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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819572165 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 72 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Survey
I am so lonely for the twentieth century,
for the deeply felt, obscene graffiti of armed men and the beautiful bridges that make them so small and carry them into the hearts of cities written like words across nothing, the dense void history became in my beautiful century.
When a man talks reason, he postpones something.
He gets in the way of a machine that knows him for the sad vengeance he is, somewhere close to the bald name of his city. "New York"
means "strike back." "Attica" means "strike back"
and so does any place in the world in the huge eyes and tender hands of my century.
I went to the capital. I had a banner and there were thousands of people like me.
There was an airplane, and for a moment heavy with laurel and sprays of peach blossom something that had never happened before stretched like a woman's shadow on a hedge between the plane and the people who saw it flying.
It was the real name of the century.
It told everyone to strike back until there was no reason in the world except a machine stalled overhead that knows everyone and is as delicate as peach blossom. But the poor years come too late.
1848
Uneven sounds whiten the pavements after nightfall. The tall hats of rebellion have taken on a life of their own,
floating and rearranging tirelessly over the pavements of the old streets which by 3 AM are white as bones.
Every hour of my sleep is a useless rebellion.
I dream that you return to hear one last argument, to touch my face in the hallway a last time before the interdiction,
the yellow bulb between apartments sputtering like a bad kiss as you go.
Justice demands that no one be loved for himself.
Freedom demands that each kiss be a contract between desire and the unformed constellations of all objects — whatever is dreamed,
whatever is stolen from the thief of possession,
whatever strikes the bone of pavement
as a woman steps out of a tenement into the permanent rebellion of which she is blameless. In 1848
the social contract becomes a horrid loneliness.
Justice abandons freedom and freedom begins to think of itself as a new star,
a light in a hallway and then a thousand lights careering over the bones of uneven pavement.
When I lie down in bed tonight I will think of a new argument to turn the tide of rebellion against freedom,
to press hands to faces until they touch bone.
How Passion Comes to Matter
When I was a boy, my father drove us once very fast along a road deep in a woodland.
The leaves on the trees turned into mirrors signaling with bright lights frantically.
They said it was the end of the world and to go faster.
I am beginning to know in whose name the uprisings, the sudden appearances of facades like damp cloths, somehow happen.
Think, for me, of a woman thrown in front of a train. You can see her
falling in the staccato of her last gesture,
that little wave, and she will never stop leaving you, just as you will never find a kiss that can move faster than a train.
Or think, rather, of a boy
who felt the death inside his first lover and went home and died of gunshot in his sleep.
I know there is a cult of such things — the young dead.
I understand the excess they cause.
But as passion is their signature, admit
we are grief-sodden and thus romantic.
We raise no columns in the great style but only the anxious facades of left-wing cities never to be completed. She brings a damaged son and an open mouthful of milk
to one who is always leaving her and she reappears suddenly under the low and inwrought housefronts of April, that month teeming with slaughter. It is the pause of the world.
Time triumphs in an incompleteness we can feel
on each other's bedding. In the unstill noise of couples, high, shameless operas prove the truth of uprisings, guiltless trains, gunshots in a boy's sleep. Father drove us very fast.
In left-wing cities, we can drive no faster.
1919
All that year, the fronts of houses wore the faces of rebel angels and eyes draped with the figures of human bodies in the attitude of a dance,
the dancers' limbs curved like lemon flowers.
The palace was a keyboard instrument.
The cafes floated on early snow and the boulevardiers eddied like yellow petals in the whorls of snow between the tables.
In that year, each mouth kissed your neck
with a damp flutter, almost too softly.
I need to go backwards that far to see the faces of the last actors aware of no difference between aspiration and silliness, hope and kitsch.
People end up with one another.
The sex is terrible, or the sex is nothing.
Late, with a metropolitan lateness,
couples lower the eyes of their freedom,
and a brief, annihilating music
reminds them in narrowing whorls, so many useless futures and a passion nearly to bite through handcuffs.
I like earliness and the feel of the provinces.
I love the wonderful year 1919
and daring housefronts newly scrubbed postered with slogans announcing no need to be ashamed of hope,
no limit to aspiration which is to be shared with the actor on your right hand
and a dazzling sequence of actors —
sky, drapery, and the human figure — on your left.
But people end up with one another in great cities.
I get up late, and since she is still sleeping I go out. The buildings say only
that they have seen over the stele of the future and stand guard against the emptiness there because I could not bear it.
In 1919, men and women stood at the height of buildings.
They played upon each other as upon keyboard instruments.
Psalmist
The first thing out of the harp is sky.
The second is the art of dance as practiced in front of all Jerusalem,
all the people brought into one city,
and a small boy at the edge of the crowd loses his heart just seeing their faces.
Suddenly, we find the power of charity.
It is what I cajole out of myself and shape onto your face like a crude face —
clumsy spirals and a warm look under bedclothes. It sets people writhing like sexy reeds in a lake's applause.
The power of charity is the guilty numbers.
I give myself, and that diminishes you.
A boy loses his heart to Jerusalem and dancers retell the story for generations as every city is dispersed in turn.
No corner remains whose language
isn't language at all but a harp song crippled out of its silence because of the dry, expressionless tragedy on our faces If I were you, there would be no harm.
In Jerusalem, there would be no harm.
It is the malforming sense of apartness
and of the tarred valley of death that sets us on one another like animals.
The sky gone, the coherent succession of bodies gone, and in their place the abstract charity of power and remorse hurts little wings and shadows and deserts.
Touch the book as though it were a tuned string.
That is not my voice or yours.
Travel a great distance and take an expensive room. It is not Jerusalem where our shadows had claws and did not starve.
A little, and then a great diaspora, this poor love.
Polygamy
Small operas, the seedy merchants at the blurred ends of fuming streets in the immigrant photographs, insist on it.
What are you supposed to do with desire in America, where your heart is so many poor shops? He takes a girl to the Catskills on a bus. Her dull kerchief and the black hairs wire out in sad profile against the window.
He marries her. He understands the milk-lipped and clean economy in his hand touching her hair. The plight of the stateless.
The hopeless milk inside the cool mouths of the Baltic. She has so much to sell across the little counter until it is all sold.
What are you supposed to do with scarcity when you are starving yourself and the next street is another America just as sad with its own kinds of trees and with adults living in a child's room, bowed under the beams?
I married a woman, knowing I was stealing from her,
knowing what becomes of desire in stateless times and at the blurred ends of streets and to the immigrant music of small operas bowed under the beams.
Understanding the economy of love fills no shop, liberates no country.
No one ever returns after he cheats someone.
He stares out bus windows. He walks the cold margin of the Baltic, looking for coins.
The Northeast Corridor
The bar in the commuter station steams like a ruin, its fourth wall open to the crowd and the fluttering timetables.
In the farthest corner, the television crackles a torch song and a beaded gown.
She is my favorite singer, dead when I was born.
And I have been waiting for hours for a train,
exhausted between connections to small cities,
awake only in my eyes finding shelter in the fluttering ribbon of shadow around the dead woman singing on the screen.
Exhaustion is a last line of defense where time either stops dead or kills you.
It teaches you to see what your eyes see without questions, without the politics of living in one city, dying in another.
How badly I would like to sleep now in the shadows beside real things or beside things that were real once, like the beaded gown on the television, like the debut of a song in New York in black and white when my parents were there. I feel sometimes my life was used up before I was born.
My eyes sear backwards into my head to the makeshift of what I have already seen or heard described or dreamed about, too weary not to envy the world its useless outlines.
Books of photographs of New York in the forties.
The dark rhombus of a window of a train rushing past my train. The dark halo around the body of a woman I love from something much farther than a distance.
The world is insatiable. It takes your legs off,
it takes your arms and parades in front of you such wonderful things, such pictures of warm houses trellised along the sides with green so deep it is like black air, only transparent,
of women singing, of trains of lithium on the awakening body of a landscape or across the backdrop of an old city steaming and high-shouldered as the nineteen-forties.
The world exhausts everything except my eyes because it is a long walk to the world begun before I was born. In the far corner the dead woman bows off stage. The television crumples into a white dot as the last train of the evening, my train, is announced.
I lived in one place. I want to die in another.
The New World
A little emptiness beforehand,
and then I take up the exhausted slogans, the party of one whose single issue is a house a little above street level,
the remote handiwork of the ironmonger like a signature afloat in porchlight,
a place you do not have to carry with you as I carry mine out of a little emptiness into bad museums where I spend time.
Every man's routine is fantastic.
Read the transcripts. Spend some time bent over the glass cases reading spider diaries and opaque, absolutely usual daybooks of the colonists. Obsessed with the familiar
(as we are not), with death in a spinney or underneath an uncleared half-acre,
they recount nothing. And even nothing is so private the handwriting crooks into scythes and obscenities.
In the next room, a handful of religious paintings.
A little emptiness in the faces,
especially in the eyes of the Christ child staring away from His Mother.
Often, she was the painter's mistress posed as Mary. She looks frightened, perhaps of blaspheming or of being beaten by the rogue who paints her.
I stand as close to the pictures as I can.
The cracks in the paint flourish like handwriting
or like new streets from the air,
so much personal history dispersing leaving only the false record of sentiment,
the old religion of the Puritan daybooks.
Life leaves nothing behind itself. Culture is the traduction of routine under the yellow light of museums, an emptiness old and new, level with the street.
Outside, the remote handiwork of traffic makes no sound.
A Parish in the Bronx
The moving filaments of traffic shadow the people and jagged, stationary cars in a church parking lot below the highway.
Anyone leaving the late mass has a choice,
a lucky one. He can look up as far as the highway and believe in so many lights moving fast. Or he can look up farther to the spire razored in floodlights,
taller than the traffic or the near buildings,
and picture himself that high, that visible.
Some choices are too easy to make only because nothing hangs in the balance.
Coming out of the darkness of a church into a dark neighborhood smeared beneath pylons,
nobody has anything to lose between the heavens of the fast cars and of the spire razored where everyone can see.
I felt so lucky when I stood there.
I felt like the last organ note of a hymn huge inside of the nothing that comes afterwards.
There is no room between eternity and the loneliness inside a car and the loneliness of the floodlights cutting a tall scaffold into the night sky.
I came out of mass and made a choice lucky to believe the choice mattered.
The fast cars sped out of the city to dances and marriages. The sharp spire laddered upwards into the easy fame of the last note of a hymn held forever.
I am no dancer. And marriage never gets to the end of anything.
I chose the perspectiveless, tall nonsense of God's noise aloft over the jagged parish,
thinking everything else was a dream too lonely for words. It was, but just as lonely is praying that all wives return, all dogs live.
Eternity takes up all the room in the world.
You can't drive fast enough. You can't picture yourself so high that the dead see you and come home.
Perspective
The view from the air belongs to no one.
Those silences and fractious parklands constantly retreat from one another like ordinary people desperate for privacy.
The view from the air is of wounded lions,
of an intimacy God will not share,
the grilles and trellises of every death uncommunicated in a big country.
Happiness divides us, sometimes in God's name, sometimes in the name of History.
I could be happy now. From my seat in the airplane I could imagine the full enclosures of people contented and with no needs beyond private moments walking the fenceline before joining the others in the night enclosure that is the final shape of countries.
I could be happy tomorrow. I could see myself out in the dark all night and in the morning standing upright beyond the fenceline,
seeing for myself the land has no shape and is spotted with lions dying ignorant of the airplanes overhead.
I would be happy because of the justice that every death belongs to lions and has no country.
The grilles and trellises of the view from the air,
windows cut into a hundred pictures,
ladders of huge flowers disappearing,
make me think there is no such thing as the world.
The wisdom of God kills lions.
The undirected freedoms of History kill lions. And there is a happiness in me that cannot live on the ground or save my country.
The Night Orchard
They have given me a room near the power station across the canal, and sleeplessness has become an island jolted by hot sounds and water lights.
A vapory static scents the air like fruit that has caught fire. Thickly, the shallows of a dream that I would have if I slept darken under a greasy skin that won't break.
And then the scent of fire again, sweet, heaviest near a woman's letter to me, propped on the nightstand.
As you near the center of America,
you reach an unmoving inland sea of towns founded, strange to say, on a migration fleeing tolerance. The coastal cities had accommodated small boroughs of affection.
Their harbors steamed with tenderness at morning,
and at day's end a borderless sublime floated in the bankers' streets and you might put it in your soft hand and then into a friend's hand like clean money.
And so the undistracted governments of heaven fled inland, upwelling and lacustrine charters of orchards, tulip farms,
and in the next century, power stations and bad hotels to afflict the transient.
Borne up and eddied in sleeplessness there,
in nearly a fever dream, I can sense orchards burning and power becoming water again.
Absurd, because this isn't Florida.
They do not drive off frost with fires in orchards as they do in orange groves.
Power stations do not spew forth shipwreck;
they light houses; they hang dry and solid in their constant translating stammer.
But I am afloat somehow, and there is the sweet of burn.
What, if anything, upholds a person cut off from the mercy of his private life remembering the little flecks of burn on skin where there had been no fire but his mouth only and at morning patches of white like sea mist? What is there to translate at the center of America but roiling shallows and, away inside you,
an answer to the letter on the nightstand?
The questions that we ask of the civil world leave us one choice: either freedom
is identical with happiness or we are all on islands in the middle of flat continents jolted by the stammer of sleepless dreaming.
The money of countries must feel like a skin or it is rubbish. I must be able to stand in the center of the night orchard and be touched by fires burning justly in the good tolerance of the landowners.
I must answer a simple letter with language wrought from my heart's error,
common to everyone by example, but belonging solely to one woman whose body is sea mist and whose voice over the telephone sounds so much like wings that it must be wings grown out of the flecks of burn along her shoulders sometime after I left her bed and she began to write such beautiful letters addressed to hotels. Finally, the power of inland
cities must be a charter of the heaven curled on apple leaves, small and perfectly suspended between happiness and freedom on one stem. As we come closer to a real sleep,
as we get that far, America is purely and completely its center, down to the seas in all directions. Its sweet produce always afire, in winter and in summer.
The question of our civil lives stammers
between legislating the difference and knowing the difference that sets each heart away on islands, and it tries to speak out of itself of the loving error of passion which is the beginning of freedom which is the beginning of happiness.
I have my answer. She has always known it.
I bury it and my face in her shirt. Great turbines and little coins like new Floridas spin in the dark.
Excerpted from "New Dark Ages"
by .
Copyright © 1990 Donald Revell.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan 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.
Table of Contents
I,
Survey,
1848,
How Passion Comes to Matter,
1919,
Psalmist,
Polygamy,
The Northeast Corridor,
The New World,
A Parish in the Bronx,
Perspective,
The Night Orchard,
II,
The Judas Nocturne,
The Inns of Protest,
Tabard and Terrace,
Heliotrope: Years and Years after the Revolution,
A Prospect of Youth,
From the Outside,
Magus,
St. Lucy's Day,
III,
Apocrypha,
The World's Fair Cities,
Wartime,
White Pastoral,
Least Said,
Festival Tumult,
Production Number,
The Old Causes,
Against Pluralism,
New Dark Ages,
What People are Saying About This
“I am deeply moved by these poems . . . I like the deep seriousness, the intelligence, the lovely music, the freshness, the zaniness. It is very mature poetry and it is poetry that has grounded itself in such a manner that it will continue to develop and progress”
“A stunning and troubling collection. The prophetic voices in these dazzling poems are honeycombed with wisdom and sorrow, they seem the voices we hear in those few dreams we still dare, even if those dreams remain edged by nightmare. This book holds urgent lessons in histories that are both public and personal, lived and imagined. The haunting, abstract lyricism of New Dark Ages is lit by a filament of rage against our seeming powerlessness in those landscapes webbed with political and intimate intrigues. This remarkable book might well become our hymnal for the 21st Century.”
"I am deeply moved by these poems . . . I like the deep seriousness, the intelligence, the lovely music, the freshness, the zaniness. It is very mature poetry and it is poetry that has grounded itself in such a manner that it will continue to develop and progress"—Gerald Stern. Pen Center USA West Poetry Prize.
"A stunning and troubling collection. The prophetic voices in these dazzling poems are honeycombed with wisdom and sorrow, they seem the voices we hear in those few dreams we still dare, even if those dreams remain edged by nightmare. This book holds urgent lessons in histories that are both public and personal, lived and imagined. The haunting, abstract lyricism of New Dark Ages is lit by a filament of rage against our seeming powerlessness in those landscapes webbed with political and intimate intrigues. This remarkable book might well become our hymnal for the 21st Century."—David St. John