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Overview
Capacity, the extraordinary new collection from the award-winning poet James McMichael, deliberates an earth that supplies what people need to live. Ocean, land, animate bodies, shelter, thoughts, feelings, talk, sex--each is addressed at the pace of someone dense with wonder's resistance to take for granted even the smallest or most obvious parts of existence.
Capacity is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466873216 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 88 |
| File size: | 105 KB |
About the Author
James McMichael is the author of five books of poetry, including The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Shelley Memorial Prize.
Read an Excerpt
Capacity
By James McMichael
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2006 James McMichaelAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7321-6
CHAPTER 1
THE BRITISH COUNTRYSIDE IN PICTURES
The frontispiece fixes as
British
a man whose
livelihood is the grass. As he had
before the take and
since,
he plies away in the sun.
"Market Day."
Storefront awnings slope into the square.
Among the occupied,
only the vendors are without hats.
Well-fatted,
sweet and full of pickle are the hooked gibbets of
beef above the pens.
The plate after
"Tractors on Parade" is untitled.
Where the village high street's
walls converge at the far end,
a motor-car has entered and parked.
Pictured empty in another,
the new Great West Road has working
fields to either side. In the one format,
affordable and bound print by print,
grass advances as a factor
never to be run out of by a
people at home.
The farmer is to be seen as having at last put
dearth right.
Nature was on its
own side always. Necessary
against nature sometimes to forbear from making
more mouths to feed.
With the poorest twelfth begetting
half the nation,
the interests of soil and
race were served
by the politics of the straight furrow.
In the countryside
alone it was that one was spared meeting
the less right sort of girl.
Need.
It had become at last what only
others knew,
even if they were in one's midst.
Outside in
Kenya,
Madras,
Shaanxi,
Quixeramobim,
nature had put in place
disastrous shortfalls,
need and epidemic,
nature had played out
Ireland again.
Of those invisible millions who were gone,
nothing was missing.
Nothing was missing
for them. There without need,
they were the revenant in England's garden,
they were the ones whose absence is their sign.
Of the unperceived who keep
safehold where they hide,
vision is a forgetting.
The British were those whom nature let bring home
as graveclothes to the ones it starved
arboreal and floral plantings.
England was green.
There belonged
ill-matched to many their likely
allotments of soil.
Across the range of them from
kitchen-gardens to pleasance,
these were not brandished. They were kept up.
While there were throwback native
cottagers who grew potatoes,
a weekly show on
gardening was aired.
All crystal sets picked up the BBC.
Because those grounds least frequented
were grounds where need was least,
of most
avail was a garden if
no one was there.
The walled reserve was model.
Its expert and only
viewers were staff.
What showed above the fine clean tilth was
surplus.
From its abounding
beds each day,
staff saw to it
for one:
by the garden's having made an
excess of nature,
nature was trumped.
Need had been made less natural.
Replaced was the old
productive ideal that the useful
good was desired.
The desired good was
useful in the new ideal.
Things become useless in the hoarding of them.
Needed for a nation's
surfeit of goods were buyers
primed by their wanting. Desire's
deputy
was the person in love.
An appetite need not slacken if what one
craves is the scarce,
and there is but the one beloved
only.
No hunger
feeds so on itself
as being able
never to have one's fill of someone prized.
They had become friends.
It would not have
occurred to him that she did not
love him. Of
course she did.
Friends love one another.
It began to explain his finding now that
along with love she also
gives him desire. Under something the
sway of which is undue,
in love with her,
he learns that he has had cleared
inside him
a constructed
garden-like place.
He practices his absence
as the stilled reflecting surface of its pool.
With features of her person in his
stead there,
to what is not its
own anymore in wanting
the self is sent
back by the other.
Far enough beyond
reason already is any
one such transport. Improbable
twice over
that with the same conclusive keenness
she should want him.
He looks for cues that
he too had given
her desire.
They are not there.
There is the coming
war to think of as well.
With conscription on its way,
better to be no more than
genial with her for now.
That is why it is her
suitcases he reaches for when he
meets her at the St Pancras train.
Right from the start he is off ahead of her
efficiently down the platform.
Against him from behind,
her fingers have it in them
that she will have to break away
too soon again for her return north.
Out of her greeting hand on his
back he walks.
For no longer than withdrawal
itself takes,
her touch had been there.
Wondering at its light
circumspect grace,
he does not mistake its bidding. What
she wants
he can from this time on want
for her. There can be no
help for them now since what
she wants is him.
Made nearly
bearable by desire is one's not being able to
withstand the desired.
The hurried meetings follow.
Their wanting one another comes to take on
greed as its base.
From the next moment between them
least likely to be surpassed
they carry
away from one another into their days away
more wanting.
It will be weeks.
To be with her
through them instead. If they could be already
beyond the war and
years on,
they might have lives.
Whole patches of days would have to be
discordant, humdrum.
Rote would help them through.
Given ordinary times to
lift her from,
have her lift him,
he would have come to
preside with her over their chances. Around them
everywhere was the petition that
dailiness might hold its gracious own.
Toward it came
sandbags on the corner pavements.
Post office pillar-boxes were rigged with
gas-detecting paint.
The mask itself smelled of rubber. What one saw
first through its eyeshield was one's own
canister snout.
Leaflets from the Lord Privy
Seal's Office were
"Evacuation: Why and How"
and "If the Invader Comes."
So the enemy might
lose themselves in their confusion, the stations'
signposts came down. There were now
barrage balloons overhead
and searchlights.
The Anderson shelter was
corrugated steel.
It needed a garden to be sunk in.
Two million more acres were to come under the plough.
Collected for their great trek
out of the city,
the children walked
"crocodile" to the trains,
a loudspeaker telling them,
"Don't play with the doors and
windows, if you don't mind, thank you."
Villages and towns were to accept a number
equal to their populations.
Each child had a pinned label.
Each was allowed one toy.
They were met at the other end
by strangers who had come to
see who they were.
A lady with a clipboard sought billets for them.
Some of them were in tatters.
The more doleful were often the last picked.
This was to be where they would
live now for a time,
out here in the country.
Files of them traipsed the lanes behind their teachers.
They were shown how to strip
hopbines,
how to make rush baskets out of reeds.
Boys served as beaters for the pheasant-shoots.
Harvest of course meant that
sheaves had to be carted. The sturdier of
both sexes
were put to work in the fields.
No bombs fell into the warm, beautiful autumn.
Most of the children went back home.
When it was time to
leave again for the country,
few of them did.
Above the blackouts,
the Germans were led at first by
moonlight up the Thames estuary.
Then it was by the fires.
Sounding like
stones being thrown at the front wall,
the incendiaries melted steel.
Bombs that screamed their way into the city
thudded down.
A smell of cordite followed.
Looked to be needed each month
were twenty million feet of seasoned
coffin-timber. There were
no more blue waterproof bags.
With the raids coming every night but one,
the dead might have to be dumped in the channel.
It is in bodies given to be seen that
ghosts meet their term.
Their transparency is no less restive.
Escapes that would fail are
patent already
in the pre-war countryside exposed.
Phantom in a picture are gaps that might have been
filled by a child.
One plate is called
"A Quiet Corner."
A trading-wherry is about to tie up.
Full sunlight has
to itself again for the afternoon
the bench
an East End child had jumped from for her
sprint to the canal. She had seen that
ropes needed securing. Having
called to her up the slope,
the bargeman was mindful that at
that same lock last spring
a man had asked to take his picture.
There are pollarded
willows in the picture. In another,
a hedge-crowned wall.
Stills of the countryside are composures.
They apply to keeping
outcome at bay.
Nameable,
all finite things are
present to one another for as
long as they show.
The bedding planes first. Ready
never to be seen as country,
they are exposed sometimes as its side.
On show in their single plots,
slate, shale and
weald clay,
marl,
the Tertiaries,
chalk and upper greensand.
A former seafloor laid down
shell by shell,
limestone dislikes interruption.
As stuffs from its lighter understories wear away,
streams take their sources back
farther with them into the scarp.
The cap-rock
outliers they leave are often wooded.
Sight is of the senses
the one that most
lends itself to remove.
Each prospect for the looker-on is
his without trespass.
Across the tiers of houserows up from the river,
each profile shows what its volume
stretches to from its
mid-point out.
The ridges to their backs are in cloud
where the sheep pass
down from high summer grazing.
Their drove-road takes the turn of the hill.
Inviting the indicative,
the tie-bulwarked lawn above it has its
copy in the millpond's glaze.
Another figure appears who speaks English.
Upfield from the crude railing over a footbridge,
his alternately-forward
knees are caught
mid-stride.
ABOVE THE RED DEEP-WATER CLAYS
Capacity is both how
much a thing holds and how
much it can do. From a solid
magnetized and very hot core, the earth
suffers itself to be turned outside.
Closest to its heart are the deepest submarine
trenches and sinks. Its lava finds
clefts there in the old uplifted crust,
the ocean floor a scramble. Wrapping at depth huge
shield volcanoes, the North Atlantic
down- and upwells, its denser layers making
room behind them through the blue-green shortest
wavelengths of light. Inside the cubic
yards it levies,
league by league, respiring, budgeting its heat,
it hides its
samenesses of composition through and through.
For the normal water level,
an ideal
solitary wave is surplus. Any wave's
speed is what it is
only if reversing it would render it still.
Surfaces are almost without feature
at Sea Disturbance number one.
When the wind stretches them, their wrinkling gives it
more to hold on to. Three is
multiplying whitecaps.
Spray blows in well-marked streaks at six.
In the foam-spewed rolling swell that takes a
higher number,
small and medium
ships may be lost to view for a long time.
Waves are additive. Doming
up on the tidal bulge into a storm's
barometric low,
the distances between them widen
as from the Iceland-Faeroes massif
leeward for another
three hundred miles southeast
they build unblocked. Little
enough for them
the first outlying gabbro
islets and stacks. These are not yet The British
Countryside in Pictures, not yet the shoals
off Arran in the Firth of Clyde.
POSITED
That as all parts of it
agree in their low resistance to flow,
so should it be agreed to call it water.
To say of water that it floods both
forward and back through places
difficult to place demands that the ensouled
themselves make places for their parts of speech,
the predicates arrayed in
front of or behind the stated subject —
water, in the case at hand. Water
attains to its names because it shows as one thing
speech is about.
It shows as water.
To say no
more than that about however broad a sea is
plural already,
it says there must be something
else somewhere,
some second thing at least, or why say
how the thing shows? Before it can be taken
as a thing, as sea,
there have to have been readied for it other
possible-if-then-denied pronouncements — land,
the sky. Possible that
somewhere in the midst of waters there could
be such things as might be walked on,
hornblende and
felsite, quartzite, remnant
raised beach platforms, shales,
a cliff-foot scree.
Until given back accountably as
extant and encountered,
nothing counts. Nothing counts until
by reason it is brought to stand still.
Country. That it stands over
against one stands to reason. Not without
reason is it said of country that it
counters one's feet. To count as
groundwork for a claim about the ground,
reason must equate with country.
To be claimed as that, as country,
sand blown inland from the dunes must
equal its having landed grain by grain.
All grains have their whereabouts.
From emplacements in their clumps of
marram grass and sedges, some will be
aloft again and lime-rich
grain by grain will land.
Country is its mix of goings-on.
For these to tally, befores from
afters must at every turn divide.
Before it turns,
a cartwheel has its place to start from. It
stands there in place. In place an
axle's width away, another
parallel wheel is standing.
Not for long.
After each wheel in concert leaves its
first place for a second,
it leaves again at once a third and more. No more nor
fewer are its places on the strand than it has
time for in its turning.
Imprinted
one at a time,
these places are the lines the cart
makes longer at each landward place.
Not late for what goes
on there as its heft at each next place bears
down onto the loams and breaks them,
the seaweed-laden
cart is in time. Time is the cart's
enclosure. There for the taking, time is
around the cart,
which takes it from inside. Around
stones in the dry-stone dyke are
times out of mind,
those times the stones' embeddings let them go.
The hill-grazings
also are in time, and the three cows.
The blacklands are in time with their
ridged and dressed short rows of barley.
As it does around
bursts that for the places burst upon
abandon where they were before,
time holds around
the moving and the resting things.
FROM THE HOME PLACE
Occurrences are
runnings-toward. From who knows what all
else time might have
sent there instead, a place is
run toward and reached and taken
up by a thing when a
thing takes place. What it
takes for a thing to happen is a place time lets it
pose or
be posed, arrested,
placed in a resting state
as clay and soured rushes are for
one first gabled end. Allotting things
constantly their whiles of
long or short standing, time is each stance's
circum-, its surround.
Circumstantial that the same one gabled end should
again take place as it had taken place one
instant before. As
wide as the first, as tall,
and though time brooks few repetitions,
a second gable
too time lets take place. Handedness
left and right affords in time a
front wall,
a back. Before on
top of it all time lets take place as well
a wheat-straw roof,
sod over coupled rafters must be laid
grass up.
Some of a house's sides are
biased, some upstanding. Because a
house has its sides,
so also does the air that meets them have its
clement and less clement sides.
To the sides a house is posed as are opposed as many
standing and inconstant
things as you please.
As distance is the room
away from an opposing, sided
instance or stance,
the out-of-doors
itself is sided by a house whose indoor ways makes
room outside. Going outside,
the out-of-doors is gone out
into.
From the standstill house out
in it
(and with room between) are
hayrick and byre, a road, the moss, discrete
potato-beds, their
grass-to-grass closed hinges.
Room is by the laws of growth at
play there outside for parts related
all as one in increase in the
one thing. Along a root
Earthed over, earthed
Over again,
The rose end, heel end,
Stolon, skin
outward through the loose mold
part by part take room.
Enlarged to membrum
virile now in size
and now to fist, they are
parts in relation. There are goods as
yield at the home place sometimes as at
other times
not. Time is
equable that way.
With no parts to it in itself, indifferent,
without relation, time offers
nothing to be carried back. Persons are
separate in time when they are living.
When certain maincrop tuberous parts go on being
missed at the hearth, back as
one again with time are persons now
outside it for good.
Against a bad
outside time,
relation
sometimes takes its sundry parts
inside.
To a first part entered in
relation with them there, inside,
the other parts are sometimes only
relatively other.
Seized as in every way
relative and to the first part's taste
are such late
outside parts as are now
stew and colcannon.
As back along the tongue
palatably are carried first one
bolus and more,
The circle of the Same surrounds
The circle of the stripped,
Assimilable Other,
Pharynx-housed, tipped
down through a tenser muscle to the gullet. Equal
each to what was wanted,
each timely part means that
apart from her
outside
are parts to be
made same, partaken, had as that one
thought is had in thinking present any
morsel she eats. Laid
hold of when she thinks
are parts that just before were
other for her,
anyone's,
apportioned out
between her and her fellows.
She thinks of everything that it is
passing in its little parts. When back at
once to those same parts are drift and
purport carried,
meaning grants the time to have
returned to her from not-yet habitable parts
just what it is she thinks of those parts as.
Until she has meant them
as that,
configurative parts are still futures,
they await being
thought about by her as having
each been fitted to its
suitable outward look.
All parts that show are in concord in their
standing over against her,
all are directed toward
what it is about them that she might mean.
As one who sees them, as one whose
self is drawn away to those
among them she sees,
no sooner is she
scattered there outside than she regains the more
that self immured in seeing them as such.
To meanings she takes part in with them, she
too belongs.
All parts that mean are
home to one still enough the same herself to be made
solute with them
inside what they mean.
Her domain
within them is the time they
take her to think.
Other for that time and
outside,
absolute,
are interrupting second parties.
High time that in his
proper person
one of them approach her now.
Others of her blood are there
around her,
inside. His having come could pass as a family call.
She can take it as that. So can he,
if beyond the frugal
greeting she tenders
she does not speak.
To address him
puts her at risk of what might follow
straightaway.
He would be sure to answer. It would be
colloquy then. Irrecoverably
past thereafter would this mute
present time be.
Among such parts as
give themselves to saying, each leaves a
now-no-more-than-recent part behind.
Another now arrives,
another. Nows
track that way, they multiply,
the gaps that let each new part differ from the last
they override.
At the same time it carries
on to its own undoing,
the present
keeps to itself. Resolute,
she presents the present
time and time again by keeping to hers.
Homesick for the Same, the One,
she gathers at the same time what she
watches for in him
and how it sits with her to see it. How
lavish of him that he is
there to see her. As long as she
thinks him that and goes on saying nothing,
she keeps everything at the
one same time. At the same time,
to think does not always
go without saying.
Articulations sometimes are come
out with,
they are aired,
my goodness, my
word what reach a party of the first part's
voice has for incarnate
third and second persons who can hear.
From its hollow up from
the open glottal cords,
the next column of
breath she issues still gives
nothing away.
Not so
The column after. As it leaves,
The lappets that she draws around it
Make it tremble so positions of the
Tongue, teeth, lips and jaw can sound it
abroad. Cast
forward from her thus are parts with their
own times each.
One does not have to turn to listen.
Airborne at the middle ear,
molecular,
each damped and stronger sound prompts its allied
hair-cell to fire. No more than a
smear at first,
the spell each sound is there for has its
onset and rise,
its temperings whose
play across the membranes no one
other repeats.
Dispersed toward him with the rest from what he
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Capacity by James McMichael. Copyright © 2006 James McMichael. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Epigraph,
The British Countryside in Pictures,
Above the Red Deep-Water Clays,
Posited,
From the Home Place,
The Issue of Their Loins,
The Begotten,
Back,
Also By James McMichael,
Copyright,