Christle - Heliopause

Heliopause Wesleyan Poetry Heliopause HEATHER CHRISTLE Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut Wesleyan University Press Middletown CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
2015 Heather Christle
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed and typeset in Whitman
by Eric M. Brooks This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Christle, Heather, 1980
[Poems. Selections]
Heliopause / Heather Christle. (Wesleyan poetry series)
ISBN 978-0-8195-7529-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8195-7530-2 (ebook) I. (Wesleyan poetry series)
ISBN 978-0-8195-7529-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8195-7530-2 (ebook) I.

Title.
PS3603.H755A6 2015
811'.6 dc23 2014044266 5 4 3 2 1 Cover illustration: Aerolith by Andy Gilmore. for Harriet What is the language using us for? It uses us all and in its dark Of dark actions selections differ. I am not making a fool of myself For you. What I am making is A place for language in my life Which I want to be a real place Seeing I have to put up with it Anyhow. W. S.

Graham Heliopause A Perfect Catastrophe To have stood midfield among the vast and livid green and never heard the grasses take their vow of silence is experience, not evidence, and meanwhile clouds descend and buffer light. When did I arrive? I recall it came on slowly as a fever as a poem is a communicable please. Whats in charge here is the scattered light all over and how it pulls my very blood into my hands until they graph a fat what the sun likes holding and some dumb mutter good and nails me to the bone. Disintegration Loop 1.1 for William Basinski In seeking to resolve a conflict between two parties one can assume each believes it is acting in good faith just as the hopeful gravel waits for your rough step The only way to be truly alone is for there to be nothing not even myself In looping you rephrase after listening to what the person has to say what the person had to say and having the new words affirmed you wait and listen again Myself the eager magnet for another to address Maybe I should think this a spiral a loop that gets closer a loop that will not close To make nothing draw a circle around what isnt there I found a note I left in the corner of a part of the poem we rarely used If you ever feel trapped it said this is where to escape But legally I owe you nothing I owe you at least that much Like being haunted by the spirit of the letter I remember my teachers story of two teenagers who died in a blizzard trying to stay warm and the tailpipe blocked with snow so I always check but it still happens just yesterday a mans young son in what the paper called one awful story The light switch has a beautiful feeling when a person reaches out to make it change and the warm quadrangles of sun on the carpet are beautiful too and red berries on the gray bush and the mail as long as it lasts and beauty is what beauty does to you Like trying to say a seagull inscribing a circle over what land the day has thought to provide to enter into agreement with yourself to lie but only out of love for the verblessness of buildings They do not rise except once and then nothing how being is nothing and if there were a word after it would be a slow decay I will love across any distance you think this has made to occur Nothing so ruthless as a life The day hangs low overhead and soon enough the new grass will emerge through the gravel They have big plans to meet in the middle and in so doing to phase all this out I go on say enough and it will blur off into sound look up and see that night has nearly settled in and darkness and hope that if I look into it long enough and keep my mouth quiet when I look down again Ill find a settled word to which nothing is attached Re: the day someone said what doesnt kill you makes it longer Its like footsteps toward you that sound for all the world like they forever move away I keep forgetting Im the smoke not the camera Then I see my dark joining sky to whats below Like watching someone from across a river on such a clear day that you can see her teeth and at such a distance that you cant hear the sound so while you know it must be screaming it is possible to imagine her faraway mouth which you can see but not save has openedis opento sing After the collapse and before the dust settles the darkness billows and grows like its describing itself to the sky this it says this and much bigger but the sky in its sorrow has had to turn away to expect praise for the beautiful apology to imagine something other than again Whether it is falling from a ship or plane or a building the human body starts its drop at roughly one rate The book said legally thought the captain of the slave ship Zong to throw the people overboard instead of letting them starve would ensure compensation for his loss And another has made the words to decay until what remains is loss loss When I go to the video it is paused close to darkness the place where I had last stopped and as I drag the cursor backward so it can start again Im reversing into morning what was night The three buildings in the corner begin a hypotenuse the dark clouds diligentcomplete The subsection of sympathy cards labeled words fail me on which we pen sorry for your loss The lights that come on last what were they resisting? Or do they not notice as sometimes can happen while the hours carry in the new-fallen dark They say we have fallena long way to the coldand planetary light They say the bomb is a flower A body falls much faster than the night You will forgive me wont you for the lines Im copying in I do not want to be alone here despite what I have said And I have forgotten to mention the music though it has this whole time been mentioning me I will say it is the sound of a clock which has had all of its hours removed The screen is dark enough now that it can perfectly reflect the facing window a corner of morning And some of the lights they tremble trying to decide whether they can go on Lights like pronouns for the buildings to remove to go through to withdraw to slowly walk into another room What is legally an hour? The time it takes the king to fall asleep the melting of a candle in the snow Hour like a jar in Tennessee And yes I am afraidto be with minutesThey have completely confused me The buildings are a sort of interference how they stand and complicate the sky but nothing interferes with the hour it is as they say a law unto itself Maybe I should say that I am sittingin a roomdifferent fromthe one you are in now and I am sitting at a distance from the screen so that the hour goes on and there is nothing that I can undo Every morning the diminishing returns And now the smoke echoes the roundness of the one building with a dome the smoke in love and unable to do anything more than repeat the words of another so after I would sooner be deadthan let you touch me it cries hopeless touch metouch me and then even that sound that shape drifts away If I could get closer I could see the river reflecting back the buildings light but I am placed here at this fixed distance and the lights are fixed there in the permanently imminent night I know there are other cities other hours where you can watch the lights