"Thanks be to the powers of serious play. Rueful, resourceful, witty, and tender, Troy Jollimore's poems are at once a triumph of virtuosity and an extraordinary tribute to the amplitude of the human heart. Tonic in their clarity of means, joyful in their engagement with form, they also bespeak the rigor of a philosophical mind. I know no living poet who has been able to pursue such large ambitions with so transparent an instrument."--Linda Gregerson, author of Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2014

Syllabus of Errors

Poems

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

ON BIRDSONG

If my readers wish to understand bird-music, they must assume that birds are not automatic musical boxes, but sound-lovers, who cultivate the pursuit of sound-combinations as an art, as truly as we have cultivated our arts of a similarly aesthetic character. This art becomes to many of them a real object of life, no less real than the pursuit of food or the maintenance of a family.

— WALTER GARSTANG, SONGS OF THE BIRDS (1922)

    ON BIRDSONG

    Poison, in proportion, is medicinal.
    Medicine, ill-meted, can be terminal.

    Brute noise, deftly repeated, becomes musical.
    An exit viewed from elsewhere is an entrance.

    The conjuror entrances a vast audience.
    The hymn that's resurrected from the hymnal

    aspires, as we wish to, to the spiritual,
    but is slow to disentangle from the sensual.

    The evening light, refracted, terminates the day.
    (A faction is a fraction of an integral.)

    What would we say to the cardinal or jay,
    given wings that could mimic their velocities?

    How many wintery ferocities
    are encompassed in their shrill inhuman canticles?


    INVENTORY

    Take inventory. Invent a story
    about the people you have hurt.
    Begin with yourself. The harm I've done
    comes on this journey with me. He walks
    ahead on the trail, or follows a dozen
    paces behind. At night we stop
    together. I try not to feel ashamed
    of him, his decaying robes, his loathsome,
    unwashed feet, so much like mine.
    We don't talk much. But two nights ago,
    the campfire dying between us, I found
    I could no longer stifle my rage, I wanted
    to be rid of him so badly, and so
    I mustered my anger and said, You only
    get seven pairs of shoes to carry you
    through this life, and you've already used up
    four. Silence. The call of a whippoorwill
    in the fields. At last he looked up.
    That might be. But know that I'm willing to go
    barefoot at the end, if that's what it takes.


    ACHE AND ECHO

    1

    Anything can be beautiful: a discarded
    Taco Bell wrapper, an industrial park,
    a strip mall, a bloodstain, a bruise, a corpse:

    you just need to see it from the right angle,
    in the right light, and in a spirit
    of equanimity, open-mindedness,

    and receptivity. Isn't this
    what twentieth-century artists were trying
    to tell us? No, they were trying to tell us

    that anything could be art. As for beauty,
    they held it in contempt, they thought beauty
    made us bad people, blind to the plight

    of the poor, to the possibility of change.
    That wasn't their nuttiest notion, either.
    Not by a longshot. But me, I can't

    give up my beauty, I'm an addict, a beauty
    fiend; if you want to take it away
    you're going to have to pry it from my cold dead hands.


    2

    Give back the ache that echoed in
    my heart. Return to me the ache
    and the echo of the ache I felt

    in Orchid Park. Send back to me
    the loose-strung ache that echoed in
    the ark that is my heart. Retrace

    the arc a happy heart might make.
    Sing back to me the song we sang
    in the outer dark, the art we make

    of the ache we felt when we traced the arc
    of the last falling star to fall.
    And stir me, stir me with the spoon

    you used to hide the moon. Then stir
    the echo of my ache. My melody
    has fallen out of tune.


    3

    One: what pleases, what disgusts,
    is only skin deep. Like the beast who becomes
    a handsome man at the end of the film.

    Two: 'tis thinking makes it so.
    What troubles is in the beholder's eye.
    Or should that be the beholden?

    Three: it was born from the womb of death,
    or so it is said. You have met its brothers
    skulking in the bushes with their video recorders.

    Four: it is what truth is, where that
    is all we know, and all we need
    to know. Pretty is as privilege does.

    Like a man who will happily murder a thousand
    songbirds, if need be,
    just to nab one perfect specimen.


    4

    At which point it is obligatory
    to make mention of Pope Urban VIII,
    who had the songbirds in the Vatican

    gardens slaughtered, to create
    a quiet sanctuary in which a
    great and moral man

    might suitably reflect
    on such topics
    as beauty, mercy, and grace.


    5

    Does every man, handsome or no,
    contain a hidden beast? Is that
    why pretty girls won't meet my eye?

    Whoever it was thought to install
    that scatter of houses, that precise
    and poignant human outpost, in

    that hilly spot beneath the dark
    erasure we call sky, should really
    be commended: such a perfect

    counterpoint, such a revealing
    object lesson in the plight
    of mortal aspirations in

    the face of the indifferent. Not
    the pain of being, but the pain
    of being some particular body,

    of dragging a narrative behind you,
    like a swimmer tangled up
    in heavy nets, feeling the ocean,

    its whole weight, beneath him. Similar
    to sitting on a bench named for
    some fallen hero or forgotten

    poet and wishing one of those flare-winged
    dashes of unabashed color, whose names
    you have tried to learn but can never quite

    remember, would pause and plummet
    in mid-bombardment and alight
    on your outstretched, expectant hand,

    on your shoulder, on your tongue. Stay
    awhile, as Faust said to his life,
    you are so beautiful.


    ON THE ORIGINS OF THINGS

    Everyone knows that the moon started out
    as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar
    flare that fled that hellish furnace
    and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended
    between the planets. But did you know
    that anger began as music, played
    too often and too loudly by drunken musicians
    at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles
    evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness
    from misunderstanding? As for the dominant
    thesis regarding the origin of love, I
    abstain from comment, nor will I allow
    myself to address the idea that dance
    began as a kiss, that happiness was
    an accidental import from Spain, that the ancient
    game of jump-the-fire gave rise
    to politics. But I will confess
    that I began as an astronomer — a liking
    for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable
    things, a hand stretched always toward
    the furthest limit — and that my longing
    for you has never taken me far
    from that original desire, to inscribe
    a comet's orbit around the walls
    of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.

CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT

... lyrebirds in the adjacent New England National Park were found to have flutelike elements in their song, a sound not heard in other populations of superb lyrebirds. Further analysis of the song showed that the phrase contained elements of two popular tunes of the 1930s, "Mosquito Dance" and "The Keel Row." — DAVID ROTHENBERG, WHY BIRDS SING

    Reason informs us that birdsong is sublime
    but can't be beautiful: beauty is conferred
    solely by operations of the human mind.
    Meanwhile, from that low-hanging branch, the lyrebird

    is waging an ongoing, spirited battle
    against philosophy. Its melodious rebuttals
    owe a little something, I've just realized,
    to "That'll Be the Day," as immortalized

    by Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Tell me, is
    a song a living thing? Does a song possess a shelf life?
    A half-life? Will your favorite song enjoy an afterlife?
    Do you have songbirds in your pockets? Is

    there time for one last harvest? Would you like to file
    an objection once the lyrebird is done with his?


    HOMER

    Schliemann is outside, digging. He's not
    not calling a spade a spade.
    The stadium where the Greeks once played
    used to stand on this very spot.

    Each night, Penelope, operating
    in mythical time, unspools the light
    gray orb Schliemann has just unearthed. Come daylight,
    her hands will re-stitch it. The suitors sigh, waiting.

    And each night I'd watch as my hero curled
    himself round home plate, as if he were going
    to bat for me. And I'd hold my breath, knowing
    a strong enough shot might be heard round the world.

    One must imagine Penelope.
    One must imagine Penelope happy.
    One must imagine Schliemann excavating
    the dugouts and outfields of Troy, carbon-dating

    the box score stats and the ticket stubs
    he pulls from the lurid dirt. He rubs
    the remains of Achilles' rage on his white shirt.
    What does not kill you can still hurt.

    Penelope's suitors are striking out,
    one after another. Their sad swings and misses.
    They can't even get to first base. She'll cut
    the stitches once more, then blow them all kisses.

    Odysseus won't care that the orb is undone.
    He'll take a swing at it with all his might.
    The ball takes flight. Odysseus takes flight.
    It feels to Penelope like he's been gone

    since the dawn of mankind, but he's already zoomed
    round third and flies like an arrow toward home,
    as the unearthly orb trails its guts in the air —
    the yarn fanning out like Penelope's hair —

    not knowing yet whether to fall foul or fair.


    ORIOLE

    A bend in the river.
    A flaw in the surface.
    How many continents
    has this lone oriole
    crossed to come balance
    on our sagging clothesline,
    and what urgent thing
    is he trying to tell us?
    That those who could translate
    his song are lagging
    a thousand miles
    behind? Or that those
    who can speak both his tongue
    and ours have not yet
    been born, that we will go
    into the ground
    and a thousand years pass
    before their eyes open,
    the wayward atoms
    of our nests and tongues
    having been dispersed,
    reassigned, and repurposed
    into their bright,
    unforeseeable bodies?


    PAST IMPERFECT

    Because my image
    of it is flickering,
    wavering like a bad connection,

    I can tell I'm not
    the only one dreaming
    of the Halifax Public Gardens tonight.

    There must be a thousand
    brains, at least,
    plugged into this portal, sharing this channel,

    this wavelength,
    judging by the way
    the edges slant off into soft static fuzz,

    as if the whole picture
    were under attack
    by swarms of gray midges, or viewed through a lens

    of murky lake water,
    and even the stuff
    in the center, on which I train my attention —

    the ducks, like overstuffed
    businessmen after a meal,
    the pond with its crisp skim of scum

    that has gathered in sheltered
    pockets tucked close to
    the shore — these too warp and bend, as if

    I were viewing a movie
    shot with equipment
    salvaged from somewhere in Eastern Europe

    after some war or
    collapse, or filmed
    by a perpetually distracted and, to judge

    by the general coloration
    of what I can see,
    terminally disenchanted cinema

    tographer. Still, if I
    focus, I can just
    barely make out the shack where they sell

    the ice cream and chips,
    hastily sketched
    like a hermit's hut in a Japanese painting,

    and as the scroll
    unfurls, if I turn my head,
    that part of me that moves freely

    through time detaches
    itself from the part
    of me that is pinned to the present, fetches

    the bag that he packed
    last night, and sets off
    walking, casually, through the gardens

    on his way to somewhere
    even more distant:
    the kitchen of my childhood, perhaps,

    where my mother scrapes
    the inside of a white plastic
    bowl with a red-and-white plastic utensil

    and stares out the window
    as if she is trying
    to imagine the set of white rooms in which

    I now live. Or is he
    going even further
    back, to see her before I existed,

    when she was a child,
    not yet rendered mortal
    by the sickness I would one day once

    have been? Try
    as I might, I can't say
    for sure. I only know that he goes

    and I stay, and that
    the distance between
    his going and my staying is the distance

    between two adjacent
    piano keys, two
    consecutive letters of the alphabet,

    the distance between
    a word and its
    translation into a now defunct language,

    this distance that wants
    nothing more than to stand
    in the way of my loving this world, this world

    that, though it wants nothing
    more than to fling back
    against me the sad siege engines of my

    incessant attempts
    at love,
    I love.