by Alan Shapiro
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
I. NIGHT OF THE REPUBLIC
Gas Station Restroom
Car Dealership at 3 A.M.
Supermarket
Park Bench
Downtown Strip Club
Hotel Lobby
Race Track
Dry Cleaner
Shoe Store
Stone Church
Playground
Gym
Indoor Municipal Pool
Hospital Examination Room
Senior Center
Funeral Home
II. GALAXY FORMATION
Triumph
Forgiveness
Conductor
Edenic Simile
Close to You
Galaxy Formation
III. NIGHT OF THE REPUBLIC
Amphitheater
Museum
Bookstore
Barbershop
Post Office
Convention Hall
Government Center
Courtroom
The Public
IV. AT THE CORNER OF COOLIDGE AND CLARENCE
Beloved
Flowerpot
The Family
Light Switch
Sickbed
Coffee Cup
Cigarette Smoke
Piano Bench
Dryer
Bathtub
Family Pictures
Color
Faucet
Bedroom Door
Solitaire
Cellar
White Gloves
Shed
Hallway
The Doorbell
Notes
Copyright © 2012 by Alan Shapiro
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shapiro, Alan, date.
Night of the republic : poems / Alan Shapiro.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-547-32970-3
I. Title.
PS3569.H338N54 2012
811'.54—dc22 2010049850
Book design by Patrick Barry
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The author thanks the following journals, in which these poems, or versions of them, first
appeared: Bellevue Literary Review: "Galaxy Formation." Burnside Review: "Race Track,"
"Barbershop." Forward: "Dry Cleaner," "Senior Center." New Ohio Review: "Indoor Munici-
pal Pool," "Downtown Strip Club." New Republic: "Car Dealership," "The Public," "Govern-
ment Center." The New Yorker: "Solitaire." Ploughshares: "Bookstore," "Park Bench," "Stone
Church." Poetry: "Gas Station Restroom," "Supermarket," "Bedroom Door," "Sickbed." Slate:
"Triumph." Smartish Pace: "Close to You," "Edenic Simile." Tikkun: "Convention Hall."
"Municipal Pool" was selected for The Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses
(2011).
I also wish to thank the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North
Carolina for a fellowship that gave me time to write several of these poems. And as always
much gratitude and love to the friends whose criticism has made this book so much bett er
than it otherwise would have been.
For Reg Gibbons
I. NIGHT OF THE REPUBLIC
Gas Station Restroom
The present tense
is the body's past tense
here; hence
the ghost sludge of hands
on the now gray strip
of towel hanging limp
from the jammed dispenser;
hence the mirror
squinting through grime
at grime, and the worn-
to-a-sliver of soiled soap
on the soiled sink.
The streaked bowl,
the sticky toilet seat, air
claustral with stink—
all residues and traces
of the ancestral
spirit of body free
of spirit—hence,
behind the station,
at the back end of the store,
hidden away
and dimly lit
this cramped and
solitary carnival
inversion—Paul
becoming Saul
becoming scents
anonymous
and animal; hence,
over the insides
of the lockless stall
the cave-like
scribblings and glyphs
declaring unto all
who come to it
in time: "heaven
is here at hand
and dark, and hell
is odorless; hell
is bright and clean."
Car Dealership at 3 A.M.
Over the lot a sodium aura
within which
above the new cars sprays
of denser many-colored brightnesses
are rising and falling in a time lapse
of a luminous and ghostly
garden forever flourishing
up out of its own decay.
The cars, meanwhile, modest as angels
or like angelic
hoplites, are arrayed
in rows, obedient to orders
they bear no trace of,
their bodies taintless, at attention,
serving the sheen they bear,
the glittering they are,
the sourceless dazzle
that the showcase window
that the showroom floor
weeps for
when it isn't there—
like patent leather, even the black wheels shine.
Here is the intense
amnesia of the just now
at last no longer longing
in a flowering of lights
beyond which
one by one, haphazardly
the dented, the rusted-through,
metallic Eves and Adams
hurry past, as if ashamed,
their dull beams averted,
low in the historical dark they disappear into.
Supermarket
The one cashier is dozing—
head nodding, slack mouth open,
above the cover girl spread out before her on the counter
smiling up
with indiscriminate forgiveness
and compassion for everyone
who isn't her.
Only the edge
is visible of the tightly spooled
white miles
of what is soon
to be the torn-off-
inch-by-inch receipts,
and the beam of green light in the black glass
of the self-scanner
drifts free in the space that is the sum
of the cost of all the items that tonight
won't cross its path.
Registers of feeling too precise
too intricate to feel
except in the disintegrating
traces of a dream—
panopticon of cameras
cutting in timed procession
from aisle to aisle
to aisle on the overhead screens
above the carts asleep inside each other—
above the darkened
service desk, the pharmacy, the nursery,
so everywhere inside the store
is everywhere at once
no matter where—
eternal reruns
of stray wisps of steam
that rise
from the brightly frozen,
of the canned goods and foodstuffs
stacked in columns onto columns
under columns pushed together
into walls of shelves
of aisles all celestially effacing
any trace
of bodies that have picked
packed unpacked and placed
them just so
so as to draw bodies to the
pyramid of plums,
the ziggurats
of apples and peaches and
in the bins the nearly infinite
gradations and degrees of greens
misted and sparkling.
A paradise of absence,
the dreamed-of freed
from the dreamer, bodiless
quenchings and consummations
that tomorrow will draw the dreamer
the way it draws the night tonight
to press the giant black moth
of itself against the windows
of fluorescent blazing.
Park Bench
Behind the bench the drive,
before the bench the river.
Behind the bench, white lights
approaching east and west
become red lights
receding west and east
while before the bench,
there are paved and unpaved
pathways and a grassy field,
the boathouse, and the playground, and the gardens
of a park named for a man whom
no one now remembers
except in the forgetting that occurs
whenever the park's name is said.
Left of the bench there is a bridge
that spans the river
and beyond the bridge around a bend
floodlights from the giant dry goods
that replaced the bowling alley
that replaced the slaughterhouse
are dumping fire all night long
into the river; but here
where the bench is,
the river is black, the river
is lava long past its cooling,
black as night
with only a few lights
from the upper story of the trapezoidal
five-star hotel across the water
glittering on the water
like tiny crystals in a black geode.
Haunt of courtship,
haunt of illicit tryst; of laughter
or muffled scream, what
even now years later
may be guttering elsewhere on the neural
fringes of a dream, all this
the bench is empty of,
between the mineral river that it faces
and the lights behind it speeding white
to red to white to red to white.
Downtown Strip Club
Its night is all day long;
the neon GIRLS out front go dark in sunlight,
while inside the cruciform stage
has stripped down to blackness,
in which the vertical
poles at the end of each transverse arm
stand naked and lonely.
Cold here is the cold on the faces of the presidents
on bills the absent hands
have pushed toward each body bending over
in a gown of brightness;
cold is the heat of the shadowless
shadow play of hands and legs
up and down along the poles,
and the hands retreating from the money,
and the hands in pockets dreaming,
or dreaming later on another body;
the heart of the cold is the opposite of what it is,
cold as the fire
through the day of its night
in the firing line of bott les
waiting for orders
on the shelf above the bar.
Hotel Lobby
Light the pursuer, dark the pursued.
Light wants to fill dark with itself
and have it still be dark
so light can still be filling it.
Light pours from the massive shining of the chandelier
over the bronze boy bending beneath it
to the bronze pool where a watery face
is rising to meet his as he bends.
Light the pursuer, dark the pursued,
along the naked back and arms,
the hands, the fingers reaching
for the rippling features, just
beyond, just out of the grasp of
into and out of, and across
the marble floor and pillars,
to the tips of leaves, and up
the lion claws of chair legs and sofas and
over the glass tops of tables in the lounge,
light losing dark by catching it,
dark giving light the slip by being caught,
on elevator doors, down every
blazing hallway to the highest floor,
the farthest room, and through it
beyond the pulsing colors of the muted screen,
from hip to hip in a loose twilight
of sheets no longer shifting.
Race Track
Oval of all
desire, desire's
inside track, its
fast track, ceaseless
since there is no
starting gate
no finish line,
the tote board blank,
the winner's circle empty
Phantom out of Vagrant by Unbridled
blacknesses of outdoor
betting windows
like a row of eyes
shut tight and
dreaming of the
urgent little bills
no hands shove
under the glass
across the counter—
and of the hands
too that open
all day to close
all day to open
to what's never
quite so keenly
held than in
the just before
just after
Pleasure Ride out of Nightmare by Recall
a band was playing,
the grandstand all
ablaze with flowered
dresses underneath
a preen of hats
parading in a Breeders'
Cup of bodies—was it,
could it have been
today? Just hours ago?
Whirlaway out of Day Star by Forego
Dry Cleaner
Inside the giant room
the air is like the air inside
the smallest closet,
stuffed full and locked.
The plastic wears the clothes
that wear no bodies
that hang from the inverted roller
coaster of the conveyor
that conveys them nowhere now
throughout the store
but where they are
above the yellow bins of bags
of other clothes awaiting
transport
to the big machines, the solvent
stringencies that purify them for the final
clarifying steam.
What clings
like memory to the crumpled-together sack—
cloth of pant leg
cuff or collar
tomorrow will be churned away
and pressed
into forgetfulness
till one by one the spilled-on dripped-on merely worn
will rise
in an aphasia of transparency
to sheer raiment, untouched
children again of light!
Even the numbers
tagged to belt loop lapel or label
will be a vestige only
of a vision of
that heavenly
first room before
the rooms they moved through
on their way to here,
immaculate bright showroom
in which the very eyes that looked
the hands that reached
were singing, "World
invisible, we view thee
World intangible
we touch thee
World unknowable
we know thee
Inapprehensible
we clutch thee."
Shoe Store
The new shoes not wanting to be old shoes
climb the walls;
diagonally
in diagonal rows,
there on the stalled
stair master
of each narrow shelf
shoe after shoe
is climbing undiscourageably up
to the boxes they get no closer to
stacked high above them.
They climb they plod
they run in place
all through the night
from whatever's coming
from beyond the window
across the marble
of the mall to fill them each
with alien purposes
that pass all day
below them in the carpeted scuff
and shuffle, in the wingtips
thumbed and creased
down aisles
dead-ending in a mirror.
They want to escape, these
leather infants of Sarguntum,
they want to climb back
into their boxes
under the precious tissue where,
tongue-tied
in the unlaced laces
laced together,
they can rest
in perfect darkness
forever on a shelf
too high to reach.
Stone Church
A space to rise in,
made from what falls,
from the very mass
it's cleared from,
cut, carved, chiseled,
fluted or curved
into a space
there is no end to
at night when
the stained glass
behind the altar
could be stone too,
obsidian, or basalt,
for all the light there is.
At night, high
over the tiny