The 90-odd new poems in Window With A Train Attached come from a certain edge of existence. These last 8 years have not been easy. My internal and external worlds had collapsed. These poems speak of that. In words, images, rhythms, a state of condition of existence. They attempt to catch the essence of a loss, of a rather congenitally well-developed sense of inadequacy. There are, for instance, quite a few animal poems in this collection (East of Eden, Shark, Taiga), all of which seek to establish a connection with their outsiderness. With their isolation.
The loss I am talking about is not entirely to do with personal trauma. It often finds a kind of solace in the perspective itself, the sad beauty of the transience of everything that makes us–and the trees and the stars–vanish all the time, even as we shop. Or joke. Or breathe. The wasabi of things. The face of death staring out of the most beautiful things. In this sense, the collection is the compilation of many speeches of one long farewell. Perhaps to the trauma, too.
This Moth. This Lamp
Gathered from Carbon, the kimono sleeves
Of your wings span a million years*.
In a house with a few books(and little else for thieves),
You are vanished forests circling my lamp.
Egg, larva, chrysalis: truth reveals its face in stages.
Then at last an imago flying from flower to flower
To find you are not a butterfly by a whisker. But beautiful
For all that, fluttering like a stamp in the air, embossing the ages.
The scales on your wings are fallen from the eyes of a god, poorer
For his vision. What else explains the lamp, lit like a pyre?
You have seen your father burn in lesser flames. Yet you fly
Through buried forest tunnels, carrying coal to the final fire.
Owl
Quiet as dust, the owl parts the leaves, scatters stars.
Wise as all the lives on earth. Death cannot improve
His chicks. He knew to hunt and kill before the day was born,
Divined a nest in the crotch of the night red as Mars.
Round-faced, round-eyed, round winged, the owl is the zero
In life’s 10. How he swivels his head like a barber’s chair.
Ears that can nearly see, eyes that can hear the shape of a squeak.
O, why does the bird look like my cat to its last hair?
There is iron in his beak, iron in his talons; who knew
These things without a heart grew from down soft as dew?
Once I froze, saw an owl swoop, rise, circle church-bound men,
Transporting a rat, his forefeet joined in prayer, to Christ in heaven.
Arrival, Victoria Terminus, Bombay
The terminus awaits the queen with each train, yet.
Across the road, the old post box, accusatory, as if I owed a debt.
I think of the letter you said you posted, long after we fought.
Twenty years late, expectant, I arrive on the hour at the spot.
