Poem of the Week | September 16, 2024

“Circadian” by Georgio Russell is our Poem of the Week.

Georgio Russell is a Bahamian writer and an alumnus of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, as well as the Obsidian Foundation. He is a past winner of the Peepal Tree Press Prize (2019), the Mervyn Morris Prize (2020), the Editors’ Prize for Magma Poetry (2023), and the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry (2024). He was shortlisted for the Frontier OPEN Prize (2022 and 2023), the Oxford Poetry Prize (2023), and long-listed for the National Poetry Competition (2022) held by the Poetry Society. Russell was also a featured poet for the British Council’s project, Unwritten Poems: Exploring Caribbean Engagement in WW1. His work has been published in Yolk Literary Magazine, PREE magazine, Frontier Poetry, the London Magazine, Lolwe, Cordite, Magma, the Michigan Quarterly Review, the Madison Review, and elsewhere.

Circadian

    after Georg Trakl

I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . . I myself am hell; nobody’s here.
         — Robert Lowell

   I quit the zombie drug cold turkey and once
the dregs of it freed my blood they found me

   around noon, stuttering nude in a weedy cemetery.
Dawn again in the PET-scan graphic, symptoms

   of another sun’s shrapnel in my brain, a planet
erratic already in its pirouette. I, too, must live

   on a coinflip’s whim, a true dual citizen
of flame and shade, my demeanour locked loyal

   to a main emotion, either side of one sickness.
No cycle is equally long before a vice versa,

   and when it happened that the sun had sicced
its happy bondage on me, I had no choice

   but patience while it remained mounted
charring the chapters I recovered, a genius heat

   austere and arrogant as god, nonstop talk
like claws tearing at the eardrum, cymbals screaming,

   a bargain between us that it would finish
only when it fed sufficient on my life, to snuff itself

   at the wreck of friendships and my many
meanwhile passions. Now, mid-stride, I become the umbrage.

The very head of me hinges into fog, one-eighty
   whipping the polar night back at random,

my silence heavy as that tyranny of shining.
   Nausea gnaws through the layers, preying on pleasure.

I am a distance wading in the knee-high now,
   blued limbs commuting crystal avenues, a joneser

whose jaws gawk here and there for leftover
   fire—tonight I might remember the hot candle

wax of love, sunflowers while I suffer
   this low libido season alone, until my prize after

abiding the baggy eyes and black drag of its teeth:
   an appetite for more than just light, for life itself

come the day these suicides fade, give way
   to the gears and volta, when at the end

of such arachnid dark, my legs will thaw
   into a slow resurgence, after months of that

white-flag moon nursing the nocturnal
   inside my skull and stomach. Then I will feel

the rabid gold climbing bright above
   the ranges, and under that colouring sky, manic

with morning fire, my Icarian heart will gallop
   upward, grinning, unbridled wild again, endlessly

forgetting the numbness of this night, and the bridges
   still smoking from the light of former dawns.

Author’s Note

The translated works of Georg Trakl have long been a source of pleasant delirium for me. He writes so intimately about his affliction and “death-like existence,” and yet the poems are dripping with symbols—with “cymbals screaming”—and surreal riddles. That kind of detached intimacy was a major stylistic choice for me as I began crafting this poem; the persona knows himself to be an inescapable “hell,” and yet the act of explaining this must mean he is a true “citizen” of himself. The world of Georg Trakl, like the world of my persona, like the world of Robert Lowell and Vincent van Gogh (invoked in the poem with a sunflower reference), was one in which there appeared to be a deep and constant derangement of spirit, mind, and emotion—an illness that has seen some very real men walking naked inside a graveyard. In “Circadian,” I attempt to illustrate that frenetic pace and loss of control, the shadow-play of a life that so frequently, and unwillingly, swings between predator and prey. The first portion of the poem (daylight) displays mania, while the latter (night) portion portrays “de profundis,” as Trakl had described it. The piece ends with the promise of repetitive destruction.