This long poem, here in its entirety, comes from my present rural New England landscape in relation to my former locales.  It’s an experience of Whitmanian conservation of matter, songs and texts that repeatedly sound through a window, the radio signal fading and static taking over—what Stan Brakhage called “the eventuality of daily living.” 

I want to discover how the poetry of landscape can document the process of entropy.  I don’t know yet.  I do know the way long-term stasis and close observation of a stone wall enable a mix of wonder and wander lust.

 

Bethany Dusk Radio

 

1. Gap-toothed

 

 

Static in the signal, cobalt dusk breaks up in branches

but only one of us believes it. It’s difficult

not to feel curious about the temperature

of a higher elevation. Or an estranged city at sea level.

 

In a minor key we describe a town seen in passing

as a dream embellished in its telling.

Let me tell you everything to know about travel:

somewhere a brown horse is stuck in the mud.

 

Every low stone wall that snakes across pine forest

to intersect a smaller property or border

mountain laurel traces back, further and farther.

A single stone wall. A canal digital with interruptions.

 

Predicting our future location is simple. But

measuring the particulars of compensation is complicated—

if a traumatic accident brings a small fortune

which portion of the ocean evaporates? Then where?

 

Evening pivots as a key change

and withholds the cymbal crashes. Woodsmoke and rain

find a radius of crushed stone, no cardinal

at the center. My left ear aimed west I listen for a train.

 

2. Flung Likeness

 

 

Where certain combinations of dusk-light are difficult 

Walt Whitman is best experienced

on the molecular level. As vapor, as cloud, as the formation

of objects and animals. All is work and near to everything

 

here in future conversations. It is difficult to believe in karma

when petty, jealous biomass succeeds. Listen:

conservation of energy, a new mantra: no work is ever

wasted. The snake furious in its basket of cellular interference.

 

            *

 

As though stone desired placement, your left hand swerves

in hyperbole to suggest physical labor. How about nothing else

meriting a series of plaintive questions, exuberance

without action, sound waves propelled into negative space.

 

The trees are bare so now I can count them. Exposed

just above the brush the low stone wall snakes across acres,

marks out some expired grid. You can see across

almost to the other side. In stone a trace

 

of earlier ice. Consider the uncountable floating particles

as a stick, virtually soundless

without its surroundings, washes up in the canal, further

displaced. Pick it up, put your headphones on.

 

3. Beginning with a Theme by Joe Brainard

 

 

I remember dinners on your fire escape.

I remember a pot of rice falling to the floor.

I remember us riding the subway with a video camera.

I remember trying to predict the future.

 

Our occasional hostility toward one another

resembled a shore in winter. It was difficult

not to feel curious about the temperature

of the water. Difficult not to touch it.

 

Walt Whitman, man of rivers and of every transition

ground to ether, bequeathed himself to grow

from my stolen wallet. From fire escapes and water towers,

from F train faces and sidewalk chatter.

 

As for fashion, black was The New Expensive

before grey was The New Ambivalent.

I kept my pants but ditched my shirt.

I dream of money. Whatever.

 

Everywhere we live with a river on either side,

a world of seas. Only one of us can swim.

Or, we both can swim

but only one of us believes it.

 

 

4. Park Life

 

 

Clouds no longer decompose and recompose

objects and animals

when we dream with increasing frequency

of drifting into a blue expanse. A portion of the ocean

 

and you in all your water will evaporate,

supposedly. A cosmos partially of water is expanding,

allegedly. From memory sketch kudzu

on the tracks, years-ago Virginia. Listen for a train

 

in the static. If rate times time equals foothills growing

into mountains, conservation of matter

means no atom’s ever wasted—

no woodsmoke, no rain, and still a radius of stone

 

with us at the center. Do we hear the roof, do we hear rain,

or do we praise a new combination? Afternoon dissolves

and aluminum dusk breaks up, light in clicking branches

we don’t have to leave behind to need. Maybe

 

the city washes away. For now recognize my throwback

to Wu-Tang—I listen and watch for a vixen.

Later allow me to demonstrate not listening for the buck

as I turn off a CGI universe on a plasma screen.

 

 

5. Here and Homeward Bound

 

 

Fact is that no machine could kill Pound, only

incite new ideas in sound, in the momentum

of fast rattlers and flat wheelers into negative space.

Windows open, book open—the record is spinning

 

into a difficult landscape. It is difficult to predict

the particulars of the future, more so to believe in karma,

and it is difficult not to resent the falling temperature

where certain combinations of dusk-light are difficult.

 

Some animal approaches if you don’t listen. After the leaves,

before the leaves, we resent a familiar predicament:

Morning noise floor of dry leaves, no barrier—

that sting in the chest, in the gut, you can’t put a thumb on it.

 

            *

 

Swerve onto a fainter highway, into desert. Imagine

iced tea served on a lime Formica side table.

With your left hand make a plaintive sort of gesture,

lights flashing. So much of driving is out the window.

 

Who’s behind you. Rate times time equals the ground

growing from hills to ether, sun showers turning into night-

snow, the driver who leads you running out of cigarettes.

Death Valley, the background, not exactly diminishing.

 

 

6. Five Discreet Scenarios with Deep Field Background

 

 

So what now. A shape is opening between a café table

and not knowing how to act comfortable,

the right word, the proper gesture

around no stranger. All that weight in negative space.

 

            *

 

We had to learn where to live, had to pencil ourselves

into a sketchbook of fire escapes and water towers,

a notebook of F train faces and sidewalk chatter.

One’s desire is another’s dilemma in crosshatching. Illegible snippet.

 

            *

 

A world of seas only one of us can swim surrounds

the grid of new growth. Of stone we listen for a train.

Midnight and nothing’s

green, neither canopy nor shield. Total barrier. The signal blocked.

 

            *

 

I have something accurate to say that lacks perspective. 

I’ll bend the note as though to send and then forgive

ancient mistakes—for instance, hyperbole. I’ll package and ship you

exuberance for twenty-five cents or acts of physical labor.

 

            *

 

Never broke, the cosmos contained as it composed

my stolen wallet, everything of star-stuff.

On the molecular level Walt Whitman illuminates

the signal, our midnight vision of a train, atom by atom.

 

 

7. Snake Fire in a Basket Future

 

 

cobalt signals a branch breaking up

pine snake stones a forest

woodsmoke crashes          rain withholds

            mountain laurel further back

 

your left hand swerves near everything     

the uncountable floating particles

                        wasted the snake in its basket

no work a new mantra

 

                        escape the fire riding a future

the temperature a shore resembled swims

before grey believes Walt Whitman rides

the subway         to grow the new video floor

 

dream with increasing frequency

and hear the center we rain

Virginia listens to years ago

                                    and you evaporate

 

pixelate the nocturnal animals

and the music goes gangsta          star-stuff

deserts and diminishes what digital universe

atom                by atom

 

 

8. Lullaby for Bethany

 

 

Heavy sleep will reveal the door through a rose

quartz wall, not quite a boundary before November

makes steely shapes in branches unlock

the distinction between a dream and a vision.

 

Not a mundane catalog: a wing clicking, a train

trailing off, the canal’s picture but never its odor.

The needle in the run-out groove, heavy beat

in the trees, the loop of static in dead wax. Continue,

 

says the terrifying white delusion by the bed.

As in, bring every dilemma to fruition

and transgress the threshold—twelve leaves up

your freezing spine is never too high. It’s all in pieces,

 

now who do you believe? The miles between

your bed and the tower’s red are not totally sleeping.

Walt Whitman sing us a lullaby

that drowns out the music of the near-dead,

 

the jingles for obsolete products, that devil of static.

If I do not sleep and my boot soles never

wear down, how will my beard ever go gray?

Walt Whitman do not keep the snow away.

 

 

9. Poem in an Open Tuning

 

 

Real radio absence I forgive into morning

snow in the past tense. What would the community

think is what could they.

            Say threshold, say brink, have a preference.

 

They’ll never show you           the easy way

the perfect life              you’ll never see

            guaranteed

                                    If I was a photographer

 

How can you fake the Blues Life? Say drink, say

another, then one more and another.

Remember our friend who thought she could

just count to twelve and suffering’s red curtain would open?

 

Who never told you                 you’ll never see

picture taking              mistaking beautiful

picture taking              whose robes did they trade you

Everyday stage fright floats into the past tense.

 

My winter once lived in a parking lot. The white van

was a bathysphere snow fell light

across. The van filthy and the radio always on,

it never disappeared. I’d sunk below the surface.

 

10. Development is a Threat to Mystery

 

 

The transmission of the half-dead crackles

and is half-dead

                        a wet wing clicking

                        a dry branch ticking

 

I can hardly hear the present over my obsession

with the city where our night is no longer permitted

                        the chatter of a café

                        transmitted this distance

 

Bethany why are you sleeping so early

Has my asking woken you

Will your nightmare of the woods on fire

                        occur beyond the molecular level

 

Does your nightmare progress as a vision

a fresh clearing and another piece of

                        the mystique violated

Reception weakens as the dark trails off

 

I reach and listen to our former city crackle

It tells me the time of night is almost morning

            If something too grotesque crescendos

            singer don’t let us listen

 

 

11. Highway Sweetheart

 

 

Which signal received belies direction and speed?

The stray tone in my ear grows into a song in your head.

We open the window to something heavy, blue note

in the trees. Before long the road along the canal runs out.

 

Salvage is a tremendous habit.

Baby, let me tell you about the number twelve,

the plan I am drawing for a new and unlivable city

of obsolete electronics and broken guitar strings.

 

There will be a snare drum with a split head

past a toy xylophone lacking mallets.

There are three Barbies behind microphones,

never in a dumpster or landfill. Black Wash Canal transmits

 

another color, dream of a westbound highway. Where

that blue signal runs out, find us washed up on a not-so-Californian

shore of digital noise. Do not mistake the sand

for pixels, or the pixels for a seagull discovering

 

a cracker crumb under a cigarette butt.

You could cover a wall with the postcards.

You could leave the window open and over years

let night sounds blow the colors out.

 

12. Variations on Stevens with Primary Colors

 

 

Dusk inches in, high-resolution. Images could absorb

a hard disk and never mellow the cold of it.

Beyond a blank screen one radio tower blinks

red to another across the valley. Goodbye goodbye goodbye.

 

Rest comes with the radio on, voices

without faces or in some cases names. They talk you

out of another conversation. Out of your room

with the door hastily shut. What hangs the phone up.

 

The red voice in absent weather not from under a mask

but like the sea aloft, what evaporated eventually returning.

The grinding water, the rasping wind.

Merely a place, an object, and we sing. Total clouds.

 

Red absence                on the radio

names the talk             that talk

                        Your ear canal could carry

yellow signal caught in cloud              a farewell

 

There is a redder way to say it inside a fading hour

but I don’t know a word of it. If I tell you how

transmit all of yellow me while I tilt in a bed of blue.

Red in my ear, in my head, all right all night goodbye.

 

 

-

“Bethany Dusk Radio” borrows from, among other songs and poems, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Joe Brainard’s book I Remember, the songs of Woodie Guthrie (as well as the slogan written across the front of his guitar, “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS”), Cat Power’s album What Would the Community Think, the Lungfish song “Highway Sweetheart” from the album Pass & Stow, and Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West.”