Untitled - Poetry Foundation

founded in 19 1 2 by h a r r iet monroe
May 2012
F O U NDE D I N 1912 B Y H ARRI E T M ONROE
volume cc t number 2
CONTENTS
May 2012
POEMS
devin johnston
113
New Song
A Close Shave
spencer reece
116
The Prodigal Son
adam vines
120
River Politics
rae armantrout
121
And
Luster
The Thinning
alice fulton
126
Daynight, With Mountains
Tied Inside
End Fetish: An Index Of Last Lines
Wow Moment
franz wright
132
Spell
Postcard 2
christopher buckley
134
Getting There
maria hummel
136
One Life
kimiko hahn
137
The Dream of a Lacquer Box
The Dream of a Fire Engine
A Bowl of Spaghetti
cally conan-davies
140
What This Is
Ace
elizabeth arnold
142
What Is a Person
judith hall
143
Just Now Between Positions
marianne boruch
144
Pencil
sandra beasley
145
Inventory
john repp
146
Crystal Meth Under Her Choir Robe
COMMENT
anna kamienska
149
A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook
Translated by Clare Cavanagh
maureen n. mclane
180
contributors
194
back page
201
My Marianne Moore
Editor
Senior Editor
Associate Editor
Managing Editor
Editorial Assistant
Reader
Art Direction
christian wiman
don share
fred sasaki
valerie jean johnson
lindsay garbutt
christina pugh
winterhouse studio
cover art by marian bantjes
“Pegasus Takes a Break from Flying Around,” 2011
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POEMS
devin johnston
New Song
After William ix, Duke of Aquitaine
As sweetness flows through these new days,
the woods leaf out, and songbirds phrase
in neumes of roosted melody
incipits to a new song.
Then love should find lubricity
and quicken, having slept so long.
The bloodroot blossoms, well and good,
but I receive no word that would
set my troubled heart at ease,
nor could we turn our faces toward
the sun, and open by degrees,
unless we reach a clear accord.
And so our love goes, night and day:
it’s like the thorny hawthorn spray
that whips about in a bitter wind
from dusk to dawn, shellacked with sleet,
until the sun’s first rays ascend
through leaves and branches, spreading heat.
I have in mind one April morning
when she relented without warning,
relenting from her cold rebu≠
in laughter, peals of happiness.
Sweet Christ, let me live long enough
to get my hands beneath her dress!
I hate the elevated talk
that disregards both root and stalk
and sets insipid pride above
vicissitudes of lust and strife.
Let others claim a higher love:
we’ve got the bread, we’ve got the knife.
DEVI N JOH N S TON
113
A Close Shave
From Baden, or what’s left of it,
pursue a long, smooth curve of road
that skirts the northern flood wall
to parallel a palisade
of channel markers sunk in earth,
the folly of a cement works.
Its blank silos overlook
a pit of argillaceous shale,
the fine and fossilized remains
of bivalves, sponges, spines of shark,
quarried and burnt with limestone charge
to alchemize a binder of brick
and the city’s shallow, brittle crust.
Around a bend, the riverbed
swings wide to open a fetch of field.
Shadows skim its mucky thaw
as juncos, whisked about by the wind
on courses neither fixed nor free,
give but a quick metallic chink.
Behind you, rain has wrapped the blu≠s
and scumbled limbs of sycamores.
Ahead, each bend assumes the name
of a gaudy packet run aground,
or snagged and sunk, or blown to bits:
for one, the side-wheel Amazon,
pluperfect wheelhouse painted green,
that struck a honey-locust pike
still rooted deep in river mud
and tore its hull from stem to stern.
Down in minutes! Within the month
an island silted up behind.
114
P O E T RY
A flock of luggage floated south,
remarked by those on Water Street
loafing before the trading post
and the barbershop of Madame Krull.
She can eternally be found
at work in her elaborate room
toujours prêt to clip and coif
or wield her razor with great skill
for those who favor her with their chins.
The scent of ginger tonic blends
with that of borscht, its acrid tang,
consumed behind a wooden screen
as Illinois grows dark. In this,
her second year since coming west.
DEV I N J OH N S TON
115
spencer reece
The Prodigal Son
“Fly at once!” he said. “All is discovered.” — Edward Gorey
In Miami, this May afternoon, I look up,
the sky hot, so hot, always, and heating up hotter —
how long I have loved this scene.
The clouds are white optimistic churches;
I cannot number them.
Herons, pelicans, and gulls glide like dreams
through cloud-portals, cloud-porticos, and cloud-porte-cochères
Giotto could have done with his passion for blues and dimensions.
Hard not to love a place always called by possibility.
Nearby, Cuba is singing and somewhere here
Richard Blanco is writing his poems.
As I enter the city,
my bishop walks with a cane towards our cathedral.
The sun shines on the people
and unites us in a delirium of light.
High above this bleached, scorched, fragile, groin-scented peninsula,
the birds track their insects and remain loyal to their nests.
I look up and I feel bliss building
as I did when my father read another book to me,
and another, the pages like wings.
There are moments of memorable patience in this world.
Airplanes advance towards Miami International,
booked with Jewish retirees and Cuban émigrés —
their descending engines disrupt the white-gloved illegal waiters
at the country clubs in Coral Gables, who deliver flan
to the ladies who have pulled their skin behind their ears like gum.
This is a place where few decisions are doubted.
On South Beach,
where everyone rearranges or expands their sexual parts,
there seems to be no life outside the physical and time
becomes a tricky thing here, spring looks like winter,
winter like spring, the scenes dense, shifting, shut —
116
P O E T RY
and before you know it the rats have preached from the mangoes
and then chewed them to corpses.
And look, how the interior decorators
unroll their fresh bolts and wink-wink to new clients —
what would be considered frivolous anywhere else
is here pondered and coerced at great length.
The feminine gains strength.
Moving closer to the cathedral,
the sea presses the harbor, wanting to be loved,
pushing up the cruise ships with its muscles.
The sea says: “I am the sea.”
We have seen Cubans come atop dolphins’ backs here.
Mothers have drowned for their sons,
but the cool gray backs of the dolphins have buoyed their children
to us,
numbed by the lullaby of sonar clicks.
The sea blesses the city the way mothers do —
forceful, pushy, ungraspable, persistent.
The black mangrove shoots take root on the porous, chalky rock,
building themselves up like steeples. Listen.
How the waves love what does not love them back.
Pedicurists bu≠ the toenails of the sugar daddies in the Delano.
Lincoln Road refines its scarlet seductions.
Bees are sticky with tourism inside the motel rooms of the rose.
Red-orange petals from the Royal Poincianas tint the minutes
with flamboyance. The pink and white bottlebrush trees explode
with seeds. I will always love my time in this city, you might say
craziest of cities, delivering its youth in short-shorts
and Rollerblades with rainbow sweatbands.
City smelling of unzipped things. Cha cha cha! Cha cha cha!
I do not think the city will ever be mine.
Beautiful Spanish and broken English spoken everywhere.
How I love that sound,
for it is the sound of people making their way where they were not born.
S PENC ER REEC E
117
Maids from Honduras push their carts,
stacking their wrapped soaps, counting them like children,
their cuticles sting with disinfectant,
perspiration staining their uniforms as they pray over the toilet seats
they clean.
O Miami!
For a decade I did not speak to my parents.
Are you listening to me? I will not bore you with details.
Instead, I will tell you something new. Listen to me.
I was angry. But the reasons no longer interest me.
I take the liberty of assuming you approve of forgiveness,
stressing hardening gentleness as you do.
I speak to the bishop about my call and the sacraments,
we discuss blessings, absolutions, consecrations —
our work of the soul. The soul has no sex and I am relieved
to speak of a thing alive in the world that has no sex.
The bishop places a paperweight atop my reports on his desk,
our professional talk is measured by the silence of the dead
who are always flinging open their shutters,
religion being the work of the living and the dead,
the hope and release in the hearts of parents turning to their children
and the hearts of children turning to their parents —
all that business in life that remains unrehearsed.
Superior to obedient, we pray.
The laughter of the bathers
through the grillwork of the o∞ce window pleases me,
their movements rinsed in the baptism of the sea, the languorous sea.
The sky at the end of the city trembles.
Light and dust warm to cream to pink to lavender.
Miami, it has been a gorgeous day, indeed. Thank you.
How I love your decks, bridges, promenades, and balconies —
the paraphernalia of connection.
118
P O E T RY
How fast the pastels encroach upon the edges.
I have a dinner engagement in Coral Gables at Books & Books
where I will see the poet Richard Blanco.
I hope he will tell me stories of his beloved, broken Cuba.
Nearly five o’clock now, and I am late.
When I arrive, Richard Blanco speaks of Cuba
as I had wished, and the city quiets all around him.
“If our bodies house our souls,” I think to myself,
“Then, Richard, poets are the interior decorators of the mind.”
Richard Blanco is saying something about going back,
his relatives singing poems in the fields. I listen.
Behind us, in the palmetum,
at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens,
the Elephant, Date, Malaysian, Kiwi, Coconut, and Royal palms
ask the city to remember their names with the insistence of priests.
Good-bye, Miami, good-bye.
Good-bye to the workers laying down the grids of the concrete embeds
on the high-rises, reinforcing their masculine nests,
gluing glass with their spermy compounds to stone and steel.
Good-bye to you, South Beach.
Let your rapturous sands darken to a deep grape color.
Let the polished feet of youth launch into their surprises and swaps.
Let the elements cool.
Good-bye, Richard Blanco, good-bye.
Today my candidacy for Holy Orders was a∞rmed.
I listen to the sea flatten.
Cuba pleads in the distance one more night.
Honduras waits on too many things to count.
No longer can I stand still.
Stars smooth the sea with their immaculate highways of long lights.
Mother and father,
forgive me my absence.
I will always be moving quietly toward you.
S PENC ER REEC E
119
adam vines
River Politics
I spit my smack,
Jim slugs his Jack,
Rob stews his lack,
Carey prepares his rack,
herons hunker on blowdowns,
deer wait on high moon for their rounds,
and the campfire
might as well be an empire
we all
watch dissolve
(in the slough, a carp roll, a splash)
into ash.
120
P O E T RY
rae armantrout
And
1
Tense and tenuous
grow from the same root
as does tender
in its several guises:
the sour grass flower;
the yellow moth.
2
I would not confuse
the bogus
with the spurious.
The bogus
is a sore thumb
while the spurious
pours forth
as fish and circuses.
RAE ARMAN T ROU T
121
Luster
What flickers
with some delicacy
of feeling,
some hesitancy —
and then persists.
š
What circles. What darts.
š
Hunger
is like the inside
biting you.
“Like” is like
insomnia.
š
These green cherry tomatoes;
their false pregnancies,
staked. Lustrous.
š
122
P O E T RY
“That’s all I meant.”
All I meant by
“witches.”
RAE ARMAN T ROU T
123
The Thinning
1
These guys try to make us
match moods to products
the way once,
under love’s spell,
we attached meaning
to sound,
attached sounds to objects.
The old magic won’t work now,
but it’s nice
to be reminded of it.
2
She’s a tease,
tears her skirts o≠
one by one.
Really?
Drops her petals
as if she could always
make more.
It’s tiresome.
124
P O E T RY
We know
what she looks like
naked.
On a cold night,
we can see forever.
RAE ARMAN T ROU T
125
alice fulton
Daynight, With Mountains Tied Inside
Chandelier too full of brilliance to be indolent.
Your prisms enunciate the light
and don’t need rain to break it into rainbows.
Snow with six crutches in each crystal.
Your livery your glitter, your purring
made visible. Only inanimate things can sparkle
without sweat. My spinet, the threat of music
in its depths and miniature busts of men composers
carved of time on top. The hollow bench
held sheet music. Sing me
Charm Gets In Your Eyes. I hear you best
when undistracted by your body. In headspace
technology, where flowers are living
in glass globes, their fragrance vivisected.
Anything that blooms that long
will seem inanimate. Heaven. Grief
like the sea. Keeps going. Over the same wrought
ground. The whole spent moan. Praise dies
in my throat or in the spooky rift
between itself and its intended. Like a wishbone breaking. The little crutch inside
is not a toy. There is no night asylum.
A restless bed, a haunt preserve,
a blanket rough as sailcloth. But sing me, was it kind
snow sometimes? With true divided lights and nothing
flawed about it? If song goes wrong,
be dancerly. Dance me, at what point
126
P O E T RY
does west turn to east as it spins?
I’ve never understood. Perspective.
How charm gets to yes. Dance me Exile
and the Queendom, by request.
It is a ferocious thing
to have your body as your instrument.
Glove over glove, let your dance express
what I’ve been creeping like a vein of sweat
through a vastness of.
This tune with mountains tied inside
and many silent letters
can be read as trackers scan the spaces
between toes and birders read the rustle
left by birds. As any mammal
in its private purr hole knows,
the little crutch inside
is not a crutch. More a sort of
steeple. Neither silver to be chased
nor gold to be beaten.
You were = = you are
more than ever like that too.
Noon upon noon,
you customize this solitude
with spires
that want nothing from me
and rise with no objective
as everything does when happy.
ALI CE F U LTO N
127
End Fetish: An Index Of Last Lines
a face stares back.
across the hostile centuries.
add a twist — delicious.
and never feel a thing.
commercial — added stretch to every gesture.
how it is made.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.
I’d be all give. Let me put it like this = =
in the nocturnal, recessed bed = =
of nettles.
resembles the bird it will fly into.
Right now I’m trying to open wide.
she turns to a tree.
she would be neither-nor.
smoky field.
that is space.
the bride.
the exdream — the world gone into god again?
the night.
the white between the ink.
the white navel — I notice — in the O.
their harsh done crust.
then some inbetween?
to a nuptial lace.
to ever dwell again.
to mask the screen in dumb expanse.
touch in linen walls.
Turn — her — loose —
What — does not console?
who could bear to save her.
yes, god her saurian voice into the ground.
128
P O E T RY
Wow Moment
From the guts of the house, I hear my mother crying
for her mother and wish I understood
the principles of tranquility. How to rest
the mind on a likeness of a blast furnace
framed in formica by anon. A photo of lounge
chairs with folded tartan lap robes. An untitled typology of
industrial parks. The gentle interface of yawn and nature.
It would soothe us. It would soothe us. We would be soothed
by that slow looking with a limited truth value. See
how the realtor’s lens makes everything look larger
and there’s so much glare the floor looks wow
under the smartificial xmas tree.
After studying Comparative Reality
I began Die Polyvinylchloride Tannenbaumserie.
Turn o≠ that tiny tasteful star, I commanded.
While you’re alive there’s no time
for minor amazements. Turn o≠ the sallow pages of
your paralegal pad. I don’t need a light to think
of you. I don’t need a god to pray.
Some things are glow alone. I said one thing you said
you remembered I said. Was it will you be my
trophy friend? Or are you someone else’s
di∞cult person? I mean the more myself I
become the less intelligible I seem to otters.
I know what you mean you said.
It’s like the time I was compelled to speak
on hedonism to the monks and nuns.
ALI CE F U LTO N
129
Did I say most religion is devotional
expediency? Or religion doesn’t worry about being
religious, its wisdom corrupted by its brilliance as light
passing near the sun is deflected
in its path. Deep in its caprices,
the whole body thinks it’s understood.
To think otterwise is isolating. When I said
hedonism stressed cheerfulness,
there were disappointed groans. Look, I’m sorry
I gave you an ornament shaped like a hollow look.
I liked its trinket brightness. Just don’t give me
a water tower dressed up as a church steeple
or one of those silly thunderstorms
that hang around volcanoes. See how those teardrop lights
make every object jump? The memory does.
You made me love. Was it exile in honey
is still exile? Am I the fire or just another flame?
Please sell me an indulgence, I begged a monk.
And tell me what creature, what peril,
could craft that sound that night
dropped like a nubile sliver in my ear.
There is no freedom of silence
when morture forces us to speak
from organs other than the heart.
It was something about love. A far cry. It was come to me
unmediated, go to god lengths. In great things,
the attempt alone is su∞cient. I think this
130
P O E T RY
’cause I’m finite. That’s an understanding
to which reason can only aspire
though an entire speech community labored
for generations to say it in a fair hand clearly
dated and scented with lavender. My one and only only
a crass color orgy will see us through
the dusk ahead, the months gray as donkey.
See how it grows its own cross of fur
and bears it on its back? I showed you that.
ALI CE F U LTO N
131
franz wright
Spell
Some fish for words from shore while others, lacking in such contemplative tact, like to go wading in up to their chins through a torrent
of bone-freezing diamond, knife raised, to freeze-frame incarnadine
and then bid it as with hermetic wand flow on again, ferociously,
transparently, name writ in river.
132
P O E T RY
Postcard 2
Incomprehensible fate that sentenced my father to my mother. I can’t
blame him, I would have left the raving bitch myself, and would do
so many many times in years to come. Then, of course, I came along.
There is a limit to what one man can endure. So I suppose I am the
reason he left, actually. I am the one to blame. And yet he did his best;
he did all that he was capable of doing, and wrote me every year, like
clockwork. He rarely remembered to mail what he wrote me, poor
man (when I think of what I must have put him through), barely legible one-sentence postcards he sometimes worked at half the night;
but as they all said the same thing, word for word, it wasn’t that bad.
He could be forgiven. The blizzard I visit your city disguised as will
never be over and never arrive. I think what he was trying to say was
that at some point I’d begin to notice I was freezing, wasn’t dressed
right, had nowhere to go, and was staggering into a blinding snow
that no one else could see. I think he meant, the cold will make you
what I am today.
F RAN Z W RI G H T
133
christopher buckley
Getting There
Time to give up
grieving my mother’s loss,
faulting my father and
his Neolithic moral certitude
about every detail
on the evening news,
his general absence
hanging like the gray
sheets on the line.
Never mind how
mismatched in the heart,
I should be grateful
they were there at all,
for that moment
that childhood stretched
like fog, the beach empty
and unmarked.
It comes to little now
who I forgive, mourn,
or thank. The dust shifts
and we are barely
suspended in the light.
I know this little thing:
there’s a boy somewhere
in a station where
the trains still run,
wearing scu≠ed brown shoes,
gray overcoat, and cap;
someone has neatly parted
and combed his hair.
He is waiting
to be taken by the hand
134
P O E T RY
and told where we are going,
to hear we are headed home —
though I can see nothing
beyond the smoke
and midnight haze
at the far end
of the platform,
where I am not
even sure of the stars.
C H R I S TOPH ER BUCK LEY
135
maria hummel
One Life
I don’t know when I stopped believing in heaven,
or if I do. Maybe I just stopped receiving heaven.
The sun rose. I climbed into the pines’ brittle
crowns. You could say I was retrieving heaven.
Not a place or a time, but blindness to everything
but one light, pulsing, pleasing: heaven.
We married in September. Everyone was still
wearing their summer shirts, sleeves of heaven.
It was white, there was a bend, and the car
spun. It was then I prayed, pleading with heaven.
When he goes limp, lie him down on the gurney,
Mom. Oxygen mask, breathing heaven.
The hospital shines, our son flies in and out.
The snow falls hard, relieving heaven.
He loves the colors of planets. I teach him
their lifelessness: beautiful, deceiving heaven.
I don’t know who is buried beneath me
but I hear her break as I am leaving heaven.
How can you cry for one ruined life, Maria,
when you could be grieving for heaven?
136
P O E T RY
kimiko hahn
The Dream of a Lacquer Box
I wish I knew the contents and I wish the contents
Japanese —
like hairpins made of tortoiseshell or bone
though my braid was lopped o≠ long ago,
like an overpowering pine incense
or a talisman from a Kyoto shrine,
like a Hello Kitty diary-lock-and-key,
Hello Kitty stickers or candies,
a netsuke in the shape of an octopus,
ticket stubs from the Bunraku —
or am I wishing for Mother? searching for Sister?
just hoping to give something Japanese to my daughters?
then again, people can read anything into dreams
and I do as well. I wish I possessed
my mother’s black lacquer box
though in my dream it was red,
though I wish my heart were content.
KI MI KO H AH N
137
The Dream of a Fire Engine
Without the sun filtered through closed eyelids,
without the siren along the service road,
without Grandpa’s ginger-colored hair,
Mother’s lipstick, Daughter’s manicure,
firecrackers, a monkey’s ass, a cherry, Rei’s lost elephant,
without communist or past tense,
or a character seeing her own chopped-o≠ feet dancing in fairy slippers,
or Mao’s favorite novel about a chamber —
the scientist of sleep has claimed
that without warm blood a creature cannot dream.
138
P O E T RY
A Bowl of Spaghetti
“To find a connectome, or the mental makeup of a person,”
researchers experimented with the neurons of a worm
then upgraded to mouse hoping
“to unravel the millions of miles of wire in the [human] brain”
that they liken to “untangling a bowl of spaghetti”
of which I have an old photo: Rei in her high chair delicately
picking out each strand to mash in her mouth.
Was she two? Was that sailor dress from Mother?
Did I cook from scratch? If so, there was a carrot in the sauce
as Mother instructed and I’ll never forget
since some strand determines infatuation as a daughter’s fate.
K I MI KO H AH N
139
cally conan-davies
What This Is
This isn’t maths —
perhaps it is
a collapse
of certainties.
Perhaps it can’t
configure planes,
yet it can cloud
our blue remains
so when we fall
as rain will do,
nothing fails
to carry through.
140
P O E T RY
Ace
Bloody hell, the world’s turned
upside down
the flame tree has become
geranium
my coral bed has grown
into a tree
the hummingbird you hammered
to the wall
though tin, could any moment
turn and flee.
The yellow sky has gone
all roundabout
and clover threes where
seaweed used to be
and blood blossoms with fire,
the powers below grow higher —
if things turn right-way-up
will the falling fire stop?
The wave is in the hill
the nest abandons me
and all the reddened earth is still
igniting
CA LLY CON AN - DAVI ES
141
elizabeth arnold
What Is a Person
capable of feeling
while in contact with another?
I look at the red-tiled roofs outside,
at all the angles
facing the white-blue cloudless sky
like the creases in Bellini’s angel’s
silver-blue dress, Tintoretto’s white one
that’s practically transparent in his
Annunciazione at the San Rocco
— cloth complex as thought!
Then the bells start, flood the void.
142
P O E T RY
judith hall
Just Now Between Positions
These, his last,
employers, dead
Inexplicably and
Unavailable
to praise his diligence,
Cast a shadow on his prospects, and he sighed.
Before all this, he
Would have lit a pipe and
mused on the past
In aromatic mauve tobacco ... Shadows
Ba±ed pleasantly
the better rug
Once a bear.
Grizzly bear.
He would have enjoyed a smoke with a bear.
Hibernation is
not unlike a job you fail to love.
He would have enjoyed
Some banter on, and amiable disputation of,
His claim. Or
on job loss, in general;
On night air, the fanfare above a curve, a star,
If suitably
asparkle in public.
J U DI T H H ALL
143
marianne boruch
Pencil
My drawing teacher said: Look, think, make a mark.
Look, I told myself.
And waited to be marked.
Clouds are white but they darken
with rain. Even a child blurs them back
to little woolies on a hillside, little
bundles without legs. Look, my teacher
would surely tell me, they’re nothing
like that. Like that: the lie. Like that: the poem.
She said: Respond to the heaviest part
of the figure first. Density is
form. That I keep hearing destiny
is not a mark of character. Like pilgrimage
once morphed to mirage in a noisy room, someone
so earnest at my ear. Then marriage slid.
Mir-aage, Mir-aage, I heard the famous poet let loose
awry into her microphone, triumphant.
The figure to be drawn —
not even half my age. She’s completely
emptied her face for this job of standing still an hour.
Look. Okay. But the little
dream in there, inside the think
that comes next. A pencil in my hand, its secret life
is charcoal, the wood already burnt,
a sacrifice.
144
P O E T RY
sandra beasley
Inventory
We gaze into your eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes.
We forget the display is blind.
Your fanned tail really a cupped palm,
gathering each hen’s quiver to your ear,
your feathers the green-blue glamours of
reflective absence. No one
ever praises the ass of the peacock,
grin of quills that does the heavy lifting,
or how you eat anything from ants
to Styrofoam, from cheese to chicken.
Road roamer, flower devourer:
the one who’ll pick a fight with a goat.
Preen all you want. What I love of you
will be the bare undercarriage,
the calamus. I am done with beauty.
Only a blinking eye can measure the light.
S AN DRA B EAS L EY
145
john repp
Crystal Meth Under Her Choir Robe
No surprise. Bills to pay, pain to obliterate,
a favor to a friend desperate
for more time before facing facts,
or a reason less beholden to One-day-at-a-time
or I-don’t-know-why or There-is-no-whyI-just-like-getting-high or Then-Jesus-spoke-to-me
blather. Nothing’s enough, not even the moments
when her voice — any voice, my voice —
vanishes into the Voice the hymn
wrenches from the throats of the spiritual
paupers up there swaying in black satin.
The God of the Garden is the God
of Chemistry, too, a single sni≠
in a lifetime proof enough — nothing
can slough errands or heartbreak
so fast into the metaphysical ditch
where all of it belongs. Weren’t we made
for better than the Fall, if Fall this is?
We all see what the Flood keeps doing.
A little while dry, please, a little while
with no chattering chimp between
the ears & the Wizard once more in Oz.
This is my mind, not hers. She’s a story
I heard. I’m a story I can’t stop hearing.
A plastic tarp in a monsoon may be
her future. A plush ride home to havoc.
A vision that delivers her from want,
deserving or not.
146
P O E T RY
CO M M E N T
anna kamienska
A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook
I now exist on the principle of shortsightedness, which demands
enhanced attention to the moment. Late wisdom, but close to the
wisdom of childhood. A lovely summer day. Color, taste, scent. A
squirrel. Cherries. Good tiredness. Cauliflower for supper. Clean
house. And always darkness, darkness that spreads around all of it.
Everything submerged in awful darkness.
š
Certain theologians assure us that the body’s resurrection begins at
the moment of death.
They know too much. God had His reasons for keeping death
under wraps.
š
Inscriptions at the cemetery in Kurozweki:
God sees
Time flees
Death at the gates
Eternity waits
1861
Grant them rest
They labored greatly
So the Last Day
Might wake them brightly.
1929
The inscription rings with a poetry much older than its date.
š
I escape into sleep. Sleep is what I’ll miss most when I die.
AN N A KAMI EN S K A
149
š
For awhile now my calendar’s been swarming with meetings and
visits, not work. The human mill: it’s hard to escape when you don’t
have a wife.
š
Internal conversations in the Gospels. Conversations on a level deeper
than linguistic understanding. Those two levels of conversation overlap each other. The people talking to Jesus try to turn the exchange
into an ordinary chat. But he decodes what’s left unsaid, and answers
questions they haven’t asked.
š
— “Do you really believe that Christ sits locked in the tabernacle of
that little church?”
— “I do.”
— “How can that be? I’m not saying He’s not there, I’m asking how
can you believe it?”
š
I’ve learned to value failed conversations, missed connections,
confusions. What remains is what’s unsaid, what’s underneath.
Understanding on another level of being.
š
The sun came out today. But I still ache all over. It made me think of
Waclaw Gralewski’s theory: every tumble, bruise, broken leg or arm
is the price for disrupting some hidden order. Instant punishment.
š
No home anymore. Nowhere to return. My house is a ruin, a cemetery. You may yearn for the grave, but just try living there.
š
15 0
P O E T RY
I have no talent. I’m not talking about the literary marketplace:
I mean how I see myself. I write poems for myself, like these notebooks, to think things through, that’s all.
š
The soul has two distinct layers. One is the “I” — capricious, fickle,
uncertain, it hops from joy to despair. The other, the “soul,” is steady,
sure, unwavering, watchful, ready, aware.
š
I received the grace of shadows. The grace of remaining in the dark.
š
God is the present tense. That’s why it’s so hard to seize the moment.
God is the eternal now. We either chase the past or escape into the
future, place our whole hope in the future. Whereas faith, hope, and
love must ripen in the present. That’s why we ignore time, waste it,
kill it. We’re killing God.
š
Granddad says that only now, at the age of eighty-six, has he lost his
faith. Maybe that’s also grace, to cast o≠ all supports and learn to
walk, to keep on even without the gift of faith, in darkness. Since
that’s how we have to enter death.
š
To write with silence. Iesus autem tacebat. Poetry from stillness. J.*
speaks to me only through silence. It’s harder and more eloquent
than words.
š
*
Kamienska’s late husband, poet Jan Spiewak.
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 51
I felt like crying, but I denied myself that pleasure, since Janek* was
supposed to come over. But he called to say he couldn’t come because he was washing the dachshund, who was going to see Monika
Zeromska’s dog tomorrow. A major event. So I cry, corporeal, not
spiritual tears. My voice is swollen on the phone.
“Child!” says Mrs. Z.
š
How to write so that the poem is as close as possible to silence?
Zen — to play on the lute without strings.
Simplicity — of course. But how? What kind?
š
In the human world everything is mixed. No pure states. Even death
is life in some sense. Archaeology — eschatology?
š
I know a Marxist who wants to raise his son on “metaphysics.” “It’s
got more to o≠er,” he says.
š
The tomb is a gate. No one saw Christ rise from the dead. With good
reason. Everything on “faith.” God always hides in a cloak of uncertainty.
š
My theory of dispersed power is confirmed daily. Power shatters like
the mirror in Andersen’s fairy tale, and a splinter sticks in nearly every
heart. Teacher — pupil, doctor — patient, sales clerk — customer: all
these relations take shape on the plane of power and dependence. It’s
a disease of the system. Even the cleaning woman in the courtyard
screams at the tenants about throwing trash from their balconies.
But those are just the petals dropped from the only tree in the yard.
*
15 2
Kamienska’s son.
P O E T RY
“Clean up after your dogs,” she yells at me.
It doesn’t matter that I don’t have dogs. She’s got her shard of
power, the right to yell.
š
Seneca: “To treat the days like separate lives.”
š
Bruno Schultz: “To ripen into childhood.”
š
I walk around disguised as an overweight old lady.
š
Deafness has seized even my dreams. They’re voiceless, like silent
movies. Or when the machine breaks in the theater and the audience
suddenly starts stomping.
š
We recognize things, as in poetry, through resemblances. Through
metaphors. This way we gather them into wider systems so that they
don’t dangle alone.
š
Tristitia vestra vertetur in gaudium. The alchemy of the inner life.
š
Biblical man consists of three parts: nefesh (soul, throat, essence, longing),
basar (the body’s envelope, meat, flesh), ruah (spirit, God’s breath).
š
I got back from Bulgaria and found out that Irena Kronska died on
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 53
the sixteenth. Zosia Koreywo was with her to the end. She says she
received more than she gave. I’m not afraid of death now, she says, it
was a wonderful passage.
They put a crucifix in the co∞n, the Gospels with her notes in
the margins, photos of her daughter, her husband, and Kafka. Just
enough luggage for the afterlife.
š
There are beautiful, gleaming beetles that feed on feces.
š
The perverse memory of our era resides in the files and archives of
the secret police. Sometimes nations should pray for amnesia.
š
Never. Never. Never. I could fill a whole notebook with that word.
š
Janek calls with important news. Your grandson has a tooth. When
they feed little Jakub, it rings against the spoon.
š
Holy Never, have mercy on us.
š
When I was little, I was always shocked when people said I was an
orphan. Now I’m surprised when they call me a widow. He didn’t
die, he grew so high alongside me that I can’t reach him.
š
John 8: 1–11. About the woman taken in adultery. What did Jesus
write on earth? People assume that he wrote down the accusers’ sins.
Now why would he do that?
15 4
P O E T RY
They threatened him with Mosaic law, which says that the adulteress must be stoned. That law was written in stone. The letter, the sign
were the first manifestations of the law. But He wanted to show them
that the written law is empty if it bears no relation to the living. He
wrote his signs in sand, in the dust of stones, which the wind might
scatter at any moment. “Here are your laws,” His writing said. The
Doctor of both laws. Mosaic law written in stone and the law of love
written in sand. It couldn’t be carved into stone without becoming
a dead letter. Every stone they meant to throw at that living woman
held letters from the smashed stone tablets. People write in stone to
make their letters last. God doesn’t hesitate to cast his word on the
wind, since he knows it won’t be lost.
š
Saint Augustine — Mozart. I like seeing those two names together.
The same spiritual expanse.
š
Diogenes, living in the barrel, had a bowl for drinking water. One
day he saw a boy drinking from his hand. So he smashed his bowl.
š
Pain because of Pawel.
Pain because of Janek.
A nasty review in Politics.
And still I walk around smiling.
š
I returned
to confirm
there can be no return.
š
The dogmatic certainty of unbelief. And the constant uncertainty of
faith.
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 55
š
Smile through a face petrified with grief. Smile at least to the Lord
God.
š
Simplicity in poetry is humility itself. We know that what we want
to say exceeds us, may even lie beyond expression. We can only make
simple signs, poor stuttering sentences. Even questions tend towards
grandiloquence.
Poetry is not an “act of imagination.” Imagination sins through
pride; it can be bribed. It’s coquettish, self-assured. It gestures at
creation, but it’s just that, a gesture, usurpation. Imagination is the
flirt of poetry.
š
There are writers guarded by their wives, rejoicing in their work.
Everything matters more to me: laundry, groceries, someone asks me
to stop by, Pawel’s* pants need pressing. Then I sit down at my desk
and can’t remember how it’s done. Only now and then the lines attack like birds of prey, any time, any place. And demand to be written.
š
I call my shadow like a dog. And go.
š
For the first time in a long while I’m home alone with my older son.
He’s distant and strange. As if I were air. “I don’t know what you
want from me,” he says.
š
The medicine of words — medicina verbi.
*
15 6
Kamienska’s son.
P O E T RY
š
To hide from old age. To crawl into a crack in the floor.
š
On the road to Lublin an “animal slaughterhouse” — repulsive words.
Some person leads a cow to the slaughterhouse. The cow bows its
head low. It knows. It holds a deeply human sorrow. We’ll remain
barbarians as long as we feed on the flesh of animals.
You shall not kill — the commandment should be understood inclusively — you shall not kill!
A parliament of storks just past Garwolin. A field full of storks.
š
Sorrow — that’s the noblest thing linking us to animals. The sorrow
of existence.
š
Everything is only a promise. Happiness, love, life itself — what
would it all be if only ...
Norwid’s “lack,” “want.” “The stain of this globe is privation.”
You shouldn’t look for completion, the promises fulfilled that our
hungers demand. The hungers alone must su∞ce. Hunger is the gift
of hunger. Want gives want.
š
Passerby, tell Poland. The title of a volume I’ll never write.
š
[-------] [Censored on the basis of legislation of 7/31/81, On the control of publications and displays, article 2, section 3 (O∞cial Gazette,
no. 20, position 99: 1983, O∞cial Gazette, no. 44, position 204)]
š
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 57
“No oppression would carry weight if there were not those willing to
yield to it.”
š
In one of his radio talks, Janusz Korczak said: “I escaped from youth
the way you flee an insane asylum.”
š
Korczak: “When the little wrongs come, it’s not worth crying. When
the great wrongs come, you forget to cry.”
š
I dream Korczak, I obsess. I meet him daily through his letters and
stories about him. I feel his presence like my own dear dead. And
only one poem to show for it.
š
Korczak (“One on One with God”):
Thank you, Creator, that you created pigs and elephants with
long snouts, that you shredded leaves and hearts, that you gave
beets their sweetness. Thank you for nightingales and bedbugs. That girls have breasts, that fish breathe air, that we have
lightning and cherries. That you commanded us to multiply in
most eccentric ways, that you gave thought to stones, seas, and
people.
š
A conversation with L.R. about staging Korczak’s Senate of Madmen.
We choose whatever won’t meet opposition, gray and flat. We’re in
our own prison. We don’t pick our values and stick by them, instead
we think: Will it get through? What will the censor say? So our hands
are tied, and culture dies.
š
15 8
P O E T RY
Two weeks before the orphans were deported, they performed
Rabindranath Tagore’s Post O∞ce. Little Abrasza played the dying
child.
Someone asked Korczak why he’d picked such a sad play. He said
they had to learn to receive the Angel of Death properly.
š
When I woke up this morning, I didn’t have a face. Just a mask of
pain. I wanted to be more than a mother, I wanted to be a friend. But
the director calls us to order. You don’t get to pick the role.
š
Szczepanski’s beautifully written text on the Parthenon. I hate beautifully written texts.
š
During the sleepless hours of the night a thought came to me that
seemed important. I got up in the dark and wrote it down. In the
morning I read: “I went looking for loneliness. But it found me.”
š
Yesterday P. asked: “Do you think the children from Job’s second
chance could actually be happy?”
š
Man — a reed swaying in the wind. Definition courtesy of a great
poet — Jesus of Nazareth.
š
Marcus Aurelius: “Things don’t touch the soul: they stand motionless at the gate.”
š
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 59
Motherhood means doing penance not only for your own sins, but
for your children’s too.
š
Dreams in the Gospels. Dreams in the Bible. I’ve thought about them
for a long time. That they were.
š
Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell’s wall. To
write like that.
š
Saint Hieronymus: “O solitude, giving birth to the stones that build
the Great King’s city.”
š
Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’arets.
In the beginning God made heaven and earth.
The holy first words in Hebrew. Almost like touching God himself.
š
To su≠er. It means God is near. Grace — like a scalpel without anaesthesia.
š
Yes, she’d been everything, just like in the old Bible song. The whole
house was in her keeping, she bore sons, she spun, she wove, she
made the meals, she washed and sewed, she clothed them all and fed
them. She endured betrayals and departures.
And now she sits on the doorstep of an empty house. The song of
praise was written long ago. And she thinks:
— No, I won’t survive this.
The burden had been her freedom.
160
P O E T RY
š
The Bible is the origin, the source. But each beginning is also within us,
each of us holds our own Bible, our own Ecclesiastes and Revelation.
š
Saint Catherine’s memoirs (1922–23):
And I went up the hill and asked the Lord what to do. And the
Lord answered me: Overflow like pure water, smooth and still,
and reflect me in yourself.
š
To praise Him in His absence and His presence. His absence is only
the scales on our eyes.
š
Niobe. Niobe — that’s me. That’s every abandoned mother.
š
To remember always the kind of rescue that Pawel and I mastered
through those long, hard years. Take yourself to a new level, higher,
intellectual. Those years with my son were important to me. I
thought it was true friendship, complete understanding, no galoshes
on the soul.
But that’s just what it looked like. In one instant he turned and left,
following his bride, as the Bible commands. Now just brief, formulaic meetings, a peck on the cheek.
š
A twentieth-century bon mot: “Those thirty years passed like the
slap of a knout.”
š
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 61
I remembered the searchlights that the bombers used to illuminate
the earth and people’s hearts — as targets. It wasn’t light. It was bright
darkness. Bright darkness — in me. Bright darkness of death. Bright
darkness of loneliness.
š
“I exist, therefore I will not be.” (Slobodnik)
š
My way of the cross, my winter’s way. To his dead hands. I knew I
would lose them and I drew them lying on the blanket that last day.
Lovely, delicate hands. Why did I draw them? How did I know?
š
Of two wise men the wisest is he who says least.
š
Zosia K.’s husband is dying. He never saw the world, but he’s
enthralled by falling snow. He asked them to open the windows.
Snow and death entered together.
š
God’s book of life grew from the longing to escape from anonymity,
the masses. May God at least see us and remember.
š
You shall not take a person in possession. It should rank among the
first commandments.
š
A good conversation with Z. The world of biology. “Future life,” he
says, “will be just the same as now, but everything will be lifted up.
God will illuminate it with his vision, will draw it to him.”
162
P O E T RY
The male moth as a rule lacks an alimentary canal. He doesn’t
need it. The cluster of nerves on his head leads him unfailingly to the
female through sense of smell. He can recognize the scent at twelve
kilometers. He fertilizes her and then dies. That’s the high point
of his life. It’s his life’s time. Biology determines the time of every
living creature. Time equals the time of every individual life and anatomical structure.
Humans also move inexorably toward their goal — toward death.
In it they are fulfilled. Only, unlike the moth, they stumble en route.
š
Z. left the same day. He gets scared when I talk about the ruin of my
house. It frightens him the way other people are terrified by the word
itself — death.
š
A collective poetry reading at the Union. Thirty poets with Slonimski
at their helm. From Ludmila Marjanska’s poem I remembered “The
dying man is not the one who was born.” Strange: the recurring motif of meat in their work. Maybe because there’s none in the stores?
š
Misfortune, personal disaster stops our inner time short. Objective
time moves on — but we spin in place like straws in water.
š
My work is best seen as a variety of orphan poetry.
š
Again about dreams in the Bible. Dreams are my specialty. The Bible
as humankind’s dream.
š
Since morning, despair lifts its head like a faithful animal.
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 63
š
This morning I suddenly catch myself: I’m not there, I’m so lost in
thought, I don’t know what’s going on around me. Can you think
yourself to death?
š
Where your pain is, there your heart lies also.
š
The Hebrew language. I kiss it like a sacred book. Time is scrolled
in its letters. Saul and David walk here, the exiled poet weeps. Even
silence speaks in Hebrew. God is silent in this speech.
š
How do animals tolerate solitude? While we were going to Poznan,
Wislawa Szymborska told me about how her hedgehog, all alone,
fell in love with a broom. Am I becoming a self-delusive hedgehog?
I don’t want to fall for a broom, whatever it’s called. I want to be free
from that. Free from solitude? That’s the riddle I keep asking myself.
Freedom demands solitude, but solitude becomes bondage. I bang
my head against the wall with thinking.
š
Talking too much about yourself is like wearing your clothes inside
out.
š
Rabbi Eliezer: “If all the seas were ink, all the reeds were quills, heaven and earth were scrolls, and every person a scribe, they could still
never write down what I learned from the Torah.”
š
Just think: your last dream can’t be written down or told!
164
P O E T RY
š
A. absolutely lacks a sense of humor. Deadly earnest, mortally engaged, always the great words. He rolls like a tank over flies, the
irritating, buzzing flies of life.
š
My study of Hebrew moves along. Sometimes I get the impression
that the language isn’t real, it’s some fantastic construct to which I’ve
been admitted, like a palace in a dream. This comes from the complete disinterestedness of my labors, since only the Lord God himself
would chat with me in Hebrew.
š
Junipers in the forests outside Warsaw. I didn’t know that junipers like
sand. They stand, huddled, like secret, silent figures in hoods. They
walk behind us. I turn to look. They stop in their tracks, like monks.
š
Title for my notebooks — “Hieroglyphs.”
š
A conversation with Father J. in Powazki. Bright day, almost warm.
Children zigzag through the soldiers’ graves. The military section
already flickering with flames of little lamps. We talk about body and
soul. We blame everything bad on the body. It’s time to give the body
a break. It’s not its fault. The body, a glutton, just wants cutlets. The
soul, the subtle soul, wants much worse things — power, glory. “In
dreams,” Father J. says, “the body resembles the soul.”
We’ve been walking through the graves for a decade now.
š
Sculptors have heads that look sculpted. Deep furrows carved in
their faces. Our preoccupations and passions make their marks, leave
abbreviations.
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 65
š
Ninetieth birthday of my granddad, Stanislaw Szypillo. He’s still
youthful, striking, with a large white moustache. He maintains his
military bearing and plays his schoolboy pranks. He just got back
from the sanatorium in Naleczowa. He charmed the nurses of course.
He found out who’d be seated at his table before he arrived, and he
told each of his neighbors that the other one was deaf. So they all
started shouting as soon as they sat down. To Granddad’s joy. The
signs on the walls inspired him: “Silence heals.”
š
The Song of Songs is a glorious love poem: the indecency comes
from reducing it to an allegory. The Scripture’s strength is its literalness. And inscribed inside its literal sense is a mystery. But our grubby
hands can’t touch it.
š
I can’t stand symmetry. Krysia and Ludwik ask me over with another
widow.
Pawel and Helena bought tickets for both of us mothers.
I feel annihilated by it.
š
Musil (about Rilke): “To be linked by the smallest things to the greatest.”
š
Does your body still rise from the dead if you don’t want it?
š
Deafness isn’t silence. It’s the endless, wretched rattling of my blood.
š
166
P O E T RY
There can be no lack of blessings in the hand of him who blesses;
there can be no lack of blessings in the storehouses of space.
š
Grass — the earth’s fleece. These tiny plants bind the earth’s depths
to the great expanse of space.
š
Chinese aphorism: “Can the swallow or sparrow grasp the great ideas
of the crane?”
š
J.’s “new poem”:
In your hair sleep sways to music,
In your palms fruits speak in human tongues.
It’s about me. What more do I want?!
Heart of my mother, don’t bear witness against me
— From Word and Fears
The su≠ering in that poetry still clutches at my throat.
Return as you are, in the tatters of rivers,
Bitten by the marshes’ beaks ...
That’s the malaria, it tortured him long after he got back to Poland.
Return, rinsed by fiery lice ...
Return, in the barbed scales of charred cartridges.
— From Anna
“Anna” was his great Song of Songs. The only kind imaginable after
the su≠erings of war, wandering, his parents’ death, his own nearstarvation.
“We’ve taken each other in remembrance,” J. said.
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 67
š
Talmud: the dream is its own explanation.
š
There are things better left untouched by words (blunt instruments).
š
A dream about an azure sea and elephants. A kind female elephant
retrieves my lost glasses from the water.
š
He emerged green as a grasshopper from a tiny red car.
š
Caesar Vespasian, before his death: “Awful. I sense I’m about to become a god.”
š
A conversation in Powazki. The kingdom of God isn’t just another
utopia, it’s a scattered reality. Wherever Truth and Goodness appear,
the space of the heavenly kingdom opens too. Thy kingdom come.
š
Ending a story with the hero’s death is too easy. Death is the simplest
solution for tragedies and conflicts, cutting the knot instead of untying it. But most writers couldn’t get by without death.
š
I’ve liked boxes since childhood. I kept my wretched treasures in
them, scraps, bits of glass. Then letters, family keepsakes. But now
there’s nothing good enough. Can you fit love into a box? Even the
final box can’t hold a person.
168
P O E T RY
š
Splendid occupations: making jam, sewing, darning. Darning holes
in nothingness, scrubbing up the abyss, stitching painful opposites
together.
Women do this humming.
š
black river pervades me
black river surrounds me
black river seizes me
black river flows to the black sea
tosses me onto black sand
š
— “Your life is a number,” says time, being a Pythagorean.
— “My life frees itself from you at every moment.”
— “It realizes me, proves, fulfills, a∞rms.”
— “I am that which lies beyond time. Like a melody, which sounds
completely only after the last note is played.”
— “Time and music. I’m both at once. I don’t know myself how it
happens. Music is written into time, but gives it a value beyond numbers.”
š
Little Jakub, a technological child, sees the world as a great machine,
a computer on which he presses buttons.
He asks: “Who turned o≠ the storm?”
š
“Night of the Senses”: St. John of the Cross. No poetry, since poetry
needs things, the ladder of things along which the angels of poems
ascend and descend.
š
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 69
Freud thought that each person possessed a fixed stock of a≠ection.
So if you love someone else, you love yourself less.
Freud’s wrong. Love doesn’t run out. It’s the miracle of Elijah
and the widow of Zarephath. The more we love another person, the
more we love ourselves, and everything else, and the world.
š
The mental illness known as writer’s block.
š
Heidegger: “A question is the piety of thought” (lecture on technology).
š
P.S. asks me why I’m learning Hebrew. Why do I live, walk, get up in
the morning, eat, sleep...?
š
Hölderlin: “What remains of the poet in times of woe?”
Heidegger: “For the Greeks being and beauty were synonyms. Now
beauty is the business of the pastry chef.”
Hölderlin: “Still, whatever endures was made by poets.”
š
Wise saying from St. John of the Cross: “the habit of imperfection.”
š
I learn to look at my literary failures through St. John’s eyes: “To
enter the path means leaving your own road.”
š
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P O E T RY
Four-year-old Jakub at his great-grandmother’s grave. He tells his
grandma (other one) that he left flowers on someone’s table, it made
the cemetery happy.
š
Ania tells Jakub going past the department store:
— “You can buy everything in that big store.”
— “Where can you just buy one thing?” he asks.
š
Little Ruta is two weeks old. They put her in a onesie for the first
time.
Lulla lulla little bough, lulla lulla lu
In the ragged hungers of creation
Her grandfather might have written it for little Ruta all those
years ago. Maciej Majewski read it on the radio today. Also: “O best
beloved ... ”
š
When I go to midnight mass the sky is clear. Full moon. Stars. When
I come home, rusty clouds sweep across the sky, driven by the wind, as
if the wind were chasing the moon and stars. It’s warm. God is born.
š
Abraham Heschel: “What seems to be a stone is a drama. What looks
natural is miraculous. There are no lofty facts, just the works of
God.”
š
Jedrzej Jan — that’s the name of the newborn. As a triple grandmother,
I am apparently obliged to buy blindingly bright blouses. I comply.
š
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171
Wild strawberries are best for mental shock.
Wild strawberries are best for the world’s end.
š
Dream. A mailbox like a shriveled apple, resembling a human face.
I have the key. I put it in the slot that looks like a mouth — nothing.
I put it in the eye slits. The box is empty. Someone’s laughing at my
need for letters.
š
I dream that I want to take a bath. I get in the tub, but it’s full of books,
not water. You can’t scrub up with books.
š
Janka’s mother is sick. One lung doesn’t work. She’s so weak, but she
stands before the high mountain of dying.
š
“Great things happen when people meet with mountains.” (An old
Buddhist proverb found in Stanislaw Vincenz.) I want to add immediately: also applies to the sea.
š
Mickiewicz to Goszczynski (1839): “The calendar and the breviary:
those are a person’s most important books.”
š
The deaf pray with silence in vain. The blind yearn for true darkness.
š
To express the truth. With a chisel. A word. With silence. With life.
š
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A tree split by a bolt of lightning. Open and always green like God.
š
When I think about Christ, I’m always stopped short by a clause in
parentheses: he was fully human (except for sin). That “except for
sin” rubs me the wrong way. I remember all Christ’s moments of
weakness in the Gospels. Maybe something almost like sin lurks in
those dark moments? Like the slightly overwrought anger when he
drives the moneylenders from the temple? Sometimes I’d like to have
Christ as a brother in sin, not just in su≠ering. Although I know his
being sinless was the sign of his divinity.
š
We don’t want immortality for ourselves: too scary. We just need it
for our family, our loved ones.
š
Overheard: she lived like a dove and she died like one.
š
Jozio Kosinski tells me about the composition topic his twin daughters got in school: what good are the elderly to us? Apparently it’s
fixed in the curriculum.
š
Elias Canetti: “Perhaps the soul of every man must be incarnated at
least once as a Jew.”
š
An elderly craftsman, a blacksmith, tells me:
You have to respect the iron. That means knowing what to do
with it. The blacksmith’s music is the song of angels to me. Lady,
you have no idea how great the iron smells!
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 73
š
No one says anymore that he writes poems, articles, essays. Everybody
writes texts. And that’s exactly what comes out: texts.
š
Octavio Paz and his splendid essay “Twilight of Revolution” (1974):
The twilight of revolution arises from a crisis of linear time.
The collapse of the future. Youth movements spring up in defense of the present. An explosion of sensuality — the body is
the present. The crisis of the avant-garde in art. The avantgarde seeks perpetual novelty and turns it into the tyranny of
the new. All revolutions degenerate into regimes.... There is no
art that doesn’t create style and there is no style that doesn’t annihilate art in the end.... What remains? Above all the defense
of dying mortals — humor.
š
Poem — a pebble tossed in the abyss.
Rock beneath my head — Jacob’s stone.
š
The space of loneliness. A slit in space. The eye of the abyss. The
abyss is an overblown concept. No getting around it.
š
All sounds fused — silence.
All colors fused — white.
š
Silence has gone gray. Not hair, silence.
š
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P O E T RY
Sometimes I reread my last note as if it were really the last. What
would it sound like then?
At times I think I jot down these scraps of thoughts and emotions
just waiting for that last sentence, the sentence that will reveal all.
š
Ania tells me that Jedrzej (eighteen months) went on his first merrygo-round. He was not enthusiastic, but bore it with dignity.
š
Szymon tells me that he has enough scholarly materials piled up for
three lifetimes.
I answer him in the words of the Talmud: “Lo alecha hamlacha
ligmor. Finishing the job is not your problem.”
š
All lights combined to make this darkness.
š
Mrs. M. says: “Right here, sitting at this table, I pitted thirteen
pounds of gooseberries. Only to find out I didn’t have to. But I told
myself: you survived the uprising, you were wounded, you’ll get
through this too.”
š
Granddad says he makes the sign of the cross over all his beloved photographs: Mura (my mother), my father, J. He’s saying goodbye. He
thinks about the accountant Mizeracki, who died suddenly, a motorcycle accident, he thinks about those who have wronged him. Then
he starts thinking about those he’s wronged, who should forgive him.
He met an old lady who had trouble walking. He took her arm and they
circled the garden twice. And he realized that he never used to think
about helping people, he’d seen people walk slowly so many times.
The night hours pass, and he takes stock of his life. He swallows
another sleeping pill. He falls asleep at one, wakes up at four. He
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
1 75
performs his morning rituals. He doesn’t throw out the wilted flowers, because I brought them. I’ll probably do the same. Here at the
home, there’s a father whose daughter comes to see him. She takes
him for a walk, her face radiates joy ... Love is when you don’t have
anyone so you can be good to everyone.
š
A biblical bestiary. I’d still like to write it.
š
How many times have I crossed out the conjunction “and” while
writing poems. Even that seems too chatty.
š
I slowly withdraw from my body.
š
I went to see Granddad the day before I left on my trip. I found him
lying in bed. He put his shirt on this morning, but didn’t have strength
to get dressed. He lies in a dark corner of the musty little room.
I made him lemonade — the only thing he consumes all day. He told
me one more time about seeing Albrecht Radziwill in Nieswiez, and
it wore him out. I put a piece of amber in a little scapular for him.
I left fresh flowers. And I had to go. Now he’s at the mercy of the
understa≠ed home and its nasty director. On the way back I prayed
in spirit to Mama. I asked her to do something. But she can act only
through me. She asks for my help.
š
The poems deluged me. They came at me like wild bees.
š
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P O E T RY
The word “zmich” means something like cud. The digested contents
of a cow’s stomach. During the famine in Russia, they pulled it out
and cooked it.
š
“‘Sed contra’ — as Thomas of Aquinas used to say.” — Milosz.
š
“Spending time with the Bible every day doesn’t go unpunished — you
can’t get away.” — Milosz.
š
Beneath the skull, a nest of quiet.
š
Granddad is dying, but he still gets dressed every day and lies on his
bedspread in sandals, not slippers. He wants to die in readiness, as he
lived. Can he? ... I leave while he’s sleeping. I stroke his gaunt hands
to say goodbye, it doesn’t wake him.
Dying — it’s a task on a human scale, but it exceeds us, like every
other human task. Animals manage it better.
š
A cold day, but sunny. Blue sky, gold in the autumn air. I’m returning
from Granddad. He lies sick, alone, like Job. As I leave, great tears
spill down my face. He says: “Maybe God will have mercy and take
me to Him.”
He, who was strong as an oak and never showed his feelings ... The
teary dark eyes of an old dog.
š
I hurry home, to the book that waits on my desk. Mauriac, “Blocnotes”:
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
177
For those who love Christ old age doesn’t really exist, since
Grace gives us once and for all the age we will have for eternity. A
person in a state of Grace is at every moment the age of his soul.
These words were written for me, waiting for me. Mauriac wrote
them on December 17, 1966. He was eighty-one years old.
š
Granddad arrives at that moment when all concepts turn inside out.
I say: “Sleep.” He says: “Eternal rest.” I say: “Hope.” He says: “Death.”
I say: “Nice weather.” He says: “Emptiness. What’s weather?”
š
I want to buy some fish for dinner. A mile-long line in front of the
store. I go to the drugstore for medicine. It’s closed. I want to buy
butter — out of stock.
After a string of such experiences a person goes numb.
Granddad asks, like a child, for marmalade. But of course there’s
no marmalade either.
š
First thing, even before dawn, I unlocked the door to his room. It was
completely dark. I turned on the light. I prayed for a long moment
before the shape covered in a white sheet. His presence filled the
entire room. It was very quiet even in my deaf ears.
If I ever fell short in what I owed him, I made up for it now with
my legs, trotting across the boggy paths to arrange for the funeral.
Funeral, December 21, Friday. And then on Saturday, the twelfth
anniversary for J.
I stare amazed at the people buzzing around with their baskets full
of sausages and herring, swarming in holiday lines.
š
In the cigarette box, where he kept his “treasures” — I found just two
scraps of paper: his certificate and a note from the prison in Leczyca
in 1946. Yellow papers, barely stuck together with a strip of brown
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tape. Here, in these two scraps, hides the secret of his fate. That provincial storyteller, whose rich, vital stories, full of concrete details
and names, went to sleep along with him, never told the important
things about himself. He always talked about other people.
He knew everyone at the home, and could tell the story of every
life.
Good, deaf Mrs. K. dreamed today, not knowing he had died, that
he came to her, took her hand, and his hands were cold.
— “How on earth did your hands get so cold, they’re always
warm ... ”And then she woke up and found out. She’d kept a blessed
candle for his last road. But she was too late. We all are.
š
Where does the soul go after death? Jacob Boehme said: “It doesn’t
have to go anywhere.”
š
We buried Granddad in the holy yellow earth of the cemetery at
Skolimow, near the forest. He lived ninety-two years.
š
I ran around today decorating all the graves: J., Lec, Pietak, Edzia,
Mama (my father, and Grandma, and Uncle Geniek are there too).
Afternoon. Holy Mass for the souls of J. and Granddad.
And then I force myself back to all the living.
š
The last day of the year. Fine weather spreads across a vast underground mirror of pain and tears.
— Edited and translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh
Translator’s note: Anna Kamienska’s published notebooks end here, with the entry
for December 31, 1979. She died in 1986 at the age of sixty-six. The second volume
of the notebooks, from which these excerpts are taken, appeared a year after her death.
AN N A K AMI EN SK A
179
maureen n. m c lane
My Marianne Moore
She has no heirs. She has several epigones but their detail-laden
lacquered ships for me don’t float. She flares singular, exemplary, a
diamond absolute the American East forged in a pressure chamber
we have yet fully to excavate.
It is said that, for all her formality, Marianne Moore spoke exactly
the same to everyone — child, adult, servant, ceo, baseball player,
college president. She was a true democrat.
If her contemporaries often turned to myth (The Waste Land, Ulysses),
to a new mode of modern enchantment, Moore made it new via a
reverse enchantment: unlike Orpheus, she does not make the stones
sing but rather sings the stones:
I sense your glory.
For things that I desire and have not got:
For things I have that I wish I had not,
You compensate me,
Stones.
— From Flints, Not Flowers
Hear this refusal to swoon, this song of lack, this almost NewEnglandy logic of flinty compensation. This bald rhythmic reckoning
with, dispossession of, “things.” In such a poem, an early poem, it is
as if Moore moves behind Eliot’s idea of the “objective correlative” —
the object adequate to emotion, to a complex of thought and feeling — to show us the process by which “flints” might become that
object, selected over and against “flowers.” For, as Milton said, and
Moore surely knew, “reason is but choosing.”
Which in Moore’s case often means negating: “Flints, Not Flowers.”
“The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing.” So goes the title of a much
later poem. What could be a fey little announcement — how
enchanting the mind! — is in Moore a diagnosis: the mind enchants:
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it casts spells, sings songs, projects its magic on and through the
object world and other creatures. The poems tack between a submission to and a critique of this enchantment. They are anti-Orphic
more than Orphic — yet one has to know the power of Orpheus to
create a poetics opposed to it.
š
At her worst she is twee, or, alternately, insistent. She could seem
prudish, famously advising Elizabeth Bishop to delete “water-closet”
from her poem “Roosters.” One could not imagine her liking, much
less writing like, Sharon Olds. But perhaps this is unfair to both poets:
there is more bodily mess and more extreme emotion in Moore than
one might think. Moore is ill-served by many of her admirers, who
put her on the mantle with Aunt Jennifer’s tigers, precious and breakable and old-fashioned, or who see her as a specimen of loveable
eccentric poetic Americana. Americans like their artists folksy, palsy,
just plain folks writing plain poems in plain American which cats and
dogs can read! (“England”). She ran the risk of becoming a character
and the weaker poems may su≠er from that.
But she is the stealth weapon of American poetry, with a ferocity and
a lacerating intelligence few poets have matched. She has a capacity
for a Swiftian savage indignation, and for a courtly feline bitchiness one finds more regularly in Saint-Simon and Proust. Her very
titles can be amusing little cracks of the whip: “In This Age of Hard
Trying, Nonchalance Is Good and”; “To Be Liked by You Would
Be a Calamity.” Like Pound, who wrote extremely funny character
sketches and savage epigrams, she occasionally o≠ers mordant little
epitaphs on encounters with inflated morons and presumptuous
numskulls:
I am hard to disgust,
but a pretentious poet can do it;
a person without a tap root; and
impercipience can do it; did it.
— From Mercifully
Her pointed social satires remind one of Jane Austen, her baroque
syntactical devastations reminiscent of Henry James:
M AU REEN N . M C LAN E
1 81
I remember a swan under the willows in Oxford,
with flamingo-colored, mapleleaflike feet. It reconnoitered like a battleship. Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were
ingredients in its
disinclination to move. Finally its hardihood was
not proof against its
proclivity to more fully appraise such bits
of food as the stream
bore counter to it; it made away with what I gave it
to eat. I have seen this swan and
I have seen you; I have seen ambition without
understanding in a variety of forms.
— From Critics and Connoisseurs
At how many inane social gatherings, or when watching how many
porcine politicians on tv, might one take solace in these exhilarating lines! The ostentatious Latinate polysyllables (disinclination,
proclivity), the intricate clauses, all move toward the punch of the
monosyllabic epitaph: I have seen this swan and I have seen you. The
thing itself, an observed scene, then glossed: I have seen ambition
without understanding in a variety of forms. The emblem, the image,
the gloss: the medieval emblem book made modern. Her epigrammatic wit is simultaneously a spine-straightener and a consolation.
There should be a Marianne Moore brand of bourbon. “Neatness of
finish! Neatness of finish!” (“An Octopus”).
š
It is remarkable that one of the best poems of the twentieth century,
Moore’s “Marriage,” is apparently so little read. The best poem on
marriage since, perhaps, Paradise Lost, to which it is enormously and
confidently indebted. A poem on the romance, the fatality, of marriage, by a woman whom some could not but see as a spinster.
They toil not, neither do they spin.
But toil she did, and spin, a queer erotic weave su≠used with feeling;
an American original Pound and Williams had the great fortune and
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P O E T RY
insight to hail.
As Williams said of Emily Dickinson and might have said of Moore:
She was a real good guy.
Opposition is true friendship, said Blake.
But this is not about friendship — this is about marriage:
This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need not change one’s mind
about a thing one has believed in,
requiring public promises
of one’s intention
to fulfill a private obligation:
I wonder what Adam and Eve
think of it by this time.
One hears here a new note, not exactly a new tone — though a
new tone sounds within this long, moving, weird, and grief-struck
poem — but a new pace, an enormously caretaking pace, a slow regular walking step, as we move phrase by thinking phrase down the line,
down the page.
It is perhaps obvious that we are talking here, that Moore was
talking here, of heterosexual marriage. About that state-sponsored
“institution” or “perhaps one should say enterprise” organizing what
Adrienne Rich later called “the tragedy of sex.” Meaning, at the time
she wrote, the tragedy of hetero-sex. Though this tragedy need not
be confined to any locality or mode of sex.
The voice: a polemically neutral or rather clinical speaker, deploying
an ostentatiously impersonal pronoun: perhaps one should say enterprise; perhaps one need not change one’s mind.
“Marriage” is in part a poem about seeing whether one need change
one’s mind.
This presumes that women have minds —
M AU REEN N . M C LAN E
1 83
which has long been doubtful
— even if occasionally “we are justified in supposing / That you must
have brains” (“Roses Only”).
Need one “change one’s mind / about a thing one has believed in”?
Are these carefully unfolding phrases a concession to all those who
continue to regard marriage as “a thing one has believed in,” the
opening clauses o≠ered “out of respect” to those who continue to
believe by one who might not?
We are in the presence of a dramatized scrupulosity as the poet considers the case. It is, then, with extreme precision that Moore gives us
a strenuously ungendered, apparently unmarked speaker: one. It is
as if she stands outside or beyond gender and indeed beyond the species, or rather that she aims for that position, that generous god-like
yet unsexed position from which to assess them both, gently mocking, shaking the head. She forces us to reckon with the position of the
speaker, generalized and impersonal as that one, but also, equally,
forced into that impersonality, as if too close to a very live wire:
I wonder what Adam and Eve / think of it by this time.
š
The poem is simultaneously a celebration of opposition-in-marriage
and a requiem for the possibility of its ever actually flourishing:
this amalgamation which can never be more
than an interesting impossibility ...
This is a poem passionately inquiring into what theorists might call
“the sex/gender system of companionate marriage” — a poem asking
whether egalitarian marriage might work, and how: questions which,
centuries before, were Milton’s as well.
Moore approaches the topos gingerly, carefully, judiciously and
mock-judiciously, as if committed to laying out all aspects of the
case. She o≠ers a forensic essay — an assay, an attempt, a testing; it
is a sifting of evidence, drawn from a vast cultural inheritance here
mobilized with a sorrowing wit.
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P O E T RY
She writes for the defense and for the prosecution, in a sustained
performance of due diligence:
Eve: beautiful woman —
I have seen her
when she was so handsome
she gave me a start,
.......................
“See her, see her in this common world,”
the central flaw
in that first crystal-fine experiment.
And of Adam:
And he has beauty also;
it’s distressing — the O thou
to whom from whom,
without whom nothing — Adam ...
Partisanship withers in the distress of this witnessing, this recognition of this double beauty. And it is as if the poet cannot see Adam
without invoking Eve’s own response to Adam, as Milton imagined
it in Paradise Lost. There Eve’s address moves immediately into the
syntax of dependency and of idolatry:
O thou for whom
And from whom I was formed, flesh of thy flesh,
And without whom am to no end ...
Adam is her pre-position: made from his rib, she is of him, from
him, for him, without him nothing. Her relation to God is always
already mediated — He for God only, she for God in him (Paradise
Lost, Book iv).
In Moore, Eve’s Miltonic salutation becomes a kind of semi-ironized,
fatal shorthand, with Adam glossed as:
the O thou
to whom from whom
without whom nothing — Adam;
M AU REEN N . M C LAN E
1 85
an apposition semi-ironized in the poet’s handling, because one must
concede that “he has beauty also,” that he should be adored; because
one feels —
the strange experience of beauty;
its existence is too much;
it tears one to pieces
and each fresh wave of consciousness
is poison.
This staggers me always, the abrupt shifts of tone, the movement
from the forensic to this sudden impassioned lyric outbreak which
does not exalt but rather sears.
Yeats said that out of the argument with others, one makes rhetoric;
out of the argument with oneself, poetry. “Marriage” is a higherorder poiesis, a sustained argument with oneself conducted through
the medium of rhetoric. Within the poem it is Adam who makes the
case for marriage, in a stately, slightly pompous formal rhetoric that ingathers phrasing and diction from a myriad of sources as we hear him —
commending it
as a fine art, as an experiment,
a duty or as merely recreation.
One must not call him ru∞an
nor friction a calamity —
the fight to be a≠ectionate:
“no truth can be fully known
until it has been tried
by the tooth of disputation.”
While
She says, “This butterfly,
this waterfly, this nomad
that has ‘proposed
to settle on my hand for life’ —
What can one do with it?”
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P O E T RY
A glorious “he says, she says” exchange unfolds as if Moore were
staging her own George Cukor comedy.
The poem both satirizes and honors male heroism. And it rings many
changes on age-old misogynistic themes, o≠ering its own catalogue
of details; there is of course a powerful male case against marriage and
Moore is keen to present it:
The fact of woman
is “not the sound of the flute
but very poison.”
In a polyphonic, polemical orchestration of quoted bits, Moore brilliantly adopts and parries the voice of one who asserts —
“a wife is a co∞n,”
that severe object
with the pleasing geometry
stipulating space not people,
refusing to be buried
and uniquely disappointing,
revengefully wrought in the attitude
of an adoring child
to a distinguished parent.
That it was Ezra Pound who spoke the wife-is-a-co∞n line opens up
new angles.
Such an exchange between the He and the She could be endless, has
been endless, and Moore will give no obvious resolution. She o≠ers
instead a kind of diagnosis.
There is a terminal, foundational, incorrigible mistaking — of the self,
of the other:
The fact forgot
that “some have merely rights
while some have obligations,”
he loves himself so much,
he can permit himself
M AU REEN N . M C LAN E
1 87
no rival in that love.
She loves herself so much,
she cannot see herself enough —
a statuette of ivory on ivory,
the logical last touch
to an expansive splendor
earned as wages for work done ...
The whole poem partakes of the rhetoric of the dubitatio:
Psychology which explains everything
explains nothing,
and we are still in doubt ...
and of an impossibility trope tested and retested —
this amalgamation which can never be more
than an interesting impossibility ...
Yet —
One sees that it is rare —
that striking grasp of opposites
opposed each to the other, not to unity.
One sees that it is rare; rare, that is, but perhaps possible.
š
I first read Moore seriously when I was studying in Oxford; I had
also been reading in various schools of feminism and psychoanalysis,
as they were in the air in those days, and as I needed tools for living.
Moore’s poem may have taught me more than any debate between
Anglo-American and French feminists, or between, say, object-relations and Lacanian analysts. Or perhaps it taught me nothing; poems
aren’t for teaching; they insinuate; they are of the Tree of Life and
of the Tree of Knowledge; they are “something feline, / something
colubrine.” As wizards of projection, anthropomorphism, and trope,
poets have their own long history of singing the song of introjection,
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P O E T RY
of transference, of projection. And of course, of meditating on Woman.
Woman as ideal, as bane, as muse, as mother, as lover, as daughter, as
harpy, shrew, whore, and bliss. Woman under erasure.
She loves herself so much,
she cannot see herself enough —
Female narcissism. The feminine as narcissism. Woman as lack. What
sentient woman does not know all about this, does not live this out?
What man does not also, in another way, live this out?
The horrible endless iteration of it all. The Dark Continent of It All
endlessly explored.
What do women want?
“I should like to be alone”;
to which the visitor replies,
“I should like to be alone;
why not be alone together?”
Woman as a mess of contradictions, as She Who Does Not Know Her
Own Mind: viz. Moore’s Eve,
equally positive in demanding a commotion
and in stipulating quiet:
And it is true I did not know my own mind.
I wrote a long essay comparing Moore’s poetics with H.D.’s and
Gertrude Stein’s; I read them intensively; I got engaged to be married; I thought and felt and felt and thought and floated ever more
perilously away from myself, for I needed a kind of saving no one
would o≠er and I could not provide myself. I read myself into all
the contradictions; I knew the bourgeois bankruptcy of marriage,
the long eviscerating history of it, the pleasures that might be found
within it; I was engaged to a man who was kind and intelligent and
loving and seemingly open to every thought, however disturbing. He
was unfazed by contradiction, a maven of poststructuralist thinking,
M AU REEN N . M C LAN E
1 89
a person who tended to approach literature as a game for amused
decoding. Print is dead, he would say cheerfully. Anything you write
is fine with me, he would say, a great gift to one unsanctioned by
family or background to write. I thought ours were equal and opposite searchings, but I had my own violent promptings and urgencies
which he did not, could not, share, and the compulsion or impulsion
to pursue these promptings was itself a weird eros that further drove
me on, o≠ —
I had fallen in love with another but not, it would seem, out of love
with him. This was unwieldy. This was worse: It was a contradiction,
a flaw in the world, unencompassable, “the central flaw / in that first
crystal-fine experiment,” and everything shattered.
For I was in fact out of love with him but not with the globe that
had seemingly enclosed us. And the woman I now loved was a darting thing, flickering and uncapturable, given to pronouncements like,
Well that is what one does, no? Marry. Everyone of course feels ambivalent.
This was to me outrageous as well as a great grief. My great vocation
was not to feel ambivalent. This was, of course, childish. It bespoke of
the vain purity of the child. Which I should have honored.
satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
— From What Are Years
For our wedding ceremony I chose passages to be read during the
liturgy. It was to be a Catholic mass — every element of the experience becoming a thorough immolation of the self on the bier of given
expectation. The wedding dress, one my parents preferred; the mass,
residual ritual of my upbringing; the marriage itself, a public consecration of the right to be an adult, that is, to have sex, and to answer
to no one except those to whom one chose to answer.
This bespoke a peculiarly impoverished sense of adulthood.
Liberty and Union, now and forever.
This was a form of self-directed soul-murder. As well as, more obviously, a revolting abuse of my soon-to-be-husband.
190
P O E T RY
What can one do for them —
these savages
— From Marriage
There was nothing to be done or nothing I could do and no one could
or did help me, nor did anyone help him. I chose a poem for the liturgy which I thought might honor and see us through this di∞culty —
The ache of marriage:
thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth
We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each
It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it
two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.
— The Ache of Marriage by Denise Levertov
We were in the ark of it, the ache of it, though our aches were di≠erent
and the ark of our covenant ultimately, necessarily, belatedly broken.
this amalgamation which can never be more
than an interesting impossibility ...
became an excruciating impossibility. Below the incandescent stars,
below the incandescent fruit, something was broken and there was
nothing to be done and
it tears one to pieces
and each fresh wave of consciousness
is poison.
M AU REEN N . M C LAN E
191
When but to think was to be full of sorrow, when to be conscious was
to wish to be dead, when in some moods one had to admit —
“I am such a cow,
if I had a sorrow
I should feel it a long time;
I am not one of those
who have a great sorrow
in the morning
and a great joy at noon”
— From Marriage
— there was this other prior thing of thinking sorrow, this wonderful keening and sometimes ludic thing. In the midst of all rending and beyond all unknowing there is a gratitude for those who
survey what’s impossible, for those who say that “love / is the only
fortress / strong enough to trust to” (“The Paper Nautilus”), those
who cry out saying —
If that which is at all were not forever,
why would those who graced the spires
with animals and gathered there to rest, on cold luxurious
low stone seats — a monk and monk and monk — between the thus
ingenious roof-supports, have slaved to confuse
grace with a kindly manner, time in which to pay a debt,
the cure for sins, a graceful use
of what are yet
approved stone mullions branching out across
the perpendiculars?
— From The Pangolin
a gratitude for those who wonder if that which is at all were not forever,
how to persist —
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe.
— From What Are Years
192
P O E T RY
All honor to those who wave the pure flag of a di∞cult joy —
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.
— From What Are Years
M AU REEN N . M C LAN E
193
C O N T R I BU TO R S
rae armantrout is the author of Versed, winner of the 2010
Pulitzer Prize in poetry, Money Shot (2011), and Just Saying (2013),
all published by Wesleyan University Press.
elizabeth arnold’s third book of poems is E≠acement (Flood Editions, 2010). She has received an Amy Lowell traveling scholarship
and is on the mfa faculty at the University of Maryland.
marian bantjes * is a typographer, designer, artist, and writer. She
is known for her custom typography, detailed and lovingly precise
vector art, obsessive hand work, and patterning and ornament.
sandra beasley is the author of I Was the Jukebox (W.W. Norton,
2010), Theories of Falling (New Issues, 2008), and Don’t Kill the
Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life (Crown, 2011).
marianne boruch ’s seventh book of poems is The Book of Hours
(Copper Canyon Press, 2011). Her memoir is The Glimpse Traveler
(Indiana University Press, 2011).
christopher buckley’s most recent book is Rolling the Bones
(University of Tampa Press, 2010).
clare cavanagh is the author of Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics:
Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale University Press, 2009). She teaches
Slavic and comparative literatures at Northwestern University.
cally conan-davies * is an Australian writer, teacher, and bibliotherapist.
paul durica is a graduate student at the University of Chicago and
the founder of Pocket Guide to Hell Tours and Reenactments.
alice fulton’s books include The Nightingales of Troy: Connected
Stories (2008); Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems (2004); and Felt
(2001) all published by W.W.Norton.
kimiko hahn * is the author of Toxic Flora (2010) and The Narrow
Road to the Interior (2006), both published by W.W. Norton. She
teaches at Queens College, cuny.
194
P O E T RY
judith hall’s * books include To Put The Mouth To (William Morrow, 1992) and Three Trios (Northwestern University Press, 2007).
maria hummel’s poem “Station” (September 2010) won a 2011
Pushcart Prize. She is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
devin johnston’s most recent books are Traveler: Poems (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2011) and Creaturely and Other Essays (Turtle
Point, 2009). He is an editor for Flood Editions.
anna kamienska (1920 – 1986) was a poet, translator, critic, essayist, and editor. For previous installments of her “Notebook,” see June
2010 and March 2011.
maureen n. m c lane’s * “My Marianne Moore” comes from her
new book of experimental prose, My Poets, forthcoming from Farrar,
Straus and Giroux next month.
spencer reece is the chaplain to Bishop Carlos Lopez-Lozano of
the Reformed Episcopal Church in Spain.
john repp’s poems appear in recent issues of Michigan Quarterly
Review, Crazyhorse, the Journal, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. He is a
frequent contributor to the book pages of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
adam vines * teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham
and edits Birmingham Poetry Review. His first collection of poetry is
The Coal Life (University of Arkansas Press, 2012).
franz wright has been doing some traveling lately to promote his
new collection of prose poems, Kindertotenwald (Alfred A. Knopf,
2011), while attempting to finish two new books of poems and prose.
* First appearance in Poetry.
C ON T RI BU TORS
195
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April / May 1965
Near the beginning of the O∞cial Guide: New York World’s Fair
1964 / 1965, city planner Robert Moses asks visitors:
What is it you want? Vast forces dormant in nuggets of imprisoned sunlight? Machines that fly, think, transport, fashion, and
do man’s work? Spices, perfume, ivory, apes, and peacocks?
Dead Sea Scrolls?
Moses answers his own question: “We have them all.” What
the World’s Fair did not have was the backing of the Bureau
of International Expositions, the regulatory body based in Paris that
had approved the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. Undaunted, Moses and
his businessmen backers invited private companies and corporations
from across the globe to create the impression of a cosmopolitan event.
Although based in France and sta≠ed by Americans, the Paris Review
was not the sort of outfit the Fair’s planners had in mind. The advertisement for the Paris Review booth appeared in an issue of Poetry devoted to “work in progress.” With poems by Wendell Berry, Hayden
Carruth, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, Galway
Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Adrienne
Rich, Anne Sexton, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and others, the
double issue o≠ered, like the World’s Fair, a glimpse of the future. At
the same time it provided, according to editor Henry Rago:
the active anthology that Ezra Pound imagined in the earliest
days of the magazine.... [When] enough poets are seen in one
place, at one time, each minding his own business, some larger
impressions just might be possible.