Sea Urchins Sea Urchins
The sea urchins star the sea floor like sunken mines from a rust-smirched war filmed in black and white. Or if they are stars they are negatives of light, their blind beams brittle purple needles with no eyes: not even spittle and a squint will thread the sea’s indigo ribbons. We float overhead like angels, or whales, with our soft underbellies just beyond their pales, their dirks and rankles. Nothing is bare as bare feet, naked as ankles. They whisker their risks in the fine print of footnotes’ irksome asterisks. Their extraneous complaints are lodged with dark dots, subcutaneous ellipses… seizers seldom extract even with olive oil, tweezers. Sun-bleached, they unclench their sharps, doom scalps their hackles, unbuttons their stench. Their shells are embossed and beautiful calculus, studded turbans, tossed among drummed pebbles and plastic flotsam—so smooth, so fragile, baubles like mermaid doubloons, these rose-, mauve-, pistachio- tinted macaroons.
Nov 19, 2013 / Books & the Arts / A.E. Stallings
To the Next Centuries To the Next Centuries
Is there autumn there, is there leaf smoke, is the air blued and mapled, oaked and appled and wined, is that tang, that ache for who knows? gone from your sweaters and hair? Are there trees even, do they break out in uncontrollable cold fires, do they shatter in long, unreal downstreamings, is October the same without them, is our sadness so river-and-wind swift, and so free, is it still our sharpest seeing, if we have not learned from them how to be taken apart, how to be blown away? Are clouds the same, are they still our clouds if leaves have never seethed against them on a tempestuous night, are they wild, is the moon the same if it has never wildly sailed through wild clouds, is there a Hunter’s Moon, a Blood Moon tinged with the rust and incandescence of the leaves, is there a moon at all, a hanging stone, a white astonishment, the exile’s breath on a pane? There is sun, I am sure—has it grown more dangerous, has its shine through thin ozone whited out your eyes, does it drive dunes through your forests, has it warmed the seas to exactly body temperature? What is it like to have won and won and won, no mile without its grid of roads, no block unwired, no handswidth without wireless, when every breeze has been rebreathed each current steered, each cliff a mirror? Is there no wild desire, no wild with all regret because no animals are wild, because the hills are leveled and the valleys raised because there is no clear and endless sky? And what has endangered my imagination that imagines you pale and bodiless and scanned, not a shadow left in your floodlit brain, your sleep hard in coming, dreams shallow and bright? Why do I see you in a white room floating among machines and drips and feeds as if you were my dead, who went before me on white boats launched into the future, as if you were me, when I am tired, as I am tired now, tired of the expertise that says there is nothing new, no thoughts or feelings not already words, no words I have not said again and again, thinking how long this trip has been, so near its end that I will never again put down new roots, change jobs, raise children, fall in love. I can lighten my suitcase now, discarding my ticket, since there is no return, the map of the city I’ll never get back to, the little blue phrase book for the language I’ll never speak again, the sweater, the half-read novel, the comb, the end of this thought.... I know you will never hear the squeak of a mail box, church bells (already quaint here), a van graveling around a turn, a CD (surely gone). I won’t ask (couldn’t endure to know) are there birds there still building the dawn. I know you can’t hear the wind I’m hearing though there will be winds, the song that’s blowing me away, though there will be song after song. And you can’t hear this, though you, like me, will lose what seems like everything and go on, cry against your weariness with leaves and moon and wind, or whatever passes then for moon and leaves and wind, cry out against death and the dead world, the dead world, and the death in you, until, like me, you can stand again unborn, unused, unknown.
Nov 19, 2013 / Books & the Arts / James Richardson
Atavistic Sonnet Atavistic Sonnet
Shadow of the gull on the airport wall, lunging as the fuselage vaults above the meadow. Hollow in the cornrow where the hobo slept, then a backhoe filling up the furrow. Misery of clocks in neon glare, whereabouts of warblers and island foxes, an old flame googled from the dead letter office, simple as the still-warm bench at dusk. Typing or sewing, or bringing down a fever through a length of knotted string and a rusted staple gun. Here comes the tattooed witch with her drum while the royals wait by the limousine grinning. Shadow of the gull on the airport wall, shallows in the stairs where we fell and stepped, hollow in the cornrow where the hobo slept, a backhoe filling the furrow.
Oct 8, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Susan Stewart
Time to Empty the Pool Time to Empty the Pool
The rocks set down in the garden and the red sorrel that finds its way to unfold in sunlight its candy-shaped blossom and the water that flattens the grass and floods all the bugs in its path down to the thirsty hostas and the things that fly out from that wrath on tough little wings that look brittle and the big colored towel of dyed cotton with giant faces of cartoons and the frayed nylon of fold-up chairs riveted to hollow aluminum frames and the clouds drifting against blue and the twisting shapes of shade where secretive squirrels and birds ply their gathering trade and the beds of zucchini and basil whose leaves droop in the heat and the territorial spiders and the occasional passing motors over the hot humming road and your soaked lashes and dripping head and your grass- and dirt-covered feet slipping into flip-flops and the stories we read under the lamp and the insects hitting the window pane.
Sep 24, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Bouchard
First Saturday of Summer in Virginia First Saturday of Summer in Virginia
Day lilies dotting the ditches orange, between tilting mailboxes, amid blue chicory and swales of yellow buttercups. Northwest on Jefferson Highway, alert for bright yellow signs printed YARD SALE, freight train clanging on my right. To follow arrows onto gravel driveways through the woods to arrive at run-down trailers or two-story homes with wraparound porches, wide front lawns and tables of children’s clothing, glassware, games, dolls, obsolete electronics. All around, blue tarps on wet grass with bags of worn quilts and sheets, paired shoes and boots, jeans laid out like Civil War soldiers piled in an open grave. To drive from sale to sale as the sun climbs the sky, blue as Hollywood eyes, coffee in a GO cup. To end at the Art & Craft Show at St. Jude’s, where men with orange flags direct parking across the street from mounds of mulch, gravel, sand, compost. To watch a teen tap dance to the beat of a jangly country song, swirling her flared skirt.
Sep 17, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Joan Mazza
Eating a Macintosh Apple Eating a Macintosh Apple
Eating a Macintosh apple she showed me her crumpled lips. And afterward she didn’t know what to do she couldn’t even discard that small mangled thing that more and more turned yellow in her hand. And daylight’s the time to get drunk when the body still waits for surprises from light and from rhythm, when it still has the energy to invent a disaster. (translated from the Italian by David Shapiro with Gini Alhadeff)
Aug 27, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Patrizia Cavalli
Two Hours Ago I Fell in Love Two Hours Ago I Fell in Love
Two hours ago I fell in love and trembled, and tremble still, and haven’t a clue whom I should tell. (translated from the Italian by Mark Strand)
Aug 27, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Patrizia Cavalli
Higher Learning Higher Learning
for Aaron and Sarah “We monetize the university. Raid the pension-fund, lease out the classrooms, put coin-slots on the phones and copy-machines, and we throw money at the football team, the basketball team, the track team, all the other teams. Sport deepens the Crocodile brand. Sport kicks communities and builds ass. You can shove the rest. We casualize the support staff. Who’s scared of a few roaches and spiders. We empty the bins once a week, then once a month. Are we serious about paperless learning or not? We stop the water fountains. Don’t replace bulbs, call it green, and save thousands. To think big, you’ve got to dare to think small. We pause the elevators, let the profs find their own way downstairs by the light of their towering intellects—or, more likely, their smartphones. Bunch of limey faggots. Underpaid, undersexed and underwear. Or as I believe they like to say over there, ‘pants.’ We get some proper K Street chops into our fundraising effort. Personalized databases. Twitterfeeds. Birthday messages. Con-dolences and -gratulations. A little complimentary merchandise goes a long way. Pre-formatted wills. Candlelight giggle-o dinner-dates with Old Croquettes. We hike the fees and we re-prioritize. It’s what you do in a race to the bottom. We lay on handmaidens and academic tutors and personal chefs for our MVPs— everything, and the great lunks still pass out at traffic-lights. We do a heavy concentration on STEM subjects, plus microbiology, medicine, law, and one other. Entrepreneur. The rest can go wither. What are we here for—educating citizens?! We free up tenure. We de-accession the library. You don’t need books to cut-and-paste, I always say. We boost distance learning. Streaming lectures. Log on and goof off. Overspill classes. Computer grading. Multiple choice. Redefine the contact hour. Redefine the degree. Virtuality is the new reality. We put in a Gap and a Walmart, and call them bookshops. We sell Pepsi one university-wide monopoly franchise in perpetuity, and Taco Bell another. and in general we take a leaf out of the contemporary airport: a shopping center with half a runway attached. We award our sports coaches ius primae noctis (for wins only), plus 40,000 square foot pasteboard-and-marble mansions on prime lakeside real estate, with green lights at the end of their private piers. Throw in a motorboat and some stables, or else we’re uncompetitive. We put up a new building a week—prospective parents like to see that stuff—and we sell on the naming rights to the old ones. They plough up cemeteries, don’t they? Nothing’s forever. Go, Crocks.”
Jul 16, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Michael Hofmann
At Brú na Bóinne At Brú na Bóinne
The tumulus—I thought it was a hill at first (trees grow out of one in Sulm)— entered into. It was a clear day, bright, the grass bounded by its hedgerows too green all around and down, the fields’ squares troubled only by the Boyne that just about makes an island of this place snaking through. Sunbeams don’t snake, at least not visibly, though 5,000 years have worked at the Earth’s orbit. Still the light goes in, into the mound through holes one to a side that tunnel towards each other but don’t meet, the sun arriving on time every year unless it’s cloudy. But to do what? Wake the corpse.
May 15, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Elizabeth Arnold