CAMPECHE
CAMPECHE
Joshua Edwards Van EDWARDS
poems
photographs
NOEMI PRESS LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO
Poems by Joshua Edwards: Public Domain Photographs copyright © 2011 by Van Edwards All rights reserved Noemi Press
Las Cruces, New Mexico www.noemipress.org
Design: Gou Dao Niao First edition Printed in the United States of America ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-934819-18-0
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-934819-19-7
for Deb, Megan, and Lynn with love and admiration
CONTENTS
DEUCALION L A T E M O R N I N G
15
S O N G L I N E S
16
D A R K E C O L O G Y
19
E X T E R I O R
20
T H E G A R D E N
23
P H R E N S Y
24
V A P O R S
27
C O L D G R E E N
28
L A M E N T
31
F A R E W E L L
32
LIFE STUDIES [ P H O T O G R A P H S ]
36
CAMPECHE D E C L I N E
53
L E T H E
54
P H E R A B E
57
D R I F T
58
S E A P I E C E
61
S O N G
62
V A N I S H I N G I S L A N D
64
TWO OLD BOUQUETS L E V I A T H A N
69
S E A W A L L
75
THREE TRANSLATIONS S P R I N G D A W N
82
G O O S E C A L L
83
R I V E R S N O W
84
DIPTYCH U N I T E D S T A T I O N S
88
D I S S I M I L A T I O N S
90
ANXIETY SUTRA I N T R O D U C T I O N
95
V I S I O N , S M E L L , A N D P A I N
98
S T R A N G E W E A K N E S S
100
D I S C O V E R Y O F L I M I T S
102
S O U R C E S F O R H U N G E R
104
F I N A L E X H O R T A T I O N
105
I N D E X O F P H O T O G R A P H S
106
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
108
Mira al agua.
—Federico García Lorca
DEUCALION
LATE MORNING In a vending machine I see my reflection
alongside the sun’s, and I watch these two
impervious flowers of being merge, transpose,
and dehisce, faces ghosted together on parallel
planes of glass, laughing over the foaming ocean. To imagine the self as the sun or its warmth is pleasurable, but something else is needed to purge the urban smell from the dank library of late morning. Walking along
the seawall, I feel waves and wind beating against the island’s rocks and shoulders,
I see citizens filled with sorrow that expands as water orchestrates their slow effacement.
Just as I arrive home, two salesmen accost me. They want to sell me my preternatural face.
They tell me that although time is running out,
I can still find happiness, romance, and eternity. I reply that I believe in an impersonal life, I’m hermetic, and my blood is on fire.
15
SONGLINES A map, a harbor, and then a horizon,
I broke one window after another until
the light was cut by an edge. Now I’m alone in silence, which profiteers call sadness, but of course it’s not. It’s profound
and passionate, a hand coming down
on a wooden table and the table cracking from anger at cocktail umbrellas, doom, and thunderstorms. The roof beams
grow older, and weaken while the mind pushes out against them. The mind
lashes out and throws peanuts at the painful body, wild in its cage of time. Between
the soap boxer’s parallax and the mime’s
gentle syntax is a way to tell the tired people who I hold dear, who follow the sun,
my thoughts on anguish, mirrored windows, and the possibility of a new village built entirely by unconscious acts.
16
DARK ECOLOGY Two alabaster hands close one book
as a dying animal drags itself out of another.
The gesture of the hands is a simple benediction that means grateful to learn language and sing. The animal is the awareness of dust and decay. Modern parables composed in half-light
are always terrifying. A popular one tells
of a retired scholar’s first play’s first performance cut short by a powerful earthquake.
Another relates the tragedy of a choir
that escapes from a boarding school, only to be slaughtered by a larger choir that has escaped from a more prestigious boarding school.
How many innocent bodies have climbed out
on the limb of romance, over freedom’s abyss, only to have it break? The number must
approach a hunter’s ideal. As the sun devotes itself to uncertain lives, morning will paint
yonder hills the colors of a convalescing earth.
19
EXTERIOR I smile at the bleached shirts in summer light. I marvel at the fusion of forests and stones. Passing by offices full of bottled water,
I imagine I’m looked at like a quiz show while I gaze up at the thin row of sky
wherein a lone gull makes its way through
a hellish correlation. All streets lead to this one, where everybody wants to be or at least
wants to have been, where the last decade
has faded from memory like it never happened and the clocks move with great urgency and reflect fireplaces and plowed fields
and helicopters full of nervous laughter.
Meanwhile, the temperature quickly rises. The presence of a tiny bell, even idle
in a small watch, seems a threat as work’s
intervals and conventions disclose nothing
of the galaxies of fearless lovers who shiver
in the broom closets of such drab buildings.
20
THE GARDEN Whatever my shortcomings, above all I lack an emotional habeas corpus
in the pawnshop of my desire, where my body is full of air or is a cloud or is harnessed
to a balloon or hides behind an imperial screen. The garden is a sanctuary for all the wrong reasons. Before the big stone buildings
of cities were built to give context to production and its mess, circumstances were kept private until the world sent arrows
and monsters to receive and interpret the scenery of progress. Discipline
and forbearance led to this enclosed pleasure. Pandemonium and guilt hang their fruits
on my dream’s prismatic trees. Embers endure. Music lends new gladness to the sleeping sky. When I wake up I’ll create smoke of a very specific color from the fuel of everything I have, and trade reason for oblivion.
23
PHRENSY The new market is being built here,
atop the old one. Salvage is a major player. It never stops. I want to give the past away but I need more time to diagram a story
of someone convicted after being caught
by the same fear that they first locked up. It is an architectural fable that begins
with a thousand sleepers together waking
early to make the morning news, and ends in poverty. There was no reprobation
to dictate that sort of beauty before now,
just a single object, lonely as an epigraph.
It fills the space something disappeared from, to prove the nature of its disappearance. The object has been stolen, wagered,
loaned, bought, traded, and given away
as a wedding present. Now the horizon
destroys itself as I replicate a fist again and again and again in the palm of my hand.
24
VAPORS Summer hangs on until midwinter, when
reproach echoes a reminder that no softness can exist without some sort of trickery.
Bruised and slightly faster than average,
the heart stands out in the last downpour
and won’t be mentioned again until it stops. Anguish and poisonous phantoms explode in art, to restore it with their vapors,
their lights that correct color from above. If the soul is a souvenir in human shape, the sun is half its shadow and discloses
who is what when in public, but when alone there are other, brighter stars, all like contemporary prisons in every way
but the one that is memory. Fangs grow
from those stars. Day after day, the sea spits up at the sky, always from new mouths,
and sometimes a cloud obscures the moon
just as two people step out onto a balcony.
27
COLD GREEN My eyes frost over when I think of how heaven could be someone else’s dump or a backstage vantage of the future. I am not saying that a god is sad
or that I want to wear my hair longer, I just see this landscape everywhere.
When knowing is on the inside looking out, death seems a place that has no corners
and forms an outline that resembles life’s,
but I have no nostalgia for old age because my nostalgia for love is a gun beneath
my pillow, cold and green. I have found
these things in song: a bird too tired to fly,
secrets of pronunciation, a defeated harvest,
an old refrigerator full of architectural plans. It is time to listen to predecessors, nothing in their coffins but evidence of my envy. Their minds go first and mine follows
closely. It’s like repairing a foreign car.
28
LAMENT This playground’s crater began way back
with the formation of a meteor collecting reflections of itself. I sit here thinking, one foot planted in creation, the other
in exploitation, that my complaint is premise and illusion, and fruit is memory and energy. Someone says a photo of a frame is not cute enough to be coy. Rather, I’m told, you must show the rotting classic and evoke
its historiography. I fall asleep drunk and wake up startled. Archery makes an echo of war. I must take a long walk before
I speak. I must buy new shoes before I walk. I must get a job that doesn’t yet exist
to afford suitable shoes. I will not mention the catalog of fossils reborn in images. As the team is led back into its barn,
a light passes from the house and is gone, terminating on the blank skull of a ram.
31
FAREWELL In a pillowcase one could hide the brays and lows of this place’s final days,
when chimes will sound in the fields
to smuggle mutiny into the lively brains
of parking lot attendants. Where is that
fabled stairway to the sky? Why worship
doors covered in calendars? The questions
never end. Take for example the aquarium.
It forms a strangeness with its sound to make worldly nonsense visible behind glass walls like a dream perhaps, meant to teach us how to prepare ourselves for endpoints obscured by fiction and fog. At times
too serious, at others not serious enough, I organize life with old ideas, in silence,
and with a cosmic sense of nature failing I set off into southern wilderness to seek some subtle center, as elusive as a crisp
dollar bill in the spillway of a penny arcade.
32
LIFE STUDIES [PHOTOGRAPHS]
CAMPECHE
DECLINE It is not pain that holds me back, but time With its sad prefigurations and smell,
Its flowers and echoes, rivers and crime. Even now, without a future, I tell
Myself lies in future tense. As my hair
Thins, I collect combs. When clocks chime, I groan. The falling world finds pleasure in despair Because to suffer means to be alone,
And I suffer through all the accidents
Of change as though I were settling a score, As if to disinvent what death invents. I once built a castle, now I do chores.
To pass the time I rearrange my things. To fall asleep I recite names of kings.
53
LETHE When I awoke I tried to ground my brain In the darkness of mankind’s memory, But the only memory to remain Was a vague entry on eternity.
In a mirror I unearthed the birthmark
Of my century. The world was shaken,
Until birds shed their feathers, trees lost bark, And all that had been given was taken Back. All of life retreated to the sea,
Where the trouble began. Nothing will come From nothing. Inside the garden, a tree
Whose fruit portends all human loss and doom. Outside I stand, until otherwise proved, Under the impression I am not loved.
54
PHERABE To describe deficiency is cruel,
But if the shoe fits, where is it? I call Myself “mayor of a lost town,” “jewel
Of forgetfulness,” and “the smell of fall.” Wherever I travel, I am engrossed
By monolithic objects that may hide
My longevity in theirs. When I crossed What I thought was a border, I denied
Myself what I didn’t want, but wanting What I couldn’t have, I was astonished
By the encroaching fear of not knowing.
At last I found shoes. I had them polished Again and again, till they were worn. This Is how it goes. All wine ends up as piss.
57
DRIFT I have heard the dogs barking, each to each, Beneath a stormy moon. They will survive
Their masters, who are so caught up in speech They do not see the rising sea, but hive Instead in their low mistaken vantage,
Where carbon rises up in plumes. I plan A leave of absence. I have seen footage Of violent waves bearing down on man
Outside his very door. Lives come apart
Like books when they get wet. The devil fell
Compelled by love, undone because his heart
Could not keep up with what it would compel. I have watched the water bring its cleavage To the shore. Departure starts my voyage.
58
SEAPIECE There will be nothing left here but the sea, When it is done showing off its power.
I have done my deeds. I have made my plea, Post time. Now my fate is the flower
Trembling before a thunderstorm. I cry
And despair to drown in tears. When the lace Of my remains releases jealousy,
I will rest, having found at last my place Beneath everything. Who I am is not What I carried. I tried to stay afloat
By holding my breath. I have tried to blot Fear out, and so I failed to board the boat Of wisdom inside weather. I’ll find hell Before it finds me. I’ll follow its smell.
61
SONG It destroyed us without intentions. It poisons symbols with the power
Of a type of love no one mentions. For its calmness we shed pretensions. With its anger we cry and cower.
It destroyed us without intentions. It abstracts the void with dimensions That embrace whatever we devour
With a type of love no one mentions. It heaps passions upon conventions And burns forever into an hour.
It destroyed us without intentions. It remakes us through our inventions. Our fear lends its smell to the flower Of a type of love no one mentions. We hang our voices in its tower
With a type of love no one mentions. It destroyed us without intentions.
62
VANISHING ISLAND On the beach before the flood, I watch ships Full of frightened people and animals Sailing toward the horizon in search
Of dry land and long life. Time is evil,
And the way the light hits the waves proves this, As does the smell of rotting cypress trees.
When I was innocent, I climbed those trees
To their crowns, where I’d count the masts of ships. I kept meticulous records of this
Count, along with a list of animals I could see from above, until evil
Appeared as a correlation: the search For wildlife grew difficult when the search For boats at sea was easy. Then the trees Disappeared also, and so did evil,
Into the hearts of everyone. The ships
Grew cannons, people walked with animals On leashes: horrible dogs. All of this
Was a warning, but we understood this
As progress. Crawl, then walk, then run, then search, Then stalk. To eat dangerous animals 64
Meant to evolve, as did to cut down trees In order to build ever larger ships.
In my hands I feel the pain of evil. It is a specific type of evil.
I worked in the sea’s troughs and crests, and this Day’s doom is a reminder of the ships
Where my austere life leaned forward. My search For nothing returned me to rotting trees And the ghostly land of wild animals
Whose shapes in clouds evoke youth—animals Bred until their good became our evil.
A voice in my head says the masts are trees, The coming storm will return all of this
Corruption to innocence, and my search
Will again mean no more than counting ships.
65
TWO OLD BOUQUETS
LEVIATHAN Love of air and water
Joined in apprehension,
Perhaps you know what’s there By way of fear, for while Living in pursuit of
And going always forth
Toward something that trembles, Its knowledge is your mind. What do you think about The great ocean’s sullen
Aristocrats—these small
Headaches and dark affairs That bathe themselves in your
Staging grounds, where you go To contemplate how what
You want became your mind? The black oblivion
Offers no reprieve for
You, hunter—in its keep
Your ears have grown too sharp, 69
So sharp you almost hear Your own heartbeat over The subtle whispers of
Water’s dismal gardens. Everything about you Is overblown, even
Your mouth is uniquely Talented at its tasks,
Gathering for slaughter Animals in their sleep,
Speaking without a sound. Noah had seven laws,
You have only one—eat
To build life out of death, Survive above all things. The fatalistic moon
Filtered down upon you Seems an imitation
Of lives you will not live. Would you be its hero?
70
Would you call out against
The morning’s weaving light
That shames the night before The passing of its cool?
Would you be at the beach When the invisible
Becomes a glow, to surprise? Inland, workers dreaming Of unitarian
Proposals lose no sleep
To fear about your mouth.
It is their wayward friends, Who wandered too far west Into fevered chaos,
That wake up with your name
As screams exploding dreams. The inland ether holds
Clouds in your dismal shape. Lucky are those who know Nothing, who cannot see
71
Hell outlined in vapor. Somewhere a piano
Plays a sorrowful song
Half-written by the hate That a grieving loved one
Would stick into your heart. Such are the arts of men.
Beware. Your time is near. Someone has learned lessons You didn’t mean to teach. A crowd is gathering.
Your skull is their kingdom.
72
SEAWALL Ten mile long stony face
On which a long light shines, Gentle scoop by the sea,
Border between men and Their original salt,
Holding the island’s shape, Shaping the waves into Choirs of longevity. Early last century, Elegant architects
Walking through the rubble Sadly took account of The stricken city that
Papers said lay prostrate Under catastrophe.
One might have yelled, “A wall!” Whatever happened, soon They began rebuilding
And staging protection
Against the water’s teeth. 75
Important afternoons
Of dazzling bodies built A memorial to
Protect against and taunt The ocean’s forceful art,
Putting forth a sign that
Can be seen but not read, Its fortune lost in sound. That fortune is too plain However, anyone
With a past knows what end Awaits every sure bet.
And so vastness may be
Frustrated by stones that
Outweigh the sea’s own, but Whoever returns won’t Remember this place’s
Antique and hopeful mood, When it was still cut off
From sorrow’s chandeliers.
76
The future has arrived,
Each storm describes it, and Until the relentless
Lives of fantasy and Remembrance fade, no peace Will be known by this town. It works day and night in
Wind and waves, its people Always toast to better
Wages for better wine.
To honor past dreamers And maintain dignity
They must keep doom distinct. What once was an image Is now an afterlife
Of working. Those who bermed The leeward side and built
This new place on that old
One need some space to sleep Or open mystery.
77
Now all the cargo’s gone In waves of memory.
The ocean cleans the face Of the old, friendly wall
With bubbles of soft foam. Gulls fill the placid sky,
Seaweed gathers in heaps. It’s a nice place to watch Nature’s indifference
Break like a winter wheel Against mankind’s talent For physical withdrawal.
78
THREE TRANSLATIONS
SPRING DAWN by Meng Haoran
Sleep through spring daybreak Birds sing everywhere
Wind and rain all night Countless flowers fall
82
GOOSE CALL by Luo Binwang
Goose goose goose Throat open to sky
White plume green water Red webbing clear waves
83
RIVER SNOW by Liu Zongyuan
Mountains without birds Footpaths without prints Boat with one old man Fishing in the snow
84
DIPTYCH
UNITED STATIONS You are standing, facing west, on a hotel room balcony, Just married, shaving, looking out at the early evening
Sun deepening its hue and dropping down, almost to the sea,
The breeze from which smells like gin. The bride, inside, is showering. She sings a sing-along song, altering the lyrics to make It an explicit recounting of the day’s activities
Beneath palm trees and suspended in an artificial lake.
There’s a verse about her white dress-cum-symbol of chastity. You wish you had a martini and could drink it all alone
At a muscular bar, your thoughts devoid of love’s quid pro quo. Contemplating the Pleiades, you daydream in classic tones
Of far-off places you’ve never been, women you’ll never know, And the heroic triumph of love over the worldly call
Of adventure. The choir of the islands sings out in effect. In a way, weddings are like real hair on a ceramic doll,
You think, knowing what you mean is that they’re a show of respect Handled so carefully they often come dangerously close To parody. One more evening here in faux Waikiki,
One more moonlit stroll along the beach, a final champagne toast Before heading back to your scholarly books and Joshua trees. 88
Bruegel’s forger finished Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Around the time that tobacco arrived and caused quite a stir
In Europe (such a stir that Spenser penned for immortal verse “Trew Nobility: / There, whether yt diuine Tobacco were”). She likes to remind you of this when you get nicotine kicks
While she has to abstain. You say you’ll soon follow suit. She quit So she could go on the pill, and jokes that at her age one fix Will undo another. Perhaps marriage is a peach with pit Intact, a tautology of two factotums, equals sign Perched precariously on a fulcrum of formality,
Not to take away from the heart of it, which remains divine. The Arch in St. Louis was started in 1963,
Christened 1965, as a testament to how we
Love to liberate ourselves and then quickly construct fences To keep what’s ours in. At your tender young age of 33, Jefferson drew up the Declaration of Independence, Its all-seeing eye bound to hypocrisy in history.
In the future, you’ll supply the sperm and she’ll supply the eggs To create new life. But for now, you’re out on the balcony,
Shaving your face, while she stands in the shower, shaving her legs.
89
DISSIMILATIONS You hold onto life like a hostage. You’re deeply embedded. You’re an actor slipping into a new script. You’re a comma
Whose purpose is to mark the moment when prose is suspended, Where begins a poem’s pensive silence or some dark drama. You’re a Charles Dickens character in the opium den
Of a long life. All you want is to sleep through the nights after Satisfying intercourse, but your mimesis may have been Caught by sexually transmitted diseases. Disaster
Is an evening when you’re so hungry every apple core Evokes grocery stores. Being the only one and only,
They can’t clone or disown you. The only thing you lack is your
Adult teeth, beneath the rotten teeth of what makes you lonely. And the truth is that devolution concurs with disposal
Till it emerges, when entourage lobbies for Decalogue, And hype is the new preparation before its proposal,
Calling for the removal of all shoes, shirts, and demagogues, And the zealous anti-Orientalists who refuse to
Use anyone’s last names first when denying them service at
The sperm bank, where the preferred euphemism is “super glue.” Remember the joke about the butcher who couldn’t get fat? 90
Rejuvenated vaginas and enhanced penises squeak
Thanks to Puritanism gone gaga vis-à-vis bling-bling à la bada bing. People piled up form a sexual peak.
Two condoms put up their dukes inside a contraceptive ring. Champagne is the new organizer for your political
Campaign to conceive something tantamount to FASD
Of the spirit. Were you surprised or did you wax critical
When you emerged from the driveway to your domesticity Without any disease but your family’s questionable Cultural history? Is it such a mystery that your
Mediocrity’s latently poised to emerge? That you’re full Of traditional vulnerability? You’ll pace the floor Until you face (at a number of paces proportional
To the gravity of the insults that have been thrown your way)
Yourself dressed like a clown. Your brain will halt to urbanely sprawl And then catapult your past beyond your future like a clay Pigeon across a clear blue sky, toward a lemonade stand At which the theory of other minds attempts to explain Why petroleum prices fluctuate with body count and Meaningful relationships end in kaleidoscopic pain.
91
ANXIETY SUTRA
INTRODUCTION I have heard in my nightmares an unseen hand at work.
I think about silence and sky, mingled in this season of dread, of
decay, of bulbs of house security lights.
I remember that I must never rest. Sadness holds names together. Outside, night is a fortress. I can always step out.
Sometimes, when I imagine bicycling by the shore, a conch shell
suddenly reveals itself as art.
ends, I think I’ll mostly stay inside.
on the radio are sounds of people dying gently in the cold.
But mysticism is no antidote to fear, and so, until the endless movie My theory is outside the air is empty and the sounds beneath music
I can picture it.
But there is hope in the way a child says silence, and I lie on a rug in
my living room in the dark, feeling something besides pain.
Torn from an atlas, landscapes grow flatter.
Like an atlas, I am speech that is not my own. I know a place beyond style. Let us call it the self.
95
But there is no self.
There is only the violence of too much love.
Somewhere, someone carries shells from a seashore to a museum,
where, unfit for public screening and vulnerable to light
restroom stall.
and the oils of the hand, my double sings in a cafeteria
My countrymen think about immortality while our ships sink. There are only beginnings.
Who can speak for the past? The past is a crystal chandelier.
There are no stories but those of the chandelier’s victims.
I pull a fur-lined hood over my head and, having nothing left to
say, I go outside.
I take my shovel. I dig.
I shake my shovel, dropping sod onto the dead fish I’m burying in
my neighbor’s yard.
I’m dizzy and religious, and across the street, an eagle with a
serpent in its beak.
I’m a citizen.
It is the future.
96
This is the last time I’ll stand in the moment before.
The world could be bird or a snake, or an island someone left
behind.
I’d really like to speak to the world.
97
VISION, SMELL, AND PAIN Outside, the stink of gas.
I curl up in a burlap sack beside a large fire.
I am lost in old books down by the edge of a frozen river, waiting
for the darkest page to turn.
Here the meaning of dream is future.
On my second day, eating chicken carcass, I feel like a man. The girl my parents wanted for me has come from afar. I cross my heart and hope.
A three-layered cake has a specific meaning. One tries to be a lover.
I believed that I was waiting, but now, in my eyes, everybody faces
desire with the filthy heart of a nightingale.
And like condors we wait to be delivered. Inheritance, fiancée, tennis.
My voice, broken by these words, is now crusted with dog shit,
anesthetized through simulacrum, a crummy word kicked around on playgrounds.
I hear a click.
Words are facts after all, and darkness is lit by their small black lights. 98
After nearly falling asleep, I walk to the train and watch, in this
country where death’s dust begins, night deepen into quicksand for youth.
Night-lights shine through curtains and illuminate the streets. I am leashed to a tree.
A honeybee pricks my lower thigh. Nothing ever felt better.
Too much motion can make rain fall upwards, so I am glad to be
stuck here, still and crying with joy.
Hours pass.
The warm noon sun is a bird’s nest slipping through, between
stanchions, stromatolites, and chimes, to travel like field notes stacked against a new calendar.
A wet dog shakes in the rain on a black and white television.
99
STRANGE WEAKNESS Vroom, vroom! Vroom!
I’m in the money! But this shower of riches reminds me of strangers.
An unmanned voice leads vested men through a town built on
petroleum.
I am done with the old ironies. It is time to drill in the wild, our abandoned autobiography now
scorched and smooth.
The past is obscured by shrouds of noise.
A German poet believed that beyond narrative there must be
a key.
The sea beneath a lightning storm.
Amid the combustion, a moment of truth. In the constraints of a bird, flutters. There are other guidelines.
An oil refinery subtracts itself from the surrounding land with
violent plumes of smoke.
A wedding is another type of fire.
100
And every book is about being miserable, but unlike eagles, life is a
bride and God is the immigrant any judge would refuse to marry.
And by immigrant I mean indigent or indigenous. Such stories.
Two indigent indigenous immigrants, confined to wheelchairs and a
seascape both belong to, have been married three days.
Now the honeymoon steadily hums.
“I’ve traced small hearts with your semen on the other side of the
world,” says she.
He replies, “Can you sing me a little of the goat song, good goddess,
while we fall and fail?”
with scenes of hunting parties painted in it.
million trees where they met and to speculate whether or
He is aware that he is becoming easy to hate, a reflux from a cave Their only forms of entertainment are to recollect the forest of a
not what once swayed in the breeze has been eliminated.
101
DISCOVERY OF LIMITS Coming back, I remember sitting on the shelf, spine broken, feeling
a loneliness no partnership could quench.
experimented.
sunrise I preferred to be naked, preferably naked with a
a gated community.
Like a canary perched on a magic lantern, my mind anticipated and I joined a parade, I learned Spanish and a little Mandarin, and after
saint in a swimming pool in the backyard of a large home in
I visited monasteries with bare feet and an open-ended bus ticket.
My heart had a loose hinge, but it meant that I was truly American. I woke and slept, while asleep and awake.
I pulled the shade and epitaphs for sleep made waves in half-words. Beneath the bridge, boys and girls shouted.
Seven billion instruments walked to work in the city on a hillside. Now, I shiver as I watch a decaying plantation mansion burn to the
ground.
producing the appearance of childhood, the sharp mustard
The process called evening spills over my corner of the planet,
between a meat of personality and the cheese of belonging.
I whisper a manifesto, an old transcript from some half-heaven
102
because I am not sweet or funny anymore.
I am a hermit in a white tent in a dark forest. Everything I know is wrong.
Life is a graveyard and I am unprepared for ghosts.
103
SOURCES FOR HUNGER Self mimics punishment.
The environment is a cash crop.
A garden knows about sleeping. Loneliness approaches.
The perfect prison is around here somewhere.
Only the shadows of true feelings ever go on display. This is a list of things meant to be unfeeling, but when you roll out
one map’s edge, another story altogether becomes apparent,
doors was nothingness and then, poof, two lovers in the
as when a cleric declares this kingdom of slowly closing morning, opposites in unity speaking a language no one but them understands.
The twentieth century was a series of deaths in stadiums, a big
misunderstanding in which the dumb guys had the guns.
and gunshots” or “the history of the turning constellations
The difference between sensationalism and the word is “fireworks
104
and the astrologer’s handbook.”
FINAL EXHORTATION At last, I stand atop a public telephone booth, in the small evening
of a disappearing culture.
Up in the clouds, portent or part of the divine, I peck. The damage is no longer a dream.
A birdbath within a birdhouse, my words are still willing and able to
mutiny.
I perform in front of the predators, my name in lights. My provocations fill the silence.
My body fills the land just like a town.
I live in a vintage shop near the source of the listener. I feel like a cannibal when I can’t sing.
One’s weakness is another’s entertainment.
I am losing my voice in the roar of the ocean.
The world is an average person, not this island we’ve been told we
are too small for.
105
INDEX OF PHOTOGRAPHS Blackbird
Independence Day
12
Garden Tools
17
Smoke Break
21
Snake
Thomas Jefferson’s Cabbage
14
18
Large but Friendly Rabbit
22
Lawnmower
26
Construction Site X-mas Tree Farm
25
29
Batting Cage
30
Chain-Link Fence
34
Bungalow Mimosa Dove Nest
Bird in Palm Motel
Sleeping Beauty (I) Sleeping Beauty (II)
33 36
38 39
40 42 43
Rogue Elephant
44
Birdhouse
47
New Vinyl Siding
Mountain Lion Friends 106
1
46
48
50
Lawn
52
Beach Scene (I)
56
Wind Storm
Beach Scene (II)
55 59
Debris
60
Sea Walk
66
Lovers
63
Seascape
Gathering Storm
68
73
Seawall
74
Dance of Life
80
Limp Palm
Blizzard Statues Dolphin
Projectile
79 85 86 92
94
107
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The friends, teachers, and classmates to whom I’m indebted are too numerous to acknowledge here, but many thanks to those whose
advice, influence, and ideas were integral wherever I’ve succeeded:
Eavan Boland, Suzanne Buffam, Anne Carson, the Cutler-Jones family, W.S. Di Piero, Kenneth Fields, Evan Firestone, Gustavo Fricke, Lorna Goodison, Linda Gregerson, Marie Howe, Amir
Kenan, Justin King, Ish Klein, Ian Maher, Cate Marvin, Khaled
Mattawa, Nami Mun, Billy Quaranto, Mike Quaranto, Chicu
Reddy, Naomi Reis, Anthony Robinson, Gus Rose, Robyn Schiff, Michael Shilling, and Nick Twemlow. Above all, my gratitude
to my family, Deb, Megan, Van, and Lynn, and everyone at Noemi Press.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the Fulbright-
García Robles Program, the Stegner Program at Stanford
University, the Vermont Studio Center, Zoland Poetry, and the University of Michigan, where much of this writing was
supported by a Meijer Award, a Zell Fellowship, a thesis grant, and two Meader Family Awards. Finally, many thanks to the
editors of the journals in which versions of some of these poems were first published: 3rd Bed, 26, can we have our ball back?, Court
Green, Crowd, Forklift, Ohio, GutCult, The Literary Review, The New Review of Literature, Pindeldyboz, and Spinning Jenny.
—Joshua Edwards
108
A good deal of the photographs in this book were taken for
The Galveston Seawall Project: A Documentary Survey, which was
made possible in part by grants from the Moody Foundation, the Houston Endowment, the Harris and Eliza Kempner Fund, and the Brown Foundation, under the auspices of the Galveston
County Historical Society. Thanks to all involved for their support, and to the editors of the Houston Post, the Houston Chronicle,
In-Between Magazine, the curators of various exhibitions, and the editors at Noemi Press, for taking interest in this work.
Thank you to all those folks who helped “love me into being”: Mom and Dad, Deb, Megan, Joshua, all the Edwards family, and the Howards all. I am also grateful to Mr. Campbell, Mr. Rogers,
Mr. Thoreau, jazz, first loves, and the sergeant who told me, “Once again, fear and superstition overcome knowledge and understanding.”
—Van Edwards
109
Joshua Edwards was born in Galveston, Texas. He directs and co-edits Canarium Books, and is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Van Edwards is a photographer, carpenter, and educator. He lives in Clear Lake Shores, Texas.