Absence tapping its home and twilight.
No one touching the piano.
Intrinsic
Unmistakable shape upon the eye, the kite is far above me, a black tail
deeply forked. Inside what follows, within the feeling of the river,
the kite might go from flesh to fruit, from frog, from nestling,
to fig, or pawpaw.
Follow a bird aboard its shadow, by the carry of its cry, into the angle
of its kill. Only something that has no history can be defined.
Kee-kle-klee. Deeply forked, the black tail. Sharp shape upon the eye,
and closer still, blue-black with, in growing light, the underworldly
reign of iridescence.
When I shake with purpose, I have no idea. Spring could be
a set of days. Or a strand of being
the wind knows how to play.
This could be immature forever, the rufous bloom of its upper breast
not to fade how things fade in the sea.
Why I shake with purpose, I have no idea.
Why I keep such keys.
Continuous coming through the doors, sounds for the hallway’s
unlit feeling.
Intimations
Museum darkness has its natural history. Back in the planetarium,
I am pretending closer to the exotic classes, the blue stragglers
in much higher temperatures.
The audience extends from there. A silhouette crop,
washed in what looks like television.
I came through my birth a little bit ragged. My feeling comes spacey
or faintly populous. I can’t say souls and know what I’m saying. Still,
Tiffany glass has fumes inside it: every Sunday’s daylight
knows this. Ummm
goes the Venetian piva. I look to the doge enfolding the balcony.
The lutes like halves of pears have stopped.
That was no game of hangman.
Now what will he put in the sky?
A book of all moons. The shadows in Galileo’s head.
The body is always being educated.
Theater is like this. The planetarium is like this.
The whale is not hurt or in any way ruined.
The whale is a great lightness.
Constable of the Sweet Oblong
In the unrehearsed glimpse of the brown bottle is the habit of sun to spot
everything.
You have caught the orange mood
flouting closer earlier.
Where the gardener calls his raised bed
Moon garden —
Where the hyssop’s square stem, the drawn-from
career of cloud, a light whipped over in aspect of wall —
bare barrier
(call name, wait for hand)
In the start of autumn, hips in the roses.
In the door made foreign by a pattern of grain. In the divers forms
of calling attendance.
Work
Nothing to gossip over: white oak shadows, a current
manifolding gold. As was the news
from nowhere: the vegetable dye, the longerwhile
of replication, to weave of the river, Evenlode.
There is no place the mourning cloak lifts up.
There is nowhere the question mark doesn’t light down.
The tent is on fire
with all you have owned: the known
to be useful, the believed to be beautiful.
The oak lobes are.
The river is. The earth will have us.
Repeat and repeat.
Salon/Saloon
Outside the sediment in the broadest sense. Inside we make
in talk and smoke
a fire to drink and gaze inside of.
When you reach for the glass—
wake like the waterbirds make in fall
maple-maple on the water
love like a pond on the heart of my brain
—shall I move in it
unusually tailored, in my only suit dyed to a wood duck’s green?
Can we watch us walk in the drinking mirror
[or bite or fly or make a warning call]
place (no pond) (no grass), the oiled wood booths
(no grass) (no edge)
—can we watch us go for a glass of beer—you in my vest
as I reach for your glass—shank crown arm fluke—the anchor at
the end of glass?
Strokes
the comb gave out a different honey
when the farmer went under
the fallow acre
and they told his bees with a black cloth flag
1849—a camp chicken’s gizzard made gold disclosures
it had been eating gold
somewhere where
sun changed water to water
{gain-}
what survives of a once-common prefix
no longer active in compounds—
{say}
the load of hay approaching
is wished upon
the wish is to be fulfilled
when the bale is broken open
Building Box (Atlantic)
Though the moon is no saw it shows a taste for wood
it ranges through wood as deep as blood, blood
still good for building astonishment.
Sail that goes
behind a crop of coast. How crops and enlargements
get in to the useful. Squirm of sail
on the rough-to-touch. Come back
it goes
come back.
Posthumous
It is late when the rummage gets underway. The air smells more
of earth than decks. Dockhands brag
to pretty bonnets, cormorants spear at wavy profits.
Now for a password
to work at all. For “walnut” to open
a single star.
I’m done with the worst of cursed and cursing.
When the wind stands me up
so I do not fall, I’ll forget which psalm
works against which sin.
Oratorium
Lap the evening water where it blackens. Cat where I cannot see
habit the light in cells. Morning would have a river in its mouth.
Oil of the flower’s every step. Never a word, neither a star—
but blue to the end of remembering.
Summer Reading
Up in the middle of the yard
is a fishing net being mended in good light. So that even
the atheist’s novel was a place to choose to live.
Bound together for motion in sunshine, the pages felt more
than a few lives long. Flowers orange
and joyful-yellow, but stuck in dusts
of human traffic, the jewelweed & touch-me-nots
could release
their contents
at the slightest brush. It is better—it shall be better with me
because I have known you.
Can I hope to say it
in any case? To blossom is thoughtless—
so we barely leave room
for each other to blossom.
Summer: the wild carrot umbel went to seed.
Summer: the wild carrot umbel could recite
the bird nest’s negative space. I am not afraid
of the concave shape. These were our common names—
the names for which
we had something in common.
Notes
I borrow my book title from a line in Wallace Stevens’s poem “Repetitions of a Young Captain.”
“Greeting Osiris” excerpts, used as epigraphs for section markers 1, 2, and 3, come from Normandi Ellis’s translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead: Awakening Osiris © 1988 used with permission of Phanes Press, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC <redwheelweiser.
com>.
SALT MARSH, THICK WITH BEHAVIORS
The Comma landing in and flying out of the sentence “A woman should behave herself naturally” is a species of butterfly and also a punctuation mark that alters, ever so slightly, some lines borrowed from The Philadelphia Story:
George Kittredge:
But a man expects his wife to …
Tracy Lord:
Behave herself. Naturally.
C. K. Dexter Haven:
To behave herself naturally.
[George gives him a look]
C. K. Dexter Haven:
Sorry.
JARDINS SOUS LA PLUIE
After one of the 1967 Ceri Richards paintings by this title.
SWEET HABIT OF THE BLOOD
I borrowed this phrase from George Eliot.
COMING TO THE FESTIVAL OF THE GOD OF BOUNDARIES
Termine, sive lapis sive es defossus in agro
stipes, ab antiquis tu quoque numen habes.
Terminus, whether you are a stone or a stump buried in the field, from ancient days you too have been possessed of numen. (OVID, Fasti, Book 2)
Thanks to Juliana Froggatt and Richard Gridley for help with this translation.
RECESSIVE
This poem is an attempted conversation with the “Janicon” series of artist Paul Feiler.
SUNRISE WITH SEA MONSTERS
After the J. M. W. Turner painting.
THE BAD INFINITY
Written after a geological walking tour of the Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio.
MISCELLANY
Peter Mark Roget kept a classification notebook when he was only eight years old. One of the section headings was “Different Things” (a miscellany). This poem works with synonyms for the word miscellany, and with miscellaneous items from my own notebooks.
A GENERAL DISCRIMINATION OF SYNONYMS
… far less do I venture to thrid [sic] the mazes of the vast labyrinth into which I should be led by any attempt at a general discrimination of synonyms. The difficulties I have had to contend with have already been sufficiently great, without this addition to my labours. (PETER MARK ROGET)
ANTONYMS & INTERMEDIARIES
In many cases, two ideas which are completely opposed to each other, admit of an intermediate or neutral area, equidistant from both; all these being expressible by corresponding definite terms. (PETER MARK ROGET)
FIRST INSPIRATIONS OF THE NITROUS OXIDE
All the language in this pantoum is Roget’s, taken verbatim from two sources: from a report he made to the Pneumatic Institute following his self-administration of the gas and (in smaller portions) from his introduction to his Thesaurus.
SECOND INSPIRATIONS OF THE NITROUS OXIDE
My information about Roget comes from D. L. Emblem’s biography, Peter Mark Roget: The Word and the Man (New York: Thomas E. Crowell, 1970). This poem is for Jane Grogan, who, at age ten, made this sentence in response to grammar homework: The musician has many guitars, but tonight he strummed his green guitar.
DISHEVELED HOLINESS
Borrows from Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and directly quotes T. E. Huxley (aka “Darwin’s Bulldog”). In his book Coleridge’s Metaphors of Being (Princeton University Press, 1979), Edward Kessler used the phrase “disheveled holiness” to describe Coleridge’s sense of divinity.
AGAINST THE THRONE AND MONARCHY OF GOD
Title taken from line 42 of Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book 1, “The Argument”).
ACOUSMATIC
This poem is for Mark and Elizabeth.
THE ORATOR’S MAXIMAL LIKELIHOOD
In statistics, “maximal likelihood” is a method used to fit a mathematical model to data. Estimating maximal likelihood helps to tune the “free parameters” of the model to real-world data.
THE BEAUTY OF WHERE WE HAVE BEEN LIVING
This poem is for my goddaughter, Lucy (May 25, 1994–July 21, 2006). The title is drawn from Robert Duncan’s “Salvages: An Evening Piece”: The tide of our purpose has gone back into itself, into its own counsels. And it is the beauty of where we have been living that is the poetry of the hour.
INTRINSIC
Only something that has no history can be defined is taken from Nietzsche.
WORK
Homage to William Morris, author of the utopian socialist novel News from Nowhere; designer of the Evenlode textile pattern; and all-around good thinker: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
SUMMER READING
The atheist is George Eliot. The novel (from which I quote) is Daniel Deronda.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to the journals that first published these poems, some in slightly different forms and by slightly different titles:
Aufgabe:
Intimations
Strokes
Cerise Press:
Jardins sous la pluie
Sweet Habit of the Blood
Chicago Review:
A Boredom of Spirit
Building Box (Atlantic)
Where Hardly Hearth Exists
Crazyhorse:
Anatomy of Listening
Sunrise with Sea Monsters
Denver Quarterly:
If It Be Not Now
Fourteen Hills:
Arethusa
Morse Gives Up Portraiture
Gray Tape:
Gothic Tropical
Greatcoat:
Eidothea
Oratorium
Recessive
Gulf Coast:
Disheveled Holiness
Harp & Altar:
Film in Place of a Legal Document
Sending Owls to Athens
Thicket Play
jubilat:
Acousmatic
Kenyon Review Online:
The Beauty of Where We Have Been Living
Medieval Physics
Mudlark:
Honey Ants
Is He Decently Put Back Together?
The Orator’s Maximal Likelihood
Ovation
Return of the Native to the Widespread Hour
NEO:
Against the Throne and Monarchy of God
Salt Marsh, Thick with Behaviors
Table of Consanguinity (The Cousin Chart)
Work
New American Writing:
The Bad Infinity
Salon/Saloon
Pool:
Intrinsic
Slope:
Coefficient
Half Seas Over
Makes an Arrangement
Midlander
Miscellany
Posthumous
Sonnet on Fire
Summer Reading
The Tusculum Review:
Arrowsic
Coming to the Festival of the God of Boundaries
Constable of the Sweet Oblong
Diminution of the Clear Thing
“Under the Veil of Wildness” is reprinted in Camille T. Dungy et al., eds., From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems That Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (New York: Persea Books, 2009).
I want to thank my family, friends, students, and teachers. For sending me all the way from China a stamp of “gladness” (“Ru Yi”—or, “the heart’s content”) with complementary bright red ink, I want to give very special thanks to Qun. Thank you for sharing this stamp—and brightening its way—so generously. Thanks also to Chris Flint, whose careful translation of passages from “The Spiritual Canticle” of St. John, though they do not ultimately appear in the book, were not for naught!
NEW CALIFORNIA POETRY
edited by
Robert Hass
Calvin Bedient
Brenda Hillman
Forrest Gander
For, by Carol Snow
Enola Gay, by Mark Levine
Selected Poems, by Fanny Howe
Sleeping with the Dictionary, by Ha
rryette Mullen
Commons, by Myung Mi Kim
The Guns and Flags Project, by Geoffrey G. O’Brien
Gone, by Fanny Howe
Why/Why Not, by Martha Ronk
A Carnage in the Lovetrees, by Richard Greenfield
The Seventy Prepositions, by Carol Snow
Not Even Then, by Brian Blanchfield
Facts for Visitors, by Srikanth Reddy
Weather Eye Open, by Sarah Gridley
Subject, by Laura Mullen
This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, by Juliana Spahr
The Totality for Kids, by Joshua Clover
The Wilds, by Mark Levine
I Love Artists, by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Harm., by Steve Willard
Green and Gray, by Geoffrey G. O’Brien
The Age of Huts (compleat), by Ron Silliman
Selected Poems, 1974–2006: it’s go in horizontal, by Leslie Scalapino
rimertown/an atlas, by Laura Walker
Ours, by Cole Swensen
Virgil and the Mountain Cat: Poems, by David Lau
Sight Map: Poems, by Brian Teare
Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, by Keith Waldrop
R’s Boat, by Lisa Robertson
Green is the Orator, by Sarah Gridley
Writing the Silences, by Richard O. Moore
Designer Claudia Smelser
Text and Display Garamond Premier Pro
Compositor BookMatters, Berkeley
Printer Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group