Two police cars outside:
flush yr Centaur.
The sea-squids of the
congresses
swim among the flooded
people;
a star urinates over Cupcake
mountain;
cloud livers drip on the
gardens.
We take it as a sign,
pixelated –
we, a short fever in
space
combining
ones and the empty sign
for nothing. (“Sat Down and Wept By Lake and Cloud Gear”)
From
California poet, critic and editor Cal Bedient comes
The Breathing Place
(Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2021), following
Candy Necklace (Wesleyan
University Press, 1997),
The Violence of the Morning (University of Georgia
Press, 2002),
Days of Unwilling (Saturnalia Books, 2008) and
The Multiple (Omnidawn, 2012). There is something curious in the way his
narrative lyrics write their expansivenesses from a foundation of poets such as
Emily Dickinson, William Blake and Herman Melville, whether the long line or
the sharpened space. As he writes to open the poem “What Was to Be an Elegy for
Emily Dickinson”: “Why should there be red shoes if the earth was never born, /
it was never born and these are its red shoes, / these the cerise Atlantic
clouds to be taken with no comedy / remainder, why should there be a suchness
of the day, // when a lightning suspender is no union.” In a curious combination
of response and translation, his poems each establish a particular and
expansive field, and write from within such in slightly different ways, whether
filling up that space, or establishing the space through writing around particular
absences. As he writes to open his “NOTES” at the end of the collection: “Now and
again, this collection echoes (adopts, adapts) material from William Blake, César
Vallejo, Tomaz Salamun, Fredericke Mayröcker.” “If breath were a sort of
gigantic torso / will all possible earths in it,” he writes, to open the poem “Breathless,”
“all Hatchling / molecules; If it could be jacked into the music / of Many Fountains
starting up Together [.]”
Constructed
in three sections—“Limits of the Containing Air,” “The Era” and “Green Water”—the
poems in The Breathing Place display both an alertness and a fierce
intelligence, offering both deep inquiry and descriptive strength, swirling simultaneously
lyrically surreal and direct language into a series of sharp, stunning
observations. “I liked my cheek,” he writes, to close “Ferns, Fingers, Gorges,”
“against his baby. I put my tongue on Time, / I cry and crouch in her
blindswarm, / my vaulting lady.” Or, as he writes to close the short sequence “Self-Portrait
as Absence of Days,” composed “In Memory of ‘Annah Sobelman” (a poet I am sad
to discover died in 2017 [see my review of her 2012 poetry title here]):
Comes the moment when, Flashlight
dead,
You cannot go farther into the
abandoned mine,
You cannot return:
There was no cry of “fire in the
hole.”
But there is always fire in the
Hole.
