Read an Excerpt
Songs
Poems
By Derek Henderson The Center for Literary Publishing
Copyright © 2014 Derek Henderson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-885635-40-2
CHAPTER 1
SONG 1
Portrait before the eyes, everything true in the lens. Her hands meet and equal. Serenity at the appearance of edges. Serenity was there before the eye roamed and is still here before the eye. Transparent storm door: the hand knows the window's evenness in a broken door (where the door broke it opens in a line, slow and bending), how the hot window cools, how the eye beholds and opens, how all's gone gummed up, gone human. Farther off, gathering in the heat, tinny like the doorbell's admission of American width, even there the eyes seem hidden in unwatchfulness as night begins to freeze, the window ledge begins turning to the ground, and the warm house makes a ceremony of its windows leaking heat. Ceremony is birth, heat dies in the window and cools off an inhabitant or two, the children run out of doors into an early-21st century, seeming to shine. In song, I become lyric heart, so, transparent. Singing meets up in the eyes in the knowledge that broken things abound in hope, the present is always beginning, an according, hoofclicks on the rooftop in June; how do we make the words? We wait. Song one is turnkey, tissue, a white yard, more American ground. Ground glass so far is heat, new working of heaven, identified and met in a snowy landscape, a high line bounding heaven. The eye grows an egg- like vault, swarm of fact in the heat, overply, heat fleeces the window with frost.
Portray the woman's reader, hands full of pearls, her silence is the product of her silence — she sails through a quiet house. Transparency colors everything: windows signed with breakage, the door is here for anyone, its clean lines, its billowing openness, its wooden lintel. Through the window a terrible image: stepping into the marriage chamber is Cain, dominating the solitude of night, this version of night — windows distribute starlight, the room fogs up its windows, the windows turn to paint an American scene outside, miles of newly planted rows turned towards the house. The first song is the window's song, too transparent. The song ends with someone tapping at the angles of the window's construction and the broken apple on the sill is fate's presence, branches outside are over everything, are ridiculous, a porous cover, just so. The first song is torque, matrix, water, roadways in May, completely American. A glass by the bed protrudes and announces water, the exact sound of a saint's passage through the room. The sky outside is huge, a complete frequency of color, there is color sitting by the window, a nightgown lain over a chair beside the window.
Pour out in the face of this mess of words. This hand is a word, cornered into writing all this shit out. To be anything before writing it is to be a thing in words I hold as ramiecation, ruination, home. Transparency flies laughing: under this window is breakage and shit — real shit, cat shit (buried far below, waste lining the yard, killing trees) — This window so streaked with blood hangs before my house and through it all I can see is America showing up all the same, warts and all, night blasted in the window, leading me to all the steps I end. A house with windows is portent of war, windows open onto America stretched to dearth, fully dried up.
This first song stretched too thin already, a tiny candy sucked into transparency. This lens bends everything to smallness, halves our search into breakage, is held up too openly to unopening skies, the stars all hidden, Eoors turned up, kisses hesitant, built on words and words only, — what else can be so immanent? I lied the erst time, I am made of tissue, a yard full of trash and weeds, fearful, always an American trying to get a leg up. Protrusion is my cup, my hateful elling up — I am a word that knows its own saying and is lost in all its shifting land, the sky could care less. I am huge with August, too full by half with scorn, overplied, seen in my window, writing this:
Retrace each letter of the woman's name. Lay miles of ink to zoom us to the occupations of bared engers. The serenity of this woman rises into the serenity of place, a calm house. The eye glides, acetate its fluid cone, its aperture: the window was erm before its breakage — the window becomes terrible in the eye as image in the camera's opening, American symbol married in a visionary mouth, night foreseen, foretold, the window blank in its material, carried across, the camera is a useless window, the window keeps the hand spanning from its wrist in this American picture of distance and lack of presence. Nothing can occupy this zone like I do, the window my song, quiet, transparent. I lack a place to rest, lack something so quiet as the angel my eye already promised in the changeless tissue of breakage, the present falling oe the boughs — I reach to it, burn for it, I cap myself oe, whatever. This place is taken away, a missed kiss, a full yard, I am completely American. The glass protrudes and stops quickly, establishes stoppage to identify sand 's passage — water-clock, too, a grand plan fully blown and frequent as St. Vitus' Dance. O, this layer is true, ene layer of flesh.
Try this again: impulse to speak gives pause to thought. As much as I occupy my space I am still, a tiny seed. The quietness of my thought comes up against the hum of space, the quiet house. Thrown from the transparent flow: yes, this is surely a breaking through (other things are pulverized, flow is not a straight line, not a constant wave, I swear) — and, this will be terrible to sum up in one sight, placed in the house locked and wedded to some pervasive American symbol of loneliness in expectation of night; and yes, this will be a branching out at last, the house will be so sought out, it will become a thing to sing about, an acme that cannot be put in print or English, or in the tight historic teeth of last year. Nothing will sing more than the words spinning about, sweet, transparent. I can say at the end: I heap up talk, the shit that spills out the mouths of angels, concrete as it figures itself out before its eventual brokenness; it is built and it is here and it is a done thing — the boughs let off cherry blossoms behind me, they cut into the new-built house across the way, this hum is only this or that possibility, and what is done in the boughs cuts the season off, discards tomorrow's snowcapped mountains; the first ceremonial turning of the key shows the new carpet already sullied, the boulevard behind more complete than the American dream that paved it past our house. We're calling a small war — I see you through the mean glass, gross and staring back at me, identifying yourself as me on the toilet, a saint passing back and forth to human. I'll be grand as I wash dishes while I look back at you watching TV, I'll see my self reflected in my window, in yours, in the window's reflection, in your TV, in my own admission of my own body.
Try the motherly speech again. Hands full of seed. The mother's silence follows alongside the silence of the whole story, of the last home left to us. Everything here is seen flying through everything else: windows and doors (the traffic of people, their collisions and straight lines, their stopping, their fleeing) — the window is a terrible imagination of creation married to the house, admitting a dead-ended Americanness, a penetration of loneliness instead of night — the window's black mirrors throw the room's light back at me, the house full of windows to use, windows firm against breakage, the hand reaches out and closes them to open them up — I am an American poet miles away, subject to distance. One open window is song, is lyric, sweetness, transparent. The song ends on top of a mountain of angel stuff, structured in the middle of breakage, made presence, bent, cut, almost razed, like this: The first song is cut short layer and fulfilling yet [TEXT INCOMPLETE IN ORIGINAL SOURCE]
CHAPTER 2
SONG 2
Wind as possibility. The mirror is clear image and color on the horizon is blur: movements of apparent light climb below Earth in the window
Wind stabs below lifts and shimmers the blood lifts off the horizon's table the camera sings has swung down the land holds over windows
The wind pulverizes me. I'm a rascal who shimmers in my own imagination and the heat of the season sullies me and makes me useless as the horizon always is — distant and hopeful only. Shift between the machines of my image and the machines that take my image. Earth opens up, furious, a window to itself.
Wind pulverizes. Risk scalds in the glossy shimmer before the eye and heat waste their sullen stretch to the horizon. The mouth scintillates, machine of photographic impulse. The earth is furious with the window. I can hear them rattling together.
Vents push out air from the dryer to the new wall. Heat shimmers between them heat in the middle of horizon. Mirage is nothing a camera can watch. Earth its own vent.
Wind in stuff. At its height it flickers in the heat in its height it opens up the horizon to a sort of wonder. The camera eats it up, the camera lingers and loiters and misses it all. The land heats up and builds its own wind.
CHAPTER 3
SONG 3
Water flows. And now we sing; perhaps too warily, keeping track of water's overflow. Breakage lovely and scattered: coke bottles and photographed as a word) blossoms lift off and chalk. Crazed cityscapes (the streets are flooded, water hard to be held; water flows below its film, off the surface all is nicked a branch, the same as the waters. Word breaks first in water. Songs come stiff, strong drink, sung with warmth; each crowns the previous.
Water is a flame. It burns as much as song yearning at its surface, acute and watery. Its colors favor breakage: bubble and cease, bubble and cease. The city before it is brief (life in flame, traffic relatively useless) film its sea-green windows which raise the state of the film, seamless purity of sameness with the water. Water is breakage in a word, I sing more regularly now, life is severer now, nothing but air in the vents and the relentlessness of song.
All water is river. The tallest mountains equal a crack in God, they are so much superficial sucking at the river. The core is my favorite place of breakage: all the chattery flow that comes out is heat. The city escapes, briefly (the roads are rivers too, and traffic pulls me into its flux); picture this — green water flowing over nothing but film, to continue in the sheer sameness of its own wateriness. Water is the hum of broken words. As we take two or three steps from the stark shore, life has no more heat than a cancelled first breath.
The water in the river. As full of movement as what two sets of eyes can see on the surface of broken water. Colors perforate each breakage: I can no longer call out in this heat. Brief city- scapes cross the surface (its streets like a river, the traffic its flow); passage of liquid-blue-green: in the same way we photograph nothing in its completeness in order to sculpt our senses in the sameness and continuity of water. Water is a verb of breakage. What calls us to pair, what calls us to three is rigid, severe: life is heat and its richness can't be seen by one person.
Hot water still splits me open. So there's nothing else left like the water that falls too hot to clean me as hot as the water was. My favorite clarity is breakage: the house opens me up to chalk on the sidewalk. Cut out the cityscape (the street cuts me off from houses across the street; the wall is not good neighbor; the storm drifting in, though, that I can handle); water will grow between us, a film that will wrap us up every night that water falls, the sluice continues to say what it has to say and the water we've got will get so hot as to burn us. Hot water works through houses and brings on breakage. Lay this out twice or thrice, it is still a grinning sign, strong and level with warmth I've already told you about.
Water is violent. Here it thickens in the channel and I see fish surface twice, searching water's height. They prefer breakage over color: their mouths taste air and call for change. Their brief passage into the breath of the city (the river is a road that flows, traffic troubles its surface only); their watery breath of the film below is nothing but everything–a camera can 't make certain that moment they end the sameness of water. Water is always a word of breakage. The fish get a second chance and at the third are caught, go rigid, dead, they follow a road of riches to get them back to their start.
CHAPTER 4
SONG 4
The stanza's strength is this: God's little gurgle (a dream of lowing cattle, all trussed up in rose — there's a rising laugh and amidst the rattling green there's nary a mean movement — it's a ballet, an invocation of innocence) is striated sequence, is structure of fire, illumination and furor, clearly placed. God out-plucks my plucking and everything announces autumn over Salt Lake City. It is still the outset of breakage — the world is automatic; it moves itself, I pass through with nostalgia. I am busy and idiotic. My contrarieties are all balled-up.
To this strong stance: an artery in the craned neck (a sound of loosening care, sinews rolling around in the collar, round head on top — everything encounters a green world, and no movement is slower in this ballet, this evocation of innocence) a hoarse sound follows, each frame illuminates what the neck pulls the eye to, the face pulled to, locked, and everything painted in sober green, in a childhood city, in breakage: world automatic, cars pass by and nostalgia is idiotically busy, now nothing contracts the kids dancing out here.
Two men stand and fart: the kids all giggle (a sunken dream, a lost carol, dressed in red, red thrown against everything, the growth of green (everything that is not green), and in the camera is an expansive ballet, an innocence) and come to abstract sequence where each mark illuminates a lock pulled and stuck; desire makes it so that pull outlasts the lock — at every point the lock dents but does not give in to the demands of breakage (what is this breakage?) in an automatic world, an automobile that won't start, nostalgia passes by, stupid and acting up against the women dancing.
I am twee, stark; I stand up: the kids spill over (in front of me a diver lowers himself, drowns himself, rides the waves, exists as ballast, till everything takes him in and grows over him, a long-time death, a slow bullet bringing waters to his shoulders) and everything abstracts itself, opens and folds, slacks and goes cold, sparking out in death, opens and pulls back, beckons. All over the house the rooms turn to garden, turn to the breaking open of shoulders: such winging out is automatic, the self moving into the world, a testament that history is idiotic. Stars begin to take over. All the turns are messages.
God is a strong line — the kids are betrayed a dream that shuts us up, robes our tongues in red, bowls us over with its redness, everything pours against the green we voted for, it's in the moving sideways, a ballet, a claim to our innocence) and then there's a vague odor, each movement of the hand fills the room with a stench that lasts — a smell of shit that kicks us out of the room and pains us throughout the end of summer. In the first arrival of breakage: the world is automatic, it goes where it must, it lords itself over us and we forget how much of our occupation is stupid, given the slow dance of tulips that fills space between us.
Stars start to stand up: they spill out a kind of light (a trauma that lowers its song to us, that clarifies the turning of the earth, a turning that clarifies everything in turn, gaining us ground as it raises us up and in the long run begins us, a sort of ballet, choreography that overruns our stopped births) and we're taken out of what we're sure of, the light we let off tosses itself, strings itself out in distraction; the house throws us out into the wet grass and everything above us drives us down we're the children now, a broken building inside of us, automatic, the cars wield proof, the newness of this is memory until we figure out our idiotic swerves. I am gaining a spot to crash, I am beginning to touch the things that made me.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Songs by Derek Henderson. Copyright © 2014 Derek Henderson. Excerpted by permission of The Center for Literary Publishing.
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