There Is A Certain Kind Of Light that You Can See Too Much Of

When I was a child my dad worked on machines that measured the flow of natural gas through pipelines. Similar to how mercury was once used in thermometers, the machines used mercury to measure the pressure in the pipelines. When the pressure changed, the mercury would move and the machine would move and a little pen would mark the movement on a piece of paper. Sometimes the machines would leak tiny amounts of mercury causing the machine to become inaccurate. My dad would fix the leak and replace the lost mercury and re-calibrate the machine. The field office where my dad worked had a special drain in the floor that was designed to collect mercury that fell out of the machines when they were brought in for repair. One time my father brought some mercury home, and my brother and I were allowed to play with the tiny balls of liquid metal. We pushed the beads around on our kitchen table. We could see our faces stretched out over the surface of the poisonous metal as our fingers prodded these little round mirrors.

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From the silver, mirror-like cover, to the use of symbols and glyphs, Mercury, by Ariana Reines, is a work of great design. It is divided into five sections:

LEAVES
SAVE THE WORLD
WHEN I LOOKED AT YOUR COCK MY IMAGINATION DIED
MERCURY
0

Each section possesses a unique form and content, but they are made of the same reflective material (like a liquid taking the shape of its container). A large part of the pleasure of Mercury comes from its slipperiness of form, style, and content all enacting its namesake.

Mercury’s poems show, on their surface, the face of the reader and the writer, but intrinsically they have properties that tell much more about our world and the pressures of its people. I know this sounds like a grand, ambitious, and reaching statement, but Mercury is a grand, ambitious, and reaching book of poems. Every edge of Mercury oozes our desires and flashes our excesses back at ourselves while emitting ancient logic and radiating some secret religion from inside its amorphous substance. This quality is best exemplified in the poem, “Baraka”:

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MEXICO TO CONQUER AMERICAN

…

I CAN’T WAIT TO GROW THE DECAPITATED FLOWER

I CAN’T WAIT FOR UPENDED PIGEONS

REVERSED RAINBOWS AND SNAKE-EATING LIQUID GOLD

I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE DEW TO FALL, TOMORROW, TODAY

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY TITS AND ABS

I CAN’T FOR THEY WON’T GO WHEN I GO

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY HIGH ASS AND MAC MOUTH

I CAN’T WAIT FOR A THICKER COCK

I CAN’T WAIT FOR A MODEST APARTMENT UNDER THE HOLE IN THE ROOF OF THE PANTHEON

“Baraka,” like the rest of Mercury, is equal parts shamanistic chant and confessional purge. Reines’s confessional lyrics are a spectacle created for the reader. The spectacle of Mercury ranges from internet porn and contemporary film, to discussions of the apocalypse with the sun (referred to as ‘lord’ in the poem “Truth or Consequences”) brought about by the lack of cattle roaming the surface of the earth. All of it through a fairly consistent first-person speaker who compulsively divulges everything. Reines’s speaker is also very aware of this spectacle being performed for the reader. She often points out the reader’s voyeurism at the peak of the spectacle:

You just texted me two cock pics

It used to be more artful

The way you did it, the composition.

Like last week, it just stopped raining.

I have a cold quicksilver feeling.

I could put this in a place where you could find it

But I’m hiding it here.

In moments like these, you realize that you are not just watching the poet watch someone else, but you’re watching the poet watch you watching her watch someone else, like an elaborate set-up of two-way mirrors and video cameras. The voyeuristic element of Mercury pushes the lyric beyond confession to exhibition: this isn’t the real, this is a performance. Even if the sex in “WHEN I SAW YOUR COCK MY IMAGINATION DIED,” the most graphic section of Mercury, is “real” or “true” it was still performed as if it was pornographic film:

“when i get your cock like a bag my face is scarred i make my nails long around your cock that goes in and your balls jump fast like a dirt sack hop hop to her pussy like a pink gum crusted with durt”

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“It is more important to affirm the least sincere,” Frank O’Hara writes in Meditations in an Emergency. Ariana Reines must have been taking this to heart as she was composing Mercury, because like O’Hara does in Meditations, Reines endears us to the least sincere. Like the little pools of metal across my table as a child, the lyrics of Mercury roll around inside my head, and over my tongue, knowing its ability to get through my pores.