Dustsceawung
 

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Another excuse not to clean up
this morning: caught, dust swarming in a lightbeam's head.
Contagion: this little dust, little sugar of the dead I am here
to watch stirred into a coffee of ground light.

How un-easily 'coffee' shifts to 'coffin'.
I shove my hand into the coffin
of my ancestors, who I will not clean up.

Here is the tree that suffered
my climbing & revenged itself
with a broken branch & arm. Here are the cellflakes
of my pastness snakeskinned into light,
to curdle with my ancestors: cockroach,
plaster, brick-dust & the dead:
here are their ashes in their primordial soup.

& here are the hundred other women
before me who did not clean up:
the thin arms, aborted broom; the startled eyes
confronted by her dustfaced predecessor:

she is caught in a new religion,
forgetting the lithe fleshhouses of husband
& children — sacrilegiously alive; her tongue
stretches & rusted languages rattle
...........their keys for her;
as if she could housewife light—
throat full to retching with names she has never remembered.

I will never clean up again—
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Wow!

Fabulous language here - S1, S3, S5. "Snakeskinned", "lithe fleshouses", "little sugar of the dead", "coffee of ground light", "housewife light."

You might consider dropping the final line.

I'd spend good money on a book that contained this.

It's a wonderful poem.

Thank you,

JB

John beat me to it. Great poem and I agree about the last line.

I agree with John. The language is spectacular, WT. The Old English title and the kennings like “cellflakes” and “fleshhouses” remind the reader of a long chain of women stretching back generations into the ubi sunt. The speaker refuses to “clean up” and forget them, instead valuing the lore and memories that have been passed down to her by the ancestors who are now dust and ashes. It reminds me of the “Last Survivor” speech in Beowulf. I like the last line. Outstanding poem.

This might be my favourite of yours, Cameron. It's really, very good. I like how the opening eases into the more rarefied language with its very demotic tone. Perhaps something about the looser perameters of non-met encouraged this. Anyway, much of the language here is really exquisite. I may be referring to my children as "lithe fleshhouses" for a while.

At first I wasn't sure about "pastness", wondering why simply "past" wouldn't do, and also thinking it perhaps a bit of a mouthful so close to "cellflakes" and "snakeskinned". But reading it again aloud it does work, sonically and conceptually. A very accomplished poem, I think. I like the closing lines decisive return to the speaker's present.

Mark

The Anglo-Saxons were no clods, were they. Imagine minds that needed such a word! It’s a brilliant launching pad for a poem, and the strikingly inventive language—“coffee of ground light,” “cellflakes of my pastness snakeskinned into light,” “aborted broom,” “rusted languages rattle their keys”—is well worth the price of the book, as John put it. I had a short list of nits, but each time I read the poem, the list got shorter. All I have left is this:

How un-easily 'coffee' shifts to 'coffin'.—The poem seems to demonstrate how easy it is. But you mean that it’s uneasy, not that it’s not easy. (Another half an hour and this nit would have evaporated too!)

throat full to retching with names she has never remembered—I’m not suggesting you drop the last line, but this one is certainly good enough to end on. I just don’t get the transition from wonder and deep memory to revulsion. Maybe that will come.

And, not a nit, but another of my perverse misreadings: I started out thinking it was the N who was both newly religious and “sacrilegiously alive.” The contradiction didn’t bother me, but I’ve realized, just before sending, that it’s the husband & kids who are alive. Leave it to me.

My favorite of yours too, I think, Cameron.

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I had a sad thought: imagine if you had brought this poem to an audience that couldn’t see the diamond-like quality of your words and didn’t feel the quaking of the imagery present in the poem. Not everyone takes the time to read a poem to unlock its medicinal qualities/benefits. This poem (your poems) requires repeated readings and a meditative-like distillation of thought.

I say all this having been unimpressed initially with the poem. It was as if I was listening to a madman speaking. Then the comments came in and I gave the poem another chance, pressed my ear to it and shut my eyes tightly so that I could hearsee it. I zoomed out a zillion light years and saw the dust. I debated with myself if the likes of this poem would ever be seen in the New Yorker magazine. I think not. It would break the mold.

To say it in cliche, you're an old soul. You disturb the dust. To not disturb the dust is spiritually counterintuitive. Dust cannot be gathered. Either can words, in a way. We must find another way to say what we see and you’ve found a way, using words you sling together and rope-tie to being meaningful and imagery that is time-transcendent. (I’m speaking now way over my head; am groping at light, thanks to the vision you created in this poem.) Funny thing about dust: Its existence is an afterthought. I never think of dust for what it is: the bridge between visible and nonvisible— The oxymoronic existence of uninvisible dust.

I think the last line belongs. I like the ambiguity. I like what the word "again" does.

The poem makes me think hard about where all the flowers have gone. And that leads me to think of dust.

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It's definitely better than Pam Ayres take on the theme.

https://www.best-poems.net/pam-ayres...-you-must.html

I’ll confess to going through the same process, Jim. I almost always feel locked out of Cameron’s poems, but I trust him to have things worth breaking in for. Sometimes I never do get inside, but when I do, I’m rewarded.

Thank you, everyone, for your kind assessments. It is not my favourite of my poems, but I am very glad that so many of you have kept company with it. I wrote most of it when I was 19, I think, then discarded it for a very long time. When I rediscovered it its voice took over and I finished it in a dazed rush.

The final line is the point of most contention; I would be interested in how it is being read, and how contentious people think it truly is. Carl, is revulsion not part of wonder, especially "deep wonder"? And to un-easily, well, let me say that I would have not added the hyphen if it were simply "uneasy".
Thank you again John, John, Carl, Mark, Glen, and Jim (what type of poem would I have to write to fit into The New Yorker?)!

For me, the last line seems an afterthought. As such, it diminishes the strength of the preceding strophe. The shift from "she" back to "I" is a minor speed bump.

As for getting published in The New Yorker, it seems that luck plays a significant role. Many pieces I've seen there aren't as good as this one.

JB

Hi Cameron,

I also like this one a lot, and echo the praise others have given it. Reading it especially in the light of your other poems on ancestry, I read this is as much about cleaning as (not) "cleaning up"/"whiting out" one's ancestors, hiding/disowning one's ancestors -- and those who did not "clean up" in the sense of not being able to be made respectable or to pass.

I have a few crits/points:

Given the colon, "cockroach, plaster, brick-dust & the dead" reads like a list of the N's ancestors. Also, the list (cockroach, etc) seems to be the referent for "their" in "here are their ashes". I'm not objecting, I like the idea, just wasn't sure if you intended it.

One thing stuck out for me a bit, given the freshness of the rest of the language was the stock metaphor, "primordial soup". I guess soup can suggest cooking, another domestic task, and the soup image may fit in with the poem that way. But if I'm reading the poem right it's more about cleaning than domestic tasks in general, so the soup image seems a little at odds with the poem. A thought, and maybe a bad one, but I guess you could go with "primordial soap", playing off the "primordial soup" phrase, but tying in with the cleaning motif.

& here are the hundred other women
before me who did not clean up:
the thin arms, aborted broom; the startled eyes
confronted by her dustfaced predecessor:

she is caught in a new religion

I get very confused here. We seem to shift midsentence from looking at 100 women to only one woman, without a clear indication that this change has occurred or how.

First two lines are clear enough. 100 female ancestors are here. I have a clear image.

The next two lines, I wondered if they were speaking of the general case -- that what follows the colon applies to all 100 other women that the N now sees. The N sees 100 pairs of thin arms. That's the natural reading, I think, given what precedes. But then "broom" doesn't fit. The N sees only one broom. So having said here are 100 women, it seems the N is only seeing/talking about one of them?

Then we come to, " the startled eyes / confronted by her dustfaced predecessor" but I see nothing in the poem for "her" to refer to. Whose dustfaced predecessor?

But since there is a predecessor here, and I'm back to the idea of a line of 100 women, stretching back in time, each eying the their predecessor.

Then with next line, "she is caught", we're very clearly talking about one woman.

Anyway, I hope I've explained my confusion clearly enough.


best,

Matt

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I’ve extended my thinking on this poem… and had a wild thought handed to me seemingly out of the blue: could this simply be a poem to express your displeasure for cleaning? You wouldn’t be the first to abhor the chore. This morning, in what can only be described as a coincidence masquerading as a missing puzzle piece, I came across this bit of information about Emily Dickinson:

“The poet took pleasure in the sweeter culinary arts, baking the family’s bread and cake, but Emily Dickinson wanted nothing to do with cleaning. She complained of her more willing sister to one girlhood friend, “I don’t see much of Vinnie—she’s mostly dusting stairs” (L176). “God keep me from what they call households,” she prayed (L36). Her understanding of the dynamics of women’s work proves more complicated than these youthful tirades. The poem “How many times these low feet staggered” (Fr238) both registers the stultifying effect of housework on women’s lives and criticizes a society that fails to value the work of sweeping cobwebs and washing windows.” (Emily Dickinson and Cooking)


I, for one, enjoy tidying up. Cleaning chores are my favorite form of procrastination. For example, I have a glass-topped dining table that I obsess about keeping clean of smudges and dust that seem to appear out of nowhere. Presently, it gleams and reflects the cherry tree that is in bloom outside my window. At various times throughout the year it provides a seasonal, ghostly reflection of the woods out back. It gives me a deep sense of something I can’t describe that is unlike any other visual I can think of. Reflections of another world on glass, maybe.

To continue with my outlandish interpretations of your poem, it could be that it represents your rage against procrastination. I am a guilty consumer of procrastination. I use it to ponder. I’m getting better at interrupting it and rushing back to the page when something suddenly occurs to me. But in general procrastination robs me more than it rewards me : )

The New Yorker comment was just an off-the-cuff thought. I think I had been leafing through the current issue and the poems in it failed to impress me. Yours did.

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Cameron, I'd been hesitant to comment on this one once you revealed that it's an older one of yours, as I don't know how much you need the critique. But I'll give my two cents.

I think by anyone's usual standards this is a very strong poem, although personally I found a discrepancy between the intensity of the imagery and the poem's narrative. To me the imagery is a touch overstated for the content, where I've found your more recent poems much more balanced and measured.

I see a lot of parallels between this poem and poems in Leonard Cohen's 'Let Us Compare Mythologies' (his first title). The writing skill was clearly present, although it sounded like it was coming from a 22 year old. In Cohen's case I found that there was a movement toward humility, humanity, understatement, and subtlety throughout his life, and much more interesting themes as he picked up life experiences. Between his first and last title 40 years later, it's really night and day.

I don't think you really need my critique of this poem at this point, but hopefully this perspective is an interesting one for you.