Dark Archive

By Laura Mullen

Dark archive: The purpose of a dark archive is to function as a repository for information that can be used as a failsafe during disaster recovery.

Laura Mullen’s fourth collection is a sequence of beautifully interrelated poems that explores how to accurately represent the reality of change and loss. Mullen pinpoints what is at stake: the possibility of communication and connection—and the hope of intimacy. Invoking Wordsworth’s "I wandered lonely as a cloud," she pushes experiments in consciousness against their boundaries in an array of poetic forms. Poetic tropes are measured against natural phenomena as Mullen examines what "witness" might mean in the context of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the failures of capitalism to effect social justice, the murder of James Byrd in Texas, the personal loss of a mother figure, and a disintegrating love affair.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9780520948259

Laura Mullen

Laura Mullen’s first collection of poems, The Surface, was chosen as a National Poetry Series selection; her second collection, After I Was Dead, was selected for the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series. She is also the author of Subject (UC Press), and two hybrid texts: The Tales of Horror and Murmur.

Book preview

CLOUD COVER

window / candle

this light that looks like

lightning

outside is inside

sputtering dance

of tattered flame

in a draft between

doors

knot of wick

softening wall

of wax

it’s not that

"I don’t understand

why you had to be taken

from us"

but any act

of understanding

turns back

halted at reflecting

glass

to my need

for meaning in this

life

clouds in a window

scud by

seemingly

flashing dark and

bright

guttering sky my brief

vision

of the worlds

that with you go

out

the light

drowned in its own

fuel

a little smoke

this glaucous

spill of cooling wax

wisps

of almost opaque

air

blown past

No Voice

Wandered lonely in the voice of another who had no voice

This is what I remember

Two figures by the water’s edge, stopped by such beauty, one numbers

The complaints travel the body stop nowhere never stop are always

Later by an open window notebook open This is what I remember . . .

Who had no voice she said, still, but I wonder how you are

I wandered like like refusing the information

I wandered, realizing I hadn’t mourned, and that I would still

In the Space between Words Begin

In the space between words begin

Attempt

In the space

At dawn the newly risen dead uncomfortable

In their restored bodies

Situation: from ‘wandering’ to rest—

Loneliness to solitude. Believing

Is seeing, experience

An accrual of images

The newly risen dead find their bodies

Uncooperative, awkward, ugly           as in any

Horror flick

I wandered lonely as a van full of hippies

In Texas

In the space between words                roots

what shall I talk about

Situation: a man at his desk pages through

Another’s writing closes his eyes seeks rhymes

For the following: daffodils, thought . . .

I fear I can no longer think

I fear I am no longer that which thinks

Or that a certain kind of thinking’s lost

Light, light, light, light. Let there be a place

From which a way seems clear or clearer

Out of the house into the golden

And never

Remediation Attempt

(winter 2005 lower 9th ward)

signs gone streetlights people

lines between inside and out

destroyed in the flood the word

destroy with troy in it letters of

a word lonely meaning stopped

starts sounds

the decision to use a frame of time

to inhabit it      habit like

going to the wall where the mirror was

expecting to see yourself seeing

the wall            (if that’s all) recalled

lines between house and yard yard

and street lost my house your house

his her their our          high green weeds

surround an isolated concrete stoop

in what’s left remember membrane

this blurred view through swaying cut

plastic makes a room within

the stripped room containing dust

promising to continue

but this respirator she was holding it out

there’s something wrong with it

I Wandered Networks like a Cloud

That floated o’er my couch, remote

In one hand, drink in the other, as a crowd

On the screen (frightened, enraged)

Fled the tanks beneath the leaves

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine,

These wars, these displaced refugees,

Filmed in never-ending lines

Along the margins and at bay.

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Hurrying nowhere, like worried ants.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Bent weeping over loved bodies:

A poet could not but be gay,

Far from such desperate company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that satellite dish

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

To channel surf the world’s ills.

The Author Is Not

Dead the author is a closed

Account occluding you

Clued in or out another

One and only clouding

Ground as stony as an autre

Clod the author’s nothing

But another method

Aloud to be allowed ssssh he

Billows up wherever we

Might see too many meanings

Crowding round about a shroud

Is not afraid of making a sound

The author is not lonely as a cad

As arias the areas of air we are arise

To spin within convention

Centers’ centers cannot hold

The hell of whole untolled

And where an urgent surge

Of suggestion floods the subject

With reflections sssssh he is still

Turning the town upside down

Adrift in the riffs these rifts

Allow so if a reader running

Aground on the drowned sounds

A thunder or dunderhead under-

Stand my numbered superfund

Friends it’s only an end to an end

Where a mind wanders the author’s

Already in his head a recollected

Glance back over a salt’s shoulder

Where chances a roof to dance

On the golden waves of the wake

Of departure the other

Are a crowd

Not disappeared just disavowed

In case you wondered

I Wandered (Phony) As

Far as the local authorities let me

On the tightly lashed leash

Of this look and leave

Policy; lonely

As a clown . . .

By and By

The necessity or so it seems of forcing

A shape