Henderson - Songs: poems

The Mountain West Poetry Series

Stephanie GSchwind & Donald Revell, series editors

We Are Starved, by Joshua Kryah

The City She Was, by Carmen Gimnez Smith

Upper Level Disturbances, by Kevin Goodan

The Two Standards, by Heather Winterer

Blue Heron, by Elizabeth Robinson

Hungry Moon, by Henrietta Goodman

The Logan Notebooks, by Rebecca Lindenberg

Songs, by Derek Henderson

DEREK HENDERSON

poems

The Center for Literary Publishing
Colorado State University

Copyright 2014 by Derek Henderson.

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce

selections from this book, write to

Permissions, The Center for Literary Publishing

9105 Campus Delivery, Colorado State University

Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-9105.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Henderson, Derek (Derek Eaton)

[Poems. Selections]

Songs: poems / Derek Henderson.

pages; cm. -- (Mountain West poetry series)

ISBN 978-1-885635-39-6 (softcover : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-885635-40-2 (electronic)

I. Title.

Ps3608.e39255a6 2014

811.6--dc23

2014035050

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39.48-1984.

1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14

Publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

This book is dedicated to my children: Charlotte, Peter, Audrey, and Alex.

I believe in song.

Stan Brakhage

Portrait before the eyes, everything true in the lens. Her hands meet and equal. Serenity at the appearance of edges. Serenity was there before the eye roamed and is still here before the eye. Transparent storm door: the hand knows the windows evenness in a broken door (where the door broke it opens in a line, slow and bending), how the hot window cools, how the eye beholds and opens, how alls gone gummed up, gone human. Farther off, gathering in the heat, tinny like the doorbells admission of American width, even there the eyes seem hidden in unwatchfulness as night begins to freeze, the window ledge begins turning to the ground, and the warm house makes a ceremony of its windows leaking heat. Ceremony is birth, heat dies in the window and cools off an inhabitant or two, the children run out of doors into an early-21st century, seeming to shine. In song, I become lyric heart, so, transparent. Singing meets up in the eyes in the knowledge that broken things abound in hope, the present is always beginning, an according, hoofclicks on the rooftop in June; how do we make the words? We wait. Song one is turnkey, tissue, a white yard, more American ground. Ground glass so far is heat, new working of heaven, identified and met in a snowy landscape, a high line bounding heaven. The eye grows an egg- like vault, swarm of fact in the heat, overply, heat fleeces the window with frost.

Portray the womans reader, hands full of pearls, her silence is the product of her silenceshe sails through a quiet house. Transparency colors everything: windows signed with breakage, the door is here for anyone, its clean lines, its billowing openness, its wooden lintel. Through the window a terrible image: stepping into the marriage chamber is Cain, dominating the solitude of night, this version of night windows distribute starlight, the room fogs up its windows, the windows turn to paint an American scene outside, miles of newly planted rows turned towards the house. The first song is the windows song, too transparent. The song ends with someone tapping at the angles of the windows construction and the broken apple on the sill is fates presence, branches outside are over everything, are ridiculous, a porous cover, just so. The first song is torque, matrix, water, roadways in May, completely American. A glass by the bed protrudes and announces water, the exact sound of a saints passage through the room. The sky outside is huge, a complete frequency of color, there is color sitting by the window, a nightgown lain over a chair beside the window.

Pour out in the face of this mess of words. This hand is a word, cornered into writing all this shit out. To be anything before writing it is to be a thing in words I hold as ramiecation, ruination, home. Transparency flies laughing: under this window is breakage and shitreal shit, cat shit (buried far below, waste lining the yard, killing trees)This window so streaked with blood hangs before my house and through it all I can see is America showing up all the same, warts and all, night blasted in the window, leading me to all the steps I end. A house with windows is portent of war, windows open onto America stretched to dearth, fully dried up.

This first song stretched too thin already, a tiny candy sucked into transparency. This lens bends everything to smallness, halves our search into breakage, is held up too openly to unopening skies, the stars all hidden, Eoors turned up, kisses hesitant, built on words and words only,what else can be so immanent? I lied the erst time, I am made of tissue, a yard full of trash and weeds, fearful, always an American trying to get a leg up. Protrusion is my cup, my hateful elling up I am a word that knows its own saying and is lost in all its shifting land, the sky could care less. I am huge with August, too full by half with scorn, overplied, seen in my window, writing this:

Retrace each letter of the womans name. Lay miles of ink to zoom us to the occupations of bared engers. The serenity of this woman rises into the serenity of place, a calm house. The eye glides, acetate its fluid cone, its aperture: the window was erm before its breakagethe window becomes terrible in the eye as image in the cameras opening, American symbol married in a visionary mouth, night foreseen, foretold, the window blank in its material, carried across, the camera is a useless window, the window keeps the hand spanning from its wrist in this American picture of distance and lack of presence. Nothing can occupy this zone like I do, the window my song, quiet, transparent. I lack a place to rest, lack something so quiet as the angel my eye already promised in the changeless tissue of breakage, the present falling oe the boughs I reach to it, burn for it, I cap myself oe, whatever. This place is taken away, a missed kiss, a full yard, I am completely American. The glass protrudes and stops quickly, establishes stoppage to identify sand s passagewater-clock, too, a grand plan fully blown and frequent as St. Vitus Dance. O, this layer is true, ene layer of flesh.

Try this again: impulse to speak gives pause to thought. As much as I occupy my space I am still, a tiny seed. The quietness of my thought comes up against the hum of space, the quiet house. Thrown from the transparent flow: yes, this is surely a breaking through (other things are pulverized, flow is not a straight line, not a constant wave, I swear)and, this will be terrible to sum up in one sight, placed in the house locked and wedded to some pervasive American symbol of loneliness in expectation of night; and yes, this will be a branching out at last, the house will be so sought out, it will become a thing to sing about, an acme that cannot be put in print or English, or in the tight historic teeth of last year. Nothing will sing more than the words spinning about, sweet,