Then a wave rolled through us
Terrible buoyancy as I held your hand
Wave made out of voices, passing through our bodies by a fatal openness to sound
Thoughts unfinished on the flowered notepads –
In their wake a crunching thud
*
The shore is the outline of the body of the sea
And the movement of its crashing is its aura
Whatever’s stacked in us along our spines, what energy,
The sea disperses, multiplies –
Its tidal swells, its reefs,
Even just its feather’s pressure in the upper shallows –
It shapes us into bodily form
The sea surprises me
It reaches into human darkness – not with light but with salinity
*
Stevens called it “the pressure of reality”
Whitman wrote, “The dark threw its patches down upon me also”
The things you have to push against on late imperial streets –
Sharp tongues, defeated glances,
The whole taut net of the social order
Just once I would like to walk by that nail salon and see a white woman giving a Vietnamese lady a pedicure
Make that a white guy
Make it for a century
And the President’s man saying ooh scary, there has to be “darkness” in power,
His stupid Gnosticism –
It’s exhausting every morning to have to say No, there is not a war in heaven
It’s hard enough each day to care for one another without having to wade through the leaflets they drop down on us
So you say it with your body, and your face –
You look a stranger in the eye, you’re brushing off your shoulders, and you say to each other without words,
What the fuck does he know about the dark?
*
Walk with me now through the warehouse district
Past the civic fountains and the reclaimed spaces,
Quote unquote,
Past the sidewalk cafés melodious laughter long-stemmed glasses
It’s easy now to feel the rocking motion underneath the pavement
After years of study it’s not hard to feel the movement of commodities,
To see the radiant city as a hellscape –
But I won’t let the end of all my reading be becoming saturnine,
I worked too hard for that –
And anyway I saw the hellscape before I read the books
I saw it as a boy
The men who never put it into words –
I see it now in bodies and in gazes, every day
Resting cop face
Resting banker face
A hurt-girl face that’s disappointed prettiness
And the guy who came up to my boy and pointed at me and said, “he’s a faggot” –
The undoing jolt when we looked each other in the eye
So yes the city is a hellscape
But the death-pulse of commodities is just an imitation of the waves that pass through us –
Never forget that
They nudged us into life and through that pinhole death they’ll draw us out to sea
*
Release from the pressure of reality –
You feel that sometimes, right?
For me it’s like the lead boots coming off
Those moments when I don’t feel guilty or ashamed
The sudden freedom makes me feel prophetic and hilarious, walking through the airport
Nope hate football sorry not so much with tanks no not impressed by men on CNN
It gives me this quite healthy feeling of wanting to punch someone, possibly a friend, in a sparring sort of way –
But then they call you to the gate
*
Travelers! I move among you with uncertain status
I wait while they call Diamond, Platinum, active military
I catch myself dreaming of a life where I’m just rich enough to harbor everyone around me, has it come to that?
I try to imagine the abolition of the value-form but I come up empty-handed
I can see Yosemites uncounted underneath Antarctic ice
I can hear a neolithic sound, a cave going Om for twenty thousand years
I see how I’m the whale, and how the whale is me
But what’s on the other side? Nada
Just because I have tremendous faith in people doesn’t mean I think we’re going to win
The rich have their guns and their data mining
But I know a dozen teenagers with better politics than Auden
Poor Auden! Always getting beaten up on the left
OK better politics than Hugh MacDiarmid
Those kids – more queer, less Leninist, more kind –
Better students of capital –
I hope I make a decent uncle
*
I’ve been hearing a lot about atomism lately
Left-wing poets and militant philosophers having a backchannel conversation about materialism through the figure of Lucretius --
It’d be harder to do with Ovid
And Pindar, hoo-boy
But that other materialism – the one where the action’s not in atoms but in gestures, genealogies –
Where sooner or later someone is related to a god, or was blessed by one, or screwed over
It’s like an allegory of that fleeting sense of contact between your body and the void around your body,
The one that’s never quite a void –
Where “to die is different than any one supposed, and luckier”
I’m not big on words like “dehiscence” but hey you – disappointed girl –
The space you leave behind you with your tossed hair is not an empty space
*
In the great transition I think it’ll be the nurses not the doctors
The nuns and not the priests
Will there be retirees who never gave a shit?
Interns who don’t?
Soldiers who were only ever in it for the scholarships
I’m having these thoughts where I always do, in a café window seat
I’ve got this effortful mildness on my face meant to counteract the low-level intra- bourgeois competitiveness in which all middle-class children are trained ...
Will the drivers who supply the Whole Foods?
Will the EMTs?
I feel like most of us would help each other since so few of us are actually profiting from this state of affairs
I know I’m not
I’m certainly paid well to keep a piece of it going,
But I’d have to hustle just like anyone, minus a paycheck or two
*
People don’t come from much
Mine don’t, at least
A gloving factory / some lawn equipment
They’re made from scratch
Easy to destroy
And the palmlike pressure keeping them together –
It feels like you would get the bends from even just the tiniest evasion of how we’ve been embodied
But there are dreams that pulse into the morning after with the brightness of relief from speciation
And other gravities in which the stars fall straight down like a drip
Halfway up a hill from the Pacific in the early light today instead of just a man I saw like flecks of mica in the molding of a handsome face the sea –
I don’t mean metaphorically, I don’t mean literally,
I mean an opening in me
I felt the body of the ocean, and the shore
I felt a deepest flexion in my hips,
Like a launch from out of the void –
My son –
I felt you mimic it
There was no shore, and you and I were swimming.
For Lissa Wolsak.
Christopher Nealon is Professor of English, and from 2015-18 was Chair of the English Department, at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two books of criticism, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001) and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), and three books of poetry: The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009) and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014). He lives in Washington, DC.