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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781350360068 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 01/26/2023 |
| Pages: | 84 |
| Sales rank: | 620,090 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Carnegie Hall
Shiner
I wake up growling apples and dirt naked and stretched under a barn sky I cannot recall how I hurt my right eye
Arch of vessels gone grape under the lid An army of red ants, a cast of shadows.
Good God. My eye has gone weak. Simply
put, I walked into an opening door.
The world is constantly changing shape very dangerous. Two desert tortoises
duke it out on Arizona soil. By morning one's always left belly-up to boil.
Now you roll around with a rock
and see what kind of bruise you can muster Dolefulness, caprice, regret, trauma My bicycle has two seats get on
Carnegie Hall
Sometimes in life you need a little help Big Daddy Free to compose something without tragedy I note the screech of a limousine, your Irish eyes farewell!
Or Wilkommen! To timid rain, a ripple on the flag of humiliation All-beef dogs and luggage of innovation
Oh cross navigate puddles and disciplinary figures I could mail myself as a violet Recur as a nutritionist —
Monstrous A beer's better than a woman because it don't get jealous Shiny erect leg — a fake!
A jewel, a peach, hand in pocket. Thief!
Well it ain't the doge but we coalesce around these golden doors, adroit figures riding gargantuan fish If I had a coin to toss as in the Trevi
but I am already returning You're really pregnant, lady!
My hose casts a gray shadow
Turn of events, a veteran requests no smoking at his table in front of the ill-used cathedral Roll tape — Golden Messiah, please let this move me
Rezando como no sabía — Yikes! Organs terrify 6 pm at war with the rush hour moo
The organs win! Snap, snap, snap the Eucharist with a dutiful Pentax as big steel pipes sound off like slit mouths
Oh Trinity, Oh Cartier, Oh Hotel Dorset Thick red flowers dying in a window display Color so plush a peninsula A gorgeous silver trumpet steams up from the dermis introducing the biscuit collection
I'm governed by a pair of functioning pumps the white walk lights in dusk
Pendulous clovers of amber and onyx I note that panhandling while eating potato chips seems to reduce your chances
Voilà la Plaza and an array of vertical ties Uh-oh Bomb-squad vans parked outside I feel renegade and clairvoyant amidst the secret securities with doodads in their ears Maybe it's the President again outside the St. Moritz I pause at the lovely liatus The sweet autumn clematis
Deep gray night of gray felt folding and enclosing explosions Almost there, to Carnegie Hall to see — who else? — Ravi Shankar
It's the Prime Minister of India It's a perfect circle of electric light It's an entwined raga round a daughter round a gata It's my fiancé birthed out of dashing sudden night
Red-coated ushers swim in a sea of silk saris Usher me in, gentlemen Raw silk the colors of arteries
September 2
Dragging around some miserable wife on a real hike, straight up a cliff of corn, holding onto silk husks for dear life — it's a little odd to vacation as your mistress, and as the only one licensed to drive, but no one seems to mind. A little disturbed but making it through Swelling up before noon, I dreamt my abalone ring came apart Live fish and shell peeled off my finger, in a retail store of which you were the owner.
This day smells like toast.
Wish Fulfillment
I saw Aurora bouncing down the street in a thin gray undershirt, she had no sense, she was a complete turnip,
her teeth flat and square like a horse's
I saw Aurora, a blood orange leaking in the east, beast-like, internecine,
yet promising the best cinnamon rolls in town —
What a load of hog! Summer of love,
hie! Hie! Shake your grim baton, drag me under your spell of ethereal porn —
Have you a turn of phrase? A bee in your bonnet? Jargon? Sherry? Fine china?
Don't leave me with my hands full of snake!
he cries, then the sepia god stops by to confide that he does not care if we think of him as complex, simple, or not at all.
The good news is, in the history of all this you will be remembered as very handsome and deciduous.
Now let us target greed, regret,
fog-filled inlets, streets greased with whiskey, any vulgar buds in the garden of the unborn. Then it all begins again with the bottom lock.
The World
The world is reaching into you deeper and faster and cheaper than ever before so what do you hope for an afternoon spent alone with porn do we live in a world of bodies or not if the falling trees don't kill the chimps the lack of habitat will they squawk as they swing from branch to branch o-o-o-awak!
with those miraculous hands the butterflies killed off by the new-
wave pollen you can't hug a Nazi and hope he'll change such an idea is an affront to national security a child stands O-mouthed in a doorway learning evil a bomb makes more shrapnel if it explodes on cement so never let your guard down, not for one minute.
Everything is muted and blue the tip-tap of creation seems cloudy, not crisp and words know nothing more than I do, or they're not telling. I grew one seed, I cultivated one thing a Christ-baby who is what he eats. A small hot thing is an animal that smells good but the good must be sealed off from the bad or the bad from the good otherwise a ghoulish black vein might creep up to the healthy pink brain but the earth is molten and made of moods so go ahead blow it up blow it up your mouth full of love and anger and white-
gold milk a crack of infinity will pulse on in one glistening ovary so believe me, it's the voice of a miserable motherfucker that whispers
you cannot realize your world
The Beginner
I didn't mean to hurt you, I am a beginner beginning to lose
sight of what I was beginning, I am beginning a house I am beginning
to grow filaments. I took you in, I took you into my mouth into my hands I heard
the flutter of your creaseless heart I heard your curls and your muscles
and the ongoing waft of detergent Ka-boom, ka-boom
My heart, your heart Two bodies, the color of egg
shifting under.
The Condemned Building
I lie all night a lump of gum sprouting knots splayed as an encore Your body missing, lifted from the bed by bats and carried up past the fat yogurt moon Mosquitoes smack against the walls and one stubby bulge on the cactus refuses to bloom. The city will not release its inhabitants, and dawn is held back by a pin At 5 am the fever breaks runs around town cries like a baby A corona of hail renders me speechless, as the crane keeps dipping into the inferno scooping out live cats and walls I begin to pray, Come on home honey, seek the Venus under the sheet. Wake me from the dream of the queen who imprisons eunuchs in soft white gowns Make your bed of snow in my mouth.
Times Square
Joy got lost, so lost she couldn't find the sky.
If she doesn't live here,
who are all the lights for?
Who is doing the living?
Meanwhile the beige-suited chicks
have grown tired of it, all the Good War shit,
the drinks named after towns —
Fort Wayne, Rome, Pomfret.
This used to be this whole block something else entirely
The man in the hotel lobby gesticulates wildly very near her breasts pushed upwards in her blazer, their career
Amidst many hairless rubber animals for sale and these hydrants, tropical juices, and revolving kabobs, it's too hard to recall
which it was — that all sadness is really anger or all anger really sadness
now that everyone's out shopping or out on parole, now that the train doesn't stop here anymore. Howdy, stranger.
Second Avenue, Winter
In the wintry mix guys are digging up Second Avenue with monster-trucks. We
part ways after the flick — too violent for our taste tonight, and now we're out
$8.75 all around. Bam! Bam! go the shots in my head, but I'm too tired for danger
So I don't walk near the three guys who have pulled over to piss on my block
I don't feel like seeing their pricks at this late hour, nor walking through
their steaming streams of urine. At home Stephen Hawking is aslant in his wheelchair
speaking through a box. He's telling us about black holes. How they were discovered
on a blackboard. We may be waiting for a signal sent one hundred years ago, and
it'll take one hundred more to get one back, so how do we stay interested over that kind of time?
Now that there's no more wine, it's time for bed What a comfort, to be less than a breath.
Sleepy Demise of the Season
Sleepy demise of the season Pitching toward the greasy heart of the next — what's
the difference — it's another perfect day — violets trail off in an innocent wind. We
walk around together because we can. Let's be subsumed by all of it, awaken to the cold
blue sun with a gurgle. While our toes perch in this century,
and our torsos hurl into the next.
O glittering fiend! False spring!
Of course we're doomed to fail. But we keep our passions, our luck proper.
On Turning 27
You have this many lines to get it done — what? —
Delineate the undelineatable i.e. cloud, motivation. This grid's made of twigs. What makes it
"literature" is the illusion of a burning house and the gradual disappearance of sporty Italians from the train. If I were in a bikini and a "wrap" and slightly sandy no surfers would really want to
"do me," how did it end so fast?
Thus I awake to my exfoliation and the drama of the included.
A Misunderstanding
I thought Zen poems were supposed to sound wise.
Now I'm going to buy as much beer as five dollars
can buy and drink it right here on the sofa.
Today's Snow
Today's snow is plaid, or the echo of plaid
Plaid coming down the stairs, dragging her ball and chain shrugging off her mantle as if to say
Am I still pretty, or are you getting ready to discard me into a heap of wet ash Inside the air is stale, this building is what they call "a sick building"
which means for a century we'll be transmitting germs and our lackluster phrasing
Snow as a box of bubbles Snow as barnacles on city umbrellas
Snow lining the caverns of sinuses Snow on the Ditson Building
O snow of my snowless childhood flickering like a wolf in and out of view
Make it new, everyone kept saying so I gave up, and made it mine
Snow down in now, one blanket at a time Snow like the prose of philosophy
Snow lands on two pendulous bronze acorns which are street lamps curved away from each other like flowers with nothing more to say
Now diagonal again, a cat swapping its tail from side to side
What if we live in a snow-globe, a model of a cell, complete with floating mitochondria
What if all the flakes are ghosts each one with a message that floats down and melts unread That would help to explain our dogged apprehension of tragedy
Straight down without mercy, plangent snow coats the Italian caterers, Staples Express, a couple of metal benches
I am pretending not to know this snow is about to be slush, just one measly inch no more than a guy in a green jumpsuit could push off the sidewalk with a hoe, which he does
The Topers
In El Triunfo de Baco he looks sad for us — for we who are too stupid
to be sad for ourselves. It's in his ivory pudge, it's in his ivy crown.
Who else is sad for us —
Grandpa Baker down in Mississippi
who truly believes Jesus was sipping grape punch at his last trough. What's
shocking, beyond this puffiness,
is that night is actually
quite generous. It knows something we don't, as did Bacchus. It's only
Velazquez who sat around fussing with the charcoal gray sky, it's
Velazquez who lived and died.
Eighteen Days Until Christmas
I lost the romance of this place and woke up old. One darling fantasy shattered over the next,
folding over a fist drenched in my hip. The Christmas trees are bound and stacked up outside, the air can't decide what to make of itself, and we are about to throw a president out. You are not your mother,
and each of your dead lives on in you and smells like the moon.
Large and mosquito-like,
my prose clatters off my fingers. I woke up old and into happy uncertainty,
the vitamins I feed to the streets,
the real relations within a bead.
Oh pouring cylinder, stark uncertainty, racket of leaves helicoptering to their death —
my love is coming out over and over again.
Here it is, what I always wanted. The air spills ash; I suppose it is light.
Harbor
Light Slab Big on the Pillow
Time to get up and stare at wasted space, slow-roasted greenery Slim beige bird, my master
It's high school again and too many people are piling into one car, we're forced to express ourselves in modern dance
The loft where we used to fuck is inhabited by a dead elf; the dials in the auto have all stopped
Actually the elf is alive, just melodramatic and the carnival has to take to the sea.
Mon enfant takes notes, from a distance.
Molino
I wandered through the pills of light Fat light on the wainscoting, then
shadows on the landing, shadows an itch in an otherwise compound eye
In summer when fog is furniture a blade pushed through the bush
to reveal a diving hole, I rigged a rope and swung out, smashed
the surface of what we don't own and call home. Tall home, cold home,
home made of vines. X marks the spot where X died. A rope swung
out, a rope swung high, then sex with a hitchhiker I named Sky. Things
too small for the smallest boxes Eerie sonatas, totems of marijuana,
body-crumbs bodies leave behind.
Fool's gold fills the pan, only a fool
would ask why. After seventeen seconds,
each second equal to one day, the shaking
ceased. The blue forest stood up,
walked away.
Wheels
You can't have anything forever not your bride nor your skin not even your trusty Volkswagen.
The joke is on us — the body in the bed may not be a body at all but bed made to look like body.
When you thought a beloved was about to enter, it wouldn't have mattered. They were all actors.
Sometimes you need a prop to go through with it. Other times you need to stand among
low brown hills, empty-handed.
Oh perfect silver bug, you overheated only once. I was seventeen
and driving back to the place where I learned how to be alone.
Excerpted from "Shiner"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Maggie Nelson.
Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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.
Table of Contents
Carnegie Hall,
Shiner, 3,
Carnegie Hall, 4,
September 2, 7,
Wish Fulfillment, 8,
The World, 9,
The Beginner, 13,
The Condemned Building, 14,
Times Square, 16,
Second Avenue, Winter, 17,
Sleepy Demise of the Season, 18,
On Turning 27, 19,
A Misunderstanding, 20,
Today's Snow, 21,
The Topers, 23,
Eighteen Days until Christmas, 24,
Harbor,
Light Slab Big on the Pillow, 27,
Molino, 28,
Wheels, 29,
Zero, 30,
January 27, 1984, 31,
The Cord, 33,
Vespers, 34,
For Lily on Her 25th Birthday, 36,
The Deep Blue Sea, 38,
The Ovals, 40,
Mind, 41,
Vallejo, 42,
After the Holidays, 43,
Harbor, 45,
After All,
Sunday Night, 49,
A History, 50,
Roses, 51,
After Rilke (II, 28), 52,
Nirvana, 53,
Nap, 54,
Another Waitressing Dream, 55,
After Talking Late with Friends and a Line by T'ao Ch'ien, 56,
After a Fight, 57,
The Pool, 58,
Winding Down, 59,
Apology, 60,
Proposal, 61,
Still Life, 67,
Losing Heart, 69,
After All, 71,
Subway in March, 5:45 pm, 72,