Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love - Softcover

Wilson, Keith S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556595611 ISBN 13: 9781556595615

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2019

Synopsis

“Wilson’s collection is romantic yet world-weary, bereaved yet fortified―a kindred reflection of the heart in the modern world.” ―Publishers Weekly Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is a collection whose poems approach family, politics, and romance, often through the lens of space: the vagaries of a relationship full of wonder and coldness, separation and exploration. There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

About this title

About the Author

Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, Cave Canem fellow, Affrilachian poet, and graduate from the Callalo Creative Writing Workshop.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

AUBADE TO A COLLAPSED STAR You bankrupt the sun, underwater statue. Dark galaxy of faults, our bed a garden of the littlest sighs of our waking. Our room, abstract. Our body heat in space, the condensation as the light makes heaven of it. We’re early, curved and signatory, the sheets paler than the sky and made of immaterial. My hands confused for want of your hands or waist. Rolling, what claims we make of earth, what is inferred and isn’t sure, what the undersides of the leaves of the forest floor are called. Your breath. My limbs and yours. All of space cannot be space. Arousing patches in the grass. A mouse I never said to you. Invasion of clover, black pollen of your hair. Only yesterday I said I love. The opposite of stars. The moon’s clear effects on the sea. In sleep, no body is the lead. I am dreaming imaginary numbers of fruit flies, mercury and birdsong, and the trash-collector, and the water glittering beige in the street. Of the Milky Way as portrayed by the swirl of your waves. I ought to have married you against the ifs of this world, out-of-flux with all the dishes and the dust on the books, and your late mornings, each movement I have missed like this, and I, accustomed to the wall when I awake, the exodus of your laugh, mascara. SCRAPBOOK ―after Ladan Osman i. look―in the middle distance the siren screams like a fatherless boy, unashamed. ii. sisyphus wears a dress. she labors pushing, always a man, and if she shrugs, he rolls atop her or the town at the foot of the hill. or a man, also called sisyphus, knocks and says: push is a man’s verb but she can help, or else, he says, forget the dress. iii. it’s said we are afraid of what we don’t understand. who among us is shaken by latin? we are scared of what might overtake us. sadness, marriage, spanish, rain. iv. like a sextant he bent as if, (as if!) to kiss her lips and staring into her corsage, she cannot help but think how able he is of taking, his hands in the ocean of her hair and his pelvis pressed against the air like a rudder. v. what is there to say? i held a bell in my hand. and i grew to be a man who thinks back on that bell. vi. what is there to tell? that was yesterday. vii. when odysseus returns, he cocks his bow and fires in the crowd. patriots are born and set into the ground by this or that flirtatious angle. viii. the first november rain laps at a set of heels. ix. a handful of plantains, which wait forever on the shelf to ripen or bruise. in the meantime, you never hear anyone speak their name. actually, a silence even when they are perfect and brown. each domestic, familiar, unpretty thing. x. i’ll say it again: if a hand is big enough it doesn’t matter what you call it. xi. a list of all this is fixed: only the ground. xii. the story of orpheus and the bear is this― orpheus, of course, sings. his wife is distinguished by her marriedness to orpheus. jumping ahead: he left behind his clothes, his furniture and everything. he ran less fast than the bear. he sang a song of slow, romantic, women. xiii. there is an old story of a man. that is the story. there is an old story of a woman that the old story of the man spoke over. i am his son. BLACK MATTERS ―after D.H. Lawrence shall i tell you, then, that we exist? there came a light, blue and white careening, the police like wailing angels to bitter me. and so this: dark matter is hypothetical. know that it cannot be seen in the gunpowder of a flower, in a worm that raisins on the concrete, in a man that wills himself not to speak. gags, oh gags. for a shadow cannot breathe. it deprives them of nothing. pride is born in the black and dies in it. i hear our shadow, low treble of the clasping of our hands. dark matter is invisible. we infer it; how light bends around a black body, and still you do not see black halos, even here, my having told you plainly where they are.

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556595611
• ISBN 13: 9781556595615
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80