LULLABY
Speculations on the first active sense
A
ffection of your waking hours breaks into rhythmic blinks
Breathing is the shock of your initiation here Is and is and is, pulse is prehistory Even before you listen your body hears itself (Rhythm is an intelligence activated by being) And by what babble and by what charge Organized by a nervous system, rhythm begins as two competing motions, saturated and insistent Those hurrying iambs proliferate perception Let that rhythm orchestrate thought Let it build and break your chemic cycles Each organ enrapts or ruptures the rhythm Each sub-rhythm forever multiplying the human body You hear more than you need to, more than you know what to do with What you overheard the first nine months Stuck to you, it stayed underwater Rhythm struck like waves inside you amplified
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Stripping you down to crashing rhythms of water Lullaby enacts substantiation Lullaby atavises whatever it touches What a rhythm will become to stay in the world Ecstatic rages digging themselves into the room Into your voice haunting air and innards You are born into vocal rhythm It percolates your fundament You list toward the memory of total comfort Listen toward the fantasy of total comfort and you hallucinate Tenderness rides on the rhythm of that voice Semantics is nothing doing (Branch ticking at the window) From the beginning you know words mean to crush The body goes under, but the head stays outside Lullaby exists between body and belief Lullaby prays because sleep requires it Like god, lullaby limits itself to commands and promises So folded in on itself, lullaby doubles your language
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An enforced patience, a willed possession Lullaby sustains as it redirects Immerses you in sensual trance To extract lyricism from the infantile Let blood depart and recombine, let it eavesdrop By lub-dub and by left-right The chorus continually wringing your gut and hands Singing lullaby, you recover your mother’s pulse Listening, your body downpours As if in the torn natal eye Goes down that hole rhythmized Baffles traffic’s chaos outside Seconds shedding their tick Grammar latches on to compulsion and silences First words repeat cadences more than phonetics Rhythm attracts and engages for its own sake You forget the rest of your rhythmic repertoire (To distrust language’s rhythm is a form of self-loathing) The ear is the original vigilant animal
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Attempting to arrange its confused, uncalm, obscure world Rhythm tries to make something of it A wall patterned by contractions, rhythmic lashes of a branch To produce rhythm intentionally is to be human To produce rhythm intentionally is to speak The child throws the spool of black thread A voice constructs a gravel runway to sleep A maze through wolves and lost mothers The child pulls and pulls the spool back by its thread Repetition is rhythm supplanting absence To listen for you is to identify a secret rhythm To listen for is to predict the future What you listen for isn’t only what you get Lullaby is language’s best way of being duplicitous and hedonistic Lullaby is Pavlovian oblivion Getting lost in your body’s fjords From unconscious to unconscious, lullaby invaginates Come out of yourself by listening in Rhythm is transferred in memories, like hatreds, like fears
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Like bugbears and murderers in the milk, you gulp it Lullaby is a process of vanishing Lullaby vampirizes the visible Accessing a human outside the senses By excess and by tip of the tongue Rhythm is the first lie The sweet lure and bye belies its bully language Its impossible promises of killers and riches Lullaby wants you dead, and lullaby fears your death Devoted to the expected, you listen Suspecting surprise, you listen twice A wave breaks its bough and hearing falls off Persistence blood-binds you Inconceivable for you not to slide under the spell The hallucination of eternal return is also erotic Any human voice eroticizes sleep You fall into it like you fall with someone into treetops The ear is cocked; the ear clenches itself off to sirens Singing is the whole body emerging from the throat, on the wind of lungs
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The voice lobs itself out of a hole An abyss in each word Coaxing you to enter and disappear You take every word with you into sleep Holes in the words dilate and dream Exhausted, your ears are panting mouths All your sayings escaping And returning, escaping and returning tired Lullaby is inaudible without an ocean in the background Sea birds entangle you in their heavy calling Lullaby heaves its lead body into your bones, its feather body Superinduces lullaby’s compound litres You, your desire, and your refusal to sleep triangulate A triple meter and a tendency to stay flat Just try to slip off your mind Boil of crickets, luna moths lathering Your listening circulates, it is a flock of bats in the fixed, blank sky Impulsing, hypnogogic Every voice is also full of what it says
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You know the song by heart as it passes through your teeth Its moving accrues meaning It is no wonder no one will ever be able to sleep Against your body, your whole hair-raising childhood If you have forgotten the rhythm of sleep The sound of your own voice misleads you into someone else’s mind Push you down the dreaming world First ceaselessly grind your nerves First exhaust your arsenal of measures And exhaust each word by wearing a hole in it Sonic gaps return your terror of vertigo You are used by that rhythm Carried into a patch of stars that pitch mnemonic-deific-amnesiac fits Rhythm localizes the infinite Rhythm is bacterial Rhythm automatically animates a lost memory Where the tree is not only itself Picking its fruit pulls an ancient sound out of the trees When the voice breaks the cradle
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Falls dark into bored rhythms Falling into continuous contractions Ghost rhythms inhabit you and itch Cells reiterate and their rhythms attune you Their rhythms send your organs out of their rockers (Organs are judges and judged) Lullaby is a protest song Whoever sings it is somatized, also horrified by the knives she is sharpening Make the song stutter, it is no lullaby anyway It looks intimate and docile, but it is a desperate, singular object of mad dedication Echolalia erupting from a wound Tests kinesthetic repetitions Until lullaby is the chaperone of insomnia Listening hard lets you guard yourself Lets you sob asleep rather than choke Throw a newborn into the sea A real lullaby doesn’t accompany anything It steals your pillows as you sleep
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Seething blood in an ear to the chest The room covers over with skin Lullaby is porous, scabbing Lullaby is infused with mourning To be possessed by rhythm is to be alive You walk because of its totemic iambics Rhythm survives a mouth Enter by shortcut Enter by laborious bridge Rhythm repairs a fragment There is no argument, there is hypnotic pass By instinct and by pleasure, it hovers To let yourself fall is unnatural Stresses falling at half-second intervals Liquids and nasals alternating light and dark vowels
(And drowsy inklings lull the distant folds)
Fresh transfiguring of freshest rhythm Under your skin even when forgotten In the slip between material and maternal
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The I carried away, carrying on like that Lullaby pours those fuckers back to you By scandal and by chance Rhythm rounding, hair around a nipple Lullaby of you thirsty walking toward mirages That animal gnawing itself with percussive insistence The barking dog’s choke-chain collar Babies cradled in contaminated branches Grey dogs creeping forward Toward the high tree in your hearing Where exhaustion builds conspiracies, builds a fort in your ear Given by blood and by breath You cannot find the sleep in any rhythm Hearing the cry, you mindlessly fill with milk It keeps you learning to swim Adjusting your rhythm to that of the waves, the undertow Pineal gland gladdening That havoc of rocking again Faraway a train trembling like fire
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A sound that wants to interfere with your wakefulness Rhythm liberates what rhythm would contradict The hinge-rhythm digs a hole for a grave or a tree A ladder voice emerges from your voice Primal overhearing of early nerves Lullaby looks ahead by listening back Anima moving with interruptive connectivity Electricity in the muscles and sensory-motors Lullaby unselves you as it sugars you up Listen your mama is gone, your papa is gone Listen, listen lullaby goes on
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To Juna and Jeff
Colophon This book was designed and set by UDP in Trade Gothic with Edwardian Script titles. The cover was designed by UDP and printed with love on Fabriano paper at PolyPrint Design. CD duplication was speedily performed by Landshark. Grateful acknowledgments to Denver Quarterly and Not For Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing (Fence Books), where versions of this text first appeared. Thanks to James Marks for the soundtrack.
Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense text © 2008 Christine Hume music © 2008 James Marks
UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE www.uglyducklingpresse.org