Ian Lockaby, Defensible Space / if a crow

 

if a crow—

then a black ice cube pressed
against the grain of the sun

while the afternoon mugs drop
pattering spoils of  a milk’d black coff-

-in  the over grown carpets
lay  a caffeinated belly bitter against
the sleep against the damn

bright  slipping away.  if a crow—
remembers you,

by what:

Something     growly
in the vanilla leaf—

don’t      dawdle now

it’s plenty late.

I’d been seeing his name around for a while, so I’d been curious about New Orleans-based poet, translator and editor Ian Lockaby’s full-length debut, Defensible Space / if a crow (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2024), a collection unsectioned, as a book-length stretch of clusters of shorter lyrics on and around a landscape of language, fields and shadows within the American Pacific Northwest. “cicadas hum and / mysteriously kill // songbirds—,” he writes, as part of “Songbirds Mysteriously Dying,” “a panic / takes in the internet // birding groups / arguing over whether // to offer the birds water— // throw it in the trees / instead, they say // outside of one’s reason / is another life [.]” I’m intrigued by the spacings and pacings of these poems, how they’re held against and through visual and even physical space on the page, offering moments, fragments, somehow held in air or breath. And through all the smoke, all the branches and trees, the repeated appearance of crows. There’s such a precision to his lyric progressions, casual and easygoing and exact across such wonderful pacing. “you’ve grown and used / different times—,” he writes, as part of the second poem, “A Way to Tell,” “You’ve learned to keep // thyme with each / of them, stacked and riveted / to your ribcage now // And every time you stand, I try to // stay still—to be / located inside of the ways I hear [.]” Or, as the poem “At Trillium Lake” begins:

There is nausea on the shelves
            of A.’s grandmother

the eve of it A traveler
            who hasn’t been here since
she was bedded down
in asylum         for softening

in the violet inconsistencies
            of mind
but who once set out from here—
mornings she’d take on
            mountaintops         alone