Nude Descending an Empire

By Sam Taylor

As a collection of politically engaged poetry for the 21st century, Nude Descending and Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet speaking to the urgency of our contemporary moment, especially its ecological crisis. This is a book that brings all the supposed sensitivity of poetry into contact with the world we actually live in—with all its crises, madness, and modernity—and insists that we feel it all. A reader will recognize many of the urgent political issues of our time, yet will find them re-inhabited and transformed here by the imaginative power of poetry. Our great ecological crisis is cast as the fulfillment of a long history of violence, domination, lies, and alienation—in one word, empire—and the book suggests that a livable future requires that we wholly inhabit our body-heart-mind and discover a new paradigm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780822980292

Sam Taylor

Sam Taylor has written for The Guardian, Financial Times, Vogue and Esquire, and has translated such works as the award-winning HHhH by Laurent Binet, and the internationally-bestselling The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker.

Book preview

PITT POETRY SERIES

ED OCHESTER, EDITOR

NUDE DESCENDING AN EMPIRE

SAM TAYLOR

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2014, Sam Taylor

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6304-2

ISBN 10: 0-8229-6304-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8029-2 (electronic)

How strange to know you are alive!

To walk among people

with the open secret of being alive.

—Octavio Paz

America when will you be angelic?

—Allen Ginsberg

CONTENTS

[FROM MY LAST LIFE AS RAIN]

The Book of Endings

Grand Opening

Jataka Tales

Walt

Song: Infernal

City of Lies

Optical Illusion

Past Tense

History

De Terre

[I AM ADDICTED TO BEING A MAN]

The Book of Poetry

Suits of Men

Celebration in Autumn

The Book of Wishes

Madagascar

Slugs Mating

The Book of Autumn

Figure, with Multitude

In My Solitude

American Mystic

The Book of Things

The Book of Revelation

[WELCOME TO MY NATIVE LAND]

Snowed-In, Little Mountain Valley

Douglas Fir

Paper

Testimony

Salamandrine

The Book of Echoes

The Last Sun Dance

Bittersweet

Blue Heron

[I, AMERICA]

#DeadFacebookFriends

Dear Customer

Confession

Poem

The Book of Winter

America: An Autobiography

Propositions (Affairs of the State)

While We Wait

Goodnight Moon

Home

The Book of Spring

Notes

Acknowledgments

FROM MY LAST LIFE AS RAIN

THE BOOK OF ENDINGS

Some time while you read this page

or the next one, a species—

like you, with your grandmother,

your dozen eggs, your walk in the park,

a species as vast as your life

and the lives of all your ancestors

chasing bison across Old Europe

or huddled around a fire—will disappear.

A species that has found its own

ways of eating, of moving, of

hiding from predators; a species

that meets itself and makes love

in the bark of a tree or on the leaves

of the canopy or in the humid dirt.

And it has come with us for millions

of years, for millions of years,

it has watched the night

and day follow each other, it has breathed

with the frogs, it has wrapped

the stars around it like a blanket,

a patterned music, a map.

At the beginning of this page

there may have been three or four left,

but now there is only one.

And if you read this page again,

it will be another one, another species,

another story of four billion years

telling itself for the last time.

Wherever life began—a word, a wish

breathed into water, a seed falling

through space—it was all of us

there—as it is now

in this unknown last one.

It has bored into wood, it has carried

water on its back, it has drunk

the dew from its back in the desert,

it has fed its young with strips of

leaves, it has built homes out of bark,

it has carved the sky into a song,

it has spoken in ways no man has heard.

It has emerald wings

it has sapphire wings

it has wings of night

you will never see it

it is already gone

GRAND OPENING

With flowers in your hair streaming

from slavery's indigo vats, come to me.

With elegies written in purple flames

on the white, brown, and