Jon Curley
AT THE BRINK
Or maybe the threshold, however this arrival works
when all is still, when all is still struck, now past
that confounding gate, here is reached the condition
of anomaly thereby maybe we can pass. The conditionals
are relentless, appalling, keep us supposing
direction is elevation— but the night (nigh) is still
calling. I address you somehow over these terms
and dimming of lights, honestly confounded (still)
but bracing for embrace, imminent must it be,
because I cherish not only this art but the space
where dwells it and the heart of its governance. Gain
please this domain where we might instill lights
in the arctic, in the attic, in the antithesis of arranged
formats. This is a plea, a visioning, a wreck-oning.
from EX SPECTERS
While the world washed up on the world, the oceans
disobeyed gravity and rose from their depths into skies
now oceanic, occasionally leaking saline tear drops back to
landmasses, both a natural occurrence and a natural gesture
of emotional farewell to wasted, wounded things.
*
Tension becomes the occasion, the invasion a situation
so dependably vile that most witnesses reliably ignore it
and then alleviate any of those tensions with the mention
of invasion with the caveat "if we cannot stop this incursion"
and then quotations are followed by ellipses then joined
comradely by that commonplace veer syndrome that sets us
again off course to find an occasion of tension with the
invasion of—
*
On the darkling plain: midnight mass graves of penitents
seeking shelter and relief, beatitude not desuetude, not
a nightmare vision or fever dream but the relentless course
of natural progression this third decade of the 21st century
as witnessed regularly by those who have not misplaced
their vision of this vision as those coffins accumulate
as necro-grade ellipses moving across, across, ever across . . .
*
No dark without dialectic, a delicate overturning
of those malignant powers pressing against us
framed by the force of reckoning ways not just
out but beyond, searching for salves in and out
of the poem. Deeper into the poem. Sek, Seeker,
dep, deeper into the poem. In its body bodes
the only organ able to fire the neurons against
negation: in the body of the poem of the body
of the poem of the body of the poem of the body
*
Now that we are here together on this page, may I
conjure with you some war and waltz-inspired attitudes
and suggest we dance the death of war with ardor
aerated with the replenishing sublimes of characteristics
unaccustomed to our times. Thus we convey or contrive
a manifesto of a different ego, a differing time, some thrust
from the inadequately usual to the emphatic, not yet-articulated
must (hint: the secret of this trend is no ruse; it can be found
in the scripture of Emily, Audre, Diane, Sonia, Eileen,
and some other scintillating Sister-Poets with worlds
and whirlwinds to invent, augment, widen, and re-wonder).
*
So we find us now here, in this habitat,
baked in good riddance, little sense, much less
anything else but abandonment and abeyance,
abject obedience, meager conveyance into
what had seemed a stable structure of meaning
if not feeling; alas, we find (once or once again)
this sentiment a judgement, a call for adjournment:
and we cannot figure out if it is "for" Us or "about" Us.
*
Despite the strictures, I commit to you,
an envious archetype out of the Blue, into
and beyond it (the Blue). Even as escape
excites possibility, (I) am disarmed, disrobed,
defeated; adversaries surround. No matter:
I cling to the azure awe invested in you
and climb to it (you) and through it. These
prepositions try to chase me, even chasten me,
but I stay stalwart with you wherever I
can find you; confound me, and find deep
Blue sea analogues to envelope me/we.
Jon Curley is a poet and teacher. His poetry collections include SCORCH MARKS (2017), HYBRID MOMENTS (2015), and ANGLES OF INCIDENTS (2012). He also wrote Poets and Partitions: Confronting Communal Identities in Northern Ireland (2011) and coedited The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller (2015). He teaches in the Humanities Department of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Poems from Jon Curley’s The Installation of Fear, Marsh Hawk Books (2025).
