The Night Ship

Timothy Donnelly - 1969-

Roll back the stone from the sepulchre's mouth!
I sense disturbance deep within, as if some sorcery

had shocked the occupant's hand alive again, back
to compose a document in calligraphy so dragonish

that a single misstep made it necessary to stop
right then and there and tear the botched draft up,

begin again and stop, tear up again and scatter
a squall of paper lozenges atop the architecture

that the mind designs around it, assembling a city
somewhat resembling the seaport of your birth,

that blinking arrangement of towers and signage
you now wander underneath, drawn forward by the spell

of the sea's one scent, by the bell of the night ship
that cleaves through the mist on its path to the pier.

Surrender to that vision and the labor apprehensible
as you take to the streets from the refuge of a chair

so emphatically comfortable even Lazarus himself
would have chosen to remain unrisen from its velvet,

baffling the messiah, His many onlookers muttering
awkwardly to themselves, downcast till a sudden

dust devil spirals in from the dunes—a perfect excuse 
to duck back indoors. (The sand spangles their eyes,

the little airborne stones impinge upon such faces
as only Sorrow's pencil would ever dare to sketch,

and even then, it wouldn't be a cakewalk, you realize.
A dust devil at sea would be called a waterspout.)

You fear that you have been demanded into being
only to be dropped on the wintry streets of this 

imagination rashly, left easy prey for the dockside
phantoms, unwatched and unawaited, and I know 

what you mean, almost exactly. This cardboard city
collapses around us; another beautiful document

disassembles into anguish—a cymbal-clap—and we can't
prevent it. At one the wind rises, and the night ship

trembles, drowsing back into its silver cloud. At two it embarks
upon a fiercer derangement. We are in this together.

And we will find protection only on the night ship.

Driver, please. Let's slow things down. I can't endure the speed you favor, here where the air's electric hands keep charging everything, a blur of matter fogs the window and my mind to rub it. Don't look now, but the vast majority of chimpanzees on the road's soft shoulder can't determine: Which fascinates more, the thing per se or the decoration on its leaking package? How like us, they-- (The hand mistook me that arranged my being bound here, buckled. I have been mistaken, ripped from a wave of in-flight radio: wakened brutally is brutally awakened, plucked from the grip of "asleep on the slope of an open poppy." One has meant this torture for another, clearly. Do we welt the same, make similar whimper? Did he take my name? I'll take another.) it is the decoration. By which I mean, we have a lot between us. You're European, and I have been to Venice where the waters pave and they can't play tennis. Fair gondolier, it is my pleasure to confess: nor will you ever catch me in athletic dress, hunched waiting at the net for a ball knocked fast in my direction, hot with fervor to knock it back to the opposing player. It just won't do. Driver, please. I have shared with you. I have become a person. That's supposed to make it hard to hurt me. The future rises, bellows, wrinkles. I can't keep living in a cramped sedan, I won't keep living in a cramped sedan-- though you hold the road, I'll give you that. There are instances of smoke and mirror, instances of shouting fire. Though you hold the road, I'll give you that, there are instances of "sticking to it" that I can't admire, and ours isn't an adhesion I ever expect to look back on wistfully. But that's for time to decide, not me. "Just around the corner, there's a rainbow in the sky."-- Haven't you ever just had to believe it? Look, if it's a cup of coffee you're after, I bet there's someplace brilliant up ahead. I bet there's someplace right around the bend. Ash in the eye and the nose and the mouth, shit in the pants and the mouth and the hand. Hound on the back of the hand and the lap, slap on the face of the hound and the ass. Ash in the eye and the nose and the mouth, mouth on the nose on the face in the pants. Hound on the back of the hand in the lap, slap on the face of the hound in the ass. Ash in the eye and the nose and the mouth and the mouth won't stop, it comforts itself, it comforts me. Funny I keep on looking out the window, identifying even as you do this. The orchids cry that yesterday were pollen ground in the fuzz of dead-drunk bees. I will not submit to being ferried that way. Driver, please. Where to now, Tierra del Fuego? There is no travel but the travel that concludes in shrieking with abandon, is there? --No. What you need is to remember what it felt like beforehand, that emptiness. Call up pictures, melodies, etc., but part of you will resist that assistance, divide from it. Drag the edge of that memory-- yes, it's more like forgetting--across that divide, until something like a rabbit-hole opens inside you. Vanish into the hole. Vanish, it is your only opportunity. It will stun you for another minute, but when the stunning passes, you will again be nowhere, nothing, and even more at peace with it.

That fire at the mouth of the flare stack rising more than three-hundred feet above the refinery contorts as it feeds on the invisible current of methane produced by the oil's distillation process like a monster, the nonstop spasm of it lumbering upwards into the dark Newark night like a sack made of orange parachute fabric an awkward number of gorillas get it on in. I would worship it. The motion, the heat, the unapologetic knack of the element to yank the appliance plug from its outlet, filling the big blue business- suite of my head with nothing but its own wordlessness and light. Not now, not knowing what I can't unknow, but back on the grasslands before we ever came to harness it I would bow down among the seething life of that primitive interior and worship the fire taking one bright liberty after another. Done listening to fellow passengers tweaking the fine points. Done rubbing the dead end of thinking like a spent torch against the cave's painted walls to make it burn better. As the train slows down as the track curves around the body of water the fire reflects in, it is a form of worship. What is it in me that hasn't yet been killed with reason, habit, through long atrophy or copied so beyond its master it parses like the last will and testament of a moth- eaten cardigan? It dumps its nice adrenaline into my system nights I hear the crisp steps of deer on fallen leaves and stop or when looking up beneath baroque snow or when I lean over the banister along the border of a strong waterfall. All good and well. But the endless hyperactive plumage exploding from this toxic aviary, this sun of industry descended from the lightning strike, obscures its diabolism with a Vegas brightness so that what there is to fear in it instead excites me up a biochemical peak from the far side of which my own voice, grizzled with a wisdom unknown to me in waking life, reminds me of the conjuror who grew distraught because he sensed the forces he had stirred up with his art would not be mastered by it. It rattles tomorrow's paperwork where it hangs from the branches of the ancient timber trees. It messes with my reception, whereas I do not wish my reception to be messed with. It tells me to be careful with my worship—that if this, too, is a resource, then they have ways to tap it.

Poem Interrupted by Whitesnake

That agreeable feeling we haven't yet been able
   to convert into words to our satisfaction

despite several conscious attempts to do so
   might prove in the end to be nothing

more than satisfaction itself, an advanced
   new formula just sitting there waiting to be

marketed as such: Let my logo be the couch
   I can feel it pulse as the inconstant moon

to which I've come to feel attached continues to pull
   away from earth at a rate of 1.6 inches

every solar year: Let my logo be the couch
   where you merge into nights until you can't

up from the shadows of a factory warehouse
   in historic Secaucus built on top of old swamp-

land I can feel it: Let my logo be the couch
   where you merge into nights until you can't

even remember what you wanted to begin with.
   Let my slogan be the scrapes of an infinite

catalogue's pages turning over and over until you
   find it again.

                     In the air above Secaucus

a goldfinch, state bird of New Jersey, stops dead
   midflight and falls to the asphalt of a final

parking lot. Where it lands is a sacred site
   and earth is covered in them. Each is like

the single seed from which an entire wheat field
   generates. This happens inside oneself

so one believes oneself to be the owner of it.
   From the perimeter of the field one watches

as its workers undertake their given tasks:
   some cut the wheat, some bundle it; others picnic

in the shade of a pear tree, itself a form of
   labor, too, when unfolding at the worksite.

A gentle pride engilds this last observation like
   sun in September. Because this happens

inside oneself one feels one must be its owner.
   But call out to the workers, even kindly,

and they won't call back, they won't even look up
   from their work.

                        There must be someplace

else where life takes place besides in front of
   merchandise, but at the moment I can't think of it.

In the clean white light of the market I am where
   I appertain, where everything exists

for me to purchase. If there's a place of not meaning
   what you feel but at the same time meaning

every word, or almost, I might have been taught
   better to avoid it, but

                                here I go again

on my own, going down the only road I've ever
   known, trusting Secaucus's first peoples

meant something specific and true when they fused
   the words seke, meaning black, and achgook,

meaning snake, together to make a compound
   variously translated as "place where the snake

hides," "place of black snakes," or, more simply,
   "salt marsh."

                   Going moon over the gone marsh

Secaucus used to be, I keep making the same
   mistake over and over, and so do you, slowly

speeding up your orbital velocity, and thereby
   increasing your orbital radius, just like Kepler

said you would, and though I keep trying not
   to take it to heart, I can't see where else there is

to go with it. In German, a Kepler makes caps
   like those the workers wear who now bundle

twigs for kindling under the irregular gloom. One looks
   to be making repairs to a skeletal umbrella

or to the thoughts a windmill entertains by means
   of a silver fish. Off in the distance, ships tilt

and hazard up the choppy inlet. Often when I look
   at an object, I feel it looking back, evaluating

my capacity to afford it.

                               Maybe not wanting
   anything in particular means mildly wanting

whatever, constantly, spreading like a wheat
   field inside you as far as the edge of the pine

forest where the real owners hunt fox. They keep you
   believing what you see and feel are actually

yours or yours to choose. And maybe it's this
   belief that keeps you from burning it all down.

In this economy, I am like the fox, my paws no good
   for fire-starting yet, and so I scamper back

to my deep den to fatten on whatever I can find.
   Sated, safe, disremembering what it's like

up there, meaning everywhere, I tuck nose under tail
   after I exhaust the catalogues, the cheap stuff

and sad talk to the moon, including some yelping but
   never howling at it, which is what a wolf does.

Timothy Donnelly

2012

Poems

The Night Ship

More by Timothy Donnelly

The Driver of the Car Is Unconscious

By Night with Torch and Spear

Poem Interrupted by Whitesnake

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The Night Ship

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