On poetry and transformation

and the cloud that lives under the ocean

What are the alien archeologists going to find of humanity’s bleak years if none of this ever goes back to normal, if we never return? If instead we live our lives transformed, and always on screens?

It’s 6am on Friday morning and my spouse Janyce has carried a tray into our dark bedroom with both cups, the coffee pot, and a small pitcher of milk. We’re sitting up, propped by pillows, and I already have my laptop open reading my Gmail. I start humming an old Squeeze song from the 80s, eventually breaking out into some actual words, and Janyce chimes in.

a stain on my notebook, and coffee…

coffee in bed.

I pull up the video on YouTube for fun.

“Look at how old this is,” I say. Janyce has her laptop open and she doesn’t turn her head to look, just nods. I watch a few more minutes of the lead singer, who is probably 20-yrs-old, dancing around in a dated orange background.

“Oh, remember Tempted?” I say. I open another Squeeze video and we both sing all the words because we know them by heart. When the video is over, I start to play yet another old pop song and Janyce turns to give me a look. She has her ear buds in and her computer screen paused on a work training.

“I gotta get this done this morning,” she says.

“All right, all right. You’re no fun,” I say. But she has already pressed play and I’ve lost her to the screen.

I heard from a friend and work colleague the other day in email. He sent me only one word in the subject line that read: “inevitable.” Over the past couple of years, he and I have shared bits of our inner selves with each other. We critique each other’s poems, share articles and books, and have long conversations about art and writing over coffee breaks. At least we did. Now we wave to each other in a Zoom square and promise we’ll make some time to catch up. But by the end of the day, another Zoom meeting, even a social one, is just one too many.

A couple months back, this same friend said to me, “I don’t want to write about the pandemic.” I get that. I never want to write about it either. But it’s always there, just under the surface. It was only a matter of time before he, too, wrote about it.

I keep thinking about my friend’s angry and evocative poem that he sent to me.

“Listen to this,” I say to Janyce, once she’s closed her laptop, and I read it out loud to her. I love the imagery, “the bones of fallen angels” and “the shards of pottery in the volcanic muck.”

To sublimate means to change the form of a thing, but not the essence. In scientific terms, it means to transform solid to vapor. In psychology, it means you divert your base feelings and propel them into another kind of action.

“I think the crux of his poem is that stanza where he is saying that we should scream until we shake something loose,” says Janyce.

“Well yeah, I see that,” I say. But I also can’t help thinking, “What are the alien archeologists going to find of humanity’s bleak years if none of this ever goes back to normal, if we never return? If instead we live our lives transformed, and always on screens?” To me, the poem is also a kind of lament on formlessness, on excavation, on timeless objects, on digging up the past and finding metaphors for the future, and at least in my mind, on what it means to make art at all. And it’s a beauty.

**Un-Sublimated**

By Michael Rutter

The cloud lives under the ocean.
The hulking, heaven sent cables, the bones of fallen angels,
ossified and slightly akimbo, carry the weights of the world—
that, all in and all told, weigh nothing.

During this pandemic year, this year of inner pieces,
we learned how not to run out of space,
even as the smart ships raced to blanch the blue-black border
of our planet, burning and sighing;
even as we turned kitchens and crawlspaces into
office-, workout-, and romper-rooms.

While we’ve been shielded from each other
the content of hallway conversations,
cash register banter,
hellos and hugs in the hallway,
‘round the table intros and outros,
un-sublimated.

Ergo, the air is all ice, veined and violent,
bestilled by what we would have said.
What remains fluid, we won’t watch:
The decades of Zoom recordings,
laid out like an endless outdoor laundry line,
all hemmed-in by the same haphazard
waved goodbyes, the boxed faces
eroding into blanks.

Here’s where you wonder about the alien archeologists
(or more likely, the future humanities grad students)
discovering our shards of pottery in the volcanic muck
or disconnected bones in the ugly oil pits.

What remains, remains non-corporeal
yet not as delicious or daring as a ghost story
traded over a bonfire.

For this trash masquerading as future treasure,
there’s no need of a shelf, a glass box, a security guard,
as the medium, like the message, doesn’t exist.

No waterlogged pages.
No hiss, rattle, and hum.
No weird disk drive music

Oh what they wouldn’t give for a good old fashioned Rosetta Stone.
Oh what we wouldn’t give to be discovered.
For someone to take away
the lost, limp year:

‘The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music
converged on by ambulance sirens
and they understand everything.
They're on your side. They forgive you.’

Alas, the visitors are not coming to listen;
certainly not to forgive.
The shouted out signals never connected,
or were lapped up by black holes.

My advice:
For all of us to create our own break out rooms,
all alone in our own darkness,
and to scream until the vibrations
shake something loose,
like a star, a planetoid, or a wayward satellite
that would have burned up otherwise
on its journey
down and out.

Let the object d’art
fall until its velocity
can pierce time and tides
burrowing into the unreachable core
like a stopped bullet
only we know is there.