Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love - Softcover

Wilson, Keith S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556595611 ISBN 13: 9781556595615

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2019

Synopsis

“Wilson’s collection is romantic yet world-weary, bereaved yet fortified―a kindred reflection of the heart in the modern world.” ―Publishers Weekly

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is a collection whose poems approach family, politics, and romance, often through the lens of space: the vagaries of a relationship full of wonder and coldness, separation and exploration. There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

About this title

About the Author:

Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, Cave Canem fellow, Affrilachian poet, and graduate from the Callalo Creative Writing Workshop.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

AUBADE TO A COLLAPSED STAR

You bankrupt the sun, underwater
statue. Dark galaxy of faults, our bed

a garden of the littlest sighs
of our waking. Our room, abstract.

Our body heat in space, the condensation
as the light makes heaven of it. We’re early,

curved and signatory, the sheets
paler than the sky and made

of immaterial. My hands confused
for want of your hands

or waist. Rolling, what claims
we make of earth, what is inferred and isn’t

sure, what the undersides of the leaves
of the forest floor are called. Your breath.

My limbs and yours. All of space
cannot be space. Arousing

patches in the grass. A mouse
I never said to you. Invasion of clover, black

pollen of your hair. Only yesterday
I said I love. The opposite of stars.

The moon’s clear effects
on the sea. In sleep, no body

is the lead. I am dreaming imaginary
numbers of fruit flies, mercury and birdsong,

and the trash-collector, and the water glittering
beige in the street. Of the Milky Way as portrayed

by the swirl of your waves. I ought to have married you
against the ifs of this world, out-of-flux

with all the dishes and the dust
on the books, and your late

mornings, each movement
I have missed like this, and I, accustomed

to the wall when I awake,
the exodus of your laugh, mascara.
SCRAPBOOK

―after Ladan Osman

i. look―in the middle distance the siren screams
like a fatherless boy,

unashamed. ii. sisyphus wears a dress.
she labors pushing,

always a man,

and if she shrugs, he rolls atop her
or the town at the foot of the hill. or a man, also called sisyphus, knocks
and says: push is a man’s verb

but she can help, or else,

he says, forget the dress. iii. it’s said we are afraid
of what we don’t understand. who

among us is shaken by latin? we are scared of what might
overtake us. sadness, marriage, spanish,

rain. iv. like a sextant he bent as if,
(as if!) to kiss her lips and staring into her corsage,

she cannot help
but think how able he is

of taking, his hands in the ocean of her
hair and his pelvis pressed against the air

like a rudder. v. what is there to say?
i held a bell in my hand. and i grew

to be a man who thinks
back on that bell. vi. what is there
to tell? that was yesterday. vii. when odysseus
returns, he cocks his bow and fires

in the crowd. patriots are born and set
into the ground by this or that

flirtatious angle. viii. the first november rain

laps at a set of heels. ix. a handful of plantains,
which wait forever on the shelf to ripen or bruise.

in the meantime, you never hear
anyone speak their name. actually, a silence

even when they are perfect and brown.
each domestic, familiar,

unpretty thing. x. i’ll say it again:

if a hand is big enough it doesn’t matter
what you call it. xi. a list of all this is fixed:
only the ground. xii. the story of orpheus and the bear is this―
orpheus, of course,

sings. his wife is distinguished
by her marriedness

to orpheus. jumping ahead: he left behind his clothes, his furniture
and everything.

he ran less fast than the bear. he sang
a song of slow, romantic, women. xiii. there is an old story of a man.
that is the story.

there is an old story of a woman
that the old story of the man spoke over.
i am his son.
BLACK MATTERS

―after D.H. Lawrence

shall i tell you, then, that we exist?
there came a light, blue and white careening,
the police like wailing angels
to bitter me.

and so this:
dark matter is hypothetical. know
that it cannot be seen

in the gunpowder of a flower,
in a worm that raisins on the concrete,
in a man that wills himself not to speak.

gags, oh gags.
for a shadow cannot breathe.
it deprives them of nothing. pride

is born in the black and dies in it.
i hear our shadow, low treble
of the clasping of our hands.

dark matter is invisible.
we infer it; how light bends around a black body,
and still you do not see black halos, even here,

my having told you plainly where they are.

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1556595611
• ISBN 13: 9781556595615
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80