Mineral Haunting

MINERAL HAUNTING

If I begin on sea-bed
the only direction
I can go
is skyward

or become an errant
channel
on earth, charged
as an in-between
deep-time eros
of long lost
geologies, the ghost
of a long-mined
quartz, singing
hold this then, this
transmission, like Orphée
transcribing god-poems
out of hell thru
the car radio

               (static on long drives, lost, like
Spicer said, dialling, channeling
aliens) o, wavelength mariner
o, boron collider, telescopically
is how I learned
my languish
                      -ing

               my antenna, my antler
               my wind-dashèd
               dreaming
               my signals
               of alternate
aethers

               could we belong here?
holding this
untransmutable
stillness, which I might call
stasis, this being static,
this glugging pondweed of it all,
outside, insects treading
surface, becoming signal, as in
something received, and
                                              gladly

looking thru
the glass, distant
when I am asked
if I would rather
be destined
to a submarine
or a spaceship
the answer is
a panicked ‘neither’
who really wants to know
the abyss? and the radio
flickers
its repository of absence
its voices, by necessity,
the sound of
unseen —

Cocteau obviously understood
these grief-waves and made
his Orpheus
into a bridge, a wire,
or Metaxu, as Simone Weil
called it, the poet
being the in-between
of the creaturely (Simone
would call this static suffering) committed
to transmitting the abyss
to the living
from the aether
which could be hell,
or could be aliens,
or could be an instance
of meteorological deviance,
depending on who holds
the pen

               is it possible to be haunted
by a mineral? by a stone? I want
to, by weather, and terribly, when
every antenna hums
and waits to be caught
I’m dialled in, an Orphée once
told me: dialling into frequencies
waiting for the sign
               that alters
                              or recognises

                                             the abyssal zone
that deepest excess
of the sea, the place
where no light
has ever entered — even the thought
of which constricts
my imagination
my language, confronts me
here, the limits
               of my wor(l)d

the sea bed might be word’s-end
the furthest version of world we could
get into and still be

and while we stood in lambent
galleries, catching drifts
of ochre
sienna, umber
I heard the rumour
that only the earth
minerals will last, like
the frescoes so faded
they were like the animals
at Lascaux
                              and
even thirteen thousand
pieces of glittering quartz
can’t make a radio
any less melancholy
or arcane, these analogue honey
traps catching
airs of old masters’ ennui

back in the room
I am stroking my screen
with complete tenderness
like a psychic
presses a finger
to the upturned glass
moved by unseen
hands — I’m touching

               neodymium demons wreaked
               from some toxic lake spectrality
               whose extraction gave me this
               occult facade of hot tactility

so that I might open,
with the artificial click
my surveillant lens
and hold this, still portal
of invisible light
in protest

and imagine
you with complete
tenderness on a long drive
somewhere, tuning the dial,
desolate Orpheus-style trying
to tell me something
of the other-side
                              tuning thru
               all the unearthed
               crystals in the world
               and the signal pulses hot blue
               thru me, crackling, free
               from feeling
               like some maladaptive
               spacecraft, alight with every
               chemical I couldn’t name, nor never
               wished to,
               displaced antler
               to the earth, like a dowser,
               or a telepath, to keep
               my palms turned up, skyward
               errant solar nodes,
               to alight here, in this space,
               with you and
               elsewhere
               too.

Maija Makela writes poetry, fiction and criticism for publications including The LA Review of Books, The Stinging Fly, Tolka, and The Irish Times. She is co-editor of the experimental literary journal fallow.

Hold This continues at VISUAL until 30 August