first edition
copyright © 2020 by Julie Joosten
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
library and archives canada cataloguing in publication
Title: Nought / Julie Joosten.
Names: Joosten, Julie, 1980– author.
Description: Poems.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200172840 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200173057
ISBN 9781771665896 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771665902 (HTML)
ISBN 9781771665919 (PDF) | ISBN 9781771665926 (Kindle)
Classification: LCC PS8619.O68 N68 2020 | DDC C811/.6—dc23
The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Book*hug Press also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.
Book*hug Press acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. We recognize the enduring presence of many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples and are grateful for the opportunity to meet and work on this territory.
for Zoë
Nest
Necklace
Swoon Revolt
On Nothing
For Nor
Love Poem
“Of Ground, or Air, or Ought”
Dear Friend
Second-hand
, touch
Silence, an Index
[whose hair is yellower than torchlight]
On Anemones
This, Seeded in a Glance
An Opening
Endnotes
Notes and Acknowledgements
About the Author
Colophon
Love, of sometimes solitude—
the elsewheres to which it passes—
a season of small fruits, a flood, a road
without balm—the where where my senses
unfold, entangling.
I’m trying to find a space big enough
for all our organs.
Touching the nerves’ equivocal, I listen
to a moth’s wings, near then far away,
murmuring, murmuring—an anterior abandoned
with the gravity of evanescence,
the ways of becoming what love will
have been.
Thought clattered
into the rhythm of
rest, the duration of a breath
my hands turn
into forgery,
forcing
a there, where
solitude stands in the shape
of what once fell
like a shadow.
While slept the sun, having
arrived or
not, spectacularly silken.
She walks across a field to
thinking how thinking
accompanies life. Lavender caves, an
abundance of loss. Wondering if
thought is also an affair
of the skin. Cowbells, cowbells,
cowbells. Her memory blushes pink.
A partial eclipse, the sun visible
like a quarter moon. Her skin trembles
the little weights and textures of gone
things. A nation of birds, some
clouds. The future arrives before
she recognizes it. A future thick as fur.
(to touch the mind spreading across
a distance called your skin, indelicate index
of my fingers’ incursion into the future
tense of spring.
If I could gather the folds of your
memory, I would take your face in my
hands, your hands in my mouth, take
your night to the marrow of water’s
surface, starred thought hanging
suspended from skies blue with cold.
Morning light enters our pores,
measures time as the vibration of snow
fall, returns to the sky glowing warm from our
blood, light having become a thought
conceived by the skin.
We might have touched here, force
coming briefly to form, the cold wind
stinging my lungs
in your chest.)
Air abdicated from the wind
blows open our door, admits nothing—
my eyes light on the doorknob, fall
into faint fingerprint lines,
live there, the brain extending into
the world as the murmur of the eyes
becoming touch becomes perceptible.
Touch, having gained dimension, displaces
the sky: tumbled clouds, humming,
sticky sun, fumbling—
I’m trying to write you the whole
body—the brain touching itself and
attaching us to life, the curve at
the edge of hearing, the netting
nerve and thought girding the stomach—
—this “this” (beat, beat) almost
unseen.
, but the stars are silent. A tendency of
momentariness opens from the corner
of an eye—the moon cleaves
cloud, black sky verges into blue, a gesture
lapses. To enter into that hesitation,
thought immolate.
Relation is the smallest unit of
perception, there must be some
molecule of touch in shale, the sky
lightened by the moon, a moth’s wing,
your skin. It’s raining. We arch
in a curve beginning with neither
you nor me.
Each phase of the moon is visible
tonight in a single sky. If there’s a verb
for the way times nest in us, collecting
in layers, or for the way we hold
times, it should be cradled here.
We hold them, touch preceding the recollection
consciousness is. A consciousness of life.
A wing at the window
and Cricket barks.
soul imbrication of cells and perception
and passion, life coinciding with life,
revelation without insistence,
knowledge contradicting history,
riot of love, deep breath drawn in sleep,
to vibrate between solidity and grace,
groundswell of non-linear time, to read in sips,
artery’s thought (little floral spires yearning
toward sky), rhythm in the background,
intuition’s tether, sea of unknowing,
gentleness as the end of the world,
senses’ breath, whirlwind of life and death,
communion of neuro-plastic longing,
to liberate love’s forms of being
love overflow of being, galaxy’s
milkiness, sensation of life, the dog
moshing among pillows and a blue blanket,
edge of grief, to write your name, duration,
the night in silky sobbing eclipse,
silent steeliness with tenderness blessed,
offerings for the lost, to rebegin,
my finger tracing a word on your chest,
hurricane French-kissing utopia,
radiant chaos, our four-poster bed,
soul’s texture, life’s blood, the shiniest season,
dancing, dancing, dancing, dancing, dancing,
unboundary of touch, my lungs / your breath,
verdant fragment, caesura, being’s heart
heart wild grasses in wind, parentheses
of laughter, rhythm in architecture,
the sense of being repeating itself,
to walk toward you, vernacular perception,
a hundred shades of indigo ink, pre-
carity as a muscle’s beat, to bear grief,
compassion and openness and love,
survival instinct in a fury,
to step into a whirl, to be windwept,
palms open, love startling proprioception,
a bullet train through cherry blossoms,
the language of tears, soul’s land, land’s weight,
earth, sky, fire, water, rock, lungs of a blizzard,
shimmering annotation of thought
thought peach juice dripping, time thickening
in my mouth, story as blood and air,
to search for form, postscript to a mood
of weathers, to kiss the inadmissible,
to lean toward the distant moon, cradling
perception’s image, love loosing a language
beneath words, style of longing, late blooming
anemone, imagination licking
briny skin, the tremble in solace,
to be absorbed entirely by wind,
by snow, memory as garnet resistance,
repetition with difference,
the vibration leading a note to our ears,
knowledge’s moon, moon’s halo, the word soul
body’s ecstasy, dog’s daydream,
pleasure in ambiguity, respect
and care and peace and bliss, to inhabit
a continuum of (un)consciousness,
plenitude in evanescence, nest
of generous attention, beautiful
bewilderment, memory-keeping,
barely discernible blood song, breath flight,
beadwork of cells dividing in the night,
roomy intimacy, to be love, storm
shelter, to float without water, milkweed,
love amplifying love, becoming’s form,
sensation of life, gratitude’s lungs, breath
of praise, knowing’s dissolve, being understood
—