THE D I A L

Chris Nealon

The Song Cave

2012

The small-talk had turned to surplus wealth

The purpose of society is mutual aid There, was that so hard? In the general prologue In the rhythm of the saints Im only the narrator, I cant be everywhere at once The things you never say to your friends because we only speak through gesture putty but the glory motivating it to move well Never to forget your friends Yes and hunchbacked like a scholar on the train to Baltimore I find myself triumphantly scrawling VEBLEN! all in caps at the top of the page

wanting you to share it with Anne your poem about the restoration of the world fluorescent yellow vests that crumple into hours of the day And Joshua

choppy water bouncing me toward Marco Polo How I think of you! Installed in the customs house and barring the way -- somewhere off to my right the grave of Ezra Pound Waves against the hull like knuckles on a door -- a world built out of echoes of itself that gradually assume substantiality I tell you after a week in Italy you really really want to see a painting of the Buddha Oh and Juliana if you read this I tried to be a peasant looking at a picture of an angel but I couldnt believe in love until I got to the creation of the animals how they launch into life from out of the void, blind all of history ahead of them and thats when I thought of you like do those robins ever settle in at night and just think, Best. Nest. Ever Thats the subject of this poem

I had a dream it went like this time was discovering itself my flight was delayed I urgently needed to join you but there was nothing to do but wait I fiddled with Grindr a bit -- I wrote a little poem Arizona bright light country I avoided, megachurches, chain hotels & Concourse B the furtive the religiously punished male gazes disappointed anguished arrogant the arrogance of men whove really only managed to be born into the hegemon & the kind-hearted faces, the ones that make you wonder what protects them one of them is fifty feet away another ones three miles from here another one is leaping free right now in fury with a spiral kick somewhere outside America is a different poetry

lusher maybe or grounded in a velvet-fisted sense of words and bodies tugged at astrally but not for me I turned that software on in Phoenix I turned it off in Washington -- Id been thinking about the charming pomposity of French Maoists so I called it P U R et D U R Id been feeling bad about the way my fear of anger had so poorly equipped me for any kind of revolution -the way I always want to skip Joan Jett and get right to the Luther Vandross Id been thinking about how my anger was perpetual and how only my friends could help me find the context for it And I saw that in another kind of poem, right now would be the moment for a turn to the objective doves flushed out from under grasses Instead I twisted the dial

-- trapped in another airport Along a winding concourse there was hideous public sculpture and an afterthought of seasonal prints depicting young boys holding gourds Overhead from several monitors at once I heard the echoing voice of a perky blond Cerberus advising us to barricade our rooms -A fighter jet was landing on a dollar bill Outside clouds serene Qaddafi had just been killed The voice was taking credit My headphones couldn't drown it out it was addressing me and what it was saying was, Youll never be ready never be ready to join your friends I understood that everyone around me was waiting for flights that never departed that in fact the business travelers reading the paper and the families in Qdoba were the dead like my father recently dead --

I couldnt turn the dial I reached for my notebook I hunched over and wrote, In a complicated cross-breeze Kept from where the tides go Two times you appeared to me Once as a woodcutter with an axe about his neck Later unencumbered as a boy Marin in halogen A black security cloak around the graphics ranch And in a passage commonly referred to as the physical interlude I saw your body in Ireland I saw your body at the dawn of time punished for picking that lemon Or in some other limbo Come to me! Youve already come You with your tremors and your three-toed cane late America

You with your unmerciful athletic beauty O in the peaks of the Trinity Alps O in the grave with thee happily to lie -- I put down my pen and I knew the title of the poem would have to be taken from Thomas Nashe that I should call it S P A R RO W - B L A S T E D after what did he say being blighted with a mysterious power of whose existence one is skeptical -- power like sorrow But what a rake that Nashe was! The cops went after him in 1590 just for calling his girlfriend Frankie in a poem -- I read it softly out loud a few times to test the cadences I mixed them in with what was on my headphones Trina was singing all my niggers jump around

and the song was so good I ended up in that moment where I wonder if its ok for me to be a nigger, you know? never whiter than at that moment The way straight people in the 90s used to ask me if they could be queer I just dont know the answer to that question Gradually I realized the other travelers were staring at me the dead who had been white and the dead who had been black My blood ran cold The voice on the monitor had turned its gaze upon me too I laid my pen in the fold of my notebook slowly I removed my headphones Id never felt such shame The voice said, You can go now

Before I tell you what I found let me mention what my friends were up against First: other poets the ones whove always said its arrogant to have a politics the ones who worry that were going to spoil the last untainted thing Then: the police bearing down on them on campus later massed against them in the squares Finally capital unconcerned with poetry at least as long as poetry never became a metaphor for fighting back For years this meant my poems would settle on a mixture of defiance and wistfulness Even on the plane or in the tunnel or however it was I finally got to the Plaza del Sol I could only write like this I wrote,

Alone behind a blind I watch the very rich emerge at night Left-wing homos! Trapped between the manifesto and the novel of manners There are like six of us illusory power / of colored vapor / to dissolve the material world Cheap-ass zooms and cross-fades how they carol to you all adventure season, calling come to Bali But you only get as far as the edge of the west Stockboys clearing out the inventory / marsh-weed swaying / the wires in your jacket starting to show Then you end up a minute or two ahead of the language I mean it took English like two hundred years to come up with I know, right? And how long will that last As long as the summer of Stieg Larsson Hours, seasons poetry doing its thing

* That one had no title -- what would you call it? How we went down to defeat in our poems -- later how we didnt Or in cafs youd listen to the outlines of a conversation and think, first date? Job interview? -- then youd realize, actually theyre working out a theory of value a horrible one So this one guy says to his frat brother, if this place goes to hell? I am outta here Meaning earth And Im supposed to be like oh, hes not so bad, hes just a fiscal conservative How did I get to this place? Writing in my handbook while the kids are in the streets Theres a dial I can twist in two directions labeled M O R E L I K E O V I D M O R E L I K E B O E T H I U S

I tried out conceptual art I tried a sorry bumbling metta for Glenn Beck But I kept going back to the troubadours Later in the same caf this other guy was like dude I am so glad Im not in Egypt right now Can that really be months ago? Turned into a serpent / reborn as a tree Speak to me, Philosophy! Its funny weather Warm for Brumaire * -- that one I called THE KIND|THE BLUE because only Couperin was enough to keep at bay that day the sense I was alone -But that was an eternity ago Let me tell you what I found

A breeze a cough And I was in a landscape like a landscape painting we all were an extensive one and we could move around -Someone turned the dial and time passed back and forth through seasons, winter summer summer winter spring fall winter fall it settled on fall -like little tercets everybody staggered into place there were groves a forest cities on a plain A corner of the plaza had been labeled THE YEAR IN IDEAS Lisa scrawled continuous language is the commons

Someone else had left a note that said, Dont tase me bro! And indeed police were circling the area But on every branch of every tree were candy wrappers fortune cookies

Colliss read, Vancouvers got your back Nathans was a poem from Milan Il giorni sono scuri ma noi abbiamo il fuoco And this is not to mention the passenger pigeons But after the fashion of the courteous medieval poets I will spare you Here I omit three thousand others who attended the bout Ill pass over Andrew Kenower saying raise yr hand if this is the most alive youve ever felt Ill skip the part where little Sashas holding up a sign for plutocrats that reads YOU ARE MEAN and I will have to cut you in half And finally Ill leave it to you to puzzle over the masked figures in the alleys leading to the plaza Theyd been stenciling T H E D I A L E C T I C all in caps

but ran off halfway through the word * Reader you know the story of the bloody battles that unfolded after You know it better than I do, since they havent happened yet You know the stories of internal struggle botched analysis and tactical defeat Youll have seen the faces of the women thinking, really? I still have to remind you not to grope me in the commune? Youll have noticed that the names are generally the names of white people But none of this will make me wish I were with you any less As I fade into time as I enter my era -Ive accepted that my mind works best when imitating vantages of paradise With you in the square that day I saw the thimble where the mind is Like the briefest waterfall behind my eyes I saw the ocean where the thimble was

And on the final page of the bright red book that dropped into the plaza I read the words, true freedom will always lie in the ability to make friends * I felt the scratch of wool My dream was ending Lisa Geoffrey dialing time around an axis Thank you Names of months the names of years I felt the warmth of Rob beside me And reaching down into the world as it took shape again I felt what were they? Right. The dollars in my pocket.

The Dial is the twenty fourth book from The Song Cave. It is printed in an edition of 100 copies. This is number:

Epigraph from Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day thesongcave@gmail.com www.the-song-cave.com 2012 Christopher Nealon All rights reserved The Song Cave is edited by Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal