Toby Fitch, Where Only the Sky had Hung Before

First published in 2019
Published by Vagabond Press, Sydney
Book design and typography by Toby Fitch
Typeset in Monotype Apollo and Avenir

ISBN 978-1-925735-32-1
© Toby Fitch 2019

www.vagabondpress.net

Where Only the Sky
had Hung Before

Toby Fitch

Vagabond Press

Contents

Sapphic Birds 9
Often I Am Permutated into a Mermaid 10
Poetry is 99% Water 12
Or 14
Feel Like I’m Somehow Related to Everyone on the Internet 15
Vague, or I Can’t Explain It Any Other Way 16
In Memory of My Furlings 18

/ Strange Rain / 22

Bear the Sky 26
Argo Notes 27

/ Strange Rain / 38

Fractoidal 42
Occupy the Sky 44
Life Creep 46
Cultivate a New Foot 47
Life Stream 48
And Aesthetic Chills Is Their Name 50
Mangled, or Yet Another Hierarchical Official Oracle 54
57

/ Strange Rain / 58

Memememememememememe 62
Apropos of Nothing, I … 65
Deep Cut of The Waste Land, or
66
An Alternative to ‘Death by Water’ 68
Therefore Wherefore Should One Use the Question Mark 70
All the Skies Above Girls on the Run
74
/ Strange Rain /
78
Petty Testament 79
Awks 80
The Left Hand of Dankness

Sapphic Birds

another day to quail / unlegislated
birds shine in dim afternoon where love swans
knifed / he folds back into the flock / green birds play
& birds pinching night

creak / your house tortured like an albatross where
children squawk your name over & last birds call
hearing birds fall out of trees the wings of home
enfold you & lock

factory birds pipe like an alarm / we lay
the falcon / before the rain birds whistle &
you become a statue they mate & peck on
above the traffic

twinkling birds listen / birds waver & spear thru
the hotel window / birds flew by us & time
past them / he’s got feathers & gives you them / his
seagull piano

landing on the beach / pigeons clack & echo
in the eaves / funeral birds break the sky’s white
mortar / the birds crack / sing me to sleep at dawn
breakfast was a lark

9

Often I Am Permutated into a Mermaid

as if i didn’t mind being seen without make-up
a stubbly reminder of the maid’s face / that is mine

it is so near to my girls’ / their unruly
hair almost frames it / unrolling it as thought waves
into the dark cave that would form in my heart

w/o their bright mess / that is a make-believe sea
traversed by shadows that are unicorns falling

/

wherefore all these litter tours i undertake
gloved-up fussily in the likeness of a mere man
unfurling his inner lady

until the girls invite me to come back as queen under the sea
’s disturbance of words on each new wave / enfolded
in worlds exploding / like flowers in time-lapse

/

is it only a dream of glass or were our bodies always water
wherever an ear is an eye is an eau it all comes
streaming in from some other aeon

10

to sprinkle little stars upon us
then evaporate
/
often i am permutated into a mermaid
as if it weren’t a given that my mind’s made up
to be uncertain of its preposterous hold against chaos
which first gave me permission to get lost
in whatever the water wants

11

Poetry is 99% Water

There are about 1.5 billion cubic kilometres of poems
on the planet. That’s about 1.5 billion trillion litres
or 800 trillion Olympic swimming pools.
If all that poetry was evenly spread over the Earth’s surface

it would have a depth of 3,700 metres. They say
the biggest known cloud of poetry vapour was discovered
by NASA scientists around a black hole
12 billion light years from Earth. Inside it

there is 140 trillion times as much poetry as all the poetry
in the world’s oceans—97% of which is salty,
2.1% locked up in the polar caps, and less than 1% available
as fresh poetry. The Antarctic has been covered

in poems for more than 30 million years and there is poetry
on the poles of the moon, Mars, and Mercury. All
the poems on Earth arrived in comets and asteroid. It happened
between 4.5 billion and 3.8 billion years ago,

a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment
and we’ve been recycling poems from these fragments
of larger epics ever since—into whirlpools and tornadoes
and other spinning turbulent flows.

12

It takes 150 litres of poetry to make one pint (568 ml) of beer.
Poems are not a complicated liquid but two
simple liquids with a complicated relationship. We each consume
around 1 cubic metre (1000 litres) of poetry per year.
Your body is between 60% and 70% poetry. This changes at
different times of your life: a human foetus is around 95% poetry
for the first few months, getting to 77% poetry
at birth; in a 70kg person there are 42 litres of poetry,
2/3rds of which is coiled within your cells. Hot poems
freeze faster than cold poems. This is known
as the Mpoemba Effect and no one knows why. Poetry is sticky,
its molecules love to stick to things, especially each
other. It’s what gives them such a large surface
tension, keeps you alive. It means that poems can pull
blood up narrow vessels in your body
against the force of gravity.

13