Andrew Durbin - Mature Themes

Ciara mounts the bike, which, at that moment, doesn’t not feel like me, and asks me to climb on. Where should we go? she asks. I can hardly speak. This moment becomes a second dream in which I imagine where I might go, out of here, so that even when I do shake myself out of it I can’t let go. I remember seeing a Ducati two falls ago on Canal before joining my friends below a moment sparkling in the presence of the Goldman Sachs employees who toasted our protest

as the actualized politics

of community eroded

downtown’s teary sense

of its ensconced

kingdom, like

we got it, OK,

you don’t want this to end,

but we do, even though in a sense

the end brought about a separate

conflict anterior to its original:

how to continue

and still be friends. On Canal,

I spotted a man on a Ducati motorcycle,

perhaps a banker or some other agent

of wealth beyond reproach,

and thought of all gross injustices served

us this, the rich white guy on his bike,

was some reminder of the fault line

that might eventually open up

to swallow him down. If histories

go fast they go faster when compelled

toward an inevitable terminus

made finally realer

in the earnest wish for its sudden

arrival, this delicate

egg of relations I’d like to hurl

at a riot cop’s helmet. The Ducati

looped in steel a black, cold ring

I would place on my own finger

but can’t because I make

pretty much nothing

and can scarcely afford the rent

of my Crown Heights apartment

let alone a motorcycle for $15k. Ciara is right: we are each our own Ducati, molded into the steel frame into which we can lean, one night in fall, to ride you, all the bodies upon whom one rides, impaled by such disasters as the sudden recognition that you can’t stand to look away, caught in the remaining sunlight, and yet must.

The cop, egg dripping from the visor lowered over the helmet, runs forward with his club.

“Catch me in the mall, I can do this, however you want, I can do it up and down, I can do it in circles,” Ciara sings, articulating a body I cannot call my own, but might locate somewhere close to it a secondary body in which he love the way I ride it, impounded by the desire to manipulate and be manipulated into the shape of others, to become with others yet another who might race back with a club of my own, the shape of the fastest motorcycle we can find. Sleek in the discourse that describes us as the inimitable technology designed to destroy one another, I love to ride it.

Outside the JCPenney, Ciara breaks my concentration and asks if I want to go. I hesitate to ask her where, knowing the location she might suggest would be essentially absent everywhere except where it televises itself semirandomly, against the bark of a tree in the woods upstate or in the champagne glass at evening or the broken visor of the egg-soaked cop, now falling back. You make me want to ride it, Ciara sings to Ludacris standing under the street light as he debates whether or not to mount the Ducati. At this, he atomizes into the moment his appearance is rendered nostalgic, a translucent memory that hardly registered at all yet for a time was all-controlling, an event that is replaced by another in a cycle of replacement too rapid to isolate the particulars of.

Actuated methods in a cluster of instruments, loss of the self in the attenuated seams of biopolitical production, blue-faced for the fallen world dropping even faster: Tell him I’m a gymnast, tell him I’m a Ducati, tell him to get off the street, tell him to ride, tell him to step back, tell him to find me later, tell him to check

his phone, tell him to replace

its cracked screen, tell him to take

the A train on Canal, tell him to cross

the bridge, tell him to hand over

his fucking money, tell him

to meet me in the mall,

tell him the history of ideas

is a series of miscalculations

each demarcating various

assumptions of mapped space,

reveries that mangle

then re-cohere into lesser,

but nevertheless raging

trajectories of departure. Tell him I want

to go faster, into the air, beyond

the accident of our moment,

the point where an invisible rope

yanked taut between

impassable hours of leisure

pulls back, a little harder,

the second you resist, and you fly

from the vehicle hurling you

forward. Speed

is a market of energy

directed toward excess.

Once you stop, then what?

We can’t stop, yet the consuming fantasy

to do so upgrades my sense of the need

to go all the faster.

We move at some new rate

toward the indeterminate point

at which something happens

but simultaneously obscures

the character that would

enable us to define it — up

the mountain along

the mountain road into

a world caught in the midst

of its material ceremonies as they

break down. I see something

in them, probably the face of Ciara,

caught between the leaves,

annotating each glimpse

of the woods with another

opaque name heroizing

this yet unbranded age. I ride

into it, a future slashed

at the horizon, lying

just below the setting sun, into

the point at which

it rises over me to summer

in the shadows shifting

so rapidly

as to seem

to not exist

at all.

I could not have written this book without the insight, advice, and friendship of Ben Fama, Ed Halter, Ian Hatcher, Lucy Ives, Kevin Killian, Trisha Low, Jacolby Satterwhite, Tim Terhaar, and Carl Williamson. Most of all, I am grateful for the attention and continuous support of Stephen Motika, who firmly believed in this book before it was ever a book. Some of these pieces first appeared in the Boston Review, The Destroyer, Epiphany, Fence, The Miami Rail, Out of Order, Pocket Notes, and Triple Canopy . Thanks to Travis Meyer and Stacey Tran at Poor Claudia for publishing a selection of this book as the chapbook Believers in Fall 2013. “Prism” was included in Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean 2014), edited by Andrew Ridker. Lastly, I would be nowhere without the love and support of my mother, father, and sister.

Andrew Durbin co-edits Wonder and lives in New York.