founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

July / August 2014

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cciv • number 4 CONTENTS

July / August 2014

POEMS dean young 287 Romanticism 101 Belief in Magic philip fried 290 Squaring the Circle d.a. powell 292 Tonight’s Quarry. traci brimhall 293 Better to Marry Than to Burn devin johnston 294 Telephone Scavenger Orpingtons rosanna warren 298 A Way Graffiti amanda calderon 300 Werewolf on the Moon For Tourists & Armies Nationalist Opera thomas sayers ellis 307 Vernacular Owl rickey laurentiis 314 Writing an Elegy Study in Black Black Gentleman I Saw I Dreamt Two Men timothy donnelly 320 Hymn to Life alice fulton 332 Triptych for Topological Heart the day Lou Reed set me free tony fitzpatrick 337 Walk on the Wild Side Looking for Soul Food Lady Eyebrows Kid Apollo Kid Hustle Candy Came, from Out on the Island Outro

Local colors elaine equi 347 Friendly Stripes Still Life #1 Monolith Wolves of the Sacred Heart It Says What We All Think Cats, Now and Forever Sixth Ave. Green with Blue Corner

comment dorothea lasky 357 What Is Color in Poetry, or Is It the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word william logan 378 Two Gents

contributors 387 Editor don share Art Director fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Assistant Editor lindsay garbutt Editorial Assistant holly amos Consulting Editor christina pugh Design alexander knowlton

cover art by tony fitzpatrick “The Atomic Oriole,” 2014

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Poetry • July / August 2014 • Volume 204 • Number 4

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dean young

Romanticism 101

Then I realized I hadn’t secured the boat. Then I realized my friend had lied to me. Then I realized my dog was gone no matter how much I called in the rain. All was change. Then I realized I was surrounded by aliens disguised as orthodontists having a convention at the hotel breakfast bar. Then I could see into the life of things, that systems seek only to reproduce the conditions of their own reproduction. If I had to pick between shadows and essences, I’d pick shadows. They’re better dancers. They always sing their telegrams. Their old gods do not die. Then I realized the very futility was salvation in this greeny entanglement of breaths. Yeah, as if. Then I realized even when you catch the mechanism, the trick still works. Then I came to in Texas and realized rockabilly would never go away. Then I realized I’d been drugged. We were all chasing nothing which left no choice but to intensify the chase. I came to handcuffed and gagged. I came to intubated and packed in some kind of foam. This too is how ash moves through water. And all this time the side doors unlocked. Then I realized repetition could be an ending. Then I realized repetition could be an ending.

dean young 287 Belief in Magic

How could I not? Have seen a man walk up to a piano and both survive. Have turned the exterminator away. Seen lipstick on a wine glass not shatter the wine. Seen rainbows in puddles. Been recognized by stray dogs. I believe reality is approximately 65% if. All rivers are full of sky. Waterfalls are in the mind. We all come from slime. Even alpacas. I believe we’re surrounded by crystals. Not just Alexander Vvedensky. Maybe dysentery, maybe a guard’s bullet did him in. Nonetheless. Nevertheless I believe there are many kingdoms left. The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather. A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life even though even though this is my second heart. Because the first failed, such was its opportunity. Was cut out in pieces and incinerated. I asked. And so was denied the chance to regard my own heart in a jar. Strange tangled imp. Wee sleekit in red brambles. You know what it feels like to hold a burning piece of paper, maybe even trying to read it as the flames get close to your fingers until all you’re holding is a curl of ash by its white ear tip

288O POETRY yet the words still hover in the air? That’s how I feel now.

dean young 289 philip fried

Squaring the Circle

It’s a little-known fact that God’s headgear — A magician’s collapsible silk top hat, When viewed from Earth, from the bottom up — Is, sub specie aeternitatis,

A pluperfect halo, both circle and square, And a premonition of this truth Spurred on an ancient philosopher, Anaxagoras, to make numerous vain

Attempts to approximate the circle Of his concerns with the square of the cell He was jailed in for impiety. Doomed calculations which God acknowledged

By doffing then pancaking his topper. He was still bareheaded millennia later, When he learned of von Lindemann’s proof that pi Is not the root of a polynomial

With rational coefficients, hence Squaring the circle’s impossible. God un-collapsed, re-donned his hat! But — it was 1882,

Progress was a juggernaut And the public had no patience for “proof.” From below, God’s gesture looked like a signal For all hat- and cap-wearing men,

Proper in their headgear, for nations, Well-stocked with helmets for delicate brainwork, To take up “the compass and straightedge” And prepare for a singular all-out attack

290O POETRY On this seductive conundrum, so men Enlisted en masse in Geometry’s army, Tossing up and away all hats Of cloth, opaque haloes, hurray!

philip fried 291 d.a. powell

Tonight’s Quarry.

We hadn’t got color up till then. And if I had a nickel, why, that was for milk. Milk money: the money a body gained. Was just me on that hillside and the kite, red & white waked up into the wind. Hardly anybody knew me then. Oh, Lord how quickly the things of this world came and went. Practically the first thing I notice when I get back. Wind, and I am lifted. Wind and I am hauled ahead by string and air. The bows sinuate the air, I hear them tatter.

A certain kindness to that hill, its slope gone gaily green against the eve and oh, the tail dipped; the string slipped. Uppity huff and drag of hawk air plundering eggs in the sparrow’s nest. You left this fragment, this bit of shell behind.

292O POETRY traci brimhall

Better to Marry Than to Burn

Home, then, where the past was. Then, where cold pastorals repeated their entreaties, where a portrait of Christ hung in every bedroom. Then was a different country in a different climate in a time when souls were won and lost in prairie tents. It was. It was. Then it was a dream. I had no will there. Then the new continent and the new wife and the new language for no, for unsaved, for communion on credit. Then the daughter who should’ve been mine, and the hour a shadow outgrew its body. She was all of my failures, my sermon on the tender comforts of hatred in the shape of a girl. Then the knowledge of God like an apple in the mouth. I faced my temptation. I touched its breasts with as much restraint as my need allowed, and I woke with its left hand traced again and again on my chest like a cave wall disfigured by right-handed gods who tried to escape the stone. It was holy. It was fading. My ring, then, on my finger like an ambush, as alive as fire. Then the trees offered me a city in the shape of a word followed by a word followed by a blue madonna swinging from the branches. A choir filed out of the jungle singing hallelujah like a victory march and it was.

traci brimhall 293 devin johnston

Telephone

A mockingbird perched on the hood of a pay phone half-buried in a hedge of wild rose and heard it ring

The clapper ball trilled between brass gongs for two seconds then wind and then again

With head cocked the bird took note absorbed the ringing deep in its throat and frothed an ebullient song

The leitmotif of bright alarm recurred in a run from hawk to meadowlark from May to early June

The ringing spread from syrinx to syrinx from Kiowa to Comanche to Clark till someone finally picked up

294O POETRY and heard a voice on the other end say Konza or Consez or Kansa which the French trappers heard as Kaw which is only the sound of a word for wind then only the sound of wind

devin johnston 295 Scavenger

A rail, buff-banded rail, weaves among the legs of picnickers who loll at ease on the buttress roots of fig trees. It queries fallen fruit with manners so refined as to be indeterminate, its herringbone immaculate. Aloof though underfoot, the rail extracts a crust of pie from picnic residue — no seediness, no trace of table-scrap solicitude for any human hand or face.

296O POETRY Orpingtons

A pair of Orpingtons, one blue, the other black, with iridescent necks and fine, ashen fluff cackle through the dark, their damp calls close enough to chafe, a friction with no spark.

They settle down to roost, two rests along a stave. Each curls into itself, comb tucked beneath a wing, as the days grow long enough to kindle in each a yolk, the smallest flame of spring.

devin johnston 297 rosanna warren

A Way

The whole trick of this thing ... is to get out of your own light. — Marianne Faithfull

She said she sang very close to the mike to change the space. And I changed the space by striding down the Boulevard Raspail at dusk in tight jeans until an Algerian engineer plucked the pen from my back pocket. As if you’re inside my head and you’re hearing the song from in there. He came from the desert, I came from green suburbs. We understood nothing of one another over glasses of metallic red wine. I was playing Girl. He played Man. Several plots were afoot, all misfiring. One had to do with my skimpy black shirt and light hair, his broad shoulders and hunger after months on an oil rig. Another was untranslatable. Apollinaire burned his fingers on June’s smoldering lyre but I had lost my pen. The engineer read only construction manuals. His room was dim and narrow and no, the story didn’t slide that way though there are many ways to throw oneself away. One singer did it by living by a broken wall until she shredded her voice but still she offered each song, she said, like an Appalachian artifact. Like trash along the riverbank chafing at the quay plastic bottles a torn shirt fractured dolls through which the current chortles an intimate tune.

298O POETRY Graffiti

Kitty Goes Kommando and the Goldman Rats — Phooey! That blue scaffolding holds up the sky. Who did we think we were padlocking in, or out? Give me that huge looping black script no one can read, a secret glyph, and just where someone has smashed the window, Jesus the Way the Truth the Life and a dented aluminum frame. He bent down, we know, and wrote something illegible on the ground. A toothy black-and-white dinosaur gapes. I like the crack in this wall of monsters where skylines topple and ogres twiddle train tracks in their claws like pipe cleaners. Down the long, semi-abandoned street in Queens calligraphy gallops toward the shop displaying, like guitar strings, seven different iron rods for gates. Hole in the wall, rose sound-hole, ribbed sounding board — always from fissures and gaps melody strains as trains thunderclank across the girdered overpass, a siren keens, and a solitary man ambles past amputated acacias fisting out with leaves.

rosanna warren 299 amanda calderon

Werewolf on the Moon

You want to touch big animals, animals not touched by your peers Woe is not you

You have the polar bear in Franz Josef Land, the white whale in the Sea of Okhotsk,

You have the brown bear, leopard & Amur tiger in Ussuri, the Far East, so east, like a talon

it hooks Heilongjiang, claims that edge of Pacific, that swath of maritime lands & a maritime state —

Primorsky Krai, home to Vladivostok, the ancient Manchurian forest, its corresponding duck,

a short North Korean river- border changing course, redrawn when the bank sloughs off,

its markers slipping, washing away — Tumen, sputtering into the Sea of Japan

There is an awareness of islands — Oshima, Okushiri, Hokkaido — tucked into the brain of every organism

Volcanics, large to small, they perforate the waters northeast to Kamchatka (& that is so far

300O POETRY your countrymen send their misbehaved children to so-called corners in their houses)

Perhaps you can stand on that shore facing inland & gaze out over the spray of those white whales of yours, the expanse that comprises your jurisdiction Now, what’s the first thing you know is there, but can’t see for mist, et al: Khabarovsk Krai, whose coat of arms is a bear holding a coat of arms of a bear & a tiger holding a blue & yellow coat of arms, inverted Y, tiny crown afloat, big bear pinching his canoe-shaped tongue between his teeth — & what tumbles from there but

Black Dragon, scrawling from Inner Mongolia to Tartar Strait, true, for all its bordermaking, to its roots

From it & all its names, names for everything: for islands, for fables, the provinces it traces, for gruesome late-Mongol conquerors & the surrounding biology You think about it

amanda calderon 301 now & again, thumbing a leatherbound natural history, gift from a pandering

South American delegation ripe with stories about their jaguar, the early explorers who called it tigre

In the world, there are 9 subspecies of tiger, all eastern, 3 of them extinct Amur is classified as merely endangered

& concentrated in Ussuri State Nature Reserve, where you are known because you shot one

It is somewhat a farce There is no state — not since Bolshevik word set foot there — only a river

bearing the name & you commissioned the research: to study everyone with a name on the Red List

of Threatened Species, to house data online at programmes.putin.kremlin.ru, to visit them all & each visit

to carry an air gun & a satchel of tranquilizer darts, to shoot, to topple, to affix the GPS collar, to caress

the fur (in the case of the whale the skin) & muse to scientists about the big, sleepy oaf:

302O POETRY Would she remember, or eat you, or both?

amanda calderon 303 For Tourists & Armies

One way to draw France is in scallops:

Dunkirk to Brest, Brest to Saint-Jean-de-Luz,

The imperceptible stone sag of certain dolmens over the Pyrenees between Saint-Jean

& Banyuls-sur-Mer

Then, to Nice

Nice, skirting the Alps to Lauterbourg

From Lauterbourg back to where you began

For the meticulous, the additions of Cherbourg, Toulon, & even Le Havre,

Maybe Givet

Yours is a green diorama It contains several kilowatts of sun, a superabundance of flowers

Men dress like they are perpetually on their way to a funeral

White people, their splotch-parchment cheeks

304O POETRY All those roast chickens, none with the fat trimmed from the rump

amanda calderon 305 Nationalist Opera

It was a party Built for the minuscule elite Lost amid acres of scuffed marble, wanderers Newspapers & schoolwork People knew To speak in surreal, mechanical hyperbole Government, of course Monuments, behemoths Of relative luxury I know what you want to ask I want you to take the truth to the world Down in the city, loudspeakers Disappearing into a hidden gulag Centuries ago The monks appeared Every morning in the lobbies of our hotels A minder was beside them The monks followed us out into the parking lot

306O POETRY thomas sayers ellis

Vernacular Owl

For Amiri Baraka

Old Ark, how funky it was, all those animals, two of every kind, and all that waste, the human shit somebody had to clean up. Somebody, some love you hugged before fear, the fear of an in-sani-nation, the No Blues, ruined your bowels. Go devil. Public programs like Race. Dems a Repub of Dumpster Molesters. Private like the Runs. God evil. Somebody had to clean that shit up. Somebody, some love who raised you, wise. Feathered razors for eyebrows, alto, tenor. Wasn’t no branch. Some say a tree, not for rest either. For change. We a wild life, long-eared and short. Prey, some prayed for the flood. And were struck by floating,

thomas sayers ellis 307 corporate quintets of Rocks & Roths, assets bond Prestige.

First Organizer ever called a Nigga, Noah, but not the last Occupier of Ararat ... got thick on Genesis and electric cello, cell-phone-shaped UFOs fueled by the damp, murdered clay of divinity-based Racial Mountain Dirt. Somebody had to clean that shit up. Some native body, beside the smooth water, like a brook

Gwen say, “I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them.”

Chaser if you straight.

308O POETRY Ark Old Ark New Ark Now

Only Only Sidney P Simple JessB would would ____ Spencer T ____ Dizzy G to turn to accent the dinner the p’s cheek. not the “ ... nuts.”

Change the record, Record Changer. Name Change the changing same.

Something only you could Art Messenger & dig in any chord. High water, like the woods of secrecy, always a trail a ways a coming. God evil. Move the d. Go devil. The Mosque watchers know. Also de wind, de wind and de Word, spoken and written, hidden in love with the intestines of Testament. Eyes like a woman’s fist, her hard facts — not the crying,

thomas sayers ellis 309 domestic consonants “of non being.” Soprano, piano, or the cultural cowardice of class, in any chord of standardized sheet music, low coup risks slit. Though flawed, too, by penetrable flesh, some blue kind. Unlike a pretty shield, loaded free.

Wasn’t just Winter or lonely. Those. Wasn’t just Sundays the living did not return.

Crouch if you a bum or one of Mumbo Jumbo’s reckless, poisonous reeds. A neck-crow-man-servant n a jes’ grew suit. Us am, an unfit second Constitution. Us am, an Af-Am ambulance full of ... broke-down, as round as we bald. Obeying hawkish eagles.

Why the young Brothers so big, what they eatin’, why they blow up like that, gotta wear big white tees, gotta wear white

310O POETRY skin sheets, like maggots, like lard, the domestic oil of death and klan sweat, who blew them up, doctored, who pickin’ them off like dark cotton, make them make themselves a fashion of profitable, soft muscular bales, somebody got to clean this shit up.

All us, us animals, on one floating stage we knew was a toilet, the third oldest in the nation, unreserved. Wasn’t no bank or branch. Yes we Vatican, despite Alighieri’s medium rare, rate of interest. It was confirmation, black fire wood. Some love that changed our screaming Atlantic bottoms when all we could be was thin olive sticks with battered whore-ti-cultural beaks, and eastern screech.

Flushed, too, every time the Yew Norker or one of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s traitorous X Jedi Clampett hillbillies fresh prince’d us ...

The real religion, our “individual expressiveness” wasn’t dehuman-u-factured by a Greek HAARP in a Roman uni-dot-gov-versity. Where we Away

thomas sayers ellis 311 our Steel, “flood” means “flow.” Where we Tenure our Ammo, “podium” means “drum.”

Flood, flow. Podium, drum. Flood, drum. Podium, flow. Drum, podium. Flood, flow.

Used to be a whole lot of chalk around the Ark, then anger, then angels, their wings made of fried white dust, fallen from when the board of knowledge was public and named after a stranger or crook, an anti-in-immigrant-can’tameter stretched across the teepee-skin, chairs of class

where we clapped the erasers, fifty snows old, like we were the first Abraham, where we clapped the Race Erasers and drove away from K James V and K Leo PB in shiny Lincolns,

312O POETRY sprinkling holy sheeple from the sky, their powdery absolute Rule. Just add oil-water. Belongs to humanity. Just add sugar-rubber. Belongs to civilization. Gold. Days. Nights. Ounces. A forty. Mules move. A forty. Move. Move. Move mule.

Whatchamacall “how we here,” where we fear, how we hear how we sound and how sometimes [time is some] even our own sound fears us, and remembers the first us, confronting Columbus with thunderbolts, when “was-we” not good citizen sober, voting and drowning, and rotting like the armed guts of our young?

Now a daze, tribe-be-known, the devil the best historian we got. Anyhow.

thomas sayers ellis 313 rickey laurentiis

Writing an Elegy

But so tangled in the branches they had to leave it, the conquistador’s black beard cut from his head whose neck had snapped, his deadness the others had to burn then, for the wind to take evenly away. If not for his lust, his sickness to chase, to claim her; if not for that Native woman’s quick intelligence, out-climbing ...

This is what I see: the Spanish moss as convicted to its branches — gray, colonial, but in my century now, suspended so close each vein might well be a whole, hanging fiction of my mind. The moss is a fiction of my mind: a screen, swinging on its gothic hinges, making the light fussier as it swags, giving not just the trees but my idea of them a Medusa look. That man,

I think, had wanted to feed something in himself not worth feeding, had founded a world on it — What is it my mind wants to get at, always extending, hungering, looking back, always tearing open again its own modernity, as if each thought is more than the little present moment it sounds like, but, raised at an angle, piercing me, having me imagine, to build such antique violences in my head, it is a thorn? This moss has been growing for ages now, can do nothing but snag and grow ... What is it the mind won’t unsee, beautiful flaw? In another version, the woman dies and her husband braids her hair through the trees.

314O POETRY Study in Black

Tu Fu, “Thoughts While Traveling at Night”

There’s a wind in the grass — Is there here a boat’s mast claiming my lonely night too? I see the stars can’t be called hanged, exactly, just hanging down, not over emptiness, but honest ground, the moon trying the black skin of this river, black corpse ... But, even plainer — I wonder if these words, my words, will ever bring me fame. I have my age, my injuries. They limit me. I’m like some spook bird I know, solo and roped between where rotting happens and a sky.

rickey laurentiis 315 Black Gentleman

O fly away home, fly away. — Robert Hayden

There are eyes, glasses even, but still he can’t see what the world sees seeing him. They know an image of him they themselves created. He knows his own: fine-lined from foot to finger, each limb adjusted, because it’s had to, to achieve finally flight —

though what’s believed in him is a flightlessness, a sinking-down, as any swamp-mess of water I’m always thinking of might draw down again the washed-up body of a boy, as any mouth I’ve yearned for would take down, wrestler-style, the boy’s tongue with its own ...

What an eye can’t imagine it can’t find: not in blood, swollen in the stiff knees of a cypress, not definitely in some dreaming man’s dream — Let’s have his nature speak. What will the incredible night of him say here, to his thousand moons, now that he can rise up to any tree, rope or none, but not fear it?

316O POETRY I Saw I Dreamt Two Men

I saw I dreamt

Two men hoisted hung up not American the rope Not closed on their breathing

But this rope tied them spine to spine somehow

Suspended From the mood of a tree not American they were

African Ugandan Nigerian

Without a license a right to touch The sin their touching incites

And I heard their names called out Revision

Or Die and You Must Repent And Forget the Lie you Lily-Boys you Faggots

Called up from the mob

Of their mothers their fathers With Christ in the blood who had Christ in the blood

Who sung out “Abide with Me”

This was my eyes’ closed-eyed vision This is what a darkness makes

And how did I move from that distance to intimacy

So close I could see The four soles of their feet so close I was kneeled

rickey laurentiis 317 Could lick

Those feet as if I was because I became The fire who abided

I saw that I dreamt

Their black skin made blacker by my feeding I thought Christ

Why did I think

Their black skin tipped blacker by this American Feeding but just one shot up

A cry African it was

American O Lord abide with me It was human lusty flat

You had to be in the hollow of it to taste it

You had to see how in such lack Invention takes hold

They say some dreams come in the moment

Of waking Stitched because daylight likes a story

That some dreams are extensions

Of an itch Thief-walking the coral of the brain

318O POETRY I say

But I did feel that one blue mouth blow out As I felt

The mood of that tree

As I saw the other turn away apart stay with silence I stayed with southern silence

rickey laurentiis 319 timothy donnelly

Hymn to Life

There were no American lions. No pygmy mammoths left or giant short-faced bears, which towered over ten feet high when rearing up on their haunches. There were no stout- legged llamas, stilt-legged llamas, no single Yukon horse. The last of the teratorns, its wingspan broader than the room in which I’m writing now, had long since landed on a tar pit’s

surface and was lost. There might be other things to think of strobing in the fume or sometimes poking through the thick of it like the tiny golden toads once so prevalent in the cloud forests north of Monteverde, only none of them were living anywhere anymore. The last was seen on May 15, 1989, the week Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You” topped Billboard’s Hot 100.

Then it dropped to three. A teratorn might have fit in here the long way come to think of it. A study claims it wasn’t climate change that killed the golden toad but a fungal epidemic provoked by cyclical weather patterns. Little things like that had a way of disappearing: thimbles, the Rocky Mountain grasshopper, half the hearing in my patient ear. There were

no Eastern elk, no sea mink, and no heath hens, a distinct subspecies of the prairie chicken. Once common to the coastal barrens of New Hampshire down to Virginia, they’re often thought to have been eaten in favor of wild turkey at the inaugural Thanksgiving feast. To work on my character I pretend to be traveling Portsmouth to Arlington in modern garb at first,

then backwards into costumes of the past: tee shirt and shorts, gray flannel suit, a cutaway jacket and matching breeches tucked into boots, taupe velvet getup with ruffles and ribbons streaming into Delaware till I’m buckled like a Puritan, musket in hand, not half-famished, and there’s plenty of heath hens everywhere I look. But there were still no Carolina parakeets

320O POETRY and no Smith Island cottontails, a long contested subspecies of the Eastern cottontail. These lost rabbits, somewhat shaggier than their mainland cousins, were named for the barrier island off the tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where Thomas Dale, deputy governor of the Virginia Colony, set up a salt works back in 1614, and not for the Chesapeake’s other Smith Island up in Maryland, birthplace of the Smith Island cake, that state’s only official dessert — a venerable confection whose pencil- thin layers, numbering eight to twelve on average, lie divided by a fudge-like frosting cooked for greater lastingness, making it suitable for local oystermen to take with them on the long autumn harvest. Smith Island in Washington offers nesting sites for tufted puffins on its rocky cliff faces as well as rest stations for migrant sea lions. Situated in Long Island Sound, Connecticut’s Smith Island is among that state’s famed Thimble Islands, a cluster of landmasses named for the thimbleberry, cousin to the black raspberry. During the Revolutionary War, the Thimbles were deforested to rid the sound of hiding places for British ships. Alabama boasts no fewer than three Smith Islands. Little can be said about the one in Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park. Its neighboring islands include Rabbit, Snake, Wolf, Wigwam, Sweetnose, and Twin Alligator down here on the American side, and Little Dry, Big, and Big Dry up on the Canadian. Tomorrow should be 82° and sunny but it won’t be. The blue pike cavorted through the waters of the Great Lakes no longer. Ditto the somber blackfin cisco. Overfishing, pollution, and the introduction of nonnative species did both fish in as early as 1960 and ’70, respectively. There were no spectacled cormorants, no Goff’s pocket gophers, and no Ainsworth’s salamanders, a species known to us only

timothy donnelly 321 through two specimens found on Ainsworth family property in Mississippi on June 12, 1964. That same day Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison. I remember the feeling of another kind, the way they alternately lay limp in my hands then pleaded to be free. They took naps in the dampness of softened logs. There’s a fine dirt, a dust I guess, that collects

under the rug I’m sitting on. I think the rough weave of it acts as rasp to our foot-bottoms then sieve to what it loosens. There were no Caribbean monk seals, eight of which no less than Christopher Columbus killed for food in 1494, and therefore no Caribbean monk seal nasal mites, an objectively hideous arachnoid parasite that resided nowhere but in the respiratory

passages of the Monachus tropicalis. When it occurs to me I sweep it up. Back in the day they used to darken our skies in flocks a mile wide and 300 miles in length, enough to feather the air from Fall River down to Philadelphia, their peak population hovering above five billion, or 40% of the total roll of birds in North America, but there were no remaining

passenger pigeons, the last of their red eyes having shut in Cincinnati on September 1, 1914. Her name was Martha. Martha Washington went by Patsy as a child. Her pet raccoon was Nosey. Cozumel Island’s pygmy raccoon is actually a distinct species and not, like the Barbados raccoon, a subspecies of the common. There might be as few as 250 of the former

hidden in the mangroves or prowling the wetlands for ghost crabs and lizards, whereas the latter was last seen in ’64 when one was struck dead by a car in Bathsheba, a fishing village built on Barbados’s eastern shore, magnet for hurricanes and pro surfers, its foamy white waters calling to mind the milk baths rumored to have kept Solomon’s mother so

322O POETRY perilously beautiful. First the milk’s lactic acid would have acted as an exfoliant, gently removing layers of the dead, dry skin to uncover younger, fresher skin waiting like artwork in Dunkirk underneath, then the milk’s natural fat content would restore moisture lost to the exacting atmosphere of biblical Jerusalem, whose name in Hebrew, yireh shalem, means “will see peace.” Most versions of the story make her into an exhibitionist but the Midrash says Bathsheba, modest, was washing behind a wicker screen when Satan, seizing opportunity, appeared as a red bird to David who, cocksure with projectiles now, aimed the stone in his hands at the bird but hit the screen instead, splitting it in half and thereby revealing our bather, the wife of Uriah the Hittite at the time but not for much longer. All these gains and losses, so mysterious from a distance, held together it has felt by nothing stronger than momentum, like a series of bicycle accidents or a pattern in the pomegranate, come to hint at a logic in time, but whether it’s more fitting to say that they promise to reveal it or else threaten to is debatable. Attempts to stem the vast mosquito population in salt marshes abutting Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s Merritt Island, technically a peninsula but more like a question mark of land flopped into the Atlantic, devastated the dusky seaside sparrow. Its last known specimen died on June 17, 1987, when the ballad “Always” by Atlantic Starr dominated radio. Mosquitoes would have taken to the nasty Olduvai water hole around which two clans of hominids battle at the start of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is after the first monolith shows up. The film’s monoliths are artifacts of alien origin, identical in ratio but varying in size, designed to provoke large-scale changes in human life. As when it dawns

timothy donnelly 323 on the wiry leader of the clan the first monolith appears to to bludgeon the other to death with a leg bone. Later on he hurls it into the air to celebrate his power, the image of its tumbling weaponhood at half-speed match-cutting to that of a long white nuclear satellite angled in orbit against the scintillant anthracite of space. Pan right to the Earth, a quarter of it silvery

blue in the corner, aloofly beautiful for sure but only a pale idea of a planet when set beside photographs taken years later by the crew of Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972, annus fnalis for the Lake Pedder earthworm, bush wren, and possibly the Toolache wallaby as well, long considered among kangaroos to have been the most elegant. The sapphire blue, the ochre

of Africa, the chalk-white spirals convolving as if an ice cap’s wispy tentacles. They were killed for fur, sport, and frequently with the aid of greyhounds, who hunt mostly by way of sight as opposed to scent. Then the Earth is at the left as the satellite approaches it almost dozily to the opening bars of Strauss’s Blue Danube, first performed on February 15, 1867, in the now

defunct Diana Ballroom. In my own Diana Ballroom, named not for the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon, and chastity directly, but by way of the two-kilometer lunar crater christened in her honor in 1979, declivity in whose embrace my ballroom trembles comfortably, I boost my chi by remembering to breathe deep, to eat oatmeal, ginger, and figs, and to commit myself

to a custody of wildflowers, up to and including the maroon perfume of the chocolate cosmos, a non-self-pollinating species whose every plant now in bloom is a clone of the selfsame specimen uprooted from a cubic foot of Mexico back in 1902. Likewise the last known Rocky Mountain locust ever to appear appeared alone that year on a prairie up in Canada, whereas

324O POETRY decades before a glistering storm of them blanketed an area vast as California, matter-of-factly devouring buckwheat, barley, strawberries, apple trees, fence posts, and even the laundry wildly flapping away on the line, the sound of “millions of jaws biting and chewing” setting a nation’s nerves on edge, or at least Laura Ingalls Wilder’s, if we’re to believe her On the Banks of Plum Creek, first of three books spectered by prototypical beeotch Nellie Oleson. Cloudiness persists regarding the difference between locust and grasshopper. Typically I keep a number of soaps on hand and seem to know by instinct which of them to reach for. In gingham and curls Nellie Oleson was played by Alison Arngrim in the 1970s TV adaptation. The Wife of Bath was also an Alyson. An Angrim is father to the outlaw Gorlim in Tolkein’s Middle-earth mythos. They say to run the tap as hot as you can stand. Fast forward a century to April 16, 2002, and dance anthem “Hot in Herre” by Cornell Haynes Jr., better known to us as Nelly, reaches number one and reigns there seven weeks. Miss Oleson, elder offspring of the local retailer, is based on no fewer than three distinct historical persons. Produced by The Neptunes, “Hot in Herre” samples Neil Young’s record “There’s a World” and lifts its hook from an infinitely more upbeat “Bustin’ Loose” by Chuck Brown. Later on or earlier in 2002, up a slope in dewy Mauna Loa, a Nelly somewhere on the radio, the last pair of noncaptive Hawaiian crows flew into the category known as “extinct in the wild.” “We are leaving, we are gone,” Young sings wanly atop percussion and strings courtesy of the London Symphony Orchestra. “Come with us to all alone.” ’Alala is the word for the Hawaiian crow in Hawaiian. No fewer than twenty ’alala chicks were hatched last year in a breeding facility at San Diego Zoo. Jack Nitzsche coproduced

timothy donnelly 325 and also played piano. “Bustin’ loose to my love Jones,” declares the late great Brown, dead in Baltimore mid-May of that year. “Bustin’ loose to each his own.” He traded cigarettes for a guitar while serving time in Virginia’s historic Lorton Reformatory. An average daytime temperature of 89°. He was father to the style of music known as go-go, so-called because the sound, Brown

was said to have said, “just goes and goes.” But there were no dire wolves, no Florida black wolves, and no Texas reds, although the red, morphologically midway between the gray and the coyote, has been bred in captivity down on South Carolina’s Bulls Island since 1987, year Tim Tebow was born and Andy Warhol died. Likewise the year in which the films Precious, Fargo,

and American Psycho are set. “It can be hard to tell,” the Times admits of the thousands who once posed for photographs in the posture known as “Tebowing,” if they intended to celebrate or to mock the quarterback for his much-publicized virtuous ways. Nor were there any of the subspecies indigenous to Canada’s Banks Island, Earth’s twenty-fourth largest island, upon which

the first confirmed wild hybrid of the polar bear and grizzly was found and shot in 2006. The island also has the distinction of its treelessness, and of being home to fleets of musk oxen. Times I count myself among them if more comfortable in my bulk I still can’t get around the funk of us. Our ancient mouths set to decimating herbages. In times of risk we assume the O-

shaped formation around our wobbly young. A sense of calm or guiltlessness blows in. Then it’s back to business with another cup of coffee, hot beverage held to have been first drunk in these parts in 1668, when frothy infusions of the slow-roasted bean spiked with costly cinnamon sticks and honey grew popular along New Amsterdam’s foggy docks. In tide pools to the north

326O POETRY eelgrass limpets affixed to eelgrass blithely at the time, unaware an insidious slime mold campaign would in centuries inflict catastrophe on their habitat, making them the first marine invertebrate dissolved in the historical era, the last of its kind plucked while the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building whistled up past the Woolworth like a startled monk’s apocalyptic vision of a cloud-bound train. It began in 1929. Sir Hubert Wilkins, Arctic explorer, advocated in The Advertiser for submarine technology as tomorrow’s answer to the Northwest Passage’s pack ice question. Ice had heretofore kept a surface-travel route troublingly out of reach, even after its putative discovery by Sir Robert McClure, who on his eastward voyage spotted from atop a windy Banks Island promontory the westmost landmass mapped three decades earlier by Sir William Parry. McClure later lent his name, understood to translate to “son of a sallow lad,” to a lunar crater whose diameter spans over twelve times that of Diana, but only a quarter that of the big kahuna Tycho, where a second monolith appears. This one emits a painful radio signal to a third, which orbits like an onyx football field around Jupiter. Rewind 150 years and McClure’s HMS Investigator, like a Musca domestica on a runway paved with flypaper, has come to a full stop in the blind white grip of ice. It felt like 1768. There were no Steller’s sea cows, the tame kelp-nibbling cousins to the manatee, albeit double their size, and there were no great auks. The last known pair of them was claimed on July 3, 1844 by poachers hired by a merchant itching for tchotchkes to ornament an office. Three long winters later, rescue sledges bundled McClure and crew up and sped them back to the claps of Britain. Soon Banks Island’s musk ox population whittled down to nil as their flesh gave

timothy donnelly 327 way to the hungry Inuit who trekked up to 300 miles to strip McClure’s abandoned ship before the ice crushed her completely, folding her metals into Mercy Bay. “I took him by the neck and he flapped his wings,” the poacher said. “He made no cry.” Inuit shaped Investigator’s copper and iron into spear- and arrow- heads as well as knife blades, chisels, and harpoons like those

depicted in lithographs in the mitts of seal hunters patiently stationed at breathing holes in the ice. But there were no broad-leaved centaury plants, no western sassafras, and no Galapagos amaranth, cousin to the seabeach amaranth. Its tiny spinach-like leaves once bounced along dunes from South Carolina to Massachusetts till habitat loss, insensitive beach-

grooming tactics, and recreational vehicles slashed figures drastically. When ice decides it must feel like being splintered from a multiplex of tightness that pains but holds together. Aerial shot of 1961. Year submarine thriller K-19 and Saving Mr. Banks are set in. Kennedy is president. The cloud of a hundred musk oxen migrating back to Banks Island rises plainly as

narrow-leafed campion, a handful of whose seeds had slept 30 millennia before being found in 2007 in a ruined system of ground squirrel burrows. Surveys will report up to 800 heads in 1967 and a thousand more in 1970. All matter thunder- cracking belowdecks: hoof of earth into water, water over air, air under water and up. So that the vessel, broken, settles

onto sea stars on the floor. The seeds were sown successfully under grow lights in Siberia, deep in whose permafrost international high-fiving scientists discovered a fully intact woolly mammoth carcass. To enlarge my sympathy I attempt to picture the loud tarp tents around the digging site, the lamp- lengths they putter away to, the costs. By 1994, estimates

328O POETRY on the island ran as high as 84,000, over half the musk oxen alive at the time, but paging ahead five years we see numbers speedily hunted back down to 58,000, or as many pounds of “fine ground beef” called back by California’s Central Valley Meat Company when “tiny pieces of plastic” were found nestling in it like the voice of Katy Perry, whose hit “Roar”

was everywhere repeating we would hear it. “Called back,” says Emily Dickinson’s epitaph. One scientist says to the other, “What’s that?” The other says, “Do you feel it, Slovo? A certain category of effect. Difficult to describe and yet a certain category of effect is still possible. You’d think it would have wizened in our atmosphere by now, or withdrawn in sickness or mere

tedium into the cold shell of itself in the manner of a what, yes, a gastropod, the very figure of a recluse, secular of course, anthropomorphic misnomer because its foot is not actually its stomach, witness the oblong rocksnail, still another thought extinct due to rampant habitat loss but no, not yet, Alabama graduate student Nathan Whelan just now located a specimen

kayaking down the Cahaba River, misplaced modifier Slovo it is the student in the kayak, not the snail, badum tish, but amid the mist and as if against this vanishment of dodos a certain category persists, not unlike a last known pair of Middlemist’s Red camellia, a cultivar sent as rootstock to England from China by John Middlemist in 1804.” Note: One is in a garden

in New Zealand, where the laughing owl is no longer, thanks largely to cats. Its call has been described as “a loud cry made up of a series of dismal shrieks frequently repeated,” “a peculiar barking noise ... just like the barking of a young dog,” “precisely the same as two men ‘cooeying’ to each other from a distance,” and “a melancholy hooting note,” to quote

timothy donnelly 329 The Owl Pages, sweet dream of a website whose first FAQ asks, “I’ve seen an owl, can you tell me what kind it is?” The other Middlemist’s Red, long presumed barren, resides in a nursery somewhere in Britain, and stalwart through its hardships, it has begun to bloom again. The remains of the Investigator found in 2010 were well preserved by the pristine cold waters

of the Canadian Arctic. And yet no one’s idea of red includes the hue of Middlemist’s camellia, which is instead a true pink, or some might even say a rose. Mallarmé would just say “flower” and from oblivion there would arise musically a flower absent from all bouquets. “Whoever reaches into a rosebush,” Lou Andreas-Salomé supposed, “may seize a handful of flowers;

but no matter how many one holds, it’s only a small portion of the whole. Nevertheless, a handful is enough to experience the nature of the flowers. Only if we refuse to reach into the bush, because we cannot possibly seize all the flowers at once, or if we spread out our handful of roses as if it were the whole bush itself — only then does it bloom apart from us, unknown

to us, and we are left alone.” Endangered coastal roses seek some subtler way of putting it. “All the roses in the world,” Rilke gushed to Salomé — whose Galilean namesake, it’s often over- looked, didn’t desire the head of John the Baptist for herself but was told to ask for it by her mother, Herodias, whose union with Herod Antipas, at once her uncle and her brother-in-law,

John declared unlawful — “bloom for you and through you.” Forget-me-nots bloom unhindered in Heidelberg, where Max Wolf spied in 1905 a so-called “minor planet” he named 562 Salome. That these odd bodies spatter the galaxy like pollen shaken from a central flower, or like honeybees tumbling along with us around the sun, I never knew until a visit to the Minor Planet

330O POETRY Center website at a turning point like April 1543. I think I saw upwards of 3500 were spotted last month alone. “Nature is an inexplicable problem,” Emily Brontë wrote in 1842 in French in a confection titled “The Butterfly.” “It exists on a principle of destruction.” Lepidopterists are scouring Florida’s pine forests and gentle costal jungles on the trail of five butterfly species

feared as good as gone. They were never listed as endangered and still aren’t known to be extinct. These are their names: Zestos skipper. Rockland Meske’s skipper. Zarucco duskywing. Bahamian swallowtail. Nickerbean blue. “I love you,” wrote Salomé, “with all your harms,” who died in her sleep shortly after the Gestapo destroyed her library, in her poem “Hymn to Life.”

Her friend Nietzsche liked the poem so much he set it to music. I’ve listened to it and can’t say I like it but I’m listening to it again as I try to finish. I promised Lynn I’d put the dishes away before the babysitter arrives but it looks like I won’t be a person of my word tonight. I had meant to write about the imperial woodpecker of Mexico. The red gazelle. I told my friend Dottie

when saddened in the predawn I have seen the people pushing small mountains of soda cans in their shopping carts stop in front of my recycling, open one bag after another of empty metal and glass, dig through them, take what they need and shut the bags back up with so much care it has destroyed me. I remember bathing my daughter when she was two and how I stopped

short thinking if I were gone tomorrow she wouldn’t even remember. The year was 2007. Radio waves associated with cell phones may not have been contributing to recent declines in bee population. “And if you must destroy me,” says the poem, “I’ll tear myself away from you / as I would leave a friend.” When there was time to put away the dishes, they were gone.

timothy donnelly 331 alice fulton

Triptych for Topological Heart

it befalls us. an exchanged glance, reflective spasm.

Is it a fantastically unlaminated question set in flesh or valentine that wears the air as its apparel? If you cut a heart from parchment, is it still a heart? A nontrivial knot, where turns of every gradient may kiss and tell. Does the vessel have edges? Or is it all connectedness, an embedding to be stretched or bent. Imagine being simultaneously alive, bound in both directions with a bow! Is it diachronic, a phenomenon that changes over time? Without ardor theory suffers. That’s why I’m stuck on you with wanton glue, per- severing, styling something blobbish and macabre into something pointed, neat. Love is a gift that springs from an unlit spot. Resin and rue. Even when I’m in the dark I’m in the dark with you.

332O POETRY say it quivers rather than contracts, fluttery with ruptions.

Doctors call it holiday heart. Valentine’s Day — named for a saint whose head is venerated in Rome — is also National Organ Donor Day, okay? Give anatomical dark chocolates infused with true invariance. With smoked salt pepper and beau- jolais in a plain brown box embellished with praises in a romance language in your hand. Please none cosseted in plush like the stuff inside a coffin. I’m just praying. Can you find a pulse or dry needle trigger point? Just saying this fudge has tears in it. Someone’s been sweating over this. Listen, Mr. Stethoscope, I’m at the end of my hope. Still, I’ll grow another blossom for that blossom-crowned skull.

alice fulton 333 some give vinegar valentines. no pillow words.

Just floppy organ thistleburr. Froot Loops and craft wire fashioned on a snarky jig: “To My Pocket Prince.” “By Bitch Possessed.” Tough tits, isn’t it? Some call it a day marked by commodified flowers, obligation chocolate. Some live on clinical sprinkles, asking where’s the feast. The carnelian pin with openwork components that let you see its self-pleasuring mechanism, storm hormones, and single pulsing vein. What even is it? Here’s the thing. A gift cannot be cynical unless the giver is. I will pay you to test this for me. Its closets vast with steadfastness at best at least for me surpass all other closets in the flesh. I’m sending this from my memory foam head. Valentines intensify the surface, heart the depths.

334O POETRY The Day lou reed set me free

tony fitzpatrick

Walk on the Wild Side, 2013, gouache, ink, watercolor, and paper ephemera, 8 × 10 in. Looking for Soul Food, 2013, gouache, ink, watercolor, and paper ephemera, 6 × 8 in. Lady Eyebrows, 2013, gouache, ink, watercolor, and paper ephemera, 6 × 8 in. Kid Apollo, 2013, gouache, ink, watercolor, and paper ephemera, 6 × 8 in. Kid Hustle, 2013, gouache, ink, watercolor, and paper ephemera, 7 × 9 in. Candy Came, from Out on the Island, 2013, gouache, ink, watercolor, and paper ephemera, 7 × 9 in. Outro

Lou Reed studied literature at Syracuse and was a student of the great American poet Delmore Schwartz. In the whole time I knew Lou, he was never not reading poetry. He loved Rilke, Artaud, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry. You name it, Lou read it. He was also fascinated by the city of New York, the same way I am by Chicago, and I loved when he told me stories of the city in the late sixties and early seven- ties and the tidal cultural changes that he himself helped foster into being ... the places like Max’s Kansas City, CBGB — the emergence of punk and the roiling and whirling energies that brought it all to bear. He was witness to all of it. One night in Manhattan, my friend Bob Chase and I met up with Lou to attend a benefit for Prospect.1, the first-ever New Orleans bi- ennial. It was at the Core Club, a fancy-schmancy, arts-positive club that had graciously agreed to host the event. While standing outside, Lou told us how “Walk on the Wild Side” came into being. It was initially written for a musical based on Nelson Algren’s novel of the same name. When the financing failed to materialize, Lou switched out Algren’s New Orleans demimonde for Warhol’s Factory deni- zens and achieved the only Top 40 hit of his career. Never before had Top 40 radio had a song that spoke so clearly to the “other” — junkies, gay people, and square pegs who existed in the margins of American life. The first time I heard it I was in seventh grade, wearing black pants, a white shirt, and a red tie (the Catholic school uniform of St. Pius X) and I remember thinking that I didn’t know completely what this song was about, but I knew it had something to do with me. It was one of those moments that set me free and let me know that there was another side. It probably isn’t Lou’s best song, or even his best-known song, but it is the one that reached into the white-bread heart of America and announced that the freaks and misfits and others who chose a life outside of the lines weren’t going to hide anymore, and this was not a small thing. Lou broke down the door, and the rest of us got to walk through it.

tony fitzpatrick 343 local colors elaine equi

Friendly Stripes

are all that’s left of Gray’s Papaya on 8th St.

elaine equi 347 Still Life #1

Look deep into the blueberry eyes of breakfast.

348O POETRY Monolith

cheerful stoic epic cozy corporate convalescence hollow gold-brick rhetoric almighty and sleek

elaine equi 349 Wolves of the Sacred Heart

Leave it to the street vendors of NYC to improvise a shrine from whatever they find,

setting a place at their table for animal and divine nature symbolically joined with color-coded floral candelabras.

350O POETRY It Says What We All Think

even if we won’t admit it.

Getting off the subway at Canal St. —

I wonder if the author is a man or a woman? A teen? A team?

elaine equi 351 Cats, Now and Forever

An arty feline couple parodies bourgeois gender roles and literary values before the days of YouTube.

352O POETRY Sixth Ave. Green with Blue Corner

How much greener is paint than grass, especially in winter.

All photographs by Elaine Equi

elaine equi 353

COMMENT

dorothea lasky

What Is Color in Poetry, or Is It the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word

It’s more like a corkscrew than a path! — Lewis Carroll

not a path, but a corkscrew: to begin

I cite Lewis Carroll from a book called The Rainbow Book: Being a Collection of Essays & Illustrations Devoted to Rainbows in Particular & Spectral Sequences in General, Focusing on the Meaning of Color (Physically & Metaphysically) from Ancient to Modern Times. This color compendium is devoted to thinking about the meaning behind our visible spectrum that has, in many ways, inspired this entire essay. It is an important book to me because I spied it once at Joshua Beckman’s house several years ago and it was like a dormant light was turned on. I think when Joshua saw me and my sleeping light all lit up, he was afraid I would steal his book, knowing how much I think about color and poetry. I must confess that I didn’t steal it, but that I thought about it and after I left his house bought two copies for myself. The quotation within the book begins a discussion of the gyre — the term Yeats used to assert that time is not a linear path but a swirl- ing spectrum of events and occurrences. I think our idea that the color spectrum is a linear construct is just as faulty as our idea that time is. Poems know this, that neither time, nor visible color, nor being, falls down a straight path. What is meaning if not something you can’t find in a neat set of steps? A poem is special because its logic is emotional and aesthetic and resists the traditional ways logic seeks to jail itself. Color is special because there is no way to pin it down. It has a live wire that illuminates its frequency. Of course, a poem does, too. I digress already. I mean to tell you now before I totally begin that this essay will explore the relationships between color and poetry. It will delve into some ideas by color theorists, as well as discuss specific poems that use color “well.” It will also give gentle suggestions for where future poetry can go in using color in new ways.

dorothea lasky 357 In the spirit of disclosure, I must tell you that this essay has taken many forms over the past year. I have written parts of it, abandoned it, taken it up again. I put my ideas on color in a future lecture called “On the Materiality of the Imagination.” The topic is bigger than I could ever even begin today. And in throwing all my colors into the wind over several months, I wrote this simple couplet:

I love color And that is all that I love.

It may be that this really is the truth. I have always loved color. I always forget that my mother is a painter and what that might mean for me and the way I read poetry. I recently told some friends ca- sually that my mother was a painter and art historian, and one of them, a wonderful poet named Emily Pettit, said, “Well, it all makes sense — that’s why you love color.” It’s true that my house growing up was always ablaze with color, bright objects, and paint everywhere. Every vacation involved either purchasing an art object or visiting a museum. Color was our religion. My mother hung Navajo rugs in almost every room and when I close my eyes to this day I see the pulse of the bright red, orange, and teal triangles of our living room eye dazzler. All families have big issues that they discuss constantly, but our big issue was color. Instead of baseball or politics, my mother and I talked a lot about what made a particular object come alive. One lifelong family discussion was a wooden rocking chair my mother made and stained for me when I was two. She asked me what color I wanted it stained: red or blue. I chose blue clearly, but she thought to herself, What toddler has that kind of color preference? Growing up, being the pain in the ass that I was, this was always a point of contention for me and I always found reason to bring it up. “That tiny red rocking chair should have been blue!” I’d exclaim whenever I was in a bad mood. As a teenager, we had a choice be- tween a red or blue lounge chair and, of course, blue finally won. When I first started writing poems, around age seven, I would memorize them and recite them to anyone who would listen. One I would always recite was called “Blue dignity,” so I will share it with you now, because hey, why not:

358O POETRY Blue dignity Is suddenly black

And brown and gray Other colors that cause flack

A sapphire poses Amongst a bed of roses

And strength and triumph remain Where graceful refrain

Oh copper-colored cream What did I dream

Don’t replay the past Or snakes will wrath

Violets violets of the sea Why did you

Leave me

Perhaps because of this personal history, I can’t help but see that color has a kind of bi-directional meaning making. Especially with art and everyday objects. One can chose what color they are. Choosing an object’s color is much like naming a baby. You can find the right one, hopefully. You can paint, restain, reupholster. Color is a mal- leable thing, based on mood, on time. Color can change or can stay the same and react to people and its environment. In this way, color is a live wire. When poems get color right, there is a kind of color fate to the pairing between visible and energetic frequency and the word, and the sound of the word. Perhaps Rimbaud got the connection between color and language best in his poem “Vowels,” which sets out to illustrate a colored al- phabet within a poem. A translation by Paul Schmidt and Peter Bauer goes like this:

Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O — vowels, Some day I will open your silent pregnancies:

dorothea lasky 359 A, black belt, hairy with bursting flies, Bumbling and buzzing over stinking cruelties.

Pits of night; E, candor of sand and pavilions, High glacial spears, white kings, trembling Queen-Anne’s lace; I, bloody spittle, laughter dribbling from a face In wild denial or in anger, vermilions;

U, ... divine movement of viridian seas, Peace of pastures animal-strewn, peace of calm lines Drawn on foreheads worn with heavy alchemies;

O, supreme Trumpet, harsh with strange stridencies, Silences traced in angels and astral designs: O ... OMEGA ... the violet light of His Eyes!

In this poem, Rimbaud sends up the one-to-one correspondence that Edmond Jabès talks about in The Book of Questions between a pro- gression of letters as a progression of time and a life, as Jabès writes:

The letters of the alphabet are contemporaries of death. They are stages of death turned into signs. Death of eternal death. But there are other signs which the letters covet, erased signs repro- duced by gestures at the heart of what is named. Thus the bird’s take-off contains all forms of flight.

Perhaps to name a letter is to name a color, too; is to set a finite pro- gression of colors and letters and things that fold upon each other in the voraciously eating vortex of time. That is not a corkscrew but a path. That is all moments, all colors, letters, all forms of flight. That is the once-dormant light all lit up. Perhaps when we connect color to language, to sound, in the space of a poem we reconnect and resist what Breton has named the tragic bifurcation of the so-called real and dream worlds that happens to all adults. Perhaps this is poetry’s purpose in our lives, to reconnect the real and dream worlds to one’s own dormant light. Of course, I believe the easiest way to do this with language is through the per- fect use of color.

360O POETRY what of image, what of color

I have always thought that H.D.’s poems are so perfect because they focus closely on images and make sure that her picture of whatever she mentions is shared completely with her reader. Take, for example, her poem “Sea Violet”:

The white violet is scented on its stalk, the sea-violet fragile as agate, lies fronting all the wind among the torn shells on the sand-bank.

The greater blue violets flutter on the hill, but who would change for these who would change for these one root of the white sort?

Violet your grasp is frail on the edge of the sand-hill, but you catch the light — frost, a star edges with its fire.

H.D. focuses on the image of the sea violet for all three stanzas. Even when she describes the “greater blue violets” in the second stanza, it is to compare them to the sea violet and to show their ultimate unworthiness. The sea violet, described so well, over and over again, turned over again and again, to be peered at from many angles by the reader, be- comes part of a shared imagination with the reader. By the end of the poem, H.D. and the reader share the image of the sea violet, its gor- geous white flower-body embodied as imaginative reality. Part of H.D.’s achievement, I might argue, has to do with her keen use of color. It is the white of the sea violet and the blue of the other violets that serve to distinguish both so simply and so dramatically. Part of this is probably because of her beliefs as an Imagist and in

dorothea lasky 361 keeping with Pound’s dictum that a poem must give, “direct treat- ment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective” and “absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.” It is the per- fect choice of colors that gives direct treatment of a thing within a poem, makes sure no word does not contribute to the presentation, and makes the shared imagination (the shared imaginative space, in material) of the reader and the poet, at least for one second in com- munion. The violets in H.D.’s poem have been agreed upon between poet and reader, at least in part, because of their colors. H.D. famously called herself the modern Sappho and part of her love of Sappho seems to be her love of Sappho’s use of colors. If you have ever read Sappho, particularly Anne Carson’s gorgeous transla- tion, you know how vividly Sappho used the colors violet and yellow, and how they appear in constant vibration with each other due to their complementary natures. Sappho writes of the “one with violets in her lap,” “having come from heaven wrapped in a purple cloak,” a “bridegroom / her hair placing the lyre / Dawn with gold sandals.” In her essay, “The Wise Sappho,” H.D. writes:

Impassioned roses are dead. “Little, but all rose” — true there is a tint of rich color (invari- ably we find it), violets, purple woof of cloth, scarlet garments, dyed fastening of a sandal, the lurid, crushed and perished hya- cinth, stains on cloth and flesh and parchment. There is gold too. Was it a gold rose the poet meant? ... I think of the words of Sappho as these colors, or states rather, transcending color yet containing (as great heat the compass of the spectrum) all color.

Color is not simply a decorative element in a poem. Color cre- ates an expanse; a field, a shared formal field, with which to plant more shared components of the material imagination, a poem. Color makes this space bigger, this imaginative space more specific and big- ger, gives it weight, makes it solid. There is a society called the Pirahã. It is said that their people have no words for colors. So, in describing a red flower, they might describe the color of it as “the thing that is like blood.” Likewise, a blond girl’s hair might be described as “the thing that is like the sun.” Even without specific color words, people can communicate the

362O POETRY tone and weight of a color through language. It is not about the magic of a word for color. It is about the magic of sharing the weighted imaginative space between speaker and listener that a description of color can produce. To describe a thing’s color is to make the energy of it change. In the following Bernadette Mayer poem, “Very Strong February,” she changes the energy of the poem each time she changes the color:

A man and a woman pretend to be white ice Three men at the lavender door are closed in by the storm With strong prejudice and money to buy the green pines One weekend fisherman and blue painters watch The vivid violet winds blow visibility from the mountain Beyond the black valley. That means or then you know You’re in a big cloud of it, it’s brilliant white mid-February A week or two left on distracting black trees Before the brownish buds obscure your view of the valley again.

Looking for company four dark men and a burnt sienna woman Come in for three minutes, then bye-bye like a gold watch left on the chair Or part of the sum of what big white families think up To store for long yellow Sundays to eat for brown ecological company. At some point later gorgeous red adventure stops, did you forget To turn it down and laugh in the face of the fearful white storm anyway Or picture it brilliant blue for a further Sunday memory In a coloring book, you talk as lightly as you can Refusing a big pink kiss, you burned the Sunday sauce Of crushed red tomatoes, you turn it down to just an orange glow. This particular storm, considering the pause and the greenish thaw before it Reminds me in its mildness of imitating a sea-green memory that is actually In the future, I imitate an imagined trumpet sound Or the brilliant purple words of a man or woman I haven’t met yet Or perhaps it’s a gray-haired man I already know who said some- thing yesterday

dorothea lasky 363 To a mutual friend who will give me the whole story in black and white tomorrow Or the day after, just as the big orange plows for the local businesses Go to work to push away the rest of the white snow that will fall tonight.

Almost every line in her poem includes a color. I often think to my- self, What would this poem be without these colors? How would they contain their material realities? What is the black in “A week or two left on distracting black trees”? Without it the line would be “A week or two left on distracting trees.” Without black, the trees are regular green and brown trees. What is the pink in “Refusing a big pink kiss, you burned the Sunday sauce”? The bursting warmth of a pink kiss influencing the warm color of a tomato Sunday sauce in our imaginations. Without it, the line would be “Refusing a big kiss, you burned the Sunday sauce.” In this color- less line, the sauce could be any color, a burnt black and not as sexy and warm. What about the line, “Or the brilliant purple words of a man or woman I haven’t met yet”? Without the purple, adding a touch of royalty and strangeness to the words, the line would simply be, “Or the brilliant words of a man or woman I haven’t met yet.” Brilliant, non-color words that are flat and meaningless. It is the colors in Mayer’s poem that take it from a didactic explanation of a series of meaningless, everyday events into the spec- tral space of the poet’s imagination, a bi-directional kind of looking between Mayer and us in the space of the poem. A multifaceted meaning-making machine. Or a poem, as they call it. When we use color in a poem, it is not an abstract state, but an as- sociation that has weight, that is tangible; a translation of reality, but again, what is reality? Is it the wild wind in the space of the word? The connection between the dream and the non-dream (and is this the waking)? A poem helps us know. In Mayer’s poem color creates a kind of imaginative testimony. Both the poet and the reader are part of its testimony through the use of color and the way the color changes reality. Georg Trakl is a poet who creates a hallucinatory world through his mix of natural imagery and unnatural (or supernatural) use of color to reconnect the real and dream worlds. Take for instance his

364O POETRY poem “An Evening”:

In the evening the sky was overcast. And through the grove full of silence and grief A dark-golden shower went. Distant evening bells faded away.

The earth has drunk icy water, At the forest’s edge a fire lay glowing, The wind quietly sang with angel’s voices And shivering I have gone to the knee,

In the heather, in bitter cresses. Far outside clouds swam in silver puddles, Desolate guards of love. The heath was lonesome and unmeasured.

In Trakl’s poem, “the earth” does something it can’t really do, as it “has drunk icy water.” The forest is edged in fire, not a natural color, like a darker brown would be. The clouds become inverted and turn into “silver puddles.” The rain is not clear water, but a “dark-gold- en shower.” There is a quiet hallucinatory quality to the poem, due largely to color choices that create a shared supernatural imaginative space between poet and reader. Because the poet and reader can enter this space so completely together through color, they both can feel just how disturbing it is to see a world turned on its end. A poet like Rimbaud writes poems that are loud with their effect on the world, they have a louder register — but Trakl quietly changes the natural world and the imaginative space in the poem. Color in a poem can change the shared imaginative space the poem creates. It can make a new reality — an imperceptible coming into reality — completely terrifying, as in the following Wallace Stevens poem, “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” where he embodies dis- embodied nightgowns with hallucinatory color choices:

The houses are haunted By white night-gowns. None are green, Or purple with green rings, Or green with yellow rings,

dorothea lasky 365 Or yellow with blue rings. None of them are strange, With socks of lace And beaded ceintures. People are not going To dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather.

Stevens uses lots of colors with simple names (white, green), although he throws a gorgeous blurple like periwinkle in there. Still, he hints at the multiplicity of reality, at the effect of color on reality, with his “purple with green rings” and “yellow with blue rings,” which produce the unfamiliar/familiar feeling of the spiritual realm, the ac- tual weirdness and awe of the ghosts that haunt the house in their “white night-gowns” come in through nightgowns that are unexpect- edly non-white, the sad and drunk old sailor caught in a neverending world of “red weather.” And the poem also seems very concerned about the fact that in a colorless reality peoples’ imaginations aren’t ignited, that “People are not going / To dream of baboons and peri- winkles.” They will only dream of a drunk, old soldier (the poor guy!), here and there, not the fantastical blue-purple baboons and beyond. In Stevens’s “Domination of Black,” we see color within the absence of color names:

At night, by the fire, The colors of the bushes And of the fallen leaves, Repeating themselves, Turned in the room, Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind. Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks Came striding. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails Were like the leaves themselves

366O POETRY Turning in the wind, In the twilight wind. They swept over the room, Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks Down to the ground. I heard them cry — the peacocks. Was it a cry against the twilight Or against the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, Turning as the flames Turned in the fire, Turning as the tails of the peacocks Turned in the loud fire, Loud as the hemlocks Full of the cry of the peacocks? Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window, I saw how the planets gathered Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind. I saw how the night came, Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks. I felt afraid. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

In “Domination of Black,” the only color Stevens uses is the color black in the title. After that color becomes the word color. We are left to our imaginative devices to picture the vibrancy of the colors of the hemlocks and peacocks against the dominating black. The rhyming sound of them is a way to connect them, both multicolored and still full of complementary colors in the dominating lipstick red of the hemlock berry and then green-blue hues of the peacock’s feathers. It is through the sound and the absence of color that Stevens paints a poem full of colors out of the stark and overbearing black. Color is not the only sensual detail a poet can use to create a shared imagination with his or her reader, but it is an overwhelming one. One that defends the idea of a material imagination, I might say, vehemently.

dorothea lasky 367 color in the wild space of the word

In his Theory of Colors, Goethe writes:

It will be more intelligible to assert that a dormant light resides in the eye, and that it may be excited by the slightest cause from within or from without. In darkness we can, by an effort of imagination, call up the brightest images; in dreams objects appear to us as in broad daylight; awake, the slightest external action of light is perceptible, and if the organ suffers an actual shock, light and colors spring forth.

I love this idea that even in the absence of light our imagination is readily capable of producing it in dreams, that the imagination houses a dormant light. I think that poets and writers have very strong dormant lights just waiting to be shared. Sometimes I think that if all poets used their dormant lights extensively it would have a viral effect and the brains of all of us would be even more lit up. Wittgenstein, in his Remarks on Color, gives poets a charge in ex- plaining that we can often describe colors more accurately in words than we can recreate them. As he writes:

256. To be able generally to name a color, is not the same as be- ing able to copy it exactly. I can perhaps say “There I see a red- dish place” and yet I can’t mix a color that I recognize as being exactly the same.

257. Try, for example, to paint what you see when you close your eyes! And yet you can roughly describe it.

Although his points are arguable, they are exciting ideas to consider. Maybe poems’ purposes are also to reconnect the real and dream worlds, to light our dormant lights to describe the infinite colors that are impossible to perfectly recreate in the natural world? Maybe that is the point and the purpose of being a poet; to describe what can’t ever be again.

368O POETRY certain colors and the violet sun: the red hat and blue, and red and blue

One strain of my interest in color and poetry started thirteen years ago with my love of a poem called “The Red Hat” by Gertrude Stein from her Tender Buttons. It reads:

A dark gray, a very dark gray, a quite dark gray is monstrous ordinarily, it is so monstrous because there is no red in it. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out.

When I first read that poem, it was in a fall where I had already spent a summer thinking almost exclusively about the color red paired with the color aquamarine. I kept imagining making a necklace of aquamarine with one single bright red bead. The fantasy transcended into other mental images where red might be a singular thing in a sea of paler attributes. I imagined a room where everything was a pale blue except one red bowl. To connect myself physically to this idea, I would wear outfits where I only had one red thing on (one red sock, sparkly red glass earrings, a red hair tie, red fingernails) in the midst of an entire pale yellow ensemble. I became obsessed with red’s power to drive everything else it came in contact with. So, imagine my sur- prise, after the thoughts of such a summer, when I came upon Stein’s poem and its line seemingly directed at me, “If red is in everything it is not necessary.” In classes on color and poetry I often start with a set of exercises focusing on color with this poem. We read the poem and then I start asking questions steeped in her line: “What does red make you think of? What would happen if red is in everything? What if this room were suddenly all red?” I wear one red piece of clothing or jewelry that day and use it as a visual backdrop to the discussion. The con- versation eventually turns to blood, even if it takes a while. I always make sure that it does. Blood could not be more important to Stein’s line and to the ex- ercise. After all, what is the effect of spaces drenched in red but that they look covered in blood. There is an alarm in the color red that seems to indicate that blood has been spilled. A place where red is literally in everything is one where I see danger.

dorothea lasky 369 In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining there is a scene where Jack Nicholson’s murderous and alcoholic character, Jack Torrance, first meets, while drunk, the ghost of Delbert Grady (the hotel’s past caretaker, who killed his family, including his twin daughters). In this scene, Grady convinces Torrance to reenact his own horrible crime and the bathroom is all red (I might add that there are some white tiles in it to lighten the mood). Whenever I watch that particular scene, I think of Stein’s line, and think: What does it mean again that red is necessary? Red has a ne- cessity to express something intense and when it is everywhere it is not necessary, because then everything is intense. Maybe this is like this red bathroom, where an evil ghost meets an evil man, to trans- fer the metaphysical power of evil. After all, time is a corkscrew, a gyre. Could it be that all beings meet their match in a place of color intensity? Blood is red. Red is blood. When you see your own blood outside of your body, you know something is wrong (unless it is expected). If red (blood) were everywhere, there would be no need for red and blood, and so forth. There are not enough books that focus on one color, but one I deeply love is William Gass’s On Being Blue, where he bom- bastically states, “Blue postures, attitudes, blue thoughts, blue gestures ... is it the form or content that turns blue when these are?” It is hard to know if it is the word that becomes its color in a poem when a color is used. But what is true is that when a poem uses the right color, when the color becomes a thing, then it makes a space in the mind for the color. Another great book is Maggie Nelson’s lyrical meditation on the color blue. In Bluets, she sees blue as an intense burning color:

2. And so I fell in love with a color — in this case, the color blue — as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.

3. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable uni- verse. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty

370O POETRY and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.

Sometimes I like to imagine red objects as their equal frequency in a blue shade, as painted in the same intensity of their redness as a twin blueness. When switching the color of objects in your imagination, you change everything about them and what surrounds them. For example, if I were imagining a woman with bright red-orange lips right now (and hey, why not?), I might in my mind then imagine her with lips the color of lapis lazuli cream. If I imagine a love scene with a bright red dress and some red wine, I can then easily see in my mind the same scene, but severely altered with a bright blue dress and navy-colored wine. What is the equal color of blood in its blue equivalent? It depends on where the blood is and if it is dried or fresh. If the bathroom scene from The Shining where Grady meets Torrance was done up in its equivalent blue tile, it might have been different. Certainly the color temperature in the room and the mood it created would have set us up to view the transfer of evil in a very different way. A poem by Paul Celan called “Death Fugue” sees blue as a color symbolizing evil. Here are just the first two stanzas, translated by Jerome Rothenberg:

Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night we drink and drink we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flash- ing he whistles his dogs to draw near whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand he commands us play up for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night we drink you at dawntime and noontime we drink you at dusktime we drink and drink There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair

dorothea lasky 371 Margareta your ashen hair Shulamite we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie He calls jab it deep in the soil you men you other men sing and play he tugs at the sword in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue jab your spades deeper you men you other men play up again for the dance

Celan’s poem reminds us what poetry can do, what brutality it can commemorate. The blue eye of the Nazi symbolizes the Aryan race. The whole history of the Holocaust is summed up in the choice of this blue eye, not green or brown, and the black milk is the doom of annihilation, of hopelessness. The golden hair of the lucky Margareta and the ashen hair of Shulamite, echoing with perfect color the dis- parity between the hunter and the hunted. Likewise, a similarly perfect choice of color to echo the brutality in Celan’s poem is in Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103°” when she writes (these are the closing stanzas of the poem):

Does not my heat astound you. And my light. All by myself I am a huge camellia Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up, I think I may rise — The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene Virgin Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim, By whatever these pink things mean. Not you, nor him

Nor him, nor him (My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) — To Paradise.

Maggie Nelson, in The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, has referred to

372O POETRY Plath’s choice of pink in “whatever these pink things mean” as be- ing savagely sarcastic. Perhaps this is true, as Plath’s use of the casual “whatever” when discussing a person rising in hot red and pink colors dying and/or rising up “to Paradise” defeats any sense of sentimen- tality when you think about it. Of course, these “pink things” are not the simple feminine attributes of the poem’s female-ish persona, but more the pinkness of flesh, skinned and dead as an animal object. These “pink things” that are sort of beside the point. The bodies and flesh we are all housed in. What these poems do is turn color on its head. Blue, a calming col- or, becomes burning with unlivable intensity in Nelson’s blue poems and the steel gaze of the Nazi murderer in Celan’s. The sweetness and girlyness of pink, a color to adorn a baby girl’s room, becomes the soft and unsubstantial, unimportant flesh to house the spirit in Plath’s poem. We are left with the question: What is it that poems can do with color? And how do these poems show us what can be done?

future uses of color in poetry, or: the sound of a poem is the sound of a color, is the progression of the spectrum, and, the problem of indigo

Contemporary American poets have boundaries to cross when using color in their work. David Batchelor famously argued in Chromophobia that since ancient times Westerners have had a fear of using too much color. Isn’t this true today? In the corporate culture that pervades our everyday lives, in the professionalization that per- vades all things now in America (or at least it feels this way), we are often warned about being “too colorful.” A recent random Google search I did for “power colors,” where my intent was to use these colors for spiritual practices, produced a whole host of websites warning job seekers and company employees to avoid wearing “too much color.” Why is this? Is it that color dis- tracts one from one’s corporate path? Is it that color ignites the spirit, a dormant light? Does the spirit have no place in one’s work anymore? If you were to buy a house today on any random street in America and were to decide to paint the outside bright turquoise with neon yellow and orange accents, you might get more than just a few strange looks. More likely you might be branded a weirdo, a crazy person,

dorothea lasky 373 even someone dangerous. The value of your house would decline with its new colors. Color, even in its absence, contains more power than we give it credit for. Think to yourself right now of the last time you read a poem with the perfect color. What color was it? Was it an obvious one? A blue sky, a green tree, a red rose, a yellow sun? Did it symbolize some- thing: a black door, a white dress? How did the expected or unex- pected color put spirit in the poem? Was the sun violet? We all need to know the violet sun. Questions about colors are good questions to ask ourselves. If we think of the old (tired?) line “Roses are red,” we can see how far colors in poems have taken us already and how far they might go. The line, seemingly simple, contains our potential future of using color in poems. After all, to assert roses are red is a pretty bombastic assertion. How can we know that the sample rose is not also blue or white or yellow-red or a million colors, too? Now with advances in nanotechnology research, we are learning that colors are not as they appear to be, and that though red appears red to us, on a smaller, imperceptible scale, anything red is gold. It is important to think of the bombastic assertion of a poet to name a color, that when a poet says there is something called red in the first place he or she has great arrogance. Colors themselves are not real, but in poems they are the connection between the real and dream worlds, the reunification of self with its dreaming self. If we consider how Stein took us a bit further with her famous “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” we can see even more so the direc- tion that poems might go. Reading such a line, we might ask our- selves: What color is Stein’s rose? How might such a line contain the color red (its expectation) and also other colors? There are so many ways that future poems can use even just the color red. In a 1930 essay from The Scientifc Monthly, Dr. George Stewart explained how modern poetry had the ability to show us not only color, but “technique of hue,” largely due to the advancement of science. To illustrate this, he outlined over ten kinds of ways red was used in Amy Lowell’s work, such as crimson butterflies, vermil- lion fishes, blood-orchid tips of mountains, copper, maroon, ruby, and carnation, comparing them to how sadly (in Stewart’s opinion) someone like Chaucer used rudimentary colors in his work, using a simple red term over and over again and not recording the possible variations.

374O POETRY In 2014, certainly a rose can be red, but it can also be a rose (con- taining red), a rose rose, or even a carnation. And red can be many things. Aside from variations in color, there are, just to begin, mul- tichromatics that now appear in car paint and nail polish for poets to consider. When describing these new colors, a poem can refer to red as red-green or red-silver or also a consistent color shift of red to green to purple to copper to blue, all within the span of a few seconds. I like what poetry can do when it is written by people who per- ceive and process color differently than most of us. In 1970, a poet named Hannah Weiner fasted for twenty-one days and wrote about how she began to see more clearly the color essence of things. In her record, objects, with their necessary color auras, were always more than the color they were. They were also the radiating colors around them. Future poetry can take its cues from what colors mean to language- makers who aren’t poets. In his Born on a Blue Day, savant Daniel Tammet describes what colors mean to him:

Some words are perfect fits for the things they describe. A rasp- berry is both a red word and a red fruit, while grass and glass are both green words that describe green things. Words beginning with the letter T are always orange like a tulip or a tiger or a tree in autumn, when the leaves turn to orange. Conversely, some words do not seem to me to fit the things they describe: geese is a green word but describes white birds (heese would seem a better choice to me), the word white is blue while orange is clear and shiny like ice. Four is a blue word but a pointy number, at least to me. The color of wine (a blue word) is better described by the French word vin, which is purple.

Poetry can learn from people like Tammet and others on the autistic spectrum. Although it is not fully understood by researchers, there is the idea that color, with processes like synesthesia, is a sensual thing, that a word might have its own non-obvious color — that “geese is a green word” even when a goose might not be green — and that words have their own objective properties. They are objects, after all. An idea that has always troubled me is how representations of the rainbow often contain six colors but the visible spectrum includes seven. We all remember drawing rainbows as children. Rainbows are made up of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. But visible

dorothea lasky 375 light includes red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, the spectrum we know lovingly as ROYGBIV. I always take for granted that purple and violet are in some way the same color. But what is indigo? Indigo is a problem. Is the possibility of indigo the possibility of the wild wind? Is it the possibility of the wild wind in the space of the word? Is it a wild animal, a being beyond? Maybe if colors show us what is possible in a poem, indigo is the problem of poetry. Because if indigo, a seeming child of blue and violet, is included in the spectrum, then why isn’t teal or turquoise (the children of green and blue)? Why isn’t fire orange part of the spectrum, or marigold? Where are these colors? And if indigo is possible, then maybe this is a reminder of what all poems can do. That all poems are the space between the real and the dream worlds, the platform between the living and the dead.

to conclude

Indigo is blue like the you of me or you Ebony is darker than the deepest Emerald like the water we swam in for a while To a man of many colors I give word — Alela Diane

In Theory of Colors, Goethe writes:

If we may at all hope that natural history will gradually be mod- ified by the principle of deducing the ordinary appearances of nature from higher phenomena ... As color, in its infinite vari- ety, exhibits itself on the surface of living beings, it becomes an important part of the outward indications, by means of which we can discover what passes underneath.

Certainly color, like sound, is one way to understand the spirit. The poem, with its physical imagination of color, wind, and sound, is an- other way, too. Perhaps the purpose of a life is not to understand the spirit, and so using colors in a poem, using music to write a poem, is not important either. But whatever we make of it, I say the delight of life will always be the point, the sharp and searing blue-

376O POETRY green mystery, the reason to do anything at all, tied up in the bloom of one’s spirit, reunified in life, reignited by color. Poetry is an im- portant way to do this. But what does this mean for poets and poems? The other day had beautiful weather and in the evening I could see the pink and purple of the sunset affect the clouds. As Stevens writes in “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”:

The difficulty to think at the end of day, When the shapeless shadow covers the sun And nothing is left except light on your fur.

Sometimes our words contain at least a handful of colors within them. This is what the poets know. A wonderful poet, Meghan Maguire Dahn, told me recently that the word livid means to become dark, purpled and blued with anger or red and flushed with anger, and also white with shock. It comes from the Latin word lividus, to be bluish, but this bluishness somehow has transferred over into the colors of the dead, as Mary Shelley wrote, “lips ... livid with the hue of death.” I once loved a person who loved the color violet so much that I became purple with my love. Beyond a passion of love, infused with blood, I wasn’t even red, I became violet. To become him, I sailed past the problems of indigo. Was he, was I? Was he not all forms of flight? Maybe this is what a poem can do. And perhaps it is true what they say — poetry is a destructive force. To crush all the colors of the spec- trum. The pink and purple of the sunset. How is this not one thing? The first time I fell in love (this was not with the violet one), I got very sick within the first year of our relationship and my love brought me David Ferry’s translation of Gilgamesh to read in bed. In between fevers, I only remembered the blue of the poem’s lapis lazuli. Perhaps I will sail across a poem when I sail across the sunset. Whatever it is these pink things mean. Or maybe it is like, as Nina Simone sang, “I intended to be independently blue.” Of course, I do, too. We create poetry in a multicolored universe. Not a path, but a corkscrew. Not a spectrum, but a gyre. Perhaps the stages of death, containing all forms of flight, constitute our rainbow. Whatever it is, it is a truly tangled rainbow. I look to poetry to help me unravel it.

dorothea lasky 377 william logan

Two Gents

The Hotel Oneira, by August Kleinzahler. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $24.00.

August Kleinzahler is a romantic bad boy, a Shelley with a chip on his shoulder. Such a hipster’s hipster has probably memorized long passages from On the Road and made pilgrimage to the Mexican rail- road track where Neal Cassady fell into his fatal coma. In The Hotel Oneira, Kleinzahler’s slouchy, doomed demeanor infects a lot of poems about travel as he bangs up in the odd hotel with a volume of Kafka by his side.

That was heavy freight moved through last night, and has been moving through since I’m back, settled in again by the Hudson at the Hotel Oneira: maps on the walls, shelves of blue and white Pelicans, multiple editions of the one epistolary novel by K., the curios — my sediment, you mighty say, my spattle trail.

Look at them down there by the ferry slip, the bridal party, organza, chiffon and lace, beside themselves, being wonderful, desperately wonderful, a pastel foam. Behind them a tug pushes a rusted barge upriver. Helicopters, small planes, passenger jets above. They behave, these girls, as if this is their last chance to be thus. — From The Hotel Oneira

There’s much to admire in these stanzas: the slow tracking through the room’s flotsam and jetsam (“spattle” is a nonce word, presum- ably the things his life has spat forth), the little touch of the “blue and white Pelicans” (paperbacks, of course, but with the dreamlike suggestion of impossibly exotic plumage), even the bullying symbol of the “heavy freight,” and only then the closely managed scene of the bridal party, the girls — banally overdressed, silly in their silliness, yet revealing a profound loss. O tempora! In his angsty self-regard, Kleinzahler often sounds like the narrator

378O POETRY of a bad Chandler novel. This sort of thing plays well into your forties, but by the time you’re ready to draw Social Security it’s a bit much. If the opening is straight from the chapel of rawboned romantic ges- tures (patron saint, Tom Waits), the lines about the girls are full of rueful sympathy. You can tell the speaker doesn’t like such frippery (he juxtaposes the bridal party with that pushy barge, that empty busyness of air traffic), but he’s taken with them despite himself. The moment might have dripped with sentiment, but Kleinzahler’s best poems risk overegging the emotion without quite making you cringe. Every page is a dangerous balancing act — the poems ramble from idea to idea, less an argument than a drunk man’s walk, incor- porating humdrum details on the fly, as if that were a sign of being cool in the midst of romantic agony:

They follow you around the store, these power ballads, you and the women with their shopping carts filled with eggs, cookies, 90 fl. oz. containers of anti-bacterial dishwashing liquid, buffeting you sideways like a punishing wind. — From A History of Western Music: Chapter 63

The poem is about Whitney Houston. Though poems about pop stars are usually a disaster (we’re lucky Lowell didn’t write about the Beatles), Kleinzahler almost makes a case for the emotion pop songs embody. (The antibacterial dishwashing soap is just right for house- wives a little too prim about dirt.) And yet. And yet. By the time he gets to the song that’s not being played in the supermarket aisle, the poem has collapsed into a crying jag. He manages not to mention Houston’s sordid death in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub, he’s so busy comparing such songs to neurotoxin (“it wouldn’t be just you dying in aisle #5. / All the girls would be dropping like it was sarin gas”). That’s the trouble with Kleinzahler. He has about all the talents the god of poetry could have bestowed upon him: a fine ear, the abil- ity to launch into poems with deceptive suavity, oddly shaped per- ceptions, a surprising eye — and a heart of mush. He’s never afraid to let the poems unfold in unexpected ways, yet on page after page there’s cloying sentiment or an eye-rolling and affected delivery that makes even the best poems suspect in their touches of feeling. Such a poet suffers from mixed blessings — as well as mixed curses. Too many of Kleinzahler’s poems embrace their slack winsome- ness, and slacker wooziness, which would be fine if you liked your

william logan 379 poems winsome or woozy. (The poet seems to moan, “Pity the poet! Pity the poor poet!”) Worse, the archness often dissolves into weary, jacked-up humor. There’s a poem about macaques that starts in what I take to be an Amos ’n’ Andy voice (“thass me, your jibber-jabbering Sulawesi booted macaque”) and quickly descends into the music-hall turn few but Eliot could pull off:

A-monk-a-monk-a-mee, a-monk-a-monk-a-yoo I once knew a lady wot lived in a shoe Had so many laces she didn’t know wot to do So many laces, faces, places ... Wot’s a girl to do? — From Tuq-Tuq

Perhaps Kleinzahler has been reading “Fragment of an Agon” like Scripture. As the younger poet says, “I jibber-jabber’d, jibber-jibber- jabber’d myself to a proper lather.” These new poems sometimes toy with history, if a little fast and loosely. German exiles (Brecht, Mann, Oskar Homolka) live out World War II in California, but suddenly among them there’s the long-dead Nietzsche playing golf in Bel-Air. In another poem, Francis Ponge obsessively watches Looney Tunes. Throwing dead philosophers into our cartoonish culture doesn’t seem very fair to philosophers, though perhaps with the phenomenologist Kleinzahler is making a backdoor joke on the character known in France as Bob l’éponge. The most curious of these historical turns, seemingly cast in the baroque eighteenth-century style Pynchon pastiched in Mason & Dixon, in fact consists of passages from the 1703 weather diaries of Thomas Appletree:

And thus did the Atmospherical Theatre play out, with its transmutations & shifting of vapours, whether the rain-bearing clouds of January riding over our heades like vast Carracks or Bulging, dull-swelling Bas-Relieve clouds bloated & pendulous, ubera caeli fecunda. — From The Exquisite Atmography of Thomas Appletree, Diarist of Edgiock

“Milk-dripping breasts of the sky,” more or less. Ah, those wild

380O POETRY Oxbridgians of the Stuart Age, always dropping into Latin for the salacious bits. The poem is a giddy romp, and giddily inane. Kleinzahler is a man at ease in these poems, letting them fill up with the dreck of the day; but then he labors to make a point; or invents elaborate setups for clumsy jokes; or writes something as unbearably twee as “To My Cat William,” which is not a patch on Christopher Smart, or a long, gadabout study of Vachel Lindsay, whose naive, tom-tomming poems Kleinzahler does nothing to res- cue. There are poems that seem mere jottings — like a writer’s sum- mer journal, feisty-scrappy but also scrapbook-scrappy — and poems that live like remittance men on unearned pathos. You can have only so many apocalyptic visions about the Age of Trash. Yet when he jux- taposes Hitler’s invasion of Russia with Napoleon’s disastrous retreat, this fitful, posturing poet seems to harbor something greater inside him. He lets the details of war do the work, as Anthony Hecht did. The obvious message is that dictators never learn from history (not that anyone else does, either). You never know quite what Kleinzahler will do next. Too many poems in this lively ragbag of a book are less than the sum of their parts, too many a train wreck; but in half a dozen places he finds ac- cess to feeling nervous in its despair. The reader has to put up with a lot of sketchy thought, hipper-than-thou gestures, and gushing romanticism (Hotel Oneira? Give me a break) to get to the deeply rendered meditations of place, full of Melvillean glamour and sadness. It’s no use asking Kleinzahler to leave out the gruesome sentiment, it’s so mired in his manner, his conception of what it is to be a poet (he’s always ordering a handkerchief with sniffles to go). The poet should never take credit for being a poet.

Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems, by William Stafford. Graywolf Press. $16.00.

William Stafford was a minor figure in American poetry thirty or for- ty years ago, neither famous nor infamous, just a hardworking poet who wrote too much and had a poem in most anthologies — almost always “Traveling through the Dark,” which most readers remember as the dead deer poem. Stafford was like a lot of poets who never rise to the heights of the local Parnassus, an honest journeyman whose work rarely strayed beyond his forty acres. There’s never much room

william logan 381 at the top — fame is not a zero-sum game, but it’s close. Stafford was modest enough, and sensible enough, not to mind. He was unassuming in person and the poems were the model of the man, written in bark-plain prose, accidental, unpretentious — like Hardy’s without the shape of genius. He fared better than many poets: there was a National Book Award early on, and later the appointment as poet laureate (at that time, the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress). If there’s a case to be made for his poems, it’s that plain American is hard-wearing. Many poets of the postwar are almost unreadable now — they chose a literary language dripping with artifice or a vernacular dull as boiled cod. The difference be- tween a Lowell and, say, a Nemerov or an Eberhart is the difference between a cheetah and a house cat. The poems in Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems are drily written, con- versational, without shape or tension — they just start, and just end, sometimes without much in between. Occasionally Stafford has an intriguing thought and just keeps pushing. A woman he knew named Lorene goes missing:

Usually, it wouldn’t happen, but sometimes the neighbors notice your car is gone, the patch of oil in the driveway, and it fades. They forget.

In the Bible it happened — fishermen, Levites. They just went away and kept going. Thomas, away off in India, never came back.

But Lorene — it was a stranger maybe, and he said, “Your life, I need it.” And nobody else did. — From Saint Matthew and All

The idea might have gone nowhere; but then he recalls the apos- tles, torn from their lives. And chillingly, almost an afterthought, a murderer, perhaps — though he doesn’t say murderer (Christ was a stranger, too). Stafford’s poems are never a tour de force, they’re a tour de réticence, their strength in what he doesn’t say. Kim Stafford, the poet’s son, who edited this volume, recalls that at a reading a stranger in the audience remarked, after his father finished a poem, “I could have written that.” Stafford replied, “But you didn’t.”

382O POETRY A different poet might have left it there, yet after a pause he added, “But you could write your own.” Stafford was one of nature’s democrats. That kindness and humility (there’s a brief flare of pride as well) was essential to the poetry; the better poems go a little further than you expect, and they take you unawares. In “Traveling through the Dark,” the speaker stops his car after finding a dead deer along a narrow river road. He says at the outset that to prevent an accident travelers normally rolled a carcass into the canyon. There’s a hitch, however. The deer was pregnant.

Her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting, alive, still, never to be born. Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights; under the hood purred the steady engine. I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red; around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all — my only swerving — , then pushed her over the edge into the river.

The poet never quite admits he could have saved the fawn, but his actions make clear he thought so. “My only swerving” is a touch of Frost; but Frost would have made the poem darker, morally tougher, perhaps less haunting. Some of the impact of Stafford’s poems come from their very quietness. It’s a pity that he felt it necessary to make the wilderness listen — surely the point of the poem is that in nature the death would have gone unnoticed. Stafford’s best poems were often little parables or fables whose meaning remained undefined. He loved his moments of prairie wis- dom, or mountain wisdom, or river wisdom — he was the sort of man who listened to what a place was trying to say. It was half crazy, but half touching, too. Stafford possessed a sentimental streak broader than a barn door, and it spoiled a lot of poems. “Why I Am a Poet” starts ruefully (“My father’s gravestone said, ‘I knew it was time’”), then breaks into cheerful absurdity:

william logan 383 The singers back home all stood in rows along the railroad line.

When the wind came along the track every neighbor sang.

That beats anything in Oklahoma! If you write about your life in such a highly stylized manner, the way WPA painters portrayed America in post office murals, the style conceals all the suffering. The poem ends weakly, miserably:

I looked back where the sky came down. Some days no train would come.

Some birds didn’t have a song.

That’s a Just So story for poets, and sappy at that. On the other hand, Stafford may have written the only poems of the Vietnam War that can still be read without embarrassment. His polit- ical poems learned something from Auden, adding dashes of whimsy that made the politics more bearable — and more unbearable, too:

Remember that leader with the funny mustache? — liked flags and marching? — gave loyalty a bad name? Didn’t drink, they say, but liked music, and was jolly, sometimes.

And then the one with the big mustache and the wrinkled uniform, always jovial for the camera but eliminated malcontents by the millions. He was our friend, I think. — From Explaining the Big One

The reader thinks, plus ça change. Stafford was born in 1914, the same year as Berryman and Jarrell and Dylan Thomas. His parents were not wealthy — like a lot of small timers before and during the Depression, they moved around try- ing to find work. Stafford hoed weeds in sugar beet fields, delivered newspapers, jobbed as an electrician’s mate. He was lucky to go to college, but while finishing his master’s he was drafted. He became a

384O POETRY conscientious objector, like Lowell, and spent the war in work camps in California and Arkansas, where he wrote poetry. His first book was not published until he was forty-six. There was something hardscrabble about the life and hardscrab- ble about the career. To say Stafford wrote too much might seem a critic’s exaggeration, but by his son’s count he wrote 20,000 poems. This isn’t a record (Lowell’s psychiatrist, Merrill Moore, wrote at least 25,000 sonnets, probably more); but it’s far over the border of graphomania, that peculiar country of the damned. “Scribble, scribble, scribble!” doesn’t begin to cover it. By comparison, Eliot wrote about seventy poems, Bishop one hundred, Larkin 120, Moore 250, Pound and Frost three hundred or so, Auden somewhat more, if you count the tiny ones. A poet who writes too much almost always has too lit- tle to say, and very few ways of saying it; but beyond the limitations of talent there’s something darkly psychological in Stafford, some desperate need that could be only temporarily assuaged by writing. Stafford was so reserved (humility can be heroic, but also other things), it’s difficult to guess from the poems what that need was. He found his style early and stuck to it. When you read the poems, you feel you know the man (there were worse men to know — worse poets, too), but really you know only the voice. You can read all of Frost without getting more than a glimpse of the rage and desire lying below. If you published the poems Stafford left behind, a book a year and a hundred poems a book, you’d finish about the year 2200; but you probably wouldn’t find them much different from the poems we have. It’s not clear what editorial principle his son used to gather these poems or organize them — he likes the political poems well enough, and the sentimental ones even better. You could probably get a selec- tion almost as good by putting your hand in a grab bag of the throw- aways. Out of the common sorrows of common life, Stafford made poems with modest ends, and modest means.

In scenery I like flat country. In life I don’t like much to happen.

In personalities I like mild colorless people. And in colors I prefer gray and brown. — From Passing Remark

william logan 385 There was something a touch sad about the poems — yet Stafford manages to seem one of life’s optimists. He was one of the rare poets, in an art that favors the monk and the monster, whose salt-of- the-earth gentleness did not count against him. Poets often get by on personality — an authentic voice is more appealing than verbal pyro- technics — but a poet of slender gifts could write a poem every day of his life and never write a great one. Writing poetry is not like stand- ing in traffic until you get hit by a truck; it’s like standing in hell waiting to get knocked down by a snowball.

386O POETRY contributors

traci brimhall* is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Nor- ton, 2012) and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). amanda calderon* is a 2014 Emerging Poets Fellow at Poets House. She lives in New York City, where she is currently working on her first manuscript. timothy donnelly’s * The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010) was awarded the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A recent Gug- genheim Fellow, he teaches at Columbia University. thomas sayers ellis is a poet, photographer, and cofounder of the Dark Room Collective. His most recent book is Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (Graywolf Press, 2010). elaine equi’s books include Click and Clone (2011) and Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems (2007), both from Coffee House Press. tony fitzpatrick was born in Chicago in 1958. philip fried* has published six books of poetry including Inter- rogating Water (2013) and Early / Late: New & Selected Poems (2011), both from Salmon Poetry. alice fulton’s new book of poems, Barely Composed, will be pub- lished by W.W. Norton in February 2015. devin johnston is the author of four books of poetry, the most re- cent of which is Traveler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). He works for Flood Editions and teaches at Saint Louis University. dorothea lasky is the author of three full-length poetry collec- tions, most recently Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012). She teaches poetry at Columbia University and was a 2013 Bagley Wright lecturer. rickey laurentiis is the recipient of a 2013 Creative Writing Fel- lowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. william logan’s new book of poems, Madame X, was published by Penguin in 2012. His new book of criticism is Guilty Knowledge,

contributors 387 Guilty Pleasure (Columbia University Press, 2014). d.a. powell’s most recent collection of poems is Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press, 2012). He lives in San Francisco. rosanna warren teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book of poems is Ghost in a Red Hat (W.W. Norton, 2011). dean young’s most recent book is Bender: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He’s currently the William Livings- ton Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas, Austin.

* First appearance in Poetry.

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