Benjamin Renne
excerpt from Nostos
- close your eyes and see the movement
- beginning like the rest, it shuffles, binary and momentous
- a step back
- even in inaction there is movement
- but those of us who lacked a certain precognition for the rules of the game puttered out before too long
- tired and hungry
- it moves always toward rebirth
- to ensure it becomes habitual
- I walk so that the arches of my feet overlap the cement cracks in the sidewalk
- to know that even in the obscured longing of shadows there exists definitive boundaries beneath us
- remember the July day when the summer stretched out in either direction?
- the pear tree in the front yard never bore fruit, but the mulberry trees bulged with purple
- there was a point where we met, bodies collided
- this coming together in the past
- one toward Spring, the other a spiral arm
- the practiced syllogisms
- I’ve already forgotten
- we walked in tandem as if to occupy the same place at the same time
- remember Heraclitus?
- secret hero of these poems
- we stretched out our legs on the bed to overcome the complications of sex
- two bodies occupied the same place at the same time
- synaptic reversals
- we stepped into the river together
- an impossibility
- an amalgam of distortions
- I reverberate the present
- likewise, you’ve forgotten where to begin
- a look, a break, disjunctions
- shapes fill out in lines
- excerpts and contrasts
- the red and white colonies shorn by the familiar stench of disease
- starvation is our methodology of choice
- remember Blake?
- I see thee in thick clouds and darkness on America’s shore
- America assumes your body as its modus operandi
- devourer of thy parent
- America bleats
- tired and hungry
- America groans under the pressure
- it culminates in erotic dialogues
- Aristophanes understood sex as a circle
- resolution only in the unsure perfection of our bodies
- as if to be diminished
- the past was recollected in moments which we only later discerned as present
- or in other words, the American dream is one continuous orgy and the politics of it are only recalled on waking
- in that same moment the Hellenic spirit overwhelmed the Mediterranean
- close your eyes and see the movement
- the struggle of the Aegean accumulating via fisheries and alphabets, turbulent oral mythologies
- the polis, a worn vestment of those Ionian shores
- politics appeared as that which contains a moving forward into discrete energies, ranges, multitudes, etc.
- likewise your body is a commodity
- likewise I reverberate the present
- remember Helen?
- after all that confusion you never trusted my poetry again
- we remembered summer because otherwise it made no sense to remember winter
- that place which contained us and our multisyllabic emanations
- it was then we expressed movement as a cautious kind of stagnation
- our bodies can be expressed in only so many terms
- naked and shriveled, writhing and wispy
- I sometimes remember stories differently
- you practiced calculating the speed of light as it pierced through various substances
- we knew the end points before we began
- so the numbers came easy to us
- equidistant politics of motion
- and plugged the rest into Excel sheets, which we cataloged according to the Library of Congress Classification System
- we followed the trajectory which took us the least time
- but to arrive home again involved some shedding of light envisioned as one turbulent motion
- close your eyes and see the movement, the crust undulating in waves
- one tectonic motion, one great thrust forward
- into this sense of homecoming
- America is that same shadow of Albion
- so we accumulated hegemonies like trinkets sunk in moonlight
- and the stars we navigated by made distorted specters on the water
- so that the structure of the problem was in the coming-forth-out-of
- the system was this purposeful movement
- ideal and constructed
- remember that bodies are always political
- and movement can be thought of as a kind of dance
- it was Nietzsche who first envisioned a dancing God, who made way for Stravinsky
- The Firebird is not rebirth in the Modernist sense, but rather a containment of forms, a dissolution of enchantments, etc.
- here at last the volta
- here at last the rhetorical climax of your body
- our bodies, American
- I welcome the movement, the transcendence of the moment
- alive and throbbing, the third axiom arrives with the [relative] dynamics subito forte
- the movement of a landmass is contained within its own political boundaries
- the
- political
- is
- its
- own
- boundar[y]
- so by the time we remembered what the crossing-over entailed we had already forgotten it
- an accretion of forms
- a building up of dissatisfied bodies
- the trip stretched outward from your eyes in all directions, streamed in simultaneity
- while your hands clutched at the oily ground, cramped with the weight of visions
- we explored innumerable corridors of the imagination
- and began to collide historically
- when finally the French flags appeared at the mouth of the York River the system began its long stuttering hiccup forward
- remember that all bodies, even water, are political
- and what is more American than a river?
- you seem always to be changing
- the force felt here is didactic
- yet there is even more to be learned from the syncopation
- we sat beside each other on the couch and played back the recordings we had made, failing at first to properly take account of certain ineluctable blemishes
- the distortion in our voices
- the tilt and swoop of pitch
- echoes in the faint feedback loop
- it reminded us of the conversions we juggled in our heads, analog to digital and back again
- of solipsism and the conservation of matter, which is of course energy
- of the sloppy arithmetic that had gotten us this far, the algebra we avoided
- it reminded us of marijuana and the little black flakes of sage which tore apart the universe
- it reminded us of bodies
- of glass frameworks whose only purpose was to refract light in prismatic streaks
- and it reminded us of the aching we used to listen for in our music, when the records became too digital to play properly
- the vinyl scratching muted in the crispness of the perfect audio file
- out of which poured our hunger
- the sudden awakening as if from a long desired hibernal ontology
- it pushed itself out of the confused mist
- America revolted, is always revolting
- to see at last a divination of historical variables
- an algebra of politics
- a certain lateral movement which can be expressed only in the unexpected surge of spirit
- that movement deceived us, made us into confused half-entities
- it de-boned our rough limbs and split our bodies along the unending sidewalk, cracks in the cement
Benjamin Renne lives and teaches in the Washington, D.C. area. In 2017, he earned his MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Concerned with vision, elegy, and prophecy, Renne explores the ways in which the Poet navigates transcendent landscapes as the cataloger and primary witness of the prophetic. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in SLAB, The RavensPerch, and GFT Presents: One in Four.