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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780874214222 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2003 |
| Series: | Swenson Poetry Award , #5 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 74 |
| File size: | 363 KB |
Read an Excerpt
THE BORGO OF THE HOLY GHOST
poemsBy Stephen McLeod
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2001 Stephen McLeodAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-420-8
Chapter One
DONATION I would make some small thing for you to hold in your hand. It would be black, smooth, blue in the right light. I would give this object to you secretly, slip it in your pocket. You wouldn't notice its soft weight as it slid past the hip, As it found its right place. I can still hear you Waking me: it was a long drive, gone so long I've forgotten who you are till you say my name, Till I hear my name, sit up straight and think that you're Jesus. What I would give you is the stone that fits the stone-hole perfectly, Its contours conforming so clean that you would not notice, for a time, That you never walked so balanced and tall, you never saw a street so rare, Your own name a bell unbending the stooped man to his full solemnity. A solid word I would give you to stop up the wind that pulls us all Into itself till we are nothing but density. This would prevent you, In all your days, from the frost at the window, from the narrow lake, That then you would not be afraid as your body goes its long way over.
BECOMING KANSAS My friend says yes to this, yes to that, Lies in bed all day saying answers, His life reduced each hour to this: water, Paper-thin sheath of flesh, various cancers That he allows, even befriends. Some of us will die of greedier Diseases, some by our own skeletal hands. Others will flicker out; a few will rage. My friend looks through his window to land Draped over itself in green velvet bulges: Rippling fields, uninterrupted ocean From eye to horizon that pulses With deepening shadow. He used to run In those fields. The corn was shoulder high. Awaiting blindness, he says yes again. With body inside-out the door's his eye: Turning to everything, everything enters him. So I infect him when he looks at me. All night he coughs up blood and phlegm. The lungs want air, not scenery. Next day, He sits up in bed and chooses hymns For his funeral. If he can stay Still like this, his body's broken gates Unhinged, allowing everything to be Inside him, saying yes to anything that wants A body to consume, he thinks He can become whatever he loves. That is why he does not break, And why the ceaseless answers, always the same. And even though tomorrow he will wake and cough half an hour, expelling his dreams, He'll start again, and in fourteen days He will finish this task. In death, the seam Of his body quietly separates, The word his mouth surrounds now spoken best: Eternal, without pitch or beat, The true music intended when I say yes. He sings this where we buried him as he Lets in the winter through his melting breast, And Kansas, which he will become, and me.
THAT CRAZY MOON I can't get enough of the moon. It's all over the place. First it's there lounging above that warehouse On Christopher Street, the one near the piers Where everybody does absolutely Everything. You can be sure of that. Next day it's coy behind a blue tree, Blue as ice in an ice commercial, tipped like a hat, Thin as a grandmother's teacup of tears. And of course it's the easiest love. Poems are lousy With it. A man walked there, Sea of Tranquility, It enthralls even more, the moon in June, our first blind date. I went out once on a blind date that lasted, like a cotton rose. There it was, big as a cow, orange, drowsy, Wedged above one of those Unimaginably expensive townhouses Where some elderly diva I imagine Relives every day of her life backwards. Dreams! It rises for me still whenever I wait for it, Glad as a fungo with nowhere to fall. I watch on 10th Street an Attic portico For some sign that not only can a blind date Turn out for the best, hand in hand, nowhere to go, Just schmoozing through the moonlit Mews, The beginning of an entire lifetime, unexplainable, But also that we stand amazingly upright, Opposable thumbs, chiaroscuro blue, Athena from a shellfish, poetry, That the sky cherishes us, an enormous Other, Not like anyone's Father, not quite like a mother. It is morning now. It is twilight soon. And there she is, and everything is true. That's the moon for you. That crazy moon.
ANDANTE CON MOTO 1. This stands for what I cannot say, the stone I cut, the chaff I sweep away, the quotidian task of bodies shedding the ore to their natural center and last door, as far from the mind as future, as a child's too trusting reach. This is my only job, to cut and search. You lean in that same doorway as though you could know from tapped sounds the distance they travel to come to you, to arrive. If I could say this I would say: You are ever an absence to me, a music with no text, a vocalise suspended in a haze so gray I almost miss it when it swells into tongues. This leaves me breathless. But it leaves me nonetheless. Make no mistake: I love language and its works. But I would change to hold you in my mouth for the length of a lozenge. This is the truth. This is the whole truth. 2. At Hotel Oceana, Garcia the Dog, his mouth full of April flowers, is leaping and leaping. From the balcony his lover, impatient, stares at the sea. He never notices the street. He believes this is a sign of character, believes that in this way love will discover him. But character is Tosca as her hand drops the knife, as she remembers to outline the cross on the forehead of a dead man she killed just to see you once more, one dawn before the birds. She knew it would end like this. She needed it to end like this, having given herself so fully to Art. Her back lifts the breast and places exactly in reach and at hand one breath at the world's last ridiculous parapet, inevitable clash: O Scarpia, avanti a Dio! 3. I've wasted a good deal of my life trying to tell you they are not lies; they are not dreams; there are ways of ending that do not require perfection, only balm. To be here is to do something flawlessly. I refuse to dream because no matter how bad it gets someone loves me; this is clear from the cellos that tell the secrets of every created thing. I believe in this: what is not here fashions me, proof of our bodies, the glow of going loose. I am coming out- doors now to walk in the snow, to disturb it. I will walk such a long way at last to become unremarkable. This is how it ends, no augmented thunderclap, only this: two skies connected, the charged space between them, how to listen, what to say when the roan mane spoons your splendid shoulder, and the music relaxes to staggered rows, and the right words gather in short, still sentences.
THE SHOULDER WHERE IT BELONGS
Why am I so determined to put the shoulder where it belongs? Women have very round shoulders that push forward slightly; this touches me and I say: "One must not hide that!" Then someone tells you: "The shoulder is on the back." I've never seen women with shoulders on their backs. Coco Chanel
A torch song slightly touches me but I try to ignore it because I am working before working but what can I do The radio has very round shoulders that push forward slightly I'm thinking about my mother's pearls in a high school picture you know it's not real it couldn't be but Don't Explain she was always determined even then to put the shoulder where it belongs last week I took to the streets where it is whispered the Rasputin of Peru has men on every corner they put your head in one place and your feet in another and no one will miss you that is his secret exquisitely the women wear their shoulders on their backs and they do not wake from these rendezvous he is that clever O to be a victim gliding Fifth Avenue deviant aloof heads turning whispering nodding in that knowing way I confirm your deepest fears one day you will wake up your shoulder where it doesn't belong and I will be there next to you watching as the rose light exposes your shadows your shoulders fabulous and backwards
OF BEING AND ESSENCE Every human wants to say something always to each thing in the road Before it is a road or the tire tracks that are not specifically sayings but The witnesses of the sayings that even the grocer's daughter keeps As lazy and natural as a dollop saying each day like a baby each thing Rare and secretly awful the ordinary sayings the things changed By being said into the one saying them the one creating them Separating them into the things they are and will be and new things How sometimes it is misty and the streets seem dangerous But the danger is quiet or perhaps it is smothered there in neutral colors Taking on ordinary sounds in the background no one actually listening A small error in the beginning is a war in the middle and silence And then no one is saying anything but staying still and amazed As she has her adventures and goes along the road on her safety tires Daydreaming or thinking about the kids how beautiful and odd But she cannot exactly know that she is thinking this it is too Beautiful and queer and exposed and wet and creaking in the sharp air What she says is in her hands you can see the blue veins on the topside On the other side you can see the white imprints of the stillborn words The glossalalia of what she will be yet on a Sunday maybe When the snow is still full and holy in the strange light
THE EXECUTION
What were you doing the day it happened? How did you learn of it? What did you do then? Augustine
That day you were playing in the dirt. You rolled Dirt cigarettes in newspaper. Hot or cold, You never noticed. You learned of it slowly, The way bugs slow down In the light or winter, the way a voice goes South. So many days have become only then Or ago or when I was a kid; details Lurk in blurred borders. You want to break out. Always, in everything, To step back into your shadow till the birds Can see through you and the heat doesn't enter And nothing matters. What did you do then? You started to die too. You began without knowing. But dying, the Participle, has no clear beginning till The moment it's said, And already it's over, the one pure thing The one did who did it, who was doing it Without knowing, perfectly. Someone exhales And then it's finished, As though a whole life of anticipated Joy is one breath, one glimpse at the new light just Clearing the horizon as the axe falls clean, Swift, with the careless Surprise of that day you heard it whisper from The periwinkles in your grandmother's dark beds, In a flock of boys, and you kept quiet, and You knew it was true.
LOGO When the last word is spoken it will be gasoline the leftover groceries roll idly nowhere stop now forever there within the light of trees light shuts down a city's ruined vast canyons over the red sky a last banner fading some- one's voice echoing O the ripe days gone the fiorellos scattered like useless money and no song lingers no dust sounds
THE BORGO OF THE HOLY GHOST (Rome: Christmas night, 1991) The earthly city affords its shrug-of-shoulder luster simply by being there. Not avarice or lust or even pride preserved it. I set my course toward The simplest, pinkest light. And if I find myself in love, for example, or caught By the slightly unsettling glare of someone's constant attention, it isn't the point of life. At the end of the tunnel to our right, a waist-high marble plaque reports, by a straightish line Engraved below the Latin, its cursive script difficult, the level the Tiber crested In 1274. Above, a shrine of more recent vintage: an overturned Glass of flowers singed by a votive light recently spent, itself knocked over. The better guidebooks will miss, while noting the genre, such windows as these. That same year (we could be told) Aquinas collapsed and found the long-awaited answer To questions never asked at Lateran IV, where he forfeited his seat to Another. And seven centuries later you are born while somewhere another flood threatens. Remarking a disaster or even a rendezvous with battered almanacs Can signify the sense that some things are important, especially when they're cut In the best Italian marble. But everyone has a birthday, and this, at least, implies That someone loves you enough to tell you what it is. We get by on our looks in the end, By what we've weathered or by what we've allowed. I can't think of anything better To hope for than the plowed and planted meadow where I've cast my seed with yours And waited for a generous summer. And so I am led to you by ancient lanes and tunnels, Routes long established for someone else's shortcuts, prayers and landmarks. This plaque is not conceivably near today's Lungotevere. Still, I suppose it's the same river. And as we emerge, my heart, unhinged, releases its rudder: Before me, unexpected, Lit by cool fluorescence, the Pantheon appears like the Host Raised in a seamless monstrance. Christmas night. The edge of a suddenly antique sky spills over, accommodating The pillowy glow that rises from discreetly placed lighting. I touch with my whole hand A large, bewildering column, pocked as the moon, and solid. I listen for the sound Humming beneath my fingers of two thousand years. I have never touched anything So unmistakable. Nothing stranger. I forgot to tell you about this, you say, inscrutable, smiling.
EASTER IN BELGRADE, 1999 Here the gathered hush Joins the light dimly. The only sound's the risk Of sound before the sound No one can hear until Its echo crashes grimly Into the battered fragments Of explanation. Ground Sustains it, though heavens trill In developing segments. And now the world is brisk With nothing, and lush With the unspeakable. In lunar cities the halls Are dark and shocked with noise As brutal histories Combine to wedge the age To its millennial Appointment. Sadly, the strains Of Bruckner in the breeze Prove illusory. Rumors Of another monster's passage Exaggerate even as the walls Of Belgrade crack and stumble. Exiled beauty seethes From music to pronouncement. Hawks cry from the cathedral Where a bishop sourly swings His Easter thurible. A missile from heaven breathes Its wondrous alleluia, And Christendom, chest-high, Repeats its yearly, inscrutable But no less urgent announcement: The Lord is risen indeed! The blood of Abel sings.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE BORGO OF THE HOLY GHOST by Stephen McLeod Copyright © 2001 by Stephen McLeod. Excerpted by permission.
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