The Stoppages Tree (Julia Guerin)
This poem was inspired by Marcel Duchamp's concept of "Stoppages." A "stoppage" is like a measuring stick, only each stoppage is of a different length. Each section of the poem is a "stoppage," a different measurement of experience. My daughter, Julia, composed this painting based on language from the poem, and using images of "stoppages" from Duchamp's work.
1
I am seduced by the stoppage of time,
like Bruckner with his endless symphonies
pushing back the inevitable
silence of the unattended moment.
For the next ten seconds nobody dies.
Late afternoon—the maple goes darker,
cell by cell darker in the slant sunlight.
I can’t be sure the leaves were just as red
ten years ago, or that John Milton’s blood
wasn’t a fraction thicker than my own.
2
I wield shears
beneath honey locust—
tenant-neglected,
grown to ground—
scissor and step back,
watch the fluttering
stem-bound leaves
follow the branches down.
I bundle new deadwood;
three green needles,
like fangs, guard each twig;
black bark thorns,
driven by the gathered droop
of leaves being lifted,
pierce through leather
the flesh of my palms.
My mind, cuspidate
in my fingers, moves
through the patterns of thorn
proliferating pain.
3
The sound of somebody
dropping the doorknocker
just once . . . I flee
unremembered phantasms,
hold eyes closed tightly—
tongue like paper—reach
for the glass of water, seem
the glass in the dark
and dilate waking. Setting
the glass off the table
edge, grope, settle it on
the corner. More sleep.
Go to sleep. Eyelids pinch
a thread of sunlight spinning
through the curtain dust.
The radiator knocks . . .
just once. Vagueness spreads
an exit through counted time
past another me I meet
fading, questioned in sodden
stillness and crepuscule.
Quick manufacture of deep
inconsequence—someone not
I overhears singing I have
not composed, conversation
rendered without regret,
the voice of the homunculus
at the core of the blood cell
and metaphor. I’m billiard-
brained! Blood and ivory balls
percuss on clipped green
and blue crystal; in each
sphere a ray is loosed
to sublimate the ricochet.
The angel’s share offered
and unattained (air breathed
in sleep), a rarification
of spirit I can’t sniff, taste,
pour into existence, but
think is a wonder of wines.
4
What interior thing sleeps with memory,
knows the certain locus of nothing
and the time of any new thing only
in the night-light of its circumscription?
What does this slumbering watcher feel
waking beside a lover of years past
who’s discovered herself under wild skies,
in a land contoured by the height of sand?
His eyes pinched, his ears stopped,
his dream-worn senses insinuate
the wonder of that endlessness
and expatiate like a ticking clock
on what he thinks he knows of his own death.
Seeking out the reality three
dimensions deep within himself, his mind,
that strict lump that can explain a bird,
that cagey bastard, calmly discourses
on phantom and fading gods, while his warming
beauty evaporates and mingles with his breath
ecstatically generating weather.
5
It was perfectly smooth, the earth
I woke to—featureless, without
mountain, grass, sand, bird, lion—
skin-tight, a bald head.
Balloon on which plaster is packed,
this world before a world; I stood
in dark after moonless dusk, and
said, nonetheless, this is my world.
I recognized the horizon,
the leavening of gravity,
the proximity of sky.
A fit of rain sprayed my face.
The lazy Susan landscape threw me
down. My first sweetheart limped
up on the brace of her polio.
Naked, I rolled on my belly.
I woke, the nixie gone, salt water
on my lips. The moon rose, pulling
water back into a great wave,
holding it back above my head.
6
Johann Sebastian Bach is
walking
into this room.
Buddha croaks
and Bach
still
walks into this room.
Walk the road,
stop, cough,
crack the bone
of sound—
Bach is walking
into this room
whirling
a grager.
Through stained glass,
scan
berry trees
and sun swizzle—
Bach is waltzing
into
this
room.
Clap your eyes!
Johann Sebastian
Bach is
walking
into
this room.
7
A creaking ecstatically extended
wakes me early in the night.
Winter air binds board in stone (a
hairline runs down the façade,
splitting bricks, parting mortar from its
hold) one more fraction of an inch.
Prone, I imagine the house shift
off its load-bearing edge
and topple into the basement.
When will it stop, the house grind
out its antagonism of stress and nail
to silent, unlevel motionlessness?
Or will I stop waking to this house?
8
Water on the beach
and the pebbled surf—
the air is full
of milk. A hand
touches me; there
I hate, but not
the hand. Nature
is the second
displeasure, when
the first tips
the world and drinks.
Round, hard, the pebble,
and black. Not
much else. Wet,
it shines. Dry,
dull. I keep it
in a dish of green
water. The blunted
shard of glass,
the charred stick,
the aluminum bent
to a coin, the
dimensionless dream
of sand, calm
if I look at them.
As I age it is not
that I like people
less, but have less
to do with them.
I can say the one
thing—about the pebble—
but the other comes
in white noise,
water on the beach.
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