cosmic predicament in a slightly different light: we don't return anywhere; we're ground down, crushed, made into mulch. Separated from everything. There is no ascent or return to where we were, there is no up there—there is nothing beyond our inevitable destruction and decomposition. Everything that forces us down there. It's fitting that the couplet-refrain makes an appearance just before one of the last truly human parts of the poem:
never entered
no escape
It's here that the poem takes an even darker turn. She becomes the center. An overwhelming obsession with Her leads the poet into a series of strange reveries:
But only as if she weakened
the limber of my ties, or, more in the manner of
remoteness bedeviling a critical span, would she vary
the tincture of her glance, put in perspective
coiled avenues of scare. She cleared away
potencies of my breathing, replaced
with the glazing of a mask. I only remember her,
the flurry of her features
set me aspin, no criss-crossed territories
in conspiring quarters of my head
bred the version of her
each second in her glance put aside
to be taken up by a brief cascade, shadow
of an elemental wing.
Breath scarce could fathom in all false globals
of my reckoning the collapsible gradients
her tailors scurried to to sew as she
flowed nourished by the gills of tide. Stones
added pattern to her ride, and I
slowed to notice, crumbling captures
in my mind's design.
Breath. Breathing. Tidal surges, stones. Elemental wings. Where or what is the desire to escape? Why does this desire remain when all of the others have long since fallen away? And, if one were to escape, what would they be escaping from? Nature? Death? Themselves? And, more importantly, where would they go? The poet spoke of the escape as a sort of growing awareness, to become oneself entirely, to self-actualize. The desire to be realized, to become whole provides the desire for this escape. It becomes a goal. He states, however, that in order to reach this goal, a kind of submission is required. The act of submission puts the individual on the "proper path"; with this newfound focus on submission, a question inevitably arises—what are we submitting to? The poet backs my assertion that the what of the first two volumes becomes a She, but he loses me when he states that this She is not meant to represent any specific woman. I agree that there's an adherence to the feminine (the feminine here helps to guide the poet-narrator through the successive layers of Here); in a way, she's a kind of Virgil. But she doesn't lead him out of the darkness; instead, she only puts him in deeper, leads him further astray. The images and textual sequences are, for me, too personal, too visceral to exist merely as a concept. She may be "wildly unpredictable", and we may have to let her "take us where we need to go", but she has a face... She appears in a physical form one last time, leading the poet-narrator and the reader into the most beautiful and evocative section of the poem:
off to of an often
mostly to only here
She says don't possible the aroma
of this disliked-up region, point to spark of fog,
beginning dust from opened tomes where all trees
in the lair and took stairs from. She says
whisper through the walls this house
moves the body of a deer, fine
its violence of find, put up
by generous fevers. She says vary your design, push
the buttons of a juggler snatch down instruments
of long decay, hush into tubes,
send spirals through,
blow pulses of your heart into.
This is immediately followed by a litany:
This house sits on sickness
This house references continous
This house is sediment and shadow
This house a whisper through woods of canoe
This house a growth of grammar
This house a vegetable vitamin stein
This house hers
This house hers
This house her
[...]
This house at the void of pulse
And then:
She says you follow her, not
on her trail, or hot, sniffing
at her sentences, urging integral syllable blend,
globed by the rollings of your reading.
[...]
sunlight trickling,
briefly open cove.
She says you never woke.
The litany then reemerges:
This house with windows of an unsweepable corner
[...]
This house hers
This house hers
This house her
[...]
This house the closet of game
This house afloat
This house unwoken unspoken.
This She gradually envelopes everything. Her presence consumes the body and mind of the poet. Everything is strained, bursting at the seams. Another couplet, like the brief moment of sunlight above, brings a glimmer of hope:
in here this no
out there that
And then, all of a sudden, a profound understanding brings about the long-awaited self-actualization:
Pond played mirror to his sun.
Many versions congealed to one, and in it
many single songsters played. He came for her
then came into himself, or turned
the tube to other inklings. To think
he thought is to think of things unthought,
and when he saw himself here as he saw himself there
he trembled and the unknown image untrembled.
A garden of never came near, and though
no sun down here the sun of him became the sun
green twined toward. And never was it as before,
for now he didn't sing but sang to his him his
liquidities of things within. Wilderness furry
at the fringe of him, scattered sparks
of heavenly her, but he greeted he
and gained a moment's diamond. All space refracted
to hard blue hover at his nose, put it
in his pocket and seem to seem complete.
Destiny centered.
The questioning merges with the feminine presence. The "I" disappears in the radiance of the completed Self. A Self now able to see, a Self with a sun inside. The text is suffused with a euphoric glow. But even joy is subject to entropy, and soon it begins to fade.
was this choice made to
be in this to be in you to follow
you here where was I in this when
I chose or when I saw of when was this
when you pulled me in was he there too
In this stanza, we encounter something elemental, something sexual, something direct. Though the poet is asking questions, there are no question marks to be found—the lines go on indefinitely, gliding past the limitations of any caesurae. Blurring at the edges, they blend into each other. Questions become assertions, become raw statements.
Immediately following this first stanza comes a peculiar couplet that will soon become a refrain:
never entered
no escape
There is something profoundly disturbing in this, yet when I look at the individual lines (and how they fit into the poem as a whole), I don't see anything that's necessarily dismal or demoralizing. Still, they provoke a strange feeling of uneasiness; something endless and corrosive is roiling beneath an outwardly calm plane. But if we look closely, the plane is cracked, and the cracks are growing. Take the last part of the second major stanza, for example:
What is that what
What that what was
That what was is
Is is this
She this is in this dim is
It gets late early down here
Turn in a tunnel of a leafage release
He what is that sees she in he
Fur falls to first poet potent see
He sings his her into her he
Then further falls to dim in she
She in dim down there in she
I dim idea
Dim in me
This stanza introduces capital letters into the poem—something that the introductory stanza ignored; the couplets are also all lowercase. I assume this was done to call attention to them, to keep them in focus, as they are often the most direct and important parts. It's also worth noting the transformation of the What into a She. A singular metamorphosis of the poet's questioning occurs. It takes on a physical form. Something to lust after, something to follow anywhere, even down there. The aforementioned cracks continue to widen, allowing a small amount of light to shine on some of the more ambiguous happenings recorded in the text. The poet's spare, bleak, and extremely guarded verse begins to expand outward from the third stanza on—it's as though for the first time, the text is able to breathe:
This house is reverses of
reverberation. None do turn about
or put up mentions that cease to shake the place.
She goes to the window.
Wouldn't you offer a place of rest?
The road has become long and dusty.
The road has become here.
At last has become here.
At last here her.
This litter has monstrosity. No sneaking up
or lifting the veil, you would only find more.
I found lost. This darkness becomes me. Does she
look out or in? She looks.
You are a give to her. Trees either side to a tunnel.
Black stages of passing through.
I never knew curtains that knew, and she asks.
She is ask. She does none. This house has become a spread,
what kind of you are you? Wavelets at the beckon.
To please the expand he knits through the carpet
of a circle trance. Roomy hollow less machines. What hum
of what under or to down there meticulous.
The sound of start does mourn to endless,
morning twilight of a mimed perspective, lines
intimating immortal ash of here
aching from the hover of her flame.
One is struck at once by the poem's apparent lack of any discursive or anecdotal thread. Seemingly disconnected and unequal verses follow upon one another without the assistance of any immediately visible logical links. By virtue of its isolated quality, and of the distance that it cultivates, each line is removed from any necessary context outside of the poem. Hence, whatever meaning a certain line may have, other than that of the most limited (self-)referential kind, must derive its function from within the poem. In spite of its disjointed appearance, Down Here has both formal (logical) and substantive cohesiveness. At times, it takes on the structure of a musical composition,—a composition that takes us directly from the unpunctuated overture to the silence that prefaces the first couplet; from there, separated by a brief pause, the second couplet. Following the second couplet (these couplets prove to be a vital construct within the poem), we are led into the third stanza (or movement); the text becomes less personal and more mechanical, more precise:
in now no out
known only in now
Trellised points of view conducive to guesses
The seasons wade out into the cottage slumps
Ignorance beneath the tables
She supplies the vintages of trespass
Irreducible codes spill into nameless disparate pores
We stumbling the road
He is a collection whose synchronicity I pacify myself into
Spread of mismatch
Upthrust contradiction
His tunes from holes the inverted drainage of attempted catch
She neither weighs nor involutes her sorrow
As if I suspended from profit spinnings of demise
The persons of this impossible
Link to once hovering covey of hushes
Necessitating fastings of weird
Cogs in the poly-periodical blood
Lamp thrust overhang
She and he become me momently spaced in gel
Dewy crystal was suspension
Oval intersections of teeming
The concentrate to become my morning juice
Territory of her
Compass of him
The organic has been almost completely replaced by the inorganic, the mineral, even though it seems to have sprung directly from the most rustic places, the most nature-dependent (the "cottage slumps" buried by the relentless cycle of the seasons). It's interesting to note the variations in the spacing throughout this book. Like what was noted above, I assume that it too was intentional, as it allows certain stanzas to stand out (the vast majority of the text is single spaced, however the above passage was double spaced, and happened to mark a transition from the organic, confessional beginnings of the poem, to the steely second movement with its bone-bleached economy and recursive motions. The childlike wonder of The Toad, and the "self-conscious poem-making" of The No Tour is washed away, leaving behind a distinct heaviness, a kind of cynicism that only comes with age and sadness.
The "burdened trees", the "lethargic ribbons", the poet "tied to time", waiting for her return, all the while being subject to (or searching for) "barbaric visions". A primal vision of sex and the stages of reproduction comes along with the image of the "belly doors". The last three lines of the stanza briefly return us to the light:
Long ago she wore the diadem, now
the rolling plum mobile does hurry her along,
parting of the grasses and the fables of fade.
The poem moves slowly, gathering itself; the poem is wounded, the poem is on its last legs. Following two short prose poems about deer and sponges (and another couplet), another change occurs: the stanzas fall away, creating four sonnets, followed by another couplet:
all is out
in this in
The stores he brought from beamy vaults
holding far into the down here his dish
come to glow, thin diaphanous expansion.
She rings ripe with her own, restively settled
into elusives the deer tune to. No juice
from there could lure her plummet up, his plums
a tune of mirror in mirror with lamp
between, no legless crawl in there,
no mandrake lesson. And I less than a kiss
at the limit of her grime. She the mulch
of all punctuation, the mulch of obscurity
curing courses of clean, weaning us
from tomorrow's noon, bringing us
calm and treacherous greens of swoon.
You two are a gradual, or an instantaneous
I can't reflect, tremors
of a modest banquet of renewal. Only once
is an impossible, the approach, flush
with dim inscriptions of a note, pleases
with its limitless integrations, cupboards
styled by aromatic clippings
of nearly forgotten time. You two have known.
Of what I too know but that space
rarely enters, like the blue evocation
of moment's dawn it suffuses, but the lingering
becomes a substratum snapped
into finer fragile. You two have passed through
and separated on the other side of my search.
What absence of link or projection
from the stomach between you two delivered
these plentiful intrusions? Severed
and several, impacted by,
a youth's collision, was it he who,
unprepared, leaped into exclusive transmission,
so wasted you? You do never know, you do,
or waver you reachless to our etching. He
whose stupendous evolution furnished
his ingenious house, did he compass
your unmentioned magnetic? You two did you
set afloat intimacies of disjunct? Unscaled
and misled sublimes? transcendencies stripped
of the weight of now, deflated so and so on?
But what has occurred must have,
in the everlasting honors
of the subterranean grope, relinquished
perch, sustained at the edge
and the favored flesh of now. You two
have never known for now
the dense of static expansion
has become a one and only spinning coin
of self-perpetuating pleasure. You two
at the length of ten thousand lasting sponges
tipped at the reach of a longest arm
have become a curious circuit, a tuned string
of dressed and dressed again voltages
linking free with a central beguiling fire.
This couplet immediately follows:
all down here
no there at all
Though we are confronted with an enigmatic (perhaps unknowable) He and She, the single vague persona of the poet-narrator draws the various threads of perception into something of a whole. Even so, we are left with many questions: who is She? What does the poet want with her? The fact that he (the poet-narrator) remains shadowy and anonymous complicates matters. Is he at all different from He—the He who is pursuing [the] She (the object of desire)? Is he envious of this other? Is he merely pursuing himself? The following stanza describes a scene completely overtaken by a fog of an almost supernatural thickness. There is an anxiety is this writing that is not present anywhere else. There is but a single instance of departure or separation (from a woman, from the body, from the self, etc.), but this departure or separation reverberates throughout the whole text, and imbues it with a haunting sensation of loss and/or mourning. The separation (exaggerated by the fog) leads to injury:
Cloisters of bruise
[...]
We three one we three
Not even in but through and through
We are this
This art we
What passages of ceilinged suchness
This world is so much of us
The poet describes Down Here as a combination of naturalness and artificiality, but that only grazes the surface. Down Here is primarily a mechanical/artificial poetic construct that imposes itself upon the natural, on what lives and breathes and fucks and screams. There are times, however, when it seems more like an organic construct being pushed through the inner workings of some vast, indescribable machine. Images of childhood and desire are fed through and pulverized by rods and cogs, all clockwork, steely and unfeeling. I would agree with his (the poet's) saying that the poem depicts a journey of the Self, a journey toward self-actualization and/or self-integration. The Here in question is the world. The world that comprises both the natural and the artificial. The Here represented is a prison. Something that we are born into, something that we must die in. There is no escape. But sometimes light shines through the bars or whatever cracks we've widened with our hands. In the poem, it is not only the "I" that is in pain; if we look carefully, we find a nature in pain, a nature suffering:
Surge of tidal moans
Shifting rooms of ride
[...]
We curve into cramped enclosure
sponge subtle stuff
Where merge we into motions of mention
Oceans of infinite intention
Bruised behemoths of beach
Where the weedy barnacles and bathes
No we no three no one
This world is no such of us
Of cloisters lost and losing
So much of us
Sown much
All mulch
The world (nature) eventually ends each life. Even though it sustains and nurtures it, it must consume it at some point, and in this act of consumption, returns it to form. Many years ago, when a certain person died, a person who was very dear to us, I spoke of it (what had happened) in passing with a friend; I asked where they thought the dead person had gone, and my friend said, to the sky, she went back to the sky; she said it clearly, abruptly, as though it were a fact. Down Here views our cosmic predicament in a slightly different light: we don't return anywhere; we're ground down, crushed, made into mulch. Separated from everything. There is no ascent or return to where we were, there is no up there—there is nothing beyond our inevitable destruction and decomposition. Everything that forces us down there. It's fitting that the couplet-refrain makes an appearance just before one of the last truly human parts of the poem:
never entered
no escape
It's here that the poem takes an even darker turn. She becomes the center. An overwhelming obsession with Her leads the poet into a series of strange reveries:
But only as if she weakened
the limber of my ties, or, more in the manner of
remoteness bedeviling a critical span, would she vary
the tincture of her glance, put in perspective
coiled avenues of scare. She cleared away
potencies of my breathing, replaced
with the glazing of a mask. I only remember her,
the flurry of her features
set me aspin, no criss-crossed territories
in conspiring quarters of my head
bred the version of her
each second in her glance put aside
to be taken up by a brief cascade, shadow
of an elemental wing.
Breath scarce could fathom in all false globals
of my reckoning the collapsible gradients
her tailors scurried to to sew as she
flowed nourished by the gills of tide. Stones
added pattern to her ride, and I
slowed to notice, crumbling captures
in my mind's design.
Breath. Breathing. Tidal surges, stones. Elemental wings. Where or what is the desire to escape? Why does this desire remain when all of the others have long since fallen away? And, if one were to escape, what would they be escaping from? Nature? Death? Themselves? And, more importantly, where would they go? The poet spoke of the escape as a sort of growing awareness, to become oneself entirely, to self-actualize. The desire to be realized, to become whole provides the desire for this escape. It becomes a goal. He states, however, that in order to reach this goal, a kind of submission is required. The act of submission puts the individual on the "proper path"; with this newfound focus on submission, a question inevitably arises—what are we submitting to? The poet backs my assertion that the what of the first two volumes becomes a She, but he loses me when he states that this She is not meant to represent any specific woman. I agree that there's an adherence to the feminine (the feminine here helps to guide the poet-narrator through the successive layers of Here); in a way, she's a kind of Virgil. But she doesn't lead him out of the darkness; instead, she only puts him in deeper, leads him further astray. The images and textual sequences are, for me, too personal, too visceral to exist merely as a concept. She may be "wildly unpredictable", and we may have to let her "take us where we need to go", but she has a face... She appears in a physical form one last time, leading the poet-narrator and the reader into the most beautiful and evocative section of the poem:
off to of an often
mostly to only here
She says don't possible the aroma
of this disliked-up region, point to spark of fog,
beginning dust from opened tomes where all trees
in the lair and took stairs from. She says
whisper through the walls this house
moves the body of a deer, fine
its violence of find, put up
by generous fevers. She says vary your design, push
the buttons of a juggler snatch down instruments
of long decay, hush into tubes,
send spirals through,
blow pulses of your heart into.
This is immediately followed by a litany:
This house sits on sickness
This house references continous
This house is sediment and shadow
This house a whisper through woods of canoe
This house a growth of grammar
This house a vegetable vitamin stein
This house hers
This house hers
This house her
[...]
This house at the void of pulse
And then:
She says you follow her, not
on her trail, or hot, sniffing
at her sentences, urging integral syllable blend,
globed by the rollings of your reading.
[...]
sunlight trickling,
briefly open cove.
She says you never woke.
The litany then reemerges:
This house with windows of an unsweepable corner
[...]
This house hers
This house hers
This house her
[...]
This house the closet of game
This house afloat
This house unwoken unspoken.
This She gradually envelopes everything. Her presence consumes the body and mind of the poet. Everything is strained, bursting at the seams. Another couplet, like the brief moment of sunlight above, brings a glimmer of hope:
in here this no
out there that
And then, all of a sudden, a profound understanding brings about the long-awaited self-actualization:
Pond played mirror to his sun.
Many versions congealed to one, and in it
many single songsters played. He came for her
then came into himself, or turned
the tube to other inklings. To think
he thought is to think of things unthought,
and when he saw himself here as he saw himself there
he trembled and the unknown image untrembled.
A garden of never came near, and though
no sun down here the sun of him became the sun
green twined toward. And never was it as before,
for now he didn't sing but sang to his him his
liquidities of things within. Wilderness furry
at the fringe of him, scattered sparks
of heavenly her, but he greeted he
and gained a moment's diamond. All space refracted
to hard blue hover at his nose, put it
in his pocket and seem to seem complete.
Destiny centered.
The questioning merges with the feminine presence. The "I" disappears in the radiance of the completed Self. A Self now able to see, a Self with a sun inside. The text is suffused with a euphoric glow. But even joy is subject to entropy, and soon it begins to fade.
October 10, 2017
Poetry often intimidates or leaves me lost and wondering why I can't seem to understand the hidden meanings I sense across and between the lines. And even though I can't pretend to understand everything I've read of Eddie's, I never feel frustrated or lost. Or maybe I do get lost, but lost in the best ways. One or two lines are enough to whirl my mind around for long reflective moments, filled with revolving images so playful and vivid. I've read pages straight through without stopping only to turn around and re-read them at a slow and sinuous pace. No matter my approach, leisurely or speeding, focused or distracted, I always extract pure reading pleasure from the experience. That said, when given the rare opportunity, my preference is to absorb each line as unhurried as possible, either late at night, or early in the morning, when the world is still.
Down Here is an incredible finish to the "Here" trilogy, beginning with the The Toad and The No Tour. Altogether a remarkable meditation of the ever present moment, of being born into this world in a human body, reflections upon unrememberable origins and unknowable futures, both of which are always here. At once deeply personal and universal in its insights and provocations. Frequently succeeding at invoking mystery out from hiding, a sustained series of fleeting glimpses. Sun clearing trees behind eyes, gap finding. Shadow head cast down upon the page, a perfect reading light.
Down Here is an incredible finish to the "Here" trilogy, beginning with the The Toad and The No Tour. Altogether a remarkable meditation of the ever present moment, of being born into this world in a human body, reflections upon unrememberable origins and unknowable futures, both of which are always here. At once deeply personal and universal in its insights and provocations. Frequently succeeding at invoking mystery out from hiding, a sustained series of fleeting glimpses. Sun clearing trees behind eyes, gap finding. Shadow head cast down upon the page, a perfect reading light.
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