Heliopause. Heather Christle

      

      Heliopause

      ▪ Wesleyan Poetry

      Heliopause

      HEATHER CHRISTLE

      Wesleyan University Press ▸

      ▾ Middletown, Connecticut

      Wesleyan University Press

      Middletown CT 06459

      www.wesleyan.edu/wespress © 2015 Heather Christle All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed and typeset in Whitman by Eric M. Brooks

       This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

      Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

      Library of Congress

      Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Christle, Heather, 1980–

      [Poems. Selections]

      Heliopause / Heather Christle.

      pages; cm. — (Wesleyan poetry series)

      ISBN 978-0-8195-7529-6 (hardcover) —

      ISBN 978-0-8195-7530-2 (ebook)

      I. Title.

      PS3603.H755A6 2015

      811'.6 — dc23 2014044266

      5 4 3 2 1

      Cover illustration: Aerolith by Andy Gilmore.

      ▪ for Harriet

      What is the language using us for?

      It uses us all and in its dark

      Of dark actions selections differ.

      I am not making a fool of myself

      For you. What I am making is

      A place for language in my life

      Which I want to be a real place

      Seeing I have to put up with it

      Anyhow.

      ▴ W. S. Graham

      Contents

       A Perfect Catastrophe 1

      ▴

       Disintegration Loop 1.1 5

      ▴

       Vernon Street 21

       Summer 23

       Realistic Flowers 25

       I Am Glad of Your Arrival 26

       It’s an Empire Out There 27

      ▴

       Elegy for Neil Armstrong 29

      ▴

       And This Too Comes Apart 39

       Hatch 41

       Such and Such a Time at Such and Such a Palace 42

       Me and My Head as Pieces of Wood 43

       Flowers Are Also Letters 44

       Nature Poem 45

       They Are Leaving You a Message 47

       Drapes 48

       Uncloudy 49

       Not Much More Room in the Cemetery 50

       As If No Light Could Warm You 51

      ▴

       How Long Is the Heliopause 53

      ▴

       Some Glamorous Country 61

       In the Dumps 62

       Pursuits 63

       Aesthetics of Crying 64

       Keep in Shape 65

       Optioned 66

       Annual 67

       Ecumene 68

      ▴

       Dear Seth 69

      ▴

       Poem for Bill Cassidy 87

      ▴

       Notes and Acknowledgments 93

      Heliopause

      A Perfect Catastrophe

      To have stood midfield among the vast and livid green

      and never heard the grasses take their vow of silence

      is experience, not evidence, and meanwhile clouds descend

      and buffer light. When did I arrive? I recall it came on

      slowly as a fever as a poem is a communicable please.

      What’s in charge here is the scattered light all over

      and how it pulls my very blood into my hands

      until they graph a fat what the sun likes holding

      and some dumb mutter good and nails me to the bone.

      Disintegration