March 11, 2020
Continuing with our mission of highlighting a few poets who have new books that were presented to a diminished audience at AWP this year due to the Coronavirus, we move on to San Francisco poet Patrick Cahill. To have Cahill’s poems available to us in his new collection The Machinery of Sleep is to remind us of the importance of small presses, in this case Sixteen Rivers, a shared-work, nonprofit poetry collective. And after witnessing Cahill work laboriously for years to publish poets as co-founder and editor of Ambush Review, a San Francisco-based literary and arts journal, it’s high time we get to celebrate his own powerful poems. I’ve admired his work for years, as I’m sure you will.
Cahill received his Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and wrote a study of Whitman and visual experience in nineteenth-century America. Portions of the work appearing in The Machinery of Sleep have appeared in The Daguerreian Annual and Left Curve. He lives in San Francisco where he volunteers with the San Francisco Recreation & Park in habitat restoration.
Following is the “blurb” I wrote for the back cover of his book:
“Enter Patrick Cahill’s The Machinery of Sleep and you enter a marvel of a world consumed by dreams, memories, deep observation, love, death, and more. With great artistry, sometimes sharp-edged, sometimes extraordinarily tender, Cahill brings us poems of astonishing range: wise and poignant, heartbreaking, life-affirming, and sometimes humorous. He is a master of marrying emotion with craft — not one word is wasted, not one more word is required. We read these words and travel far — from ‘Q’s world (MIA)’, based on ‘conversations…with an acquaintance who spends time in another world’ (‘Shawn occupies three bodies now’) to ‘The Poet Ponders His Lot’ (‘The mouse speaks English, but squeaks in French…a motor mouth to boot. But cute.’) to ‘She fled with the moment’ (‘even the arabesque of her wingless flight / the fragrant air / that circumscribed her memory / of water ice and snow / fled the universal dark / and nameless matter / of which she was herself / an infinitesimal dot’). The Machinery of Sleep is a collection that will hold you from the first line until the last, for there is so much richness here, so much brilliance end to end and back again.” — Katherine Hastings
Let’s move on now to a few elegiac poems from The Machinery of Sleep. Your comments are always welcome.
.
Gone
you a composition of desire even in the fog star
jasmine burdens the air, its fragrance a devious substitute
yes, even in the fog
.
take us to your Russia, Natalya your frozen sun blurring
its migrations of snow, those blue and senseless distances
Natalya take us from these disappearing surfaces
.
we’ve ground the lenses for clarity for poetry makes
nothing happen yet Spinoza inhaled the powdered glass
of his trade and died of it
.
have you ever pined for the perfect role rolled for the
perfect dream dreamed the perfect mountain where the pine its
garland weaves woven the perfect sacrificial mountain tree
.
the moving air moved through your reflection beyond the
window above the walk the living too moved through
you I looked right through them to traffic beyond
.
then one day you began you began to disappear
lingering there behind me your reflection gone and if
I turn around one day, you won’t be there
.
Brief Time
In one of her self-
portraits
Frida Kahlo translates
her shattered spine
into a fluted
column
of broken stone
ten years
before her death
ars longa
vita brevis
Seneca’s translation
of Hippocrates
but in the original
art is the art
of medicine
and life this brief
poor allotment
given those
who hope to master
a most difficult art
.
Gone Astray
That bird flying into the future left us behind
what hallucinations fill those trees
gone astray in thought
you wait for a voice under the oak
beyond your expectations
or trace of where you’ve been
talus stealing the mountain trail
clouds moving their shadows across the slopes
our first language knitted in place
or twined around a vision
we amateurs amator amare
lover to love
.
Note: In the poem “Gone,” above, the first quotation is from W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” the second from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To Jane: The Invitation.”
.
wordtemple.com 