Heliopause (5 page)

these black words will drift to reach him

given all this thick light

                 given how time

Notes and Acknowledgments

The epigraph to this book is taken from the second poem in W. S. Graham's sequence, “What Is the Language Using Us For?”

“Disintegration Loop 1.1”

I wrote this poem over several weeks, waking each morning and playing William Basinski's video of lower Manhattan, recorded during the last hour of daylight on September 11, 2001. The accompanying music is a “decaying pastoral loop Basinski … recorded in August 2001.” While the music and video played across the room, I sat in a chair with my paper and wrote for the full hour. Or rather, I sat for an hour and wrote when it occurred to me to do so. The poem is full of lines and ideas from friends and books, for whom and which I am very grateful.

Thank you, Jess Fjeld, for telling me about looping and conflict resolution.

Thank you, Robert Kaplan, for introducing me to the history of zero.

Thank you, M. NourbeSe Philip, for creating
Zong!
, and thank you, Cathy Park Hong, for alerting me to its existence.

Thank you, Jen Bervin, for catching “loss / loss” in your
Nets
.

Thank you, Sylvia Plath, for the “light of the mind, cold and planetary.”

Thank you, William Carlos Williams, for seeing “the bomb is a flower.”

Thank you, Wallace Stevens, for placing that jar.

Thank you, Matvei Yankelevich, for bringing Alexander Vvedensky's minutes and confusion into English.

Thank you, Alvin Lucier, for sitting in a room.

Thank you, Ted Hughes, for remaking Ovid's tale of Echo and Narcissus.

Thank you, Anne Sexton, for watching “the lights copying themselves, / all neoned and strobe-hearted.”

Thank you, William Shakespeare, for “all our yesterdays.”

Thank you, Dana Inez, for reminding me of the geometric definition of “center.”

More than anything, thank you, William Basinski, for your music.

“Vernon Street”

According to the March 10, 1896, notebook entry of Alexander Graham Bell, the first words to be spoken and understood over the telephone were in fact “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.”

“Elegy for Neil Armstrong”

This poem was created by erasing a transcript of communications between mission control, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin during the first moon landing. I found the transcript in
Things Working
, a book in the Penguin English Project published in 1970 and edited by Penny Blackie. As here, in the original pages the text appeared in white against a black background.

“How Long Is the Heliopause”

“
We're so happy our paths have crossed
” quotes a box of Nature's Path Organic Heritage Flakes I bought and then ate.

“They say it is hard to believe / that when robots are taking pictures // of Titan's orange ethane lakes / poets still insist on writing about their divorces” refers to one of Christian Bök's tweets from September 8, 2012. Many of his tweets begin with the word “they.”

The lines about “The cat who may be alive / or may be dead” are based on my misunderstanding of the philosopher David Lewis's paper, “How Many Lives Has Schrodinger's Cat?” as explained to me by the poet-philosopher Larisa Svirsky.

“Some Glamorous Country”

The title of this poem borrows from Frank O'Hara's “Ave Maria.”

“Keep in Shape”

This poem refers to a passage in the New Testament (John 8:1–8), in which Jesus writes on the ground of a temple. It is the only story of him writing instead of speaking aloud. The King James translation renders it thus:

Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.

And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.

And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,

They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.

Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?

This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with
his
finger wrote on the ground,
as though he heard them not
.

So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

“Poem for Bill Cassidy”

Bill Cassidy was a poet and my friend. He died in 2011.

“A green thought” belongs to Andrew Marvell.

The “mind of winter” and the “green tongue” belong to Wallace Stevens.

▴

Thank you to everyone mentioned above, as well as to Michele Christle, Christopher DeWeese, Lisa Olstein, Emily Pettit, and Suzanna Tamminen, for whose careful reading I am grateful.

Thanks also to the editors of the following journals, where some of these poems first appeared:
Barrelhouse
,
Better
,
Burnside Review
,
Colorado Review
,
Everyday Genius
,
Fanzine
,
LIT
,
Mead
,
Octopus
, and
Poetry
.

Thank you to Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Emily Pettit, Guy Pettit, and Dara Wier at Factory Hollow Press, for publishing some of these poems in the chapbook
Private Party
.

Thank you to Christopher Louvet at Floating Wolf Quarterly for publishing
Dear Seth
as an e-chapbook.

▪
Heather Christle is the author of three previous poetry collections. She has taught writing at Antioch College, Sarah Lawrence College, Emory University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she received her
MFA
. A native of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she now lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she is writing a book about crying.