© 2015 by Richie Hofmann
All rights reserved
Alice James Books are published by Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc.,
an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington.
Alice James Books
114 Prescott Street
Farmington, ME 04938
www.alicejamesbooks.org
eISBN: 978-1-938584-30-5
Cover Art: Fernando Vicente - Serie Atlas - Grito, www.fernandovicente.es
NOTE TO THE READER
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You wait out this tempest in the Windsor chair, away from the windows.
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Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
SEA INTERLUDE: DAWN
I
Idyll
Three Cranes
Egyptian Bowl with Figs
Capriccio
Imperium
Illustration from Parsifal
First Night in Stonington
Fresco
SEA INTERLUDE: PASSACAGLIA
II
Allegory
At the Palais Garnier
Scene from Caravaggio
Mirror
Antique Book
Description
Amor Vincit Omnia
October 29, 2012
Keys to the City
SEA INTERLUDE: STORM
III
Bright Walls
Erotic Archive
The Harbor
Purple
The Ships
Braying
Fly
Second Empire
Night Ferry
SEA INTERLUDE: MOONLIGHT
IV
The Surround
Abendlied
Midwinter
The Gates
Gatekeeper
Egyptian Cotton
After
Imperial City
• Notes
• About the Author
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the editors of the following publications:
32 Poems: “Bright Walls” (as “Untitled”), “Fly”
The Adroit Journal: “Midwinter”
The Common: “The Harbor”
Cosmonauts Avenue: “The Gates”
Denver Quarterly: “Antique Book” (as “Song”)
Devil’s Lake: “Scene from Caravaggio”
FIELD: “Imperium,” “Abendlied”
Gulf Coast: “Description,” “The Surround,” “Gatekeeper”
Harvard Divinity Bulletin: “Capriccio”
Indiana Review: “Sea Interlude: Storm”
Lambda Literary Review: “At the Palais Garnier,” “Egyptian Cotton”
Maggy: “Purple”
The Massachusetts Review: “Amor Vincit Omnia”
The Missouri Review: “Sea Interlude: Dawn,” “Sea Interlude: Passacaglia,”
The New Criterion: “Illustration from Parsifal,” “Mirror”
New England Review: “Night Ferry”
The New Republic: “October 29, 2012”
The New Yorker: “Idyll”
The Paris-American: “Allegory”
Ploughshares: “After”
Poetry: “Fresco,” “Keys to the City,” “Imperial City”
Poetry Northwest: “The Ships”
Shenandoah: “Braying”
The Southern Review: “Egyptian Bowl with Figs”
Southwest Review: “First Night in Stonington”
Tin House Online: “Second Empire”
The Yale Review: “Three Cranes”
“Fresco” was reprinted in T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
“Braying” was reprinted on Poetry Daily.
“Midwinter” was reprinted on Best of the Net 2014.
“After” was reprinted in Best New Poets 2014, edited by Dorianne Laux and Jazzy Danziger.
For generous financial and artistic support, the author thanks the Poetry Foundation, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, the James Merrill House, the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College, West Chester University Poetry Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. For encouragement, thank you to Natasha Trethewey, Mary Jo Salter, Emily Leithauser, Jacques J. Rancourt, Tarfia Faizullah, Lisa Hiton, and especially Kara van de Graaf. Thank you, Ryan Hagerty. Thank you, family.
This book is for Ryan.
SEA INTERLUDE: DAWN
Smoke-green mist leans into the rocks,
where fishermen whistle and mend their nets,
practicing rituals of brotherhood
before the luster of sky and sun,
which flashes against the pale horizon
with the oily turbulence of a swarm
of herring. Above, the familiar gulls
shriek the news of the world.
The ocean gurgles a dead language.
Standing at the water’s edge, I watch myself
loosen into a brief, exquisite blur,
like Antinoüs, nearly naked in the cold,
in the morning gone adrift, turning away from love
toward what he knows, even then, is loss.
IDYLL
Cicadas bury themselves in small mouths
of the tree’s hollow, lie against the bark-tongues like amulets,
though I am praying I might shake off this skin and be raised
from the ground again. I have nothing
to confess. I don’t yet know that I possess
a body built for love. When the wind grazes
its way toward something colder,
you too will be changed. One life abrades
another, rough cloth, expostulation.
When I open my mouth, I am like an insect undressing itself.
THREE CRANES
1.
Wading low through marsh and grass,
quick and cautious, the crane, too,
knows this: there is a freedom
in submitting to another. Cranes mate
for life. With necks outstretched,
they take flight, a double arrow’s stab
of silver, released and then gone.
I have searched for nourishment
in you, like a long, black beak
in the earth. How was I to know
what I would find there? Every night,
we shrieked our presence to each other,
desire or grief lacquering us onto our lives
like birds on a paneled screen.
2.
All winter long, the men built
another bridge, stacking slabs of metal
and concrete near the barrier island
where we lived. I was worried we had fallen
from each other. Silent on the beach,
we watched machines hoisted on and off
the earth. Standing one-legged in the marsh:
a crane, all steel and orange light,
binding the horizon.
What will becom
e of us? I almost said.
Gulls wove in and out of the cables,
shrieking up and down within the stacks,
in unison, I noticed, with our breath.
It almost looked like a living thing.
Lying on my stomach, reading
Crane’s letters again, I felt a hand
behind me. Orange light pressed
the window. The hand that touched
my shoulder was yours (“I know now
there is such a thing as indestructibility”).
Your confessor, I listened for your breath
(“the cables enclosing us and pulling
us upward”), but felt only the ceiling fan,
and traffic, somewhere, chafing against
a wet street. Then, your lips on my neck
(“I think the sea has thrown itself upon me
and been answered”) before I closed the book
and turned my body under yours.
EGYPTIAN BOWL WITH FIGS
In the Egyptian gallery: dried fruit left in a bowl,
as if time and beetles and a dead king
had chewed around them,
picked the fig flesh
from his teeth, wiped clean his gaudy, painted lips,
before his body was brushed with resin, a ball
of linen lodged in his mouth, in his rectum;
before a hairless priest pulled the brain out through the nose
with a hook.
So much history is painted in gold
on a golden door, the rest carried off in the floodplain,
or covered with earth, dropped in ceremonial jars
with the dead king’s brain,
or into bowls of clay
and sycamore, like this one, which held me
for an hour, wondering how long a handful of figs
could nourish a man, myth-like.
But I am young.
My hair is the color of antique coins. No one I’ve loved
has died. How can I know or say what hunger is?
CAPRICCIO
From the leafy, walled-in courtyard beside the house,
where fountain water trickled
from a river-god’s mouth
into the unseasonable heat of that afternoon, we watched
the heavy bees, clumsy in their flight, humming
against the bricks and orange tree blossoms.
Everywhere we walked, you would point out how the Japanese
honeysuckle clung
to the walls and fences.
Each star-shaped flower scattered its breath into fragrance,
which the heavy air held around us,
until, as if no longer able,
a downpour,
all the aroma flushed away in the sky’s own sighing—
IMPERIUM
As if yoked in a wooden beam, our bodies cross into the thrall
of the river,
whose name means red—hooves and sandals
with iron hobnails hammered
into the soles, one after the other
into the muddy water. We move at first like light on brass.
Now like a legion. Now a piece of the river
being crossed.
ILLUSTRATION FROM PARSIFAL
While resting in the dim-lit inner study,
I pulled a book down from the shelf—a dusty
old retelling of the opera, its once scarlet
cover crumbled now, faded to a claret’s
brittle blood-purple. With care, I spread
a page, as one draws back the drapes,
not wanting to be seen. Inside, a youth, golden-
haired, marches undaunted toward his longed-
for future, the margin’s blank. Beyond it, the treasure
he seeks. Walking at his back, two austerer
figures: a woman, who grips one dangling tress
of his tawny pelt as her lowered head rests
against his shoulder, and an old man, his beard
meager on a face pinched by hunger for bread,
who carries on his spindly shoulders the past
and in satchels at his side. He taps
the garland of fine-penciled earth with his tapered
staff, as if to stir the souls of those who predate
this moment—under the red dust, the veil
of aging paper, those people who no longer live.
FIRST NIGHT IN STONINGTON
So rare in this country to pace the streets
of another century, to wander and survey
gray alleys, cobbled by colonists and pilgrims,
and crooked houses later built for fleets
of Portuguese fishermen, whose heirs, today,
received the bishop’s yearly blessing: sailors’ hymns
and holy water. In the town square, someone
has set a cannonball, the balding, black veneer
freckled with rust, on a tapered pillar embellished
with the date of its arrival, a battle won
by port-merchants and innkeepers’ wives. All here:
these long-dead people’s memories, cherished
and chiseled into iron.
In this apartment, too,
another story preserved in the black chair
where no one sits; in boxes stuffed with photographs,
loose buttons, and playing cards; the faded blue
of Japanese prints. A book, open like hands in prayer,
rustles when the window draws a breath.
FRESCO
I have come again to the perfumed city.
Houses with tiered porches, some decorated with shells.
You know from the windows that the houses
are from a different time. I am not
to blame for what changes, though sometimes
I have trouble sleeping.
Between the carriage houses,
there are little gardens separated by gates.
Lately, I have been thinking about the gates.
The one ornamented with the brass lion, I remember
it was warm to the touch
even in what passes here for winter.
But last night, when I closed my eyes,
it was not the lion that I pictured first.
SEA INTERLUDE: PASSACAGLIA
Pulling the rowboat into shallower water,
you wedged an oar into the rocks. I squinted
down at the fish, struggling to see them
like a memory in which only part
of a moment returns, the rest somehow unlit,
blank like a swath of tiles missing
from a Byzantine mosaic—a scar
that will not reflect another century’s light.
Later, when the boat and your body
and the light have found their way,
what will there be for me? Will the scales,
elegant as hammered gold, shine through
the water? Or will I have lost them already,
fallen through my hands, every one?
ALLEGORY
As it was for the ancients, it would be for me: songs written down
in pictures. The one about the trees on fire
when I came upon them, and the grass flattened around me—
that was what I saw.
The trees are like a fresco,
I thought, insofar as they are gold and tell a story.
AT THE PALAIS GARNIER
We always arrived late,
sometimes in masks. You wore a sword
at your side. The heads that watched
our little pageant were busts of the great composers
and not men lined up for the executions.
The style was Second Empire,
but the Empire had already fallen
by the time the façade was finished.
The casts changed seasonally
like our lovers. I remember,
through black-lace fans, Hänsel & Gretel
eating a garish cake in the darkness.
We covered our mouths
when we laughed at the children trapped