The Breathing Place

Cal Bedient

This is the Dutch door with six glass saucer windows on the upper    panelThis is the international orange Dutch door in the house by the seaThis the spectacle of waves bashing the rocks below the houseThis the velocity of the spray tons of vaporized liliesAnd this is the third bell of the Dutch ship in the 23rd psalm of the    seaCorrection: this is the HMS Indomitable and this is Billy Budd    sweetest of sailors on the wide sloppy waterOh Billy fragile Billy you must be wary my friend for even in a    crow’s nest gazing at the copper sunset over the lachrymose sea    you are still among menThese are the copper pans I shine each day in the chalk white house    by the seaI await you whoever you are on this chair made of minerals cooked    in the hottest suns before galaxies formed to flash goodbye we die    in every directionThis is my welcome my friend trusting you to mean me no harm    for no one prepares a table before me and sets out the clear glass    dishes for the wineCan you see the rain pissing on the widow panes?Outside is the furious blunder of creation some call hellHere there is nothing to fear sit still be comforted all will be well    for thou art with meMy friends if I have any friends may tell you I’m snappishI have done yoga I now breathe easy    among most quanta of the animal kindYes, even among folk who walk around with a sly coyote air and    tricks to entrap their preyWell I understand them their particles too have been cooked into    meannessBut you are a dear one feeling quite at home in my creaking house    by the blowing seaSit by this table of skyblue glass molecules a lovely crystallization    from universal madnessScientists theorize that the center of the Milky Way smells of rum    and raspberry they want you to feel at home that’s so sweetI really can’t have all this fidgeting when I’m talking to youI have never been so happy to be with anyone as I am with you in    this well defended house by the seaYou are as beckoning to me as the windows set like the six eyes of    the sand spider in my orange doorThank you for being with me as was permitted when the world    was first sucked through the straw of forms and made to claw    and fornicate and sail by the standoffish stars and hang a boy for    being charming guileless and prettySo it is that billions of folk can just sit and talk as you and I do here    where uninvited the world has come

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Photo of Cal Bedient

Cal Bedient is a co-editor of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion and the author of books of literary criticism on T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Robert Penn Warren, and others, and five volumes of poetry—most recently The Multiple and The Breathing Place, both from Omnidawn.

Cover of The Breathing Place

Oakland, California

"Cal Bedient's poetry has always been singular and I can happily attest that the The Breathing Place is as sui generis as his other books. Dazzling, peculiar, piquant, The Breathing Place is bold and picaresque, with dashes of the Western. His kaleidoscopic play on these dark times tickles the ear, drenches the senses, and saturates the mind. I absolutely love this book and you should too."
—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings and of Engine Empire

"Teeming with utter, gem-cut particulars but vast as the 'ever-more-enormous material world' itself, The Breathing Place titillates with radical specificity as it stretches one’s perception to the limits of what it can hold. Bedient has always been drawn to what glimmers, shudders, sizzles and combusts; his poems blister with a beauty rooted in turbulence, defiance, and 'the rage to be extravagant,' as if each of them—even the most elegiac—were, at heart, an argument that all true poetry should emulate 'the Blast that got us here in a Perfect Offense to reason.'"
—Timothy Donnelly, author of The Problem of the Many

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