Note to readers: this post is a collaborative effort between myself, Jack (your regular editor + poet!), and Claudia, who you can find on Substack at Petri Dish Poetry. Claudia and I were both big fans of Caroline Polachek’s latest album which came out earlier this year and got the idea to write a post together. I think I may have gotten the idea when I first spotted one of Claudia’s collages — featured throughout this piece — and suggested that we write something together.
The post that follows consists of Claudia’s meditations on the album, followed by a poem I wrote using one of the album’s evocative song titles, “Butterfly Net”, as the title. If you haven’t heard the album, and would like to, you can listen to it for free here.
The first day of summer arrives in unashamed and wild joy. The need to recharge your bones under heated skin is felt so strongly that one rushes out into the garden to stand, bare feet, amongst the grass and the soil, the smell of the earth. That is the first note of Caroline Polachek’s Desire I Want To Turn Into You. A guttural cry of sun drenched frenzy and a call to return a body back into the gardens from which it came.
Polachek is a demanding narrator on her sophomore album. She insists on painting a picture of violent reds, ripe oranges and freewheeling blues and then, like spring, pulls life from colour and texture.
Her vocals mimic movement found only in nature. The playful “Da-da-da-das” of Pretty Impossible flirt through the song like a butterfly caught in the breeze or a ray of sun across the skin; freedom weighed up in the air around it. This connection with self and nature, found so easily among flowers and insects, the things of the earth, is what she urges her listener to consider. On Sunset she wears her own body like an uninvited guest, it’s dripping orange chorus sticking to skin with dust and sweat. Bunny Is A Rider embraces pure amaryllis femininity, violence and grace in equal measure, as she purrs about her own non-physicality over a beat insisting you embrace the space beneath your hips. Masterfully weaving between these explosions of colour are cooler moments, such as Crude Drawing of an Angel rippling up the skin like a shadow — and you briefly pass under a patch of shade.
It is here that you may hope to catch onto a feeling as fleeting — and insistently present — as the air surrounding you, pressing against your skin, the silvery dust particles filtering down in the beams of light through trees, forest cover. This moment, like Butterfly Net itself, almost feels too intimate to observe. A celebration of patient pacing, it is euphoric in its very gentleness. Now would be a good time to take off your shoes and allow Hopedrunk Everlasting to push up like soil beneath your toes and quietly reconnect you to the mission statement of the whole project, “they’ll find our bones and yet they won’t pull close to me”.
Dig your heels into plant and dust matter older than your own. Blood and Butter evokes this level of personal intimacy, the woody notes of the unexpected but oddly fitting bagpipe unfurl the song from soil into green space, the deep interior. There is triumph in this garden, big moments of sky blues caught in glimpses as though you looked up and saw I Believe wheeling across the sky, the pleading “feel my embrace” spilling out of the chorus like a chemtrail or a rocket’s arc into the heavens.
Caroline is seeking the same instant connection that you are. In Fly to You, she pleads to be “closer and closer”, the song’s swirling and layered vocals pushing towards a gentle and deeper love.
Smoke finds a resolution in the self, confident and ecstatic it bursts through the record in full super bloom, using the soundscape of album to spiral in on itself. The big answer found within what surrounds its own creation. Here you stand in the dappling sunlight, feet in the cool dirt surrounded by multicoloured blossoms and ever-changing air. A body made from everything around it, moving through and with the earth it came from. As you feel the heat tighten your skin, it rings true — I’ve never felt so close to you.
BUTTERFLY NET I waited for you forever. It was almost like waiting for something insubstantial which nevertheless hinted at renewal A seed unwinding its roots in the dark, as if the dark were the ink it dipped its feathers in Or the burn waiting to peel off my back. Was I wrong to assume something between us had caught in the butterfly-thin breadth of summer, Or was the sound that I heard just a lighter failing to start? A man I once loved told me I had sadness in my eyes. He wasn’t the only one. We walked from the small landing strip through a bit of jungle and down to a tropical beach. Lots of people were there, as if it were one of the festival days. You disappeared for a moment to hook up with somebody and your brother told me how he’d like for us to share a workshop. I forgot to ask him what goods we’d make. Beloved, since I’ve stopped taking the meds my dreams have become more vivid. Slowly we made our way into the city and I wondered if this is what it would be like to wait for you — to always dream of arriving somewhere exotic fragrant lost, and yet to feel as if I could call it home. Bro, if I look sad when you gaze into my eyes it’s because I know something you don’t And anyway — we’d just had sex. And who doesn’t look sad after sex?
Soul soup-tier writing from everyone <3
Keep them coming, this is beautiful writing + collage + song/video. Thank you