Had a series a bit ago called 'non notes', and had some recent eyes on it by one Jacques Andervilliers, that I must acknowledge. What work it takes to give to something taken into itself, and at that, so long ago. Deeply appreciative for the time.
NON NOTES
The dream wakes up before I'm over. Some private sea discontinues the shape of my mother. A drop of blood doesn't explode but one day might. Every chicken is now or was the two-handed loneliness of a birth-skipped god.
~
response by Jacques Andervilliers:
Me: "The dream wakes up before I'm over." That seems to me like a heck of a line. The writing here has absolute: blood, god. Attached is an image of a poem. Thoughts?
E: It is a heck of a line—because it quietly reverses the expected order of things. We assume we wake, and dreams end. But here:
“The dream wakes up before I’m over.”
The dream has precedence. It has agency. It outlives or outpaces the speaker. The “I” is the thing that lags, that must finish, that is somehow behind its own experience. That inversion is what gives the line its charge—it destabilizes the hierarchy between subject and inner world.
From there, the poem seems to operate by absolute nouns under erasure—as you noticed: blood, god, mother. But they don’t land as declarations. They arrive in a state of deferral or distortion:
• “Some private sea / discontinues the shape of my mother.”
The mother is not described; she is undone. “Discontinues” is such a strange verb here—it suggests not destruction but a quiet ceasing, like a product line ending. It’s impersonal, almost bureaucratic, applied to something intimate. That tension is powerful.
• “A drop of blood doesn’t explode but one day might.”
Blood is held in suspension—The threat is deferred. The line lives in the not yet, the conditional. Violence is latent, not enacted.
• “Every chicken is now or was the two-handed loneliness of a birth-skipped god.”
This is the most destabilizing line. It takes something ordinary—chicken—and routes it through metaphysical loneliness. “Two-handed loneliness” is especially striking: it gives loneliness a bodily form, almost like cupping emptiness. And “birth-skipped god” suggests a divinity that bypassed incarnation, or failed to enter the world—so what remains is absence, diffused into the everyday.
What the poem is doing, structurally: It’s not building an argument or even a clear image sequence. It’s more like: introducing absolutes (dream, mother, blood, god). Refusing to stabilize them. Placing them in states of interruption, deferral, or misalignment.
Everything is slightly off-phase with itself: the dream wakes before the speaker is “over” -- the mother’s shape is discontinued -- blood hasn’t exploded (yet) -- god has skipped birth. So the poem lives in a kind of ontological delay—nothing fully arrives into its expected form.
There’s always a danger with words like “god” and “blood” that they come in pre-loaded, heavy, almost too meaningful. But here, the poem avoids cliché by estranging them—not letting them settle into their usual symbolic roles. If anything, the poem’s strength is that it never quite cashes in its own intensity. It doesn’t explain itself. It lets the phrases remain slightly illegible, which keeps them alive.
~~~~~
NON NOTES
The velvet crows seeming to swim in the river as it's filmed. The missed meal eaten in half by presence. The skeleton dragged from anatomy class by the recent angel of your mother's broken arm. And touch, of course. Still hurt that taste was first.
~
response by Jacques Andervilliers:
Me: Now I feel that I see what he is doing, better. He, the author, is painting both with images and meaning. There is rupture, there is deferral. There is continuous shifting in the lines. For some reason I did not see that before. Your comments on the piece.
E: Yes—what you’re seeing now feels exactly right. The poem is not choosing between image and meaning; it’s letting them interfere with each other, so that neither fully settles. Each line begins as if it might stabilize into an image, then slips—into abstraction, into association, into something slightly displaced.
Take the opening:
“The velvet crows seeming to swim / in the river as it’s filmed.”
At first, it’s visual—dark birds, reflective water—but “velvet” softens them into texture, and “as it’s filmed” introduces a second layer of mediation. We’re not just seeing; we’re seeing something already being recorded, already at a remove. The image is doubled, slightly unreal.
Then:
“The missed meal eaten in half by presence.”
This is where your sense of rupture becomes clear. A “missed meal” shouldn’t be eaten at all, and yet “presence” consumes it—presence itself becomes an agent, almost a devouring force. The logic fractures, but not randomly; it’s as if absence and presence are exchanging roles mid-line.
And the most striking movement:
“The skeleton dragged / from anatomy class by the recent / angel of your mother’s broken arm.”
This is a chain of dislocations. The skeleton (clinical, educational) is pulled into something personal and mythic—the “angel” of the mother’s injury. The word “recent” is crucial: it grounds the image in time, but also makes the angel feel improvised, as if suffering has just now generated its own strange guardian. Again, the poem refuses to let any register stay pure—science, family, injury, divinity all slide across each other.
By the end:
“And touch, of course. Still hurt / that taste was first.”
There’s a quiet, almost offhand acknowledgment—“of course”—but what follows is unsettling. “Taste was first” suggests a hierarchy of sensation that feels wrong or at least unexpected, and “still hurt” lingers without explanation. The poem closes not by resolving but by leaving a residue, a felt imbalance.
So what you’re noticing—rupture, deferral, shifting—is really the poem’s method. It’s constantly starting to mean one thing and then becoming something else, often within the same phrase. Images don’t illustrate meaning; they become unstable sites where meaning flickers. That’s why it may not have registered at first—the poem doesn’t announce its moves. It works by small dislocations that accumulate, until you realize nothing has been allowed to rest in a single frame.
In a way, it’s very close to what you’ve been describing: not a sealed, serene snow globe, but a sealed environment where the contents are in slow, continuous rearrangement, never quite landing, never fully testable.
Me: I feel like, first, why did it take me so long to be able to deconstruct his method. It seems like it took me a long time to “get” his aesthetic. I guess it’s because I’m old. Second, I feel like, the “never quite landing, never fully testable” is like a solace, like a relief. Unlike the mortality and gravity of the bodily world, the zone of the poem, however dysphoric the content, is suspended – in a sense, there is a freedom. In a sense, anything can for this time be said – in this zone.
E:
It didn’t take you a long time because you’re “old.” It took time because this kind of writing asks for a different mode of reading—one that most of us aren’t trained in at first. We’re usually taught to look for coherence, development, resolution: what does it mean, what does it add up to, where does it land. This poet is doing something else. He’s asking you to stay inside the motion of the lines without forcing them to resolve. That shift—from reading for conclusions to reading for states, pressures, and transitions—often comes later, not earlier. It’s less about age than about a loosening of expectations, a willingness to let meaning remain provisional. In that sense, what you’re experiencing isn’t delay so much as arrival at a different kind of attention.
And your second point feels exactly right: there is a kind of solace in that “never quite landing.” Not because the content is easy—it isn’t—but because the poem suspends the usual conditions under which things must be decided, fixed, or judged. The bodily world insists: things end, things break, things must be named and accounted for. The poem, by contrast, can hold contradiction without collapse. It can let a mother be both present and discontinued, let an angel emerge from injury, let meaning hover without being forced into a single channel. That suspension isn’t escapism; it’s a temporary release from necessity.
So yes—within that zone, there is a freedom. Not the freedom of saying anything arbitrarily, but the freedom of allowing things to exist in relation without having to finalize them. It’s a kind of permission: for this moment, nothing has to prove itself, nothing has to conclude. And that, especially against the pressure of mortality and gravity, can feel like a real form of relief—almost like stepping, briefly, into a space where the world has loosened its grip.
kingsoftrain 