In the Prelude, Wordsworth narrates a story of walking to the edge of a
river and seeing a pile of garments. The next day, he learns that they belonged
to a man who drowned. Wordsworth describes seeing the dead man’s Ghastly face, a spectre shape / Of terror, but
goes on to contend that, having had familiarity with the fantastical worlds of
poetry and romance, he wasn’t frightened; rather, his understanding of poetry Hallowed the sad spectacle / With decoration
of ideal grace; / A dignity, a smoothness. At the time, he was eight years
old.
/
On one level, poetry mediated trauma
for Wordsworth. But on another level, the “smoothness” he describes is, as far
as I’m concerned, wholly absent from the narrative he relays in the Prelude. Like any Arcadian space, it's
not one that is truly sanctified or idealized; rather, it is contaminated by
anxiety and violence, both tangible and imagined: a meadow made from a drowned
man’s face.
For the remainder of his life,
Wordsworth revised the Prelude. He
mediated the adolescent rawness; he made the edges eloquent, the poem more like
a formal container for a feeling. Originally, he’d intended for it to be the
first part of an epic trilogy, one whose length surpassed Paradise Lost.
/
But he failed. That motherfucker died.
And
form is a feeling.
And
form is a garment.
And in my mind, I return to the clothes.
I return to the discarded excess, to the pile that signifies death before we know its name; I return
to seeing my brother emptied and seizing on the living room floor, a shell I
saw continuously dead and reborn, a skin like an Aeolian harp making music in
the wind by the willing of God or an unbreathable word. I return to the
garments. I return to the river. I roll up my pants and step in the water and
feel the rocks along the bottom. I return to the Death whose face I felt in the
basement and stroked his eyes and hallowed sockets and nostrils and indentation
above the lip and the unwashed space behind the ears. He said, You can’t see me, and you won’t. When I
turned on the bulb I saw a mass of garments and a plastic mask.
I return to my family. I return to the
river. I roll cigarettes with my childhood friends and we sit in the woods on
rotting logs and dream of a pond with a pale hand sticking out.
O,
golden wound.
I feel more removed from my brother
each time I come home.
I drink wine. I change the oil. I put
snow tires on the car. I lie all day in my childhood bed with its unwashed
sheets and decades of flesh and a feeling whose skin I’m unable to name.
/
I
open the meadow.
The
wind comes in.
Marty Cain is the author of Kids of the Black Hole (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017), a book-length poem, as well as www.enterthe.red, a digital supplement. His creative and critical writing appears in Fence, Boston Review, Jacket2, Tarpaulin Sky, Action Yes, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi, and is currently pursuing a PhD at Cornell University, where he studies rural poetics. With his partner Kina Viola, he runs Garden-Door Press, a handmade micropress.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
