by Adam Day
MODEL OF A CITY IN CIVIL WAR
THE LINDA BRUCKHEIMER SERIES IN KENTUCKY LITERATURE
© 2015 by Adam Day
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher.
Please direct inquiries to:
Managing Editor
Sarabande Books, Inc.
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Day, Adam, 1977–
[Poems. Selections]
Model of a city in civil war : poems / Adam Day.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-941411-02-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3604.A9798A6 2015
811’.6—dc23
2014028848
eBook ISBN: 978-1-941411-06-3
Cover by Jonathan Graf.
Interior by Kirkby Gann Tittle
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Before the War
Model of a City in Civil War
Combine
Anoosh’s Obituary for Himself, to His Son
Winter Nights
Hiding Again, in London
Sleeping with Uncle Lester
The Leaving
Winter Inventory
Water from the Same Source
Elebade
Blind Attis
Smoke
Time Away
The Children, the Grass
Undercover
Apprehended at a Distance
Snow in a Brick Courtyard
Winter Fever
The Cow
The Insomniac
We Lived Above the Key Shop
Clean Lines, Diffuse Lighting
Coming in at Night
Washing the Old Man
He Speaks of Old Age
His Dementia
In Mourning
Now and Forever
Fårö
The Kinghorse Butchertown Brawl
Dakota
A Polite History
The Revolution
Diorama—(Scarlet and Liver)
Sarclet
The Mayor in Sky-Blue Socks
The Birthday Party
A Strapping Boy
Orr’s Island
Unease
Comportment
Condensation Cube
Notes
The author
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Grateful acknowledgement to the editors of the following publications, where these poems, sometimes in different versions, first appeared:
AGNI: “The Children, the Grass” (published as [Here are the Children]” and “Combine”
Antioch Review: “Hiding Again, in London”
Carolina Quarterly: “His Dementia”
Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art: “Sarclet” and “Dakota”
Colorado Review: “Condensation Cube”
Copper Nickel: “Blind Attis”
Crab Orchard Review: “Snow in a Gdansk Courtyard”
dcomP magazine: “The Revolution”
FIELD: “Water from the Same Source”
Forklift: Ohio: “He Speaks of Old Age” (published as “Old Age”)
Gulf Coast: “Anoosh’s Obituary for Himself, to His Son”
Handsome: “The Mayor in Sky Blue Socks” (published as “[Deer herd in the icy fields]”)
Hotel Amerika: “Apprehended at a Distance” (published as “[The colorless lake, buoy bells in fog]”) and “Model of a City in Civil War” (published as “[A diorama of a city in civil war]”)
Indiana Review: “Fårö” (published as “The Dinner Party”)
iO: A Journal of New American Poetry: “Time Away” (published as “Shark and Dog”)
Jelly Fish: “Elebade”
Kenyon Review: “Diorama—(Scarlet and Liver)” (published as “Gallows Portraits”) and “Family Romance”
Madison Review: “Sleeping with Uncle Lester”
Mid-American Review: “The Kinghorse Butchertown Brawl”
Louisville Review: “Strapping”
Margie and Verse Daily: “The Cow”
Meridian: “Before the War”
New Madrid and Verse Daily: “Clean Lines, Diffuse Lighting” (as “Mother’s Hair”)
New Orleans Review: “The Insomniac”
North American Review: “We Lived Above a Key Shop”
Pebble Lake: “The Leaving” and “Winter Inventory”
Poetry London: “A Plateau of Excellence”
Roanoke Review: “Coming In at Night” (as “Coming In from the Back Porch at Night”)
Salt Hill: “Orr’s Island”
Still: “Washing My Old Man” (as “Washing Father’s Feet”) and “Now and Forever” (as “Badger Philosphes”)
Subtropics: “In Mourning” (as “Badger in Mourning”)
Sycamore Review: “A Polite History” and “ ” (as “[From such material it is almost impossible . . .]”)
Third Coast: “Smoke”
Third Coast: “Winter Fever” (published as “The Good Winter”)
TYPO: “Unease”
The following poems first appeared in the chapbook, Badger, Apocrypha, published as part of the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship series: “Winter Nights,” “The Revolution,” and “In Mourning.”
My deep thanks to the wonderful team at Sarabande, and to everyone else who has supported me and my writing, many of whom I have the honor to call friend: Philip Levine, David Alworth, Ellyn Lichvar, my son Alistair Day, Kathleen Graber, Cathy Wagner, Cal Bedient, Fritz Ward, G.C. Waldrep, Bruce Smith, Hannah Gamble, Ashley Capps, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Tom Sleigh, Sarah Arvio, David Lehman, James Tate, Heather Patterson, Aleks Karlsons, Kathleen Driskell, David Baker, Sumita Chakraborty, Sven Birkerts, Timothy Donnelly, Jeffrey Skinner, Breth Fletcher Lauer, David Lynn, Alice Quinn, Maurice Manning, Jillian Weise, Don Bogen, Joshua Poteat, Tony Hoagland, Sally Connelly, Martha Greenwald, Josh English, Jeff Hipsher, Ben Lord, Philip White, Lisa Williams, Jason Schniederman, Michael Estes, David Harrity, Kyle Coma Thompson, Broc Rossell, Mark Neely, Greg and Beth Steinbock, Gayann and Robert Day, Elizabeth Hamsley, Tony Hamsley, Sam Sims, Ken Walker, Michael Cooley, Scott Ward, Jay Baron Nicorvo, Mitchell Waters, Taylor Roberts, John James, Jessica Farquhar, Amy Attaway, Jessica Worthem, Anthony Carelli, Colleen Ammerman, Will Lobko, Madeline Schwartz, Robin LaMer Rahija, Makalani Bandele, Sean Patrick Hill, Duncan Barlow, Kathy Barbour, Kari Kalve, Alen Hamza, David Ebenbach, Kyle McCord, Ellie Schilling, and the crew at Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville.
Special thanks to the Poetry Society of America, New York University, the University of Houston, and to the Kentucky Arts Council for their generous support.
Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game.
—Theodor Adorno
The house itself is none of these appearances: it is . . . the geometrized projection of these perspectives and of all possible perspectives, that is, the perspectiveless position from which all can be derived . . . not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Model of a City in Civil War
BEFORE THE WAR
I was a woman before the war—
we took the arms of our enemies
and swung them from our crotches.
And lived with them there
until, like ticks, they grew inward, and we
were the first men. But we didn’t want
those stolen limbs anymore, and so tried
by force to give them back, hoping
the fists would come alive inside
women and grab hold. But when we were done
the arms only hung dumbly
between our tired legs, shrinking in time—
a useless door handle, a hung shadow
we walk upon.
MODEL OF A CITY IN CIVIL WAR
Men carry a mattress retrieved
from a dumpster past the flooded
foundations of an unfinished
high-rise, an old woman catches
a pigeon in the folds of her dress,
the dead smile and rise from swimming
pools or stand at attention
on stamps. The landscape can’t believe
it’s real—there is no ground
beneath it, like what mirrors do.
The velvet-curtained walls
of a movie theater. On screen
the hanged men speak
to one another from broken
necks, and the aspen leaves
show white in the dark.
COMBINE
Captain Nazret helped the Communists overthrow Haile
Selassie and when
he discovered his wife’s infidelities sewed her into bed
as she slept
and moved his family to the Isle of Man, where he retired
and began losing
his mind, so that one All Hallows’ he pasted a mustache
onto the pastor’s
sorrel mare and rode it through the cobbled streets of Cregneash
saying to the costumed kids,
“Come pet comrade Stalin.” Children loved the old
syphilitic because
he’d show them his stomach’s gnarled track of surgery scars, because
of the violet-backed
sunbird he kept until the neighbor’s cat, with wet green eyes,
reached a paw
through the cage bars, and snagged the bird on one hooked claw
so that a crosshatch
of feathers and blood tattooed the tile floor. That night kids drugged
the Siamese
with cough medicine and stapled it by the scruff to its owner’s
picket fence.
•
On a Siberian expedition, Nikolai Bryukhanov brought the wrong
food for the sledge-dogs,
so they had to be killed. But not by the squeamish Commissar.
On the third day
of Bryukhanov’s trial, Stalin sent a note with accompanying
illustration that read:
“To the members of the Politburo, For all the sins, past and present, hang B.
by the balls. If they
hold out, consider him acquitted by trial. If they don’t, drown him
in the river.”
•
Here sits Queen Anne at Hockley Hole, London
for the dog and bull show.
A rope is tied ’round the root of the bull’s horns and fastened
to an iron stake,
its slobbery gray nose blown full of pepper to enrage it before
it’s baited. Meanwhile,
men hold dogs by the ears. Let loose, the goal for the dog is to hold for all
hell to the bull’s
snout—the most sensitive spot other than the genitals—“If a bull had balls
hanging from its face
they’d be attached to his snout.” Now, either the dog remains
fixed, or is thrown
tearing out the flesh it has laid teeth on. The bull, a skeptic in dialogue
with hope, works
to slide a horn under the cur’s belly, and throw it, so that a dog’s side
is often ripped open
entrails protruding like wet sausage—“Yes, it provides much joy
for the community,
and the animals certainly gain a sense of dignity in achievement.”
•
Goya’s “Portrait of the Family of Charles IV”: intermarriage preserved
the family’s wealth
and the compact features of mongoloids. Deformed by a hunting accident,
Charles—subsidiary
to his wife, his mouth full of gravel—spent his power slowly collecting
watches and wrestling
with grooms in the stables—like male otters, they bite each other’s necks,
drawing blood, but
thick layers of fat prevent serious injury. We see only the profile of Doña
Carlota Joaquina,
the King’s eldest daughter, more oversexed than even her mother, whose “chief
renown was for a readiness
that kept her in a state of tropical humidity as would grow orchids
in her drawers
in January” (“My mouth may be scalded but I’m still noticeably wet,”
she wrote a lover.)
•
Tennessee Williams had a little black dog named Bibbles whom
he kept as a minotaur
keeps his women—he set to kicking it one day because the creature
seemed to him
too promiscuous, too “Whitmanesque” in its affections. Seventy-one
and choking
on the cap of a medicine bottle—nothing like the brass bit in a horse’s spit-foamed
mouth, nothing
like the rough-trade neck-ties that had gagged him. Tell us a joke; tell us a story
to make us all
laugh. The cops: “If that’s aspirin on your dresser, what’s the needle for?”
Him: “I can’t stand the taste
of the stuff.” Tennessee—the eternal that is ever-present in our midst. Sexually
incontinent. Panic
insomnia, tooth-rot, green liquid pouring from the bowels. Still
he has a physical
presence. You could imagine him hitting someone. “I don’t think it’s sex
I want. There’s no great
hankering for that. It’s the quiet, humdrum dread of coming up alone to this little
room at night, to that
emptiness where God would be if God were available. And going to bed and turning
my face to the wall.”
ANOOSH’S OBITUARY FOR HIMSELF, TO HIS SON
Armaan, during the Revolution your mother
left, and I was asked to strangle a collaborator:
baggy-trousered, with a stoat-face. The house’s pink wallpaper
was covered with maids and horses. Over the shower curtain
his wife’s pantyhose hung. Chair-tied, sweat ran the rims
of his glasses. A lamp threw cold light, promises
were made. I’m a father. Drunk, I adjourned to the driveway
to shovel snow. There were spider webs of moisture
in the trees and hedges. For coffee, I used ice cream
in place of the missing milk, sick of what I knew . . .
As for your mother, Armaan, I can only say I feel better
about her infidelities when I’m well-dressed. And I am.
WINTER NIGHTS
Walking from the house into a field
of snow, the moon eases from its blue
blouse, half-blinded by the hills. Eider
shadows skate past the pond boat
overturned on shore. There is
the fatty scent of pine, like the smell
of marrow. Things are blooming
that shouldn’t yet. She reaches up
to her shadowed fa
ce to touch
something real but imagined, like
some invented criminal pleasure,
like making a virtue of a flaw.
HIDING AGAIN IN LONDON
The streets, black with rain, I walk
past the British Museum to University College,
where the Socialist Workers Party is screening Land and Freedom.
I sit in the audience, looking
for women—confusing jargon: class intercourse,
sexual warfare—aware of the probability
of defeat. We can’t know much
of each other. I fell in love with Marx