American Poetry
Page 25
pinches the sore spot Clarity, phantom limb pain,
cases of difficulty and crumbly hopes
despite twenty-twenty.
I lay down in your night soil, your leaf litter, bone meal
your superphosphates, it was your bright idea.
My polka dot insights on the absence or rarity
of realism get me nowhere, and show signs of distraction.
I had some difficulty distinguishing between varieties
of artificial sleeping lawns.
The why stuck like sequins about your face—
Just forget it.
The lower stages of your unconcern
are stunning, detachment rips the only array I had
cast in a frenzied outburst of
my position in the animal series:
unmanned, unslaked, collapsible.
Why doe I love?
So mine eye is enthralled to thy shape.
III.
On the imperfection of the peony record.
On the lapse of time as estimated by primal scenes.
On the endeavors of our unreasonable beauty collections.
On the unknown worlds of eyelash varieties.
On the flammable appearance of promises.
On their perfect number.
IV.
The stag threatened us with its horns; the weasel ran away with our lunch; the wolf tore a tent to pieces, then its owner; ducks snapped at our fingers; the woodcock defended its nest; the nightingale crashed into the car window; the goldfinches made a mess of the finial; the lions caught a rabbit and fought over the remains; and the hounds chased everything in sight.
V.
Dabbed distilled arriving
glossed current animal, waits
The bearing of these three great facts—
You suffer from overproduction.
You’re handmade.
A.E. could mean many things,
which one’s to be master is all.
(Amelia Earhart scraped the sky in a silver Electra changing her flight from west to east.)
Raptly, assemble piecework
Rapid increase!
Spikelet of laziness and love
to have the leafy facts of your unknown worlds
which is what colors mean, and natural light.
Ardently sweetheart
align our miscellaneous points of correspondence:
the blue striped shirt, unlikely details, bone horns,
and crush the ungetatable,
any reason for your endeavors seems true.
He varies most
Saturday afternoons ferns in the hair
pulling off your Ovid T-shirt
wet moss Sa tah lite of love
falling backward into the bushes.
VI.
Early Spring stepped across the stream in rubber boots.
I rolled the tapestry up and tucked it under my head.
Ground-cherry landscape, emphasis Narcissus
perceptions wave in and out, headlong date palms,
A.E. tied with a bow.
The fierceness of the specific, slow motion capture
drawn to their differences and origins,
clear you have the cruelty to be interesting.
The burden: wild roses behind you
display ciphers in silver yarns.
Hectic beauty prism saturation
stream horizon light streak
particulars use your feathers
veritable imperial collector
orange curl luster
if they were seemly to be seen.
See here my heart,
fringed facts,
the sooty nose, the surface
so round, so rare, a radiant thing
whitewashed with expectation
so I ate my words.
Clatter of details asks all attention
complex relations of plants and animals—
Risked enthusiasm, geometrical ratios of increase
in bold irreality. It’s easy to look at
dark green edged with yellow, articulated leaves
fragrant lit oval, the whole’s the hard part.
A bark, night-silvered
I fall victim to the symmetry of scenes
look for you in the break in the trees.
From Preterient
Susan Howe
Teachings on Style and the Flower
In 1402, the Japanese Noh performer and aesthetician Zeami Motokiyo wrote several items concerning the practice of the Noh in relation to an actor’s age. He said a boy’s voice begins to achieve its proper pitch at eleven or twelve, only then can he begin to understand the noh.
But this flower is not the true flower not yet.
Irish Literary Revival
1926. Mary Manning having wandered on the Brontë moors in Yorkshire, carries a copy of The Scholar Gypsy home to Dublin. She always takes it with her when she goes out walking. It is 1948. I am to read aloud the last three paragraphs of Wuthering Heights for the sixth grade public reading contest at the Buckingham School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The book is my mother’s choice. Poetry is our covenant. She believes tables move without contact I am skeptical. If what is present to the mind at one time is distinct from what is present in another what is belief? Hoosh. Not in the Catholic graveyard not in the Protestant one either. Bird in the hand worth two of its own emptiness. This flower, taken from a scrap of paper, is said to be the Ammellus or Italian starwort of Virgil. Long ago Ogham stones were erected to commemorate the dead in rune-like ciphers then memory for voices then the rapid movement of ballads. Nearly all go to Scotland anglicity. I have no option but to be faithful to unlucky half human half unassuaged desiring dark shade you first Catherine. Lexical attention must be guarded from the dark age of childhood though lengthen night and shorten day. You are my altar vow. This cowslip is a favorite among fairies.
The Gate
A double cowslip bears one flower out of another. It remains in pastures long after the grass has been eaten away a stage name under the true one
Mind the hidden
Dedication to M enough
to the wood if you have
aconite and poppy she
said “Lie still, sleep well”
Quiet for it is a small
world of covered bone
Come veil the thought of
I shall dress primrose
_______
Rookh which stray
account the dark sea-
robber’s map rose
of a hundred leaves
who learns ARABY
Even in the old story
arrow ragged Lallah
_______
Boiled milk was greatly
appreciated a step on the
road to luxury and there
was slim made of bitter
potatoes broken up when
kindly cottagers strove
to cherish and welcome
Patrick Brontë’s childhood
Their guest strove well
_______
Homemade bread was
fadge the raised soda
bap or scone came later
baked on a griddle or
girdle while baking was
called “harning” but
mashing up potatoes
in meal and flour was
called “baking”
_______
Advanced from Emdale cabin
to Lisnacreevy cottage neither
sought nor accepted sympathy
Hoarded his savings he didn’t
dread hobgoblins Mrs. Gaskell
exaggerated the facts in this
matter as have many others
Carried his webs to Banbridge
Could weave and read at once
_______
At supper sowans fine enough to
thread a needle the Brontë mind
never ran smoothly his children
were given ghost stories monsters
I am grateful archaeology Galway
oral history warcry boat curragh
When stealthy in shawl slumber
speaking from memory set forth
by moonlight written fact Irish
only in name limestone traveller
_______
Mary Manning presents this
book to her Dear Sister as a
token not to be appreciated
so must act esteem affection
Affection take this book Dear
to every moment she cannot
Invisible she grows tired and
beside vast catacomb Thebes
_______
Reader of poetry this book
contains all poetry THOOR
BALLYEE in seven notes for
stage representation May
countryside you reader of
poetry that I am forgotten
Long notes seem necessary
Unworthy players ask for
legend familiar in legend
the arrow king and no king
_______
A character walks on thatch
bridge across the deep stage
Material image and her mate
Chanting within her role she
cannot step beyond invisible
right foot lifted in half step
Where is he going because this
play is famous for April sage
green kagota kneeling piety is
a dominant restraint he does
not stoop as in pitiful reign
Noh lies in its concentration
You child of Atsumori old cloak
faded gown sleeve flung open
_______
Fabled founder in darkness
in Greek authentic helmet
illumination his heirs and
assigns forever as if wives
in themselves loosened the
murderous shawls so they act
astonishment but all terror
exactly as I have written I
am in ash blue gray Kogota
costume till the one here who
is the child Chorus comes in
Now Ireland in rebellion I
am arrived at upper memory
eroded base on shallow step
Seven Hands
Cole Swensen
THE HISTORY OF THE HAND
Once. you said turning
is still saying
such theories: star bomb bird and so on equally
convinced, we started once
to hold
used to mean to anoint before it meant
to bless
or lessen
or whiten the sky
“Hands appear in the earliest” (framed, sized)
overflowing the margins. The man
born with two left hands was born a grown man.
The man born with his hands full of hands later died.
There’s no mystery to this. You listened, looking down,
counting, thinking, And?
Assyrian hands were carved of stone.
Egyptian hands were the point of the tale.
The Gothic hand, like no other, launched. That of the Renaissance,
early and late,
fragile and breaks, a wave on light.
Ghirlandaio had hands of willow, while
every hand that Dürer ever drew thrived.
Most hands are startlingly small, like eyes.
THE HAND THAT
The hand that thinks, that lies inside, that lines
the moving hand; the ventricles of the thinking hand and what it thinks
and what it sees (because it does
Thinks: “When you tie a knot
you can utterly forget, you can think
(can be thinking
of something else at the time) that the muscle is itself memory
lives again a folded time alive I tie.
I thought nothing of it
then. Type. Watch what
lives without you. To have harbored
as mutiny that doesn’t even bother The hand
was (once an) animal, a prior
Architecture: Archlessly, each one.
There’s nothing in the frame.
There’s an empty frame on the wall.
I love you more than that I keep thinking that
the hand is sky
though I’m not yet
sure exactly how.
THE HAND AS
The hand began an animal and from thereon did
some guile that soft
plural kite
in
flock
did
herd
who thus shard
comes to mind first I mean, note
the exploded
stasis
used to mean star
or stop
in every native language
you hold it up. Stark. Startle. Arp. When you hold up your hand
and the world stops
and you find yourself looking at the back of your hand,
which, the longer you look at it, looks starved.
THE HAND DEFINED: I
How is the We define the Where begin? an elbowful of muscle
fine as an inner ear
Those who say the definition of the hand begins in the shoulder say those who say (they abbreviate) (mya): between 3.9 and 4.2 Million Years Ago, Australopithecus anamemsis: To find. Fossils of the hands and feet are so much rarer than those of skulls. Refined. We’re back to the inner ear. To hold onto earth hearing
with the fingertips all those singly
millions of early braille, caressing a an
armful of earth in falling
and is still falling
the entire
structure of the back and shoulder
and enormous parts of the brain.
FAN
Species of when, that outward
drift, a piano under every lens.
It was a compliment:
the hands of a surgeon or of a violin.
It was hot that summer and every day thereafter
Slipped through the trees. The vanes of a fan
are often made from
bone she said I own this one
of painted air of where
was it painted where air spears
and folds like ribs turned to leaves
turned to sand. :the opposite of a fist
is these hands gone up before a face. Summer gate. Sun made of gave.
HELD
The cup the hand becomes
a bell
is first a shape, then there’s something
soft in your hand. The hand is a curved
thing. The held being
a function of the inverted arch
and ease of vault
when looking up, an immense
Walk backward from here to the sea.
across the street
the hand always curves
in the holding. The held, its own being
a mollusk shell
all phalanges and grippage
Was now surrounds, what might
be the connection between tool use, language,
and the spiral gene determining
twenty-one muscles set out to sea
on a perfectly lovely day the human hand fits
the human waist just above the hip like, you might say, a glove.
GRASP
As the hand carved first its arc in air
a
corresponding
sweep through the
brain
was made aviary spaces something like
airplane hangars in their relative dimensions
and thus the impression of standing
under a sky that you can see. And the supple wrist, as it turned,
turned too in the mind and acquired
>
All we can do, say, with the thumb and a single finger was once.
What
can you remember doing first thing this morning among
answers and the liquid trees
Who picked this
fruit of just
the key in the door got there by itself. The lights just grew on the
trees.
A Dialogue
Susan Howe and Cole Swensen
The following began as a dialogue around a reading that Susan Howe gave at the Centre Georges Pompidou on May 3, 2000. We would like to thank the Centre, and particularly Marianne Alphant and Hannah Zabawski, for planning and facilitating the reading. And we would like to thank Dominique Fourcade and Claude Royet-Journoud, who thought up this project and to whom it is dedicated.
We begin mid-conversation …
SUSAN HOWE: For instance, the Metaphysical Club—a group of people from different professions who met in Cambridge between 1871–74. They presented papers and discussed them, all very informally. Peirce, William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. attended meetings. Chauncey Wright, another academic reject who has almost disappeared from American intellectual history, was a key member. The term “pragmatism” was first used during these meetings. By Peirce.
The members of the Club represented various disciplines; lines were not so clearly drawn as they are now. And the mix added richness and riskiness, as in post-Reformation thought and practice, when scientists, philosophers, lawyers, mathematicians, politicians, ministers, playwrights and poets shared ideas and discussions. Newton never considered his religious cosmology independent of his science. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, science was called “natural philosophy.”
COLE SWENSEN: An interesting difference in social organization, as well as a different quality of curiosity—more inclusive, more voracious—a curiosity that caused things. It must have increased everyone’s awareness of connections and echoes among fields.
HOWE: Yes. The connections I’d like to explore are with various evangelical and revivalist enthusiasms in the early and mid-nineteenth century in upper New York State. The area was so repeatedly swept by such enthusiasms that it became known as the Burned-over District. One movement was the rise of spiritualism, which in its modern form originated there in 1848.
SWENSEN: What a year that was! It’s almost as if a year can be volatile in and of itself, and everything that passes through it, event and object alike, is magnified.
HOWE: You are not kidding. Even in supposedly backwater places like the Genesee River Valley. I am, after all, a poet of place, and I feel this part of upper western New York State is haunted or perhaps charged.