Dickinson - Kingdom, Phylum

KINGDOM, PHYLUM KINGDOM, PHYLUM Adam Dickinson Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Dickinson, Adam, 1974
Kingdom, Phylum / Adam Dickinson. Poems. ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-54-2
ISBN-10: 1-894078-54-3 I. Title. PS8557.I3235K56 2006 C811.6 C2006-902307-7 Copyright Adam Dickinson, 2006 We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of
Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program
(BPIDP), and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our
publishing program. Cover image by Victor Brauner.

Loup-table (1939-1947). 54 x 57 x 28.5
cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris. Estate of Victor Brauner / SODRAC
(2006). Photograph courtesy of Art Resource, New York City. Author photograph by Judy Townson.

Design and layout by Alan Siu. Brick Books
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my first order Contents Some people dismiss taxonomies and their revisions as mere exercises in abstract orderinga kind of glorified stamp collecting.No view could be more false and more inappropriately arrogant. Taxonomies are reflections of human thought; they express our most fundamental concepts about the objects of our universe. Each taxonomy is a theory about the creatures that it classifies. Stephen Jay Gould This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world.Genuine contemplation never lasts long; the natural being that only now revealed itself to me in the mystery of reciprocity has again become describable, analyzable, classifiable Martin Buber All things desire to be as close as possible. So planets form as spheres.

So the lost walk in circles. Smoke leaves a fire clinging to the faces of those who stand over it, curling in the anxious arcs of changing state. The table is set in the capital. The tsar sits to a meal of round beets, globes of bread, and the circular livers of ducks. Let us eat he says, but cannot. His stomach turns.

So hell has circles, Dante tells us. So the damned may still cling, so they may eat. A stone dropped in a still pool makes concentric rings. Gravity is not inert, it is not without need, or caprice, or folly. At all costs, things lie down. They wish to touch.

The water marks this wish with waves. Diminution. So the sound of footsteps comes from everywhere. So a pulse has the acoustics of dream when it is dark, when you are making for home. Wolves encircle deer. Deer contain wolves, they are chemistries of undergrowth, winter die-back, and winter in the hips and legs, and winter breaking into the cedars making the boughs taste resinous, making the deer taste like paved roads, like coins, and everything is crowded together.

How quickly what is becomes dance, becomes feast. So the sun makes a wheel in the sky. So clocks take the form of wide eyes, open mouths. History repeats itself. Great loops in the goings and comings, in the heart attacks and treaties, the agricultures that start again in the dim mornings where hedgerows suddenly have the look of long graves. The hands on the clock go around.

The hands return easily to the mouth without thinking. This is how we contain ourselves. Sadness is a cold front in the lungs, the air contracts, snow clouds line the soft pink coasts. Ecstasy is a thermal vent, breath escapes through your palms, newly vertebrate islands stand out of the ocean. Teeth glint through spreading fingers. So it is written from dust to dust.

So there lies between summers open-windowed wit and winters mineral pensiveness the autism of spring and fall, the equinox, where, for a moment, with expressionless face, things could go either way. Cars spin out in the rain, in the snow. Do doughnuts. Accidents happen on the drive back home. So when the rain has passed there are always three rainbows. The first two are easy enough to see, spooning each other like sediment, a record of the changing light, the wavelengths that passed on, collected in the air like primeval forests, bodies.

The third rainbow is always behind you, circling the sun. There the archive is kept; where the visible has its own halo. So the stations of the cross go around. Repeat. So water will cross over itself. Oxbows.

The Mississippi, The Saskatchewan, Mackenzie River Delta. So the phases of the moon are lessons in composition. What she meant to him falling asleep in the car as he drove back from the city. The deer that stood in the dark at the side of the road. How he stopped to watch them gather in the field, and she surprised him with touch, and the moon that lit her face, a daylight of rooftops and speechlessness. So strength returns with rest; every task a departure.

What is it within us that we learned so well in the caves, what reflex climbs out of our hunger, wraps around that place in the brain where language assembles, where it rises out of the rocks, a passion, a staff? What we learned from the boulder. So prayer makes us thicker, brings this world to the next. So food makes us thicker, brings this world to the next day, intestines are a ministry, wells dug in the tablelands. Food augers through the coils of dry need. So a sphere is the largest volume with the least surface area. The smallest commitment to the outside.

Hedging has form: I love you, but as a planetlike the farthest ones of spun gasin case you get too close, in case you open the careful tectonics of my bare arms. So electrons go around the outside. Two trailer park girls go round the outside. So I love you. I love you; a stutter is desire balled in the mouth, pure roundness, language of the infinite O. So even light curves in on itself, catches in the throat.

So it drags its waves great distances, taking thirty years to leave the star Arcturus and arrive in a pair of binoculars in a clearing of barren rock and spruce on a night in August where you are with your family, who have lived away from you for years, who have grown older, have gathered their lives about them in woollen blankets, in windrows of touch, and there above you all, like a photo album, the house being built, a song from the 70s, is all the time that has gone before. Arcturus gives light from the year you were born. So a wave is a circle proposed and withdrawn, proposed and withdrawn. The ocean touches the coast with stutter. The sun reaches a period of indecision each night, drinks, smokeswhatever it is the circular do to continue. Starlight touches your family; the Great Lakes curve around you like sleeping, slow-breathing dogs.

Starlight is the outside of a tree, the oldest part that cracks, that cant contain water, the image that slowly arrives, milk that comes up from the ground in a faint chain of globes. So the brain was once a stem before we crowded it with wonder. A single stem before joblessness, child poverty indexes, downtown redevelopment projects, arterial service lanes, lobes of laissez-faire. Tell me, what do you do? The hippocampus says rise, eat, have sex, stand in a high place, lie down under cover and sleep. It says I do. There is no outside, no delegated tasks, no facility for the genius salesman.

So the brain has spheres, so the mind wanders from room to room trying to feel at home, rearranging the furniture, tilting the pictures to various angles of down. If youre crossing the equator in a boat and you flush the toilet, which way does the water circle? How much of descent has to do with attention? We go down without looking; our boots take in water thoughtlessly. The moon on the river is small scoops. Fish curve in their muscular tattoos returning at night to the bugle of eddies. So we eat. The outside comes in.