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L I T E R A T U R E “Please scold me.” Dody heard her voice, strange and constricted in her chest […] “I am a bitch,” Dody heard her voice announce from out of the doll-box in her chest, and she listened to it, wondering what absurd thing it would say next. “I am a slut,” it said with no conviction. Sexism, class, financial anxiety and male violence are closely tied to another recurring theme in Plath’s work: depression. Stories such as “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom”, “Tongues of Stone” and “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” show her mining her own experience of breakdown, determined to make art from despair. But by the time she wrote The Bell Jar, with its condescending boyfriends, manipulative admen, dismissive male doctors, predatory dates and life-threatening sex, her field of vision had widened. There Plath underscores the interconnected relationship between mental illness and the body politic in the novel’s first sentence: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York”. Is the novel’s heroine, Esther Greenwood, really sick, or is her breakdown a consequence of living in a “sick”, repressive, conformist society? Both the Rosenbergs and the ambitious Esther will be punished, through electrocution, for their dissidence. After Esther receives her first excruciating shock treatment at a mental hospital, she says: “I wondered what terrible thing it was I had done”. Plath’s earlier stories show that she had been preoccupied by the intertwined themes of punishment and female ambition for at least fifteen years before she made their connection explicit in this famous, harrowing scene. Some of the most startling pieces in the Collected Prose are previously unpublished story fragments that make art of Plath and Hughes’s relationship. In “Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags” (1956), for example, the fictional Gerald and Olwyn have a spat. The story fragment is based on Plath’s visit to Hughes’s West Yorkshire family home, the Beacon, with her new husband in September 1956. Her description already contains the acidic notes of Ariel (1965): Daylong he sat tousled in his mother’s parlour in his old RAF sweater, writing poems about water d rops and mar t y red b i shops and p l ay i ng h i s battered, cracked Beethoven records over and over. […] She had married a genius. Olwyn saw him famous and suave in a tuxedo, roaring sestinas in a royal godly voice over the BBC, in a dither of actresses, ballet dancers and Italian countesses with a literary flair, while she skulked about choking on cheese rinds like a tearblind mouse. When Plath wrote these words, she and Hughes had been married for about three months. “Venus in the Seventh” (1957) may have been a draft chapter of Plath’s lost novel Falcon Yard, based on her Cambridge years and marriage to Hughes. (Plath’s mother, Aurelia, said she watched Plath burn the manuscript in Devon in 1962, in the wake of Hughes’s infidelity.) “Venus in the Seventh” was inspired by Plath’s trip to the continent in the spring of 1956, and her return to Hughes, fictionalized as Ian, in London: “She just wanted Ian: very simply. She could swim in him: that incredible violent presence of his: leashed. Too much man for this island”. Plath’s protagonist, Jess, romanticizes Ian’s violence in a troubling passage that shares details with Plath’s journal entry from March 1956 about what she called her first “sleepless holocaust night with Ted”: “If you hadn’t come back, I would have come to Cambridge to find you again. To make up for that last time ...” Jess shivered, holding herself up against him, their toes touching. “Oh,” she laughed ruefully. “It was terrible, that. I went to Paris all scarred. Black and blue ...” “But you liked it?” “Yes.” “I was furious with myself. I don’t know what happened to me ...” 4 “It wasn’t right, somehow, then. I felt it. You didn’t even know my name, really.” She couldn’t help coming back to that, finishing it off. “I do now, though.” Violence, both real and performative, was a part of the couple’s relationship from the night they met in 1956. As was strength. In her journal from the 1950s Plath often spoke of Hughes as being “strong enough” for her, and she for him. In “Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags”, Gerald says to Olwyn, as they walk across the moors, “I like the way you don’t cry to be carried over the rough places”. Plath and Hughes wanted to shock British poetry, and each other: “You love one-syllabled words, don’t you?” Ian says to Jess in “Venus and the Seventh”. “Squab, patch, crack. Violent.” She answers: “Yes. I guess I do. I hate ‘ation’ words. They’re so abstract. I like words to sound what they say: bang crash. Not mince along in sing-song iambic pentameters”. Jess, sounding very much like Plath, declares Ian’s poem “an altar to spill blood at”. But she did not learn this preference for banging language from Hughes. She had written about her desire to use taboo words as far back as “A Dialogue” (1953): “Euphemisms […] That’s what I can’t stand either. Why not use the good vile words. Damn. Dung. Hell. God, they sound great. Scrawl them on the sidewalks and fences and shock the ladies and the gentlemen”. It wasn’t until she went to Cambridge in 1955 that she began to write poetry that reflected her aesthetic iconoclasm. (“Pursuit”, which she wrote shortly after she met Hughes, was a turning point.) “Venus in the Seventh” shows her poetic philosophy crystallizing. The last piece of short prose Plath saw published during her lifetime was her review of Malcolm Elwin’s Lord Byron’s Wife, “Suffering Angel”, which appeared in the New Statesman on December 7, 1962. It was written in late November, about six weeks after Hughes had moved out of their home in Devon. That autumn Plath was writing the poems of Ariel, and the review is an obvious, if coded, commentary on the devolution of her marriage. She begins by quoting Byron’s mother-in-law: “Who could see that Suffering Angel Sinking under such unmanly and despicable treatment, and not feel?” Yet she refuses to offer up self-pity or vitriol to London’s literati, or to Hughes. On the contrary, she professes little sympathy for Byron’s wronged wife: “Annabella’s refusal to grant her spouse an interview (she never saw Byron again), let alone try to make a second go of it, seems due less to his cruelty, adultery, incest and the rest than to the ‘formidable apparition’ of that consistency Byron had observed in her before their marriage – a consistency fixed by the ego-screws of pride and a need to be for ever, like Milton’s God, tediously in the right”. Though Annabella was “reduced to a Skeleton – pale as ashes” after Byron left her, Plath ascribes her state not to his humiliations, but to Annabella’s “killing dybbuk of self-righteousness in possession!” Plath wasn’t just reviewing a biography – she was extending a tentative olive branch to Hughes. She wouldn’t make the same mistake as Annabella; she would grant him another interview. Maybe they could “make a second go of it”. According to Hughes, the two spoke of reconciling after Plath moved back to London in December 1962. But Hughes was seeing two other women at that time, and Plath’s last letter to her former psychiatrist, Dr Ruth Beuscher, written a week before her suicide in February 1963, suggested little hope for such a reconciliation. By then she was depleted and depressed, and had begun to blame herself for the breakdown of her marriage – for never having grown up, as she wrote to Beuscher in her last surviving letter. One recalls lines from her story fragment “Hill of Leopards” ( 1957 ) , probably a l so par t o f the Falcon Yard manuscript and printed in the Collected Prose for the first time: “I am his mistress, she thought. And damn proud of it . And will be, until he takes another. But then. Then. Her mind blacked itself. She could not go on”. n TLS Walking Out One Morning After Lockdown Has Been Lifted Darkness everywhere. Night pervades, then dies. Now kerb sweepers, bread vans and early traffic rumble by my window-side bed while rain-music fizzles on slate roofs as dawn pours inside. An alarm squawks that I must not lie in my listening to telegraph-pole birds getting high over elms and rowans, lifting into citrus-burst skies like memories of songs, but rise and walk the city with multimillioned windows for eyes. Versions of the world and time are limned through screens over-pinging with messages. Data flutters through whatever dimension it is data flutters through – the space within space, as I open my door like a book and walk past steam-wands stretching hot-foamed milk in cafés, unshuttering shops, skinnymalink cats curled under fenceposts, the lampposts’ travelogues of scent casting spells over all-sniffing dogs. Nothing feels real if it’s not on the net yet nothing on the net feels real. Now I brim with yesteryears, feeling virtual on this thoroughfare, walking into carbon debt and exhaust-brume on compact streets dwarfed on each side by tall grey buildings so the traffic’s like a two-lane-wide ant-trail up the deep crack of a rhino’s back hide. And onto grass I go, over the sluice-sounds of drain-flow, underground culverts, into the city meadows. ‘One thing is for sure,’ he said. Then he died. Then another. And another. Such vast scale, my mind miniature. I dreamt I was asked, by a smart machine, why it shouldn’t pull the plug on human things, and all my consciousness could muster was hot emotional mess. Now ping-ponged between position and sense, onto grass I go: as if the best way of honouring the dead is to make the most of living. A teen gobs a humongous bruise-yellow yinger onto a tree-lined path, and onto grass I go to sync with the time-zone of earth’s slow verbs, dreaming names, faint signals, green whispers, winged singers in sycamores, willows, hornbeams, free park benches where a red-head businesswoman in an ink-blue suit eats a meal-deal Wiltshire ham sandwich under clearing heavens while sad shadows blend with the cherry trees’ ginger-tinged sunglow. Onto grass I go, and I’ve made it to the meadows. You’ll know, of course, I write this at my desk in the night, these words already processed by machine, as a cyclist in look-at-me lycra torpedoes past a duffel-coated toddler who’s learning new words, links with the living and dead, lifting in titchy hands a dandelion whose wind-drifted seeds land their trance-like parachutes on bittercress and wild carrot while a frisbee glides past like a complex experiment on motion and grace. Through the tree-leaf-reeled air come soft-pocked tennis sounds, and I can’t grasp this slide between phantom and real, but want to ask Hey there, smart machine, how do you feel? Hey trees, what you laughing at? Two students in beanie hats with tote bags of books sip from reusable refilled hot polypropylene cups, sunlight on their faces, and yes, I’m in this, whatever it is, this blue lift, this light page, this world-plunge, this. A L A N G I L L I S Alan Gillis is an Irish poet who lives in Scotland. His most recent collection of poems is The Readiness, 2020 OCTOBER 18, 2024
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C O M M E N T A R Y A G E N C Y / A L A M Y SN E W T T © opened fire on students and civilians protesting against martial law, killing as many as 2,300 people in ten days and beating, raping and torturing many more in the aftermath. News of the killings was immediately silenced by Chun’s government and remained t a boo f o r more t han a gene r a t i on . Casualty numbers are still fiercely contested. While May 18 became a day of commemoration for the victims in 1997, Gwangju remains a flashpoint for political conflict. As recently as 2017 Han was blacklisted on grounds of ideological bias by the former president Park Geun-hye’s administration ( 2 0 1 3 – 1 7 ) , w i t h Human A c t s exc l uded f rom a national literacy project. Han was born in Gwangju and was nine years old at the time of the violence, but her family had moved to the outskirts of Seoul earlier in the year. She has said that her life was changed when her father, also a novelist, showed her photographs from the uprising two years later. The memory of her eleven-year-old self absorbing the shock is captured in the epilogue of Human Acts, titled “The Writer, 2013”: I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t even realized was there. The breaking of a tender thing – a soul, a conscience or a physical body, as in the case of the characters depicted in Human Acts – is the most urgent subject of Han’s masterwork. In seven parts, each labelled with the name of its narrator and the year in which they speak, we hear from the community surrounding a middle-school student, Dong-ho, who helps identify corpses brought to the Provisional Office. Why a boy, barely a teenager, has been entrusted with this role is a valid question, to make no mention of the question of why these bodies are piling up in the first place. There is no reasonable answer to any of these questions, yet Han’s writing insists that we still bear witness to such atrocities. A hunger for truth Nobel laureate Han Kang makes uncomfortable reading for the Korean authorities YOOJIN GRACE WUERTZ There were no expectant news vans outside Han Kang’s home on October 10, as the Swedish Academy announced thi s year ’s Nobel prize in literature. Unlike most laureates, who receive the award later in life, Han is fifty-three and at the height of her career after three decades of prolific work, comprising eight novels, as well as short stories, essays and poetry. She was reportedly finishing dinner with her son when she received a phone c al l f rom Mats Malm, the Academy’s permanent secretary. Admirers of Han’s work might imagine the moment as one lit by the kind of light emblematic of her writing – crepuscular yet st ark – where the personal suddenly becomes intensely public. The next day South Korean media reported that Han had declined to hold a press conference, citing a deference to those suffering in wars. To readers of her work, which probes the limits of human violence as well as the knotty, necessary work of loss and grief, this announcement will have come as little surprise. But the South Korean public, vorac i ous consumers of celebr i t y culture and accustomed to i n t imate acce s s to t hei r i dols , responded with outrage and derision. The prestige of the Nobel, they felt, belonged to all of them, and they felt cheated of the afterglow. Much has been written about the extraordinary ascent of South Korean soft power on the global stage since Seoul’s Olympic debut in 1988, which marked the country’s intentional bid for cultural influence. For those not paying attention, it might feel as if we’ve woken to an overnight K-ification, in the form of K-drama, K-beauty, K-pop. The “K-” denote s a c u t e s y, e a s i l y d i ge s t i b l e market i ng reference to Korea, and to the corresponding manifestations of super-slick, hyper-processed and unapologetically addictive cultural exports. Han, who was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian (translated by Deborah Smith), and was a finalist for the same prize two years later for The White Book (also Smith), has made significant contributions to the zeitgeist of Korean cultural prominence in the past decade. But rather than underscoring her country’s shiny ragsto-G20 glow-up, her writing demonstrates a strenuous counterpoint to, or refusal of, the capitalistic, patriarchal workings of the K-universe. In The Vegetarian, published in Korean in 2007, Yeong-hye, a young woman in contemporary Seoul, becomes haunted by dreams and memories of violence against animals: The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides. As a result she decides she will no longer eat or serve meat in her home. Her husband, who had married her because he believed her to be “completely unremarkable in every way”, finds this sudden change in her existentially unsettling and begins to wage battle against her body and mind. Because she will no longer sleep with him, as he smells of meat, he finds it acceptable and arousing to rape her. As a last resort, he calls in Yeong-hye’s family, who verbally and physically assault her, and force-feed her pork. When she is hospitalized for a suicide attempt, her mother apologizes to her husband, ashamed by her daughter’s unknowable, degenerate behaviour. The Vegetarian, according to this synopsis, could be read as a successful, if one-dimensional, work of feminist body horror, of Yeong-hye’s dissociation f rom the mores of South Korean soc i e t y that demand that a wife eat, dress and behave in a narrow, circumscribed manner. But in the novel’s second act, “Mongolian Mark”, we see that her character is not simply a negative of current values, but also a hungry demand for a specific, utterly idiosyncratic experience of life free from every constraint. Han’s writing is not only a rebuke; it forms a meticulous record of human need and desire in all its complexities. While The Vegetarian is Han’s most successful novel in translation, Human Acts (2014; 2016) is considered her most important novel in South Korea. It grapples with the legacy of the Gwangju Uprising (also called the Gwang ju Massacre) in May 1980, when the army, operating under the orders of the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, Han Kang, 2024 Yoojin Grace Wuertz is the author of the novel Everything Belongs to Us, 2017. She was born in Seoul and lives in New Jersey In the fourth section, titled “The Prisoner, 1990”, a survivor of government torture struggling to provide testimonies for a professor’s research asks: Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? This is the central question running through Han Kang’s work. Her language, often as direct as a conversation with a friend, forces readers to drop their defences and well-worn evasions. The violence she describes shocks until we realize – until she brings us to realize – that the alternative of simply adjusting to its demands is the greater horror. n Victorian ABC Frederick Nesta (editor), Where the Victorians Got Their Reading “New international work.” Key new volume for Victorian studies. www.eerpublishing.com OCTOBER 18, 2024 TLS 5

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L I T E R A T U R E

“Please scold me.” Dody heard her voice, strange and constricted in her chest […] “I am a bitch,” Dody heard her voice announce from out of the doll-box in her chest, and she listened to it, wondering what absurd thing it would say next. “I am a slut,” it said with no conviction. Sexism, class, financial anxiety and male violence are closely tied to another recurring theme in Plath’s work: depression. Stories such as “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom”, “Tongues of Stone” and “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” show her mining her own experience of breakdown, determined to make art from despair. But by the time she wrote The Bell Jar, with its condescending boyfriends, manipulative admen, dismissive male doctors, predatory dates and life-threatening sex, her field of vision had widened. There Plath underscores the interconnected relationship between mental illness and the body politic in the novel’s first sentence: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York”. Is the novel’s heroine, Esther Greenwood, really sick, or is her breakdown a consequence of living in a “sick”, repressive, conformist society? Both the Rosenbergs and the ambitious Esther will be punished, through electrocution, for their dissidence. After Esther receives her first excruciating shock treatment at a mental hospital, she says: “I wondered what terrible thing it was I had done”. Plath’s earlier stories show that she had been preoccupied by the intertwined themes of punishment and female ambition for at least fifteen years before she made their connection explicit in this famous, harrowing scene.

Some of the most startling pieces in the Collected Prose are previously unpublished story fragments that make art of Plath and Hughes’s relationship. In “Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags” (1956), for example, the fictional Gerald and Olwyn have a spat. The story fragment is based on Plath’s visit to Hughes’s West Yorkshire family home, the Beacon, with her new husband in September 1956. Her description already contains the acidic notes of Ariel (1965):

Daylong he sat tousled in his mother’s parlour in his old RAF sweater, writing poems about water d rops and mar t y red b i shops and p l ay i ng h i s battered, cracked Beethoven records over and over. […] She had married a genius. Olwyn saw him famous and suave in a tuxedo, roaring sestinas in a royal godly voice over the BBC, in a dither of actresses, ballet dancers and Italian countesses with a literary flair, while she skulked about choking on cheese rinds like a tearblind mouse. When Plath wrote these words, she and Hughes had been married for about three months.

“Venus in the Seventh” (1957) may have been a draft chapter of Plath’s lost novel Falcon Yard, based on her Cambridge years and marriage to Hughes. (Plath’s mother, Aurelia, said she watched Plath burn the manuscript in Devon in 1962, in the wake of Hughes’s infidelity.) “Venus in the Seventh” was inspired by Plath’s trip to the continent in the spring of 1956, and her return to Hughes, fictionalized as Ian, in London: “She just wanted Ian: very simply. She could swim in him: that incredible violent presence of his: leashed. Too much man for this island”. Plath’s protagonist, Jess, romanticizes Ian’s violence in a troubling passage that shares details with Plath’s journal entry from March 1956 about what she called her first “sleepless holocaust night with Ted”:

“If you hadn’t come back, I would have come to Cambridge to find you again. To make up for that last time ...” Jess shivered, holding herself up against him, their toes touching. “Oh,” she laughed ruefully. “It was terrible, that. I went to Paris all scarred. Black and blue ...” “But you liked it?” “Yes.” “I was furious with myself. I don’t know what happened to me ...”

4

“It wasn’t right, somehow, then. I felt it. You didn’t even know my name, really.” She couldn’t help coming back to that, finishing it off. “I do now, though.” Violence, both real and performative, was a part of the couple’s relationship from the night they met in 1956. As was strength. In her journal from the 1950s Plath often spoke of Hughes as being “strong enough” for her, and she for him. In “Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags”, Gerald says to Olwyn, as they walk across the moors, “I like the way you don’t cry to be carried over the rough places”. Plath and Hughes wanted to shock British poetry, and each other: “You love one-syllabled words, don’t you?” Ian says to Jess in “Venus and the Seventh”. “Squab, patch, crack. Violent.” She answers: “Yes. I guess I do. I hate ‘ation’ words. They’re so abstract. I like words to sound what they say: bang crash. Not mince along in sing-song iambic pentameters”. Jess, sounding very much like Plath, declares Ian’s poem “an altar to spill blood at”. But she did not learn this preference for banging language from Hughes. She had written about her desire to use taboo words as far back as “A Dialogue” (1953): “Euphemisms […] That’s what I can’t stand either. Why not use the good vile words. Damn. Dung. Hell. God, they sound great. Scrawl them on the sidewalks and fences and shock the ladies and the gentlemen”. It wasn’t until she went to Cambridge in 1955 that she began to write poetry that reflected her aesthetic iconoclasm. (“Pursuit”, which she wrote shortly after she met Hughes, was a turning point.) “Venus in the Seventh” shows her poetic philosophy crystallizing.

The last piece of short prose Plath saw published during her lifetime was her review of Malcolm Elwin’s Lord Byron’s Wife, “Suffering Angel”, which appeared in the New Statesman on December 7, 1962. It was written in late November, about six weeks after Hughes had moved out of their home in Devon. That autumn Plath was writing the poems of Ariel, and the review is an obvious, if coded, commentary on the devolution of her marriage. She begins by quoting Byron’s mother-in-law: “Who could see that Suffering Angel Sinking under such unmanly and despicable treatment, and not feel?” Yet she refuses to offer up self-pity or vitriol to London’s literati, or to Hughes. On the contrary, she professes little sympathy for Byron’s wronged wife: “Annabella’s refusal to grant her spouse an interview (she never saw Byron again), let alone try to make a second go of it, seems due less to his cruelty, adultery, incest and the rest than to the ‘formidable apparition’ of that consistency Byron had observed in her before their marriage – a consistency fixed by the ego-screws of pride and a need to be for ever, like Milton’s God, tediously in the right”. Though Annabella was “reduced to a Skeleton – pale as ashes” after Byron left her, Plath ascribes her state not to his humiliations, but to Annabella’s “killing dybbuk of self-righteousness in possession!”

Plath wasn’t just reviewing a biography – she was extending a tentative olive branch to Hughes. She wouldn’t make the same mistake as Annabella; she would grant him another interview. Maybe they could “make a second go of it”. According to Hughes, the two spoke of reconciling after Plath moved back to London in December 1962. But Hughes was seeing two other women at that time, and Plath’s last letter to her former psychiatrist, Dr Ruth Beuscher, written a week before her suicide in February 1963, suggested little hope for such a reconciliation.

By then she was depleted and depressed, and had begun to blame herself for the breakdown of her marriage – for never having grown up, as she wrote to Beuscher in her last surviving letter. One recalls lines from her story fragment “Hill of Leopards” ( 1957 ) , probably a l so par t o f the Falcon Yard manuscript and printed in the Collected Prose for the first time: “I am his mistress, she thought. And damn proud of it . And will be, until he takes another. But then. Then. Her mind blacked itself. She could not go on”. n

TLS

Walking Out One Morning After Lockdown Has Been Lifted

Darkness everywhere. Night pervades, then dies. Now kerb sweepers, bread vans and early traffic rumble by my window-side bed while rain-music fizzles on slate roofs as dawn pours inside. An alarm squawks that I must not lie in my listening to telegraph-pole birds getting high over elms and rowans, lifting into citrus-burst skies like memories of songs, but rise and walk the city with multimillioned windows for eyes. Versions of the world and time are limned through screens over-pinging with messages. Data flutters through whatever dimension it is data flutters through – the space within space, as I open my door like a book and walk past steam-wands stretching hot-foamed milk in cafés, unshuttering shops, skinnymalink cats curled under fenceposts, the lampposts’ travelogues of scent casting spells over all-sniffing dogs. Nothing feels real if it’s not on the net yet nothing on the net feels real. Now I brim with yesteryears, feeling virtual on this thoroughfare, walking into carbon debt and exhaust-brume on compact streets dwarfed on each side by tall grey buildings so the traffic’s like a two-lane-wide ant-trail up the deep crack of a rhino’s back hide. And onto grass I go, over the sluice-sounds of drain-flow, underground culverts, into the city meadows. ‘One thing is for sure,’ he said. Then he died. Then another. And another. Such vast scale, my mind miniature. I dreamt I was asked, by a smart machine, why it shouldn’t pull the plug on human things, and all my consciousness could muster was hot emotional mess. Now ping-ponged between position and sense, onto grass I go: as if the best way of honouring the dead is to make the most of living. A teen gobs a humongous bruise-yellow yinger onto a tree-lined path, and onto grass I go to sync with the time-zone of earth’s slow verbs, dreaming names, faint signals, green whispers, winged singers in sycamores, willows, hornbeams, free park benches where a red-head businesswoman in an ink-blue suit eats a meal-deal Wiltshire ham sandwich under clearing heavens while sad shadows blend with the cherry trees’ ginger-tinged sunglow. Onto grass I go, and I’ve made it to the meadows. You’ll know, of course, I write this at my desk in the night, these words already processed by machine, as a cyclist in look-at-me lycra torpedoes past a duffel-coated toddler who’s learning new words, links with the living and dead, lifting in titchy hands a dandelion whose wind-drifted seeds land their trance-like parachutes on bittercress and wild carrot while a frisbee glides past like a complex experiment on motion and grace. Through the tree-leaf-reeled air come soft-pocked tennis sounds, and I can’t grasp this slide between phantom and real, but want to ask Hey there, smart machine, how do you feel? Hey trees, what you laughing at? Two students in beanie hats with tote bags of books sip from reusable refilled hot polypropylene cups, sunlight on their faces, and yes, I’m in this, whatever it is, this blue lift, this light page, this world-plunge, this.

A L A N G I L L I S Alan Gillis is an Irish poet who lives in Scotland. His most recent collection of poems is The Readiness, 2020

OCTOBER 18, 2024

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