Jennifer Metsker
Talking about The Earth Room at the Hearing Voices Network Meeting
after Walter De Maria
1.
In the earth room
earth awaits.
City dwellers in elevators
fold their souls into envelopes
and grid lines excavate.
Animals sin then die.
Their sins cannot outlive us.
People die too soon.
Their sins cannot outlive us.
The walls holds the earth.
Beneath the earth is every
voice we’ve ever heard.
2.
The word for wall
has two walls in it.
The word for barrier
has two men.
They bend down
to lift the blocks to build the walls
that holds the earth
in the middle of the city.
We dreamed the same dream:
we carried the earth with us
in our strained containers.
Earth exists the way
periwinkle forests don’t,
inside of brackets.
Inside of we.
We slept in foxholes.
We could see
the damage done.
3.
If you want to be an earthquake, start here, on the horizon.
Flex your factory hands, the ones you’ve had since childhood.
Those tiny fingers how they’ve aged—they’re alpine hands,
thin as air. The soil ought to lift for them.
We dream the same dream.
We ground the room into a powder.
Still I must ask you about your mother and father
and if you have enough siblings to get by.
Do you have a garden? Do you step into a yard
shaped by dahlias or peonies or sharp-angled evergreens?
There’s too much tragedy inside of weeds, yet
we dreamed the same dream, a room of earth.
There must be a weakened fortification
beneath the concrete where we skinned our knees.
We.
As children.
We.
As lightning rods spaced at predetermined intervals.
We.
Or perhaps these are the same things.
4.
Earth blanket
coal blanket.
We have a shared
affinity for blankets
or a need for
thicker skin.
We could have been
vagrants. We
are close
to the earth in that way.
Otherwise we are
sky blanket god blanket
where for art thou
blanket?
We cannot
rely on blankets.
We need
a thou blanket
or a now blanket.
5.
This room contains particles of earth
and the afterlife, but we don’t know
which particles go where.
This is what rooms are for.
They hold objects that forget who we are.
Earth is perforated—oh, how easily it tears.
We once dwelled in the earthen floors of anchor holds
where we absorbed too many prayers.
We were ancient mud assaulted by solar flares.
We were pyramid bricks and palm sweat.
We met at the earth’s core.
We were Pangean pilots.
We took the low road here.
We moltened into the room.
We said hello.
6.
God said to me, I said to you,
and time lost its surface texture.
Voices sound like earth sometimes
or wet gravel scooped into bags,
or glaciers grinding down a mountainside.
Or sanctified tubas or sonic chisels or wrecking
balls booming though tombs.
Think of Sinai. That voice.
Think of all the earth you’ve eaten.
Or don’t think.
We think too much already, you and I.
7.
Is there a the difference between
my earth and your earth?
My days are separate from the earth:
I want to bury them.
My earth is made of pills and sins:
I want to swallow them.
My earth absorbs unseen sorrows.
It sews them into animal carcasses.
I want to hold their funeral.
My earth tastes like
an old alphabet.
It has a grit
and a cadence.
I want to speak with it.
I want to hear it speak.
8.
We asked God if we could borrow a cup of sugar.
We were given earth.
We earth around the house in our spare minutes.
We stir earth into our coffee mugs.
We have too much time on earth.
We tend to our earth room.
We rake it with our hair.
We feed it worms.
We feed it exoskeletons.
We feed on earth when the night shovel visits us.
We sink into its furrows.
We pretend that we are seeds.
Jennifer Metsker is the author of the poetry collection Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise, which won the Editor’s Prize from New Issues Press. Her poetry has appeared in Beloit, Rhino, Birdfeast, Gulf Coast, The Cream City Review, and other journals. Most recently her work can be found in The Dialogist, Four Way Review, Pigeon Pages, and THE SHORE. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is the Writing Coordinator at the Stamps School of Art and Design.