Azure Azure
It’s that wafer ash set next to the hardy Dutchman’s pipe that reminds me of the unlikely sight we caught on hotel cable TV: Al Schön espousing orange wines. Two decades ago, he was the school’s athlete-Platonist. And now we’re all as louche and brown around the edges as this Baronne Prevost. The Julia Child, the Rise and Shine —these rosebuds exist to ornament fulsome christenings. So it happens today that Azure is introduced toddling in a glade of bamboo topping out at a whisper on the hillside. “Azure, meet our Gray.” “Gray, Azure.”
Mar 21, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Ange Mlinko
Cicadas Cicadas
Gray rainbows in the nighttime irrigation. Immediately forgotten. Then I hear a child carry a tune in a whisper. I was dashing through those ashen rainbows immediately forgotten. You could truncate butterfly to butte and still get migration and a cumin route. But not camel. Not emu. Not Tuareg. Not a Russian garlic dome like painted clove on steppe nor geodesic ostrich egg. Totally forgotten, til the child’s moonbow tune whispered in what wagon, rickshaw, landau rattled me to a carrefour. I couldn’t tell the autumn from the drought, crescent over Quonset hut, or put language to the pulp that made me ill. Inside the mouth of the water-flow monitors, goblin goblin—robin. New World cicadas that chant in parabolas. A new address, a dryness, they stop. Focal chill.
Mar 21, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Ange Mlinko
The Suit The Suit
She said take it off slowly so I can Master when it begins; I want to watch How you work button by button through Each skillful undertaking and so he moved As if to include her but she would not touch Or help with jacket or tie, determined To solve from where he comes and also To learn the color of how he can disappear Into the sea of more and more Black. She is tired of thinking Further. This time everything off until the firmament Shows up. Upon which she puts down the compass Of her body to lie along the pressed Cloth and slip into all that dark material Each arm, wrist against each cuff to see how It is done.
Mar 14, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Sophie Cabot Black
How to Watch a Police Beating How to Watch a Police Beating
First off, there should be two sets of laws— act like an ox and try not to be nonwhite or named Becky. A hippie, with its gauche idealism still intact, is annoying and self-destroying so administrations can contain it better. It's also an enormous help that your skin is recorded like data on the surface of your body, it broadcasts a signal—that you're tripping your face off at the prom for instance. My eyes feel more Episcopalian than ever, those furry little hellions that forcefully broke up a peaceful assembly of women's rights activists. Parking violations can carry bigger fines than beating up women and you act like these people can tape you but you can't tape yourself. Perhaps if the police bombed a foreign country with lattes my friends would begin to act like themselves again. It seems to me that this is not an assemblage of rights activists at all, said the lion, but a love of replacing state violence with video game violence, great movie gore and plans to repopulate the entire province with horny people again, to participate without these detached coagulations of disoriented rage branching off Falstaff just for the heck of it. To act as banker, you have to live on interest or uncover laughter at a huge obese religious electoral reform corsage. I guess you're supposed to go through and deny each of the five senses individually.
Feb 29, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Drew Gardner
Complaint Complaint
Walk out the front door, the dog tugs Boyishly at the leash. I sit at my desk. A breeze Floats up from Oakdale on the hottest day of the year. This is the climate of reason. But in the climate of no reason I look out the window at midnight. My mother appears in a red coat, raking the leaves. Always she wore that coat in autumn, The tattered wool, the large Black buttons, But only to rake leaves. Why my house was built on the dividing line I cannot say. Walk out the front door, Somebody dies. Walk out the back, The rabbit jumps out of his hole. Bedroom in one world, kitchen in another— You could say it’s always September here, Every day the first day of school. The bus is waiting. I’ve got books, my lunch, My gym clothes in a plastic bag.
Jan 25, 2012 / Books & the Arts / James Longenbach
The Language The Language
field of black sheep who know Church Latin a shipyard of vessels all named Sentence a tangle of words in a basket of laundry a night like no other blackbirds falling like endings a gift unrecognized by grace a barrel only a barrel at the Stoics’ Hotel they stay for years getting lost in the language
Jan 11, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Maxine Chernoff
Black Candle Black Candle
Your girlish shoulders are for blushing, For blushing under whips, and in dawn’s raw ice to shine. Your child-like hands are for pushing, For pushing flatirons and feed sacks, and knotting twine. Your feet, infant-tender, are for tiptoeing, Tiptoeing through shattered glass, in the blood-tracked clay. And I, I am for you, a black candle burning, Like a black candle I am burning, and dare not pray. (translated from the Russian by Christian Wiman)
Jan 4, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Osip Mandelstam
L’Élan Vital L’Élan Vital
It happened when a doctorate honoris causa was awarded to a certain Lamerdière of Freiburg— Switzerland or Breisgau, who cares? Garbed in rainbow gown, he mounted the dais and barfed his Objurgation. I revile the larva, he said, the grub from which, in due course, issues the angelic butterfly only to die in the flaring of a match. I despise the silent, the tenuous, the fading. The only god is Rhombus, not the mullet, but the everlasting anti- teleological, universal thunderclap. Not that susurrus which sophists call l’élan vital. If god is word, and word is sound, this almighty bombination, for which no beginning is, no end will ever be, is unique in being both itself and everything else. Jove dies, your Excellencies, the poet’s hymn does NOT last. At this point a Jumbo jet blasted my ears and I woke. Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale, 1925–1977, translated by William Arrowsmith and edited by Rosanna Warren. Copyright © 2012 by Beth Arrowsmith, Nancy Arrowsmith and Rosanna Warren.
Dec 21, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Eugenio Montale
Their Power Their Power
An Epigram [1851] Immense armies, generals bold, Police—covert, overt, of both sexes— ‘gainst whom are these aggressors?— A few ideas… that aren’t new but old…! (Translated from the Polish by Danuta Borchardt)
Dec 14, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Cyprian Norwid
Scenes from ‘My Life as Sherlock Holmes’ Scenes from ‘My Life as Sherlock Holmes’
1. Feeling around for ideas in the dungeonette 2. Scattershot remnants of tulle and fur 3. To quell an especially decorative urge 4. The taxidermy machine in the hall 5. I enjoy life for a day or two 6. A set of alpaca calipers and an alpaca, in a plaza 7. To have banished disreputable grammar 8. Purloining a moment from the restless ocean 9. Vignette of a cat on a lap, ruminative 10. Before it all kicks off 11. Overheard: squawks from the surveillance pavilion 12. Adjective meaning “pursuivant to fishiness” 13. I take the case with a gothic reluctance 14. To the cave of the giant sloths 15. A salmon, a sirloin, a sticky situation 16. Getting pelted with elaborate hairballs in the kisser 17. Truth or carrier bags 18. I vanquish the wrong evil mastermind 19. The return of the alpaca 20. On the run 21. What dissemblers take for granted, sometimes 22. To tweak a surreptitious plan 23. One camelid down, one to go 24. Last ham standing 25. I relinquish my new friends with regret, and doughnuts 26. Sloping off to the hair palace 27. Having ravished a library for unseemly cheeses 28. Girdles within girdles, or faux circumference 29. A cob peering eerily through a sinister window 30. Dissection island
Dec 6, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Jane Yeh