Recovered+Body

Selections from Scott Cairns's //Recovered Body// (2006) include "Mr. Stevens Observes the Beach" and "In the Well of Joseph's Brief Despair."

“Mr. Stevens Observes the Beach”

Quite pleasant in its way, its deeply sad, largely inarticulate way. And what is that in the air? Some faint and fleeting

//eau de decay//? Low tide in our shallow bay. Say, you’ve got a look about you that suggests something nearly tropic on your mind.

Listen! A dozen //shes// singing at the shore! But singing such cacophony you might mistake the song for some mere calling home

of errant boys, or common hollering in a game of volleyball, or just loud talk. A fortunate boundary, don’t you think? –

this ample stretch confusing sand and sea. I like it best just after a good storm when everything is changed – the wrack

and wreckage newly rearranged, the beach itself retrenched along an unexpected line. You can walk for hours before you meet the signs

insisting that the shore is property, purchased (with a lien) and posted to attempt some wish for privacy. They don’t mean much.

Turn back if you will, I like walking there best of all, where the illusion of ownership – soon enough recensed by size 12 loafers –

gives way to more productive misperception. The lighthouse at the point is miles farther than it looks. Our sunlight is so keen

it pricks the simplest observation. Down the windswept margin human figures, dogs, beached boats, our tufted yellow grasses,

the very dunes, //all// waver in heat, all seam – so long as you squint in your approach – to verge on something large indeed. The sea

has a numbing sort of genius, which it flaunts. Not far inland, the earth’s fixations strike their grinning pose, frankly idiotic;

but here, where substances continue making daily messes of all //things//, where even I each day discover I am made to make

another set of fresh concessions in which, so long as no one’s listening, I like to sing with some measure of abandon into the wind.

In this poem, Cairns writes about materialistic boundaries and challenges the notion of ownership in 14 stanzas consisting of three lines each with roughly ten syllables. Also notice, in line 37, the favor for the act of creation that Cairns shares with Cummings. Some function, some form.

“In the Well of Joseph’s Brief Despair”

From that chill floor whose cloying mud became a numbing garment, the young man saw the world above poised as a pale blue pool – remote and indifferent – which, rather than reflecting any semblance of himself, seemed rather to absorb just about every- thing – all light, all hope, his future. He had tried climbing out, tried calling for mercy, but each failure had left him more weary, dis- heartened, more thickly coated with mud.

And in that airless space that taunts and accu- sations from above also became increasingly confused, so that words became less, less like objects, more like unfortunate weather. Finally, exhausted and utterly without resort, Joseph slid back to the clay, giving into the pressure of the blue pool held above him, falling silent as its trembling aspect became an abysmal amplitude.

Then he was lifted out, haggled over, and sold for a meager sum, during which time he could neither struggle nor speak. The journey into Egypt was one long study of the sky without conclusion.

And in succeeding years, through their provocative turns of fortune – false accusations, a little stretch in prison, a developing facility with dreams – Joseph came gradually into his own, famously forgave his own, pretty much had the last laugh, save when, always as late in the day as he could manage, he gave into sleep

and to the return of that blue expanse, before which all accretion – accomplishment, embell- ishment, all likely interpretations – would drop away as he found himself again in the hollow of that well, naked, stunned, his every power spin- ning as he lay, and looked, and swam.

Again, this piece contains four stanzas of poetic prose while challenging perspective by looking at an age-old story from a different point of view.