The Felled
our bodies plaqued with wet leaves in the seam of fall
shoulder out of enclosures stamped into the ground
as passed from hand to hand chipped nuggets of root go
with muscled vine and tendrils of fine resin dripping
on the smooth-of-dark sleep-cut stone in dim October
and this building calm in the slumping tug of the hush
our bodies plaqued with wet leaves in this seam of fall
move buoyantly in the twig-steam and spiced vapor
of the all-living duff as we assemble unknowingly
the mudstuck bower where we’ll at last lay down
Woodpile, July 4–September 21
shouldered enclosure
bodies of trees
masses of bodies
passed by censors
in-delicate embrace
sung wet outlines
are shown through
on the stacked wood
white drip of viscid
snug moonlight in rows
scented masses
the boys singing
passed by censers
in cords of wood
box-cities of it
the cricket captured
still giving, giving
invertebrate skyscrapers
to the duff
serving still
all living
rain bringing
no censers
no smoke
just considering
cooling days
over endless chirping
we are
here
the scent of fire
[Litany]
the burnt aspens
the eaten spruce
denuded
the hidden redwood
newborns chasing flames
a tree new to science
but known by its people
throughout centuries
of colonization
a specimen
may it go on
as it will outstanding
the worldwide gingko
famously forever
before Sycamore Gap
(felled)
after afforesting windbreak
(in-built)
a “great green wall”
to negotiate the Gobi
all who still hold up
streambanks against wash
who still hold down
sliding plates of soil
and fold the rocks
we carve our names in
the bark to burn off
even still then together
as mountains moving
three mourning cypress
in a German painting
and the ashes they cut
the ashes they cut
the Joshua poached
because we forget
how a yucca needs
the sand its moths
make habitat of
as we seem to need
anonymous lumber
chipped and pressed
the ply martyrdom
the bananas in rows
their pickers looked over
(faint scent fading by
old name of “Cavendish”)
still freshly nursed
the two I forgot
but can see through this
a gift from the city
through this window
implanted street trees
where the city ashes cut
to hold back green
bejeweled invaders
these two need water
so in dry weeks I—
my hose a breast
my breath their air
my mulch a swaddle
the puddle of milk
on the sunken sidewalk
for my tulip and elm
my rosid and poplar
in loose yellow slump
leaf dropping summer
my lament dehiscence
but in this drought
yes I will too drip
and decohere
placefully made
a home for another
Why I Forgot to Garden
1. The shaking wind like the gush of breath I let out as a kind of sigh-huffed punctuation when the conversation sputters into the wet mud of my complaint like a refurbished Packard.
2. The unallocated desire that had burned in me for ten months already when the days went cool on us again.
3. The garden looking abandoned simply because no human had passed there and it was thickening with the wool of blown seed not far from its birthing grounds of next year just below where loose assorted wonderful vermin had turned the soil just by being there into a kind of dry mush that if someone did come along they’d find as pleasant to step on as one of those polyfoam mats you can buy at a bougie enough office store.
4. The tear in the fabric of text hampering the ergonomics of the passenger seat’s pleather.
5. The way the winds drive harder in the fall because the jet stream still somehow comes down to our latitude following the seasonal descent of the sun.
6. Turbulent flow as an ongoing area of research.
7. More leaves falling when more wind is blowing.
8. The unallocated desire that has burned in me for ten years already.
9. Novel form as a passage to the end of such desire; the fact that no such invention should be necessary. That if I could speak plainly. That I do not see where we’re going from here. Struggling to be okay with that. That I need more and I do not understand how this is not plain to you or how you could deny it to me. Every time you think I don’t know what I need.
10. “Plain” being a long stretch of uncultivated field but homophonous with a kind of shaving device used to make things square and proper, or, in circumstances demanding decoration, to add a straight line of curved ornament to a wooden surface.
11. Time-worn symbols of fertility complicated by the fact that we are both men still managing to manifest themselves as if they were unalterable truths.
12. The theory of metaphor as the structure of thought.
13. Literary inheritance as a valid but still deficient substitute for the continual creation of kinship. Having heard the words the Fisher King before I understood who or what it was. Knowing that was passed to me by a professor to whom it was passed by a long line of mainly men down from Eliot from all the way back to Chrétien des Troyes back on to the oral origins of the legend back on to perhaps another man whose inability to reproduce was more physical. My ongoing engagement with A. and other young poets by the acts of speaking, reading, writing, and thinking as an endlessly reticular or I should say rhizomatic continuation of such a line, “rhizomatic” being taken not so much from French theorists as from my own more immediate inductor whose name was David and whom I claim here as a forebear. This is all for you.
14. The industrial reversal of the man/nature divide as manifested in the fact that a plain is not an uncultivated field. A field is a cultivated plain.
15. The violence of feudal times and the mysterious wound of the Fisher King contrasted with the bureaucratic stranglehold of the adoption process.
16. The fact that I’m externalizing this to such a degree that I cannot admit adoption would be perfectly achievable but that it just isn’t something you think we’re ready for. And I know you’re right, so instead I blame the state.
17. The recognition that if we were not both men it could happen just by accident. Knowing the terror of such an accident without denying what it would mean to me. Knowing that such a terror will never be mine.
18. All the times I’ve daydreamed of it happening by the accident of some family connection of yours needing a home for newly bereaved children. That I can only envision such a scenario when it is paired with any given variety of societal collapse.
19. Knowing that wouldn’t sway you either. Thinking I could even know that. Recognizing that in discussing the issue with you my expectation that you will always refuse its possibility (even when you explicitly do not) is itself a barrier to achieving its realization.
20. The salience of this issue, having derailed completely what could have been a perfectly plain, juicy, ominous narrative depiction of a common couple’s argument that nonetheless would speak to some fundamental, fated disagreement, the plain truth being sometimes quite ugly, even technical when the mind is technical. Such textual ugliness an obviousness so naked that the performed circumvention of emotional pain gives the reader a direct but voluntary conduit for said pain.
21. This text still causing to arise in the writer an idea of the redemptive power of literature-as-kinship (repeat item 13). The unallocated desire that has burned through ages.
22. Whereas, having also just polished off the final changes of a poem for a dear junior writer who learns from me I can return now to a more proper allocation (dislocation) of said desire and write a beautiful poem. Something my body not only allows but would seem to require.
23. The dry mush of my bereavement. Its fictive nature its real nature. Its real nature one day coming about only by means of fictive elements. Washed by words and placenta. Made new because the soil when living makes itself new. All conditioned things bitter except for the spotlessness of bitterness well spotted. So I give it up. I give it all up for you. Repeat item 3.
24. Just by being there. Pain so naked it can only be yours if you choose to bear it.
Jacob J Billingsley is a queer guy who blushes at the word “man.” His work has appeared in ALOCASIA #5, ANMLY, Empty Room Radio’s “compulsion petal,” on social media, and in his DMs. His sibling gave him a now-giant Cereus as a housewarming gift, and his backyard has more Ageratina in it every year. He can kind of drive.