The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (7 page)

where the wind in its many directions is directionless

and impossible to put your back to. He said you'd been living

rough for a while, he wouldn't go to the wake at the bar,

it was too much sadness. That day I'd walked the beach,

picking up shells, their spirals of Archimedes and logarithmic

spirals, principle of proportional similarity that protects

the creature and makes it beautiful. Sandpipers materialized

through tears the wind made, chasing fringes of the rising tide.

At first there were two, then three appeared, but when I began

to pay attention I realized they were everywhere.

MAN IS A RATIONAL ANIMAL

It was the same life, more or less,

yet suddenly a flight itinerary represented

the most tangible indication of my fate.

From the air I saw mountains, forest,

lakes in which dissolved the notion

of ownership, and the sweet little Beechcraft

wagged its tail on landing

in a crosswind. My fellow passengers

claimed their long guns, carried them in cases

like guitars out of the terminal.

Darkness accompanied the second segment,

the Dash 8 traversing the southwest

in high cloud and swinging out over

the Atlantic. Lights might have been

ships, or islands, towns someone

from there could identify. But I wasn't from there.

Where land ended

and the water began was indiscernible,

though I was not afraid. Because I didn't know

what I was seeing.

THE LIVING OPTION

Having crawled from the desert

of the 1970s already greying a little, impatient,

with physical inconsistencies, crying

bosons and fermions, crying out

the four forces, calling the unified

from the unnamed wastes, it saw in our homes

a vacancy, began repurposing the furniture.

Already it seems never to have been otherwise.

When I think of it my atoms are as the weakening

euro, the housing bubble, too many parts

in search of the one part, it's a joke.

It's a giant scientific instrument outside Geneva.

An argument that knows not me

or my siblings, that has no dominion

over me yet enters my thinking

and undermines it. Then all of my theories

seem raised by the state, fearful,

acting out inappropriately.

                                               I went to see you

on an airplane and on an airplane

was I medicated amid the transatlantic

generation and its complimentary

beverages. People of the light

flying over the living waters. My body,

belted in, a joke, and the heap we call

a mind also, each atom an engine schematic,

a backup system sequence or a prayer

from childhood though I'd lost my faith,

that's how weak I am.

But in the cockpit, threefold,

the Great Invisible Virgin Spirit was incorruptible

in my sedation and in the cabin

the new cashless society

and off the wings degrees

of freedom.

                     No patterns emerged

between us, it was new

each time, each event its own, with fresh

odds. We honoured the principle.

Though our creditors didn't see it that way.

They filled our past

with their notices. Their notices

were our bridesmaids. When I think of it

all my atoms are past-due notices

but with the option to consolidate as one large

debt. The market writes its autobiography

on minds and bodies, my own and those

of my siblings. Are we not innocent

with respect to it? Our credit rating is

a joke, our homes venture with us

through the rental agencies.

                                                  We went west

before the west dried up. Between Calaway Park

and Dead Man's Flats the cumulonimbus

extended their funnels, melancholy

and inquisitive, they love

the earth so much. Long-haul truckers,

shepherds of product, blew past

on deadline into the storm, tweaking

in their cabs, each cloaked in his machine

with a handgun for an angel

in the lots and roadside pullouts.

If you can't see it, it has

the advantage.

                          If you can't see it,

it's philosophy. A game between us

and the nature of things. People of intent in the valley

of the shadow of. One hundred metres underground,

a divine heart races in the apparatus

and soon we will hear its voice. It will speak out

from the invisible orders not as an attribute,

a quality or quantity, but a truth perfected

in all the ineffable places. A live

hypothesis. A supersymmetry.

Is it possible to love something like this?

I prayed it might happen to me.

NOTES

“Fables of the Reconstruction” is the title of R.E.M.'s third album.

The title “When Asked Why He'd Been Talking to Himself, Pyrrho Replied He Was Practicing to Be a Nice Fellow” is adapted, along with a line in the poem, from Diogenes Laertius's
Life of Pyrrho.

The World of “The World” is a cruise liner of 165 luxury apartments owned by a community of residents who live on board as it continuously sails the globe. The poem also draws from Ludwig Wittgenstein's
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

“Rothko via Muncie, Indiana” includes lines quoted and adapted from a letter written by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb to
The New York Times
in 1943. The poem was inspired also by
Middletown,
a 1982 documentary series set in Muncie and produced by Peter Davis.

“I Let Love In” is the title of a song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

The title “All That Is Certain Is Night Lasts Longer Than the Day” is from W. G. Sebald's
The Rings of Saturn,
translated by Michael Hulse.

“Forty” is for David Seymour.

Since “Life Is a Carnival” was written, a third member of The Band, Levon Helm, has followed Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. The title is that of a song by The Band.

“Roof Repair and Squirrel Removal” contains a line from Walter Benjamin's “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

“Lord of Fog” includes a phrase from Shakespeare's
Richard II.

“Darklands” is the title of the Jesus and Mary Chain's second album.

“Spiral” is in memory of Jim Coates.

“The Living Option” adapts a line from William James's “The Will to Believe” and uses a refrain from “The Second Discourse of the Great Seth,” included in
The Nag Hammadi Scriptures,
edited by Marvin Meyer.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the editors of the journals and anthologies in which these poems, in earlier versions, first appeared:

Poetry

“Bitumen”

The Nation

“Ode,” “The Corners,” “Trouble Light”

Riddle Fence

“Rental Car,” “Fables of the Reconstruction,” “A Western,”

“Affirmations,” “The National Gallery,” “The Living Option”

The Paris Review

“Museum of the Thing,” “Lord of Fog,” “Darklands,”

“Museum of the Thing II”

Eighteen Bridges

“Rothko via Muncie, Indiana”

The Humber Literary Review

“Interior,” “A Good Hotel in Rotterdam,” “Prospect”

Magma

“When Asked Why He'd Been Talking to Himself, Pyrrho Replied He Was Practicing to Be a Nice Fellow,” “Your News Hour Is Now Two Hours”

Vallum

“Via”

Room

“I Let Love In,” “Lift Up Your Eyes,” “All That Is Certain Is Night

Lasts Longer Than the Day,” “Sault Ste. Marie,” “Against Lyric”

Brick

“Keebleville,” “Forty”

Studio
(online)

“Birth of the Rifle”

The Dark Horse

“Roof Repair and Squirrel Removal”

The Walrus

“Life Is a Carnival”

Cordite Poetry Review

“For the Ski Jump at Canada Olympic Park, Calgary”

Tag: Canadian Poets at Play

“The Midlands”

Poetry London

“The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out,” “Conversion,” “Spiral”

The New Quarterly

“Spiral”

Hazlitt
(online)

“Conversion”

A significant number of these poems previously appeared in
The Living Option: Selected Poems.
Sincere thanks to Neil Astley and Bloodaxe Books.

The Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, the University of St. Andrews, and Barns-Graham Charitable Trust provided crucial financial and professional support toward the completion of this book.

I'm deeply grateful to Jonathan Galassi for his encouragement and his faith in this book. And to Sarah MacLachlan, Kelly Joseph, and everyone at House of Anansi, for their work and care.

As always, to my family, who are in every word.

Thanks to Ken Babstock, Kevin Connolly, Michael Helm, Michael Redhill, Christopher Richards, Damian Rogers, and David Seymour, for their insight and generosity as readers.

And especially, to James Langer.

A Note About the Author

Karen Solie
was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Her collections of poems include
Short Haul Engine,
Modern and Normal,
Pigeon,
and
The Living Option.
She has received the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry.
The Living Option
was named one of the best poetry books of 2013 by the
National Post
(Toronto) and
The Independent
(London). Solie lives in Toronto. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

ALSO BY
KAREN SOLIE

SHORT HAUL ENGINE

MODERN AND NORMAL

PIGEON

THE LIVING OPTION:

SELECTED POEMS

 

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