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Night of the Republic

Page 3

by Alan Shapiro


  not to sound like, saying "Honey, listen to me, honey.

  Honey. Honey. I am not your mother. I Am Not Your Mother."

  Then she holds the phone away from her ear so even I can

  hear the tiny insect-buzzing of what against her ear would be

  his shouting back.

  Starlight has to bend, the writer says, around that invisible dense

  matter,

  warping itself in order to be seen.

  So even after we factor in the distorting eff ect of time and distance,

  the light-years of light-years that light has to cross to reach

  us, the visible shapes we see inside our giant telescopes look

  nothing like the shapes they are.

  There's a white shark on the wall next to the television screen

  where I see an aerial view of a funeral procession or a

  rally—fists shake in unison, and if the sound weren't muted

  I might hear voices chanting, but all I hear around me is a

  thick gauze of bar talk and laughter and the woman saying

  over and over, honey, honey, listen, honey, honey, while

  on the screen I continue looking up at what I'd be looking

  down on if I were there:

  the massive seething a quivering cell seen under a microscope,

  a dense coating of flies on something dead.

  Then there's a lake, and a bright red Jeep flies out of it and lands

  safely on a dirt road and drives off right to left as if into the

  open mouth of the bright white shark.

  The writer of the article describes dark matter as a black canvas

  on which the visible universe is painted. If that fi gure captures

  best the relationship of gloom to glitter, couldn't the canvas

  also be the painter, the unseen the conjuror of the seen, as if

  the ten percent that doesn't hide were being imagined by the

  ninety percent that does?

  Dark matter. She is not his mother. She refuses to be his mother.

  But there are places in the cosmos, however few and far between,

  where "galaxies form where no dark matter is, at least none we

  can detect."

  In the physical therapy room of the nursing home my mother

  placed my grandmother in after she slipped in a puddle of

  urine and fell and broke her hip, the old, the damaged,

  at various stages of infi rmity, were working with therapists

  at different stations in the room—one woman looked quizzically

  at her hand, as if it wasn't hers and wasn't not, matter

  neither dark nor bright, as it tried to squeeze a yellow ball,

  over and over, only the tips of her fingers twitching, while the

  young therapist, more girl than woman, kept urging her on the

  way a mother would,

  though she was not her mother,

  saying, "That's it, Lois, come on now, kiddo, you can do it, you

  did it yesterday." And nearby, a man wizened to his very bones

  held fiercely to the rails of a small track down which he took

  unsteady small step after small step, like a toddler crossing wet

  stones—he was followed by another woman with her hands

  out ready to catch him if he fell. Everywhere inside the room

  the young the healthy, the fortunate, were encouraging the

  old, the sick, the hobbled—everywhere the old, eyes burning,

  were pushing back with all the might inside their bodies

  against the dark matter their bodies had become.

  Places, the writer tells me, where light too is a force, light too a

  kind of pressure

  though my grandmother refused it, sitting in her wheelchair, looking

  on, her silence the darkest matter, an impossible density

  nothing could get around without distortion, broken only by

  her saying when my mother came to visit

  You are not my daughter, I don't have a daughter,

  saying it over and over, as if she knew my mother would carry

  the voice inside her ever after, beyond the funeral, no matter

  whom she spoke to, or where she went, the voice reverberating

  in her voice reverberating in the ones she loved, the

  ones who loved her

  the distorting effects of time and distance nothing the shape it is

  the white shark is swallowing the president who shakes the hand

  of another president in a bright room made brighter by the

  flash of cameras

  and an old man yelling as he carries a child to some kind of safety

  from a smoking doorway

  the woman flips shut her phone and stuffs it in her bag and disappears

  and again the lake spits out the Jeep that lands safely on the

  ground and drives away.

  III. NIGHT OF THE REPUBLIC

  Amphitheater

  In the dream time

  of the molecular

  what persists as

  colonnade

  or stair is struggling

  blindly to hold

  back, hold

  in, what in it,

  of it, every

  moment wants

  to whirl away

  from what it is.

  It is a kind of keeping

  faith, a loyalty,

  the way the garbled

  pieces of the

  architrave call back

  the column that's

  no longer there;

  how even now

  the horizontal rows

  of nearly worn-

  away-to-nothing

  seats rise steeply

  all around the inside

  of the colossal oval

  that encloses

  the missing stage

  where Pindar isn't

  singing, "Take heart,

  remember Oedipus:

  if a sharp ax

  hacks off the boughs

  of a great tree

  so its beauty spoils and

  its fruit fails,

  it can still give

  an account of itself

  should it come later

  to a winter fire,

  or should it rest

  at last on a foreign

  pillar performing

  its sad task

  so far away

  from what it started as."

  Museum

  So much of once

  and now and soon

  is or will soon be

  caught here, framed and glassed—

  free of the drifting air—

  and hung, so that

  the very halls

  that lead from room

  to room are rooms

  themselves that make room

  in little dim-lit alcoves

  all along them for what

  there wasn't room for

  in the other rooms.

  On the wall outside

  each doorless doorway

  the audio guides lined up

  like black-suited

  miniature docents

  are waiting to tell the story

  of the ambition and the breakthrough

  to the early to the later

  to the late or belated

  recognition of the name

  whose final triumph was to

  end up in the digital

  recording of the nameless storyteller

  telling the story

  to the inglorious and mute.

  All night, inside each

  doorway there's an empty chair

  that keeps watch

  over an empty bench

  that watches the cordonedoff

  and glassed-in

  figures revert to pigments

  that revert to dyes,

  oils
and the mineral

  grains that press

  against the glass

  to pass right through it

  into the air they came from,

  alive again—docents of dispersal

  drifting from room

  to room through hallways

  down the marble stairs

  out past the headless Winged Victory

  they entered by.

  Bookstore

  As if hallucinations made of words

  could hallucinate themselves beyond the words,

  out of the books, out of the newest

  on display behind the window, and the ones

  on tables in the gloom or ranged on shelves

  in different sections; out

  of the pages building to betrayal,

  out of the spectral signatures

  of doom of boredom of deceit,

  after the stranger comes to town,

  before the girl's disgrace, before

  the shadowy flood or fire,

  the bodiless mimicries escape

  tonight the tangling plot lines

  into the bodies of the couple

  kissing outside the store,

  into the ardor of the way they kiss,

  he leaning against her leaning back

  against the window, his hands flat

  on the glass above her head,

  hers on his hips to draw him

  farther forward while her leg rubs

  up the inside of his thigh

  and down, and up again,

  higher and still higher,

  while the books behind them keep their own sweet time,

  serene because the wraiths return,

  inevitably, tomorrow or next week

  or years away and a cooler hand

  will take the book and open to a passion much

  more desolate for being mutual

  and new and never ending

  till the page is turned.

  Barbershop

  "Beauty falls from the air."

  —Thomas Nashe

  Eternity is the spiral up the pole

  spiraling to its endless end.

  Time is the vitrine

  of antiquated gels,

  conditioners, restoratives,

  stray sections from yesterday's Today

  all over the table

  in the waiting area where

  Eternity is waiting.

  Time is the electric

  razors upright in their chargers

  beside their teeth-like

  att achments, and the scissors,

  the clippers, the trimmers,

  on the mirrored shelves

  attached to mirrors

  that the big chairs face,

  unswiveling.

  Eternity

  is the swept floor,

  the bald air,

  the faceless mirrors,

  while Time, and its one idea

  of beauty falling,

  is a book of blank pages

  ghostwritt en by

  Eternity in vanished

  passages of hair.

  Post Office

  A convex mirror tilts downward from the corner

  where wall and ceiling meet

  behind the nearly room-length counter.

  In the center of the mirror

  what's beyond the counter

  bends a smaller version of itself above the counter

  out toward itself below it

  while the room's periphery

  curves back into the dark

  the center's bending from.

  Parallel to the counter

  the rope barrier

  strung straight from post to post

  curls into itself within the mirror,

  though parallel to it and just as long

  but too far back beyond the mirror's border

  to be caught within it

  there is a narrow table

  with pens at intervals

  that hang at the ends

  of silver chains

  or lie in a silver tangle on the surface—

  while one chain dangles penlessly

  like a silver snake's sloughed skin.

  The mirror is a litt le world, a globe, a map.

  Back against the far wall

  there's a wider table

  for the giant book

  of everywhere

  and slots and holders for every size

  and kind of envelope or label

  all of which tonight are unaware

  of the out-of-the-blue

  or dreaded plea plaint news

  or notices they'll be tomorrow—

  And if the mirror is a map

  this table is the blank space

  on which the mapmaker scrawls—Here Be Monsters.

  Here be indecipherable codes,

  unreachable addresses,

  every letter a dead letter,

  unclaimed, untracked,

  from no from

  to no to.

  Convention Hall

  There was the amplified and echoing

  "optimistic hatred of the actual"

  that every flag waving

  to make it so kept

  waving to the joyous rhythm of

  even after

  in the docile chaos of a

  confetti of balloons

  tumbling out of darkness

  high above the lights.

  Look at Us, the anthem,

  Look at Us, the shield,

  the sacrifice—

  but look

  at how unfillable

  the cavern of the Great Hall is,

  more vacant and silent

  for the stage dismantled,

  the massive absence

  of the cheering and singing; look

  at how the last of us,

  our delegate

  torch in hand

  sleepwalks in patrol

  patrolling nothing

  like a soldier "in the

  midst of doubt, in

  the collapse of creeds"

  who doesn't know

  the war has ended,

  behind enemy lines

  no longer there,

  obedient to "a cause

  he little understands,

  in a campaign

  of which he has

  no notion, under

  tactics of which

  he doesn't see the use"—

  moving in darkness

  from light to smaller light

  along the catwalks

  through the tunnels

  over the swept floor

  to the farthest exit sign.

  Government Center

  All of the old buildings that surround it

  with their embellishments,

  their frills, their flauntings,

  have turned away, embarrassed

  by how nakedly

  outside

  outside is here.

  At night especially,

  nothing is not exposed

  to whatever it is

  that's looking out

  from within the rising of the set-back

  or jutting, many-angled

  brick and concrete large

  to small to smaller openings

  that swallow

  whatever light they cast.

  At Washington and State,

  the wide brick stairs lead up to wide brick stairs

  up to the bricked

  expanse, the brick field of the benchless plaza

  edged here and there by lampposts whose light

  spotlights the litt le public trees

  that tremble leafless

  and raw in stone tubs

  for everyone

  who isn't there

  to see.

  If you were there, walking,

  you wouldn't be able to tell

  the sound of other footsteps

  coming toward you
r />   were your own.

  You'd have to hurry not to feel

  the feeling of what it is

  you're being told

  about the feeling of being

  looked at, looked through, tracked

  by every brick

  and concrete

  angle of the opaque

  openings you can't look up at

  into

  as you hurry past.

  Courtroom

  Hillsborough, North Carolina

  Everything inside the room

  looks upward

  through penumbral zones

  from the ghost ship of the gallery's

  galley-rows of benches to the

  waist-high balustrade

  that is the barrier

  we call the Bar, and from

  the tables beyond the Bar

  to the lectern facing

  the high desk

  we call the Bench,

  behind which

  above the flag we call the Flag,

  high on the wall to where

  the circle of the seal is

  across the bott om of the outer

  rim of which

  the legend in a language

  no one speaks

  is speaking silently to no one:

  Esse Quam Videri—To Be

  Rather Than to Seem—

  Like what? the two girls

  staring out inside the seal

  appear to ask, like what?

  in white robes—

  Greek or Roman, Roman or Indian?

  a Roman's seal's Greek fantasy

  of an Indian princess and her att endant,

  the princess seated

  on a tree stump, on a beach,

  the water calm behind her,

  as she looks down

  past the Bench, the Bar, the strict rows

  of low benches in the gallery

  where the absent galley slaves

  lashed to the public oars

  are rowing nowhere

  and so can't notice

  that a ship over her shoulder

  (is it the ship they row?)

  is sailing straight for the horn of plenty

 

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