Drought-Adapted Vine
ALSO BY DONALD REVELL
Tantivy
Last Verses (translation)
The Bitter Withy
The Illuminations (translation)
The Art of Attention
A Thief of Strings
A Season in Hell (translation)
Pennyweight Windows: New and Selected Poems
Invisible Green: Selected Prose
The Self-Dismembered Man (translation)
My Mojave
Arcady
There Are Three
Alcools (translation)
Beautiful Shirt
Erasures
New Dark Ages
The Gaza of Winter
From the Abandoned Cities
© 2015 by Donald Revell
All rights reserved
Alice James Books are published by Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc.,
an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington.
Alice James Books
114 Prescott Street
Farmington, ME 04938
www.alicejamesbooks.org
eISBN: 978-1-938584-29-9
Cover art: Bartram, William. Travels, 1793. Plate 27, “Bartram’s Evening Primrose.” Courtesy of the Sterling Morton Library, The Morton Arboretum.
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CONTENTS
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
I
1. Chorister
2. A Shepherd’s Calendar
3. Alphabet City: An Autobiography
4. Beyond Disappointment
5. In Paradise Alone
6. Letters to an English Friend
7. “Ridiculous winter flower”
II
1. The Creation of the Stag
III
1. To Shakespeare
2. Debris
3. The Library
4. They Are Not Making Anything. They Are Working.
5. Pitty-Pat
6. Mountain’s Edge
7. France
8. After Clare
9. Borodin
10. New Colors
11. Tantivy
12. Graves Variations
13. Deluge
IV
1. The Watteau Poem
V
1. Olney Hymn
2. For John Riley
3. Black Madonna
4. The Cattle Were Lowing
5. Hunting
6. Gihon
7. Air and Angels
8. To Heaven
9. Encantadas
10. Foxglove
• Book Benefactors
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank the editors of the following for giving many of these poems their first appearance in print:
Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day
American Poet
The American Poetry Review
Bat City Review
Catch Up
Conjunctions
Connotation Press: An Online Artifact
Fifth Wednesday Journal
The Literary Review
New American Writing
Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (Second Edition)
Plume
Poetry
Unstuck
VOLT
FOR JAMES LONGENBACH
I
…what we changed
Was innocence for innocence…
—The Winter’s Tale
Chorister
Cello or clarinet, it was smoke, smoke,
Just as Paradise fading over time at the road’s
End is a black and white photograph
Of Paradise. Elementary schoolboy
Leaning into the hedgerow somehow still,
Such am I. A car passes. And then no
Traffic at all, for hours, for years it seems.
Make a little music, boy. Light a cigarette
Found in the roadway, a sign from God.
I remember the bitter taste of small berries
Before the summer began, and then
A bitter taste again in early autumn. Sweetness,
A little portion, like a wisp of smoke
Mistaken for music. A lonely car
Is all the traffic ever comes. Walk on.
I am entering a photograph fades with me
And no one else. Ahead, a derelict
Sound in the shape of cellos disappears
Into pale, gray foliage. Childhood’s
Amazon River hounded out of church,
Out of the painfully small portion
Of ripe berries any soul can find,
Empties into Paradise one white boy.
A Shepherd’s Calendar
A boy’s face above a bicycle
One hour after sunrise
Riding west-south-west insists
Out of marred and moving whiteness
Wisdom consists entirely
Of afterwards, of far ahead
Where time is finished with itself
Just as the mountains over there
Are finished with the sun. For now,
Joy. For an hour at least,
The effortless white of the wheels.
Boy, to mar is to marvel.
To be the wound of the sun
On Time’s face is beautiful.
Alphabet City: An Autobiography
AUGUSTINE
God is in the kitchen drawer,
And His love is infinite.
BEES
Are dying everywhere, and it
Will be the death of all gardens.
CHILDREN
Are bees.
DANTE
Has a box of crayons he’d like to share.
EVERYWHERE
There is one flower
Afraid of the sunlight.
FEAR
Desolates the colors,
Pigment of bees, pigment of children.
GUEVARA
Has a magical book. When
Someone reads it, she becomes a bird
No soldier can harm.
HEART
Is a hollow island
With hands of its own.
Those hands crush the heart.
ISOLDE
Is making her Christmas list
At the kitchen table. From time to time,
She pats the enormous dog at her feet.
JESUS
Held a buttercup beneath my chin.
There’s no going back.
KENTUCKY
I’m just saying, in the middle of the night
I’ve seen horses thrown into fires,
And they were all praying together.
LOVE
Ask St. Augustine.
MIND
Not what I thought you were. I thought
You were myself, a step away. But no,
You are that crazy flower in Christ’s hand.
NEW
/> York.
ORIGINAL
If only God had built a little house for Himself
Beside the apple tree and lived in it.
PLATO
Soccer cheese bum. I tried to teach my infant son to say
“Socrates is a bum.”
QUIET
Not this side of extinction.
ROBERTA
Was my sister’s name. It was she
Hung the bigger children on a fence for me.
SISTER
Come back.
TIME
Why can’t we be friends? I remember one time
I was walking through Central Park and left
No footprints in the snow. We were friends that day,
Weren’t we?
UNDERHILL
Was the name of our subway station,
Entirely above ground. It was also
Our telephone exchange.
VEINS
Little veins are bursting all over my legs
Like spiders bursting in the trees.
WHITMAN
Tell me, did you mean it? Is death really
As wonderful as you say?
XANADU
“Sloppy Joe’s” sounds just about right. But still,
It would be foolish to forget that Coleridge
Was the best of us all.
YELLOW
The flowers have feasted upon bees and children.
Z
Alive still alive.
Beyond Disappointment
Ascending through yellow broom and sluggish
Red-brown wasps, I find the new house.
In no way does it resemble the old.
Let there be no comparisons then.
No kisses before or shirt-sleeves after.
I pull the comforter over my head,
And it is warm. The women spinning
In the next room weep as they spin.
Hence and farewell valediction: “life’s journey.”
It makes no sense. The children mock us with it.
A typewriter beneath the Christmas tree
Calls to the ice caps. Illustrated monthlies
Burn in the wasps’ burnt nest. It is
Such perfections make the sun to rise.
In Paradise Alone
The very wasp of flowers is ago,
Almost ago; there’s one, then one is two.
Some weeks from now, an hour
Writes it. Down in a book it goes,
Into the cluster, purple wings folded
Upon its breast which, after all, a shadow
Gnaws, knows. The one is two, distantly,
Never to know a wasp so close, a thing
As near as flowers. Time makes strangers.
The wind comes close to the ground, taking
Colors of bested soil into daylight.
The wasp unfolds. Flowers sing for joy,
“One at least! One at least!” Tatterdemalion my.
Letters to an English Friend
1.
No want of empire, only
Of wings, of true career.
Say mavis: match to strike.
Say threshing floor:
The republic evermore.
We are killing each other,
Not skating. These are
The last days and no
Kidding. The undersong
Perfected me, adored you.
Hart and hind, heart in hand.
William James places a white hand
Upon white Henry. The picture
Sets fire to the hair
Of two oceans.
2.
Wild fires out of control
In the ill spirit of
This summer’s charity:
An election year, in-
Finite specimen hours.
Martin, you meant beauty
By wasps and lake water,
As I by dragonfly
And fires. Out of control,
Out of control and still
Not free. America
Rhymes all with algebra.
No wings for you or me.
No water for the fires.
3.
The loan is the Lazarus
Rain also saying late
Autumn into the tree
Whose one reply is
To flower to flower
Out of sequence as
There is no sequence now
Not any longer
Lazarus rhymes with Jesus
As James with Andrew
In between the syllables un-
Wind the winding sheet
Autumn comes again
Anymore hot for it hot
4.
Or lifts, as love was said to do, its shower.
It all comes round: Heraclitus, us;
Marvell, us; Hudson and Ouse.
I was thinking of death and of
Its curious elections. But love!
Unspoken illicit love in the lotos rose,
One and the same, is a shower too.
And so the visits to the grave
Are women, arms akimbo,
Smiles below ground. I
Will send a picture too, if you
Will call our river by a briar name,
Entire lifetimes in the swimmer’s sound.
5.
Mine are the lesser trees
Nevertheless look upwards
Into the paloverde the topmost
Frivol branches a balloon
Blue for a boy my birthday
Remembered in heaven by
Christ of the lesser trees.
I cannot join you in Italy
But a Desert Father
A sort of fritillary noising
Balloon bellflowers only
This June morning gives me
An errand to give to you—
Taste two of the wines in Orvieto.
Which is the greener? Which is the color
Of summer straw after all the green has gone?
“Ridiculous winter flower”
Ridiculous winter flower
More perfect butter
On the ground the disused
Ground beloved
Must survive must live to tell
Another orphan
Something raised us
Out of the dust
Something gave us color
A gold also tender
I shall not tell its name
I’m tired
Laughter and piano teacher
Ridiculous winter flower
The gate’s wide open now
II
Is it a time to wrangle, when the props
And pillars of our planet seem to fail,
And Nature with a dim and sickly eye
To wait the close of all?
—WILLIAM COWPER, “The Task”
The Creation of the Stag
I dreamed the red chapel uncompleted, tall
In its iron graphic scaffolding.
Manhattan was two cities, and the chapel
Colored them red: birth and death; arrival
And departure. My mother was glad. Pointing
Up into the sky where a zodiac
Pinwheeled at her pleasure, she showed me
Taurus and Gemini, Scorpio
And Gemini covered in fresh paint.
Christ will stand there, just there, as today
Color and tiny, hazardous stars hang
Intervening fires. The middle of life
Is nothing. A nuclear pinfold frightens
Children frightened already. The chapel there
Rises above all of it, is a new deer.
Canary-yellow corduroy trousers
Embarrass the dream, as though a city
Were made of wine stains, red, my mother’s wine,
The yellow of imagined birds
My father’s disaster, his paint, his car.
The Gemini, with Taurus between them,
>
Smile. The chapel is in need of repair.
Smile. Rome was built in a day like today.
Only look into the sky to see
The pattern of God’s pleasure—
Palette and planchette, color wheel—
Whose center never moves beneath the weight
Of the center. To the right is treason;
To the left, blindness. Between the Gemini,
Someone turns to ask: “Why are you crying?”
Here is a plate with an alphabet
Of flowers. Here is a zodiac.
I weep for the Gate of Kiev, for death
Saluting death with bells, backwards into
Things unfinished, like martyrdoms, from which
Cities arise only to be captured
By scaffolding. A man named Modest mourns
An architect called Victor. In the limousine
(For this is a procession—every poem
A procession) a pretty girl smokes. Outside
Of the car, clouds darken invisible
Windows. Cruelty is not a game here, not
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