By SUSAN KINSOLVING
A war surgeon, he saw all losses: life being
the larger part; limbs the lesser. Legs hanging
from trees; on the field, hands disarmed.
Teeth missing; toes afloat in a bucket of blood.
By SUSAN KINSOLVING
Motto: We Provide Warrior Care
The war was over. The only thing to kill was time.
And memory. Looking in a mirror, a G.I. wondered
why. Whether to laugh or cry, he had to face his
future with a new face, one that would be recomposed
with an acrylic eye, a rubber ear, a grafted nostril,
or a plastic nose. Pretend it’s camouflage, the surgeon
said. And thank the Lieutenant Colonel you’re not dead.
1754
She insisted that a gazebo, grotto, and gate be added
to the Estate. Two obelisks were next. And soon, a sham
castle was built on adjoining land. Then she planned
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.
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.
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.
With burning eyes
she rose before dusk
the mountains beneath her
and all the hills
filling like window panes with liquid suns
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
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,
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.
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