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
Ice Cold Water Ice Cold Water
The palate clears, but the flavor of regional words sticks to the roof of the mind, salt, style slapped to theme: the categorical difference between a shooting star, otherworldly as it is, and its oceanic twin, slippery as a child at the playground, contracting its five arms toward its center, twirling, turning around, riding itself and abiding in its secret pleasures, neither bitter nor dour, which would suggest preference or its absence, something that simply goes from here to there, from one port to another, from this to that shade of meaning. Listen carefully to what is whispered in your ear: bring me “a glass of ice cold water” which, no doubt, will be found in the “ice-box.” But this request has nothing to do with quenching thirst. It has a twin meaning, maybe Siamese. It’s a highly personal way of considering and particularizing a universe that, all of a sudden, belongs to everyone, a currency, the familiar voice of all who open their doors and respond the same way with the same gestures and by so doing come to be themselves. What, otherwise, are a provincial’s daily pleasures? At ease speaking the vernacular God mandates and calling a spade a spade, avoiding any direct link between what was requested and served and what truly corresponds, the said and the received. And so what in other places might be called falling head over heels is rendered here as “a bucketful of ice cold water,” an expression derived from purely metaphoric “snows.” (translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander)
Nov 21, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Pura Lopez Colome
Blue Ridge: Streams Are Roaring Blue Ridge: Streams Are Roaring
Morning in the shade of a persimmon tree. Later, downstream below a hornbeam. A shy man hollers from across the valley. Every other rhododendron flower holds a tiny bee, just the way each macaroni shell in pasta e fagioli eventually holds a bean. A little Italian goes well up here. Latin, too&emdash;castanea, ruficapilla, caroliniana: Paroles: Dogwood calls the catbirds. Black cherry calls the blue.
Nov 16, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Merrill Gilfillan
slow poem slow poem
slow things heard in old songs sad songs sung by the sides of old inns dry roses clutched by a lover a wedding dress downriver you will ask them their names the women who remember will ask you in turn where you come from inside this small country you are writing a book it’s unfinished the evening enfolding you slowly a soreness in the fingers who are you they ask you will get in the car with the mirror with the silver flaking in the back the book will receive much criticism you knew it from the story the bride gone downriver where dusk pulls the sunset quarter after quarter so many have written they will ask you with roses will ask what to call you by the river where you come.
Nov 9, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Rodney Koeneke
improphised improphised
1imagine peter, not nodding over his palms that dawn, but praying the vindictive 2prayers of the righteous, drawing enough testosterone up from his balls to light 3all the dew in the garden afire, more than enough to keep him awake, enough 4even to make him slap judas’s silvery lips before they could kiss the sacrifice, 5causing chaos among the spear- bearing romans : imagine him alive with the fury 6of love and utterly blind to the lacerated look on his friend-of-friends’ face, denying 7nothing, not his name, not his faith, not his rage, hurling affirmations at his inquisitors— 8yes, i am the man! : this peter, all flesh and flood, imagine him murderously steadfast, 9less rock than stone, a self- made weapon, still weeping at the cock’s crow, every pre- 10diction re-writing itself anew in his woeful image : human if he did and human if he didn’t.
Nov 2, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Evie Shockley