May speak to facts but never to opinion.
I was given a flag at my father’s grave.
Beside him, my mother in death has made
A baroque staircase, a variance, a rage
Brighter than archangels. Take it from me.
Totty as busy rain, climb it, climb it.
“…no unearned income/can buy us back the gait and gestures//to manage a baroque staircase, or the art/of believing footmen don’t hear/human speech.”—W.H. Auden, “Thanksgiving for a Habitat”
Psyche Showing her Sisters her Gifts from Cupid, painting by Fragonard, 1753 (collection of the National Gallery, London).
“Yes, I will be thy priest and build a fane/In some untrodden region of my mind,/Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,/Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind…”—John Keats, “Ode to Psyche”
Busyrane: a wizard in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Busyrane was associated with lust and with sexual love.
Watteau in rags: climb! For only far is
Free. The difference between a rag and a rapier
Catches fire at extreme of sky,
Disappearing just then, sex then, leaving
Adam there, Eve until a long time
Mother mine. The baroque smiles across me.
Edna Davis pray for me and my good conduct.
Sainted depth of focus undercroft pray.
All over again shall we manage
The staircase, a ways ahead,
Rags becoming rage, brightness falling through
Busy rain. June 18th, 1961.
The final license of a final day
Says you. And of the two sisters, one says I.
At my right hand always, when I am writing, sits The Hymnal of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (1940) inscribed in delicate blue handwriting,
For good conduct
From, Edna Davis
(Teacher)
June 18, 1961
V
A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should
be the first man to climb a tree.
—The Red Badge of Courage
Olney Hymn
not my life
this and
that is a
death I cannot
die
O’Neill
doesn’t even
know me
any old lady
on a porch
with a pill
shows me the
rain beginning
its godly
amble up
the green alley
my life
rain rain
on the chainlink
fences
on the ragged
red leaves
and green invisible
flowers
my three
children embracing
me
brush the handprint
of God
from my shirt
this and that
and that is
a death I cannot
die
For John Riley
The murdered poet opens to a torn page.
A ridiculous gesture, save for being true.
Mow the grass and the dragonflies feast.
Water the grass and birds feast.
North of England mariachi ampersand.
The enjambed trees make enormous portals.
Go apple, apfel, apples fall in parallel,
Each alone. Likeness is no likeness nor
Contrast a divide. The Holy Ghost
Proves God a murderer. I am on Christ’s side,
Horizontal with the slain whose shadows
Keep the grass together. Keep walking.
Worlds apart are all the worlds we know.
I lifted the skirts of childhood to say so.
Black Madonna
The day is mountains, too many mountains.
Counting them, I see that something happens
Between three and four. Black Madonna counts
The fingers and enigmas of her newborn son.
Lady, push the old car out of the snow,
The snow’s turning black. I hate to see it.
And when he is grown and I am gone,
The man is a trouble in the trees, not
One of us and not a part of me.
This now, this then, and this shape of animals
Striding across the end of time
As mountains, make sounds. To count them all
Is to become Christ. Snow comes after,
Like sweat in the music between three and four.
The Cattle Were Lowing
It might also have been a sleigh ride.
Mozart’s sister, a perfect oval and more
than perfect incline,
Tucked into a blanket, laughs
For the first and last time in her life.
Genealogies tickle a little, and then a long
pain afterwards—
Pain of connection, most awful
Pain of separation every Christmas.
Even angels find their armor
burdensome then.
We rode across the snowy plain. The earth
Was mirror-glass ground into a fine powder.
Oh do not stop. Do not stop ever. I
Will give you a book of matches if…
There is the first of three dances still to consider,
And poverty, sole purpose of the wren.
Hunting
A cloud, a rabbit, and a quail, these
Are the letters of Jesus’ name.
Ewer,
Dogs and a ewer:
Vermeer angers your awful roommate,
And still God’s mercy rains upon the past.
Put it together.
Donald, only you.
Vermeer—
Dogs and a ewer.
Either everything is music or nothing is.
Either we live in the past or there are more birds
Than can be counted.
Everything is music.
Gihon
They all wore little hats
Vermont that I
Can see, the river its coronet
Of yellow beetles—crawling,
Flying—the flowers wearing
The river for a hat.
I can see that
When I stand alone
Upon this acre as now
Sober and living, the same, the same.
They wore:
Hats.
They are not dead,
John and Johnny and John,
Which is a fine name for a river,
Only gone.
Having death out of the way,
The ill-fitting suicide discarded,
Pajama-like, on imaginary sand:
Good, good. We stand.
Air and Angels
What if they knew.
We shall unearth them,
Drink the alcohol from their matted hair.
Unclosing their eyes, we shall perhaps
Find that final retinal flare
Of the angel or eruption
Into new life of a birthing star.
Breathless is the word.
Comes a time there is no other sound
But intake, but inspiration
That tilts my head into an empty cloud.
The animal finds a way to the window.
The soul, in one last fling of desolation,
Dives underground where it must not go.
To Heaven
The working class is not a leaf. The leaves are leaves.
In oval portraits, child by child, the entire innocence
Of the world shrinks to nothing. Geminiani gone.
Dante done to death. I dreamed of a forest where my skin
Was gray and my loves were gray and all the leaves
Were golden. It was as good as an ocean.
No one said a word. There
was nothing to explain.
I wake each morning much too early. The low moon
Accuses. The distant traffic noises and first airplanes
Accuse. I reach for my glasses in the half-light hoping
For a moment or two with the ovals by my bed.
There is a distant nude who was a baby. There are two
Children reaching upwards towards a golden leaf.
In forests hereafter, they take me back to sleep.
Encantadas
Poisonous flower of the soul obscene rigging
Of tall ships tattooed onto blue water tattooed
Flesh of the soul Richard of Saint Victor told you
The body is inside the soul a-sail westward
To the islands of flowers and we shall be there
Early tomorrow we shall have awakened pure
From dreams of ourselves nude stranded in the rigging
Richard of Saint Victor has uttered prayers westward
From the black Encantadas rest safely darling
Put your faith into the clouds these white sheets sailing
Entire worlds early souls aweigh poisonous
Irises with wings I mean the ground is alive
Foxglove
I saw the grass giving live birth to grass,
Every blade open, pushing new,
Wet clumps into the light. I saw
Funnel clouds buried in the ground teeming
With young fish. There were also children
Running around with brightly colored pails.
Imagine what they did. It was springtime.
Vision runs up a hill called Vision. It never
Comes down. A religion of balloons stays aloft
A long time, long enough at least to cross over
Into non-conforming grassland—a reindeer,
Craggy, milkmaid running for her life land.
And poetry. Jesus please slow down.
The bad men are far behind us now.
Lunching among postcards of the Last Judgment,
We can breathe. We have time. We have plenty of it.
BOOK BENEFACTORS
Alice James Books wishes to thank the following individuals who generously contributed toward the publication of Drought-Adapted Vine:
Kazim Ali
For more information about AJB’s book benefactor program, contact us via phone or email, or visit alicejamesbooks.org to see a list of forthcoming titles.
RECENT TITLES FROM ALICE JAMES BOOKS
Refuge/es, Michael Broek
O’Nights, Cecily Parks
Yearling, Lo Kwa Mei-en
Sand Opera, Philip Metres
Devil, Dear, Mary Ann McFadden
Eros Is More, Juan Antonio González Iglesias, Translated by Curtis Bauer
Mad Honey Symposium, Sally Wen Mao
Split, Cathy Linh Che
Money Money Money | Water Water Water, Jane Mead
Orphan, Jan Heller Levi
Hum, Jamaal May
Viral, Suzanne Parker
We Come Elemental, Tamiko Beyer
Obscenely Yours, Angelo Nikolopoulos
Mezzanines, Matthew Olzmann
Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books, Edited by Anne Marie Macari and Carey Salerno
Black Crow Dress, Roxane Beth Johnson
Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, A Reading by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine
Tantivy, Donald Revell
Murder Ballad, Jane Springer
Sudden Dog, Matthew Pennock
Western Practice, Stephen Motika
me and Nina, Monica A. Hand
Hagar Before the Occupation | Hagar After the Occupation, Amal al-Jubouri
Pier, Janine Oshiro
Heart First into the Forest, Stacy Gnall
This Strange Land, Shara McCallum
lie down too, Lesle Lewis
ALICE JAMES BOOKS has been publishing poetry since 1973. The press was founded in Boston, Massachusetts as a cooperative wherein authors performed the day-to-day undertakings of the press. This collaborative element remains viable even today, as authors who publish with the press are also invited to become members of the editorial board and participate in editorial decisions at the press. The editorial board selects manuscripts for publication via the press’s annual, national competition, the Alice James Award. Alice James Books seeks to support women writers and was named for Alice James, sister to William and Henry, whose extraordinary gift for writing went unrecognized during her lifetime.
DESIGNED BY MIKE BURTON
∴
PRINTED BY THOMSON-SHORE
Drought-Adapted Vine Page 4