Marabou

by Jane Yeh

Overview

SHORT LISTED FOR THE FORWARD POETRY PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2005 SHORT LISTED FOR THE WHITBREAD POETRY PRIZE 2005 Reading Marabou is like browsing through an album of snapshots, coming across fraught, frozen moments in the lives of intriguingly enigmatic characters. There's an Egyptian mummy, an Elizabethan shoemaker and a flock of Cumbrian sheep; Oscar Wilde, a talking owl and a pair of Renaissance princesses. In this collection, Yeh illuminates the concept of personal identity with startling originality and freshness. Borrowing from the languages of fashion, espionage and revenge tragedy, her taut, pressure-packed lines combine vivid imagery and bold confession to reveal profound emotional truths.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847776310
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	10/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	222 KB

About the Author

Jane Yeh is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the recipient of both a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and an Academy of American Poets Prize, and currently serves as Writer in Residence at Kingston University. She is a frequent contributor to Poetry Review, Time Out New York, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Village Voice and the author of Teen Spies.

Read an Excerpt

Marabou

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By Jane Yeh

Carcanet Press Ltd

Copyright © 2005 Jane Yeh
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-631-0

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CHAPTER 1

    Correspondence


    I've gotten nothing for weeks. You might think of me

    As dated in a blue housecoat, buttoning and unbuttoning,
    Waiting you out: I have my ways

    Of keeping time. When your letter comes, dogs will bark
    Up and down the street. The tomatoes in the garden

    Will explode like fireworks. Each day the mailman passes
    In a reverie, illiterate, another cobweb

    Grows across the door. Picture me
    Going bald one hair at a time, combing and curling, burning

    My hand on the iron once every hour: I like to
    Keep myself busy. When I hear from you, aurora

    Borealis will sweep across the sky. Every lottery ticket in my drawer
    Will win. Even the mailman will know the letters

    Of your name. If you bothered to notice, you would see me
    Turning to gold rather slowly, bone

    By bone, the way teeth come
    Loose from the gums, the way animals go

    Extinct, in geological time.


    Double Wedding, 1615


Anne of Austria, sister of Philip IV, to King Louis XIII of
France; Isabella of Bourbon, sister of Louis XIII, to King Philip
IV of Spain

    We are laced taut
    As an archer's bow strung with catgut, a lean

    And deadly spring to the touch. At each breath
    Our stomachs press whalebone, seven bent fingers

    Stiff as our own ribs and wrapped in linen, leaving
    The fine print of their weave on our skin. We are wired

    For great things and small movements, hooped
    To glide like gigantic orchids, full-

    Blown, slow-footed, and deliberate
    In error. Afterwards we will bear the strange marks

    Of another house, gold arms on a gold collar,
    But for now no other jewels hang about our necks

    Than these: pearls knotted with string, clasped
    With velvet, and fitted just the length

    To choke us. This day will slip from us
    Shedding marquisette, point d'esprit, zibelline, trailing

    Taffeta and broché behind it; it will leave us bare-
    Handed and desperate to remember what we were

    Before it, and it will take everything we have
    To recollect what we wore when we walked

    The length of the nave without stopping, how we kept
    Our eyes straight and unturning until it was over.


    The Pre-Raphælites


    'What do you mean by beauty?' In the Grosvenor Gallery
    In our 'mediæval' dresses, in our rapt and utterly

    Fashionable gazes, we cannot touch
    The isinglass wall of these

    Damned unprofitable lives. What it is
    That wrecks us —

          I was lying
    In the garden, up against the barrier

    The mandragora were twined like thin fingers.
    Sometimes I pose when no-one is there.

    Please God I am a creature of habit and well-fed. A puzzle
    Like a door in a hedge that is made of hedge, inscrutable.

    What it is that is wrong in me —
          When one glove in a pair is turned inside-out
    It becomes the same as the other one, but with the seams exposed.

    Nobody wants to see that.
    Here is a conjuror's trick:

    I the disappearing girl. Look again and I turn up back in the box,
    Same as before. I have not got anywhere.

    Why am I, why am I caught
    In the hinge of this world and it presses me, where was the wrong turn

    Taken took me to the middle of the maze and gave
    Me this head, these hands, this beast's face?


    Adultery


    I could beg but I don't have to. What it is
    I couldn't say. A chronic incidence

    Of cringing from the light in elevators,
    Night trains, doorwells: if this heart, it clatters

    Into the bin like a handful of change, if this tatty
    Muzzle, it fits the crime, if strapless

    Were to 'having it' as bang-up is to 'done that',
    Would my position be worth a flutter?

    Darkness, debt, a peep, the thrill: possession
    Is theft from, proof is knowing where, love

    Is blind they say, but I'm having none of it.
    I've an eye to the main chance.

    I look better in the dark.
    Even if the phone rings now I won't stop.


    Convent at Haarlem

In the seventeenth century the whitest linen in Europe was
produced at Haarlem. Strips of fabric were laid out in the fields
to undergo bleaching and drying.

    We go out
    Sprinkling bone-ash from long-handled shovels, it is dusk and the seventh

    Month of repetitions. Ours is the lengthwise passage
    Between March and November; we filter through the dunes

    Like rainwater, keeping straight by the linen. In the brownest
    Stretch of grass you could come upon me,

    Above all scurrying animals and fringed about with water:
    Sieved out from a sea off the Low Countries'

    Polderlands, slipping the estuaries.
    You would judge me a narrow sort of reclamation.

    We turn in to our several labours, the spreading of rushes, the winding up
    The well. In a house of silent women

    You are the rotten timber, the sand that rustles under-
    Foot, the crooked tallow candle's socket: yours is the slow

    And graduated wearing. Once, I was the one running
    Across the green lines of your fields, crossing

    The blond-wood boards of the floor of your room, an original
    Bit of nonsense, your doll.


    Cumbria


    It seems unfair to the sheep.
    Now that the cull's on, they haven't a chance.
    They can't help being round, contagious, and woolly.
    Ghostly herds bobble slowly down the track.

    Their haunting is not sinister; it is not by design.
    We got left behind. Something went wrong.
    An atom's half-life is the time it takes for half the mass to decay.
    The half-life of a sheep is unnatural — survival of the faintest

    Impression of a beast, marginalia —
    Then erased. It is meaningless,
    Our existing, like a note on the leg of a pigeon left blank:
    No message. We can't eat

    But we pretend to: that's inertia.
    Like a wind-up toy, you can't unwind it.
    The bolt in the head, the head on the pyre.
    Then we wake up but we're not alive.

    You can't take our picture. (We don't reflect light.)
    What can't be observed can't be changed by the viewer.
    We're listening to the wind making shapes in the sky
    Like sheep, like smoke. Here we are, listening.


    The Only Confirmed Cast Member Is Ook the Owl, Who Has Been Tapped To Play the Snowy White Owl Who Delivers Mail for Harry

quoted from a New York Post article on preproduction for the first Harry Potter film

    Claw up. Claw down. Cut.
    My fine eyes. My fine eyes are — Cut.

    I was fluffed and plucked, like a beauty-pageant winner,
    Between takes. Like a news presenter.
    Could I be a news presenter?

    Rider: 5 rashers bacon. 8-oz. tin mixed nuts.
    2 lbs. rabbit fillets. Assorted drupes.

    Between takes, I did leg-lifts in my trailer.

    If asked what is your most treasured possession, I would say
    The woolly toy Tracey, my personal trainer, gave me when young.
    I learnt to spy it from afar, then swoop down and seize,
    But only on cue. Mr Sheep goes everywhere with me now.

    If I could wake up having gained one ability,
    It would be the capacity for more facial expression.
    It is so tedious to have one's beak set in a permanent frown.

    My greatest talent is impersonation —
    To simulate a person's idea of an owl.
    Sadly, I owe my success to typecasting.

    My greatest fear is to be found wanting.
    At the premiere party, the women were not very clothed.
    It is of advantage to be clad always in feathers.

    I allowed fake friends to pet me.
    My picture was taken several times with the boy.
    I enjoy parties because otherwise I see only Tracey.
    Afterwards, you wonder what the glitter was for.

CHAPTER 2

    Bad Quarto


    With my low production values I'm a little

    Unfinished, a tinful of rushes, cobbled together
    On two rows of nails with a razor blade and ruler. I'm shot

    Full of holes and jump cuts, running short on continuity, barely
    Holding up for the duration. You can see right through me.

    When I'm curled up on a vinyl chair, a cheap edition, a Topshop knock-off
    With mismatched buckles — when I'm down at hem and misdemeanoured,

    Paralysed and uncharismatic, after you've thrown me against a wall
    And frisked me — when I'm caught in your ratchets

    Inexorable, turning, stretched across a table, stripped
    To the core with all my skimpy shanks showing, if then I'm

    Off-spindle, missish, lo-fi and hissy,
    Tangled, denatured, petty, a crosspatch —

    It's because you can expose me.


    Telegraphic


    The orchids allow for drastic invitation. My last resort

    Is cabling you at Spa, where the waters keep their manganese
    Secrets below where the fingers of plants taper off

    In despair — where you are burrowing behind your silks
    And drapery into an elliptical bed, closeted

    Among the glass globes' mouths choking with flowers,
    Invalid. I have been wasting these two weeks

    In an extravagant show of faith, gloved in lavender
    And clinging to an ostrich-feather fan, expectant as

    The evening primroses in their velvet coats palely
    Scattering themselves across the hedge, the bell

    On the corner that sounds each hour
    When it is not the hour. After you recover

    Beneath some canopy of lilies, left over
    When the cutting work is through, after

    You pick me apart stem by stem in
    The porcelain chambers of your head, I will live

    On eggshells, chips of bark. You will leave
    A new man, not feeling

    How I will stick in you: ghost
    Limb: wormwood heart.


    Monster


    I have been away too long. The radios crackle
    In continuous forecast: sunken treasure soundings.

    Chests of gold are chiselled open. In France, an ancient shark
    Sheds its skin of amber. The specimen is well-preserved.

    What happens to sleepers when their lids are shut
    Is invisible to the world. In a vampire's casket

    Lies a lifeless dreamer trying to escape.
    I have been singled out by fate

    To become a creature that lives in the dark alone. A natural
    Craver of attention. A professional moaner.

    I am coming back, back
    With a trash artist's vengeance, hieratic in eyeliner, marabou

    Blonde, back like an automatic
    .22 pistol, a sweetheart, a stainless: whiplash

    Smart, back in business,
    Back with bells on, back spitfire, back sharp.

    I have been dangerous,
    But now there's no stopping. I have been glamorous,

    But not for long enough.
    They're calling, they're calling for overtures and beginners —

    Flashbulbs everywhere, my dear. Won't you lead me in?


    Paris, 1899


    Where the trees are thick in their trunks, hard-veined
    And pronounced of silhouette. They are disdainers

    Knowing how everything fits together, poised among their own
    Old world. I was made for destruction, too improbable

    For this century. When the gas-lights go on they crush together
    Awkward and flaring, unschooled in flattery. They mock me.

    If the day comes I shall stand before you: uncertain
    Of voice, unsteady of feature. I shall barely remember

    How to signal assent with my hands, much less the words
    Orchidaceous and belated, least of all

    How to account for the distance
    From the shimmering, fantastical concoction of my past

    To the thing I have become. Will you find me
    Utterly your own one, still? Along the fraying edges of hems

    Our misalliance wanders like pick-stitch, quite crooked
    And vanishing when reversed. We shall not meet again.

    When the day comes I am sure to feel nothing
    Even as the continent slowly is shifting, and over

    The waters the bells of Trinity and Magdalen are faint in their calls, faintly
    Swinging, and when day comes past the houses

    In Tite Street the hyacinths will be languid
    And astonishing in their finery. Turn, counterturn, stand.


    Teen Spies


    Elijah, Helen, Paul, and me
    Clocked the cat by the bikesheds. 1.43. Kept an eye
    Peeled for falsies. Hid in the bushes from Aunt Kay.
    Made a dead letter drop and drank Russian tea.

    I'm the smallest; Elijah is our control.
    Our mission? That's undercover for now. We can't tell
    How this enigma will unfold, but we're so full
    Of energy we can't come down.

    We've got our own lingo and wear special suits —
    Study the codebook, radio for supplies,
    Draw our cryptic pictures, stay up all night.
    We kill time waiting for our lives to start

    With log notes: Saw a demented corgi piss
    On someone's shoe. Shadowed DF back
    To his flat. Observed a parrot sat
    On someone's head. I am past

          seventeen and have never been kissed.


    Biological


    Smallest in the blight, strictest
    In the root of a bonfire's glare,
    Flawed as an emerald in a Florentine ring. Inextricable

    From the narrowest lattice, lacing
    The malmaison roses together. We were squandered
    By an early dismantlement, the forced

    Damage of a transplanted organ in a polythene bag,
    Set in a bed of veins with their blue cut ends —
    That is, his design was irregular,

    Exceeding crabbèd, it was a hood to us
    In our close-wrought tower, as we sat together
    In a room lined with radiometers, blind and ticking

    And when the needle in the spine
    Of the rapidograph trembled, it meant
    The air was five parts poison on the outer edges, worst

    In the burden, the dead bell tolling
    When I looked at you, before it was spoilt
    And dumb from exposure, after the rope tightened around

    The wheel, once it was set in motion we knew
    Everything would fall away like a crack
    Suddenly opening across the earth, tearing

    The corners off the keep. Which was how
    We were twice removed from the scene of the crime,
    The way the slightest thing becomes visible when fixed

    Under water under glass, just that far away
    From light.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Marabou by Jane Yeh. Copyright © 2005 Jane Yeh. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press 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.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Acknowledgements,
I,
Correspondence,
Double Wedding, 1615,
The Pre-Raphælites,
Adultery,
Convent at Haarlem,
Cumbria,
The Only Confirmed Cast Member Is Ook the Owl, Who Has Been Tapped To Play the Snowy,
White Owl Who Delivers Mail for Harry,
II,
Bad Quarto,
Telegraphic,
Monster,
Paris, 1899,
Teen Spies,
Biological,
Blue China,
Love in a Cold Climate I,
Love in a Cold Climate II,
Divining,
France, 1919,
Substitution,
Defence,
Portrait at Windsor,
Seaside Resorts,
Parliament of Fowls,
House,
Fête Champêtre,
Vesuvius (In the Priests' Quarters),
III,
Shoemaker's Holiday,
Revenger's Tragedy,
Rhode Island Waltz,
Alchemy,
Exercises,
Self-Portrait After Vermeer,
Notes,
About the Author,
Copyright,