What wound is this of yours
that you should keep worrying it?
I like it. It tastes of tears & soil, like a boiled beet.
These aren’t even your ancestors.
But that’s half the attraction, isn’t it?
It’s like a revolution unfolding on the internet:
close at hand yet comfortably far away.
The anguish. The comradery.
But this city belongs to the dead.
All cities belong to the dead.
This one has more trees than most.
And I love any tourist spot
where the residents stay hidden
& don’t ruin our game of make-believe.
What game is that?
I sit still as a stone until words emerge.
They form themselves into epigrams on my forehead.
Air flecked with blue and gold and green, one soft
grey strip of cloud against which a plane’s silhouette
moves toward a distant airfield. We’re all going
somewhere, aren’t we? Even if we’re huddled
in these rooms in rows of vinyl chairs, or later
packed three deep in an elevator car ascending
or descending through a windowless shaft.
Who could hear the faint hush of crickets
from inside this womb? Who could hear
the chant of cicadas or the rumbling in
the bowels of the earth? The woman pressed
against the wall has earrings in the shape of
coffee cups. All I can think of is you,
and where you are at this moment. The man
in the blue-and-white seersucker suit
presses buttons for all our floors:
nine, eight, seven, six; five,
four, three, two, one.
photo by Darwin Bell (CC BY-NC license) - click to enlarge
Writing is hardly an innocent act. I remember with what force I had to strike the keys of my dad’s old manual typewriter when I was a kid. How the ribbon would rise to the occasion like someone throwing himself between an assailant and his victim, absorbing the blows. And as the ribbon ran dry, how the type would slowly fade, prompting me to pound the keys harder and harder, pummeling the paper, turning the letters into pale, shallow graves.
The first time I used an electric typewriter, it felt like cheating. It was in 4th or 5th Grade. I was typing up a parody of the movie Jaws — “Lips,” which we would later perform in appropriate costume. One of the kids who’d volunteered to help on the play sat and watched my two-finger typing, studying me closely but not saying a word until I was done. “I think I understand how you’re doing that now,” he said. I hadn’t realized until that moment that it was a kind of magic trick.
I took touch typing as an elective in high school, and of course we used nothing but the most modern IBM Selectrics. That was in 1982, I think. But when I started at Penn State two years later, it was nothing but the old manual for me. I figured as long as I had a newish ribbon and a sturdy, erasable bond, that was good enough. And in my own writing, watching a poem take shape letter by letter and word by word… I find myself almost salivating now as I recall the pleasure of that tactile experience. Poems were things that you hammered out by hand, which is perhaps how poets were able to unironically refer to poetry-writing classes as “workshops.” And most lyric poems being fairly short and the look on the page difficult to grasp with too many hand corrections, it was easier to just keep hammering out new drafts. I have a huge file box upstairs filled with nothing but those abandoned prototypes, like the empty larval shells of cicadas. The final drafts sit in a nicer, metal tomb downstairs, beside my writing table. It’s hard to simply throw out a handmade thing.
After we bought the adjacent property here in Plummer’s Hollow in 1992, we had the melancholy task of going through the derelict house where our neighbor Margaret had lived almost until her death the previous year. Among her possessions were three typewriters from her youth in the 1930s or 40s, when she had pursued a secretarial career in New York City. They were huge and black, archaic as ringer washers or Model T Fords. By that time I had switched to a word processor and was happy to have put the typewriter era behind me, so when a friend mentioned he collected typewriters, I passed those machines onto him without a second thought. Now I kind of wish I’d kept one of them as a conversation piece.
Around that same time, I had some people up for a party, and they all had a good laugh at the ancient, hulking, hand-me-down of a PC I was using. It must’ve been at least ten years old! I used WordPerfect 6.0, and only a Courier font because that’s what typing was supposed to look like. A few years later, I finally upgraded and put the old beast out to pasture — literally. I didn’t know then about the heavy metals and other hazardous substances found in circuit boards, cathode ray tubes and the like. So now it sits in a shallow, unmarked grave somewhere out in the goldenrod patch we call a field.
For touching what wasn’t mine—
even though I didn’t want it,
even though I gave it back—
I lost my fingers.
The press called us demonic
but they, my ten thin fates,
were innocent as fire
in search of fuel, & I
in my disguise as oxygen
couldn’t let them go out.
We shattered windows
to let more world
into those narrow shrines
to whatever. We broke in
aorta by aorta,
cavorting like a virus,
smashing the attenuated
plaster antibodies
in our excess of what
I thought was joy.
How they writhed & curled
in it! How they shook
& shuddered into ash.
Crepe myrtle clumps barely luminous in their sheen,
streaked jacaranda in the aftermath of rain—
Floss of cerise and magenta, ruffled anew in green
arms of trees. The air’s moist; this is how we know
change is coming. Tiny hairs on the nape, antennae
trembling. Stand in the driveway, listen: undertow,
swell of that wave furling. Autumn’s dark boat
has already pushed off. The turquoise sea is laced
with kelp and driftwood. Summer turns its coat
sleeves out, and makes a promise the way you do:
no vows, no witnesses but for a few letters
in the sand. But I row, you row; we both do.
Built 1844-48 by Richard Turner to Decimus Burton’s designs, the Palm House is Kew’s most recognisable building, having gained iconic status as the world’s most important surviving Victorian glass and iron structure. —Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: History and Heritage
