[Brian Kiteley’s note: This is a poem by Seth Landman done under the constraint of the Bridge exercise I talked about in the post A Book of Quotes. The first section, Seth says, up until the first “//” is from Hawthorne’s story “Wakefield.” The last section is from Moby Dick. And there’s a bit in the middle about God which is all Allen Iverson. Everything else is Seth Landman.]

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The Singularity

by Seth Landman

The singularity of his situation
must have so moulded him to himself,
that, considered in regard to his fellow-creatures
and the business of life,
he could not be said
to possess his right mind.
He had contrived, or rather
he had happened, to dissever himself
from the world—to vanish—to give up
his place and privileges with living men,
without being admitted among the dead. //
The singularity is a moment of direct revelation. I am,
you say to yourself, not a superstitious
person. I will admit a superstition
when it speaks to me; when, cloudlike,
it veers across my path. You can be
superstitious about the circumstances
of your best self, when the distractions
are obscured and you become
momentarily and unflaggingly
single-minded. It’s up to God.
It’s in God’s hands. I do not know
if that will help me or not. That’s God.
God does that; it ain’t up to you.
So head back to the beginning, the first
memory, the singularity of being alive,
first of all, and then of being alive
and knowing it. And head forward,
heedless as possible, into the future
where the plans you make are little
outposts where, faithfully, you peer
around and see if anything out there
might be trying to kill you. There are things
going on in the world unnoticed because
they are too terrible to admit.
When I was four years old, Hurricane Gloria
ripped a tree out of our front yard,
and though I remember the aftermath,
the mulching of it, the subsequent removal
of other trees, I do not remember which
way it fell so much as the luck of its falling
away from the living room
where we watched it
get uprooted
by an extraordinary
wind. The singularity is the utterance
and the point from which there is no
turning back. Possible actions present
their cases all at once to the brain.
The meeting is haphazard and chaotic,
the choices we make are beyond choosing.
Can you really hear yourself think
in the constant hum of the mind?
We walked on a road that had been flooded
long ago, casually unaware of the ghosts
listening to me tell you how I felt about you.
Even when we can’t get what we want,
even when we don’t, even when we shouldn’t,
we force ourselves past some invisible divider
and into a truer world
in the strange, rare moments
when we allow ourselves to be truly honest. //
At that moment the two wakes
were fairly crossed, and instantly,
then, in accordance with their singular ways,
shoals of small harmless fish,
that for some days before
had been placidly swimming
by our side, darted away
with what seemed shuddering fins,
and ranged themselves fore and aft
with the stranger’s flanks.
Though in the course
of his continual voyagings
Ahab must often before
have noticed a similar sight,
yet, to any monomaniac man,
the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.

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