The Hell Test (Seven Springs)

Abstract

DANIEL POPPICK | 135 The Hell Test (Seven Springs) Daniel Poppick poetry 1. In the new music I’ve discovered nudity. Idiomatic footfall marking its route over a pane of glass, plunging into a darkened meadow. An interruption in the field filled with a vaporous microphone, titling the air with what it records—an animal running through the grass, stalking the glass, stepping onto it, lowering his snout, and whimpering as he smells the window under his feet. 2. I used to trespass regularly on a piece of property two towns over from where I grew up. Property is the syntax of the reddening horizon. But “property” isn’t the precise word. It was an estate, meadows and mansions, little monuments of infrastructure dotted along its outer edges: an abandoned stable, a shattered greenhouse, a rotting pump overgrown with flowering vines, an enormous house with a fountain in its garden, a pile of rubble, a swimming pool lined with marble. It was decadently abandoned. I told my parents about it at dinner. Alarmed, they told me not to go back, so I did as often as I could. I walked alone there, stoned at the end of my teens, meticulously surveilling myself for signs of profundity that no one credited me; if I could not articulate what I was, I would let the properties on which I trespassed speak for me. Was I of this ruined estate? The place looked like a horror movie even in broad daylight. I always stopped by a spot in the middle of a field, no building in sight, in which a skylight jutted out of the grass over what appeared to be a dank cellar below. There was a hatch a few feet away that I could have easily opened, but something stopped me. I listened for hours on end to music 136 | DANIEL POPPICK featuring psychedelic mandolin solos and lyrics about talking coyotes , played the role of Dan in an edgeless theater for an audience, such as it was, of one, and was, to what I think of as my present self, insu≠erable. I was magnetized to suburban ruins, especially if the ruins were under construction, as the knowledge that I was standing in the skeletal infrastructure of what might someday be some unknown family’s home filled me with a sharp longing that I loved because it would never be satisfied; I would never be able to gather enough of the multitudinous downed branches of adolescence to build the theater-in-the-round that I imagined adulthood to be. For instance, it was impossible to imagine owning a house. One day, walking through the woods of the estate alone, I felt a presence in the trees o≠ to my left. I looked up and saw, fifty paces through the forest, a structure so large and ominous that the mere outline of it made my blood run cold. I’d never felt that way about a building. A stone tower with nothing around it. I stepped back, then stepped forward. It was January, and along its rim ice seemed to bubble from the ground. I walked up to it and marveled at how close it had been without my noticing. I craned my neck and saw a tree growing on top of it. I had been raised as a Reform Jew—in other words, an agnostic worshipper of narrative—which meant that this image appealed. I wanted to see it up close. I pried open the door to the tower and found a metal water silo inside, corroded and percussively dripping. In a helix around it a rusted set of stairs spiraled up. I tested the first one, and it seemed sturdy enough to hold my weight. I started walking up, slowly, wondering if I could find a latch in the ceiling to get to the top in the dark. Twenty feet up I heard a wet crunch. The stair snapped under me and clattered into darkness—I grabbed the rail, and the entire staircase swung free from its bolt. I caught myself between the tank and stone exterior, and slowly slid myself down, the mechanism clanking in on itself, my heart pounding...