Poteat - The Regret Histories

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five poetry books annually through five participating publishers. Publication is funded annually by the Lannan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, Barnes & Noble, The Poetry Foundation, The PG Family Foundation and The Betsy Community Fund, Joan Bingham, Mariana Cook, Stephen Graham, Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds, William Kistler, Jeffrey Ravetch, Laura Baudo Sillerman, and Margaret Thornton. For a complete listing of generous contributors to The National Poetry Series, please visit www.nationalpoetryseries.org. 2014 COMPETITION WINNERSMonograph by Simeon Berry of Somerville, MA Chosen by Denise Duhamel for University of Georgia Press The Regret Histories by Joshua Poteat of Richmond, VA Chosen by Campbell McGrath for HarperCollins Lets Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno by Ed Pavlic of Athens, GA Chosen by John Keene for Fence Books Double Jinx by Nancy Reddy of Madison, WI Chosen by Alex Lemon for Milkweed Editions Viability by Sarah Vap of Venice, CA Chosen by Mary Jo Bang for Penguin Books For Jake Adam York I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual. VIRGINIA WOOLF The dead, the dead, the deadour dead... all, all, all, finally dear to me.

WALT WHITMAN

Whole forests went to sea disguised as ships. Whole seas went to forest disguised as time. Im looking for a story that will lightmy way out, a star in the sycamores grass, taken from night and nothing and limbs cut back from the wires. It is not summer, there is no mist on the streets. The yard, vacant with ivy and nest, wears brown, and the streetlights. Help me spelled out in supplicant ink, roaring through clots of frost. Help me spelled out in supplicant ink, roaring through clots of frost.

Look at us, late winter, pulling dead branches from the fence at night to avoid the neighbors, poison pushed under the shed for the rats. Lets surrender all illusions of spirit, because it deceives us. The spirit is not air, even in its highest form, no matter who sparks the flame. Tonight, I suffer from not knowing how to suffer. Tomorrow will be the same. There used to be pills to cure this affliction.

Early decay, feebleness of will, Wonderful Little Liver Pills. Beef, Iron and Wine for the poorest blood, for fever of the known and unknown world. The sycamore leans its branches on the telephone lines. To hear them on the phone, those manuscripts of bark breathing the wires, does nothing for my courage. This is how you become a saint: translate the ruins, wherever they sleep. Bloom the tulip tree early and watch bees gather in the sleet.

There is no abyss, no oblivioned ocean. Just a landscape, like this one, born from a river and seven hills, bones under the hospital cobbles, ghost rope taut in the gallows. The glad bees orphan their hive, too soon and unwise. It isnt death I want, but it isnt life, either.

Ghost in the yard, early morning, the hammock swinging on its own. Rather, I saw myself reflected in the window and wanted it to be a ghost, early morning, the hammock filled with wrens.

Any sign would be enough. The childhood fear returns, youre thinking, nostalgia buried within, held to the shallows, but its more complicated. This is 1900. There are many things to purchase. Theres more than just dying here. Disease is a good enough excuse, but this isnt disease.

We just dont know were changing, or what were changing into.

Between the new ruin and the old, clover spreads like milk through the folds. Soon into the night with him. BORIS PASTERNAK There are bulbs made now to match the light of 1900, 7-watt filament barely a flame, soft as a fevers ear, where sepia is made, where milk is drawn by cloth and whale, and moths turn their brief heads from the woolens. Dark was different thenpure, indivisible, a nothingness moving toward us out of the stars. Afternoon came unbroken, July in the trees, tallow and beeswax, nothing the dark couldnt handle.

Twilight is what hurt the most, when the soul pulled the body to the low sky and every good thing looked inward, belonging not to itself, but to another older province, early owl, open field, children in the foliage, briar and rust. It was a time when lamp blisters were healed with a round of butter or boiled jewelweed rended from sewer banks. Little puck lamp burninglavender and clove, 90 cents. Library lampbright as 75 candles, $6.50. The century lends its light to the evening so that it might have substance, or sight. The little white throats of pigeons lined up in the eaves, the new gaslights on 25th Street imitating the old gaslights, our faces young in the warmth, something I might already believe. Its amazing sometimes to find Im still not dead here.

The gunshots have become almost friendly, talkative neighbors building a new tongue, and the shotgun shells dropped outside the market roll unspent and certain in the wind. I moved into my life to take it apart, stars dismissed like years and two fireflies above the crepe myrtle. Where my house was built a grave was found, grave of another house, and under that, another grave. Louis Kahn asked, What do you want, brick? Less grave, more house. Houses live and die, and to speak of light is a human thing, all the while the air changes it, creates and re-creates, moves across the river, cinders of moonlight corroding the abandoned house down the alley. From my backyard I can see a sapling growing on its tin roof, and I know Im supposed to look past this, to recognize the syringes and pipes, condoms and plaster, plate of chicken bones on a mattress in the gutted kitchen, as a living ruin, monument to a plague gone courteous at dusk, but Ive seen mud wasps circling the old parlor chandelier, wary, as if a flame would appear.

They knew something I didnt, so I sat on the mattress to feel the body of the last century beside me, and there was something familiar, something lonesome and tired in the design of mold on the half-eaten walls, wallpaper faded to powder, and graffiti like veins on the ceiling spelling out exactly what history has always said: fuck all yall this my house. We just werent listening. We invent what we need and what we needed was to see, one frog slurring the night grass, one sycamore sifting color from the spotted hearts. This is still the same night, though, the same dew settled on the bricks, same sorrow, same signal from them to us: keep the story straight. The centuries will float to me... out of the darkness, light flooding a mattress, maybe there were wings.

Take my word for it, bats falling through the streets unlit rooms, ghost bird, ghost hand, pale ghost of mouse and bulb brought from the hollow oak that is now only a stump with a sidewalk built around it. That much I can give of those days. Because we were infinite then, the night bore us up, all the burdens of men and animals, headless, dun-kept, swinging their lanterns against the other world.

The night has used itself up, the river, unbound, turns away and the highway turns to disquiet, trucks downshifting the overpass, engine upon engine of early morning, sweet diesel thick as wool and all that peaceful asphalt sympathetic through the horizon. Not exactly peaceful, just there, a vessel uniform and open, free from any other purpose, curled by the office buildings, yellow windows still lit with no memory, no guilt. There is someone up there throughout the rain, holding up the sky.