The view excavated any hope of escape. “Ha ha!”
the trench, that sunken fence, seemed to say
with its furrows dug deep enough for despair.
All posts tagged: Poetry
Review: Complete Poems
Book by NICOLE KRAUSS
Reviewed by
Elizabeth Bishop, in her tender, funny, and deeply restrained memoir of her relationship with Marianne Moore, begins by explaining the title, “Efforts of Affection”: “In the first edition of Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems of 1951 there is a poem originally called ‘Efforts and Affection.’ In my copy of this book, Marianne crossed out the ‘and’ and wrote ‘of’ above it.” It is a strange revision, either obsessive, the act of a fastidious editor, or, possibly, a cryptic admission of something unspeakable or unspoken. The conjunction offers a more open, if inscrutable, connection while the preposition builds tension, hierarchies, acknowledges the possibility of intimacy, loss, indiscretion (and Daniel Varsky’s desk). In the end, either Moore or Bishop or both have let slip a glimpse of something whose larger existence lies hidden away.
Ferdinandea
One of several names given to a ghost island that appeared in July 1831
When the buried volcano erupted,
sulfuric smoke leapt from the Sicilian sea,
seeped through locked, felt-lined chests,
blackening the silverware.
Jerusalem Light
With burning eyes
she rose before dusk
the mountains beneath her
and all the hills
filling like window panes with liquid suns
Realization
If I forget you Jerusalem, may my right hand wither away. . .
If I do not remember you . . .
—Psalms 137:5-6
To write in Jerusalem
in a garden
with a wind that comes from the mountain
under a canopy of grapevines
Song
By HONOR MOORE
Of sheets and skin and fur of him,
bed of ground and river, of land,
or tongue, of arms, the wanton field,
The Curtain
Waterfalls of curtain like spray –
Pine needles–flame–shimmer.
The curtain has no secrets from the stage:
You are the stage, I am the curtain.
Phaedra
1. LAMENT
Hippolytus! Hippolytus! It stings!
It sears… my cheeks blaze…
How pitiless the hell, Hippolytus,
Concealed in your name!
Fleetings
*
Daily land for the craving landlubber
givest us this day,
art the way. Stars and Mars
inconsolable shine,
sway,
entwine
in the trite.
Salvage cars, salvage cars in the night.
Ignite.
The Massage
By RAFAEL CAMPO
The neon strokes of Chinese characters
exclaimed the ancient city’s endlessness.
Beijing at night: how much we cannot know,
how little we will ever understand.