Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling

Moving towards the Vertical Horizon (excerpts)

Moving towards the Vertical Horizon (excerpts) i. Once it’s written down it’s no longer true When you create a file you are dealing with stillborn information Photographs have been worthless since it became so easy to enhance them When there is no means of giving proof there is no reason for anyone to hide Everybody stays silent Not exactly what St Anthony had in mind ii. Christ was alive one of only 300 million when Natives met here to trade and discarded these broken tools in what, then as now, was alluvial mud (each spring the stream runs high and cold) they didn’t know of Him nor He of them; 8 / Plans Deranged by Time at Contact, say 1600, there were only 500 million persons on the earth, by 1750 still only 700 million the aboriginals already proscribed doomed; by 2010 you will have your choice of 35 cities with over 8 million people apiece the rich with concertina wire and broken glass atop floodlit garden walls, the others in corrugated tin shacks if they’re lucky if they’re not among those taken out by disease; cities maybe but not metropolitan for there is no polis but a new distinction not yet coined, only to be lost— some other generation can recover it Look at your density map and see where there are fewest, and go there take up what was dropped as worthless prove to these skeletons they were wrong iii. If you don’t have possessions then you don’t have to break as they do The Poetry of George Fetherling / 9 though you still make choices this is one of the rules so easy to remember do you pick an eminence that defends itself and rely on cisterns or remain in the valley water’s flowing there but high ground on two sides? Flight is no escape from compromise but a journey to find the primitives they had good reasons for believing as they did Build small and build thick several locations a day’s patrol between them better than one big one surrounded and surprised There’s still much to be said for the square two-storey box without doors or windows below just a ladder someone lets down or you pull up behind you there’s life in old ideas yet The separate kitchen reduces danger build it plumb and secure it find the old dump now buried for bottles broken ones 10 / Plans Deranged by Time can be cut down later with ice from the lake and fire from the sky but use little that was made by man no plastics, rubber, aluminium Your best protection once was anonymity; that didn’t work now the plan must be to go rearrange what nature gives you a field strewn with rock is a wall that awaits assembly not like the city where all was allegory, sex a metaphor respiration syntax Everything was a symbol then now everything’s a kit The Poetry of George Fetherling / 11 ...