Wayward

Katharine Coles

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781946448156, 9780399165467
• eBook ISBN: 9781597098243
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Since her early poems, Katharine Coles has been known as a poet who isn’t afraid to tackle big subjects that occupy the intersections of art and science, including how we know what is true (if we do). Driven by her insatiable curiosity and relying on a use of form and elision so deft it amounts to sleight-of-hand, Coles brings these big questions into small spaces in her seventh book, Wayward, moving the reader at mind-speed through brief meditations on love, marriage, and family; the permeable boundaries of the self; death; and perception. Though her subjects are deeply serious, Coles’ primary tools for addressing them include her wry wit and agile intelligence, which, taking nothing for granted, she deploys to examine our basic assumptions about the world and our experience within it. As always, Coles here uses technical skill to move her thinking in new directions—many of them at once.

∞

HOW WE SING

With our leg bones. With alphabets
And lambkins. With bat-wings

Hung out to dry. With the birds.
With our heads on our sleeves. From

The lion’s throat, in stitches. Riding
The backs of dragons. Bohemian,

Spare-pantried, squeezing our boxes,
Penises wagging, breasts akimbo, mouthing

Feet, hearts in our hands, whistles
Whetted. Bare faced. Captive. In time.

CANIS SOLLICITOR

Make room for doubt. Dig
And roll in the cool hollow

And snooze. Dig some more. Find
A bone you buried last year

Or before then forgot. Believe
You have no past or future, no

Idea. Chew and gnaw and worry
What if you’re the hard

Core of everything. What might
Be wrong, hold together.

LANDSCAPE WITH ANGEL

What does it need with wings? It lofts
Over soft hills and furrows with no apparent
Energy or effort, feathers and frock
And hairdo all unfluttered. Urgency

Expresses itself only through the horizontal
Body, or would if this messenger didn’t
Look stiff as a board surfing the air. While
We’re at it, why does it wear clothes? No small

Human embellishments hide among the drapes,
No secret conceals itself in cunning folds.
(If it’s earth’s, not heaven’s, the landscape

Lies always under night, dotted with lights
Which might be tended fires and might be wild,
On the edge of hope, the edge of blow-up.)

WAYWARD

Will sally for any direction you name,
Or not. After, back, in, too,

Out to follow. Down
Like a dog or some hero

Sunk into his own private
Guided tour of hell. Some of us,

Cowed, go home and weave.
Others take to sea to find

How many animal shapes
Contain them. I might have

A horn on my nose or more
Arms than I can tell what

To do, as many brains, eyes
In my palms or odd

Numbers of hearts
Unbiddable. Good

Heaven, do unto
Or just feed them—I’d rather

Think what greens
Mean in numbers or how

A sky’s dazzle blinds
And blisses. East, west: no way

To know, is the thing, what
To count, how far to go.

THE ARCHIMEDES PALIMPSEST

Not erased. Equations painted
Over. Curious mathematics.A leaf

A spiral a ghost fluttering
The edge of vision, a style of inquiryall there is

To find out. So
Give it up: evangelists here live in

Color, mouths popped around
(Leavesdisappear in flight)

New truth. Beneath, behind,
A set of pieces can be

Arranged in the form of a square.What did
Archimedes draw? Straight lines

Off-kilterfloating bodies
(Old-time preachers again)more like

Examples than proofsturn instead to
A radical idealization. If time is not a river

Maybe one mind absorbs
Into another then bleeds out accumulated

Catastrophes, not every advance
Improvement. The past

As it will be, hints
And layers recoverable:

Interpretedthe diagram shows
Not known.

ANNUNCIATION

What matters is what occurs occurs
Between them, not to them. It’s only that
The angel doesn’t matter, nor the virgin.
A blade of light scissors the air

Between them. To them it’s only that:
A glancing blow, or a kind of cleaving,
A blade of light. Scissor the air
Wide open, then it happens:

A glance, a blow, error a kind of cleaving—
Of? Or to? So something else can enter.
Open wide then. It happens
Those two forget themselves, not knowing—

What? or who?—so something else can enter
And, in entering, replace them.
We can’t forget ourselves. Knowing
Carelessness has brought us to the point

Where in entering we replace them.
The angel doesn’t matter, nor the virgin.
Carelessness has brought us to the point.
What is matters. What occurs, occurs.

THE NEW DAY

Enters in the heroic mode, feathered
And helmeted, muscle-bound

For glory, smelling of scorch. Raise
That sword a little higher

If you can lift it and buckle your straps
Tight. Inser...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• ∞
• Notes
• Biographical Note
• Back Cover