HIGH LIFE [2018 CLAIRE DENIS]

You’re the patron saint of elsewhere,

jet-lagged and drinking apple juice,

eying, from the sixth-floor window,

a kidney-shaped swimming pool

the very shade of Hockney blue.

I know the left-hand view of life,

I think, and it’s as if I have, of late,

forgotten something in the night –

I wake alone and freezing,

still keeping to my side.

Each evening tidal night rolls in

and the atmosphere is granted

a depth of field by satellites,

the hammock moon, aircraft

sinking into Heathrow.

Above the light pollution,

among the drift of stars tonight

there might be other traffic –

migrations of heron and crane,

their spectral skeins convergent

symbols, arrows, weather systems,

white flotillas bearing steadily

towards their summer feeding.

A million flapping sheets!

Who knows how they know?

The aids to navigation might be

memory and landmarks,

or the brightest constellations.

Perhaps some iron in the blood

detects magnetic north.

I wish one carried you some token,

some Post-it note or ticket,

some particular to document

this instant of self-pity –

His Orphic Loneliness, with Dog.

Advances? None miraculous,

though the deadness of the house

will mean your coming home

may seem an anti-climax

somehow, and a trespass.

To deal with all the sensational loss I like to interface with Earth. I like to do this in a number of ways. I like to feel the work I am exerting being changed,

the weight of my person refigured, and I like to hang above the ground, thus; hammocks, snorkeling, alcohol. I also like the mind to feel a kind of neutral buoyancy

and to that end I set aside a day a week, Shabbat, to not act. Having ceded independence to the sunset I will not be shaving, illuminating rooms, or raising

the temperature of food. If occasionally I like to feel the leavening of being near a much larger unnatural tension, I walk off a Sunday through the high fields

of blanket bog, saxifrage, a few thin Belted Galloways, rounding Lough Mallon to stand by the form of beauty upheld in a scrubby acre at Creggandevsky, where I do

duck and enter under a capstone mapped by rival empires of yellow feather-moss and powdery white lichen. I like then to stop, crouched, and press my back on a housing

of actual rock, coldness which lives for a while on the skin. And I like when I give you the nightfeed, Harvey, how you’re really concentrating on it: fists clenched, eyes shut, like this is bliss.

II

I like a steady disruption. I like it when the solid mantle turns to shingle and water rushes up it over and over, in love. My white-noise machine from Argos is set to Crashing Wave

but I’m not averse to the presence of numerous and minute quanta moving very fast in unison; occasions when a light wind undulates the ears of wheat, or a hessian sack of pearl-

barley seed is sliced with a pocket knife and pours. I like the way it sounds pattering on stone. I like how the starlings over Monti cohere and separate their bodies into one cyclonic

symphony, and I like that the hawk of the mind catches at their purse, pulse, caul, arc. I like the excitation passing as a shadow-ripple back and how the bag is snatched, rolls

slack; straight, falciform; mouthing; bulbing; a pumping heart. I like to interface with millions of colored pixels depicting attractive people procreating on a screen itself

dependent on rare metals mined by mud-gray children who trudge up bamboo scaffolding above a grayish-red lake of belching mud. I like how the furnace burning earth instills

in me reflexive gestures of timidity and self-pity and deference as I walk along the kinder surfaces, grass, say, or sand, unable ever to meet with my eyes the gaze of the sun.

III

I can imagine that my first and fifth marriages will be to the same human, a woman, the first marriage working well enough that we decide to try again as soon as it’s,

you know, mutually convenient. I can see that. I like the fact that we’re “supercooled star matter,” even if I can’t envisage you as anything other than warm and bleating. The thing is

I can be persuaded fairly easily to initiate immune responses by the fake safety signals of national anthems, cleavage, family photographs, country lanes, large-eyed mammals, fireworks,

the King James Bible, Nina Simone singing “The Twelfth of Never,” cave paintings, coffins, dolphins, dolmens. But I like it also when the fat impasto of the canvas gets slashed by a tourist

with a claw hammer, and a glimpse is caught of what you couldn’t say. Entanglement I like, spooky action at a distance analogizing some little thing including this long glance across the escalators

or how you know the song before you switch the station on. When a photon of light meets a half-silvered mirror and splits one meets the superposition of two, being twinned: and this repeats.