Songs
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About this ebook
The poems in Derek Henderson’s Songs are “translations” of a film cycle of the same name, shot by American filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933–2003) to document his and his family’s life in Colorado in the mid-1960s. Where Brakhage’s films provide a subjective visual record of his experience bewildered by the eye, these poems let language bewilder the space a reader enters through the ear. Henderson tenders the visual experience of Brakhage’s films—films of the domestic and the wild, the private and political, the local and global—into language that insists on the ultimate incapacity of language—or of image—to fully document the comfort and the violence of intimacy. Songs expresses the ecstasy we so often experience in the company of family, but it just as urgently attests to ecstasy’s turbulent threat to family’s stability. Like Brakhage’s films, Henderson’s poems carry across into language and find family in every moment, even the broken ones, all of them abounding in hope.
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Book preview
Songs - Derek Henderson
SONGS
The Mountain West Poetry Series
Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell, series editors
We Are Starved, by Joshua Kryah
The City She Was, by Carmen Giménez Smith
Upper Level Disturbances, by Kevin Goodan
The Two Standards, by Heather Winterer
Blue Heron, by Elizabeth Robinson
Hungry Moon, by Henrietta Goodman
The Logan Notebooks, by Rebecca Lindenberg
Songs, by Derek Henderson
SONGS
DEREK HENDERSON
poems
The Center for Literary Publishing
Colorado State University
Copyright © 2014 by Derek Henderson.
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to
Permissions, The Center for Literary Publishing
9105 Campus Delivery, Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-9105.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Henderson, Derek (Derek Eaton)
[Poems. Selections]
Songs: poems / Derek Henderson.
pages; cm. -- (Mountain West poetry series)
ISBN 978-1-885635-39-6 (softcover : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-885635-40-2 (electronic)
I. Title.
Ps3608.e39255a6 2014
811’.6--dc23
2014035050
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39.48-1984.
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14
Publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This book is dedicated to my children: Charlotte, Peter, Audrey, and Alex.
I believe in song.
—Stan Brakhage
CONTENTS
SONG 1
SONG 2
SONG 3
SONG 4
SONG 5
SONG 6
SONG 7
SONG 8
SONG 9
SONG 10
SONG 11
SONG 12
SONG 13
SONG 14
SONG 15
SONG 16
SONG 17
SONG 18
SONG 19
SONG 20
SONG 21
SONG 22
SONGS
SONG 1
Portrait before the eyes, everything true in the lens. Her hands meet and equal. Serenity at the appearance of edges. Serenity was there before the eye roamed and is still here before the eye. Transparent storm door: the hand knows the window’s evenness in a broken door (where the door broke it opens in a line, slow and bending), how the hot window cools, how the eye beholds and opens, how all’s gone gummed up, gone human. Farther off, gathering in the heat, tinny like the doorbell’s admission of American width, even there the eyes seem hidden in unwatchfulness as night begins to freeze, the window ledge begins turning to the ground, and the warm house makes a ceremony of its windows leaking heat. Ceremony is birth, heat dies in the window and cools off an inhabitant or two, the children run out of doors into an early-21st century, seeming to shine. In song, I become lyric heart, so, transparent. Singing meets up in the eyes in the knowledge that broken things abound in hope, the present is always beginning, an according, hoofclicks on the rooftop in June; how do we make the words? We wait. Song one is turnkey, tissue, a white yard, more American ground. Ground glass so far is heat, new working of heaven, identified and met in a snowy landscape, a high line bounding heaven. The eye grows an egg- like vault, swarm of fact in the heat, overply, heat fleeces the window with frost.
Portray the woman’s reader, hands full of pearls, her silence is the product of her silence—she sails through a quiet house. Transparency colors everything: windows signed with breakage, the door is here for anyone, its clean lines, its billowing openness, its wooden lintel. Through the window a terrible image: stepping into the marriage chamber is Cain, dominating the solitude of night, this version of night —windows distribute starlight, the room fogs up its windows, the windows turn to paint an American scene outside, miles of newly planted rows turned towards the house. The first song is the window’s song, too transparent. The song ends with someone tapping at the angles of the window’s construction and the broken apple on the sill is fate’s presence, branches outside are over everything, are ridiculous, a porous cover, just so. The first song is torque, matrix, water, roadways in May, completely American. A glass by the bed protrudes and announces water, the exact sound of a saint’s passage through the room. The sky outside is huge, a complete frequency of color, there is color sitting by the window, a nightgown lain over a chair beside the window.
Pour out in the face of this mess of words. This hand is a word, cornered into writing all this shit out. To be anything before writing it is to be a thing in words I hold as ramiecation, ruination, home. Transparency flies laughing: under this window is breakage and shit—real shit, cat shit (buried far below, waste lining the yard, killing trees)—This window so