Poems by Michael Trussler

Salvador Dali and the Glacier

The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess... There are the spent casings of history to sift through, pick up, and examine. Calm-like, hysterical, forensic.
C. D. Wright

by Michael Trussler

From Canary Fall 2019

Michael lives in the wide-open spaces of the northern Great Plains of North America that’re now part of Treaty 4 on Turtle Island.

Not the persistence, but the forfeit, of memory. It isn’t clocks
but the future that’s been melting. The twentieth century
keeps gathering itself, dying. Homo faber: there was a time
when talking dolls, automatic elevators and hearing aids were
new, marvelous. Today has its own brand of what’s new
again: let’s make a deal and behind door number 3
Antarctica’s shrinking Thwaites Glacier falls out, face
down, embarrassed, and set spinning adrift
across the floor. The future’s pitiless and melting. One of
our dirtiest little secrets: this endless fondness
for endless delay.
From an illegally downloaded inflatable
raft for refugees to huffing model airplane glue to the mobile
appendectomy app, there are simply too many time
bombs to contain, the private pathways
of a mountain gorilla sanctuary
not excluded.

Recall the ancient, submarine Exocet.

This is cardiac ischemia. This is predictable
as AI, and moody too: this is Gutenberg’s invention
of consensual memory. People ferrying auditory
hallucinations. A masterpiece and an optimist
by nature, the ocean’s asphyxiated and the unborn
are marooned inside what we do and what
we don’t do. Squandering
the poorest is perfectly legal
and technically simple. What’s here now isn’t
finished with its rage for collapse.
Ice is losing its various
names and it’s not only avian malaria that’s on the rise.

I’ve never
been here before, have you? Has anyone?

We live as though there’s an inescapable
clause in our human
contract stating that even moon dust requires
the accompanying paw prints of an
apex predator, a Schleich jaguar
will do, and the awaited appearance of some
unrecognizable creature, a mumbling Jesus come
round at last and then abandoned somewhere

in the horizon’s suddenly → become
a land fill. Here we enter the newest
of possible worlds: charismatic as Thanatos
richly undocumented, and finely
illustrated with the precision of pixels
beginning to sag . . . nor forget
homo faber
to plant each grave with imperishable acorns to offset
both the Fabergé egg and the flimsy rescue attempt
of everyone’s improbable vanishing as we eventually
hear ourselves as . . . outcasts swarming to stay—

Note:
Possibly the most iconic painting of Surrealism, Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) depicts clocks drooping over a landscape and can be found in MoMA’s collection in New York City. In “The Hour of Our Death,” Philippe Ariès mentions how the Marquis de Sade stipulated in his will that acorns should be planted over his grave so that eventually the site would become part of the forest again and the grave, like his legacy, would disappear.