Poetry / Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

:: from The Immemorable ::

II.

Look, the original workday was short: make a distinction. Rest.

You don’t even have to proofread. The sky overcast, the planet’s various waters

so still they could be fields of ice. The idea of virtue and vice traces its origin

to nowhere, as the world does, dissolution being in fact the beginning,

rather than the end, of everything. Around the end of the sixth century, Pope

Gregory I combined two deadly sins into one: tristitia, or sadness, and acedia, or sloth.

When you are idle, you become sad. Or perhaps when you are sad, you become

idle—in either case, the threat of cessation like the minotaur trapped in the

center of its maze. Sloth, the sin of the strike. For what is duty, now, that holy

mood that sloth is said to supplant? The duty to the commute. To the gas

station and the insurance bill. To the shipping fee and the monthly fee to eliminate

the shipping fee. To emails. To pore shrinkage and the large gym and the

vomit which means you’re pushing it. To the diary in which you write “self-care”

and “me-time.” To the me-time coated in nail polish, to the woman now at your feet,

now anointing your head, to the military rows of recliners covered in plastic. Dereliction

of duty: to turn away from that which rules you. Having found itself faced

with the featureless world, God had no instructions. We are not so fortunate,

and the only sin that will still reliably kill you is that of slowly shaking your head.

IV.

The multiplicity of languages foreclosed the possibility of a universal name. A reminder,

if you’re the believing sort, not to get too cocky. Now we have girl bosses. Now

we have influencers. Don’t get me wrong: nostalgia’s a hunk of pyrite, and our rulers

have always been incompetent. But you cannot deny that we are building again towards

the firmament, scraping up coral and mahogany and the earth’s very guts to do

so. And what are we saying to one another as we scoop the entrails out of swine

to make them better for eating? We say “deliverables.” We say “innovation.” We say

“private equity.” In goes the flesh, out comes this tangle of saw-toothed nothing.

The curse of Babel was not the division of speech into French, Ibgo, Mandarin,

Russian, etc. It was to put into our mouths words like “synergy.” Like “police.”

The true name of the woodpecker belongs to the immemorable. The very ground

that holds us and the weight of our putrefying monuments has a name contained only

in the morass prior to the divine. To even apprehend the idea of that trace, one must

study and sink into mourning. To mourn, one must become a vessel for a cold wind,

wash oneself in bile. The ritual will not change after the abolition of grief’s middle

managers. It will instead simply become more available, and in the collectivity

of our slow ablutions, our respite from the tyranny of joy, we may sense that behind

the transparent wing of a dragonfly is something other than the objects that lie beyond,

something else in its shimmering. We will never grasp it, and it is our only hope.

I forget exactly what happened on the fifth day, but it doesn’t matter: we are

nevertheless living in it, a kind of global Wednesday. We are tired, we are punished

unrelentingly for being tired. Asked about my recent accomplishments, about my

contributions to the community, I open my hands and out tumble several weeds

made of fur, a browser tab, fourteen deleted text messages. Another sent over and

over again. My latest initiative is eating until I feel sick, so that the sick feeling that

attaches to me like a barnacle might be said to have a cause. I am thrilled to announce

that I am this year’s recipient of the cloud of dust that remains after a tremendous

implosion. The light that filters through has a slow quality. A quality that should be

tawny, but is somehow a thin and unwell yellowish-green. The sins that are not sloth

have formed a path of nonwoven fibers to the next absolute flood. Do not tell me

to simply love my facial features; how on earth is even the most active doer of good deeds

to keep up with the pace of capital’s accumulation? Today at the lake, what I thought

was a distant piece of plastic flotsam turned out to be an enormous dead fish, belly

shockingly bloated, four translucent fins pointing, slapstick, straight up.

I thought it would take forever to reach the shore. It arrived in minutes.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This long poem is part of a larger project on the history and tropology of melancholy. This piece comes at the very end of the collection, and is one that is in explicit dialogue with David Kishik’s remarkable The Book of Shem, which is an annotated heterodox translation of the first book of Genesis. I, personally, am not religious. But I was absolutely floored by Kishik’s rendering of God as a type of melancholy void, a void after which humanity is patterned. In response to this, I wanted to try and form a picture of the ways in which our creation myths overlap with, or indeed form, our notions of affect and temperament. Part of what’s going on in this poem is a hard look at what we use to fill the voids that we are: consumerism, capitalist frenzy, imperialism. We turn a certain kind of rapaciousness into virtue; we prize a very specific wide-eyed happiness. The wellness industry doesn’t really want us to slow down at all; it wouldn’t be an industry if it did. Melancholy, as an affect that is by definition characterized by slowness—slowness almost to stupor, but also associated since Aristotle with special intellectual capability—is seen in the modern West not only as a disability but also as a type of sin. What if it were in fact one of the only virtues capable of apprehending the gas pedal of modernity, the utter unsustainability of the pace at which the world forces us to labor, to accumulate, to live?

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is the author of A Brief History of Fruit, winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry from the University of Akron Press, Animals I Never Saw, winner of the 2025 Flume Press chapbook award, and BETWEEN, winner of the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Prize from Finishing Line Press. An American living in Canada, she teaches at the University of Ottawa.