where the plum wallpaper was kind

                                  

                                  STRANGE CINEMA

                                  by Adam Fitzgerald

My ode to failure begins like a girl who awakens in a dream

and realizes the surface of her sleep over ungroomed clouds,

suspected in a vague pleasure of doubt. It continues on then

like a train departing from its track, sluicing invisible foam

and realizes the surface of . . . Her sleep over ungroomed clouds

troubled me. She failed too, the pungent musk of her hair

like a train departing from its track, sluicing invisible foam.

I don't care about any of this. I miss the person inside who

troubled me (she failed too). The pungent musk of her hair

is all that matters in the lobby where I slept, vacantly foraging.

I don't care about any of this. I miss the person inside who

hears nothing but the tracing of loss, some minor addenda.

Is all that matters in the lobby where I slept, vacantly foraging,

your shadow? Like cut pink fruit? A sudden shaft of sun?

Hear nothing but  the tracing of loss, some minor addenda.

Or hear something, if you want, casually, a crevice in a name.

Your shadow like a cut of pink fruit, a sudden shaft of sun.

But that was before, when we could share our fumbled sex,

hearing something we wanted, casually, a crevice in a name,

in a room of lost boots, where the plum wallpaper was kind.

But that was before, when we could share our fumbled sex.

My ode to failure begins like a girl who awakens in a dream,

in a room of lost boots, where the plum wallpaper was kind.

Suspended in a vague pleasure of doubt, it continues on then.




from Adam Fitzgerald, The Late Parade,, 2013.

A coming and going music

                             by Ted Hughes

IN THE DARK VIOLIN OF THE VALLEY

All night a music

Like a needle sewing body

And soul together, and sewing soul

And sky together and sky and earth

Together and sewing the river to the sea.

In the dark skull of the valley
A lancing, fathoming music

Searching the bones, engraving

On the draughty limits of ghost

In an entanglement of stars.

In the dark belly of the valley

A coming and going music

Cutting the bed-rock deeper

To earth-nerve, a scalpel of music

The valley dark rapt

Hunched over its river, the night attentive

Bowed over its valley, the river

Crying a violin in a grave

All the dead singing in the river

The river throbbing, the river the aorta

And the hills unconscious with listening.

WHITENESS

Walks the river at dawn.

The thorn-tree hiding its thorns

With too much and too fleshy perfume.

Thin water. Uneasy ghost.

Whorls clotted with petals.

Trout, like a hidden man's cough,

Slash under dripping roots.

Heron. Clang

Coiling its snake in heavy hurry

Hoists away, yanked away

Ceases to ponder the cuneiform

Under glass

Huge owl-lump of dawn

With wrong fittings, a parasol broken

Tumbles up into strong sky

Banks precariously, risks a look

A writhing unmade bedstead

Sets the blade between its shoulders

and hang-falls

Down a long aim

Dangles its reed

Till it can seen its own pale eyes

Suddenly shakes off cumbersome cloud

To anchor, tall,

An open question.

Now only the river nags to be elsewhere.

from Ted Hughes, River: New Poems, 1983.

The day they carried you off

                        THE COATS

                    by Tess Gallagher

                                             for Mary Kepler (1884-1966)

They made you complicated,

a new one each year

and underneath, the same

old print dress. Outside

under the maples you were smart

and garrulous on my grandfather's arm

walking down Valley Street

to the shops, talking into his silence

as into some idea of yourself

grown to your side.

Yet you loved telling how

you were engaged to another

the night he took you off 

in his buckboard.  Marriage too

came like an impulse

to turn against yourself.  Life

caught you up in its clumsy arms

and danced you out of your Oklahoma

youth into the milltown

of my birth, you in your new coat,

leading me into the dimestore

to buy silk ribbons.

Shut in the closet, your coats

were a family of witnesses

who could not remember you.

They were waiting for the one

to send them all again

into the weather.  Standing

before your mirror once

in the dark of the bedroom

I put myself into a heavy tweed

with its cold silk lining.  The wide arms

were a hiding place; the hem

brushed my patent leather shoes.

It was a bargaining

that I should turn into the room,

you age about me like a sack.

I wanted to throw something over you

the day they carried you off

like a trophy in your silk lining

Rosy and familiar you received each of us

in a housedress that denied you

were going anywhere.  That year

the winter came over the ground

like a rich white pelt.

I thought of you accepting it,

something chosen, a comfort

that had sought you out

in the cold of the land.

from Tess Gallagher, Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, 1987.

Pan

                       

                                            PAN

                               by Angelos Sikelianos

Over rocks on the deserted shore, over the burning heat

          of harsh pebbles,

beside the emerald waves, noon, like a fountain,

          rose shimmering.

Salamis a blue trireme deep in the sea,

          in spring's spindrift;

the pines and mastic trees of Kineta a deep breath

          I drew inside me.

The sea burst into foam and, beaten by the wind,

          shattered white,

and a flock of goats, countless, iron-gray, plummeted headlong

          down the hill.

With two harsh whistles, fingers pressing

          his curled tongue,

the goatherd huddled them on the shore,

          the whole five hundred.

They gathered in close, crowding the brush

          and wild thyme,

and as they gathered, a drowsiness seized

          both goats and man.

And then, over the shore's stones and the goats' swelter,

          dead silence;

and between their horns, as from a tripod, the sun's quick heat

          shimmered upward.

Then we saw the herd's lord and master, the he-goat,

          rise alone

and mover off, he tread slow and heavy,

          toward a rock

wedged into the sea to shape a perfect lookout point'

          there he stopped,

on the very edge where spray dissolves,

          and leaning motionless,

upper lip pulled back so that his teeth shone,

          he stood

huge, erect, smelling the white-crested sea

          until sunset.   

from Angelos Sikelianos, Selected Poems.  Trans. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. 1979.

The Greeks are blinding Polyphemus

                              THE GREEKS ARE BLINDING POLYPHEMUS

                                                          by György Rába

Because he is one-eyed

because his dinner his choice morsel are different
because his footpath is not known
because he shepherds it though he is a born blacksmith
because he has not heard cormorants for days
because he perks an ear to the song of the present
because he won't build he camps out in his cave
because he builds his cave adorns it with curtains of bay leaf
shines new -- bends dress and cover
they lift a red-hot pole
like the plug hole on a ship's rib
they poke ream out his eye
because his hovel is a home of death 

But news lives in him too
every seeing eye gleams alike like a sun
and in everyone there dwells a death
same as someone rowing with bare hands
he'll flex his cliff-ripping muscle
you can see the present's body
and let it trill as sweetly as it might
the future lets drop flakes of enamel

Many a seafarer will yet sail here
being taken aback will never be over
how long will you be listening
to the dialogue of because and but
lord of eternal waters

trans., Emery George

Great bales of cotton rise up from the ground

SCENES FROM A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF MISSISSIPPI

by Natasha Trethewey

1. King Cotton, 1907

From every corner of the photograph, flags wave down

the main street in Vicksburg. Stacked to form an arch,

the great bales of cotton rise up from the ground

like a giant swell, a wave of history flooding the town.

When Roosevelt arrives -- a parade -- the band will march,

and from every street corner, flags wave down.

Words on a banner, Cotton, America's King, have the sound

of progress. The is two years before the South's countermarch --

the great bolls of cotton, risen up from the ground,

infested with boll weevils -- a plague, biblical, all around.

Now, negro children ride the bales, clothes stiff with starch.

From up high, in the photograph, they wave flags down

for the President who will walk through the arch, bound

for the future, his back to us. The children, on their perch --

those great bales of cotton rising up from the ground --

Stare out at us. Cotton surrounds them, a swell, a great mound

bearing them up, back toward us. From the arch,

from every corner of the photograph, flags wave down,

and great bales of cotton rise up from the ground.

2. Glyph, Aberdeen 1913

The child's head droops as if in sleep.

Stripped to the waist, in profile, he's balanced

on the man's lap.  The man, gaunt in his overalls,

cradles the child's thin arm -- the sharp elbow, white

signature of skin an bone -- pulls it forward

to show the deformity -- the humped back, curve

of spine -- punctuating the routine hardships 

of their lives: how the child must follow him

into the fields, haunting the long hours

slumped beside a sack, his body asking

how much cotton? or in the kitchen, leaning,

into the icebox, how much food? or

kneeling beside him at the church house,

why, Lord, why? They pose as if to say

Look, this is the outline of suffering:

the child shouldering it -- a mound

like dirt heaped on a grave.

3. Flood

They have arrived on the back

of the swollen river, the barge

dividing it, their few belongings 

clustered about their feet. Above them

the National Guard hunkers

on the levee; rifles tight in their fists,

they block the path to high ground.

One group of black refugees,

the caption tells us, was ordered

to sing their passage onto land,

like a chorus of prayer -- their tongues

the tongues of dark bells. Here,

the camera finds them still. Posed

as if for a school-day portrait,

children lace fingers in their laps.

One boy gestures allegiance, right hand

over the heart's charged beating.

The great river all around, the barge

invisible beneath their feet, they fix

on what's before them: the opening

in the sight of a rifle; the camera's lens;

the muddy cleft between barge and dry land --

all of it aperture, the captured moment's 

chasm in time.  Here, in the angled light

of 1927, they are refugees from history:

the barge has brought them this far;

they are waiting to disembark.

4. You are late

The sun is high and the child's shadow,

almost fully beneath her, touches the sole

of her bare foot on concrete. Even though

it must be hot, she takes the step; her goal

to read is the subject of this shot -- a book

in her hand, the library closed, the door

just out of reach.  Stepping up, she must look

at the two signs, read them slowly once more.

The first one, in pale letters, barely shows

against the white background.  Though she will read

Greenwood Public Library for Negroes,

the other, bold letters on slate, will lead

her away, out of the frame, a finger 

pointing left.  I want to caller, say wait.

But this is history: she can't linger.

She'll read the sign that I read: You Are Late.

You both smile, you both know

from A TIME FOR EVERYTHING

                                                     by Karl O. Knausgaard

. . . . . .

            Did she suddenly begin to cry out?

          Yes, suddenly she began to cry out. They must have thought they were so far away from people that they needn't exercise any restraint. Appalled and ashamed, Cain turned away, finished as fast as he could buttoned his fly, and tried to think about something else as he walked back, but the picture of them stayed with him, all the time he could see her flapping breasts and her swelling rump, his quick thrusts, and he thought almost with fury that that wasn't how it ought to be, not like that. It should be as it was in the dance below, where the different worlds barely touched one another, and the one glimpsed just enough of the other to want to learn more about it. The boys' world happy and arrogant or silent and determined, the girls' shy or impish, sensitive or strapping, with secretive minds and a laughter you could let yourself be completely filled with, and then dream about: their faces then! These sudden flashes of a girl's lovely features that come while working or before going to sleep, the lightness you're suffused with, the happiness that doesn't stop there, at the frontiers of the face, but goes on spreading, and at last envelopes everything there is. A pair of worn clogs standing on the doorstep, the rain that begins to fall on them, this is her, both the shoes and the rain are her, and you hurry over, pick up the shoes with sudden tenderness, put them in the hall, and run out into the rain, face turned up to the sky, for she is falling on you, and on the grass and the trees, and on the river and the hills. The green caterpillar crawling over the stone wall that isn't even aware of your finger, but crawls up it, makes you happy because it reminds you that she exists, just as smoke from a chimney that's whipped by the wind and dissolves in the gray air reminds you that she exists, and the brown water in the ruts of a cart track when the sun shines on it, and the green grass beside it, and the squirrel that each day hops along the same branches of the same trees at the same time of day, this, too, reminds you she exists, as it runs across the road with its bushy tail in the air, climbs a tree on the other side, and is gone. Everything reminds you of her, everything makes you happy, and the only thing you really want is to see her again. Perhaps she'll come walking along the road at dusk? Perhaps you'll push your plate aside, walk into the hall, put on your boots, and go out to meet her there? If so, it will be with a trembling heart. And perhaps the sun will shine on the pine barren on the other side of the river, while the sky above the meadow is gray and the air filled with soft rain, and perhaps she'll stop when she catches sign of you, because maybe she feels the same, maybe she's been thinking of you during these days and weeks, too. So it won't really matter if you haven't anything to say to each other, because you'll both be feeling the same and wanting the same: silently you'll walk side by side down the road, the grass making your shoes wet, she glancing at you now and then, you glancing at her now and then, you both smile, you both know, this is you.

          It should be like this and only like this, thought Cain, and halted at the top of the meadow.

. . . . . .