From our Archives: Aerialist by Ander Monson
Associate Editor Heath Joseph Wooten on today’s “From our Archives” bonus content: If we have not all known the feeling of being reaved from ourselves, we have certainly realized the gaps yawning between ourselves and others. In Ander Monson’s “Aerialist,” these gaps are illuminated by a conspiratorial intimacy which seems to say—irreparably—you are there, I am here. Seldom have I spent time with a poem that so lucidly captures a solitude so absolute that you begin to doubt whether you yourself are there at all. The beauty here—of course—is that a poem so indebted to the language of flight and absence can still carry you so close to the ground.
A version of this poem is included in Ander Monson’s book Vacationland and first appeared in Passages North Issue 26.1 in 2005.
aerialist
It is easy only now to tell you this.
That being gone is like from a fissure
yelling back to sky. That this construction
yellow tape is all I have left over.
That this girder—on which I sit and hoot
like a loon a hundred feet above
the street—is my only chair. That the stone
lions propped on top of the D&N
building are here for me alone (among
the dead only I crave heights), and for the few
important hearts delivered by chopper to the pad.
What I thought I had was dust and shiny
string looted thereafter by birds, amen. Now I
am alone and aerial, all the afterbirth and light.
Ander Monson is the author of eight books: four of nonfiction (Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, Vanishing Point, Letter to a Future Lover, and the forthcoming I Will Take the Answer), two poetry collections (Vacationland and The Available World), and two books of fiction, Other Electricities and The Gnome Stories. A finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award (for Other Electricities) and a National Book Critics Circle in criticism (for Vanishing Point), he is also a recipient of a number of other prizes: a Howard Foundation Fellowship, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction, the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award in Nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He edits the magazine DIAGRAM <thediagram.com>, the New Michigan Press, Essay Daily <essaydaily.org>, and a series of yearly literary/music tournaments: March Sadness (2016), March Fadness (2017), March Shredness (2018), and March Vladness (2019). He directs the MFA program at the University of Arizona.
