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
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Such and Such a Time at Such and Such a Palace 42
Me and My Head as Pieces of Wood 43
They Are Leaving You a Message 47
Not Much More Room in the Cemetery 50
As If No Light Could Warm You 51
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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