Ian Lockaby, Defensible Space / if a crow

 

if a crow—

then a black ice cubepressed
against the grain of thesun

while the afternoon mugsdrop
pattering spoils of  a milk’d black coff-

-in  the over grown carpets
lay  a caffeinated belly bitter against
the sleep against thedamn

bright  slipping away.  if a crow—
remembers you,

by what:

Something     growly
in the vanilla leaf—

don’t      dawdle now

it’s plenty late.

I’dbeen seeing his name around for a while, so I’d been curious about New Orleans-based poet, translator and editor Ian Lockaby’s full-length debut, DefensibleSpace / if a crow (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2024), a collection unsectioned,as a book-length stretch of clusters of shorter lyrics on and around alandscape of language, fields and shadows within the American PacificNorthwest. “cicadas hum and / mysteriously kill // songbirds—,” he writes, aspart of “Songbirds Mysteriously Dying,” “a panic / takes in the internet //birding groups / arguing over whether // to offer the birds water— // throw itin the trees / instead, they say // outside of one’s reason / is another life[.]” I’m intrigued by the spacings and pacings of these poems, how they’re heldagainst and through visual and even physical space on the page, offeringmoments, fragments, somehow held in air or breath. And through all the smoke,all the branches and trees, the repeated appearance of crows. There’s such aprecision to his lyric progressions, casual and easygoing and exact across suchwonderful pacing. “you’ve grown and used / different times—,” he writes, aspart of the second poem, “A Way to Tell,” “You’ve learned to keep // thyme witheach / of them, stacked and riveted / to your ribcage now // And every time youstand, I try to // stay still—to be / located inside of the ways I hear [.]”Or, as the poem “At Trillium Lake” begins:

There is nausea on theshelves
            of A.’s grandmother

the eve of it A traveler
            who hasn’t been here since
she was bedded down
in asylum         for softening

in the violet inconsistencies
            of mind
but who once set out fromhere—
mornings she’d take on
            mountaintops         alone