In this haunting collection, Dominic Lyne navigates the intricate labyrinth of grief to confront the enduring shadow of a devastating loss. Exploring the profound impact of witnessing his best friend’s death, Dominic delves into the depths of despair, the lingering echoes of trauma, and the arduous journey toward healing.
A decade after the tragedy, this raw, honest collection offers a testament to resilience, finding solace in the transformative power of time and the bonds of friendship. "The Sky was Empty, but Still the Thunder Rolled" is a poignant exploration of loss, healing, and the enduring power of human connection.
In this haunting collection, Dominic Lyne navigates the intricate labyrinth of grief to confront the enduring shadow of a devastating loss. Exploring the profound impact of witnessing his best friend’s death, Dominic delves into the depths of despair, the lingering echoes of trauma, and the arduous journey toward healing.
A decade after the tragedy, this raw, honest collection offers a testament to resilience, finding solace in the transformative power of time and the bonds of friendship. "The Sky was Empty, but Still the Thunder Rolled" is a poignant exploration of loss, healing, and the enduring power of human connection.
It generally starts with a photo,
our social life god Facebook,
in its omnipresent wisdom,
draws my attention
towards the memories of mine
it stores digitally.
Their 1s and 0s
slip through
the pinprick cracks around my safe
and force it open
before dispersing on a waveform,
leaving the true physical memory
exposed and naked.
Just writing
the last three words of that sentence
creates a sense of foreboding.
I know where this is going.
I know how it ends.
We were at a house party,
I cannot remember where.
Her and I,
a group of others,
most of whom I did not know,
a few by faces only.
That did not matter,
it could have been just her and I,
surrounded by our own bubble,
high, drinking fruit juice.
No alcohol.
We did not drink alcohol,
but drugs were fine.
Noses powdered with MDMA and cocaine,
the rough and the dignified.
A perfect analogy of us.
My roughness mixed with her elegance
created a drug so perfect that
not even heroin could have a chance
of winning my affection.
And why would it?
Brown rotted my soul,
she made it sing.
My T-shirt said “dope” on it,
a cross separating each letter,
an anchor printed
at the bottom, just above my groin.
That T-shirt summed up
the days leading to this moment:
strung out on heroin,
I had dropped my anchor into
the unseen lake that exists beyond
the cave entrance of an anus.
I had fucked some random guy
on the bed of a thirteen year old.
It was not as sordid as you have
allowed your mind to sink.
It was the son’s of another friend –
the bed, not the anus –
who was not home.
For clarity, the guy was eighteen.
I had just turned thirty.
I added that for ego purposes.
This is not relevant, I am deflecting;
trying to bury one memory
with the rubble of another.
The original is not actually a bad one.
It is just a keyframe
too close to the end of a movie
you wish would go on forever.
Enjoy these lighthearted moments,
they disappear pretty quick.
Jaws sore from laughter,
nonstop and uncontrolled.
Separated from reality by the “tee-hees”,
our minds broadcasting television
produced by LSD.
The chair devoured us,
it broke us down like a Venus Flytrap;
spitting out the remains across the floor.
“I love you,” Tree said,
pulling herself free from
chlorophylled digestive fluids.
I bent double, trying to breathe,
watching her pick herself up.
“I love you, Dom.”
“You already said that.”
“Well, you doubly know now, don’t you.”
**
The night bus’ engine fell quiet.
Lost in our own world
we had not seen the bus empty around us.
“What’s that fucking noise?” I moaned.
The constant distorted looped mumble
was attempting to push its thumb
down on my high;
hoping, it seemed, to crush it
like a sociopathic child does an ant
in a precursor to a future
diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder.
The same psychopathic tendencies as the driver
who, approaching us angrily,
shouted for us to get off the bus.
Stumbling towards the exit,
I finally process the tinny mumble and note
it is the voice of Siri’s older sister.
“This bus terminates here.”
Fuck you.
Standing on the pavement,
surrounded by unfamiliar scenery,
an abscess of apprehension threatens to pop;
to evacuate a torrent of pus-leaden panic.
Stay focused, Dom,
it is just a micro-diversion.
“Where the fuck are we, Tree?”
The answer was instant.
“We are here.”
“But where is ‘here’ exactly?”
“Here.”
Dominic Lyne's The Sky Was Empty, but Still the Thunder Rolled is a raw, expressive collection of poems by an author with a masterful ability to render the trajectories of loss and grief with compelling honesty. From documenting experience at the very site of pain to mapping the ways in which the individual continues living after, Lyne demonstrates free verse poetry's capacity to translate the most consuming human emotions to the page.
Though working in largely organic, winding free verse, Lyne exercises a formal control of the poems that evolves over the course of the collection. At the book's outset, upon the death a closest friend, the poems are artfully meandering, self-critiquing streams of consciousness. They fold back on themselves, sometimes clumsily interrupting the thought with asides or clarifications or confessions of inability to think (though the thinking continues nonetheless). In these gestures, the reader feels the immediacy of traumatic loss. With intention and vulnerability, Lyne shows us the messy and stumbling yet expressive powers of the grieving mind.
As the book continues, as distance is gained and reflection becomes more possible, the poems become tighter with a more sophisticated focus on central ideas and core images. Where the speaker had been exploding with sprawling emotion and grit, he now exercises the brevity of elegantly compressed (and arguably, more affecting) passages of lyricism. We see a clarity in careful, conscious lines that transform suffering into insight.
Well before the collection's end, the reader is fully convinced of the deep damage a loved one's death has done. But through layers of intellectual, philosophical, psychological, and spiritual meditation, the speaker shows us how we continue moving. How we grow with and alongside our grief.
As a model for poetic grappling with trauma, Dominic Lyne's The Sky Was Empty, but Still the Thunder Rolled is a must-read for poets and attentive students of the lyricism of loss. An impressive showing by a talented poet, this collection will move readers to tears as deftly as it rattles our sense of what the medium can do.