from To Have Fallen
To calm these visits one grants the mirror a blemish
Concerning other worlds,
there is at least a terrible one
Do we swim in the font or drown here?
The older sister sensed about me
my carnation torn adulthood I mean childhood
Still gliding across the seams, watering the hall myself,
the stone rolling away
And for other people
Strange face in a normal car
This face
Sister I’m no good at impressions
Red around the edges
white
a little pile of underpants in the bathroom
Spring Not even plain objects can say
if it will be time or judgment or a third account
This season in my house
built before me in a little shrine by that strange road
Each thorn extends the itinerary from clutches
wrong returns
hoods and jesses the trails left by love and boredom
Like nothing’s missing glimpses of
pasts (yellow-strum ginko, enamel
through hedge stairs, cloud digesting sky
from a wash and buzz static green)
Love mistakes crawling into that shadow
for a remedy
Sometimes the score is settled, sometimes only whittled hells
These poems belong to an early section (“To Have Fallen”) from my next book, Underlight (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012). This book as a whole is a knot of devotional and elegiac lyric work. My sense at this point is that every devotional gesture contains an elegiac dark passenger and every elegiac gesture cloaks a procreative, adoring light. The scope of this bind more-or-less expands to encompass everything for me. Along with the rest of the “To Have Fallen” section, the poems on view here were assembled by a kind of accrescent and decrescent crumble. This whole section of the book was the most difficult for me to stabilize and the most emotionally difficult for me. Threads persist from five or six year old drafts, but the current state of the section bears almost no resemblance to its early iterations. These are poems trying to recover but tranquilize anamnestic fragments. They fail in both efforts but not completely.
Aaron McCollough is the Librarian for English Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His fifth book of poems, Underlight, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse this year. His fourth book, No Grave Can Hold My Body Down came out last year from Ahsahta Press. His other books include Little Ease, Double Venus, and Welkin.