Stay, Illusion
Lucie Brock-Broido
Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2013
This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright ©2013 by Lucie Brock-Broido
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com/poetry
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96204-1
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-96202-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brock-Broido, Lucie.
[Poems. Selections]
Stay, Illusion : Poems / By Lucie Brock-Broido.—First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-96202-7 (Hardcover)
I. Title.
PS3552.R6145A6 2013
811’.54—dc23 2013023978
Jacket image: The Wilton Diptych (reverse, detail). Anonymous, 14th c. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson
First Edition
v3.1
For My Sisters
Annie, Julie, and Melissa
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
I
INFINITE RICHES IN THE SMALLEST ROOM
A MEADOW
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
YOU HAVE HARNESSED YOURSELF RIDICULOUSLY TO THIS WORLD
CURRYING THE FALLOW-COLORED HORSE
MEDITATION ON THE SOURCES OF THE CATASTROPHIC IMAGINATION
HEAT
DOVE, INTERRUPTED
DEAR SHADOWS,
SELECTED POEM
LUCID INTERVAL
OF TOOKIE WILLIAMS
FOR A CLOUDED LEOPARD IN ANOTHER LIFE
PAX ARCANA
CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE
FATHER, IN DRAWER
II
EXTREME WISTERIA
POSTHUMOUS SEDUCTION
NOTES FROM THE TREPIDARIUM
MISFITS
IN OWL WEATHER
HUMANE FARMING
EIGHT TAKES OF TRAKL AS HIMSELF
JUST-SO STORY
SLEEKER, CURRIER
MENTAL MUSEUM
SILENTIUM
A GIRL’S WILL
THE STORY OF FRAULEIN X
GREAT RECKONING IN A LITTLE ROOM
UNCOLLECTED POEM
GOULDIAN KIT
III
OF RICKEY RAY RECTOR
SALT LICK IN SNOW
MOON RIVER
OBSERVATIONS FROM THE GLASGOW COMA SCALE
RUBY GARNETT’S ORNAMENT, CIRCA 1892
THREE MEMORIES OF HEAVEN
RED THREAD
DEATH XXL
LITTLE INDUSTRY OF GHOSTS
SCARINISH, MINGINISH, GRIMINISH
THE MATADOR
DOVE, ABIDING
A GIRL AGO
TWO GIRLS AGO
GAUDY INFINITESIMAL
HELLO BABIES, WELCOME TO EARTH
IV
BIRD, SINGING
THE PIANIST
ON HAVING CONTRACTED THE HABIT OF BELIEVING IN THE INTERIOR WORLD
CONSIDERING THE POSSIBLE MUSIC OF YOUR HAIR
FAME RABIES
LUCID INTERVAL
THE ILLUMINATED KUNITZ
WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE
MEDIEVAL WARM TIME
CAVE PAINTING OF A DUN HORSE
MANDLESTAM
NON-FICTION POEM
CARPE DEMON
FOR A SNOW LEOPARD IN OCTOBER
A CAGE GOES IN SEARCH OF A BIRD
Notes
Acknowledgements
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
I
INFINITE RICHES IN THE SMALLEST ROOM
Silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.
If it is written down, you can’t rescind it.
Spoon and pottage bowl. You are starving. Come closer now.
What if I were gone and the wind still reeks of hyacinth, what then.
Who will I be: a gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple-size gray circle
On the tunic of a Jew, preventing more bad biological accidents
From breeding-in. I have not bred—
In. Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not
Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin.
The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness.
Blue-footed mushrooms line the walkway to my door. I would as soon
Die as serve them in a salad to the man I love. We lie down
In the shape of a gondola. Venice is gorgeous cold. 3 December,
Unspeakable anxiety about locked-in syndrome, about a fourth world.
I cannot presume to say. The violin spider, she
Has six good eyes, arranged in threes.
The rims of wounds have wounds as well.
Sphinx, small print, you are inscrutable.
On the roads, blue thistles, barely
Visible by night, and, by these, you may yet find your way home.
A MEADOW
What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one
Of the several contraptions I can turn on the off-button to at will.
Yes, yes, of course it is an “Art.” Of course I will not be here
Long, not the way the percentages are going now.
He might have been
Half-beautiful in a certain optic nerve
Of light, but legible only at particular
Less snowy distances. I was fixed on
The poplar and the dread. The night was lung-colored
And livid still—he would have my way
With me. In this district of late
Last light, indicated by the hour
Of the beauty of his neck, his face was Arabian in contour
Like a Percheron grazing in his dome of grass.
If there is a god, he is not done
Yet, as if continuing to manhandle the still lives of
The Confederate dead this far north, this time of year, each
Just a ghostly reason now. Of course there are reasons. One:
Soon the wind will blow Pentecostal with the power of group prayer.
Two: the right to bear arms. Three: he did not find my empathy
Supernatural, at the very least!
—Have you any ideas that are new?
I was fixed on the scythe and the harlequin, on the priggish
Butcher as he cut the tenderloin and
When I saw this spectacle, I wanted to live for
A moment for a moment. However inelegant it was,
It was what it might have been to be alive, but tenderly.
One thing. One thing. One thing:
Tell me there is
A meadow, afterward.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
If my own voice falters, tell them hubris was my way of adoring you.
The hollow of the hulk of you, so feverish in life, cut open,
Reveals ten thousand rags of music in your thoracic cavity.
The hands are received bagged and examination reveals no injury.
Winter then, the body is cold to the touch, unplunderable,
Kept in its drawer of old-world harrowing.
Teeth in fair repair. Will you be buried where; nowhere.
Your mouth a globe of gauze and glossolalia.
And opening, most delft of blue,
Your heart was a mess—
A mob of hoofprints where the skittish colts first learned to stand,
Catching on to their agility, a shock of freedom, wild-maned.
The eyes have hazel irides and the conjunctivae are pale,
With hemorrhaging. One lung, smaller, congested with rose smoke.
The other, filled with a swarm of massive sentimentia.
I adore you more. I know
Cannot be taken down. You would like it now, this snow, this hour.
Your visitation here tonight not altogether unexpected.
The night-laborers, immigrants all, assemble here, aching for to speaking,
Longing for to work.
YOU HAVE HARNESSED YOURSELF RIDICULOUSLY TO THIS WORLD
Tell the truth I told me When I couldn’t speak.
Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship Or a child
Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer
In the 1930s Toward the iron lung of polio.
According to the census I am unmarried And unchurched.
The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.
Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful
Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of ice.
I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.
For whom left am I first?
We have come to terms with our Self
Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.
CURRYING THE FALLOW-COLORED HORSE
And to the curious I say, Don’t be naïve.
The soul, like a trinket, is a she.
I lay down in the tweed of one man that first frost night. I did not like the wool of him.
You have one mitochondrial speck of evidence on your cleat.
They can take you down for that.
Did I forget to mention that when you’re dead
You’re dead a long time.
My uncle, dying, told me this when asked, Why stay here for such suffering.
A chimney swift flits through the fumatorium.
I long for one last Blue democracy, which has broke my heart a while.
How many minutes have I left, the lover asked, To still be beautiful?
I took his blond face in my hands and kissed him blondely on his mouth.
MEDITATION ON THE SOURCES OF THE CATASTROPHIC IMAGINATION
Green as alchemy and even more scarce, little can be known
Of the misfortunes of a saint condemned to turn great sorrows
Into greater egrets, ice-bound and irrevocable. The wings were left ajar
At the altar where I’ve knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough
As sugar raw, and sweet. From the outside, peering in, it would seem
My life had been smooth as a Prussian ship gliding on the bridegroom
Of her Baltic waters in a season of no wind. Tinny empire,
Neighborhood of Bokhara silks, were you to go, I would stop—simply
As a pilgrim putting down his cup. Most of my life,
I had consorted with the unspeakable, longing to put my mouth
On it. I was just imagining. I can be
Resumed. Some nights, I paint into the scene two Doves,
I being alternately one and then the other, calling myself by my kind.
In the living will if it says: Hydrate. Please.
Hydration only. Do not resume me then.
HEAT
In Belarus, the fourteen-year-olds one thin flight away
Heard Oswald singing in the shower,
In his cool American. It was 1959. In crush
They sent a note to say how sweet
A songbird he was then.
Dear Girls, he wrote, I want very much to meet you, too.
Four Novembers later not far from West Virginia, we were scooped
Back home from elementary school in rain not-quite-yet snow
To put our heads down in the mink-skin of our mothers’ laps.
Open Carry is the law in Oklahoma now.
I just feel more safe, said Joe Wood, cocked
Among the waffles and the syrups and the diners
At the diner there. On the jukebox, Lefty Frizzell
Is singing “Long Black Veil” inside the flannel rain.
Well back beyond the Iron Curtain, I write to you tonight
From Minsk, where no child will ever cry into my lap, all seal
And cashmere, chintz. I put my eye against the peephole
Drilled so long ago through Oswald’s bedroom wall
And see the leafless world all quietened.
My little gun’s a Lady one. I just want to feel secure
And I’m probably dead on. I want very much
To meet you. I would be, as ever, yours.
DoVE, INTERRUPTED
Don’t do that when you’re dead like this, I said,
Arguably still squabbling about the word inarguably.
I haunt Versailles, poring through the markets of the medieval.
Mostly meat to be sold there. Mutton hangs
Like laundry pinkened on its line.
And gold! —a chalice with a cure for living in it.
We step over the skirt of an Elizabeth.
Red grapes, a delicacy, each peeled for us—each sheath
The vestment of a miniature priest, disrobed.
A sister is an Old World sparrow placed in a satin shoe.
The weakling’s saddle is worn down from just too much sad attitude.
No one wants to face the “opaque reality” of herself.
For the life of me.
I was made American. You must consider this.
Whatever suffering is insufferable is punishable by perishable.
In Vienne, the rabbit Maurice is at home in the family cage.
I ache for him, his boredom and his solitude.
On suffering and animals, inarguably, they do.
I miss your heart, my heart.
DEAR SHADOWS,
If it gets any darker in here no one will ever be able to see again, like cats
With their eyes sewn shut at birth.
I could barely stand to write what I just wrote just now.
On the heavy walnut table—numbles for roasting on a truss of fire,
The loin, a spit, an iron moving in a fit of blood.
Here, sit in the lap of me and purr.
Once in the imagination’s feckless luck, in the excelsior of living wild, I wore a pinafore
Of linsey-woolsey cloth—knowing he was too shy to unbutton it in back.
Miss Stein would never, not in this life, appear unto my vex of work.
What is not ever said you can’t take back.
Goats slaughtered young would have made the softest gloves for him, his hands.
Pronouns are not to be trifled with, possessive ones or otherwise.
(Mine is a gazelle, of course.)
I am of a fine mind to worship the visible world, the woo and pitch and sign of it.
And all that would be buried in the drama of my going on.
SELECTED POEM
Who was I—lying in the cattails and the milkweed’s flue,
In the tiny adjectival prows of leaves of sugar maples and of great
Oak trees; the burrs of newly dying things were in my hair.
A girl in gentle murder in the bowl of being there.
Nothing was rhetorical.
Everything was sepia.
It was a time when my father may have been alive.
In the Gargoyle Store, I buy a gryphon off the rack.
When I go home, I am Solange in Jean Genet’s The Maids.
The production moves through the sooty basements of churches
Full
of persons wrapped in the coppery leather limbs of methadone.
Their arms are scarified and wracked with rain.
I am still almost a virgin, technically.
I have made promises I may not keep, go on with my
Soliloquy and was some kind of beautiful.
LUCID INTERVAL
Tread very gingerly; you’ve used up almost all the words.
Heavy worry about growing small again, but this time accidentally.
Don’t be so fanciful. If you’d add those mustard-family vegetables
To the pot roast It would feed so many more.
Shepherds are still tender in a time of war.
New lovers plagiarize say awkward things and yearn.
My heart’s desire would be only to desire, but not to grasp.
And not by yonder blessed celestial anything I swear.
OF TOOKIE WILLIAMS
A thousand inmates’ spoons for music
While the paper kite flies like a boy-weed caught
In wind from San Quentin to nestle in the next
Prison and the next. Do not do this thing,
The kite said,
But not that gently on the page of it.
No, said
The Governor, Not if Mr. Williams won’t atone.
Underground, a pen of clemency will not irritate
The vellum of the night.
There was a snag, the warden said.
So enormous was Tookie’s arm
The needle couldn’t enter it, eleven minutes poking
There to find the vein,
Thirty-six to put him down.
Tookie was a big man,
The warden said, But it’s only salt that stops
The heart—you know—that simple.
But if I say “simple” for example, I mean
That in the private gardens
Of our aristocracy, the animals are haltered in
Or bled out broad by
Day and when they take them down,
The children are only very gently
Sad, a habit of the class they were born to.
Me, I am not “mean,” I’m told, only
Vengeful, which is a relief to me, of course.
The wind is kicking up now. Lung for lung.
Soon I will be done for.
On his last night here on earth, he took only milk.
FOR A CLOUDED LEOPARD IN ANOTHER LIFE
You were a seed still in Darwin’s left breast pocket,
Not imagined yet, almost invisible in the felt
There just above his heart,
The bluey nubbin sleeping in a child’s
Unmarred arms.
Things vanish in the morning when we wake
Like loam that only grows on buttermilk, at night.
In April, a tiny feline on the ledges of a billow cloud,
Or like the finch let loose in the mossery, you were ended