The Pale King

                     by David Foster Wallace

§ 1

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day.  A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys.  All nodding.  Electric sounds of insects at their business.  Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow.  insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and sxhist and chondrite iron scabs in granite.  Very old land. Looka round you.  The horizon trembling, shapeless.  We are all of us brothers.

       Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew.  An alfalfa breeze.  Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert.  Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. No Hunting. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak.  The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail.  Read these.

Lullaby

Lullaby

                  W.H. Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm;

Time and fevers burn away

Individual beauty from

Thoughtful children, and the grave

Proves the child ephemeral:

But in my arms till break of day

Let the living creature lie,

Mortal, guilty, but to me

The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:

To lovers as they lie upon

Her tolerant enchanted slope

In their ordinary swoon,

Grave the vision Venus sends

Of supernatural sympathy,

Universal love and hope;

While an abstract insight wakes

Among the glaciers and the rocks

The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity

On the stroke of midnight pass

Like vibrations of a bell

And fashionable madmen raise

Their pedantic boring cry:

Every farthing of the cost,

All the dreaded cards foretell,

Shall be paid, but from this night

Not a whisper, not a thought,

Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:

Let the winds of dawn that blow

Softly round your dreaming head

Such a day of welcome show

Eye and knocking heart may bless,

Find our mortal world enough;

Noons of dryness find you fed

By the involuntary powers,

Nights of insult let you pass

Watched by every human love.

Gallipoli

From: The War Correspondent 

                  by Ciaran Carson

1. Gallipoli

Take sheds and stalls from Billingsgate,
all glittering with scaling-knives and gutted fish,
and the tumbledown outhouses of English farmers’ yards
smelling of dung and straw and horses
cantering through the back lanes of Dublin;

take an Irish landlord’s ruinous estate,
elaborate pagodas from a Chinese Delftware dish
on which the fishes fly through shrouds and yards
of leaking ballast-laden junks bound for Benares
in search of bucket-loads of tea as black as tin;

take a dirty gutter from a back street in Boulogne,
where houses teeter so their pitched roofs meet,
chimneys tall as those in Sheffield
or Irish round towers,
smoking like a fleet of British ironclad destroyers;

take the oregano-scented arcades of Bologna,
spaghetti-twists of souks and smells of rotten meat,
labyrinthine as the rifle-factories of Springfield,
or the tenements deployed by bad employers
who sit in parlours doing business drinking Power’s;

then populate this slum with Cypriot and Turk,
Armenians and Arabs, British riflemen
and French Zouaves, camel-drivers, officers and sailors,
sappers, miners, Nubian slaves, Greek money-changers,
and interpreters who do not know the lingo;

dress them in turbans, shawls of fancy needlework,
fezzes, knickerbockers, sashes, shirts of fine Valenciennes,
boleros, pantaloons designed by jobbing tailors,
feathers of the ostrich and the pink flamingo,
and outfits even stranger;

set up some slaughterhouses for the troops,
and stalls with sherbert, lemonade and rancid lard for sale,
a temporary hospital or two, a jail,
a stagnant harbour redolent with cholera,
and open sewers running down the streets;

let the staple diet be green cantaloupes
swarming with flies, washed down with sour wine,
accompanied by the Byzantine
jangly music of the cithara
and the multi-lingual squawks of parakeets –

O landscape riddled with the diamond mines of Kimberley,
and all the oubliettes of Trebizond,
where opium-smokers doze among the Persian rugs,
and spies and whores in dim-lit snugs
discuss the failing prowess of the superpowers,

where prowling dogs sniff for the offal beyond
the melon stench of pulped plums and apricots,
from which is distilled the brandy they call “grape-shot”,
and soldiers lie dead or drunk among the crushed flowers –
I have not even begun to describe Gallipoli.

Pearl

                  

(14th century English)

Translated by Jane Draycott

                       I

One thing I know for certain: that she

was peerless, pearl who would have added

light to any prince's life

however bright with gold. None

could touch the way she shone

in any light, so smooth, so small --

she was a jewel above all others.

So pity me the day I lost her

in this garden where she fell

beneath the grass into the earth.

I stand bereft, struck to the heart

with love and loss. My spotless pearl.

I've gazed a hudred times at the place

she left me, grieving for that gift

which swept away all shadow, that face

which was the antidote to sorrow.

And though this watching sears my heart

and wrings the wires of sadness tighter,

still the song this silence sings me

is the sweetest I have heard --

the countless quiet hours in which

her pale face floats before me, mired

in mud and soil, a perfect jewel

spoiled, my spotless pearl.

In the place where such riches lie rotting

a cfarpet of spices will spring up and spread,

blossoms of blue and white and red

which fire in the full light facing the sun.

Where a pearl is planted deep in the dark

no fruit or flower could ever fade'

all grasscorn grows from dying grain

so new wheat can be carried home.

From goodness other goodness grows:

so beautiful a seed can't fail

to fruit or spices fail to flower

fed by a precious, spotless pear.

So I cam to this very same spot

in the green of an August garden, height

and heart of summer, at Lammas time

when corn is cut with curving scythes.

And I saw that the little hill where she fell

was a shaded place showered with spices:

pink gillyflower, ginger and purple gromwell,

powdered with peonies scattered like stars.

But more than their loveliness to the eye,

the sweetest fragrance seemed to float

in the air there also -- I knew beyond doubt

that's where she lay, my spotless pearl.

Caught in the chill grasp of grief I stood

in that place clasping my hands, seized

by the grip on my heart of longing and loss.

Though reason told me to be still

I mourned for my poor imprisoned pearl

with all the fury and force of a quarrel.

The comfort of Christ called out to me

but still I wrestled in wilful sorrow.

Then the power and perfume of those flowers

filled up my head and felled me, slipped me

into sudden sleep in the place

where she lay beneath me. My girl.

Eros and Psyche

by Jehanne Dubrow

after Antonio Canova’s sculpture (1787)

From a certain vantage point they

could be lovers—the man

with his arms encircling my

mother, and both of them gone

marble. He has woken her with

the sound of broken wings. Her

blanket is polished rock, cold

and weighted to the bed. From

this angle the knife is hidden,

although it’s there, the way

an arrow is always shooting through

this story, desire a dart that

finds the tender spot. Bodies

make a space for gods to

intervene. Tonight if there are

souls like butterflies, then they

have stilled. If beauty could be

bolted in a box, if a deity could

say, Don’t open this, then my

mother might stay asleep

forever, unbothered by the

monument of those hands.

Alive Together

                        by Lisel Mueller

Speaking of marvels, I am alive

together with you, when I might have been

alive with anyone under the sun,

when I might have been Abélard’s woman

or the whore of a Renaissance pope

or a peasant wife with not enough food

and not enough love, with my children

dead of the plague. I might have slept

in a alcove next to the man

with the golden nose, who poked it

into the business of stars,

or sewn a starry flag

for a general with wooden teeth.

I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas

or a woman without a name

weeping in Master’s bed

for my husband, exchanged for a mule,

my daughter, lost in a drunken et.

I might have been stretched on a totem pole

to appease a vindictive god

or left, a useless girl-child,

to die on a cliff. I like to think

I might have been Marry Shelley

in love with a wrongheaded angel,

or Mary’s friend. I might ahve been you.

This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,

our chances of being alive together

statistically nonexistent;

still we have made it, alive in a time

when rationalists in square hats

and hatless Jehovah’s Witnesses

agree it is almost over,

alive with our lively children

who -- but for endless ifs --

might have missed out on being alive

together with marvels and follies

and longings and lies and wishes

and error and humor and mercy

and journeys and voices and faces

and colors and summers and mornings

and knowledge and tears and chance.

From Lisel Mueller, Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, 1996. 

 

Ours

Ours

by Jonathan Galassi

This house these walls were ours

and everything inside them the

lawns the trees the flower beds

the stone walls not the fern

walk that is Alison's but it's the

way the first light filters

through the thinned-out branch-

es part of us the ancient

apple orchard the hydrangeas

yellowed lily leaves the old

barn the new studio that you and

Chris created for me and the ice-

house and the light is ours the

angled brilliance and the funk of

fall the weather's turned the
snow the stairs the stars out on

the lawn the cold coyotes' calls

are ours the view from the mar-

tini bench the copper beech the

thyme terrace and the new one

and the girls are ours the young

shad and the lilacs and our

square bed and the birch room

and the teahouse sunset apple

smoke the flame azaleas that

didn't take the peonies the si-

lences and evening unraveling

the immense white pine and fuel

oil smell were ours these rooms

are ours the pictures sofas car-

pets my grandmother's bud vase

the coin silver spoons and Eloise

is ours and Pheobe was this room

is ours the square bed and the

threshing here was ours the si-

lences the Paris bedspread and

the dressers and my red desk in

the alcove and your bathroom tub

the inky tentacles e-mail was ours

and phone calls and what makes

you think you're you was always

ours

           pretend you're with me as

you read this all the empty

hours were ours the rattling down

the hall the perfect view across

the road the hills the walls the

white fence fallen branches bit-

tersweet the stairs the girls are

ours the love the friends the

silences your voice your eyes your

hair your neck the beauty all are

ours the empty mornings and the

silences were ours the staring at

the fire before it died the grappa

and the whiskey in etched glasses

and the bellows the black marble

fireplace and Chris's gavel Mol-

lie's picture Christopher's two

drawings dinner by the fire was

ours the sausages the peppermint

foot rub your cowhide slipeprs

endless books too many you kept

saying in the halfway house hu-

midity and hummingbirds all ours

all ours the afternoons the misty

mornings looking up the lawn the

copper beech the peegees turning

purple Haystack and the deep

sleeps the Bald mountain treks

the fern walk and the two chairs

by the stream we never sat in

and the little living room and

Libby's paths the Alfords' rugs the

girls my parents' nesting tables

Pete Street's hidden staircase

all the evenings the talk the

laughter all the music all the

friends the silences the girls and

everything that was and wasn't

ours

           and hours were ours the

walks the silent drives the si-

lences unspoken love the lacks

the guilt the missing the alone-

ness what we couldn't do the

what we didn't say the things I

couldn't do the one I couldn't

be and wanted to and didn't is

ours too and rage is ours and

loss and hours alone are our

the silences the hall the girls

and the unknown was ours the fu-

ture that we couldn't share the

fear the falling leaves and fail-

ing ruining the fault lines and

the love lines and incomprehen-

sion and the need to know and to

be known and broken faith deri-

sion denigration power was ours

and powerlessness and struggle

and my twisted heart that got un-

twisted and your face your voice

your neck your back the tears

the girls the life I left the lost

life all of it was ours is ours

was ours is ours was

From Jonathan  Galassi, Left-handed: Poems (2012).