December 2012 Post.Indd

founded in 1912 by harriet monroe December 2012 q & a FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cci • number 3 CONTENTS December 2012 POEMS lucie brock-broido 311 Father, in Drawer Extreme Wisteria mary karr 320 A Perfect Mess The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God on the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives The Obscenity Prayer Loony Bin Basketball richard kenney 330 March Anaerobe Words Are the Sum marilyn chin 340 From “Beautiful Boyfriend” david harsent 346 Three Poems after Yannis Ritsos tom sleigh 352 The Advance atsuro riley 358 Striplings sharon dolin 362 Three Poems from “A Manual for Living” eliza griswold 370 Ovid on Climate Change Ruins Libyan Proverbs dana levin 378 At the End of My Hours michael lista 387 Fowl Today’s Special Parkdale, then Princess Street The Scarborough Grace letters to the editor 394 contributors 398 back page 411 Editor christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt Reader christina pugh Art Direction winterhouse studio cover art by art chantry “postmodern pegasus,” 2012 POETRYMAGAZINE.ORG a publication of the POETRY FOUNDATION printed by cadmus professional communications, us Poetry • December 2012 • Volume 201 • Number 3 Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. 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POEMS The editors thank Christina Pugh for her extensive help in developing this issue. lucie brock-broido Father, in Drawer Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him. With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it. Also directives from our dna. The nature of his wound was the clock-cicada winding down. He wound down. July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes Of cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell. Barges of coal bloomed in heat. It was when the catfish were the only fish left living In the Monongahela River. Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in By the slink from the strap Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin. The nature of his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast. In the old city of Brod, most of the few Jews left Living may have been still at supper while he died. That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle Tinsel color, washing To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west, Ohio-bound. This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart. LUCIE broCK-broido 311 Extreme Wisteria On abandon, uncalled for but called forth. The hydrangea Of her crushed each year a little more into the attar of herself. Pallid. Injured, wildly capable. A throat to come home to, tupelo. Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable. Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear. Wistful, woke most every afternoon In the green rooms of the Abandonarium. Beautiful cage, asylum in. Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not Have been there. So few wild raspberries, they were countable, Triaged out by hand. Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others, Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence. Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves Will (perhaps tomorrow) die. High editorial illusion of “Control.” Early childhood: measles, Scarlet fevers; Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home. Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths. Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence, In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of such. Wisteria, extreme. There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home. 312 POETRY Both of your poems recall Emily Dickinson’s #772, which features a dead lady’s drawer and also rose attar (essential oil) as the “gift of Screws.” Would you agree that Dickinson’s poem plays a role in your own work here? Dickinson’s poems still hold for me their mysteries. Her letters are another story. I’m in cahoots with those. But I have been in Widerruf with Dickinson for decades. This is not a term that exists in any known literary theory, save one mention of this phenomenon in an introduction to Paul Celan’s Last Poems: Celan was the skilled practitioner of the art of the Widerruf, the refutation of a given poem (often Rilke’s) by one of his own. The late poems begin to dismantle even that scaffolding ... By forcing the flood of colors, images ... through a series of nar- rowing locks, [he] creates a parallel universe of language ... in which a stylistic devolution “creates out of its own wreck the thing it contemplates.” That is to say, I think we’re all in conversation on the page with that which came before us, or even during us. We inherit whatever canon we’re in the midst of, a great collective influenza. In the very poem of Dickinson’s you mention, “Essential oils — are wrung — / The Attar from the Rose,” there is some fair- ly clear evidence that she herself was in Widerruf with a particular Shakespearean sonnet. After summer’s “distillation,” he writes, a flower is extracted into “a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass.” An attar in a vial, concise. I had to do some research to come up with that — for instance, Vendler’s Dickinson. As for your inquiry regarding the “lady’s drawer,” I confess I was hoping it may have been an orchid, akin, let’s say, to a lady’s slipper. So I set myself online. I came up only with steamer-trunks full of details about lingerie. What I mean to say is that, in my own work, often, I may have been with Dickinson, but she was not with me. LUCIE broCK-broido 313 “Father, in Drawer” comes across as both stoic and emotional, a really exquisite balance for an elegy to achieve. From your perspective, which particular elements of the poem help it to walk this line? I don’t have a stoic bone in my body. Would that I could conjure even a feigned indifference to — anything. To the contrary, I am different to everything. In real life, emotion is easy; holding back is tough. On the page though, it’s the opposite: that’s what I strive for — the chill (of course), the stupor (a necessity), but never quite the letting go. A backdrop for “Father, in Drawer”: My father, David Broido, was forty-four years old when, in Philadelphia, he died on the morn- ing of the Fourth of July, 1968. He was alone. By noon of the fifth of July, I was in the middle of writing a love letter to him. Strange how someone is always alive until you know otherwise. I had no idea what we were in for. That letter that I posted — wound up: where? Later that afternoon, my sister and I were told that he was gone. We were inconsolable. I think poetry is a cold art with a big heart of all heat. Almost half a century later, the willful “affect” of that colder self, on the page, pre- vails. I wrote the poem, intentionally, with sharp edges and all hope of innocence in ruins. My father’s father died at the age of thirty- nine, also on the Fourth of July (already a loaded day to us), also of a massive cardiac event with no warning. The poem is, in part, about the mandates of a destiny. Turning, as I am wont to do, for a moment, to the untimely de- mise of Michael Jackson — when his brother Jermaine (who had announced that death) was asked how he could accept such a loss, he said he did not know.

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