from Twenty-Six Reflections (4)
from Twenty-Six Reflections (5)
from Twenty-Six Reflections (6)
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from Twenty-Six Reflections
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4
The book's cover opens like a car door, a life gets in. The senses follow the book's form: the weight of reading slowly shifts from right to left. Pages turn until the covers are parallel again. Now, the reader done, the door closed, one life escapes another. But what from beginning to end happened is in the spirit and keeps on moving. The symmetry is in the reflection only: it is a cave with the sun inside, it is a heaven for dust.
The book and the reader of the book: two living things usually having very little to do with one another, but so intimate in relation. The eye loves them equally.
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5
after George Oppen
In “the old marks of wood in the concrete,” the image of the animal and the ghost of trees transformed and imprinted into building material create a portrait of a shipwreck, and that wreck, when it does not mean an end, means the site where one endeavor transforms into another; in a lifeboat, on a desert island, or swimming alone in DEN WILD ZEE (the Dutch way of saying fierce seas), a few pages before the survivor “clambered up the cliffs of the shore and sat […] down upon the grass, free from danger and quite out of reach of the water.”
The ship has sunk. Its end is the beginning of an adventure of moving away from the realm of “baffling hierarchies,” to the hardware store.
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6
To read in front of a public is to stand at the Belgian border and make an argument that does not to go anywhere. Being themselves inside a myth, with one season left, the author is there with their translator, expressing together what could be called a kind of “appetite.” They're boxing clever like they've arrived from the next world, as if the event happens only under whatever is the first or brightest star.
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The Lamp of Folklore
for Jeffrey Yang
There's a secret in the forest
Near its path not of today's world
This era of dog food and vapes
But a trace from heavier times
When very serious people
Roamed around with bad intentions
Vague suburban machinery
Now fills the air with farting sounds
But back then outlines of human
Forms disappeared in the shadows
Between trees maybe soldiers
Who were the worst people of all
It's almost wet enough to rain
But back then it rained all the time
These yards where politicians' signs
Sport sloganeers' contrivances
Were once littered with lethal traps
A wrong step and you'd be kaput
One creature ties that remote time
To our present day roaming still
Especially on grayish days
Among the bleak lives in small towns
Where he sleeps in toolsheds at night
He is known as the Leatherman
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Joshua Edwards was born on Galveston Island.
His books include The Double Lamp of Solitude
and Imperial Nostalgias, and he translated María
Baranda's Ficticia and co-translated (with Lynn Xu)
Yang Licai's Prison Poems and Temple Speak and
Pee Poems. He directs Canarium Books.