The Narrow Circle Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE NARROW CIRCLE

  NATHAN HOKS is the author of Reveilles. He lives with his family in Chicago, where he teaches at Columbia College and runs Convulsive Editions.

  THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES

  The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five poetry books annually through five participating publishers. Publication is funded by the Lannan Foundation; Stephen Graham; Joyce & Seward Johnson Foundation; Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds; the Poetry Foundation; and Olafur Olafsson.

  2012 COMPETITION WINNERS

  the meatgirl whatever, by Kristin Hatch of San Francisco, CA

  Chosen by K. Silem Mohammad, to be published by Fence Books

  The Narrow Circle, by Nathan Hoks of Chicago, IL

  Chosen by Dean Young, to be published by Penguin Books

  The Cloud That Contained the Lightning, by Cynthia Lowen of Brooklyn, NY

  Chosen by Nikky Finney, to be published by University of Georgia Press

  Visiting Hours at the Color Line, by Ed Pavlić of Athens, GA

  Chosen by Dan Beachy-Quick, to be published by Milkweed Editions

  Failure and I Bury the Body, by Sasha West of Austin, TX

  Chosen by D. Nurkse, to be published by HarperCollins Publishers

  THE

  NARROW CIRCLE

  NATHAN HOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  First published in Penguin Books 2013

  Copyright © Nathan Hoks, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  Image credits appear here.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Hoks, Nathan.

  [Poems. Selections]

  The narrow circle / Nathan Hoks.

  pages ; cm.—(National poetry series)

  ISBN 978-0-14-312373-6

  I. Title.

  PS3608.O48285N37 2013

  811’.6—dc23

  2013006561

  For Teddy

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to the editors of the following venues in which some of these poems first appeared, often in different versions: Boston Review; Colorado Review; Crazyhorse; Forklift, Ohio; H_ngm_n; jubilat; The New Megaphone; Poem, Home: An Anthology of Ars Poetica; SCUD.

  “Infinite Interior” appeared on a broadside for the Pop Mirror-Shaped Reading in Madison, Wisconsin. Thank you to Lewis Freedman and Andy Gricevich.

  Thank you to my family for their tolerance and encouragement, and thank you to everyone whose spirit and intelligence helped along these poems, especially Nikki Flores, James Shea, Chad Chmielowicz, Chris Hund, Joel Craig, Joseph Bienvenu, Jorge Sánchez, Vieve Kaplan, Leora Fridman, Catherine Theis, Jill Magi, Maureen Ewing, Larry Sawyer, Michael Anichini, Eugene Sampson, Sarah Green, Jared Stanley, and Kate Hollander. Thank you also to Paul Slovak at Penguin and Stephanie Stio at the National Poetry Series.

  CONTENTS

  About the Author

  About the National Poetry Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  THE INTERIOR

  Flight to the Interior

  Shadow of the Interior

  Birth of the Interior

  Operation White Out

  Personality Test

  Invisible Barrier Syndrome

  Chair of the Interior

  Robot of the Interior

  The Reality of the Interior

  Charles Dickens of the Interior

  Mouth of the Interior

  Birds of the Interior

  People of the Interior

  Spiral of the Interior

  Infinite Interior

  Lily of the Interior

  Family of the Interior

  Film of the Interior

  Institution of the Interior

  God of the Interior

  Farewell, Interior

  Hôtel l’Intérieur

  THE EXTERIOR

  Sandwich of the Exterior

  Family of the Exterior

  Winter of the Exterior

  Message of the Exterior

  Building the Sandbox of the Exterior

  Outline of the Exterior (The Sun)

  Candelabra

  The Architect and the Hat

  Spores of the Exterior

  Marigold of the Exterior

  Barometer of the Exterior

  Twitch of the Exterior

  Sky of the Exterior

  Mouth of the Exterior

  Anatomy of the Exterior

  Steam of the Exterior

  Edge of the Exterior

  Animal of the Exterior

  Apple Tree of the Exterior

  Heart of the Exterior

  Letter of the Exterior

  Mind of the Exterior

  Image Credits

  They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up.

  And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle,

  And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning

  Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.

  —WILLIAM BLAKE

  THE

  INTERIOR

  FLIGHT TO THE INTERIOR

  I’ve got secrets I’m about to leave in the river

  And it makes me feel homeless to stand here

  Having to think them through.

  Silence yourself, says the tree line—

  You are miniature, absorbing

  Time on your way to the end of the tunnel.

  You are about to enter an orange plain

  And the sound in your head will be

  A car starting in the rain. You will fill yourself

  With pockets. You will file your nails

  Until the heart of your ghost fills with glowing juice.

  Finally you feel fully washed of your self,

  Blown into several pieces of sky, transparent

  But also a bloblike raindrop.

  For the rest of the day you will glue

  Blue and green squares to the tree trunks.

  Every rotting leaf is a form of speculation

  You have inherited from the raindrop.

  When the shadow splatters, the thing itself splatters.

  All of us become the river.

  SHADOW OF THE INTERIOR

  My friend Michael always carries

  His chair from house to house.

  He calls this chair his heart, his warm

  Beeping heart that he cannot shake

  From his hands no matter how hard

  He shakes them. Imagine, he says,

  Imagine having t
o look at your inner life

  Always in your hands, always pointing

  The direction from place to place

  Until you cannot stand it. One day

  You are in a desert where there is

  Simply no context for your feelings.

  A rhythm rattles your head.

  Light sneaks quickly into your eyes

  And you cannot tell yourself from sky.

  You need a place to lie down, a place

  To bore into. You will be happy to

  Have your chair. You will clutch its

  Thin legs and think about the moon.

  A little bit of rock and mud under your

  Feet reminds you there was a lake here once.

  Lucky you. You see everything inside out.

  BIRTH OF THE INTERIOR

  The oysters I did not eat are in the fridge

  Dreaming of the ocean they did not mean

  To leave. They came here on an

  Airplane, in many ways like my wife

  Who is washing her face in the bathroom

  That makes your face feel like it is

  Shrinking so you try to get out. If you stand

  Up too fast you feel blood running

  Circles in your head, tightening the skin around

  Your nose and cheekbones. Perhaps your hair

  Grows a little. In the mirror you don’t

  Notice major changes but you feel

  Something large poking its soft head

  Through your chest. You are excited

  For the new installment. You run to

  Tell your friends to get out their cameras.

  They have never heard of cameras. You

  Walk across the couch to the window

  Where the raindrops have settled

  Into a little pool on the sill. You are

  Half of everything you see. The indiscretion

  Pulverizes your insides. You have to wear

  A shiny fur hat to cover up the pieces.

  OPERATION WHITE OUT

  My friend John is always carrying on

  About the laundry detergent. His neighbors

  Have built tall fences. When he walks

  Into a party the host turns up the music.

  I try to cheer him up, invite him over

  For jelly donuts. His sullen face bothers

  My dogs. His bloodshot eyes seem to drip

  On their egg-white fur. I try to distract him

  By sharing my theory that over the years

  The sky’s shade of blue has been

  Gradually lightening so that soon

  The sky will be white all the time.

  You won’t want to bleach your undershirts.

  You won’t care about the enzymes,

  How they work away at the marinara

  On your cloth napkin. And the lake

  Of soluble phosphates will fill with

  Algal blooms and kill the fish and plants.

  The same green spot is growing inside me.

  PERSONALITY TEST

  Everyone tells me I look like Jim.

  Jim, I say, who the hell is Jim? In truth

  I know him, but I’m feeling anxious

  About these accusations. I have to flip

  Through a stack of magazines just to

  Work up the courage to go to bed. And

  When I awake I’m not certain I’m in

  The right room. My fear is assuaged

  When I see Jim’s portrait hanging

  Over the dresser. I reach for the feathers

  I keep on the nightstand. Their silky

  Texture teases my insides, begs them

  To come out. Another tissue wriggles

  And glides its cursive across the wall.

  If I were to close the curtain more dust

  Would appear around the rim

  Of my water glass. I can’t drink any more.

  My insides will be washed away.

  Finally you feel fully washed of your self

  Lucky you, you see everything inside out

  Tell your friends to get out their cameras

  My insides will be washed away

  INVISIBLE BARRIER SYNDROME

  All the good baby names have been taken

  Says my wife who refuses to have a child

  But can’t stop playing with the stuffed zebra

  That lives in the box beside our couch.

  The shadows brush by her face as if refusing

  To let her pass. But a baby does not need

  A name and I can imagine it on a large wheel

  Rolling through the door. A man in overalls

  Will probably be behind it with his cell

  Phone going off and a pigeon feather in

  His ear, which will make us cringe, but we’ll

  Be cool, we’ll play along. We’ll pull out the couch

  And add a picture of a truck to the wall.

  No one but babies believes in walls

  But there they are and we cannot avoid

  Walking around them. Walls in my house,

  Walls on the street. When there are enough

  Walls my wife and I stand in the middle and call it

  The inside. A leaf is growing out of our face.

  CHAIR OF THE INTERIOR

  The chair is my hombre, my shadow, my humming stone and curvature. It says yes and I dress it in tissues, supple to its nicks and gashes. I meant to save it from fissures, from virtue, from nature. My hombre, mi amor, I can’t remember life without you. Did I have one? One perhaps, under a brackish master, all queasy and nebulous, supine and lost in transmutation so as to permeate the bread, even the bread subsumed by lifeless vapors. The sky is a kind of bread, all-permeable, blue amigo, a package to unpack at a rocky summit. Hombre chair, hermano sky, they become one, they hoist me, the air thins, and from this angle I see a panther hunting mules. And though it pains me, I stop myself from stopping it.

  ROBOT OF THE INTERIOR

  My robot is a challenged acquaintance. He wears blue in the morning, dreams of cigars, speaks often of the azure. To him people are pink and pukish and dull and distrustful. When we look at each other we squint and say “soup,” or “s’up?” Though we never shake hands and absolutely refuse to call each other by name. I’ve been asking him to keep a diary or paint a picture. I try to explain the ecosystem but he only hears a squirting sound. “Are you unhappy?” he asks, and although I know he means it, I can only point to the ceiling and smile.

  THE REALITY OF THE INTERIOR

  is a flower turning toward the sun on a day there is no sun. I drink a lot of water and try to sit still. My insides jiggle a little—just enough to make me ill. I look outside: still no sun. Even after the rain, nothing. When my wife comes home, I close the shades and go to bed. When I wake up, a speckled flower is peering through the window.

  CHARLES DICKENS OF THE INTERIOR

  It was midnight when I heard the voice on the radio. Ice must have been turning into water on the roof for I could also hear a painful groaning coming from above. Inside there was painful groaning too—maybe that’s an exaggeration though I feel to a certain extent that painful groaning is a characteristic state of being inside. Perhaps this stems from the winter when we kept the heat too high and I was always waking up in the middle of the night soaked in sweat so we’d have to change the sheets before getting back to sleep. I was reading a novel by Charles Dickens, I don’t remember which, and it occurred to me that reading itself is a kind of sleep. The text and the heart rate work in chorus. An image flashes through the head. Charles Dickens Charles Dickens. His voice was never on the radio but I hear it now and then and it does not give me shivers which you’d expect of a ghost
’s voice. London fog. That is his voice. And the purple interior of this bedroom. That is his voice too.

  MOUTH OF THE INTERIOR

  When I hold a spatula

  To the lighted lightbulb, the silhouette

  Zooms away. The silhouette burns

  A mouth inside the mouth. The mouth

  Burns an engine in the silhouette.

  With this mouth you might say:

  Silhouette yourself. With this mouth

  You might make other mouths.

  You might spend four days kissing.

  You might sing and eat at the same time.

  This mouth does not fear

  The street sweepers, the meter maids,

  The parking attendants who piece

  Quilts out of left-behind seatbelts.

  With this mouth a bird rises and flares out,

  The wind swims by like seaweeds,

  An electrical charge and the wind

  And a lantern around your neck.

  Mouth around your neck.

  Neck around your neck.

  The silhouette comes back like a cape.

  Mouth eats poem. Falls from rafters.

  Lightbulb beside the house, house up in flames.

  The same green spot is growing inside me

  My hombre, mi amor

  It does not give me the shivers

  A mouth inside the mouth

  BIRDS OF THE INTERIOR

  On the side street of my heart

  In the control room of my silence

  In the landfill of my shadow

  In the happenstance of the silo

  In the spirit of my laundry room

  In the water tower of my life

  Below the watchtower of my social life

  In the fuse box of my empathy

  In the fuselage of my ire

  Around the archipelago of my apathy