A Poem on Oil for the Occasion of the End of Winter
1.
To state something simply
To unfold your hands–
To have the compassion for anyone–
if it is what you are moving toward
To spend the day in bed–
to become a bed–to rhyme in “slow-time” and silence–
to bend, to flinch at the sun–
to marry the moon,
to drink moonshine with friends–
to ride the subway
with friends–
to hush in the flowers,
cold in root,
mute in love,
and wild landscapes
breeding poetry, to loth the roadside,
to see the roadside, to quote again:
“It takes an American
to do really big things.”1
Of life
leading toward
an elegy
An existence of things
left over.
Little notes and photographs,
books and
notebooks,
a magnet from a
dinner in
Connecticut
we ate at
in the
summer.
Of the memoir too,
a diary of experience
and living,
who can say
what has happened?
2.
Imagine– a proper language of sleep, considering daylight, or bush clusters, consider
breath and eye movement, my heavy hands seeding, reading lines as the sentences of
turning over bodies, clouds and fertile dust, the living coat, an oil-slicked horizon.
3.
There is, of course,
first the stretching out
of my eyes across
daylight, bush clusters again,
in the morning and breathing
slow nutrients
from the heaviness
of all the world cycling
on and off,
all imagination happens
at the level of the atomic circle.
The bending down of the pupil
inward always swelling
in language.
Each sentence
filling the space
between breath and idea.
Like all others
in public,
the ecosystem
of the city
holds in it
the history
of all burning nights,
cop cars and barricades,
pipelines and retaining walls,
grease and the fat
of whales and
sheep, fishy haze
of the what-once-was,
energy always
moves in circles.
Hamlet cries
for the worm,
later staring
from a pit into
the foggy twilight,
we think about
dying and
coming back
again from it.
Melville working
in the customs house,
later narrated by Krasznahorkai
walking around the city,
the west-side waterfront
now the
Whitney.
Gansevoort St
named for Melville’s
grandfather, a
colonial Colonel
fighting the British
and Iroquois.
A fort constructed
then torn down,
a market constructed
then torn down.
The art
hanging above
the street,
a building built
with green bonds.
4.
Manhattan panorama,
rose petal building tops
on the morning commute
in which I take several
forms of transportation:
my feet walk to a subway which moves toward
the ferry across the river, watching carefully the other
boats. The UN comes into view, the police are set up
in their boats too, the president is in town.
Slow and violent,
this is the rhythm
of grass and coal fire.
It is history,
we saw torching time,
seagulls dance
in the piles of trash.
There is no way
to locate
the self here.
The social existence
of coal in the ground
and air, and in
books, Bleak House
twilight:
Smoke          lowering          down       from        chimney-pots,
making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in
it    as    big as full-grown snowflakes — gone into
mourning,   one might imagine,   for the death of
the sun
Sooty conversations
over dinner thinking
on the poetry
of giving up, of
blowing up, of
heaving up desire.
This is another way
of holding
the world together,
into spaces
of past and future,
the sentence performs
the same trick,
a slice of moments
strung up
on a hillside, explosions
stumbling through
the creative
forests.
5.
In 1993 Chevron named an oil supertanker after Condoleezza Rice.
7 years later Condoleezza Rice would resign from Chevron’s board to join the Bush administration.
2.4 billion people live within 60 miles of a coastline.
In 2012 the Dong Fang Ocean (formerly, the Exxon Valdez) was sold as scrap for $16 million.
Oil and gas companies, fossil fuel-burning utilities, and the banks that fund drilling donate to police departments’ charity foundations.
On December 10th, 1967, the United States Atomic Energy Commission detonated a nuclear explosion in rural northern New Mexico to explore whether or not such explosions could be useful for natural gas extraction.
6.
I want to tell you now about my lungs–the in–and–out failing voice of the morning, the snow outside, the coke-plant history of midday.
In the end, I am a ratepayer. It is electricity moving toward history, thoughts come always after. Freedom flows from the ocean.
The rain comes, water abandoning one state for the other.
1“Control,” Rae Armantrout, Partly: New and Selected Poems.
**
NICODEMUS NICOLUDIS is a poet, PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center, and co-founder/managing editor of Archway Editions. He is the author of Multicene (2023) and lives in Queens.
