by Adam Day
barking in the hollows of the hills. We were
rebels; or when generals were killed,
the generals. Sometimes the military
were better rebels. We were the products
of our own ideas: being rough
is a game. Unseen loudspeakers drowned
protest in canned laughter and waltzes. Men
patched wounded women; like pregnancy
it was an unfair competition. Captured
or capturing, condemnation followed
upon execution. What’s lovely about war
is its devotion to thoroughness
and order. It keeps count. At the end
we got down and tasted the forest floor,
holding the place where someone
was before, stood in dead shoes,
understanding the mathematics of it, the finite
sets of odd cardinality, below the pirated
nest of a titmouse and eight pink-white eggs.
DIORAMA—(SCARLET AND LIVER)
There is Mussolini in his tight,
rough-wood coffin,
shirtless on pine shavings. One eye opened. Swollen face
pancaked, his mouth a singed, lipless stretch.
•
“Despisal of the bourgeois is the beginning of virtue. . . ,” wrote Flaubert.
and wondered why we laugh
at affliction.
Maybe it’s because that thing
that sits with us at breakfast—
that eland—and looks back at us
from the bathroom mirror, and sleeps
even in our coat pockets,
that thing intimate and unfamiliar, a someone
unknown
who we will enter or be entered by, is,
finally.
•
The miniature American flag waves
from the blue, snow-stranded Bronco’s antenna.
•
The fascists were hung by their feet—like the crooks and embezzlers
of medieval times—
from the girders of an Esso gas station
in the Piazzale Loreto. A far cry from the Mussolini
who sat in a chair at cocktail parties
holding his thumb out
for women to bite down hard on.
Closer to Goya’s Suerte de Varas
whose arena is littered with gored horses,
and a picador frozen amid a frenzied crowd
who stare at the bull,
its wounded shoulder a bloodburst,
balancing against stupor.
Out of decency
before the crowd in the Piazzale abused the bodies,
Clara Petacci’s skirt was tied tightly around her knees.
•
My great grandmother’s death
was communicated to me by phone
through an impatient orderly—“Mrs. has expired”—
as if
she were a side of beef
or an embrace between lovers in an English gazebo.
•
Flaubert also said: “The most beautiful woman isn’t
beautiful at all
on the dissecting table, with her bowels
on her face,
one leg flayed, and an extinct cigar
reposing
on her foot.”
•
Turn the picture upside down
and the seven hanging fascists
with their arms outstretched
look much like their excited countrymen
screaming for a goal at the Stadio San Siro.
•
Fritz Haber
whose fertilizers increased the world’s food supply
sevenfold—Brod aus Luft;
whose gasses strangled allied troops in the trenches
of Ypres—Tod aus Luft;
whose wife, soon after, shot herself
in the heart with his service revolver, and the bullet
passing through her
made a sound like the gulls
baying outside.
•
There are men on the Esso station’s girders, communist partisans,
looking down
the bodies of the hanging dead,
as relaxed as steelworkers arguing baseball,
lighting cigarettes on a single steel beam, seventy stories
above Manhattan
in Ebbets’ Lunch on a Skyscraper. It’s the curling
fingers that give the dead away
as if in reaching for snow
instead they found sandpaper.
SARCLET
A gull with one wing dragging like a banner
humps down the ice-skinned cove. A thinning
man among the raw-boned cows, nostrils wide, salt burn.
Lung-colored water breaks like one hundred doors
slamming, shrinking shingles, and away.
Fat snow butts a fallen gutter. The overlong
cold-droozed grass slips from chapped hands thickening
in the naked wind, falling asleep at the line, sliding
darkly into pockets. As the eyes loosen
their bluish hold on the horizon, killdeer cut
over the dunes—the sky’s market light, the sun kneeling
between clouds in thin complicated continents.
THE MAYOR IN SKY-BLUE SOCKS
Deer herd in the icy fields. The mayor
in sky-blue socks hugs a chestnut,
biting the bark like a cube of sugar
between his teeth, but no tea coming,
just polite hatred, holding the place
where someone else had been, too dumb
even to scream. No one will ever love him
as that cat loved him. In this place night vanishes
men from the world; it’s no safer, nor
more attractive, but it’s improved appreciably.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
Morning ferry
after a night
of carnations,
a deserved toast.
Now, the rail station
burning. Too much
wind and cigarettes.
Green night
in my hair. Eyes
all over.
A STRAPPING BOY
After Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal
I was the theatre
of a fairyland
restored to life.
When the waltz ended,
the two soldiers
disengaged themselves.
And each of those two
halves of a solemn
and dizzy block
hesitated, and happy
to be escaping
from invisibility,
went off, downcast,
toward some girl
for the next waltz.
ORR’S ISLAND
So small
my neighbor
last autumn. Shadow
lake. Moon half.
Light
save us. Shade
his backlit
outline. His dead
ages. Who’d fail
his girl of sixteen—
his son, Vietnam,
god, reason? He’d
sit out there
in the wind, come
dark. Long dead.
UNEASE
The sun wore out
the mesh of morning
air, wind pitched
among weeds, the hum
of ducks like government
buildings. The swelling
perfectly upholstered
nursing home, the trees
sucking at the heat.
Monkfish on ice above
the slow, slick fluid
at the curb. Cabs go on
moving over the streets
like a fog, as if invisible,
as the beaked policeman
idiotically crosses himself.<
br />
COMPORTMENT
From such material it is almost
impossible to create a picture
of life. What was the color
of the travel permit a sergeant
would have needed to get from spring
to fall that year? One strips for oneself,
a kind of masochistic self-inspection
with a scarlet-billed crane outside
the window. A natural celibate,
a kind of anchorite. An event
at the limits. Outside, daylight sits
shining beneath the fog above an island
like water on a rabbit’s ear. The body
is useful, then isn’t. One goes
and sits at the mahogany desk
as if nothing has happened.
CONDENSATION CUBE
After David Alworth’s “Bombsite Specificity.”
The best way to visit Kelvedon Hatch bomb shelter is in the new
Alfa-Romeo. With its four-wheel disc brakes,
luxurious interior and road-holding ability, it’s safe, fast and pleasant
to drive. Just follow the sign: “Secret
Nuclear Bunker.” ’60’s-era mannequins in Burberry with moving legs
and breasts, loitering in corridors. A skinny husband
in the craw of a cold bed, with a snore like a toothache. Tranquil tensions
escalated. With striptease the décor is always
more important than the person disrobing. Whatever chaos reigns above—fallow
fields, the ponds cowering—
life underground is snappy, ordered, austere. A zone of leisure. How war can be
productive; constellating Nixon in the kitchen, celebrating appliances
and amenities. Baked beans, tomato juice, Nescafé, a rational level
of dread. Outside, night’s cold,
object’s cold; no different from a church. Condensation on Plexiglas. Descending
from a slope of debris, children swarm
the ruins. False-feathered cardinals for floral arrangements, pressed
& colored glassware, garden
tools. Typhoid from seashells cleaned improperly. How stupid and forgettable
adults are. To conceive of the world
as a target. Like a cantilevered goldfish. To vie for spots in the only shelter
in the neighborhood. Nowhere else
to go but another part of the airplane. To photograph ourselves as humans; to see
ourselves as bullets and bombs
see us. Children embroidered in a rug like musical instruments abandoned
in a field. Seeing all the different moments
the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains; like soldiers looting a clock
factory. Participant-observers; innocent
nobodies. The incompleteness of the past; the ongoingness of history. Dogs eating grass
beneath the dripping trees; the smell
of a white dress rained on. It is a country which you can imagine, for it is
pretty like a picture, as it lies there
amidst its landscape, like an artisanal snow-globe, which it owns.
NOTES
“Combine” owes a debt to the following:
Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia by Jonathan Brent
Wyatt Prunty’s forward to The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia
John Worthen’s D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider
Peter Hall in “Demolition Man: Harold Pinter and The Homecoming,” by John Lahr, in The New Yorker
“Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry #88,” in The Paris Review, interview by Will Aitken
“Anoosh’s Obituary for Himself, to His Son” features a small detail taken from an apocryphal story of Robert Creeley being served coffee with ice cream in place of cream by Louis Zukofsky.
“Winter Nights” contains a phrase reconfigured from Knut Hamsun’s Pan.
“Hiding Again, in London” owes a debt to:
Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station
“Becoming the Emperor: How Marguerite Yourcenar Reinvented the Past,” by Joan Acocella, in The New Yorker
The Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service, by Alison Light
“Sleeping with Uncle Lester” borrows particulars from David Cone’s Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South.
“Elebade” borrows from Samuel Beckett’s last prose piece, Stirrings Still.
“Undercover” features details from:
Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness
Frank Whitford’s Egon Schiele
Jennifer Michael Hecht’s The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France
David S. Reynolds’ John Brown, Abolitionist
“Unfurling the Hidden Work of a Lifetime,” by Seven Henry Madoff, in The New York Times
“Apprehended at a Distance” owes a debt to Elfriede Jelinek’s Nobel Lecture, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
“Clean Lines, Diffuse Lighting” borrows from E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel.
“He Speaks of Old Age” quotes briefly from:
“Domains: Sir John Mortimer: The Country Barrister,” by Edward Lewine, in The New York Times
Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust
William Feaver’s Lucien Freud
John Berryman quoting from a conversation he had with W.B. Yeats, as appears in “John Berryman, The Art of Poetry #16,” in The Paris Review, interview by Peter A. Stitt
“In Mourning” features detail from “Domains: Sir John Mortimer: The Country Barrister,” by Edward Lewine, in The New York Times.
“Now and Forever” features particulars from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and Maurice Merlea-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.
Fårö is a small Baltic Sea island north of the island of Gotland, off Sweden’s southeastern coast, on which Ingmar Bergman both lived and filmed many of his movies.
“A Polite History” uses specifics from Slavoj Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, and from the Graywolf anthology, New European Poets, edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer.
“The Revolution” borrows from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and “Putin’s Pariah,” by Andrew Meier in The New York Times. It also briefly paraphrases Walter Benjamin’s essay “Central Park,” one of his many writings on Baudelaire.
“Diorama—(Scarlet and Liver)” features detail from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
Sarclet is a small crofting village near Wick on the eastern coast of the Scottish Highlands.
“Comportment” utilizes specifics from:
Beatrice Hanssen’s writing on Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher in Critique of Violence
Anthony Cronin’s No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien
Saul Friendlander’s Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”
“Condensation Cube” takes its name, and perhaps more, from the art object of the same name by Hans Haacke. It further borrows from:
Jean-luc Godard’s Pierre le Fou
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
Tom Clark’s poem “Like musical instruments”
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five
David Alworth’s “Site Specificity”
Michael Winters
Adam Day is the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, a PEN Emerging Writers Award, and an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. His work has appeared in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, AGNI, The Iowa Review, Poetry Ireland, Guernica, and elsewhere. He coordinates The Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia, Scotland, and the Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest.
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