from “Familiar”

Matt Hart | Familiar | Pickpocket Books | 2022 | 172 Pages

TRANSLATION, OBLITERATION, CORRESPONDENCE, & FRIENDSHIP

“can’t picture our home without you”
—The Wrens

It isn’t as easy as it sounds
Talking to dead people
And living people simultaneously
While attempting to be more
Than a cell phone tower
Or a telescope forever
Scanning the classroom
For life on other planets
Scanning the sidewalk
For hundreds or even fifties
Scanning the newsfeeds
But always feeling hungry
Are you out there?
Do you read me?
I’ve been talking
All semester
About carrying
Handfuls of sand,
Which were once
A gorgeous castle,
Across a turbulent river
To the far other side
And trying to rebuild there
But only making an electron face
Or a jackrabbit omelet or thirst
At least that’s the way
It seems at first, but
The more you look at it
The more distorted it becomes
Owls and wolves
Punk as fuck 
Stuffed with mailboxes
There’s even an event horizon
And the event is
That you’ve discovered
The things on your mind
That you had no idea
Were on your mind
Probably sex and death
If the Surrealists were correct
But they got that from Freud
And I got it on good authority
By opening the mailboxes
And reading the letters
Which were sent through the sand
From the other side of the river
The original side, but let’s don’t
Get bogged down in originality
My advice is not to worry about it
The Venus flytrap you are
And a shit-ton of books
Are all you really need
Originality takes care of itself
Memorize more quotes
Which technically should be “quotations”
But quotations didn’t sound as good
Right there, and what do I care
About technicality?
Enough to apply it
To apply technique
And then acknowledge
That it’s a tiny part
Of the much larger grass stain
Rolling around on our backs
Beneath the sun
Anyway, as I was saying
Before I interrupted myself
With originality
I was reading a letter
That was delivered through the sand
From the far side of the river,
Which seems even further away now
Like it never even existed
And what the letter said
And remember it was many letters
Was, and I’m paraphrasing, Dear Stranger
I noticed that you disassembled my castle
And carried it by handfuls
To the other-other side
And while what you’ve built there
From the remnants is more modest
And a-shambles, there is nevertheless
A resemblance, a correspondence between us
That I almost recognize
It seems you’ve lost the moat
And gained a carport
It seems you’ve mismanaged the turrets
But now you have rivulets of streaming TV
I rather like the azaleas you’ve planted
Out front, and the geraniums in their pots
All I ever had was catapults and guards
Maybe you’ll allow me to visit someday
And warm your new place
With the fog of what was
Sincerely Sincerely Sincerely
Only Echoed
As you can imagine
Reading these letters
As one letter
I was stunned
Sitting with my jackfruit
And my over-easy eggs
Then I scanned the other shore
And somebody waved
So I waved back
And promised to write
The hummingbirds and rabbits
Were finding their way
And I was finding mine
In a haze
Back to you

30

The facts are one thing, but the truth is something else, and reality’s often a mix of the two—appearing one way to me and another to you.
But all of it erupts now, and so seriously, around us.
Notice: The sun doesn’t need any alarm to wake up.
The moon doesn’t need a metal claw to hoist itself.
Why should it be any different for us?
I sometimes imagine the minor things as major and vice versa.
(But what could be more massive and miniscule than us together?)
To be sure, I am not convinced by sermons and lectures,
Though I am sometimes a fan, both blank and relentless.
And the lexical breeze through the screen makes me weep
(For everything false ever taken to be true,
And for all the unfortunate believers confused.)
I go out for a walk to feel electric and reflective.
Someday another Big Bang will take our place.
Someday the call of the loon will be our own.
What I believe in the meantime is that I need to be methodical,
That I need to be vulnerable and sincere when I am with you,
And that the light and the love that creation placed inside us
Is more than all the reference books
In all the world’s libraries
The switchblade’s grass
Or the pounce of a cat.
Let my heart be broken, if that’s the necessary thing,
And my blood spilled around in the splash of your image
’Til the two of us become another language entirely, so
The omni of that might mix up our cells,
And the facts and the truth and reality converge
Into a source something wiser.

32

When I look at my dog or an owl or a wolf, when I look at a maple or the moon or a computer,
I see life (and in it light!), un-self-conscious and moving.
I would like to be similarly un-self-conscious and moving,
But here I am in the Zoom meeting
With all the other muted busts
Feeling like I’m part of some 21st Century target practice
Where the assailants are the eyes of my friends, family, co-workers.
So after we all leave the meeting, I go outside for a walk,
Or I stare out the window into Nature again.
I try and listen to what it tells me.
“I am always with you” is mostly what it says,
But what I hear is “I am mostly with you behind glass or on a screen.”
Other than that, it never complains. It doesn’t accuse me.
It doesn’t care about the past or the future or the increments of heat.
It’s always asleep and it’s always awake,
And I am a vision in a translation of a dream…
I am one form, and creation is its content.
No one kneels before me where I spill it in the street.
Centuries have withered so that new ones might flower.
The happiness of process is advancing and receding.

And I am still most alive when we’re talking
To each other, or writing back and forth
To prove that we exist. We address the envelopes
And in the upper right-hand corner, we place a Walt Whitman stamp,
Since currently those are an actual thing, 72 cents.
The image is based on one of the portraits of him as an old man.
He looks lovingly at me, and I shake my shaggy head
On its stalk back and forth, my lights today just a little more dim.
And behind him, the soft skies are lilac, of course.
When last they bloomed, only the usual number of us were thinking
About death, but now it kind of seems like it’s everybody,
Like death is everywhere, bleeding into the math
Ten million last week, eleven million this week.

I don’t know why today I’m in over my head,
Why I’m wrecking this section instead of propping up the nation on a lilac pillow of unclouded possibility.
Where’s my faith? Is it a striking green display of Granny Smiths at the market?
Is it a dot-to-dot connecting our song and how we feel about it?

Well, just to show you how off the rails I can be,
I’m going to take the horse that Whitman gives us in this stanza—
Which he describes with some delight as being “full of sparkling wickedness”— 
And ride it into the sunset of today while I still can.
But in the next section, I’ll be back in a whole new way.
You can believe it, or you can just wait and see.
What I need’s a little time in the margins
To tremble.


Matt Hart, from Familiar.
Copyright © 2022 Matt Hart.
Reprinted with permission of Pickpocket Books.