Fumbling forward in an arrogant fog.The sensation of tiredness—tingle smell of swallowed coffee in the noseis tiny, like Captain Cook’s ship picking the edge of Australia.He and my nose are determined nits.Something eternal’s surely obscured—?The mouth-covering submission of having a vaginaof looking at the sky and desiring another order,or not desiring another order (to be delivered by Cook or by nose)but understanding the ridiculous fear that animates the oppressorso small in a big space.The memory of my father at the drive-thru window of a McDonald’s at night on I-87 north, his face lit and strained serious, is easyto describe, whereas someone else’s foam earphones,or a soft anxiety that wants you to lie in it,or the mountains at night, in a kind of feminine community and exclusion.How tiny I wanted us to beon our journey which was a centimeter of atlas.How my commitment to disoriented wonderment obscured the physical reality of what we passed—alien antenna,romance of high school names painted on a rock face.It’s over and I’m on the long end of its pendulum.A great lie I had constructed and am still lamely buttressing.How the farm at night was dark and cool showing us the real meaning of a house.How the Lord might have thrown us over the Pacific like acorns.It is the motion I make when leaving you in your car seat, facing backwards.How your warm organs in my embrace withhold the undiscovered place they constitute.
The End Is Always Sudden
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- December 12, 2024
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“The End Is Always Sudden” from GREEN ISLAND: by Liz Countryman.
Published by Tupelo on June 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Liz Countryman.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Liz Countryman is the author of Green Island, which was selected by Julie Carr for the 2022 Berkshire Prize from Tupelo Press, and A Forest Almost. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Lana Turner, and The Canary. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where she is Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina and co-editor, with her husband Samuel Amadon, of the poetry journal Oversound.
“Liz Countryman’s powers of description remind me of both Virginia Woolf and Bernadette Mayer: she looks at the ordinary through the lens of history, seeing in a dresser, a seashore, a clearing the necessary and ruthless work that is time. She sees the past always staring back, and the challenge of her poems is to make a more meaningful life out of, and despite, the losses and failures of that past—the twentieth century, hers and ours. I am in awe of the masterful poise of these poems—insistently gendered, often wry, always wise, full of grief and fearless confrontation and full of the poet’s “desire to be lifted.” Green Island is a devastating book and a beautiful book, and it is a book to hold close and read again.”
—Jennifer Chang
“In Green Island, Liz Countryman’s beautifully perceptive and formally adventurous second book, she investigates how a ‘commitment to a disoriented wonderment,’ like an ‘arrogant fog,’ had once ‘obscured the physical reality of what passed.’ In doing so, Countryman does not give up surprise and ‘wonderment’ nor disorientation so much as she finds them in ‘undiscovered’ places as near at hand as an ‘embrace’ or when placing a ‘kiss [on] the inside of a turtleneck.’”
—Michael Collier
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