Read an Excerpt
Syllabus of Errors
Poems
By Troy Jollimore PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7344-9
CHAPTER 1
ON BIRDSONG
If my readers wish to understand bird-music, they must assume that birds are not automatic musical boxes, but sound-lovers, who cultivate the pursuit of sound-combinations as an art, as truly as we have cultivated our arts of a similarly aesthetic character. This art becomes to many of them a real object of life, no less real than the pursuit of food or the maintenance of a family.
— WALTER GARSTANG, SONGS OF THE BIRDS (1922)
ON BIRDSONG
Poison, in proportion, is medicinal.
Medicine, ill-meted, can be terminal.
Brute noise, deftly repeated, becomes musical.
An exit viewed from elsewhere is an entrance.
The conjuror entrances a vast audience.
The hymn that's resurrected from the hymnal
aspires, as we wish to, to the spiritual,
but is slow to disentangle from the sensual.
The evening light, refracted, terminates the day.
(A faction is a fraction of an integral.)
What would we say to the cardinal or jay,
given wings that could mimic their velocities?
How many wintery ferocities
are encompassed in their shrill inhuman canticles?
INVENTORY
Take inventory. Invent a story
about the people you have hurt.
Begin with yourself. The harm I've done
comes on this journey with me. He walks
ahead on the trail, or follows a dozen
paces behind. At night we stop
together. I try not to feel ashamed
of him, his decaying robes, his loathsome,
unwashed feet, so much like mine.
We don't talk much. But two nights ago,
the campfire dying between us, I found
I could no longer stifle my rage, I wanted
to be rid of him so badly, and so
I mustered my anger and said, You only
get seven pairs of shoes to carry you
through this life, and you've already used up
four. Silence. The call of a whippoorwill
in the fields. At last he looked up.
That might be. But know that I'm willing to go
barefoot at the end, if that's what it takes.
ACHE AND ECHO
1
Anything can be beautiful: a discarded
Taco Bell wrapper, an industrial park,
a strip mall, a bloodstain, a bruise, a corpse:
you just need to see it from the right angle,
in the right light, and in a spirit
of equanimity, open-mindedness,
and receptivity. Isn't this
what twentieth-century artists were trying
to tell us? No, they were trying to tell us
that anything could be art. As for beauty,
they held it in contempt, they thought beauty
made us bad people, blind to the plight
of the poor, to the possibility of change.
That wasn't their nuttiest notion, either.
Not by a longshot. But me, I can't
give up my beauty, I'm an addict, a beauty
fiend; if you want to take it away
you're going to have to pry it from my cold dead hands.
2
Give back the ache that echoed in
my heart. Return to me the ache
and the echo of the ache I felt
in Orchid Park. Send back to me
the loose-strung ache that echoed in
the ark that is my heart. Retrace
the arc a happy heart might make.
Sing back to me the song we sang
in the outer dark, the art we make
of the ache we felt when we traced the arc
of the last falling star to fall.
And stir me, stir me with the spoon
you used to hide the moon. Then stir
the echo of my ache. My melody
has fallen out of tune.
3
One: what pleases, what disgusts,
is only skin deep. Like the beast who becomes
a handsome man at the end of the film.
Two: 'tis thinking makes it so.
What troubles is in the beholder's eye.
Or should that be the beholden?
Three: it was born from the womb of death,
or so it is said. You have met its brothers
skulking in the bushes with their video recorders.
Four: it is what truth is, where that
is all we know, and all we need
to know. Pretty is as privilege does.
Like a man who will happily murder a thousand
songbirds, if need be,
just to nab one perfect specimen.
4
At which point it is obligatory
to make mention of Pope Urban VIII,
who had the songbirds in the Vatican
gardens slaughtered, to create
a quiet sanctuary in which a
great and moral man
might suitably reflect
on such topics
as beauty, mercy, and grace.
5
Does every man, handsome or no,
contain a hidden beast? Is that
why pretty girls won't meet my eye?
Whoever it was thought to install
that scatter of houses, that precise
and poignant human outpost, in
that hilly spot beneath the dark
erasure we call sky, should really
be commended: such a perfect
counterpoint, such a revealing
object lesson in the plight
of mortal aspirations in
the face of the indifferent. Not
the pain of being, but the pain
of being some particular body,
of dragging a narrative behind you,
like a swimmer tangled up
in heavy nets, feeling the ocean,
its whole weight, beneath him. Similar
to sitting on a bench named for
some fallen hero or forgotten
poet and wishing one of those flare-winged
dashes of unabashed color, whose names
you have tried to learn but can never quite
remember, would pause and plummet
in mid-bombardment and alight
on your outstretched, expectant hand,
on your shoulder, on your tongue. Stay
awhile, as Faust said to his life,
you are so beautiful.
ON THE ORIGINS OF THINGS
Everyone knows that the moon started out
as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar
flare that fled that hellish furnace
and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended
between the planets. But did you know
that anger began as music, played
too often and too loudly by drunken musicians
at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles
evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness
from misunderstanding? As for the dominant
thesis regarding the origin of love, I
abstain from comment, nor will I allow
myself to address the idea that dance
began as a kiss, that happiness was
an accidental import from Spain, that the ancient
game of jump-the-fire gave rise
to politics. But I will confess
that I began as an astronomer — a liking
for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable
things, a hand stretched always toward
the furthest limit — and that my longing
for you has never taken me far
from that original desire, to inscribe
a comet's orbit around the walls
of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.
CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT
... lyrebirds in the adjacent New England National Park were found to have flutelike elements in their song, a sound not heard in other populations of superb lyrebirds. Further analysis of the song showed that the phrase contained elements of two popular tunes of the 1930s, "Mosquito Dance" and "The Keel Row." — DAVID ROTHENBERG, WHY BIRDS SING
Reason informs us that birdsong is sublime
but can't be beautiful: beauty is conferred
solely by operations of the human mind.
Meanwhile, from that low-hanging branch, the lyrebird
is waging an ongoing, spirited battle
against philosophy. Its melodious rebuttals
owe a little something, I've just realized,
to "That'll Be the Day," as immortalized
by Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Tell me, is
a song a living thing? Does a song possess a shelf life?
A half-life? Will your favorite song enjoy an afterlife?
Do you have songbirds in your pockets? Is
there time for one last harvest? Would you like to file
an objection once the lyrebird is done with his?
HOMER
Schliemann is outside, digging. He's not
not calling a spade a spade.
The stadium where the Greeks once played
used to stand on this very spot.
Each night, Penelope, operating
in mythical time, unspools the light
gray orb Schliemann has just unearthed. Come daylight,
her hands will re-stitch it. The suitors sigh, waiting.
And each night I'd watch as my hero curled
himself round home plate, as if he were going
to bat for me. And I'd hold my breath, knowing
a strong enough shot might be heard round the world.
One must imagine Penelope.
One must imagine Penelope happy.
One must imagine Schliemann excavating
the dugouts and outfields of Troy, carbon-dating
the box score stats and the ticket stubs
he pulls from the lurid dirt. He rubs
the remains of Achilles' rage on his white shirt.
What does not kill you can still hurt.
Penelope's suitors are striking out,
one after another. Their sad swings and misses.
They can't even get to first base. She'll cut
the stitches once more, then blow them all kisses.
Odysseus won't care that the orb is undone.
He'll take a swing at it with all his might.
The ball takes flight. Odysseus takes flight.
It feels to Penelope like he's been gone
since the dawn of mankind, but he's already zoomed
round third and flies like an arrow toward home,
as the unearthly orb trails its guts in the air —
the yarn fanning out like Penelope's hair —
not knowing yet whether to fall foul or fair.
ORIOLE
A bend in the river.
A flaw in the surface.
How many continents
has this lone oriole
crossed to come balance
on our sagging clothesline,
and what urgent thing
is he trying to tell us?
That those who could translate
his song are lagging
a thousand miles
behind? Or that those
who can speak both his tongue
and ours have not yet
been born, that we will go
into the ground
and a thousand years pass
before their eyes open,
the wayward atoms
of our nests and tongues
having been dispersed,
reassigned, and repurposed
into their bright,
unforeseeable bodies?
PAST IMPERFECT
Because my image
of it is flickering,
wavering like a bad connection,
I can tell I'm not
the only one dreaming
of the Halifax Public Gardens tonight.
There must be a thousand
brains, at least,
plugged into this portal, sharing this channel,
this wavelength,
judging by the way
the edges slant off into soft static fuzz,
as if the whole picture
were under attack
by swarms of gray midges, or viewed through a lens
of murky lake water,
and even the stuff
in the center, on which I train my attention —
the ducks, like overstuffed
businessmen after a meal,
the pond with its crisp skim of scum
that has gathered in sheltered
pockets tucked close to
the shore — these too warp and bend, as if
I were viewing a movie
shot with equipment
salvaged from somewhere in Eastern Europe
after some war or
collapse, or filmed
by a perpetually distracted and, to judge
by the general coloration
of what I can see,
terminally disenchanted cinema
tographer. Still, if I
focus, I can just
barely make out the shack where they sell
the ice cream and chips,
hastily sketched
like a hermit's hut in a Japanese painting,
and as the scroll
unfurls, if I turn my head,
that part of me that moves freely
through time detaches
itself from the part
of me that is pinned to the present, fetches
the bag that he packed
last night, and sets off
walking, casually, through the gardens
on his way to somewhere
even more distant:
the kitchen of my childhood, perhaps,
where my mother scrapes
the inside of a white plastic
bowl with a red-and-white plastic utensil
and stares out the window
as if she is trying
to imagine the set of white rooms in which
I now live. Or is he
going even further
back, to see her before I existed,
when she was a child,
not yet rendered mortal
by the sickness I would one day once
have been? Try
as I might, I can't say
for sure. I only know that he goes
and I stay, and that
the distance between
his going and my staying is the distance
between two adjacent
piano keys, two
consecutive letters of the alphabet,
the distance between
a word and its
translation into a now defunct language,
this distance that wants
nothing more than to stand
in the way of my loving this world, this world
that, though it wants nothing
more than to fling back
against me the sad siege engines of my
incessant attempts
at love,
I love.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Syllabus of Errors by Troy Jollimore. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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