“I have no covenants but proximities.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

1. everything I am is us

 

Giant prow
in ambiguous
weather. Love is

 

numerous.insects spores metal cloth

 

(Are we in
the moving or
beside?)

 

The interstices
in which the smallest
moments

 

Your famous solidity is at stake

 

intermingling
particles

 

The earthworm’s cogito is wet, wet

 

 

2. smallest changes

 

 

What was at first inept

 

 

The fin, embarrassed

a notion of moving onto land

 

 

Not knowing how the random

might
sort

 

 

The lessons of kindness

accumulate often under the radar

of dramatic unhappiness

 

 

death melts us

into slightly altered information

 

 

Air-smell. the next is

happening

 

 

3. the remembrance of passion

 

 

People having traveled to places

inside the use (and abuse)

 

of photographs

 

 

Repetition never
is

 

 

Every word with hands all over it. Lips. A parting

of hair

 

one small bruise

 

 

Thus she tried to have a foothold in animal

 

 

4. in parallel

 

 

the road. A small worn mountain

 

Driving and the faulty meanings

 

fog and the dead

 

various sizes
spread out in equality

 

What slips

 

beneath
what language tries

 

to call experience

 

Corpuscles

all over

 

 

5. lightclocks

 

 

The antique light
on your skin today is

out of scale with the humming

 

 

Spheres

 

 

Slightest shift

and you collapse
into a gene pool

 

 

Glaciers that calved
now melt

 

Aged light worn from travel
brings a bath of the Romans. Her skin

 

in particular. Gorgeous

curdled milk

 

 

6. the lyric we

 

Who invited you anyway? Inside

a proposed world filled
with specific things

 

a situation

Occasions to look from the window

A silver plastic deflated balloon
stuck in a tree for years a partial
bicycle canned goods and a citizenry

 

 

(history corrupt
with forgetfulness)

 

 

And you my beloved
dirty with desire

and belief in the self
as an independent unit

 

The micro-organisms know better

 

Close the door
to persistent

metaphysical
phantasms

 

 

7. walking

 

Continuous small birds set an example. Open

appealing objects with edible kernels

 

 

not to be mistaken

for depth

 

The interior. An idea

of a place
to visit

digging around like some police
detective

 

the past supposedly

 

 

Your mind entangled and your blind eyes. I asked you
to take them off today

 

 

A day of pure walking

A bath of biology

 

 

8. across fields accompanied by birds

 

 

Ascend. This lies
next to life is terrifying

 

a field of sorts

Grass dust cumulo-nimbus

 

 

and ants holding crumbs

high

in a complex Aida-like
procession

 

(enemy body

parts left behind)

 

 

The ascension of the birds is their ascension

 

 

as slightest changes accumulate

into a new

 

 

 

 

Notes

section 1: Title is from Oppen’s “Blood From the Stone”.

section 3: Line 6 echoes a performance by David Antin in which he said “Every word we use has hands all over it.”

section 8: Title and quote in line 2 are from Lyn Hejinian’s The Fatalist.

“Reverse Landscapes” is an attempt to realize a kind of “eco-poetics,” to write from a position that isn't entirely human-centered. At the same time I wanted to avoid the conventions of “nature poetry” and to blur the line between the cultural and natural. The spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson hovers throughout.

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Evelyn Reilly lives in New York City and has just taught a course on visual poetics at the Poetry Project at St. Marks. She supports herself writing text for museum exhibits, and has published poetry in numerous journals including ACM, Barrow Street, The New Yorker, 6ix, and 3rd Bed. Her first book of poetry, Hiatus, was published by Barrow Street Press in 2004. In the same year Hiatus was a runner-up for the Poetry Society of America’s “Norma Farber First Book Award”. Reilly's new chapbook, Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces, will be published this Fall by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs.