ALSO BY WILLIAM LOGAN
POETRY
Sad-Faced Men (1982)
Difficulty (1985)
Sullen Weedy Lakes (1988)
Vain Empires (1998)
Night Battle (1999)
Macbeth in Venice (2003)
The Whispering Gallery (2005)
Strange Flesh (2008)
Deception Island: Selected Earlier Poems (2011)
Madame X (2012)
CRITICISM
All the Rage (1998)
Reputations of the Tongue (1999)
Desperate Measures (2002)
The Undiscovered Country (2005)
Our Savage Art (2009)
Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure (2014)
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Copyright © 2017 by William Logan
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Ebook ISBN: 9781524705671
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Logan, William, 1950 November 16- author.
Title: Rift of light / William Logan.
Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2017] | Series: Penguin poets
Identifiers: LCCN 2017007683 | ISBN 9780143131823 (paperback)
Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General.
Classification: LCC PS3562.O449 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007683
Cover design: Lynn Buckley
Cover art: The Iceberg, c. 1875, by Frederic Edwin Church. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago / Art Resource, NY
Version_1
for Jamie Fellner and Karen Jardim
CONTENTS
Also by William Logan
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
I
Thoreau
Leaf Color
On the Late Latin Light
Martin Luther, 1525
Bad Garden
Bruno
Clouds
The Clipper Ships
In Medias Res
The Landscape as Holy Order
The Abandoned Crow
Fall in the Sketch Pad
The Needle
Complaint
Midges in Material Form
The Retention Pond
Venice in Rough Light
II
In the Dedication Lay the Index
Long Island. Summer. 1968.
Mug Shot
On the Consolations of Faith
The Kiss
The Harbor
Sincerity
The Storm
Melville in the Straits
The Midwife Toad
To a Former Beauty
Venice in the Ordinary
The Locked Closet
After Eden
A Garret in Paris
Moth
III
Little Compton
My Father in the Shadows
Mary Sowle
The Mail
The Box Kite
On the Banks of the Allegheny
The Other Other Country
The Other Life
Mysteries of the Armchair
Sonnet
Descending into Philadelphia
In the Gallery of the Ordinary
Sunday Out
The Field
Sea Turtles
My Grandfather’s Second Wife to My Father, 1958
Christmas Trees
Snow
The Servants’ Stairs
IV
Louise Brooks
The End of the Road
The Pheasant in His Empires
Dürer’s Stag Beetle
Then, in the Trumpetings
Venice in the Old Days
The Venetian Dog
Winter Before Winter
Winter in Cloud
On Hair as a Revolutionary Mode of Dress
The War
A Cloudy Sunset in East Anglia
Night World
The Troubles
On Reading That the Ozone Is in Danger from Air Conditioning and Amphibious Life from Shampoo
There Was
Lt. Selkirk on the Weymouth
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Battersea Review: After Eden; A Cloudy Sunset in East Anglia; The Midwife Toad. Birmingham Poetry Review: Bad Garden; Descending into Philadelphia. Blackbird: Sincerity. Boulevard: Fall in the Sketch Pad; Venice in Rough Light. Carolina Quarterly: On the Consolations of Faith. Cincinnati Review: The Needle. Compose: The Locked Closet; The Other Other Country. Hopkins Review: The Kiss; Winter in Cloud; Sunday Out. Hudson Review: The Pheasant in His Empires. Journal: Winter Before Winter. Journal of Florida Studies: The Retention Pond. Life and Legends: Moth. Nation: Snow. New Criterion: The Harbor; Leaf Color; Mug Shot; The Venetian Dog. New England Review: Bruno; Long Island. Summer. 1968.; On the Late Latin Light; Venice in the Ordinary. New Republic: Sea Turtles. New York Sun: The Mail. New Yorker: Mysteries of the Armchair. Notre Dame Review: The Clipper Ships; The Servants’ Stairs; Then, in the Trumpetings. Parnassus: There Was; Lt. Selkirk on the Weymouth. Pleiades: Melville in the Straits; Midges in Material Form. Plume (online): Night World; On the Banks of the Allegheny; The Other Life. PN Review: The Field. Poem-a-Day (online): Complaint. Poetry: The Box Kite; Christmas Trees; In the Gallery of the Ordinary; Thoreau. Poetry Northwest: On Reading That the Ozone Is in Danger from Air Conditioning and Amphibious Life from Shampoo. Raritan: My Grandfather’s Second Wife to My Father, 1958; The Troubles. Salmagundi: Martin Luther, 1525. Sewanee Review: Sonnet. Sewanee Theological Review: Dürer’s Stag Beetle. Smartish Pace: The War. Southwest Review: The End of the Road. 32 Poems: Venice in the Old Days. TLS: In the Dedication Lay the Index; The Landscape as Holy Order; Louise Brooks; On Hair as a Revolutionary Mode of Dress. Two Bridges Review: In Medias Res; Little Compton; The Storm. Virginia Quarterly Review: A Garret in Paris; To a Former Beauty. Warwick Review: Mary Sowle. Yale Review: The Abandoned Crow; Clouds; My Father in the Shadows.
A couple of hours I had noticed a growing rift of light in the clouds to the west; it looked as if the dull day might have a rich ending.
—George Gissing, New Grub Street
Here and there a little smooth water, an occasional rift of light through the clouds—alas! only to be followed by greater darkness.
—William Ingraham Russell, The Romance and Tragedy of a Widely Known Business Man of New York
I
Thoreau
That oily bale of rags, lost
to the silent architectures of the wood—
or so it seemed, as the fall’s chancels
darkened, and rough earth gave and forgave.
Forgave, I mean, the intrusion.
Leaf Color
A steely torn si
lver, rusted along the edges;
the faint acidic yellow, like the backwash
of a polluted pond; earth-spatter
and gold spot in blotchy shallows;
grays the purpling of drenched slate;
and a pooling crimson with the false
bonhomie of the maraschino cherry—
all that unnecessary life turning to tinder.
The shadows were fragile-fertile
beyond the shocks of grimy hay in a spent field.
The India-ink, closeted blacks—
why choose the easeful darks?
Not that anything lay hidden there.
Was it only the spilled-over, abandoned life
and, from the wastage, the broken buds?
On the Late Latin Light
The semiprecious sunset, windswept, vain,
took the cold buttery light and made it work.
Myopia blurred the rain, laying the dust.
It was elegiac lite, in other words.
The window framed a gallery of garden,
wisteria draped along the mossy fence,
the lilac punk-show of a woodblock print,
as if a chisel could engrave a thought.
There was an hour when style was not the cause.
Jerome in his ink-blotched study, lion and skull
props in some fantasy of scholarship,
scratched down the words of God in his own tongue.
Latin was not the tongue, I forgot to add.
He was the odd man out, or in, perhaps.
Martin Luther, 1525
Old Cranach’s Luther, Protestant sincerity
dissolved in paint. The boy monk’s inkblot cloak
swallows him like a python taking a goat,
the dull face slope-jawed, bangs unbarbered, long
longing for the tincture of the cell.
The brute uncertain jowls below his stare
complain, What I have seen, I have not seen.
Struck by a bolt on the Cunard Line to Patmos,
he hung his theses on a marlinspike
the iron of oxidizing heretics,
his Christ the jailer-headsman of new souls.
Said, We are beggars, by way of epitaph,
not a bad way to end, or to begin.
I honor him, he who stayed petulant, blastproof.
Bad Garden
During the time of the Tulipomania, a speculator often offered and paid large sums for a root which he never received and never wished to receive.
—Johann Beckmann, A History of Inventions and Discoveries
Spattered with indigo,
the prickly borage
conquers the roses
like a Mongol horde—
not the lancers
of the Great Khan, perhaps,
but unshaven bankers
intent on a hostile takeover.
Tulips were big money in 1637,
when a Dutchman
could swap his brewery
for a rare bulb—but not
such sullen, go-ahead
Wall Streeters, hedge funds
hardly worth plucking for a salad.
Are such petite
flowers devious, coquettish but shy,
waiting until your back is turned
to blossom, or wilt,
or contract some unsightly disease,
a reminder of secret ecstasies
and conjoined humiliations?
Perhaps they are as much
as we shall ever know
of the beautiful.
Bruno
A nerveless pigeon perches, triumphant,
upon your bronze head. However artless
the interrogators with their docket of charges,
however apologetic the torturers with their brands,
you survive the acids of history.
The clerks of submission lie almost at peace.
Platonic Rome—that hotbed of democracies,
the cant of lecture—worries into the new century,
as if on a shopping tour. In the whirl of traffic
beyond Trajan’s Column, in the hieroglyphs
of the signboard and politician’s bill,
lies the palazzo of memory, its gilt couches
and spindly armchairs burning with remonstrance
like the leftovers of a yard sale. The lost canals
claim their unquiet rest. Bruno, the Campo
de’ Fiori would be empty now, but for your ash.
Clouds
By night, tarnished silver
whipped past on west winds, hurrying
after some unmet appointment,
dark and quarrelsome, or given to tears.
They passed in ranked orders, the clouds,
as the first blackbird aria broke,
hoarse practice for the racket to come.
That morning, they resembled nothing,
no Rorschach in the sky kept un-empty
for the theologies of vacancy.
One old master piled cotton wool on a table
and stared until he found the sky.
Later Gainsborough propped up sprigs
of broccoli for his far woods,
with stubs of moss for bushes,
and rocks of cork and coal.
The Clipper Ships
True, I have follow’d the rough trade of war
With some success, and can without a blush
Review the shaken fort, and sanguine plain.
—Edward Young, Busiris
Under bleached, burnt-out dawns,
the loblollies cut the crystalline fog
like masts. Enter the magnolias,
puffy blossoms yellowed as old china plates,
with much to teach us about rough trade.
In Medias Res
The whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon.
—Melville, Moby-Dick
We woke to the advertisement for our lives.
Heat withered the air in the listed flat
with its horizontal slit-windows.
We looked at nature through a turret.
The ceiling had begun to turn to salt.
The Landscape as Holy Order
The marks [that the sharks] thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.
—Melville, Moby-Dick
Dusty cow-parsley, red slash of poppies,
crushed gather of hedges rimed with snow-blossom,
these, these too, abide in the faint election
of those reserved, reserving appetites.
Why go over what has gone before—
pilgrims of correction, even the static century
in which nothing yet has happened?
Beyond, after all, lie the seas
where fins steeple the dark, moving in for the kill.
The Abandoned Crow
With cocked head,
it raked the ground
under one anthracite eye,
a shadow in shadow.
The crow sidled the railing
and stopped
to review, like Kant,
the villainies of the aesthetic.
The gardens had grown
to weeds, the weeds
to briars. It pecked
the black cloth of a book.
It slipped a tarnished coin
into its beak.
Ragged at the ends,
its wings wore
the sheen of watered silk.
The crow flew into the gutter
&nbs
p; to consider the ideas of order,
or a rusty piece of wire
twisted like a spiral staircase.
Fall in the Sketch Pad
That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and . . . eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing.
—Melville, Moby-Dick
The gray damage hung over the roof tiles,
that late light passing for annunciation.
They were almost our fathers, the headless statues
lagged in their rows down the dead garden.
Then the streetlamps died, as if soon
it would be dawn. A scatter of pink petals
dampened the walk, the petals too like your flesh,
that shocking warmth beneath.
The Needle
The traveller who at the present day is content to travel in the good old Asiatic style . . . will find ample food for poetic reflection in the singular scenery.
—Melville, Israel Potter
Oh, the usual derangement of yew trees
rising over the garden wall like Japanese mountains.
Teacups of roses like drops of blood.
The lichen-measled walk. A sharp sun,
wary as the light in de la Tour.
Then age edged from the shadows,
the way paper rots from the margin.
On that ferry to Dover,
your half-closed eye disclosed its darkness,
the eye of a needle.
After those words unsaid,
the sky pumped full of preposterous dye.
Complaint
The faucets squeeze
out a dribble of rust.
The stained slipcovers
fray like sea wrack. Scruffy, haggled
weeds jailed in broken pots;
shy, disfigured poppies;
a barked rose succumbing
to white-frocked aphids—
the garden doesn’t work. The heater
doesn’t work. Nothing works.
Who lives in such a house?
The pipes piss and moan,
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