The characters in QUASIMODE inhabit worlds—real and imaginary—where nothing works right and everything teeters on the edge of obliteration. They are shabby strivers, oppressed by fate, invalid ideals, and their own incompetence. In the title poem, the speaker attempts to build a planet:
Inevitably, we’d start again, unfolding
the instructions, slipping tab A into
its designated slot, giving every bolt
a twist with that patented wrench that kept
getting lost. But always something was wrong
with the gravity, or our mountains would drift.
And yet the worlds these characters inhabit are filled with joy, even if it can’t be justified:
What I most feel, in this place, this instant, alone,
is gratitude—which, with a force of emotion
that surprises me, I long for someone to receive.
I’m not sure why: So that my love may be returned
to me as love? So that I may not be as senseless
as the wren? I do not believe in God. I never have.
I can’t.
“Stephen O’Connor is a poet who can invent the human, the age, and the planet from scratch. And when he has constructed them in his meticulous, visceral cadences, they will astonish you with their strangeness, their precariousness, and their familiarity. These are the poems of a quintessential adult, a writer who has discovered what we usually can’t imagine: a personal world examined from beyond the individual vantage point. “At my age, nothing is new, but paradise/can be built on less.” There’s an achingly concrete mysticism here, a transcendence too exacting to require a God or admit an endpoint, built like physics on the evidence of the senses subjected to inspired questioning. A poem like “Yellow Valley” is both raw—you might think of Michaux’s phrase “man and woman at the edge of the abyss of love”—and an epic Wittgensteinian thought experiment, an anti-fantasy, critiquing and subverting its dramatic premise and speaker. Always the backdrop is a world of utter contingency. O’Connor’s voice creates a thrill of intimacy, with loved ones, with the reader, with the unknowable present, even if time is the place where we vanish. Quasimode is a book that will last.”
D. Nurkse
STEPHEN O’CONNOR is the author of five previous books, including Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, a novel, Here Comes Another Lesson, short stories, and Orphan Trains, history/biography. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Conjunctions, Agni, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Best American Short Stories, among many other places. He teaches in the Sarah Lawrence writing program. For more information, visit stephenoconnor.net.
Quasimode
1.
After eons of interstellar drifting, we began to build
our planet. At first it seemed a game: Glue rock
to root to sunset in wheat field to unjustified
joy in the cricket-loud night. But, unexpectedly,
we began to care. Then nothing
looked right: the sand on our beaches
was rain gray, our apples ripened
cockroach brown; and we could never
get our moon quite right; instead
of rising, it would wobble along
the horizon’s edge, then
fall off.
2.
You’d get that look in your eye. “What
are we doing!” you’d say. I’d shake my head:
“You’re right. You’re right.” Then one of us
would pull the string, and all our new-made
facts would revert to possibilities, nightmares,
hopes, home truths. Oh, those endless ages
breathing spacesuit air! Oh, those
solipsistic hallucinations! Those lonely
eternities when we were mere zeros
in the gulfs between stars!
3.
Inevitably, we’d start again, unfolding
the instructions, slipping tab A into
its designated slot, giving every bolt
a twist with that patented wrench that kept
getting lost. But always something was wrong
with the gravity, or our mountains would drift,
or there would be rigidities in the air that blocked
even our most heartfelt exclamations.
4.
We held a conclave: Since the world wouldn’t work,
we had to retool ourselves. Mostly we did it
collaboratively. We’d set larynx by eyebeam by tibia
by lip and take turns fitting piece to piece. We’d hang
our words on wires and tinker
with their meanings, using dental tools and chamois
cloth to make them gleam. One afternoon we set
our memories on pillows—lopsided tree-house
beside snow-romping dog beside streetlight buzzing
and a smattering of Chinese. But we looked
at them so long and tried them out in so many
situations that we grew confused about whose
was whose, and could no longer remember
why that mattered. On good days
we’d wind up approximations of ourselves,
on bad days Quasimodos, platypuses,
banana slugs. We’d laugh, shrug, trade
sober glances, then start again.
* * *
Confidence Man
He wakes us in the 4:00 a.m. quiet, sits us down
in our moonlit kitchen and, placing a cup of steaming
water in front of us, to which he adds a single basil leaf,
he talks in that unequalled voice. During blackouts,
he waits beside us while heat seeps through
the dripping air conditioner, and pedestrians
walk home by phone light, and he abides
until the refrigerator motor rattles on and the lamps
flicker brown, then bright. When we are old,
and our bodies are turning to the ugliest of meats,
he hovers at our bed’s end, weightless as an angel.
But he is not an angel. He has surrounded himself
with acres of consolation, but all we see is blue
dust—faintly acrid on the tongue, and it makes
our eyes water. “I wanted ours to be a perfect
union,” he tells us at the table in the back, candle out.
“I wanted every desire to be balanced, exactly,
by generosity. And stasis to be a form
of flight. But I was yammering
in my sleep. I was driving with my headlights
dark. And every word I told my love
was a lie. So here I am, waist-deep in cindered
beliefs, and I can’t stop lighting them.
And I can’t make this yearning leave.
This yearning:
my teaming city. And I can’t stop hope.
I look at you and I am filled
with hope, and I am filled with yearning,
and I am hollowed out entirely, and I cannot
stop. I cannot stop.”
* * *
Above the Lake
In this season the world is composed
of absence: black, which is the color
of no-light, and white, which is the color
of blank. By world I mean this snow,
these woods, this bleak sky, this mute
roar, which is the afterlife of sound.
By absence I mean abstraction, this black
brook as diagonal gash, these slim trees
as lines, vertical, monotonous, impossibly
interchangeable.
By abstraction I mean
meaning, I mean human longing,
I mean loneliness accreting as quiet
on quiet, as white on bluish white.
All of the above poems are Copyright © Stephen O'Connor, 2024
