"Contiguous"

"Bolero"

Liam Burke

Liam Burke (he/him/himbo) lives in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land. His work has appeared in battleaxe press, &co, and in/words and is forthcoming in The Malahat Review. He has been the Assistant Director of the Sawdust Reading Series and co-host of Literary Landscapes on CKCU and performs in the band Moratorium. He is pursuing a master’s degree in philosophy at Carleton University.

“In ‘Lonely Souls: Causality and Substance Dualism,’ Jaegwon Kim problematizes substance dualism, the view famously defended by Descartes that we have a material body connected to an immaterial soul. Kim’s thoughtful, lyrical short paper provided a way into constructing a love poem — ‘Contiguous’ — as philosophical exegesis: a way to consider the attraction of two souls and all the metaphysical entanglements that follow.”

“‘Bolero’ responds to Anne Adams’ Unravelling Boléro, itself a response to Maurice Ravel’s Boléro. It’s about the loss of speech resulting from semantic dementia, a degenerative frontotemporal brain disease. Both Adams and Ravel suffered from this illness; Adams was unaware she was ill while painting her response piece. Semantic dementia patients will typically become more visually creative and engage in repetitive behaviours as their speech centres begin to degrade.”

To prove a cause, draw a line
between two things; show a pairing.
A body “A” is contiguous with a body “B”
just if it shares a border with “B.”
It’s okay for A to B to have rest stops,
A1 after Cobourg, B1 Port Hope;
so long as the vestige of each space rests
fingers on the next. I want the road.
I drink so much coffee these
days that my soul shakes. Is that
contiguous enough?
The days are getting colder and my
lover is far from me. It’s hard to draw a line
to Mississauga on foot. I miss the mornings
where our bodies overlapped in bed
and our boundaries blurred, contiguous.
This palm “A,” as in “at last.” This mouth “B,” for “be still.”
Pressed like this, our souls are meant not to occlude
one another, welcome in the same space. In any case,
fine if they aren’t concatenated
like our skins. As Kim put it,
we only want to know what God did.

trace topography of each line

blood-orange crescendo

her breath in every valley

in the dark; the momentary latch

could feel her way around the contours

as glissandos out to the horizon

soft arp. could catch

ii.

gathered in the dust in every valley

follows leading tones

in the dark; the momentary latch

clustered like notes

or pareidolia of a polyrhythm

iii.

pink as the bel ly of the earth

feel her way around the contours

though words unravelling

left-hemisphere rallentando

limbic system uncoupled

ventrotemporal dragging

iv.

minor-major third slur

(in the dark ; the momentary latch)

pareidolia patterns

faces as thin as notes unravel

a red brass ostinato desert dusk

before th e cold brea th of night