Gregory Crosby : Echolocation

 

 

 

It takes a lifetime to learn how to become forgotten.
          I was reading about the Cloud of Unknowing & thought,
We’re lost in the Cloud of Knowing now, we know too much
          & understand almost nothing, & hard on the heels
of that thought came a blank—as if oblivion itself
          gave me a nudge, grinning without a mouth, a nod
as good as a wink to a blind bat, but bats aren’t blind:
          they move through the dark by echolocation, I read that
as a child, I could search that up, confirm it, but I won’t.
          I want to sit outside the cloud for a while, outside the
knowing that’s a form of forgetting. I want to sit here,
          outside the cloud, outside knowing, drinking apple cider
by a window where the trees move silently. A few feet
          from here sits all I’ve accomplished, on a shelf, ready
to be forgotten, or not. Ready, or not, I live
          to be forgotten, we all do, eventually, though
we do our best to deny it. What good will it do
          to live on in memories unless someone writes it down?
A book to live on until it’s forgotten too, but oh,
          to live against oblivion for just a little while
longer, a few more decades, a century or two...
          The mystic claims that to write is to get out of the way
of the self, to decreate it; only then can you be
          one with God, a magic trick where you disappear
up your own sleeve (nice work if you can get it). Who
          is the echo in that union of voice & reply,
that dissolution of self that allows the self to live
          in ecstasy, in bliss? It doesn’t matter: if they
hadn’t written it down it wouldn’t exist. When I
          was in sixth grade, briefly in a private school, we read
Randall Jarell’s The Bat Poet, & I had to write
          an essay, & I didn’t quite get it (my head was full
of science fiction at that moment), & the teacher
          gave me a C+ with the comment, For someone
who wants to be a writer, you don’t have much to say.
          Well, I certainly showed her, didn’t I, haha.
How the laugh echoes backwards & forwards at once,
          like a cloud that moves with the wind & against it. 
I’m wondering at the loneliness of that little bat,
          the loneliness of echoes, of mirrors, of blanks.
I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better to sleep
          upside down for a while, to let the underground
rivers of my life pool in my brain & drown the thoughts
          that give shape to the dark, the pings! that tell me
where things are, the landscape I must navigate every
          night, in dreams, nightmares, buried aubades, don’t-let-
that-evening-sun-go-down dusks. The cloud grows & glows,
          glows & grows. To be an animal is to live without
regret, to live with forget, the eternal present
          that doesn’t exist for us, a unity with a God
that’s only available to bats, to dogs, birds, tigers,
          whales. I’m the kind of animal who lives in a cloud.
The cloud grows & grows & glows so sickly bright
          it’s blinding; it bears down upon us like headlights.
I’m the cloud, too, & the little bat, flitter-fluttering
          within it, through it, winging my way toward the dark
through the dark, listening, speaking, waiting for the echo,
          the blank I recognize, my voice & not me at all,
feeling it fading & in that fading finding the shape
          of my forgetting. The sound comes back, back:
scritch, screech, tap tap. Is this union? Is this God?
           Nudge, nudge; wink, wink.

 

 

 

Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System).

 

Gregory Crosby : Stephen Dobyns 1941-2026

 

 

 

 

The poet and novelist Stephen Dobyns died on June 14, at the age of eighty-five; I’d always admired the way he conducted his career, funding his poetry with a series of detective novels set in Saratoga Springs. In moments when my own poetic vocation seemed a mug’s game, I would think, “Well, I can always write detective fiction, just like Dobyns.” But as enjoyable as the adventures of private investigator Charlie Bradshaw are, it was Dobyns’ poems that made the biggest impression on me, particularly Cemetery Nights, published in 1987 and a book I devoured that year at the age of twenty, when I was just beginning an effort to read living, contemporary poets, even though I didn’t yet understand I would be joining those ranks (I was still trying to write fiction).

Part of the reason the poems in Cemetery Nights spoke so directly to me was for that very reason: they were narrative and fantastical, often beginning with a bold, aphoristic statement (Some people but their trust in art, other/ believe in murder. Each can be in error.) or a not entirely rhetorical question (When are we satisfied or get what we want,/ when do we speak the truth of our feelings?) that the poem would unfold almost as a fable, but in a dry, clear-eyed tone that was irresistible to me, each lengthy, single stanza carried along long-limbed pentameter-busting lines with a confidence and calm that seemed easy. Dobyns rarely breaks up the stanza, so it’s almost as if walking through a spacious gallery while listening to someone tell you something in an urgent whisper, something important, but never raising their voice to get the point across.

The poems wear their dream logic lightly in order to drop their gravitas unexpectedly into the reader’s lap. A man is imprisoned by magic in a black walnut tree only to be carved into a mermaid in a little allegory of art (“The Mermaid”); the last Pony Express rider waits even now for a man to declare his love by letter, though of course the man doesn’t (“Pony Express”); God retires to “a little brick cottage/ in the vicinity of Venus” where he laments with his buddy the Devil that really he should have just stuck to gardening (“The Gardener”); in the title poem, the dead rise and insist on doing all the things they did when they were alive, even though their rotting bodies are falling apart. A wry melancholy coats everyone in these poems, but it rarely overwhelms them—Dobyns’ impulse to storytelling always shrugs it off with a whaddyagonnado shrug and images that hit heart and head like little arrows, as in the ending of “Street Corner Romance”:

                                         ...You see, we are no good
          in emotional isolation. Even a tire iron yearns
          for a steely mate, and love, what is love but
          that dark reflecting lake that any creature
          may have the good or ill-fortune to glance into. 

(I love the unobtrusive, but felt, internal slant-rhyme of mate/lake.)

Re-reading Cemetery Nights brought back vivid memories of the pleasure I first took in the collection, a pleasure in surreal narrative I later found in James Tate as well. When I picked up a much later book, Winter’s Journey (2010), I found that Dobyns’ long line and tone remained intact, and if anything more personal—the anger with the “low, dishonest decade” of the Naughts courses through these poems, that wry melancholy now tinged with bitter bewilderment, and, in poems like “Napatree Point,” prescience: ...And I’m/ still no closer to understanding how to live in a country/ that’s become an embarrassment... Same, Stephen, same.

Around the turn of the century, I met Stephen Dobyns after he gave a reading, and was able to tell him how much I’d liked Cemetery Nights, and how some of the rhetorical stances in those poems informed my own later practice; he accepted my awkward praise with graciousness, and we sipped our post-reading reception wine. And now he’s dead. How difficult to be an angel./ In order to forgive, they have no memory./ In order to be good, they’re always forgetting./ How else could heaven be run?

 

 

 

 

 

Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018).

Gregory Crosby : PARALLAX DAYS COPY

 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t join Twitter until 2010; casting about for a username, I was stunned to discover that “monostich,” the technical and often misspelled term for a one-line poem, was somehow still available. How is that a platform seemingly designed for aphorisms and one-line poems did not already have a dozen variations on that handle? I scooped it up and proceeded to tweet out the monostiches that I’d been collecting in a little notebook.

No one cared.

Later, I found that my thirteen word horror stories gained slightly more traction, in part perhaps because they were termed “stories” instead of poems. I wrote over 300 of those, and duly collected them into a manuscript later, but the original monostiches I’d tweeted out over 2010 and 2011 gathered the fine digital dust that most things on the Internet gather.

It was only after I’d downloaded my tweets and deleted myself off that site that I, unexpectedly and thankfully prompted, began to go over them and pluck some out and revise them into what became Parallax Days, rescuing them from their electronic oblivion to return them to the thin but immortal arms of print. I’m glad they have a potential new life... and I’m just as stunned that the handle of monostich was still available when I signed up for Bluesky.

 

 

 

 

Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System). He is currently the poetry editor for the online journal Bowery Gothic.