Rob Cowan
from SEA OF ISLANDS
staring through this screen down onto the street
eye ask
if I gaze out this window when
will there be another window if
I walk out this door where
will there be another door if I
fall through this ceiling how could
there possibly be a floor
if I walk through this
wall will I be in a well
an inhabited cylinder
not dissimilar from the sphere
inhibited by them, their notions
their bodies so cramped, encubed
where they question their doors and
windows and walls and ceilings and floors
just as much as we
interrogate our next door
neighbors with enjambed questions
on the other side of this
wall on this planet of windows
walls but winds
your floors but fields of grass
asphalt and reverse faults.
but ceilings... ah, ceilings...
there we can exhale......
because they don’t actually
exist or else
the rain would only
issue from our eyes.
——
When I wake up, I land
in New York, abruptly, after
too much time in reverie.
I land on land that doesn’t
belong to me, that shouldn’t
belong to anyone (the arrogance).
Momaday wrote, ownership is
antithetical to Indian thinking,
usufruct a bygone concept
inAmerica, I-Land par excellence.
When I was born on Long Island
I landed here and each time I take
off for another plane I have to
land because I cannot breathe long
in the charged stratospheric depths
on this Turtle Island because
the gravity of the situation
cannot be ignored, attending
the wake of this sphere,
awaiting its barrenness.
When I was a child, a popular song
concluded that, when you get caught
between the Moon and New York City,
the best that you can do is fall in line
and I have, starring in my own traj-com
between a planet and its offspring, between
thoughts astir and emotions marooned,
for while I gaze at that eternal lunar face,
in another time, in another place,
someone else is gazing at it too.
———-
I’ve been taking it pretty dark lately
following the scat tracks of a
creature with indecipherable prints
deep into the wood
deeper into the snow
deepmost into the knowing
how I stumbled upon a fastness
in the shadow of a hemlock stand,
a phthalo copse robbing the world of its sound.
I’ve been taking it pretty dark
lately weaning off reality, learning
to digest the proteins
of singularity, of sun-glare, of
roads well-worn into
the narrow interior,
not stopping to
utter averse
to breaking character.
I’ve been taking it pretty
dark because that’s the form in which thought comes
not packaged for easy transport
its limits ungatherable
eluding clenched knuckles
but I did find this fast
-ness in which I can be still, where
I can be launched into
grace-time.
—-
Zere’s a film in which my
double looks incredible,
blonde Natalia thought tending
Frida flowers, seeking to emulate
a sort of telescopic mother,
but I can’t remember
what films my double
starred in, what directors
scarred by, tried looking
it up on the internet idealization database
but I don’t know his name I know
it sounds sexy and smart like
Joaquin Fassbender that he
was born in some exotic locale
to parents who didn’t just run
the mill grew up in myriad lands
in multiple tongues and didn’t want
to be a movie star it just happened
just as moving star doesn’t
know how it came to be dawn,
Natalia whispered to me.
Robert Cowan is the author of two poetry collections and three essay collections. These poems are from his manuscript Sea of Islands: a lunar lyric.