This month we bring you work by Dylan Carpenter, a poet new to our pages. Dylan also has poetry in an upcoming print issue of The Common.
Let me, for a little longer, ponder that familiar place
I remember but would not, could not, and had refused to face
Wholly as a place unto itself, instead of an idea
That concealed a recherché emotion: My Wallonia.
How do I begin? The place that I endeavor to portray
Languishes, a somnolent geography, and slips away.
When I want to sing of my Wallonia, I cannot sing.
Its appearance in the mind´s glare prophesies its vanishing.
Fruitless as the basis of an order done away with, it
Irreversibly has morphed from present into preterite—
Now the summer wind blowing the grain across the threshing floor . . .
Now the iris bearing vespertine September at its core . . .
Were Wallonia. Depicted faithfully in portraiture,
My Wallonia would be a field effaced by craquelure.
Changes, changes, these interminable changes scar the soil.
Those who do survive such progress are obliged to praise the spoil.
I am made to till a salted plot no measure shall restore.
Everything that happens through this field gets threshed a metaphor.
Where is Purpose? Where, Tradition? Why does only Stasis grow?
Someone! tell me why the Living pick the Dead to be their foe.
When the dried up river in the still life shimmers, when the land
Rises and the rusted iris mends her blemish in my hand—
I shall rest. The rookery is roosting on the pillory.
Nothing changes that should change and nothing stays as it should be.
What I want I want and what I reap I reap. This is the tear
Widening between the Old Way and the world in disrepair.
Does the river in the violet valley flow as it had flowed
Down the opal hills and past the lime trees by the Roman road?
Does the swallow nest, where, once, the chamomile evoked a squall
Cast haphazardly and snowflake-like across the mossy wall?
I can almost see the waterfall unbolting down the crag
And the lordly rooster strutting in his black, red, yellow flag
Wavy in the Walloon wind atop the Chateau’s lofty tower!
Does the bruised bell hung inside the chapel steeple toll the hour?
Now another set of symbols circumscribes the Spiritual
Framework here: The Camera, The Theater, and The Hospital.
Plundered in the zealous dawn, the Chateau crumbles on the plain.
My Wallonia is gone. Only the vestiges remain.
But I haul the washed brick Chateau up before the man-made moat
Mirrored there, seeming like amaranthine memory afloat.
I remember I remember I remember! Now as then
I am doomed for life to play the Babbling Tragedian;
Let my linen sift the wind; adjust the knot of my cravat;
Wander through the anguished orchard rootless as an afterthought;
Stand among the absent apple trees, unsung; and be unmade.
Costumed by my ancestry, I never shall escape that shade.
Brothers! Hypocrites! Extraordinary Public Charlatans!
Swindlers! Inquisitors! Ambitious Jackals! Jacobins!
Fabricators! Paralegals! Growth Financial Analysts!
Adjunct Chicken Sexers! Synethesiatic Flavorists!
Birth Certificators! Coders! Far-flung Telemarketers!
Data Miners! Content Editors! Compliance Officers!
Water Treatment Systems Operators! Martyrologists!
Deontologists! Astrologists! and Sundry Specialists!
All of you! You mediocre Superstorm in cavalcade
Marching through Wallonia, too numerous to ambuscade!
Shut up! Halt your jacquerie at least until my thought has fled.
Exite! Hie thee to thy thieving world´s irradiated bed . . .
I don’t know. I’ve done exactly what I said I wouldn’t do.
I have made an ostentatious pageant of my Waterloo.
I suppose it is appropriate. The imbecilic heart
Of the imbecilic world deserves my imbecilic art.
I forget myself
as I forget the window over the
Evening garden
and the boxwood maze’s penetralia
And the black
reflecting pool abbreviated
by the night
And the swallow hidden in the heather startled
into flight.
All becoming
ushered through the boxwood maze. And if I hid
Feeling—feeling
hid itself from me. And what I did I did
Uninitiated into these
absurdities, as clear
As the bottom of the ornamental
pond used
to appear.
Splendor: Mystery.
Familiarization: Aftermath.
Springtime
when the rain abated and I tread the maze’s path.
Then, the present moment glided past me like the river Our,
Affluent, a tributary of the tributary Sûre,
Tributary after tributary customarily
Emptying into one river emptying into one sea.
I believed the world would flourish in proportion to my red
Wish, as if the leafy ivy bower turned my wilded
Heart into the locus of the labyrinth, like the potted rose.
I forget its thorns, its formal urn, its foolscap folios
Undisturbed by pride or lust, at the beginning, long ago.
Mellow April saw the pathstones papery with cherry snow.
In the starry sky above the Walloon moon rotundly waxed,
Shining dumbly on this place that seemed distinct from what it lacked.
What desire, buried, did I brush against? I could not tell.
It was mine and mine forever. And the spring in parallel
Spread its teardrop, paisley leitmotif, enisling the scene.
As I exited the maze and strolled across the ancient green,
Why did I believe the world occasioned me? Without compare,
Red Boots, Stranger who would alter everything, was standing there.
Transient transcendency transported me, transfixed, to you,
Long ago before the Mad Impingement and the Blue Adieu!
My remembrance burns like chandelier-kept candles tossing down
Pearl reflections on a stately table’s lacquered wood: Your Crown.
Jealous at the sight of the honey dribbling about a jar,
I grew jealous of the ruby inset in your pendant star.
Jealous of the bedside light you touched each night before your slept,
Jealous of the very tiny, dainty box in which you kept
Change, assorted trinkets of such utter insignificance.
Thunder woke me. Cloth appalled me. I misplace my eloquence.
It was this and it was only ever this. Our minuet,
Moments that would later mean too much, would not withstand the threat
Multiplying outward at the stupid root of all of this
Decadence! O Walloon Swallow, fly, fly from that precipice.
You departed. Studying your boots, you mumbled your lament
Saying —What I mean, I cannot say. That isn’t what I meant.
So the war between Nostalgia and Idealism is done
And the very worst among us is ascendant. They have won.
Let us praise the new Wallonia the Many hungered for!
How historical, how glamorous, to live amid L’age d’Or!
I have heard the symptoms play upon world’s corroded lyre,
Pictured my Wallonia and seen the waterfall afire.
I have seen us pitifully surrender, one by one, the Wish,
Frowning at a technocrat who stammers—Hör auf, ich warne dich!
Footless footmen, goatless goatherds, songless sirens, to the last,
Privately remark—Of course I hate all this (they blame the past).
Distances are disemboweled, but if I listen closely I
Still do hear the murmurous, beleaguered chorus whisper —Why?
Why oh why shall we despair while everywhere such legions swell?
Pondering and pondering the secret time shall never tell.
My Wallonia is ceded to the middling flâneur
Who regards this fatal illness as more moral than the cure.
Heedful hands have stripped the music sheet of stave and teary clef.
I forget my song. O Death in Life. No. No. O Life-in-Death
(the days that are no more)
And its ribs are
seen as bars
on the face
of the setting
Sun.
Dylan Carpenter’s poems appear in The Hudson Review, The Iowa Review, Lana Turner, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals. He is a lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park, and lives in Baltimore.
