Earth Science

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Sarah E. Green

May 2015

© 2015 Sarah E. Green. All Rights Reserved. 2

This dissertation titled

Earth Science

by

SARAH E. GREEN

has been approved for

the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Mark Halliday

Professor of English

Robert Frank

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3

ABSTRACT

GREEN, SARAH E., Ph.D., May 2015, English

Earth Science

Director of Dissertation: Mark Halliday

“I Am Not Sentimental” looks at poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Adam Zagajewski,

Robert Frost, Gregory Corso, and Rachel Wetzsteon, all of which have in common the speaker’s grappling with diametrically opposed ideas (ways of living, ways of seeing.)

Though the speakers make divergent choices, in every case the poem is able to sincerely and substantively engage both sides of a dichotomy, before settling on a conclusive course of action or perception. This openness to paradox and/or counter-argument heightens the poems' poignancy, immediacy, and intellectual liveliness, creating the sense that in every case the poet is thinking in real time and as surprised by the outcome as the reader.

“Earth Science” is a collection of poems that explores the ways in which life surprises us by disrupting simple categories: stranger and neighbor, lover and enemy, luck and loss.

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DEDICATION

Dedicated to my grandmother, Margaret W. Grimes

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Mark Halliday and Jill Rosser for their guidance.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page Abstract ...... 3 Dedication ...... 4 Acknowledgments ...... 5 “I Am Not Sentimental” ...... 8 Works Cited……… ………………………………………………………………...32 Earth Science: Poems ...... 34 I...... 36 Towels ...... 37 Prayer ...... 38 Assembly ...... 39 Plan For The Apocalypse ...... 40 Bon Bon ...... 41 Bruno Mars ...... 42 Nike ...... 43 Salt Peanuts ...... 44 The Auditions ...... 45 July Linden ...... 46 Sorry For Me ...... 48 Shrimp Boats ...... 49 They Died As They Lived ...... 50 II...... 51 There’s Been a Miscommunication About My Past Snake Skins ...... 52 Watching The Cranes ...... 53 Wong Kar Wai’s “Fallen Angels” ...... 54 Insect ...... 55 Awake Before Him ...... 56 Constellations ...... 57 Sunday Afternoon, Spain ...... 58 Mayday ...... 59 Hotel Winter ...... 60 Light Sentence ...... 61 Patch of Blue ...... 62 Splash Line ...... 63 Porpoises ...... 64 III...... 65 7

Earth Science ...... 66 Pastel ...... 67 Light, Don’t Leave Me Out ...... 68 Omens ...... 70 Fate Factory ...... 71 Afterword ...... 72 High School ...... 73 October Recovery ...... 74 Chances Are, Lafayette, Indiana ...... 75 At The Mechanic ...... 76 The Marines’ Priest ...... 77 Skeleton Evenings ...... 79 Our Bird ...... 80 Acknowledgments (Publications List) ...... 81

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I AM NOT SENTIMENTAL: AMBIVALENCE AS A SIGN OF GENUINE

ATTENTIVENESS IN POETRY

Robert Frost in his essay “The Figure A Poem Makes” compares a poem that has managed to achieve immediacy to a pressed flower that retains its scent. (176) There is a lyric genre of poem which is able to stay fresh in that way through the novelty and accuracy of its imagery. But I believe the poems I talk about in this essay reward multiple readings as reliably as the included Frost poem does. By dwelling earnestly and unhurriedly in emotional and philosophical suspense, they can trick even a reader who already knows the ending into wondering what will happen. These poems apply the mindfulness a painter brings to visual observation to whatever question they have on their minds. Some of the poems here readily admit their ambivalence; some unsuccessfully try to hide it. Zagajewski doesn’t doubt himself as much as stand in awe of the strange paradox that is the simultaneous resilience and demolition of Lvov. (“To Go To Lvov”)

Awe is not so far from doubt; both states are tuned in to the limits of complete knowledge. The humility of not knowing joins all of these poems, whether they admit it or not; even Frost’s, which avoids a fully conclusive statement about the emotional range of a phoebe. In so doing they avoid sentimentality, which Kevin Prufer has defined as lack of complexity. (77) By leaving room for sentiment, while introducing tension against it, the poems are able to be ultimately more emotionally affecting than poems with unshakeable, monochromatically passionate, belief.

The first poem I’ll discuss, Gregory Corso’s “Marriage” provides the only example in this essay of a speaker for whom ambivalence is a pleasure. (Modern 9

American Poetry) The performance in the poem is of a character trying to make up his mind, but the series of alternating pros and cons in “Marriage” functions more as a filibuster delaying any decision than as an activity with an end goal of clarity. Corso’s speaker would rather feel the discomfort of uncertainty, which is future-looking, than the pang of regret, which looks back. As long as he puts off decision-making, he has not failed. He has nothing to mourn. There is always the chance he will someday make the right decision.

Meanwhile, in putting off deciding about marriage, he is actually choosing to be until further notice unmarried (paving the way for the sixty-and-lonely future he is supposedly scared of.) But the poem seems to exist in denial of time and consequence— at least inside the magic circle of its duration. The real ambivalence in Corso’s poem is not about whether to marry, but whether to commit to anything—marriage or non- marriage—and in so doing be in any way limited, losing either eccentricity’s freedom or domesticity’s comfort.

“No! I should not get married and I should never get married! / But—imagine if I were to marry”—that’s just one double-take in a series of many by Corso’s frantic, charming, and mercurial speaker. The word “imagination” is crucial; Corso’s imagination is, to put it colloquially, his frenemy. On one hand it allows him to picture a few different

“happy” heterosexual endings: suburban peace with a nurturing wife in staid Connecticut;

Gatsby-like cool detached life with a glamorous woman; protection from being the odd one out, unkempt and lonely. Each of these tidy futures offers—threatens—a ticket to stability: 10

How nice it'd be to come home to her and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen aproned young and lovely wanting my baby and so happy about me she burns the roast beef [….] imagine if I were to marry a beautiful sophisticated woman tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves holding a cigarette holder in one hand and highball in the other and we lived high up a penthouse with a huge window from which we could see all of New York and even farther on clearer days

This stability seems to be thanks to each abstract wife, who is appealing less for her unique 3D inspiring of intimacy than for the lifestyle (contained, safe, respectable, and/or escapist) she would be able to sustain. (Even in the coziest scene above, they are in separate rooms.) There is even the specter of a woman in the –fear- of being 60 and “pee- stained” (what if I'm 60 years old and not married, / all alone in furnished room with pee stains on my underwear / and everybody else is married! All in the universe married but me!) Corso’s speaker seems to imagine a wife would do the laundry—the implication being less about laundry per se than about being attended to, being mothered.

In any case, Corso can barely inhabit these tableaus for five lines of the poem without either worrying he will wreck them—or hoping he will. That underlying psychological uncertainty—whether he’s afraid to fail, or defiantly hoping to—adds depth to Corso’s commitment-phobic character. He’s not just ambivalent about

WHETHER to marry; he’s ambivalent about WHY he’s ambivalent about marrying.

Of course in humans (as in dogs?) fear and aggression are tightly linked; in this speaker they merge into something like one feeling. I might not be good at marriage— because I don’t want to be good at marriage. I don’t want to be good at marriage— because I might not be good at marriage. His anxieties are typically masculine. Sexual: 11

some obscene honeymoon going on-- then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates! All streaming into cozy hotels All going to do the same thing tonight The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen The lobby zombies they knowing what The whistling elevator man he knowing The winking bellboy knowing Everybody knowing! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything! Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye! Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon! running rampant into those almost climatic suites yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel! O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy a saint of divorce— and claustrophobic: When she introduces me to her parents back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie, should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa and not ask Where's the bathroom? How else to feel other than I am, often thinking Flash Gordon soap-- O how terrible it must be for a young man seated before a family and the family thinking We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou! and financial: After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living? Should I tell them? Would they like me then? Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter but we're gaining a son-- And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?

Corso’s “mad genius” persona rescues him both from those anxieties AND from the boredom of their potential cessation. It exempts him from standard judgment. At the same time it ruins his chances of daydreaming for very long about security.

God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married! So much to do! like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books 12

Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky! And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him When are you going to stop people killing whales! And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust—

In the following stanza, a fear about providing as a father contains a poignant metaphor for Corso’s mind:

I doubt I'd be that kind of father not rural not snow no quiet window but hot smelly New York City seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls

His mind can never be Connecticut; it will not be still. It will be New York City: populated, diseased, inflamed, pungent. His inner landscape predicts his outer one. It’s both chosen and hardwired. He’s proud of it, you get the sense, especially in the one stanza where he describes his style of courtship:

Should I get married? Should I be Good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood? Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries and she going just so far and I understanding why not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel! Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky—

The ideal woman for this person is one for whom eccentricity doesn’t deflect intimacy.

This girl seems to consent to going to cemeteries; she consents to being kissed (it seems) after hearing about werewolf bathtubs (lucky Corso); she consents to lean and be wooed under the stars by a man in a velvet suit and Faustus hood. There’s no way to know if 13 she’s tolerating or enjoying him, but in the speaker’s characterization of the moment, reciprocal enjoyment seems present. As Corso says, “it’s not that I am incapable of love / it's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes.”

With the right person he might not have to wear shoes, but it’s hard for him to believe in this person: “were a woman possible as I am possible / then marriage would be possible.” What does “possible” mean? “As I am possible”—it seems to mean “as I am spontaneous, restless, convention-defying, containing multitudes.” Then marriage would be possible. But he can only imagine (misogyny? immaturity?) such a woman “already married” or 2,000 years in the future. If it were possible for him to imagine a possible woman—then this poem would not exist, an artifact of such human rebellions and frustrations.

In contrast to the speaker of “Marriage,” the speaker of the next poem, “Keaton” by Elizabeth Bishop has already chosen the kind of life he desires to live; the life he thinks is both personally and morally right. (Poem of the Week) For Keaton the two are one and the same. He does not seek out Corso’s escapist cloud of vascillation. He would prefer to be left alone by the intrusive and out of touch “they” who suggest that he be more flexible/emotional/spontaneous. It makes sense that Corso’s id-driven, creative speaker would find relief in uncertainty while Bishop’s superego-driven, traditionally masculine speaker would see doubt as the enemy of his dharma. It’s also natural that

Keaton, who’s already committed to a way of life, would be less receptive to the idea of alternatives. 14

The fact that compromise seems to so alarm the Keaton character is intriguing.

Why not some middle ground? Why not be just a little more sentimental? The discomfort this speaker shows with the idea of even slightly softening could be seen as an anxious need to feel that he has mastery over his knowledge of himself. There is no part of him by which his conscious self might be surprised (he seems to hope.) Where Corso wants to feel his someday-wife is “possible as I am possible”, Keaton imagines “a serious paradise where everything works.” Still, there must be a part of him that doubts his choices, or he wouldn’t need to keep reaffirming the life he’s made.

In Elizabeth Bishop’s late poem in the voice of Buster Keaton a conflict plays out between the silent film actor’s stoic and absolute temperament and a nagging “they” who would encourage the actor to be more flexible, to surrender to feeling. The Keaton character, on one hand, seems committed to being true to his Sherlock Holmes-like personality. Inherent to that personality is an unchanging-ness, so to try out what “they” suggest—to go with the flow—would not be a simple experiment. The act of experimenting with deviation would be already deviation; a capitulation to “people”.

Therefore Keaton will maintain his “rigid spine”.

There, it’s decided; so where is the conflict? Is it simply that “people” won’t stop exhorting Keaton to be otherwise? Or is it that Keaton the character (or Bishop the writer) really does know him/herself to be complex and to contain contradictions? Does

Keaton long to “find all this absurdity people talk about” and is that the source of poignancy in the poem—that he cannot—or does he (and/or Bishop) seek urgently to tamp down the possibility of that worldview seeping in? 15

First, the shape of “Keaton”: the poem gets its intensity from its alternating patterning of concentration and disruption. There are so many obstacles to being “good”,

“correct”, solving problems, “serious”. One has a small jaw, small brain; one’s machinery breaks; “they” harass one to “bend”. In Keaton’s world even the “emergencies” are

“appointed”; one’s temperament is “made”. Paradise would be— rather than an abundance of possibility and indulgence— a relief from the task of repairing. Even the lovers would have a break from having to find one another. They would “hold hands”.

It’s implied that paradise would be a kind of Noah’s Ark in that way: everyone satisfactorily paired off, no loose ends to apply one’s small brain to. “People” think

Keaton’s “rigid spine” must be exhausting, and he admits it is “painful”, but the seemingly gentle alternative, “[going] with the skid”, wouldn’t relieve someone like this

(or so he seems to believe)—you only run into the new trouble then of “colors [dropping] out” when you lose your smile in the “leeward” chaos. No, relief will only come from the world cooperating and keeping itself in order, not from oneself relenting to dance with it.

Well, if this character already knows who he is and what kind of life he is committed to, what is the point of the monologue/poem? Is it simply to explain and give voice to a less-represented segment of society—perhaps so “they” will leave him alone and stop trying to change him? Maybe. But there is such a strong undercurrent of temptation to deviate in this poem—it only increases with every gritted-teeth “I will”.

The implication is not that Keaton is somehow denying his “real” expressive/flowy self (that possible self seems to have been definitively misplaced with the “lovely smile”), but that there is a labor, an exertion, even to being oneself, living in 16 line with one’s values. The temporary rest from labor that straying from those values would offer is no match for the benefit of self-respect won through continual proving of autonomy and discipline.

A slightly different reading might be that for Keaton (and Bishop) a self that is not made and asserted through exertion and conflict is not delineated enough; to “go with the skid” would feel too much like losing the self’s borders. Even in paradise where presumably one can relax a bit, Keaton would not wish to lose himself to “absurdity”.

Okay, he “does not find” it. It’s a tricky question whether to conflate or keep separate desire and ability. Is this a person who—at least sometimes— desires (in order to be less out of step with “them”) to surrender to whimsy and feeling but is truly not wired to experience those modes? In which case the poem is his defense of his difference? If the

“lovely smile” were not there, I might say so. But those “many colors” sound so beautiful. Even the word “many”, that plenitude, suggests that there was a time when this person was capable of a range of affect, not just joy, but a range of joys, the kind of range that accompanies expressive fluency. Keaton is a silent film actor, after all; his job asks him to be contained. He is committed to being excellent at his film-dharma. In that sense the “I wills” do read like wedding vows, with film as the partner; the vows of a person who pruned certain aspects of himself in order to be more thoroughly productive at his art—in order to stay focused. Not just for the moment; “for the ages”.

I love that idea of “[setting one’s] jaw for the ages” as if the jaw was a compass.

Bishop paints Keaton as a captain whose ship runs on restraint and stubbornness, and that captain sounds a great deal like Bishop. Okay, so this artist who’s “made at right angles 17 to the world”, who has a “rigid spine” is rigid about his commitment to his work, and his wariness of entropy—but he wants us to know this does not mean he is a robot. He “will love”, after all. He “will serve”. “They” are starting to sound a tad ungrateful.

The only part of the poem where Bishop herself distracts me from the persona of

Keaton is the line “I know what it is to be a man”. It’s easy to say in 2015 that this poem shows the effort and/or artifice required to maintain a stable, normative, masculine gender identity; that it shows traditional masculinity requires willpower to perform, and that the performance of it is a response to pressure from society. (Overcome the setback of the small jaw!) But this poem’s only “society” consists of people encouraging Keaton to be less strong-and-silent. That “know[ing] what it is to be a man” feels less like a reluctant toeing-the-line by a man longing to be more expressive than a satisfying core trust in one’s instincts about the person he wants to be.

And that’s where I hear Bishop; her specter as the female poet ventriloquizing

Keaton seems near, sharing that gut-level preference for embodying a masculine version of excellence. I don’t know why I have often read the line as sad or wistful. Perhaps it’s the wistfulness of a person “made at right angles to the world” who is too “rigid” to imagine (or try) a life in which she or he balances strict personal standards with contingency and romance.

There is pathos in the absoluteness of the choice. “I know what it is to be an artist”, the line could read, with art meaning for Bishop a particular kind of ascetic gymnastics. That is the art that satisfies her—as reader and writer. You have to assume 18 that the gratification of creating the kind of work she believes most has value offsets the ache of lives not lived or selves not explored.

Bishop seems not to have felt that ache as much as her aesthetic opposite, Sylvia

Plath, who wrote: “I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want… I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited." (Plath, “Quotable Quote”) Perhaps Bishop did share, however, Czeslaw Milosz’s contention that “the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person”. (“Ars Poetica”) The Keaton character must work to maintain the reliable and unchanging persona his art requires; he must continually repair that persona’s machinery. Rather than challenge this effort, Bishop appears to revere it, as if dedication to form—in art, in life— is a kind of public service, a kind of heroism.

The next poem I want to look at, Frost’s “The Need of Being Versed in Country

Things”, is tricky to compare smoothly to “Keaton” because Frost’s speaker perseverates introspectively while Bishop’s speaker is reserved and externally focused. (Bartleby) But the poems do share an important quality. Both poems make the case for romanticism as a life-enriching if intellectually erroneous way of seeing. Reading “Keaton” it’s hard not to feel sorry for the Keaton figure, sorry that he can’t “find all this absurdity” people talk about. He almost sounds sorry for himself. Similarly, in the Frost poem, there’s a magnetic reluctance at the end as he turns away from the self-soothing idea that a farm’s birds might grieve its absent humans. Both poems’ speakers choose—Bishop’s stoically, 19

Frost’s wistfully—to be realists, but not, the poems’ tones imply, without feeling some loss or ache in that choosing.

In the poem “The Need of Being Versed In Country Things”, Robert Frost manages to communicate both a sympathetic awareness of the human temptation to believe nature is moved by our presence and absence, and a clear-eyed certainty that nature is not moved. Who’s tempted by the former perception? Is the reader tempted? Is

Mr. Frost? Who knows; he avoids first person, and this choice allows him an ambiguous assigning of blame (which is not really blame, since the poem suggests the error is human, and in some way, touching.) Rather than employ a sort of Amazing Grace conversion-narrative format (“I thought x, now I think y”), Frost places the reader in a landscape and tells us what it does to him. Or does to us—the authoritative tone with its formal objectivity would have the reader submit to this speaker’s conviction this is how things are; it’s not personal. We would see it the same way. Because Frost’s literal (“the chimney was all…that stood”) and figurative (“like a pistil”) descriptions in stanzas 1-3 are absent of explicit human sentiment and behavior they allow Frost to perform a kind of

“sneak attack” of pathetic fallacy priming (before immediately negating it.)

The literal images tell the journalistic facts of what is there—satisfying the logic- minded—while the figurative images sway, perhaps, or resonate with, the sentimentalist.

How do those figurative images work? Frost’s metaphors are a kind of poet math.

The house had gone to bring again To the midnight sky a sunset glow. Now the chimney was all of the house that stood, Like a pistil after the petals go. 20

In Frost’s “math”, the chimney is equivalent to a pistil, the house equivalent to a flower.

On one hand, this first stanza is imagistically unsentimental; there’s a rightness to the disappearance of petals, a natural cycle, and so why not see the house’s disintegration in the same light? On the other hand, the choice of “go” lends the line poignant affect, assigning agency to the petals. As soon as petals have the capacity to actively “leave” the pistil, the pistil seems more forlorn, and by pistil Frost means chimney. The chimney then seems almost to miss the house. “Petals” almost seem like (maybe thanks to Pound)

“people”. So that verb “go” is really important; again, it allows Frost to be reasonable in his overall description, but to insert sentimentality (affective/intentional objects, in this case) in a subtle way. Really, this isn’t the first occasion of intentionality—the house had gone “to bring”, as if choosing to make way for the sunset. I like the echo of “gone to seed” in “gone to bring”, especially with the flower simile. The passivity in the colloquial phrase made active by Frost’s swapping in of “bring”. The house can’t bring the sunset anymore than Aurora can bring the dawn, but it’s a nice poet way of illustrating what’s made possible by the roof’s absence. If one were feeling –extremely- sentimental one could conflate people with the house and read in some sort of “gone to glory” in that sunset (but Frost would never want us to do that.)

The barn opposed across the way, That would have joined the house in flame Had it been the will of the wind, was left To bear forsaken the place’s name.

The barn across the way is a survivor of sorts, presented like a companion who wasn’t chosen to burn/”die” yet. (Again, Frost gives the wind intentionality.) How does the barn respond? We might read “bear” as loyalty, although it’s no such thing—“the place’s 21 name” is just a sign some human gave the barn. Frost populates that barn with the friendly ghosts of teams of oxen that no longer “drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs /

And brush the mow with the summer load.” The combination of “drum” and “scurry” is a playful and somehow childlike one, reminiscent of the rhythm of children’s footsteps.

Not very ox-like. Frost is getting away with this sustained sentimentality (which he will soon upend) because it’s embedded in his turns of phrase rather than emoted.

“The birds that came to it through the air / At broken windows flew out and in”; I love this image because this weaving between two modes or realms is exactly what Frost is doing. “Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh / From too much dwelling on what has been.” Here is the first overt comparison to human behavior. The birds sound like us; they sound like humans when humans are being overly pensive.

But Frost stays with simile, a less conviction-filled choice than metaphor. “More like”. “Too much”—simultaneous with the idea that birds feel like we do is a mild shaking-off of nostalgia, like a desire to become practical again, to get some air. This backing-off from sentimentality begins the movement toward Frost’s reminder that, though we want the birds to grieve with us, for us, they do not grieve. “For them there was really nothing sad.” This is an interesting line because it can be read both as “nothing sad” ever for birds, and “nothing sad” in our (human) disappearance—a nonchalance on the birds’ part that makes me, at least, feel a little indignant!

The same speaker who has just lent the landscape affect in stanza by stanza asserts, with the same certainty, that the birds are not grieving. This is not a poem in which the speaker is ever uncertain. The speaker is not unsure. The speaker knows 22 throughout the poem both what is real—nature is minding its own business—and what is human—humans attempt to find ourselves mirrored emotionally.

I find the poem generous because of that—Frost didn’t skip to the punch line and write a poem haranguing romantics for their misreading. He patiently re-enacted the

“error” of looking for solidarity in the non-human world, and I think this re-enacting despite knowing the ending implies that he himself re-enacts the same. One can be both wise, versed in country things and still wish to believe a sweeter reality. The pronoun

“one” matters; “one would have to be versed”—Frost doesn’t say “I’m versed”. He seems to stand in between—aware intellectually of the rightness of “country things”, but open enough to be stirred by the poignancy of the divide between humans and wilderness.

I chose to include the next poem, “To Go To Lvov” by Adam Zagajewski, despite the fact that this poem is an outlier from the others I’m discussing. (Poetry Foundation)

Its speaker is not trying to make a decision about what kind of person to be—sentimental about country life, or not; flexible, or not; married, or not. Yet the trajectory of thought in

“To Go To Lvov” does embody what Fitzgerald called “the test of a first-rate intelligence”, i.e.: “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

In this poem, the implicit contradiction is: a) Lviv, as the Ukrainian city is called now, geographically exists and can be visited, and b) Lwów, the pre-war city of

Zagajewski’s Polish-Jewish infancy, cannot be found—though these two places are the same parcel of land. The poem’s major explicit contradiction is this: a) “somebody cut

[Lvov] with scissors”; “now there isn’t any”; and b) “it exists”; “[Lvov] is everywhere”. 23

Or put another way: Question at start of poem: “Which station for Lvov?” (implication in the context of the poem: there’s no station). Answer, near-end of poem: “Just pack” (as if to say ‘the act of packing for Lvov is the station.’) The only way to reach Lvov is by surrendering the quest for it, at which point Lvov draws near—not the mapped place, which is at once too out of date and too newfangled, but the sense experience of it, idiosyncratic, timeless, and intimate.

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” Joan Didion (133)

An unusual thing about the beginning of “To Go To Lvov” is that the logistical- sounding question “which station for Lvov?” is answered with flimsy conditional particulars rather than definite spatial ones1. “If not in a dream”; “When dew gleams” (not where); “When express trains and bullet trains are being born”; “[when] in haste.”

Another unusual thing is that the noun “dream” would typically be followed by “in which”, not “when”. Dreams are usually situated in language by the kind of prepositions we use for units of story, not units of time. Zagajewski’s atypical choice of preposition goes a long way to set up the double-realm of this poem; the concreteness of “when” turns “in a dream” more to simile, shorthand for it feels dreamlike in the morning when one departs for Lvov. Alternately, “when” can signify how vivid and true the “dream” of

Lvov feels— that time when I went to Lvov.

1 A note: As a non-Polish speaker, I acknowledge that my heavily grammar-based analysis of the English translation of “Lvov” rests on the risky assumption/hope that translator Renata Gorczynski was faithful to the syntax of Zagajewski’s Polish and/or that the evocations/connotations of Polish tenses are equivalent to English ones. 24

Zagajewski engineers things so we don’t have to choose yet if it’s a dreamlike dawn or a dawn-like dream. “But only if Lvov exists”: this seems reasonable. Maybe don’t depart for a nonexistent place. Maybe that would be dangerous, or at least inefficient. “If it is to be found within the frontiers, and not just in my new passport.”

Another reversal. One might assume that a relocated or exiled citizen would prioritize the proof and access to his original city marked by official documents like a passport, not dismiss that passport as less definitive than “the frontiers.” After all, fellow ex-patriot (of a different country) Eavan Boland’s poem about the famine roads, “That The Science of

Cartography Is Limited”, takes as its concern the absence of said roads on Ireland’s map.

(Smith Poetry Center)

But where Boland’s speaker is surprised, Zagajewski’s speaker, downplaying his new passport and leaning heavily—bitterly— on the new, would likely not be surprised.

Of course the famine roads, half-completed, dug by starving people, “[would] not be there.” (Boland) The state would never commemorate state violence on the people’s terms any more than it would mark the spot of Zagajewski’s “grass snakes like soft signs in the Russian language” or “snails [conversing] about eternity.” I love the infinitive after those grass snakes: “grass snakes like soft signs / in the Russian language disappear / into thickets. To pack and set off, to leave / without a trace, at noon, to vanish…”

Even though Zagajewski is just following the anaphora pattern he set up in the poem’s first line, here it sounds like the grass snakes themselves are packing up and setting off. It’s a slippage helped along by the symmetry of “disappear” and “vanish”. 25

And perhaps the grass snakes are leaving—if the grass snakes can be seen to stand more ominously for other harmless residents of Lvov disappeared by the Holocaust.

World War II as backdrop for this poem cannot be ignored, nor can Zagajewski’s personal history though his biography is not equivalent to his speaker’s narrative.

Zagajewski was born in Lvov but his family relocated to western Poland soon after.

According to Arthur Lubow, writing for Threepenny Review:

“Zagajewski’s family joined a migration of Poles that departed Lvov and moved westward to Silesia, settling in Gliwice […], which had been emptied of its German population. In industrial Gliwice, situated in coal-mining country, the older generation made no attempt to adapt to their new ‘post-German’ surroundings. They dressed as they had in Lvov, and saluted each other with the professional titles they had enjoyed there. ‘They simply did not want to accept the fact that they had ended up in a difficult, strange, ugly city,’ Zagajewski wrote in the title essay of his book Two Cities. ‘They considered themselves still in Lvov. Mr. Attorney, Mrs. Wife-of-Doctor So-and-So. They were incapable of moving to Gliwice. Indifferent, whether they had lost their memories or not, they pretended that nothing had changed.’ (“The Last of His Kind”)

The reader can see instances of that kind of resistance to, or denial of change, in this poem. “The cathedral rises” in present tense “you remember”. Such an odd line: you remember this thing that exists now. Not “the cathedral rose.” The insistence of that present tense seems a way of standing behind the legitimacy of cultural and personal memory. It’s practically a proposed metaphysics: emphatic memory brings landmarks forward in real time.

That accomplished, the poem slips into the past tense more expected of a memory. How does it go there? By aggregating present-tense, or tense-less, abundance: raspberries, gardens, weeds, Queen Anne cherries… but interrupting that list’s parallel structure with “my desire which wasn’t born yet.” (Desire must be born of lack and this 26 list is the opposite of lack.) Desire’s past tense situates Sunday’s luxurious scene in past tense too: “Sunday and white napkins and a bucket / full of raspberries standing on the floor, and / my desire which wasn’t born yet” which is fascinating because that scene is an associative simile for the present-tense cathedral!

“The cathedral rises, / you remember, so straight, as straight / as Sunday and white napkins [etc.]” A past-tense simile for a present-tense cathedral. The trick of this passage is that the accrued sensory pleasures seem to stand apart from tense altogether and so from time. Put another way: the raspberries which preceded Zagajewski’s speaker’s desire also outlive that desire in the version of Lvov told by this poem. Which feels rather defiant.

This attribute of outliving/sustaining matters because it’s an example of what survival means on this poem’s terms. “We were never meant to survive,” Audre Lorde once wrote, but a Jewish poet in World War II could have written the same line. For this speaker, sense-memory polished to an ever-retrievable shiny immediacy prevails as the true proof of a besieged place’s (people’s) resilience and accessibility, not its three- dimensional, renamed ruins.

The poem could have stayed in the private realm of wistfulness for personal or familial touchstones. But the stakes rise in the section beginning “There was always too much of Lvov.” Here Lvov turns from an individual Eden to a character in its own right, volatile, irrepressible, effusive. Premonitions of both the war and its culturally bleak aftermath darken lines like “the audience… was in a frenzy and didn’t want to leave the house”, or “inside the houses a bit of anger and great expectation”, or “smoked through 27 every chimney.” At this point Lvov-the-character seems metonym for Lvov’s people in their era of full-range expression. “Too much” reads like a term of endearment more than a problem; maybe even a point of pride. If there’s tension in this freewheeling period it can be found in “no one’s” ability to “comprehend [Lvov’s] boroughs” –not so much its literal neighborhoods as the pending troubles waiting around the bend of history.

Or not; maybe inscrutability is celebrated there as ultimate freedom. If so, Lvov’s evasion of the speaker’s grasp –the same evasion that stirs up longing in him—is its secret weapon for survival. Mystic Lvov, essential, core Lvov, eludes the grasp of both the powerless and powerful. Meanwhile, Lvov-the-3D does not elude. It would be too romantic—violent, even, disrespectful—to say Lvov escaped fascism’s intrusion. The poem does not say that. Instead, “chilly gardeners”… “without mercy”… “without love”… “cut it” with “scissors”. Soon, “trees fell soundlessly” (how eerie that lack of a witness is). “I won’t see you any more,” the poem says. “So much death awaits […] every […] Jew” in the city.

The poem makes it clear that Lvov in its physical form did not escape. But Lvov- the-idea? “As in a child’s cutout / along the dotted line of a roe deer or a swan”: that’s how war criminals used their “pruning shears” to change its borders. But their imagination is deficient. A cutout of a swan is not a swan. Lvov the idea “exists [each day]”. “It is everywhere”— despite the fact, because of the fact that— there is no station.

The last poem I’ll discuss is “A Bluff” by Rachel Wetzsteon (77), a poem that is in some ways an ontological cousin of “To Go To Lvov”. Both poems find solace in the unassailability of the imaginary realm in contrast to the vulnerability of cities and 28 relationships to violence, betrayal, and disillusionment. Wallace Stevens would surely join them on Team Imagination. So would Tomas Transtromer, whose poem “Allegro” describes a man under siege sitting down to play Haydn. Transtromer writes: “the music is a house of glass standing on a slope2; / rocks are flying, rocks are rolling. / The rocks roll straight through the house / but every pane of glass is still whole.” (12)

But where Zagajewski is certain in the end that Lvov is everywhere, Wetzsteon only performs certitude. Sure, the formal rigors of her poem work to bolster the sound of decisiveness; end rhyme provides authoritative-sounding closure at the musical level. But she is not certain. In a way, Wetzsteon’s speaker shares with Corso’s an attraction to being endlessly pre-committal, basking in the anesthetic glow of possibility. However,

Corso’s speaker is alone in his enthusiastic preference for that state. Both Zagajewski and

Wetzsteon describe a life in which imagination becomes a refuge after tragedy—tragedy enacted by other people. Corso’s speaker in limbo keeps himself from letting anyone change his life course in any way (which is a luxury, in a limited way.) Zagajewski would still prefer his childhood city to an imagined one. Wetzsteon would still prefer her “soul.”

Robert Hass in “Faint Music” writes “the friend / leaning toward you, saying

“And then I realized—,” / [is] the part of stories one never quite believes.” (Poetry

Foundation) Rachel Wetzsteon’s “A Bluff” (77) avoids claiming the kind of fixed epiphany Hass can’t believe, wavering instead in its self-consoling monologue while trying to stay the course. Her thought process, rather than its result, constitutes the action of the poem. She is only “almost grateful” for the cards she holds. Like the Bishop poem

2 a slope is not so different from a bluff… 29

“Keaton”, this poem is less an example of reveling in ambivalence (a la Corso) than an example of trying to stave it off. The result of Wetzsteon’s palpable second-guessing in this love-lost poem that’s trying to be tough is an insistent poignancy. A poem sure of being a victim or certain of resilience would leave less of an emotional impact.

Wetzsteon’s speaker makes it clear, instead, that the poem’s smart, triumphantly defiant seeming ending does not assuage the pain described in the poem’s opening two stanzas.

To begin with those stanzas: First of all, we have to talk about the setting. As is quickly immediate from the title, the poem is set up spatially and rhetorically on a bluff.

Bluff, noun: “a high steep bank”3. Bluff, verb: “to try to trick someone into believing something.”4 The bluff (v.) performed by this poem is the speaker’s contention that she’s superior to, looking down on/at “the city below” in which domesticity has undoubtedly cooled passion for the imagined occupants of the outer boroughs. The danger of being on the bluff (n.) is that this is a speaker who has already nearly died as the result of romantic despair (“no / […] was a verdict that nearly bled / the hope from my veins.”) A high steep bank might not be a safe place for her to be. But this speaker wants us to know that safety isn’t everything.

Wetzsteon characterizes committed love as a “thoroughly boring” tableau of lo-fi desire, deadeningly mundane household disrepair, and unromantic over-sharing. At least on the precipice she’s not “landlocked.” “Here on the bluff / the city’s radiant with surprises”; “all seems possible.” The line “they get what they want and they never want it again” is meant foremost narratively as raw acknowledgement by the speaker that, having

3 Free Dictionary 4 Cambridge Dictionary!! 30 been acquired as a love object, she is no longer salient to her love interest. But the message doubles in the poem as consolation, if “they never want it again” is applied more aphoristically/universally to mean all love stories, including the speaker’s story’s hypothetical alternate ending.

If she had gotten what she wanted, perhaps she wouldn’t want it anymore. She may be bereft, “[cry] all the time”, but she is not bereft of desire. She doesn’t have to exchange the magic of wanting’s “fierce questions” for the disillusionment of having’s

“jeering answers”, however otherwise disillusioning rejection may be. “Too much of a good thing” is “never enough”; might ruin the good thing. There may be an enoughness

(she tries to convince herself) to the what-if state, a sort of intactness that is superior to the burst bubble of a carried-out daydream.

As Mark Halliday has previously observed in his Pleiades essay “Art Against

Loneliness”, there’s an echo of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sharp charm and musical intelligence in Wetzsteon’s work:

“In some ways Wetzsteon is the urbane, witty, vulnerable daughter of Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poet now underrated (though less interesting than Wetzsteon, I'd say). There are sentences and stanzas in Sakura Park that you could believe to be Millay's, and Wetzsteon must have recognized a mood of her own in Millay's famous lines: ‘Life in itself / Is nothing, / An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. / It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, / April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.’” (Poems.com)

Reading this poem, though, the inexactness of that echo makes me sad. Where Millay in the poem “Afternoon On A Hill” looks “at cliffs and clouds” before eventually “when the lights begin to show / up from the town” ascertaining “which must be [hers]” and

“[starting] down”, Wetzsteon never starts down. “The blinking / outer borough’s houses 31 warn me,” she writes, “[…] that passion stops.” She prefers “this lookout / where all seems possible” to “the bureau top’s / skyline”. She’s smart enough to know her dismissal of cozy coupling is likely too sweeping, smart enough to feel that part of her wants what’s “down below”. This is why the poem calls itself out as “a bluff.” Still, to blatantly acknowledge that the reality which can’t be hers might be indeed sweet would seemingly destroy her. Rejection “got [her] thinking”; her talent for formal, double- edged, and beautiful thinking kept her, it seems, for as long as possible—and keeps this poem—alive.

The poems discussed in this essay share in common a speaker’s grappling with diametrically opposed ideas (ways of living, ways of seeing.) Though the speakers make divergent choices, in every case the poem is able to sincerely and substantively engage both sides of a dichotomy, before settling on a conclusive course of action or perception.

This openness to paradox and/or counter-argument heightens the poems' poignancy, immediacy, and intellectual liveliness, creating the sense that the poet is thinking in real time and as surprised by the outcome as the reader.

32

Works Cited

Bishop, Elizabeth. “Keaton”. The Poem Of The Week. August 2012. Web. 4 Mar 2015.

“Bluff (noun).” Free Dictionary. Web. 4 Mar 2015.

“Bluff’ (verb).” Cambridge Dictionary. Web. 4 Mar 2015.

Boland, Eavan. “That the Science of Cartography is Limited.” Smith Poetry Center.

Smith College. Web. 4 Mar 2015.

Corso, Gregory. “Marriage.” Modern American Poetry. University of Illinois-Urbana

Champaign. Web. 4 Mar 2015.

Didion, Joan. “In The Islands.” The White Album. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,

2009. 133. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “The Test of a First Rate Intelligence.” SaidWhat. Web. 4 March

2015.

Frost, Robert. “The Figure A Poem Makes.” Best American Essays of the Century. Ed.

Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 176. Print.

Frost, Robert. “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” Bartleby. Web. 4 Mar

2015.

Halliday, Mark. “Art Against Loneliness.” Poems.com. Web. 4 Mar 2015.

Hass, Robert. “Faint Music.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 4 Mar 2015.

Lorde, Audre. “A Litany for Survival.” The Black Unicorn. New York: Norton, 1995.

Print.

Lubow, Arthur. “The Last of His Kind.” Threepenny Review. Spring 2010. Web. 4 Mar

2015. 33

Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “Afternoon On A Hill.” Poets.org. Web. 4 Mar 2015.

Milosz, Czeslaw. “Ars Poetica?” Poetry Foundation. Web. 4 Mar 2015.

Plath, Sylvia. “Quotable Quote.” Goodreads.com. Web. 4 Mar 2015.

Prufer, Kevin. “Sentimentality, the Enemy?” Pleiades. 32.1 (2012): 77-80.

Print.

Transtromer, Tomas. “Allegro.” Half-Finished Heaven. Trans. Robert Bly.

Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2001. 12. Print.

Wetzsteon, Rachel. “A Bluff.” Sakura Park. New York: Persea, 2006. 77. Print.

Zagajewski, Adam. “To Go To Lvov.” Poetry Foundation. Web. 4 Mar 2015.

34

EARTH SCIENCE: POEMS

“We would give anything for what we have.”

Tony Hoagland 35

I.

"She then saw in his mouth the whole eternal universe, and heaven, and the regions of the sky, and the orb of the earth with its mountains, islands, and oceans; she saw the wind, and lightning, and the moon and stars, and the zodiac; and water and fire and air and space itself; she saw the vacillating senses, the mind, the elements, and the three strands of matter.

She saw within the body of her son, in his gaping mouth, the whole universe in all its variety, with all the forms of life and time and nature and action and hopes, and her own village, and herself."

Bhagavata Purana

36

Towels

Why were there never enough towels in the guesthouse run by Benedictine nuns in Italy? Because the nuns wanted to save water. Why did the nuns want to save water? Because they were poor and also wanted to save soap and electricity consumed by tourists blow-drying their hair and spilling self-tanner on the bedspread. We were the tourists. Why were we blow-drying our hair? To look hot. Why were they poor? Because they took a vow of poverty. Why did they take a vow of poverty? Why are people poor? Why did Jesus say “The poor you will always have with you”? They took a vow to live in solidarity with poor people who there will always be as long as you and I take vows of wealth. What’s wealth? It’s like a wish to always have enough towels, not just enough, hundreds more towels than we need. How many towels do we need? Enough to soak up all the water on the blue tiles from the glass shower with the bent door, so it doesn’t drip down to the nuns’ quarters where they have lived so long not touching men, or being touched by men, or being seen by anyone except tourists, to whom they feed fresh bread and strong coffee, for whom they mop the floor, and pray, tourists who track in little microbes from the street, little scraps of song. Little sunlit gap the grocer passes baskets through in the morning, then a receipt, then rings his bicycle’s thin bell and pedals quickly back into his life, so separate from the life of nuns, he thinks, poor nuns. Poor us, I think, thinking God’s something to go find or to deny.

37

Prayer

All through September, that one loud cricket kept me up— perched, it seemed, just behind my pillow, on the back porch, chirping like a smoke detector out of reach, out of batteries. Now he's gone, the window closed, and, a few good night's sleeps later, the pipes have started up their steamy midnight conversations, the room filling with heat the way it's meant to, the walls thundering and clanking the way they, too, should be. Waking me, though, at two a.m., again at five, with their foreign consonants. It will be like this for months? It will be like this: the sleeplessness of want, of have. No monk beating my shoulders with a stick, shouting, Wake up! Wake up! Only these startled mornings— angling the light, checking the time. And then kicking off the answer, falling again toward the question.

38

Assembly

Cambridge, MA, July 2012

While the bombers were playing basketball or smoking weed and powering up a level on Xbox, I was falling a little out of my tube top down the street from them at Christina’s Ice Cream, dropping my sunglasses, trying free spoonfuls: rose, cucumber, chocolate, green tea.

Last summer, I still hoped a certain man might change his mind. I swam. I watched The Bachelorette. The loudest noise was my neighbor once a week at the fire hydrant setting a blue bin full of rinsed-out bottles down. Next door, all three triple-decker porches glowed at 6 PM from solar lanterns. The bombers were not bombers yet, just brothers, both younger than me, wrestling. I had some things on my mind, like which sandwich to buy— while I waited, a very old waitress put up her feet.

She was wearing compression stockings. Last summer, the younger brother decided to grow out his hair because girls liked it. The right lung of one of my friends showed a dark spot, another friend called me in tears about a pregnancy she didn’t want, I cried when a third friend called, finally pregnant. I was happy for her. I traipsed in flip-flops for some peach muffins, some iced coffee. Men asked did I need help carrying groceries? Men argued, loud, outside the mechanic’s, about Red Sox trades. We were all very alive— all of us and the brothers. Who cares? the bombers began to say, I guess, and then believe.

39

Plan For The Apocalypse

Whatever you’re buried with, that’s what you’ll have to comfort you in the afterlife, if there is one. If there’s no afterlife, you won’t need comforting. It’s not the dead who need comfort— the dead don’t need, either, batteries for their flashlights, or carbon water filters, or granola bars. But it might make the living feel better.

So it might be okay to plan for the apocalypse as if it was a medium sized hurricane, and, out of habit, throw a party that would make Louisiana proud, heavy on bourbon and zydeco.

The party could double as a jazz funeral. But who would be there to play trombone? What if, once word spreads, everyone including you is out making their last errand the thing they were too scared to do before, creating a wish fulfillment traffic jam, while the apocalypse ticks down? Stuck in traffic, you’ll be glad for the granola bar.

But when the traffic eases, the sad fact is no one will be there to rent skydiving equipment to you, or play your secret karaoke song, or arrest you for protesting, or kiss you illicitly-yet-in-a-triumph-of-the-human-spirit-kind-of-way. Because they too will be out at dusk with a scrap of paper on which is written a faint and outdated hopeful address. So you’ll be stuck talking to strangers similarly pacing the street, looking at street numbers, talking about your mutual chagrin at what is turning out to be a failed errand. And you’ll feel that a more ideal apocalypse is still out there.

40

Bon Bon

That donkey— there's so much I don't know about my life.

Like: I've called him a "baby" in stories, but was he full grown and just miniature? I've said that he chased us— it's true—that part is accurate— along a gravel road in Burgundy.

We passed the driveway where he grazed, or begged, or head-butted his colleagues, or waited for his owner to come home, whatever, my friend wanted advice on his one-act which would put forth his views about Israel and Palestine.

The donkey charged at us—it sounds silly, I know— as if to gore us like a bull then let us be, then yards later, or meters, feet, kilometers— a quarter mile, that I feel sure of, he sprinted toward our backs, stopping again when we both turned around and then he ran back to his yard. This happened several times. "Oh that's Bon Bon" our host laughed later, and we laughed. He was a serious donkey doing his job, guarding the house, or he was a young donkey trying to play, I remember he seemed like he might kick us in the head, but he didn't. It was a strange town, come to think of it. Certain mornings, the indistinguishable cows would low out of nowhere— or so I felt on solo walks, taking pictures of cornflowers— and all rise to their feet. 41

Bruno Mars

My student Amy says Bruno Mars the singer seems sincere about wanting his ex to be happy. He loves her so much, he hopes her new man buys her flowers. Crystal, ten years older than Amy, offers: He feels regret. Patrick says he’s talking to himself, telling himself not to fuck up next time. To buy the next woman flowers. Delia says not all women want flowers. Haley agrees, causing a ricochet in that chair row of quick high fives and we’ve-got-it-figured out smiles. Evan says he’s trying to win her back. He hasn’t learned anything. It’s a ruse. He doesn’t want her to be happy. He wants her to be happy with him. Delia says God, to hear this song five times a day on the radio— Haley says We do. Delia says I mean as the girlfriend. She’ll never come back, Crystal says. He’s learning, Patrick says. Amy says, again, he seems sincere. 42

Nike

An elegy for my student Raychand, 17, shot in a fight

He says: “Poet, I spy a water tower abandoned by clouds

I squint a cigarette you think I can’t see from this hill on G street bricks like 5x close up slides of skin I spy empty half gallons tied to trees crevice silt no rain do I feel like a crevice? I feel like an eye for a bright sneaker an eye easily winning your game I feel wind finally rustling the t shirt at my back here in sweat city and I see color do you? I see my color and its color somehow even with no eyes behind my head no hands no bike no mother who can carry everything I win” 43

Salt Peanuts

My dad in the neonatal ICU as a med student was kind of responsible, at least for five minutes, for keeping all of those babies alive, but he tried not to think about it. He adjusted miniature IVs. He recorded vital signs on charts and signed as illegibly as possible, to seem official. The babies didn't know how frail they were. They thought they were normal puppies. They thought he was their dog mother. But the machines were how they ate and breathed. The machines in charge of keeping track of heart function sounded like dripping tap water, or, at times, the silver resonance of a tuning fork. The sounds crossed. There was almost a steady rhythm. There was almost a tune-- "Salt Peanuts" by Dizzy Gillespie, my dad thought, but none of the nurses had heard of it. They heard heart monitors. They had clean sheets to fold. So he had to wait thirty years to tell me and my brother, in the car on the way to dinner, as if he heard our healthy hearts and lungs pumping, and thought of it, as if we were old enough now. 44

The Auditions

The auditions disappointed me personally. All of the women could breathe fire. All of the men could disappear. Sharp knives available to juggle were too safe; china plates to be balanced on palms of dancers on ponies' spines turned out to be unbreakable. After the applicants had gone and I'd poured my bourbon, tiger cubs—two— raced orangely toward me, knocking me over with greetings. From the circus floor I cursed in a warm tone. Stupid Peace,

I growled. Stupid Tenderness.

45

July Linden

At first I thought it was a grape arbor or a guest’s jasmine shampoo. I would walk around barefoot after a glass of wine on the sidewalk, holding up a leaf and sniffing— not this, not that, it was not my house, I was only feeding a couple’s fish and sleeping lightly on the woman’s side. The man’s end table held spectacles and vitamins, hers a goofy stuffed monster, Portuguese books on tape, and I never fully closed the blinds at night, the better to see old starry neighborhoods I’d missed. The better to eavesdrop on a swaying couple in the parking lot— shadowy heart to heart, I will never….sweatshirt to sweatshirt, Don’t say that…one friend leaning against a car reading his phone. You have to get your life together… Neighbors yelling It’s 3 am!

That city tree coming in like a tide, like a piece of music or embroidery, then sailing off, I still didn’t know it was a tree. It started to unlock me, I started to leave the porch door open while I slept through firecrackers almost but not quite blowing off teens’ hands, and someone could have climbed the balcony and stabbed me for whatever reason people stab women sometimes, but they had better things to do, like watch TV. Feeling a need to check the door, halfway through the night, I finally didn’t trip over my shoes in the hall because I could see, the moon was full, and the fish that had been sick got better and started eating more, even built the foam nest male bettas make when they’re happy. So I bragged about that, feeling responsible. And the owner replied, from Brazil, Cute, 46 but it’s sad, too, isn’t it. He thinks he lives in an ocean. He thinks he’s changing his life. 47

Sorry For Me

My heart went out to the bee. You think this is sentimental— I don't care what you think. The bee obliviously sipped clover. There's a decline of bees, and nothing can stop it, so I felt sorry for the bee, glad to see it, alarmed by the nonexistence between its wings. Its nonchalance and appetite or whatever. Instinct stitched on like a shirt tag. This bee belongs to X. This bee is contracted to destiny. Glad to see it, and I mean that, because a world with bees is semi-familiar. But I'm the same person shaking the bee-like thing out of my hair on the highway minutes later who did not care if it survived. Just don't sting me. What would you do, or Jesus do? I like the part where Jesus gets angry at a tree. "Tree, give me shade. God damn you," Jesus said, and that tree died. Not that its death brought anyone more shade except the tree which finally rested though it lacked faculties for sensing that. Why was I sorry for the bee? Because it didn't know its kind are vanishing and with them beauty of the honeyed kind. Sorry for us about flowers. Sorry for me the bee did not apologize for leaving me to pollinate the whole backyard from memory.

48

Shrimp Boats

When my grandmother sang about shrimp boats, I thought she was singing about how they were far away, how we wished we were up close and could see them. I didn’t know that she was singing about time. It took North-Carolina-percent humidity, vague green tendrils, back road gravel white as white noise, three lamps glowing in strangers’ living rooms, the sun still up at 8 pm, chalk streaks of clouds, brooding magnolias, a tarp over the pool behind a stranger’s fence thirty years later for me to understand. How familiar this evening has always been, under my life, close as the horse behind the fence. How soft the air against my face in that spare bed, facing the beach at night, my grandmother singing while hanging bathing suits to dry, lights blinking far away on decks of the same boats inside her song, lights I could see, the ocean dark, the gulls hidden. I thought the minor key was there in honor of the dead turtle we saw that day, my first dead thing, dead on its back, its belly soapy with sea debris, sticky with loam. The ocean washing over it— me with my little pail. I was the baby safe at home, the waves crashing in, somewhere men toiling, or that’s what the song said, the boats much farther than the last sand bar, where I was not allowed, where I would someday go. 49

They Died As They Lived

I order braised greens and pick out the greens

My mom thinks my new tight pants are too tight

I watch a video of an animal saving an animal

Holy Basil tea

You can put the word “holy” in front of anything

Try it

Except the lady with the surgical mask over her face

“More so because of the color”

The color is red

What animal doesn’t matter

Sometimes it’s a dog on a highway median

Sometimes a bear

Which reminds me: “she died as she lived”?

Among the buffalo

Swimming with seals

Or my friend roofing without a harness on

Don’t you just want to embrace him?

50

II.

“It was just plane shadow to train shadow But to me it was skin to skin”

Joni Mitchell 51

There’s Been a Miscommunication About My Past Snake Skins

I didn’t intend them for the town archive. They don’t apply, now, to this me. I intended to slip away and down a riverbank and through a log, or a tire. Some reeds— I left so many skins. Don’t gather them. Don’t come looking. I’m in a field, feeling ready to be a different snake. Snake 17. Don’t host a whole reunion show. Thank you, but buy a snake skin purse, a pair of snake skin shoes. Wear them yourself. Think about how it would feel to be a snake. It would feel like witness protection. It would feel like exiting without having entered a door. When I lie down, I call that “waiting for my next mission”. And then I shake that mission off of me.

52

Watching the Cranes

Watching the cranes pour into Platte River like floating black letters, a note dictated to pink evening sky I miss my grandfather's scrub pines and the clothesline suspended there and I miss the old space between chipped piano keys, the way a stuck key lets you imagine all sounds in its place, so you can say you'd hammer righteously that humid key if it were playable, but instead you are stuck with silence and ecology is stuck with you, naked human on hot summer night, one of us taking a turn being the river, one of us taking a turn being the bird. 53

Wong Kar Wai’s “Fallen Angels”

Is it still dripping? The colander of June cherries you brought into the dark living room and the small empty bowl for cherry stones

Saturday noon, the blinds closed against sharp Harvard light yesterday’s office shirt rumpled, you tapping your cigarette hand too far away while the VCR whirred

On the coffee table, a sympathy card two years old for your dead father (why was it still there?) Your roommates sleeping, every dish dirty, the kitchen trash blocking the door

It never will ease, that summer spit of cherry stones, your sadness smudged on all the furniture, my sadness played by the Chinese girl, your hand bored by my knee

54

Insect

Listening to my neighbor’s record— all techno traffic beats and outer space—it’s like borrowing someone else’s thick skin. Like when I wore your Red Sox coat and followed you into porch smoke, because I thought I saw a light on in our loneliness. 55

Awake Before Him

One of those mornings before the fight that meant we’d never acknowledge each other again, could never take anything back,

I thought, If I were his wife, it would be just like this: same grapefruit soap from Trader Joe’s, mildewed shower lining, same sweet grass smell at the back of his neck, wine on his breath. On the dresser: same wallet, pills, phone, lighter, keys. If I were his wife, at breakfast we’d still rarely meet each other’s gaze, he’d crawl into my arms after some failure and it would become my failure too, to pay the rent, to feel like a hero. I’d still wonder who he dreamed of. Only in bed, still, would anyone smile. Even then it would mean pretending that there was no world, and I wasn’t restless, bright blank noons he asked me to stay, then fell back asleep, all the curtains drawn, heavy. Did I want that?

A.C. spinning its same white noise, its preset cool, calmly canceling out my faint girl heat, motoring down to 68, then dropping off, seeming almost alert to his small snore, like it knew him best. It was here before me. It would be here, too, after. It had seen when, how, why I’d fallen, it knew already where I would fall— soon, forever, in the lineup of almost-wives. The shirt I’d recently borrowed was one my jilted predecessor left. But I didn’t know. I lay watching his giant dim sleep, freckles over his cheekbone. His jeans over a chair, the belt still in them. His soft earlobe. I wanted all that. I didn’t need trees, or a good book on the train, or anyone to warn me.

56

Constellations

Across the room at the party after we weren’t speaking any more: a thread of small lights between my shoulder and his shoulder. Both shoulders kind-of-turned. Lights that were, to be honest, just wine glasses refracting intermittent blinking from a Christmas tree. Glasses in hands of bystanders who were not bystanders in their own account of the evening, taking part, gracious, in real, non-subtext-filled conversations. Bare calves and knees of mini-skirted girls on couches, men standing up straight when asked about the kids, the kids are good, the dog had to be put down, he was a good dog, yes, the wife’s almost done with her MD. I tried to look somehow without looking, without him knowing I cared, my back to him. My heart lurched as far as it could to his side of my chest but it could not fly physically through it. Once at the grocery store, I sensed him behind me, two aisles away, and I knew we were missing each other. Glad to reconvene at the counter. His greeting arm. A little kiss while the receipt printed… This was not that. Whenever one of us arrives somewhere to rest, the other rises, swift, from that place, mathematically. When I turn in sleep and he is not with me, he is still near enough to irritate. We breathe at odds. I hear him dreaming. Constellations, I think— one law keeps us from moving closer. Another says we have to share a hemisphere. We’re not famous, though. We don’t have real names. Try to see us, we’re hidden by clouds.

57

Sunday Afternoon, Spain

I.

I wanted to stay lost in the cool synagogue, Spanish with frescoes arching over me gold and blue lazuli, outside high noon and getting hotter, our bus farther and farther away, somewhere our bodies were mapped to be before we strayed.

II.

Toledo was closed. There were no people except a man selling museum tickets, a few Japanese tourists. There was one drink machine with one Sprite and I drank it, sun-poisoned, and you thought I’d feel better if I threw up. I thought I’d feel better if I lived in the synagogue, where no one was selling leather, toy swords, or armor and no one was taking pictures in front of Toledo’s lookout, oil and water layers of brick streets and fortresses, sparkling painfully, no one was accidentally ordering fried octopus, no one was turning around to find their headsets stolen, the tour bus gone—

The synagogue was a snowdrift I wanted to fall asleep inside, but you kept finding me and making me walk, and looking at the map, and making me walk the other way, and sweating, leading us up that air-conditioned escalator, and down to the train. Though

I loved you, I wanted to return to the synagogue alone, but you brought us both home.

58

Mayday

In the old ritual, you ring the bell and slip away, leaving flowers before a stranger’s strange front door. There’s a delay before the sound. You’ll be tempted to wait until the chime completes itself— don’t wait. Run promptly back to your own door. Don’t walk by later wondering if he’s found it yet, the basket— lilacs, roses, dandelions. Let him think the gift could be from anyone. Let that thought change the way he walks around this town, change how he sees faces, at least for a few weeks— each face could be the face attached to this delivery, could, like a flower, disarm him. Don’t look back. Be a stranger with conviction and integrity. If he sees your face, pretend he’s wrong, you’re from Tanzania, anything, he can’t possibly remember you. Hope he remembers you. Don’t look at him. Pretend he never gave you, somberly, a million years ago, although he took it back, a key. 59

Hotel Winter

The dark is a way of moving. The wait is a place. Zero filled me with its virile nothings. Sweet, I know— zero— the dark’s a weight. The weight’s a place to let your truck run off the road, uphill where other wheels have gone before you. The move’s the way station. The stay’s one night, the dark’s sable, the dark’s a stall for a stallion named zero with a moving mane. There is no wait in vain. 60

Light Sentence

I was ready to dissolve and be the air’s sugar or however it wanted me: agave, Equal, honey, Sweet n’ Low, sweet charity… I was ready to be a store window punched in, sugar glass for a stunt man to stumble and crash through, ready to be punched down, but no baker was free.

Summertime, the cotton high, the fish jumping…. I wished the sun would swallow me. But it declined so I just had to live and eat and work and do errands, wake up and live some more, and my health refused mostly to fail, strangers were stubbornly kind, even when I set fires.

It’s such a small town. I try turning myself in but they still won’t arrest me. Only hold me for a few hours. 61

Patch of Blue

Before we broke like a blue egg knocked off of a rafter

Before a fox got us

Before a hurricane drove that rafter and the whole roof into the stars so we could see the stars crossed, glittering with nails from the rafter like boots you might have worn to achieve a height from which to say

I was the fox—

Before I had no alibi Before I said you were the twisted nail Before there was no egg at all There was a patch of blue

I see it everywhere

T shirts rivers my eyes trawling your eyes for forgiveness 62

Splash Line

This is the juice of a lime, the juice of an hour. I understand most fabric after discarding. I'm a difficult shirt-sleeve.

She likes a metronome; I have a grocery egg, the patterns on this dress, the pleated light. Clouds move but they're all cut from the same grief.

Breathe anything.

63

Porpoises

I’m counting porpoises. My wet bathing suit wilts over the railing of the balcony— teal and white polka dot, shoulder tie fluttering. Taut fishing line runs from every balcony down to the beach, crisscrossing the air, keeping tourists from luring gulls with potato chips. The gulls stay away. The porpoises swim close to shore in early morning, but they stay hidden, mostly specks of black on blue. Sometimes their fins sharply interject. Sometimes they leap in circles. Sometimes we can’t see them at all for whole minutes but our eyes still track the secret route west we’d take if we were porpoises, threading ourselves along the labyrinth. They return— a glistening back shows in the next predicted spot— and it feels like winning. A framed sign in the entryway says Caught in a Rip Tide? Don’t Swim Against It! Swim Sideways. Every day the half-and-half is expired. A teenage orange cat rubs itself on the lifeguard’s long emergency blue float, leaning up on the dune. Clean laundry smells like bleach and cornbread. “Porpoise!” my mom used to exclaim and call my brother on the hotel phone in the next room to look outside. “Porpoise!” I call you now from the deck but the ocean will not deliver. It changes color like a Husky’s eyes. You’re mad that I woke you for nothing. I’m mad at the view. Under the water, a team of porpoises is traveling, and far under the sand, on the other side of the world, a team of sled dogs is waiting, heads tilted, for our slightest instruction.

64

III.

“I look for omens everywhere…

They come to me like strays”

Carl Phillips

“How can you recognize chance unless you're filled with secret love for it?”

Georges Bataille

65

Earth Science

Why does everyone have to say “It’s not real pizza”? What’s realer than my dad, quiet at the Greek restaurant with the Acropolis half hidden by a plant in Bedford, Mass., ordering us both slices, him late from work during the trial separation, so late that it was dark enough, waiting at school, to do my science homework: Find, then draw,

Cassiopeia. Mornings, the worksheet said next draw the sun over the neighbor’s house, for several days, watch it move left as autumn progresses. I would have thought that it stood still.

66

Pastel

I don't know this morning, with its glissandos at rest in sheet music of small children, still-unfamiliar chateaux tucked in the blind spots of its fat hillsides. Spring seems predictable as an anthem. Trees, flowers, bees, timed fireworks; dawn’s parade float of quilted clouds. One barely has to look at it.

Why can I barely look at it. 67

Light, Don't Leave Me Out

1.

Light kettle sending up faint wisps. Light muezzin at his bullhorn. We checked the light nets: nothing. We shivered and waited for the light bus. Light unripe in the tree. Light fermenting like yeast. Light picking its boots up at the cobbler.

2.

Is light a religion or an idea? Is light a fact or a feeling? Does light desire a body? Is light Syrian in Syria?

3.

Not just serviceable. Not just to see by. What then? Green shoots, red bricks, shadows of leaves, optimistic windshields? Capitalism-light? Sun as parade wave mastered by Miss Regionality?

4.

Worms, mushrooms, ferns, fossils with ferns on them. Respite.

5.

Color left out where the halos go.

6.

Plenty of peaches, absence truncated, warmth come nearer, Florence implied by a steeple, batik sky fabric, rose quartz, pink-cheeked circulation, beta carotene glow. Don't we feel bathed and clothed and fed? 68

7.

Don't leave me out of your necklace tossing, light. I'm not in solitary confinement. Don't leave me out of your change lecture.

8.

Photodecomposition on the battlefield. Don't leave me out of your homily.

9.

Only most things dissolve, not everything.

10.

Raptors’ shiny beaks. Insect glint and whir.

69

Omens

She said: “I don’t look for omens

Because none come to me.

Because I can’t find them—

Here come the starlings

In their non-pattern, the church bells

Fighting over two worn tunes.

I don’t drink tea. I read my horoscope

The way my colorblind husband

Once chose his ties.

I hear no rhythm. I love the stutter

Of a motorcycle at a light,

Unmusical,

The paper thrown at my doorstep

That wakes me up.

I get up then.

My knees ache when it snows—

That’s air pressure. I put out apples for the practical raccoons.”

70

Fate Factory

Did the three fates choose their own fates? Why would anyone want to spin, measure and cut eternally? Why are there three? For bathroom breaks? Is there a window looking out over the city from Fate Factory like the one on Beacon Street in my old office job's painted and airy ladies' room? Do the fates, like me, practice stretching their eyesight right there like some magazine told them they should, or some radio doctor, I guess they don't have time to read, noting distant jet streams, white type on water towers, a dozen school children holding a rope, wing-like flickers between buildings? Are the fates paid? Is virtue seriously its own reward? Is my head so over-full of aphorisms from the past, the future's aphorisms stand no chance? Will I always be here, bumper to bumper on manifesto bridge and have to pee? Is that what Dustin meant in 2011, sliding his coaster at the bar closer to me? When he said, after a talk I've forgotten about theology, Can you prove I'm here right now of my free will? Can you prove I'm not? 71

Afterword

But I can’t remember if your father burned the field— what was it now, for the ice skaters? He set it on fire? Teenagers giggling, heads bent, arms around each other’s waists, white skates tossed over their shoulders, their plaid coats, the blades dangling. You were remembering the smoke. Or was it the neighbor’s yard? The neighbor’s fire? What season? I said. Late fall, you answered, and the burnt leaves blew around us in your half-raised hospital bed.

72

High School

Jane’s car orbited my home like a science lesson about Saturn’s rings.

But I was slowed down from leaving. Jane’s Mustang’s red, used to be aqua—

I said to the floor, pink azalea May, I don’t know why I’m living.

Jane said we’re here to figure it out. She said Dead you’re just in space floating around. I floated around the phone. She said I’m coming to get you.

Galaxies affixed themselves to the family roof. My dad said Don’t you dare go down those stairs. His voice climbed, fell, landed with the fertilizer and the potting soil.

Forever I stayed up thinking about hanging up the phone, listening to scrapes of skateboards on sidewalks, watching for headlights, waiting so long that summer came. 73

October Recovery

Coming down from the train of sickness, stepping onto the platform in this thin city, clear air. No one to greet me. Cold blue sky.

Waking, as if into a pressed shirt. That scent, steamwater and sweat. Folded papers in my hand.

I’m in my own bed. Landmarks: a steeple, cut off by my windowsill.

The neighbor’s dog typing away on the wood floor.

Cracker crumbs in my sheets. Michael, I thought of you piling cairns of white stones, between sadnesses, your body by now a kind of pillar, a station. In fever dreams, I could feel the candles you’re lighting for them in South Boston. I wanted to tell you, the dead will find the fruit you leave.

74

Chances Are, Lafayette, Indiana

You may have visited this strip club advertised by one high heel, a line of automatic cursive on the back page of the college news. I can’t remember if the dancer’s stockings show their seams. We don’t see beyond her ankle in the square white box. What she is and isn’t wearing, how long she can stand, balancing there. Maybe she’s busy filling in the rest of that sentence: Chances are, you won’t go home with me. Chances are, I’ll get into business school. And what business would she start? Don’t say risky. You know she’s smart, bored, trying to quit smoking. It isn’t sad if we imagine that she’s young— as young as chance, and as distractable. Chance is an amateur.

Chance hangs out on the back roads. I had my chance, people say, like they’ve lost an umbrella. Chance was just here, but we keep getting caught in the rain. Chances are won by some guy in your old neighborhood at a Dominican store with a Red Sox photo, a flag in the same frame. Chance is opening a restaurant near you.

75

At The Mechanic

I'm glad there's a place I can get my spaceship repaired in this city, so I can leave this city soon one garden plot of gratitude, bad books, a rolling chair, some broken shelves.

I swear at times on my spaceship. I wish, on my spaceship, I dined better. I wish I was better at returning phone calls between lift-offs. I wish I knew why they're paying me to travel to the moon when there are qualified astronauts more scientifically inclined, while I simply describe the moon over my radio in layman's terms. "It looks like the moon," I always say, and try to remember what comes next: "roger" or "copy". "Thank you very much," the moonwalk wrangler always says back, one part concern, two parts relief, each time, as if I've confirmed something he suspected.

76

The Marines’ Priest

“I was new. What took getting used to was they’d ask my permission.

Permission to use first person? I’d say, Granted. They’d say, I need your help.

You see, they’re not supposed to go by ‘I’. Always This recruit. This recruit seeks such-and-such. South Carolina— Many did prison time before they came, or drugs.

They stop that pretty quick. Funny, there’s someone shouting in their face all day You’re nothing, but it makes them feel, you know, they are something, surviving it. That there’s some place inside of them. Inside us— look, no matter what we lose, we have to make the loss a holy place. Time heals? Not really. No.

The eulogy I gave today? A mother’s healthy three month old. A mystery. What could I say?

Time won’t heal that.” He stops because the waitress brings his fried fish plate. He’s old.

He bows his head. Permission 77 to use first person? I imagine him saying.

78

Skeleton Evenings

Just a few layers between my skeleton and this lottery ticket, these shopping bags, these pears, this snow, these strangers shoveling. I do not slip. I cross when the cars stop. I watch the light go pink and sentimental between bus routes, lost gloves, change, I grind my teeth. My skeleton is unknown now to archaeologists but has a weight and age they could test for, I am not

Egyptian or a bog girl from long ago, I was not buried with jewelry, or with someone, I carry home discount roses, I take the stairs, I curse the dark landing, I turn the key.

79

Our Bird

Red as the 9 of hearts, Our bird perused local grasses. "Ours" out of love's Colonial logic. House Finch. I thought he'd have a cooler name-- A name to get across the rarity-- But nothing's rarer than a home. "I gave my love a rare ring", Anon brags But in a later, wiser mood, She gives that same love a chicken.

80

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (PUBLICATIONS LIST)

Pleiades, “Shrimp Boats” Medical Journal of Australia, “Salt Peanuts” Gettysburg Review/ the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2009, “Chances Are, Lafayette, Indiana” Sixth Finch, “Watching the Cranes”; “Assembly”; “Nike” H_NGM_N, “Splash Line” Passages North, “October Recovery” FIELD, “Prayer” The Congeries, “Bruno Mars” LEVELER, “The Auditions”

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