Movable Islands: Poems by Debora Greger

by Debora Greger

Overview

From 'Painted Desert': What is hospitable about this parched landscape? Colors present themselves as limply as waxes left in the sun: plain brown, a little green, a poor gold, blue that glares.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691643441
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets , #670
Pages:	78
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.50(d)

Read an Excerpt

Movable Islands

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By Debora Greger

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06422-2

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CHAPTER 1

I wish I were the night that I might look on you with many eyes. — Plato

The First Movement

And when a little more time has passed, two or three hundred years, ... everything we do now will seem clumsy, and difficult, and terribly uncomfortable and strange. — Vershinin, in Three Sisters

    Next door the dock starts over by itself,
    grinding its gears like salt.
    A letter is undelivered. In the desert
    a sentry snaps awake in a night so black
    he thinks his eyes no longer open,
    and he feels for the iceberg
    he had been sleeping on.
    Slipping. The earth
    curves sharply beneath him.
    There is the fall he sees
    the moment before it happens
    that never happens.

    Another morning, the whole island
    tilts into the sun.
    Over the next hill
    an orchestra warms up.
    The constant "A." The first movement,
    andante cantabile.
    He leans in the doorway,
    half in or out,
    and lifts his hand in a wave
    although no one else is in sight.


    The Armorer's Daughter

    My father is a hard man.
    When my mother couldn't give him a son,
    he made the best of it, that is
    he made me into what was missing.
    So I polish a breastplate until
    my smudged face is reflected blue-black
    and my arm is stiff as a gauntlet.

    I have my father's stubborn jaw
    they tell me, those boys from the village
    who tease, envious of my lot.
    The roughened men who come for a mending,
    who bring their smooth sons to be measured,
    say I have his hands, too wide for a woman.
    Then I think of the beetle on the stoop
    whose shell shamed the finest armor.
    It scuttled away when I reached down.
    With his hand.

      I am and am not him.
    Give me the dusty wings of the moths
    that dared spend the night on his workbench
    and I would fly — where?
    Out to the hill with the shepherd?
    To the mill where the miller's son
    is clouded in the finest-ground flour?

    This wool-gathering angers my father,
    he pounds music from metal,
    a chorus of glow and chill, bend and stay.
    I drop a helmet with a carelessness
    I barely recognize and run into the yard,
    into the road, tripping on my skirts.
    Late afternoon, after a rain, already
    the sun's low flame lights the edges
    of everything. This world shines,
    rings and shines, like his dream of heaven.


    Fainted Desert

    Another day knocking in the orchard —
    a long-necked machine shaking almond trees
    branch by branch, making the sound of someone
    hitting the door, demanding entry.

    But when I go to answer it, the door gives
    under my hand onto a wall of heat.
    Crawling out of leaves, a truck rattles to the road
    just ahead of its dusty shadow.

    What is hospitable about this parched landscape?
    Colors present themselves as limply as waxes
    left in the sun: plain brown, a little green,
    a poor gold, blue that glares.

    When have I not thought in these shades?
    The poverty of imagination, taking what is given
    as simply given. The pink Englishman,
    on his antediluvian bike, wears pale,

    buttoned-up layers of clothes as armor
    against the weather. On what used to be
    a kitchen chair in what was a garden,
    his brown daughter shakes her straw-blonde hair

    down across her shiny shoulders. She's winding
    white yarn. Why do I detail, at such length?
    It's like this that I love you, like dirt
    which lies everywhere like water after long rain.


    The Coloring of Experience

    Against the tinny sky, scattered
    on the elm's blackened branches,
    the pale half-coins of its leaves
    seemed a kind of wealth to the kid waiting
    in the remnants of a rain for some adult
    to finish with another.

    I could say that while she stood squinting
    in the refractable air, up in the house
    a woman was suggesting to the girl's short father
    that in bed everyone's the same height.
    Or was using some similar line to maneuver him
    down the hall. But no such grown-up

    knowledge is tied to that tree,
    that flat light. Just this: what I saw
    when I was eight was someone else's vision
    and unreportable. Still. Now I wonder
    what those two middle-aged, middle-class
    American tourists thought when

    at Versailles both separately saw
    an eighteenth-century courtier
    cross a bridge no longer on the map.
    Though companions, they didn't
    speak of the outing for years and, when
    they did, only to a third person.

Letter to My Sister

Today there is only a man and a half, and it is as still as the desert.... — Masha, in Three Sisters

    On the way home I stopped
    and listened to the ice
    cracking in straight lines south,
    lines the wild geese take.
    The day turned from the sun
    toward the cold that is the home of everything.

    Tonight, tired of this house, this skin,
    I think of the weight of darkness
    on your house at the edge of the desert.
    You in the old rocker, not rocking,
    listening — to what?
    "Wolves in the winter," your letter tells me,
    "One never sees them.
    How is one to sleep without them?"

    One late afternoon
    the wind filled your hair like a flag,
    and your words blew against your face.
    You crushed a sprig of sage
    until the air was full of the smell,
    half medicinal, half wild.
    I remember that but nothing with it.
    What am I looking for? Something small.
    A twig to take me back. A twig to send me on.


    Depth of Field

    The last of the light rusts around us.
    On your chest, a book's pages
    ruffle in your slow breath.
    Your camera, accurate about your children's
    reluctance to stand still,
    would freeze this flutter and miss
    the one inside, your heart's
    uneven, stubborn rhythm.

    The book's about a tribe whose men,
    on a long hunt, hollow little depressions
    in the plains and sleep there,
    to wake at dawn under a sheet of frost.
    It doesn't say how the man
    who discovered them spent his nights.
    Or what drug is making you sleepy.

    There's a photo in which one of us,
    crying, has run from the pose
    — to be captured, blurred fist
    to bleary eye, in the corner of the frame.
    You didn't know your own strength
    the way we did, hugged hurriedly
    after a sitting, in a tangle of cords and lights.
    You don't know what remains of it.

    Monet, in his last, huge, hazy paintings,
    depicted water lilies, details
    that for another painter would have been
    just background. Middle distance,
    depth of field — with sky-shaded eyes
    you've been scanning what's out there
    but listening for something else,
    somewhere inside.

Pentimento

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. — Lillian Hellman

    Across the meadow a change of cloud comes
    and, looking up, you see what you can't hear,
    a whiteness falling, filling the cracks
    in the old scenery, icing the aviary
    and the stuffed bird on a summer hat.
    Someone wearing white gloves
    plays the white keys of a piano,
    unaware that she is overheard. Caution,
    that crumpled handkerchief,
    is thrown to what wind there is.
    The white creatures begin to appear:

    The floury hands of your mother.
    The clouds of her breath around your name.
    The white shoes of summer.
    The white arms of the tree you loved
    and fell from. The white hair
    of a girl you covered with leaves
    under that tree. The white breast
    hidden in the white dress.

    A varying hare ventures into this
    softened landscape, feeling safe
    from the snowy owl. This is its error.
    Yours is of a different order.
    These things you had forgotten
    have nothing to tell you.
    You open the door to see more clearly.
    There is the field, green,
    and dark birds breaking into flight.


    The Light Passages

    A day later than he said in the letter,
    still humming, half-whistling
    the theme of the piece he stayed on to practice,
    he leaves the car at the last road sign
    and climbs the fence, taking the old shortcut
    through the orchard at sunrise.
    He stumbles through weeds,
    sending up sleepy birds,
    the only sounds their stiff wings
    and ice cracking on the branches
    from which they have risen,

    thinking not of them but of how
    Beethoven, playing a new sonata for friends,
    hardly touched the keys
    in the pianissimo,
    imagining a light passage
    that the others, not deaf, could not hear.

    From the porch he looks back —
    the orchard, still again,
    is another world, a trick of the eye,
    as the house in silhouette was before.
    The house, still dark inside,
    is still home.
    Careful not to wake his family
    after all the years,
    he slips through the door
    and surefooted as if he had never left
    goes to the piano
    and begins to play.


    Physical Properties

    After three days of wind
    compounding itself, early this morning
    it knocks the power out. What hour

    was it last time? Prime, and your brother,
    a groggy acolyte, extinguished a candle
    he'd just lit, daydreaming of more sleep.

    In the poor light of that hour,
    a schoolgirl — you — discovered she was
    wearing one black sock, one blue,

    as she fumbled for the romantic novel
    buried in her bookbag. Another
    winter circus, these slippages

    of memory, this hold. Like an acrobat
    hurtling from her horse toward the paper-covered
    hoop, you feel in the dim chill

    you're moving into the embrace of a man
    unaware of his size and attendant strength.
    Maybe, like velocity, the fear is made

    as much of duration as of direction.
    That girl trying not to devour her story.
    What the book didn't cover —

    all properties of inertia. Maybe
    it's just a matter of articulation.
    Iced oak leaf stubbornly shivering

    on its branch. This man's elegant jointing
    braced to break your fall. These words,
    involuntary as breath: This is what I

    want. This hour is what I want.


    Bad Debts

    You peel an orange for someone
    who's again bitten her nails to the quick.
    She ignores the gesture's fruit,

    but who can miss the sharp oils released?
    The air is as freighted as that
    over mint fields during harvest,

    something shot past, caught afterwards.
    The civil voices of your parents
    wafted away as you drowsed in the back seat.

    Beside you lay the shell, lime-whorled,
    ripe with death's salt and stink.
    Against your ear, its waves matched

    the waves of your blood, giving back
    what you are always left, that thief
    of the moment, yourself. You owe something

    still to that shell just as this woman
    must owe you for wandering when you did
    and for coming back as if to some other room.

    She offers you an orange segment
    but lets you open her hand and follow
    the almost moonless nails, their calendar

    of tenses, because it has nothing
    to do with her. It's yourself you must
    pay back, blankness for blankness,

    kindness in kind.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Movable Islands by Debora Greger. Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Acknowledgments, pg. v
• Contents, pg. xi
• The First Movement, pg. 3
• The Armorer's Daughter, pg. 4
• Fainted Desert, pg. 6
• The Coloring of Experience, pg. 7
• Letter to My Sister, pg. 8
• Depth of Field, pg. 9
• Pentimento, pg. 10
• The Light Passages, pg. 12
• Physical Properties, pg. 13
• Bad Debts, pg. 14
• From This Angle, pg. 15
• Body of Work, pg. 16
• What Dances, pg. 18
• Going to Sleep, pg. 19
• The Palace at 4 A.M., pg. 20
• Long-Distance Swimming, pg. 21
• Grisaille, pg. 25
• Sleeping Beauty, pg. 26
• Patches of Sky, pg. 27
• Trappings, pg. 28
• The Invention of Routine, pg. 29
• White Fields, pg. 30
• The Painter's Model, pg. 32
• Fall, pg. 33
• The Man on the Bed, pg. 34
• Not You, pg. 35
• To Make You Well, pg. 36
• Sea Change, pg. 37
• Closing, pg. 39
• Night Freight, pg. 43
• Calibrations, pg. 44
• Myopia, pg. 46
• Fictions, pg. 47
• Any Story, pg. 49
• After Iceland, William Morris Dreams of Panama, pg. 51
• Business, pg. 52
• Companion to Ships and the Sea, pg. 53
• Natural Forces, pg. 54
• The Life of the Remittance Man, pg. 55
• Knowing, pg. 57
• Crossing the Plains, pg. 58
• A Second or Third Dimension, pg. 59
• Bearings, pg. 60
• Field Glass, pg. 61
• Hard Water, pg. 63