MARTY CAIN
from THE PRELUDE
I'm inside The Prelude. It's pretty hot in here
By the lake, by the river, in the dry slightly torn pages
That some guy keeps turning, the oil of skin and ash
Marking the archive. It hurts when he writes
When he presses the pen into my chest and ink pours
Out from the hole. But there's sun in here. There's trout in here.
And when I look into the water, I see my face.
IT IS THE GOAL OF THE MENACE TO ABSOLVE US OF MEANING
what.
moss.
grew.
from.
you
a host in a rock of BOVINE CONSCIENCE a celestial atom
under the tongue of how the stars slid across the room &
formed tangible lines on my chest, SURFACE BETRAYAL! you
have to close your eyes to see the complex webs of intestinal
longing, pay what you want, stand where you want, blue air
thru your hair and access the server on your personal device, a
trillium seal, a tulip we're after, a fern we swallow, we compost
our sadness until the outline changes and I'm in the basement
with the jug in my hand––––––
to
have
grown
up
again
TO BE RELENTLESS AND FURTIVE IN OUR GAZE! a glacial
shiver a red shag-carpeted coffin making its way down the river
through cyclical gaps in the nimble current, screaming at a
waterfall and expecting a response. I agree w/ the wind in me
and the needle out of me the broken window we swam into the
foundation of the abandoned utility shed hung by the lord of
capital on the granite hill, we kissed under asbestos with blue
shivering lips. TO HAVE GROWN UP AGAIN. To return to
silence and digital meadows with the innocence of a headless
dove who brays her way into experiential loss. I was here once
before in this text before you. I swallowed tadpoles and swam
with no ambivalence, a footless swain on a bermless hillock.
The brain of a worm and the wine gone through me.
SCAN. OVER. OPEN. WATER.
Each June I was plagued by the feeling that I was in fact already
dead, a fecund corpse making its way through the yellowy alley
of days... I fell asleep one night and dreamed my chest became a
field of wheat with apple trees growing from each of my nipples,
my belly-button a small pond in which sunfish swam... There was
a man ploughing the field, singing to himself under his breath
and I could barely hear him over the sound of the motor, he
turned at a corner, turned once more, and then saw my face and
stopped the engine. His face was a smaller version of my own,
looking back, sort of smiling, almost laughing. I was ecstatic,
permeable, and dead, and I was the Sun.
AND
LIGHT
POURED
FROM MY
EYES
AND PAINTED
THE SOIL
I put my hand through the garden to reach the other side. I learned that it had no ending, no
second side; it was a mossy crystal; it was a hive against dualism; it was a surface through
which Time shined and crossed other surfaces.
I thought of this as I was standing at the bank of the river, surrounded by garments –
denim, corduroy, pleather, tweed – seeing my reflection and hearing myself (the wind thru
the ferns like an Aeolian harp).
Does death, or this page, have a surface? Can a corpse have an ending?
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI ARE FLOATING DEAD IN THE RIVER AND I PROD
THEM GENTLY WITH A STICK
Am I PACIFYING TRANSPARENT LUNG or do
my contours shift into strident vengeance
against the mouse exiting the fridge halo and
crossing the porch and into the crack of
sweltering crawlspace and onto the lawn where
it enters from the hole BENEATH THE
COMPOST the worms enter and lose their
bodies and gain their bodies and
the
striated
garden
on
a
moon
itself
the cultural lawn made a measure of how we
approach semantic messiness to pull from roots
and kill what's unwieldy and if we have a mess at
all it's in SMALLISH CONTROLLABLE
PATCHES an ivy a briar an authoritarian
herbaceous layer a golden retriever gleefully
shitting WHILE ITS HAUNCHES TWITCH and
sipping Twisted Tea as the days run by
we
gave
the
chickens
human
names
Dorothy Sidney Little Lucia or Lucy or Daddy's
Little Layer or Bertha Roberta or My Breakfast
Maker Purveyor of Shit and Calcified Fragments
a Language like the Remnant Smear and
Protruding Straw that Clings to the Egg
that
clings
to
the
egg
Wordsworth's brain buoyant in fluid, the jar on
the shelf with light shining through. I dump it onto
the operating table; it makes a "splat" and releases
liquid. I ready the knives. What's it thinking when
I finger the creases, what isolated universe in that
mass, absorbent and fresh, the foam leaving our
mouths when we touch the page and enter the
hive. I stab the cerebellum and relish the breeze. I
do some digging, I spread the folds. There's a Fitbit
embedded within the pink; it measures the precise
speed of the ambulatory lyric and provides an
output of the QUANTIFIABLE AFFECTIVE
RESPONSE to the epiphanic gesture that sputters
the line, permeates the meadow, rides the wind
like a cremated child into the cave where the
prophetic words are written in a youthful cursive,
neon green; the feeling machine uploads the data.
It glowers in hardware and the centuries pool. I
touch the brain and close my eyes, hear country
music softly in the frontal cortex. I slice the brain
and make a liverwurst sandwich.
Marty Cain is the author of Kids of the Black Hole (2017) and The Wound Is (Not) Real: A Memoir (forthcoming 2020), both from Trembling Pillow Press, as well as Four Essays (Tammy, 2019), a hybrid nonfiction chapbook. Individual works appear, or are forthcoming, in Fence, Best American Experimental Writing, Poetry Daily, Sink Review, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi, and is a PhD candidate at Cornell, where he is at work on a dissertation on poetry community and rural geographies. In Ithaca, New York, he co-edits Garden-Door Press and helps run the Party Fawn Reading Series.