by Jay Rogoff
VENERA
VENERA
POEMS
JAY ROGOFF
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS BATON ROUGE
Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 2014 by Jay Rogoff
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
LSU Press Paperback Original
FIRST PRINTING
DESIGNER: Mandy McDonald Scallan
TYPEFACE: Minion Pro
PRINTER AND BINDER: Maple Press
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rogoff, Jay.
[Poems. Selections]
Venera : Poems / Jay Rogoff.
pages cm
“LSU Press Paperback Original”—T.p. verso.
ISBN 978-0-8071-5429-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN
978-0-8071-5430-4 (pdf) —ISBN 978-0-8071-5431-1 (epub) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5432-8 (mobi)
I. Title.
PS3568.O486V46 2014
811'54—dc23
2013018693
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
For Penny
who brought me to Ghent and elsewhere
Contents
1) ONLY CHILD
Courtship at Isenheim
A Son For My Ex!
The Outer Banks
No Dream
The Kindergarten Heart
The Doors of Siena
Gingkos
Redemption Center
Practicing
Barbara
For Malcolm in Carolina
Night Light
The Porch
Adirondack Scenic
Butterfly Effect
Translations
Dazzle
Intercourse
Orienting
Mother and Child
Life Sentence
Dirty Linen
Only Child
Laughter
2) VENERA
The Reader
The Mother
The Whore
The Light
The Window
The Daughter
The Door
The Vessel
The Virgin
The Sister
The Field
The Ark
The Queen
The Handmaid
The Soul
The House
The Earth
The Fountain
The Garden
The Singer
The Bride
The Mirror
The Table
The Lover
Acknowledgments
VENERA
1)
Only Child
Every child is an only child.
—YIDDISH PROVERB
Courtship at Isenheim
About love
no one said anything.
Raising his hand from under
his wing
he raised her above
all women. No wonder
as she knelt
in that heavy velvet gown,
fallen hair flung down her shoulder, she felt
let down
and turned her coloring cheek.
Her fluttering valves made her sneak
a look
perfect for church
had there been a church,
sly sabbath eyes nailing boys, not the book
in her lap, where a virgin would conceive—
who could believe
it?—a look
she knew could kill.
But an angel?
He was something, beautifully made.
Decked in gold brocade
and red silks that swirled
mysteriously around him, he kept his scepter
back, kept her
at arm’s length from his curled
hair, his fingers
articulate as a dancer’s.
In the red room
the flint striking the steel chime
of his bedchamber gaze
ignited her desire to press
his beestung lips to hers.
She would have died for that! but heard
his sentence promise
no angel,
no man.
He gave his word.
What could she say?
How could she seduce
heaven?
She felt her heart
palpitate, her blood
hurtle
as like a torch his eyes
sought her averted face.
Her free,
unnatural
Ecce
hid in its art
her nerves’ unbearable thought:
an only son
who would possess
the only limbs to tangle
with, the only heart to beat
against her own.
A Son For My Ex!
When you breathed again your smile
on that greening urban hill
looked shocked as hell—
why did I whirl you and steal
that kiss? All afternoon in the dark bar
scotch chased with beer
had helped us deduce you from your bore
of a fiancé. Now bare
trees waved sticks blessing
us like lightning,
conducting us starstruck. Dancing,
your arched foot glancing
some fragile chandelier each time I’d lift,
breath held, hands on your hard flesh, I loved
you forever aloft.
Who could keep you? Left
for sheerer faces, darker plunges, the soul
evaporates like alcohol.
Flame licking my skin shrunk me in my small
hours, light licking the wall
and dying, leaden, the bed
enormous, no matter who shared
it, till one day waking re-glued
like a mug, I no longer knew you were mad,
no longer conceived our marital
chapter as ice-picked, hole-
pocked, inscrutable
as braille,
no longer wanted you in hell.
No jokes, no spell
or incantation that some vile
thing suckle you awake. No tail.
Well
in spite of all
I wish you and the baby well
in spite of all.
The Outer Banks
We walked out to watch the sun set
into the sound,
sinking sullen feet
into the sand.
The sun gleamed with a cooling flame
like memory,
like an apparition or dream.
You followed me
that twilight, late spring, sawgrass cutting
our chilled flesh;
wind whipped your hair forward, shrouding
your face.
Too cold! you said, turning to walk
back to the house
we’d rented, and I watched your back,
your thighs and Nikes
disappear. Orpheus.
In light like blood
I fought for breath while furies
or gulls said
nothing, hovering. The sun exploded
in a streak
over the sea; on shore I shouted
in the dark.
No Dream
My lips brushed it—or did I dream
that nape exhaling such perfume,
those fine hairs wicking it erect
in my breath’s breeze to conduct
odors too
thick, too sweet to swallow,
pregnant with roses and vanilla?
Did I know that softest skin,
a patch unsullied by the sun,
so smooth the fingers of the blind
would hush when knowledge reached its end?
How many groped that brailleless land
where breathless touch translates to sound?
How many watched you turning, deaf,
as if you’d known no human life,
as if you heard no drowning scream
as you sailed out the crowded room?
The Kindergarten Heart
Kindergarten heart,
oh Judy May,
how have the blue years hurt
you? Memory makes the downy
hollow of your upper
lip lovely as any form rubble
shot from the mallet of a sculptor
has left in marble.
I moved away. All moved away
those years where Judy May
and Lynn Soffer
sit sipping milk, eyes
lit, mischievous,
their woodblock fortresses
guarding the future
where their sighs
betray me
and offer
love to men unworthy.
Their cascade of chatter can’t hide
the cynical curve
of lip, the speculation of
eyes that watch
the pudgy kid
in drab olive,
and bewitch
him into a dream
love
will chrysalize and save
him, cracking to free him from the sad,
balding, divorced
man he must become,
who sits in a room imagining
their stares
at evening
into their children’s eyes
and remembers
when the kindergarten teacher
Mrs. Silverman
sat him in the corner after the kiss
he still swears
each awarded him when he handed each
a handmade valentine.
The Doors of Siena
Glimpsed off a chamber, down an alley, out of
a fragrant window, they open—onto what?
a garden, a plaid bedspread; the infinite
or nothing; a de Chirico perspective:
skewed columns with a shank of sharpened light,
a misremembered shortcut
rushing you bang into a locomotive.
Standing at ends of long hallways I’ve heard
through far doors slanting open—onto whom?—
a nothing, a rustle, a fleeting word
I thought I recognized, a stifled laugh—
and known why the Sienese would paint a room
you’d pace as if blindfolded on a cliff.
Gingkos
The fallen gingko
leaves lit the avenue
of left trees. Among a washed-out fall their yellow
dazzled like a dance
floor
lit under lit-up couples
far
under the unruffled bare gingkos
and steel skies
decorous above
that yellow shocking as a bit plum’s bloodiness
to a young girl.
The gold leaf-
fall
would cushion
our step
smoothing our strewn
way. Why couldn’t we stop
our path’s diverging, the dance
rent to prowl
narrow pavements
singly toward bars or embraces,
to root in exotic
aromas, locked rooms, dark houses,
all while those local
immigrants the domestic
gingkos
spread
their brilliant bed
their hospitable
fall?
Redemption Center
Flying home, high over
dreaming states, hurtling through cloud
I shut my eyes and stand
in air-conditioned
weather beyond weather,
my beautiful young mother and father
on each side, squeezing either hand
of their little boy. We glided
down dazzling aisles and I saw leather
in the mind of God—
a Mickey Mantle–model glove.
Heaven!
But we hurtled past to offer
our accounting: the dog-eared books
infinite with stamps I’d lick and stick
lick and stick
long rainy days till my hands stuck
to the walls and our walnut furniture:
a shriek,
and a hot washcloth scalding to the quick
my gummy fingers. But immaculate clerks
now tallied and forgave
smiled and forgave
and handed us a toaster oven,
a miracle
no one on earth had seen before.
Shut years ago—a shell
smashed, gutted, its Muzak strings
mute. Once a thousand stamp books’ wings
glittered gold-green plumage
on every fluttering page.
Long fledged. A naked mansion, an urban hell.
As we descend
my dream
of the lost center cracks open. I’m middle-
aged with parents
in the ground.
Can we redeem
nothing we love?
5
Cents
says the empty bottle
in my hand.
Practicing
Debussy at dusk.
When her fingers press
music through twilight like the musk
of peonies
I smell
a place
where the risk of a kiss
once dragged her through hell.
At a seventh in Chopin drops
start
in her eyes,
start
drizzling
onto her practicing
hands. She stops.
I think she’s thinking about her ex
practicing across town. I fear she’s
far
from contracting
their decade
into a prelude,
compressing it like a concertina
and extracting
the air,
squeezing
it into something
finely
varnished.
Instead
at the piano she opens the box
releasing
her demon
into the dusk, closing
with it, forcing
the oxygen
back in
its dusty chambers,
rehearsing
with each chord
the hard
shadow he cast in that room
brilliantly lit
one night,
the voice that told
her Go on.
Her damp glance
catching and releasing
me (exhale),
her hands
day by day know their skill,
recovering
her fingering,
foot firm on the loud pedal,
practicing.
Barbara
In a barbaric world
child against father
a grisly world
refusing all color
the good
townspeople manifest
an intense civic pride
fixed
on their rising tower.
Can good
come stone
by stone?
The stonecutters who hack
rock
the quarriers have quarried
and carriers have carried
by trestle or trundled by barrow; the crane
operator who with his fabulous engine
raises
towards white heaven
these monstrous
precision-cut opaque
jewels
so the masons might set them lightly mortared
ever higher; the architect
whose limitless
vision
makes him squint as he stares
into the sun;
even the fine gentlewomen
come to gawk at the work
and gasp at the profane
babble
of men at manual labor—all revel
in this shared belief
in the pride
of the town,
in rock
and its redemption,
in its Gothic
potential
its promise
its life.
Amid all the hubbub
she sits the hub
of industry
the primum mobile
of the economy
of this town fixed on blank sky.
Among this populace gazing up
she studies the book in her lap
a rare girl
who likes to read whose single-
mindedness can blot the cruel
eclipse of reason like a tower
ob-
scuring the sun.
Her robe
blankets her hill
unfurling in every direction.
The town has devoted the tower,
all broken
arches squat blocks and impossible
tracery
a gift from a grieving father,
to her
this cracked
jewel
refracting
a light
crazed and invisible
as air
a light that can penetrate
sacred stone
and inspire the heart-pure
to kneel.
Such stub-
bornness (her patrimony)
has set her in stone.
Resolute as stone
the hollow of her upper lip
betrays not a tremble
her eyelids not a flutter
at the prospect
of her high prospect
removed from every creature
(her sister; her brave terrier)
hunger
for dowry
tracery
for lace, palm fronds