Five Poems from Chariot

Timothy Donnelly

Midnight at the pit of my irrelevance:
a hair’s breadth away, I step closer to the mouth of it, no more afraid to
shake hands with my lacuna than a bird is of the air
whistling in its bones. To stay possible as long as possible

had felt like enough now—a persistence of streaks
in soft butter yellow shed from the clock tower onto the indigo-
freaked slate-to-black vagueness
that indicates the river. The light lives

on like this, drowning by day
in its own muchness, sensed most acutely at night
where there’s less of it, when its difference from what dominates
sharpens its edges, or the perception of its edges, so that its presence

is felt
contradistinctively—not a thing of the world, but against it
and inside you, less parasite than language
awakening the vacancy, fluorescing what it means, its marks on the page

of the water a welcome, a widening
outside yourself and into a manifold that can’t be marketed
or observed, so if anyone’s near you when it happens, they won’t know
what’s happening—they won’t know you’re more than what you answer to.

Where Space Begins

It depends on who you are, and what you’re after. If you’re NASA
handing out silver astronaut pins, space starts exactly
50 miles above the planet. But if you’re less scientific than that,
and want only to find your way through the dark, hands groping

for the word for the banister, space might begin
at the surface of your skin, or even underneath it. Let’s stay
here a moment, pasting it together, listening to weather
come into its own as it hits an obstruction—rain on the window,

wind on the tarp—words as they loosen
hold of the world, peeling away from what they can’t quite become
in order to be more completely what they are—taking off
after midnight, like geese do, so the realists can’t track them

en route to another level, they set root in what they posit
apart from what they point to, making a space of themselves
anyone can wander in—a garden without entry fee. I write to you now
from its hot-pink periphery, about to set foot in the pleasure of it

outright—a maze of azaleas at full tilt, an open-air temple
built not for worshipping gods in their heights, but right here
among us in clouds of abundance as they recombine
words whatever way they can, exposing the backend of the possible.

Angel of the Hearth

When it came it was like a cherry popsicle
melting down the arm of a stranger’s child, colorful
and sloppy, but having nothing to do with you, you could walk past it
on the crosswalk and not think twice. Or when it came

it was like a festival
of some religious intent, the wax effigy of a saint
confused in flowers out of season shedding blessings down your street
with amateur music on a litter built by hand by the avid.

Or when it came it was like the avid
hands of strangers pulling knobs and switches, leaving
traces in the air’s clear wax like litter you have shed like music
without intent in the course of your developed day. Or like the spirit

inhabiting a neighbor, one who grabs you by the arm
for balance on the crosswalk and quick
as math you feel the power isn’t where you expect it, it can hide
anywhere it decides, and nothing will go right for you for weeks after,

months—keys will go missing, money
won’t reach you, new milk sours in the fridge overnight—
and as you sit at your hearth for comfort, it will be there in that fire
caressing you, erasing you, filling you with images of things you’d kill for.

Ultramarine

But in a sense I am always looking over a cliff
overlooking the sea, the thoughts batted out of me in pages
by appointment by the wind, a student of the hazardous
rhapsody water makes as it slaps against the rocks and into air.

I don’t care here that I should be raking in the big bucks,
working the circuit, peddling the self. I’m too busy breathing
in the ancient fragrance of the sea like the sick cologne a friend gave me
that smells like church walked into church.

Nor am I impressed anymore by those spiritualistic tricks
the hustlers pursue to imbue what they do with a shimmer
of significance when what’s underneath it all is nothing,
which is not to be confused with nothingness, which is sacred.

Yves Klein said he signed his name to the sky to make
his greatest work of art, but look again—that’s not his name,
but the French for “Help, I’m bored.” And of course he was. Anyone
with an appetite for the absolute is either overexcitable or

perilously bored, which brings us back to the cliff, the waves
a true ultramarine, literally “beyond the sea,” like Klein’s own
patented shade of blue, to which I remain ever-faithful, its value
equal to a loud prayer that answers itself softly and vice versa.

Chariot

Confusion of the verb to chair, meaning to accommodate
both bodily and otherwise, as in “The buttercup’s bright chalice
chairs the morning dew,” or “How much more of this do you
suppose the heart can chair,” which is a question apt to throw

a person off at first, who envisions a throne, likely of gold-
leafed wood, thrown into the heart’s red blaze—iconographic,
cartoonish, and soon to combust—as is the heart, the other
counters, at last understood. Alone, I cupped my palms to chair

tadpoles as a boy, a jar did after that, and then the pond
chaired them back again and into frog adulthood
over time, which chairs the total of what is, pulling us along
in its procession like a chariot, irreversibly deeper into itself

and likewise across space, as if a jumble of chalk horses
on ascent into cerulean, azure, aquamarine—all the blues
Redon used late in life after decades of lithographs and charcoals.
How did we get here? Unclear, if it matters; what matters

is we stay—aloft in possible color, all the oil paints and pastels
that came to represent for the painter “a reconciliation
with the external world,” as I just now read in a book, which is
a vessel to chair the world, itself a vessel to chair all possible books