Signs & Wonders

by Charles Martin

  Signs & Wonders

  JOHNS HOPKINS: POETRY AND FICTION

  John T. Irwin, General Editor

  Signs & Wonders

  Poems by Charles Martin

  This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the G. Harry Pouder Fund.

  © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press

  All rights reserved. Published 2011

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Johns Hopkins University Press

  2715 North Charles Street

  Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Martin, Charles, 1942–

  Signs & wonders: poems / by Charles Martin.

  p. cm. — (Johns Hopkins: poetry and fiction)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-9974-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-8018-9974-5 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  I. Title. II. Title: Signs and wonders.

  PS3563.A72327S54 2011

  811′.54—dc22 2010042463

  A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or specialsales@press.jhu.edu.

  The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible. All of our book papers are acid-free, and our jackets and covers are printed on paper with recycled content.

  TO JOHANNA

  Contents

  Directions for Assembly

  I/ THE LIFE IN LETTERS

  The Flower Thief

  Souvenir

  Some Kind of Happiness

  The Sacred Monsters

  Words to Utter at Nightfall

  Mind in the Trees

  Autopsychography

  Support

  East Side, West Side

  1/ Vermeer at the Frick: His Mistress and Maid

  2/ John Koch at the New-York Historical Society: The Party

  To Himself

  Brooklyn in the Seventies

  This Organizing Solitude

  Theory Victorious

  II/ SOME ROMANS

  On a Roman Perfume Bottle

  Ara Pacis

  Ovid to His Book

  Three Sonnets from the Romanesco of G.G. Belli

  1/ The Good Soldiers

  2/ The Spaniard

  3/ The Coffee House Philosopher

  III/ NEAR JEFFREY’S HOOK

  The Twentieth Century in Photographs

  Poem for the Millennium

  Who Knows What’s Best?

  Getting Carded

  For the End of the Age of Irony

  Near Jeffrey’s Hook

  Foreboding

  After 9/11

  After Wang Wei

  Poison

  Acknowledgments

  Signs & Wonders

  Directions for Assembly

  Signs is a noun (as in DO NOT DISTURB);

  Wonders (as in “with furrowed brows”), a verb.

  I/ The Life in Letters

  The Flower Thief

  At last he struck on our block and snatched

  Geraniums out of the flowerpots

  And window boxes we had left unwatched,

  Plucked the plants whole, took flower, stem and roots,

  Danced down the street in glee and merriment,

  Every so often letting out a whoop,

  Asperging us with soil mix as he went,

  Until he settled on an empty stoop.

  And there gazed on his prizes, fascinated

  By something in them only he could see,

  While those who called the local precinct waited,

  Watching him with or without sympathy.

  He learned the essence of geranium.

  We learned that the police don’t always come.

  Souvenir

  1/

  Somehow it had escaped

  By the time that we had flown

  Back to New York City

  And on to our new home---

  That slender insect, shaped

  From a green husk of corn

  Twisted until crickety

  On a cobbled street in Rome.

  2/

  A Chinese emigrant,

  Perched by a cardboard box,

  Fashioned these vegetal

  Crickets and grasshoppers;

  His wiry fingers bent

  And tied the sheathes to flex

  In forms that would appeal

  To bargain-hunting shoppers.

  3/

  Bagged up in plastic, tied

  With little wire collars,

  Like goldfish in their bowls

  Waiting for adoption,

  Each silent cricket vied

  For euros or for dollars

  And waited to be sold:

  It had no other option.

  4/

  If it had been poverty,

  The dull incessant grind

  Of want which went unheeded,

  That snatched up and replanted

  Him here in Italy,

  What put it in his mind

  To sell what no one needed

  And almost no one wanted?

  5/

  Was it just ignorance

  Of the foreign market---

  That and the optimist’s

  More than half-filled glass?

  “What every Roman wants

  Is a good cornhusk cricket---

  With a few deft ties and twists

  My dream will come to pass!”

  6/

  That isn’t even funny:

  He sleeps on a low cot in

  A single crowded room

  On the shift assigned him.

  He owes his landlord money.

  He fears he’s been forgotten

  By his family back home:

  Will Good Luck ever find him?

  7/

  Perhaps: Que sera, sera.

  But now among the fakes,

  The faux Gucci scarves and shoes,

  The double-A batteries

  And plastic ephemera,

  He stands by his box and makes

  A life he did not choose,

  From what would otherwise

  8/

  Be overlooked as waste

  (As he himself might be

  In this world’s new order):

  But how shall the genuine

  Not be wholly effaced

  From life and memory

  And taught to slip the border---

  How, if not by design?

  Some Kind of Happiness

  A windblown grain of happiness

  Has just now taken residence

  Between the moistened surfaces

  Of eye and lid: I blink and wince,

  Not recognizing it as such,

  And then I grimace to expel

  What I can feel but cannot touch,

  This moonlet torn from Planet Hell,

  Whose photo, magnified, would show

  A wilderness of jagged peaks

  And icy crevices below.

  It threatens to stay on for weeks,

  And with no fixed plan traverses

  The jellied pond that runs with tears,

  Paying no mind to my curses.

  Then suddenly it disappears.

  What kind of happiness was this?

  One more likely than another:

  Briefly here, abruptly gone---bliss,

  If not unalloyed with bother.

/>   The Sacred Monsters

  The legend, built up over many years,

  That told of how the spells the monsters cast

  Reduced the hapless children to hot tears

  And left the grown-ups they became aghast

  And swaddled in unmanageable fears

  Originating in the nightmare past---

  That legend needs revising, it appears,

  Now that we see the monsters plain at last:

  How this one, backed into a corner, snarls,

  While that one rears to strike, but must give way

  Before these oldsters from the suburbs, clad

  In polyester leisurewear, who say

  How pleased they are to be here.

  Then, “Mom, Dad, I’d

  like you both to meet my good friend Charles…”

  Words to Utter at Nightfall

  So here I am in Oakwood, a funeral

  park built in 19th-century Syracuse,

  tracing out names while windblown snow swirls

  down at my ankles. December, twilight:

  another failed quest for immortality

  come to completion under a polished grey

  stone---but tonight I halt before it,

  stopped by its one-word inscription: utter

  *

  “Utter?” Say what, I ask myself cluelessly:

  If utter had been somebody’s cognomen,

  who would have raised this stone, neglecting

  either a given name or initials?

  And UTTER lacks apparent connection to

  any of many words it may come before:

  “bliss,” say, or “rot”---intensifying

  joy in the outcome, or indignation

  at learning that oblivion isn’t a

  concept, merely. When once we eliminate

  noun and adjective, only verb is

  left to consider. So I consider

  UTTER a sharply worded imperative,

  bitten in stone, unknown as to origin,

  aimed, it may be, at finding someone

  who goes off rambling in cemeteries,

  hoping to be instructed by randomness,

  hoping, among the dead ends so evenly

  spaced out in ordered rows, to find the

  one that might signify: Here continue

  *

  Easy to say, but where is continuance?

  For certain, unaccompanied UTTER is

  awkward at best---an unvoiced, barked-out

  syllable trailed by a schwa, dissolving

  in the thin night air, cold and companionless,

  unheard by anyone, unresponded to.

  Take it, then: weave it into measure’s

  ancient invention, this shopworn form, now

  frayed at the edges, far from original:

  use it to make an evensong utterance,

  passed on by one whose heartfelt wish is

  not to have either the first or last word

  Mind in the Trees

  I was of three minds

  Like a tree

  In which there are three blackbirds.

  —Wallace Stevens

  But Wallace, what if there were, say,

  Three hundred of them in one tree?

  Of how many minds would you be?

  I saw three hundred here one day---

  Not blackbirds, since not every black

  Bird’s a blackbird---these were crows,

  So densely driven, you’d suppose

  The branches of the tree would crack.

  Yet the tree didn’t seem weary

  Of bearing them without a fuss---

  One of the few eponymous

  Oaks of Oakwood Cemetery.

  The next day came three hundred more

  And formed a second colony

  On branches of another tree;

  They spread across its upper floor.

  Day after, a prodigious din

  Proclaimed the transfer was complete:

  All the tall trees across the street

  Appeared to have been settled in.

  This was in autumn. They had flown

  From the bare cornfields west of us

  To spend their nights in Syracuse.

  At first light they would be long gone.

  I’d have to have a mind of crow

  To tell you where it was they went,

  Although I think that their intent

  Was plain enough for us to know:

  To feed as well as they were able

  On gleanings from some barren field,

  Or test what a town dump would yield

  In scraps scraped from a kitchen table.

  From where they’d been, they’d all fly back

  To our neighborhood and roost

  Right around dusk: a sable host,

  A giant beating wing of black,

  Dissolving until each crow finds

  Its nightly perch.

  Regarding their abidance

  in our area,

  I was myself of several minds:

  Their raucousness by night and morning,

  The paintballs of their excrement

  (Mixed, it would seem with fresh cement)

  That dropped among us without warning,

  Clearly would not gain them favor.

  What would, then? Their ability

  To make do on the little we

  Allow them, and, indeed to carve a

  Niche, however scant and dire

  From our gleanings and our rot

  Speaks well of them, though we may not.

  It’s also easy to admire

  The way they seem to get along,

  The nice civility each shows

  (Or seems to show) his fellow crows,

  Despite the discords of their song.

  And there’s the beauty of their flight

  Whether they glide, now high, now low,

  Or struggle though grey squalls of snow,

  Racing against impending night;

  Or when they form a canopy,

  A treetop-level aggregate---

  Each one a fine black cuneate

  Shape on the lemon yellow sky;

  It seemed each little mark they made

  Was capable, collectively,

  Of making one text of each tree,

  A book whose upturned page displayed

  The tree’s own thought.

  And then, one day,

  The first or second day of spring,

  At sunrise, all of them took wing

  At once and hoarsely flew away,

  Not to return until next fall

  With a noise like blackboard-grating chalk.

  I’m practicing a crow-like squawk

  To greet them when I hear their call.

  Autopsychography

  Fernando Pessoa, Autopsycographia

  The poet knows just how to feign.

  So very thorough his pretense is,

  That he pretends to have the pain

  He honestly experiences.

  Those who read the poet’s verses

  As they read them, keenly feel

  Not the two pains he confesses,

  But just their own, which is unreal.

  So round and round in every season,

  Upon its tracks this gaily smart

  Toy train goes on, beguiling reason,

  And it is called the human heart.

  Support

  Support is what the film of oily dust

  Is put upon and slowly bonded to

  Until it forms a thin, ambivalent crust

  That disappears when there comes into view

  Whatever we are here today to see:

  A vase of flowers, Wolfe dying at Quebec,

  A virgin with an infant on her knee,

  Some woman grinning at Toulouse-Lautrec.

  If it cannot be said to face the wall,

  There’s nonetheless a wall or ledge or shelf

  Supporting
it, though the provisionality

  of that support says that support itself

  Moves through such portals, all of which depend

  On yet another and so never end.

  East Side, West Side

  1/ Vermeer at the Frick: His Mistress and Maid

  Light flickers gaily over those surfaces

  that, in this painting, represent what, if not

  beauty and pleasure, health and value?

  Framed by the background, the homely servant,

  whose downcast glance suggests her uneasiness,

  presents a note appearing to startle her

  seated mistress, who must have found it

  either unwelcome or unexpected

  if not unwelcome. We cannot ever know

  if what she had begun writing one lover

  was interfered with by another’s

  well-timed or untimely importuning.

  Soon, other readings, each just as possible,

  will come to press their claims on the spectator.

  But we can say no more for certain

  than that there has been an interruption;

  unconscious act and conscious reflection were

  caught as she touched her chin with the fingertips

  of her left hand, while from her right, she

  let the pen drop to the covered table.

  So, if I claim Vermeer must have wanted this

  uneasy painting read as a secular

  Annunciation, where the one picked

  happens to be neither maid nor maiden,

  I mean it just as a thought experiment:

  there’s not the slightest hint of submissiveness

  in her demeanor, and the drama

  played out about her is her own doing.

  Nor do I find it even implausible

  to see the maid as angelic messenger:

  in an Annunciation, brightness

  flows into darkness, and so transforms it,

  while here, a girl constrained by her poverty

  briefly enters a plane of great privilege;

  whatever right she has to be here

  is one that she has been granted merely.

  But this is not about the inequality

  inherent in a common relationship,

  nor will some god reduce the mistress

  to the sealed chamber of his abidance:

  This is about the free play of consciousness

  in steady light that limns and illuminates

  those whom it falls upon: the favored

  few, constrained only by what they’ve chosen.