American Poetry Read online

  can’t-be-said-here. The afternoon of after rain

  dazzles with cloudlessness and a painful green

  set casually against blue: light

  mottled by fractal leaves

  freckles your outstretched arm,

  repeating apple, apple, apple, sour

  fruit and crabgrass. A damp T-shirt

  takes on that color, nothing

  will wash it out. I wear it for weeks.

  October

  doorway, flutter, moth

  or leaf in flight, in fall

  foyer, stammer of wind, a patter

  hovering, dust hushed or

  pressed to trembling

  glass, smut, soot, mutter

  of moth or withered stem,

  late haze, gray stutter

  crumpled, crushed,

  falter, fall, a tread …

  November

  williwaw, brawl in air,

  shunt or sinew of wind shear

  blown off-course, pewter skew

  vicinity, winnow and complicit

  sky preoccupied with grizzle,

  winter feed of lawns’ snared

  weathervane, whey-faced day

  brume all afternoon of it

  (lead reticence of five o’clock)

  remnant slate all paucity and drift

  salt splay, slur and matte brink

  snow stammers against sidewalks

  December

  White light seen through

  the season’s double window

  clouding the room reveals the roses’

  week-old gift of petals bruised purple-black.

  Dry paper falling on white cloth

  seconds white room’s wonder

  at cold sun flurried, crumbling stars

  compacted underfoot: lattice

  of fixed clarity, wintrish eidolon

  half patience, half in prayer.

  NATURALISM

  Between them is only difference.

  —Saussure

  The error was the inspiration

  Trees I’ve never seen with names I knew

  real word but not true wood,

  ginkgo male or female, always

  only one kind: a living fossil, oldest

  gymnosperm, ‘naked seed,’ reproducing

  by means of direct contact

  with air (resistant to pests

  and pollution): there shouldn’t

  be flowers, shouldn’t be fruit

  White flowers one book says

  are yellow, Ginkgo biloba,

  scientific names strew themselves across

  damp sidewalks, appellation sheds

  petals in May wind, simile, similitude,

  have I compared, the only extant

  member of its order, Ginkgoales,

  Ginkgoaceae, domesticated

  by description (extinct otherwise)

  Wrong attributes over everything,

  petals stuck to soles, imagined

  into subject matter, fan-like leaves

  framed by mistake, words (Chinese

  or Japanese? my sources

  are unclear) for silver apricot, silver

  nut: tiny plums prized for their kernels

  (plum-like), the ripe flesh stench between

  two fingers, beneath two feet (which one?)

  They fall after first freeze, heavy

  with frost (an unambitious tree, wrinkled

  fruit barely an inch across: tiny

  cherries?), stepped on in early winter

  Iowa the stink comes back

  of August, late summer smell

  smeared through December

  (red-purple when the book says

  yellow, and smelling of nowhere)

  Write only what you see, it said,

  first this, first that (I walked past them

  every day, under them, three in a sidewalk

  row: a commonplace tree, no real interest

  at all, reeking fruit fouls the sidewalk all fall,

  cross the street to avoid them)

  The read tree and the real tree

  (this happens only in writing): never

  an even number, three of one kind

  Knowing the names with nothing

  to paste them onto (trees I’d seen

  but never known, misnomer

  printing petals on wet pavements): just one

  kind at a time, white four-petaled

  flowering May, clear green lobed leaves

  cover summer, gold in fall (perhaps

  some strain of ornamental plum):

  first come flowers, first come leaves

  Not the same tree at all

  —for Robert Philen and Lawrence White

  Two Poems

  Barbara Guest

  BLURRED EDGE

  It appears

  a drama of exacting dimension.

  Anguished figure,

  reign of terror.

  Craft and above all

  the object within.

  Softness which precedes

  blurred edge.

  A hint disappears inside the earlier one.

  Softness still nudging,

  A different temperament,

  inside an earlier plan.

  Upon this stool is draped material

  arabesque of an iron stool,

  bare bones of the iron seat.

  The arrangement of objects announced

  more firmly than before.

  Observation. Candor,

  where candor approaches the cube.

  Dark siphon bottle mood

  of blurred edge

  Life permitted no privilege

  no exegesis

  no barnyard door. The feathered visage the domed hat

  allowed no strange air or music.

  An attempt to get beyond the arrangement,

  vibration of a peculiar touch.

  It changes between eye and alarm,

  the hibiscus,

  more gifted.

  Part of the tension,

  is illusory.

  A hint of what was going to be.

  Covering and uncovering necessary.

  Self pouring out of cloudedness.

  If views of the lower body

  do not conform,

  a risk of being exposed,

  Rain and altitude.

  This is not sand, it is drama.

  The anguished figure, sand blew away

  that armor. A look extends the blur.

  Other creatures alive

  word exchanged for meaning,

  moment of descriptiveness.

  Sand blows away.

  In distance,

  figure passing,

  unworded distance at edge.

  PATHOS

  Arms flutter close to the body, skating on pure ice, harmonious composition,—

  body in mellifluous line—

  face in profile withheld itself, thin smile,

  self approval.

  Lithe her romp!

  lithesome her romp upon the indignation of ice.

  She is falling!

  Shiver of the fallen,

  of the tulle skirt.

  Disarrangement of the composition,

  Snow falling from tree.

  So young in this electric world—,

  something Katya needs to know. Something is needed,

  fiction is overturned.

  Something she must know about hazard, what spills out—

  —disturbance,—pathos.

  Equilibrium is never fixed—

  losing momentum in the trials—boot tossed away,

  a gesture she made.

  Making difficulties for herself in the wrong direction.

  Fear of the word, haunting of fear—

  the word passed through that haunting.

  Weight of the useless word and narcissus,

  mirror moving backward,

  impromptu surface of the alphabet when she fell side
ways

  with irascible measure—the pit of the plum

  rolled onto ice, and her silhouette merged quickly

  with ice in that chapter.

  Opened the entrance door,

  and make-believe arrived with a doll on its surface,

  arrived with the soil of the moon, it was impermanent

  living with shifted screen life.

  Lived not for pleasure, to hear the cry

  in a small coil

  of ice.

  And heard through the oak panel—,

  amazing to listen to speech

  by way of adulthood.

  To articulate velvet,

  without noise or spectacle.

  Life in that eccentric balloon.

  To scribble ice figures,

  and drink out of the cup when bolder.

  The electric world sends its current through her legs,

  a global concern for her being.

  The globe is drawn into this, and the frills,

  the sorrow of falling

  into an historical position, the legs will finish

  this position, music

  use up the irresistible current, lived

  with the shifting screen.

  Lived not for pleasure, to hear the harp-like

  cry in a coil,

  to live in an eccentric balloon.

  To scribble across ice

  and drink from an orange cup. When they were nearer

  historical legs used up this position,

  falling down historical legs, anxious writing.

  Foreignness enters the hallway in the Debussy—

  hinting at the fable

  resisting her.

  Do they wonder at her pathos/ dressed in tulle,

  athletically inclined on jumping bars.

  One at a time

  misleading her./

  She is part of the moment/ unrequited amour/

  icing machine.

  This motion in her eyes,

  going outside, the red brook

  flowed into her eyes, her winsome eyes,

  drawstring of light.

  Two Poems for the Seventeenth Century

  Donald Revell

  FOR THOMAS TRAHERNE

  The ground is tender with cold rain

  Far and equally

  Our coastlines grow younger

  With tides

  Beautiful winter

  Not becoming spring today and not tomorrow

  Has time to stay

  Easter will be very late this year

  Thirty years ago

  I saw my church

  All flowery

  And snow

  Melting in the hair of the procession

  As tender as today

  A sight above all festivals or praise

  Is earth everywhere

  And all things here

  Becoming younger

  Facing change

  In the dark weather now like winter

  Candling underground as rain

  FOR ANDREW MARVELL

  Tiger of luster of swordplay is just a stick

  On a sandpile

  I remember because everything is all of its characteristics

  Apart just once

  Together for eternity in death’s unlimited magic

  Ilex conjures acanthus

  I’ve never tasted quince I like the snow apple

  Filled with sirocco

  An austere example

  And my son knows

  In his tigerish swordplay

  Once apart as I board the usual airplane

  I remember

  Magic I’ve taken from his hand and pressed like sharp sharp sand into mine

  Resemblance

  Paul Hoover

  Placing ancient birds

  in absent skies,

  the midst is

  endless. To rise

  alone is clear,

  the sudden plum

  of a mountain,

  a reckless cabin

  inhabited by ghosts,

  its weather rainy

  with ash and

  bones. Sire of

  light. Color and

  substance joined like

  coasts. In earth’s

  black dream, objects

  take shape as

  mind and scum.

  The weight of

  water pouring on

  your head is

  one reminder, but

  our habit is

  confession and the

  dirt of history

  even in these

  photos by André

  Kertesz of people

  reading, the true

  light of seeing

  in the midst

  of squalor, on

  balconies and roofs,

  even a bug

  grazing a page

  of Voltaire. A

  frocked monk is

  reading in a

  painting on the

  shelf, where a

  layer of dust

  has fallen on

  the pears. How

  often nothing happens,

  how often it

  is shared, and

  then toward evening

  this feeling of

  completion. In its

  own carnal grammar,

  recurrent entries in

  the book of

  skin. Normal as

  form, every button

  shines. To be

  entered is all,

  breathless and sinking

  in the sweat

  of love found.

  The new place’s

  old dream darkens

  like a world.

  This is birth:

  the beating and

  the drum, eternity

  and the parrot,

  meaning and the

  feeling, chaos and

  the boy. Breathless

  acts are fragments,

  degrees of desire.

  None are structure,

  all are numb.

  The length of

  the bridge, its

  gesture elegiac, a

  string of chinese

  lanterns is firm

  as direction. We

  can still remember

  the garden and

  its foxes, baby

  and its cake.

  Are you marked?

  A lark in

  sauce? There’s warmth

  in not needing,

  but still you

  want with ripe

  eyes open. It’s

  like the movie

  Wind with its

  rhetoric of silence,

  where a flag

  of a man

  struggles toward the

  door, only to

  discover the recent

  day is closed.

  On a monochrome

  screen, he comes

  to resemble darkness

  and time, a

  meaningless object and

  its useless sign.

  Five Poems

  Elaine Equi

  FURTHER ADVENTURES

  The bird carries her off in its beak

  her prettiness

  (ribbon heart’s rouge)

  straining against flight, doing what she never

  dreamed (actually, what she often dreamed

  but never dared). Up high

  one can see the breath of Time,

  its cold exhale. Time has carried her off

  and the world is rearing up on hind legs

  like the statue of a general on his horse.

  The girl carries the world off

  (its prettiness and twin ugliness)

  as surely as she is carried, yet can’t stop

  feeling she has forgotten something:

  a necklace of beads, a train of thought,

  a funeral procession with a broken clasp.

  Something shining benea
th the world

  (a word a charm).

  Something is calling her back.

  LEAN-TO

  The eye of the walking stick opened,

  polished with ego (of good quality).

  A crutch is a useful thing.

  Shadow in shadow,

  character in character,

  mano a mano,

  we walked the length of the city

  (a wheezing a many-chimneyed thing).

  What is a story, I asked.

  A story is a poultice, you said

  applying its pressure.

  A story is a blindfold

  for leading the blind.

  The ego glittered,

  the city slowed.

  Cautiously, the eye

  of the walking stick opened.

  “YOUR PURPLE ARRIVES”

  Purple flower.

  Purple heart.

  Heap of sharp

  and muddy edges.

  Bruise or blossom?

  Harp strings

  trickle-down

  realignment

  of morning’s slow …

  bright bug

  with a crumb of window

  on its back.

  DESSERT

  This caramel is scriptural.

  This lemon tart more beautiful than a Matisse.

  It’s the way paintings (and heaven) taste

  as they dissolve and we internalize them.

  Gurus know it.

  Don’t you remember after they slapped us

  with peacock-feather-fans,

  the little piece of rock candy

  we each got and sucked in the corner,

  thinking that if the mantras didn’t work,

  at least there was this.

  OUT OF THE CLOUD CHAMBER

  and into the street.

  Out of the art-deco prison

  and into the cozy burning house,

  the bleak house,

  the decadent steak house.

  Out of the mouths of tulips and slaves.

  Out of the frying pan and into the choir.

  Out of mimesis endlessly mocking.

  Out like a debutante,

  in like a thief.

  Out of pocket,

  out of reach.

  Out of time

  and into being.

  Out of sight

  and into seeing.

  Out of your mind

  and into your pants.

  Out like a light

  and in like a lamp.

  Conjunctions

  Norma Cole

  -1.

  (to not turn on machine with light in eyes)

  you ask me state of nature

  most two hundred of our time

  all good nothing, silent treatment

  those girls, the cousin, the bakery