After Assault
Less the blood than the timing.
Running till my mouth unlatched in the street.
Each exhalation in the cold became
a charmed shape. Leafless linden in air.
Winter interest landscape architects call the spectacle of bare trees
like years ago the legs of the stillborn foals
branching out of the wheelbarrow.
Overturned, a bucket freed the bottle flies
feasting on afterbirth. Quick to flee—
dark swarm on a path no one else could see.
Mercy Error
Caught on a long oak branch, fishing line in a freak-knot
around the heron’s foot
snared the bird. We hope it thrashed to death quickly—
better than starving.
By one leg it must have dangled for weeks. No one
at home to save it or see:
slack wings spinning,
a wall of red creeper,
feathers descending cool September.
Lacking a rifle, we delay shooting the line
to bring the slaughtered thing down.
The gun comes from a neighbor’s house.
Common Law
Elizabeth laughs at the news:
how it has made everyone so happy,
the pre-school in a nursing home.
As though people were meant to live together!
As though we needed each other. At my office
we debate flesh: if flesh
is muscle, or animal, or else
any material that shapes the living
or living-ish—flesh of seeds,
flesh of washed fruit. Bird flesh,
turtle flesh, fire flesh. The train
fresh with the smell of cucumbers
crunched out of a paper bag
by father and daughter—
it all makes me think of someone
whose house I ran past until
flesh became our common world.
These days I keep three crystal bowls
lined on the windowsill.
Absent flesh, I kiss their prisms, I kiss
the comets they cast to the floor.
Phillip: Thank you Sam for your patience and for allowing Vinyl to publish these ludicrously gorgeous poems. I am so excited to share them with the world.
To speak to the unspeakable. To give shape to the shapelessness that is our deepest selves, our most difficult experiences. Your highly lyrical meditations are first and foremost beautiful, and also incredibly smart. I was invested in unwrapping each poem by means of the titles and exploring whatever remnants of experience your speakers shared.
In “After Assault,” it is unknown who or what was assaulted or how. What we get is:
“Each exhalation in the cold became
a charmed shape. Leafless linden in air.
Winter interest landscape architects call
the spectacle of bare trees”
This is the voyeur, the shell in which the energy of assault dwells or as aftermath of assault. This is a mind eager toward more than utterance while also keeping the reader on the outskirts. What we do know is that it is “less the blood than the timing,” less than physicality of the brutal and more its invasiveness and unexpectedness.
Can you speak to the “charmed shape?” Why is the speaker so invested in giving a trail of ideas and images to make tangible the innerworkings of self after trauma?
Sam: I am so grateful to be discussing work with you, Phillip. Thanks for your care with these.
To your questions: Can you speak to the “charmed shape?” Why is the speaker so invested in giving a trail of ideas and images to make tangible the innerworkings of self post trauma?
I had been thinking about the lung as a type of organic, efficient crucible, and I imagined what emerged out of that mold as being tree-like, a “leafless linden.” So in an expressive sense I wanted the phrase, “charmed shape,” to describe breath made visible by the cold, hanging in the air. It was only after working on the poem I realized the phrase also foreshadowed other images: bare trees, a limb, a swarm, all of which seem to me to project a kind of mystery or troubling allure. “Charm” was also a question of modulating tone, countering the gloom of the piece a little because this poem is post-emergency. Troubled, yes, but safe, for a time. Breath is proof of that ongoingness, and if that proof is visible, even for a cold few moments, why not call it a lucky thing?
About the poem’s structure, its trail (I love that you use this word), perhaps the alternative would be a reliance on greater narrative coherence. I didn’t think event-driven clarity was this poem’s intention. I was more interested in aftermath than incident; in haunting, in trouble, in the journey through and around. I trusted that a straightforward title could provide a reader with enough information to access the poem’s subject, such as it is, and to understand the poem as an object in the shadow of a violence, even a small one. From there, I’m more interested in what the poem conjures as its own whole, more interested in depicting effect than cause. It’s also true that thought may not be linear in the wake of violence (if thought is ever linear); it loops and elides, evades and returns. It isn’t only a matter of subject meeting form, though. I like working in this mode. Following impulse and instinct and then, if necessary, relying on time, distance, and scrutiny to ensure that meaning has accrued through process. It isn’t my intention to keep a reader on the outskirts of anything, nor is it my intention to tell a story.
P: In your poem “Mercy Error” the part the stops me is “We delay.” What is the mercy after mercy? What is the error in this poem? I read two, the birds and perhaps the speaker’s and whomever is accompanying.
I would also like to get your take on narrativity. Here we have a poem that is a story but based on speculation, fully aware that it is based on hope—“we hope” and “must have”—and recreates a story simply by observing this image of the dead bird in the tree. Can you speak to this ghost narrative, where all the action with the living bird happens in the mind, and the quicker happening within the delay, the real time moving as though peripherally.
S: You know, I’ve been reexamining this poem in light of a recent conversation. My friend was walking on the beach and came across a seagull with a broken wing. Convinced it was done for, she was unsure what to do. Her phone had no signal or she might have tried contacting an animal hospital or some place, some advisor. She told herself if she saw this bird on her way back, she’d do something (put it out of its misery). And so she returns and she sees the bird and she’s distraught because she doesn’t want to kill it, but she goes ahead and picks up a rock and approaches. And of course the bird knows exactly what’s going on, and it walks right into the ocean. Paddles into the waves. So my friend is off the hook because swimming after waterfowl is where she draws the line.
So I’m telling this story in front of some people because I think it’s sad and hilarious and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the exact same bird at the beach. We veer into a conversation about the idea of mercy killing as it relates to animals one might encounter in the wild. We could expand those boundaries further, but there’s actually a lot to unpack in that container, right? And another friend gets this interesting look on his face, and he reminds us that the first noble truth of the Buddha is that life is suffering. He says that what we’re calling putting an animal out of its misery is robbing it of its experience of the world, the only experience there really is. I’ll never forget what he said: “That’s not compassion, it’s aversion.” Aversion to the truth of a suffering we don’t want to face.
The speaker in this poem encounters suffering, but it’s post-fact. I was interested in the missed opportunity to relieve suffering while confronting the fact that sometimes (more-so in nature, I think) providing relief is beyond our means. The suffering of animals seems to me to be of great importance, not as a replacement for the question of how we treat each one another, but as a piece of that question, how we conceptualize our place in a life-giving system.
About the poem’s delay, I think there are really two. Explicitly, the speaker lacks the tools to cut the line. The branch is so high up, a good shot is the best way to reach it; he doesn’t have a gun, so he has to wait for someone else to bring one. Whatever’s accomplished at that point won’t resemble mercy at all because the suffering was done, it was past relief. This is just clean up. And that’s the second delay, which is really the first, the missed opportunity, the being absent. I thought about that absence as an error, what took the speaker from compassion to observation. It’s important also that this wasn’t a bird with a broken wing; it was destroyed by the unnatural, something for which we are directly responsible. That’s another error, one that has nothing to do with mercy. It’s trash.
I suppose I’m interested in the ghost narrative for a few reasons. First, I wanted the element of indictment, of culpability. If the poem had a different perspective I think it might be at the cost of that ethic. The speculative allows for both description via the imagined and assignment of responsibility. Maybe this was a ghost of a poem I didn’t want to write. I mean, there was a lot of information that might have been placed into a longer narrative relating to this encounter, but I’m just not that kind of informational poet at the moment. I also value the speculative because I value doubt. And that’s because I think hope and doubt are very connected. They’re not oppositional at all.
P: How do you see hope’s and doubt’s relationship play out within your own writing process? Does this have anything to do with imagination, how one makes of the world what isn’t there, or at least what appears to be absent?
S: When I said that hope and doubt aren’t oppositional, I meant doubt can offer real solace if you see goodness speeding away from you, fading, or being made otherwise impermanent. If you doubt your own certainty in entropy, if you focus your capacity for skepticism on that selfsame viewpoint, the world opens a little more. You allow yourself the joy of waiting to be wrong. Maybe that can build into a kind of faith, a faith that could light the way to revelation. And that has everything to do with the imagination, I think, though my wish is also for the imaginative force to lead to action, to connection, and to community, so that we aren’t only in our own minds. As for how these ideas relate to my own process, well, if I’m honest sometimes it has to do with valuation. I hope to make something of value, but often I doubt that I have or will. And yet.
P: “Common Law” is so brilliant. I just want to ask you how you wrote it. The way it moves effortlessly through ideas, turns quickly from the nursing home and preschool coexisting in the same space to questions about “flesh,” the body. The poems builds on what came before without directly referring to previous ideas. The preschool/nursing home expands in thinking about how flesh relates to flesh, what it means to have a body, and what it means to even exist. Sometimes flesh is something that keeps us away (“fire flesh”) or that feeds us (“flesh of seed”). But in the end, not everything is flesh. Crystal is not flesh and if light were flesh, crystal splits it, much like how the opening of the poem speaks to our being split young from the old, selves from selves. Can you just bless us with your writing process for this poem and let me know how far off the mark I am [haha]?
S: First, thank you. What a compliment. I remember trying capture a sense of the present as I was writing. Nabokov wrote that the future isn’t real to us the same way the past and the present are real, that the future is “a figure of speech, a specter of thought.” I found that interesting because it’s actually so often how I feel about the present, which we perceive in motion, can’t be transfixed, is without plan or artifact, slips through your hands like water. I like to try to approach that because I like art that gives a sense of a life—anyone’s life—as it is lived in the moment, which is maybe a New Yorky thing and why this poem slips around the way it does from one subject to the next, trying to build a coherence or perspective out of different components: conversation, observation, memory, reality. Maybe restless, maybe modern. I think the present holds so much in and of itself, but it can always lead you back somewhere. For instance: when I look at those bowls, I feel the memory of a pressure against a specific vertebra because I bought them off my friend, the poet Austen Rosenfeld, for twenty dollars at her stoop sale before she moved to San Francisco. I biked with them in a backpack for eight miles to my apartment, and I felt their rims pressing into my spine as I waited at the red lights (also Nabokov: “Transparent things, through which the past shines!”).
P: Thank you for this! There is a kind of atemporality in not only this poem but in all of the poems you’ve allowed us to publish here at Vinyl. And with a revision of how time moves, how we perceive time in something as arguably static as a poem, the event of a poem, is part of what makes your work so intriguing. You take narrative instances of story, and make them even more realistic by recognizing slippages between what happens, and interpretations of happenings, and the possibility to confuse or obfuscate distinct moments across time. My apprehensions about the doubtlessness of a lot of narrative poems are relaxed when I read your work. You move through the doubt, in recognition of its presence and possibilities for better understanding ourselves and how we move through this world “like water,” to borrow our words.
I must say that we have been conversing over months and to see that Carl Phillips chose your manuscript Company for Four Way Books’s Levis Prize is exciting. I know it will be a while before it is released, but can you talk about what Company means to you as a potential book. What were some creative leanings you had while working on it? Will any of the poems published with us make an appearance? Also, how did you react/feel when you received the news? Did someone call you?
S: I love that you use that word potential. I’m not sure I fully realized how potential–of understanding, of injury, of tenderness–fit in the picture until now. Other than that, Company engages with perception and misperception, memory, sexuality, threat, real and imagined community. Risk, heartbreak, imperiled animals (like us). All of the poems that appear Vinyl are in the book as well.
I learned about the Levis Prize in June. I had recently returned to Brooklyn after three seasons in Provincetown and was still re-acclimating, getting my land legs back. I got an email while having a drink. It didn’t seem real at the time, and the next day I thought it might have been a dream. I still feel very lucky and grateful to Carl for selecting the manuscript. It remains strange and exciting, having worked on something for so long, to see it reach the next step.
P: Thank you so much, Sam, for your time and patience! I wish you the best of luck with your debut, Company, and cannot wait to have it in my hands!
S: Thank you, Phillip, for your care and insight.
Sam Ross’s book Company was chosen by Carl Phillips for the 2017 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming in 2019.