From A Book of Hours

Sailing with just the jib
The earth a broken crib
and all the babes a-squall
cry no more cry no more
There’s such a thing as bit rot
you said          you said
it seemed everyone was reading
about extinction amidst the extinction
as if knowing were enabling. Winner
loses, the Marxist wrote, melancholic,
remembering the existentialist
adrift on the seas of his certainties.
To the east the sea’s growing darker
and a punctual low roar times itself
in the ear against the blood that in the ear
moves. Motorboat hour. Lobster trap check.
Exposed rock and the low tide
and an unease outstripping psychology.
Everyone dissolving into everyone
else but the lunge for the sublime
continues oh pathos and rage
for individuation. With the VR set on
the rapist feels it and then? Limits
of empathy as Noah determined
pulls up his ladder the sealed-in elect
to survive the drowners to drown.

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“This poem is a kind of distillate or a precipitate of a lot of elements, some of which I know, including: looking out at Gloucester Harbor; ambient unease; overheard bits of speech; conversations and readings about various modes of disaster—ecological, sexual, political, medial; Coleridge’s ‘Dejection Ode’; skepticism about ‘empathy;’ an astonishing passage in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Time for Everything about the Noah/flood story. It was composed in August 2019, and seems now to be part of a series—a kind of contemporary ‘book of hours,’ devotional meditative work: a mode of attention if not ‘solace.’ Among the writers and interlocutors here are Anne-Lise François, Dana Hawkes, and MC Hyland.”
—Maureen N. McLane