C A M P E C H E N O E M I P R E S S L A S C R U C E S, N E W M E X I C O

CAMPECHE CAMPECHE Joshua Edwards Van EDWARDS poems photographs NOEMI PRESS LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO Poems by Joshua Edwards: Public Domain Phot...
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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.

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