CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive
Katharine Coles
Cento from Various Non-Poetic Sources
A signal of danger has arrived in consciousness.
It is a metaphysically pointed arrangement.
The clarity of light is an astronomer’s dream,
Mostly random, a fluke of the heart. Every scale
And spiny fin is neatly articulated. But that is not all:
A single big bird plummets straight down from the sky.
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
The eye is not innocent, it is already committed.
“Cento from Various Non-Poetic Sources” is made with sentences from Ken Johnson’s “Teaming with Transcendent Life” (New York Times, March 29, 2012); George Makari’s “In the Arcadian Woods” (New York Times, April 16, 2012); John Noble Wilford’s “Amazing Race to the Bottom of the World” (New York Times, December 12, 2011); Henry David Thoreau’s journal (May 6, 1854); and Elizabeth Ironside.
Dogs of Ice
Beginning with an erasure from Amundsen, with a little Cherry-Garrard
What after all is necessary
Will we know it when it’s in our hands
we started with 52 dogs
no abnormal strain
Helge, Mylius, Uroa in splendid condition
Jimmy Pigg, Bones, Nobby hardly animal
the eyes the mirror a living soul
joy sorrow gratitude scruples
Not forgetting ambition and desire
Not forgetting the ability to eat one’s own
Scott and his comrades were their own dogs
to get the dogs to obey cost us a wet shirt
Odin, Thor, Lurvin
ravenous dogs devoured
whips lashings ebonite points
plaintive howls on the march
I did not would not understand
Thinking about blinding light blue snow
A land by international accord empty of dogs
we had to chain Rex, Lasse
in any case we had to reach 82° S
I have pursued my own way my own desires
I did not would not understand
the whip lost its terrors
crowded together heads out of the way
the body did not matter
There is the body I have held in my hands
Old now, blood moving under my palms
such endurance to equal
What must be given up
leaning against my knees tail waving
He returned with eleven dogs
flogged home grown fond
the dog has not understood his master
Who among us understands what drives us
the master has not understood his dog
Under my hands blood and breath moving
Eyes a living soul her flesh beloved as any
holiday humour ought to have prevailed
when we cut him open
his chest was one large abscess
I haven’t even understood myself
Here Be Monsters
We could fall off one
Edge or another. Water
Roils and troubles as if it would
Throw itself over, and glacier
Meets sea by pushing into
Erosion’s demand and response. Fissure
Could swallow a body whole
Then close on itself, sucking
Its tongue. Feel
The earth’s end old maps
Elaborate with what’s unknown
But fully imagined, voracious
Tooth and claw
White to the bone. Just beyond
The horizon, right over
There is the trouble
Trying to picture our progress
Straight and flat. It doesn’t matter
If we finish on water
Or land, on ice or the deck of a ship
Taking flight. At the wave’s top
The body hangs weightless
In its turn. It doesn’t matter
As soon as we arrive at any point
We’re headed out the other side,
A place beyond which
There is no beyond except
In the mind, which is
It turns out the body after all
Where we live, whole-
Hearted. Where surface will not hold
We must shatter.
Katharine Coles’s fifth poetry collection, The Earth Is Not Flat, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in March 2013. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Seneca Review, Crazyhorse, and Image. In 2010, she traveled to Antarctica on a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. During 2012–13, she will be on leave from the University of Utah on a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
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