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
Ways of Rebelling Ways of Rebelling
Who needs to be at peace in the world? It helps to be between wars, to die a few times each day to understand your father’s sky, as you take it apart piece by piece and can’t feel anything, can’t feel the tree growing under your feet, the eyes poking night only to find another night to compare it to. Whoever heard of turning pain into hummingbirds or red birds—haven’t we grown? What does it mean to be older? Maybe a house without doors can still survive a storm. Maybe I can’t find the proper way to rebel or damn it, I can’t leave. I want to, but you grow inside of me. And as I watch you, before I know it, I’m too heavy, too full of you to move. Maybe that’s what they meant when they said you shouldn’t love a country too much.
May 15, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Nathalie Handal
Suet Suet
It turns out I was killing the birds. I gave them what they wanted, what they craved: suet packed with seeds, hung swinging on the sycamore with chains. Suet brought the downy, the bellied, brought small clinging birds from the sadness of the woods. It fattened them. It readied them for winter. But with spring came the melting world: too rich, too much weakened their bones. And snapped them. You were light as a whisper when you lay on me. I ran my fingers over your chest as though I were dressing you in air—the only clothes I would ever want on you. Still, the mockingbird wants it the most, diving at the other birds, driving them away, his gray black white reel of wings—so fierce, I can’t even take it back. I never knew he would be angry, this bird I’ve heard so much about, sung about in songs, the one I was supposed to buy my baby, the one who learned my baby’s cries. There’s sun on the porch and I want you so bad I think I might die. I have hurt you harder than anyone has ever. I don’t know what is right. I don’t know whose turn it is to beg, to cry, to be wronged, to be wanted. All I know is when you lay down on me, I felt no weight. And when you touched my breasts, they began to weep. And when I said I was sorry, sorry, I am so so sorry, you lowered your head to my chest and drank.
May 15, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Alison Stine
Penzance Penzance
What if only your rich friends are beautiful? What if only they have exotic varieties of hydrangeas? It’s so quiet you can hear a Prius A cup of tea with a gauzy helix of steam above it Floppy hats, identical bags in several colors Somali brownish gray maxi dresses with shadows in folds instead of patterns Bees drop onto inconspicuous green flowers Giraffe markings tattooed on a shoulder I’ve seen that expression before It doesn’t take long for it to decide to flee
Apr 30, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Joel Sloman
What Did Clausen See What Did Clausen See
What did Clausen see in the sky? Probably no one will ever know. He flew in all excited from the garden (where he had been weeding carrots) and pointing to the clouds exclaimed: There, there! I asked him: Would you like a drink? But he, with a wild look in his eyes, just kept repeating: There, there! He wouldn’t respond to anything. Later he was taken to an insane asylum. (His furniture ended up on the auction block.) What did Clausen see in the sky? Probably no one will ever know. (translated from the Polish by Piotr Gwiazda)
Mar 13, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Grzegorz Wróblewski