Chris Nealon

Sea Reliance

Toronto, 1992

The lights came up and they were playing Spinning Away -- a song about a painting --

And the waning of the promise of the synthesizer met the first sweet rush of queer cinema

Now I can’t tell if the broke-down third-way Moog-utopia the kids today are working out is just nostalgia or if they constitute an opposition to their peers who are like yeah I wear flip-flops because it’s all good

            Children of empire!

Out on the water                    

       Sea-birds              ships named after poets

Then I think of painting photos – how Richter uses it to reassert the dominance of an older art –

       The casing on the earphones brushes past your lower lip

       The mighty Andrew Joron sailing by

Andrew! Tell me what poetry should be about –

I have a list of band names that comes close

A note in my notebook says, if your poems are based on optimism about people you are fucked

But I don’t believe it

Little empty Starfleet Academy in the Port of Oakland

A little bit of Know Your Enemy

Colors singing out from under movements of the squeegee

“The Wealthy – who were also called Perpetual Sailors – ”

­

Chris Nealon is the author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001), and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), as well as two books of poems, The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004) and Plummet (Edge Books, 2009).