Three poems from Wet Dream, a collection by Canadian poet Erin Robinsong, forthcoming fall 2022
***
IN AN ANIMAL IN AN ANIMAL
I was cursed to love the world forever
And especially now sweating it
Out, spitting it out, drinking it in
Before my heart becomes unbeatable
A friend who’s not afraid of death
Says deathfear is used as the ultimate lever
To make people do almost anything.
I am afraid of death the way I’m hesitant
Before heroic psychotropic doses, forgetting
What feet are what names what faces are for
I like these forms though there must be
So much more in the universe
That in the afterlife I’ll be like one of the mindblown
Who took so much acid they never came down
Hungover in the MRI tunnel I prepare myself
For this, or for losing my mind while living in it
Which to me sounds worse than death. I like my sanity
Too much, and this planet
And I said to my friend okay but
If dying is no problem, don’t souls still need a liveable
Rock to come be fleshy. His premise being the problem
Of dying is solved in returning, and he would know –
So I guess we’ll all be tardigrades, jellyfish, echidnas
& billionaires, which sounds like a plan to me
This is the kind of knowing that got me a B-minus
In Philosophy of Religion class
Before I learned the ways of the academe
And shut up, or said it in a certain way
You know the way & then exhausted
Return myself from forcible forms & travel
Into my own mouth & labyrinthal
Guts, the multiheaded situation
Of me with no demands but that I be planet
To numerosity and receive their dews
Which let me live which let them
And we live
Out this vast body by the grace
Of subvisible evolving geniuses. I know
About being a body from a body
Through a body because a body in a bigger
Body that needs to go on so I can be your
World, trashing
And filled with trash I didn’t ask for
There is a toxin that just keeps travelling
The shrew of all moods is curiosity
I secrete in my guts when I’m shut in
By reason, which is somehow the auspice
For melting & burning the world
& this is why we have to be witches
Ending the empire that feeds on forgetting
To end. A theory afraid of plants
Songs, darkness, wind, water, dreams
& a caterpillar hanging on a thread
From her ass
Who all know
How to end
Not-dying is the apocalypse
Just ahead of being cooked
In wine
Curative for forgetting. When it ends
The world goes on
Transforming, generous in ends
***
RAIN ON THE INARTICULATE
In the dream my eyes emitted a fluid
That was a fractal of the sea cried to scale
In a liquidity lent everywhere, a sea folded
In and leaked in return, perspired by way of
Turning round, as hydrology’s juice as galactic
Pigment, as a tear is the totality of oceanic
Feeling. The eye the organ most limited to surfaces
Has another sense which emits a liquid exigence
Which seeps or wraps to see inside this replete
Wreck of a planet’s liquidity moving solutions
From clouds through eyes into dissolving commons
Of wet intelligence melting like ice, as ice
In this rain on the inarticulate, as Eliot almost said
To soften the shabby equipment, swell it, warp it,
Rot it, make it sprout. Rain rain rain on language
Surfaces from water’s warpings, dampened thought
Intimate office of bodily mixology wrapped
In a fabric of dissolving sutures, soluble memory
*
To speak of water’s entanglements is to dissolve
All lineation. Relation is osmotic, cosmic, contagious
In a talk qʷn̓qʷin̓x̌n̓ describes a century
Of toxic slag in her traditional territory
Dumped by Teck smelter into the Columbia
River before the Colville Tribes took them to court
For 20 years, and in this fight having to prove
Water flows downriver.1 A droplet of the state
Of colonial decrepitude, stupitude
Flowing through time as a conceptual toxin
Crumbling like the brain cells of a losing reality
In a world infinitely downriver does not stop
Does not stop lead and mercury does not stop
These logics even as they crumble the ocean
Into sediments dredged from 1492, from 1715
From 1965, 2021. Water is the transportation
System of all thought. Between us, through us, through
Space and time. Like a ferry that is the water itself
*
Up hydrology’s workings we rose
Or sank, lugubrious
Or levain, in fleshes sodden opulence
Appearing as a solid, then a vapour
Cream is fur in another form
The sky carried everything that could be
Thought inside of it like spores
That only water could water into possible
Palpable nameable flameable form
Or liquid lived as this condition
Of minglement, before or during
400 years of a dry dream
Of discrete of leakproof as
A concept that invented plastic and
Metallurgic slag and glyphosate
Since skin doesn’t breathe since
It’s sealed as an airtight nightmare
Of singular dosage, you eat yourself
Since to remove or dam or constrict or
Deprive or bleed off or siphon or drown
Or understate or sell or pump full of
The only non-hydrophilic substance
Which is oil, would be leachant of
The wet mind of reality
Fouled & filtered by clouds mixed
Into thought, I grow whet & planetary
As a creature
Whose organs clean the water
On a Monday as perpetual liquid vastness
Passes through borders of continuous peristalsis
***
SCALAR
Reality is the most
heartbreaking substance
Ever drunk through every pore
nostril word
Every secret entrance to the
face. Ariana says the instruction is
To love it at all costs.2 An
ongoing task
Since the real requires
stupidity, so much stupidity
For whatever reason. This place
is so stupid
And the light loves it, the water
runs it
The soil of it is where we come
To meet each other in whatever
state until we’re what we are again
When I lie facedown on the ground
with my arms out
I can carry the whole thing,
it’s exactly the weight I can
Hold though that seems crazy,
this place is crazy
Like that, no one said that it
wasn’t
As I hold the whole
fucking rock in my arms
The mismatch in scale is a phase
& I think we can relate anyway