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Model of a City in Civil War

Page 4

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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ok; we do

  hope you enjoy it! Founded in 1994 as an independent, nonprofit,

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  literary nonfiction—genres increasingly neglected by commercial

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