Elegy for the Builder’s Wife Nick Courtright
Elegy for the Builder’s Wife Nick Courtright blue hour press 2010
Blue Hour Press • 1709 8th St • Tuscaloosa, AL 35401 www.bluehourpress.com • editor@bluehourpress.com © 2010 Nick Courtright. All rights reserved.
Acknowledgments Many, many thanks to the journals who have published poems from this chapbook: American Poetry Journal (“This Is a Clarification”) Denver Quarterly (“Ukraine Love Song”) Flyway (“Aubade / The Explorer’s Faith”) Harpur Palate (“July”) The Iowa Review (“Elegy for the Builder’s Wife,” also featured on Verse Daily) Massachusetts Review (“Peer Into,” nominated for Best New American Poets) Ninth Letter (“Preparing for the Fire”) Pebble Lake Review (“The City”) Salamander (“Intimacy of the Crocodile”) Siren (“The Movement of Beauty”) Third Coast (“The Surveyor”)
Contents
Between Lovers and Poets...............................................................11 Aubade / The Explorer’s Faith.........................................................12 Ukraine Love Song.........................................................................13 A Kind of Destiny...........................................................................14 The Surveyor....................................................................................15 Intimacy of the Crocodile................................................................17 July ..................................................................................................18 Preparing for the Fire......................................................................19 Pirates..............................................................................................20 Peer Into..........................................................................................21 Origami...........................................................................................22 Circumstance...................................................................................23 Elegy for the Builder’s Wife............................................................26 The Passing of Time........................................................................27 A Kind of Fast.................................................................................28 Kiev.................................................................................................29 The Movement of Beauty................................................................30 The City...........................................................................................31 A Kind of Desperation....................................................................32 Condolences....................................................................................33 This Is a Clarification......................................................................34 A Kind of Acceptance.....................................................................35
Between Lovers and Poets For the sake of tomorrow, don’t take it too seriously, says Rumi, pleased with stillness. He says, love should demand so much forgiveness, and should take silence for a pearl. Such silence, he says, is the best sound. In December, worried philosophers circle the sun only to find more suns. The more they count the more they wish they couldn’t.
11
Aubade / The Explorer’s Faith Nothing coming up from the Atlantic except time and knowing that daring to venture out for the first time someone had once done, going out and out not to turn back, even though the nothingness around no more turned into something than it stopped, breathlessly, being water.
I found us there, where I waited
for a sleeping night to fill up with sleep like the earth had with water, one fair green gallon at a time. And if there were a bridge from here to there, or from there to here, at the middle we would part, the vast expanse of ocean on one side matched only by the other side’s vast expanse of ocean.
12
Ukraine Love Song Open mouths opening over flatland earth, why can’t I stop watching what the eyes want? —The tireless shape of a leg rising up as if born of the ground, as if reaching for the ungiving trees: the trees’ woebegone desire trembles and the sky trembles back. Romance is rarely a question of who has said too much, or who has said too little, or whose regrets are sealed in an unbreakable jar. It is a question of east or west, where we can be scandalous, either together or by ourselves.
13
A Kind of Destiny Fugue, Centrifugal, Refugee, Fugitive. All arts aspire to the condition of music, to the oilfire of departure waking glass into sand into glass and into your hand, the slowest song, a wild spin, to be lost and to be losing yourself: Fugue, Centrifugal, Refugee, Fugitive.
•
Next year was a ball of fire. It was either good or evil, and you watch it knock on the door. It stands there, impatient as a boy. In it, you expect unplanned vacations, the city removing itself from the rear window, the year coming on and coming with its satchel of possible happinesses. But there is only this ball of fire, the vacations that haven’t happened yet, the ordinate sameness of them, in a row, like green yew trees.
14
The Surveyor He knew his charts and maps someday would do no good, not even if he looked his own many times over, as well as those of others to try to understand how the waves too will have their salty opinions, and the ground will grow old but will not pass, and every history is drawn for itself in spite of itself… on everyone’s fingers the whiteness of the hours is cast, and broken.
•
Words, he guesses, are designs without dimensions. Design is words without themselves. Too bad he could say. Too bad. But when mothers call for their children and children pretend they are painters, the mouths of flowers, the mouths of violets. They were sold like meals to desperate souls.
• 15
The girls with fog and feet of black dirt, drawing to him, with the blankest stare, and a body like any—grief is a tumbler wearing rocks smooth, and those who leave, leave.
16
Intimacy of the Crocodile When I say we walk to the store to buy the things we need this is a metaphor for that f irst morning glance when eyelids separate and in floods what survived another improbable night. When I say the undrinkable oceans are there for a reason I mean that is why I beg for a safe passage through the haunted cellars of childhood. When I say the reptile is the most natural mother this means be very still, and rest your head on my shoulder.
17
July In her sleep she wades through an orchard. Grass high against her legs. The day is like a cactus. • She needs little for happiness, but the apples are just out of reach. In the dream her face is glass. • Patience can be a grave virtue, to give in. Somnus, to sleep. She feels she’s been here for weeks. • For a month the creek bed has been dry. Unbroken but getting there fast, she walks the tracks. • Morning: the trestle shakes beneath her feet. Her face is the same as glass falling from the sky. • Something small is just out of reach. It’s July. She’s been longing for more. It’s long been July.
18
Preparing for the Fire Even the smallest bits, invisible to the eye, belong To us and we to them. Rain is the same. Leaving this place is hope for a red morning. A moth pounds the window, in love with human light. I walk through the front door, and you say One day you will wake to find yourself finished. I walk through the front door. Look at the time, You say. Look at the time. Your bags and my thousand flaming trees are full. Hills fall over each other, rumpling their outfits. In the ghosts between clothes and skin, so much. So much, and our cold forest warms itself with itself.
19
Pirates If I had doubted the woman whose apples filled baskets and time, I would have none of the afternoon tied up in knots. And if I had doubted the apple, Ohio would have me swallowed by its unbelievable mouth— then I could doubt like only the dead can doubt, with their thin hands still, and unnerving. Summer could spin like a beetle into the dirt, and I could prod the sky with choices. Summer and I could work together on the mortgage of nature. But these thoughts are ridiculous, and I wouldn’t force them. So, strangely, it, this whole world, comes down to bliss. Doubt is an anchor on a man’s chest. Lift it.
20
Peer Into The glass surface of the glass lake, the mirror watching her eye herself in the face. When this instant becomes the next possibility branches into becoming, and there she sees: she is in the groove of time and all she chooses is her own blue perfection. But it is blue. But it is the rail on which the engine of minutes rides, rolling with all of us (all of this! ) latched in worry to its cloud, like a child. When she pretends she is beautiful no more than rocks or breathlessness, and the candle has no air for knowing its light, she reflects too: vanity, love, time, why.
21
Origami You want to fold into fours the paper that is the world’s oldest tree. And run its limbs through the sky like a scythe. You want to shame the east with the sun in its morning pocket, and hats turned down to shield every eye. You want to take a stand. For the tree to live forever upright and strong, for the moon to curl up against its wishes, for the east’s mystery to wear thin as muslin. But there will be losses, the crashing of skin against other skin. When two forests grow into one forest. Desire is a fist in the dark. You’ve never wanted anything different.
22
Circumstance The bellowing of the train in the distance, which you do not hear, • The hummingbird whittling around the lilac, which you do not see, • The greatest love you have experienced, which you do not remember, • This absence is the salt you taste when your dreams stop, and you • Crumble into bed, but do not know you live, and have never been.
23
Elegy for the Builder’s Wife Slow build, houses where thousands live, skeletons of houses without roofs, without walls, houses like strange bones rising along red paths we’ve always walked but will not walk again— these are like sheets that will never feel the skin, the white silences made most desperate amongst so many indistinct voices, when her red throat gently closes up. In her hands the geraniums shake like railroads, the plaster skin of walls becomes unattached and a great wave draws back, making naked the unknown earth beneath the sea, only to close it off again. We are the builders trembling under a bridge, pouring the gray rock as her death calls through the din, and he remembers nothing but what he whims.
26
The Passing of Time Beneath that bridge he could not share the pouring, the light talk of the missed, once glimpsed, sleepless, sorry— he felt smaller yet than a child. Barn swallows lilt and jostle the air around him— he has not come here because he is the one who is to come here. Last year is again further away— bones narrow, the spine narrows, the boy lays his hands across his lap. He has waited so long to see again these fields— then even them, into coal, into oil, into diamonds, glass-cutting diamonds, then alive into skin, again into skin and then earth again— then above, and around, they are all that is left. And he is but a body and its shifting, its shaking reach into the future.
27
A Kind of Fast His heart is hungry, his veins and arteries are hungry. He is not perfectly round stone: on the roof he is jagged, while an old woman preaches thin chords of life found off shore, below the wave which stands alight and firm like a knife. When he is hungry, the chords of his angry memory—expecting nothing— say what’s not been said before: Later, night will undress you as a stranger would undress you, and the bed will hold you as a stranger would not. Stars were eyes, shaking behind the windshield. The horizon was a beam.
28
Kiev The stone is blackened and chosen by crows. The library is empty, the grass is grass And the marble fountains allow Water to water—in the photo, below The sharp points of churches and the sharp points Of men of stone of God, obstructing The image—the top of your turned head. Just your shock of hair.
29
The Movement of Beauty In a building with thin walls, white walls, nothing is Rotten or joyless. In there is your careful body. It is a body beginning at its center and moving outward. It does this until it fills a place its own size. Under your head is a chest. Inside the chest Are gold coins and letters from the war. Perhaps this chest is made of more than bone and flesh. Only some of this is true. For a moment, you are narrow As a chute of steam. Like steam, you disappear. It is all you know to do. You are pieces put together To make pieces. It is natural then that you would be Under a blue sky. See it want to watch you. The blue, Blue sky. It finds you beautiful in a way it cannot describe. It tries using simple and unaffecting language: Graceful, supple, innocent, strange. This does not impress you, a smooth, gentle body, Steamlike and permissive. The sky struggles. Still, you are blessed, by and by.
30
The City Touch faces like the blind touch faces. Say to everyone you’re very beautiful because you know no better. Forget that mothers won’t admit everyone considers the end from time to time. Don’t wonder what it would feel like. And don’t worry: at too-soon passing, most people fail. So look up, before your neck is broken by expectation— skyscraper faces mirror automobiles as they float by, their steel swimming like barracudas just below the water’s surface. Do you see how their scales shimmer, how their teeth are bared?
31
A Kind of Desperation You never saw the tree swallow the street with iron limbs. You never thought places you stood were tell-tale. You never suspected your escape from Babylon would leave the garden hanging once more. But you took home waterfalls, and never thought to suspend your finger like a knot above your lips. • September. Creeks cannot help those who gather quietly in the shadows of rocks. You could have been moss. September. With a paintbrush you never knew truth was the bell above the wooden door—cobblestone, dandelion, seaweed, underwater shouting saw the river shake. Later, balanced so carefully beneath the obvious night, an end.
32
Condolences In a dream you come to me. We are inside a church. I can hear The organ’s pleas, its pipes urging me on, its pipes not letting go. • The falling of the jaw from the skull, bone-white as it must be, The eyes of the skull unsurprisingly ashamed, hollow. • I see us. We become condensation on the pipe; world, world. —Earth will do so much and so little with your bones. • Don’t be so hard on yourself; for the first time the river overflows. By any other name water is only wet, and you are only gone.
33
This Is a Clarification The thing to do now is to forget this place, where the purple sky hangs low, and the church bells sound unlike church bells. His folded hands say something different, a sound that says black day, where the light from the dream of childhood is cast again on the backs of the eyelids. He leans forward into the horizon, like it is a blade. He can picture himself as a palm tree, no, as a shipwreck. All this time, this entire story, he has been swimming at fantastic speed. (And then, when his lungs are most full: day.)
34
A Kind of Acceptance In the oblivion of languages from afar, in four drops of ink lain on a leaf, love is not found except in what is sought. And when you cannot escape, you will lie with the simple rest of rubber. So in the worrisome step of the wasp I must go on. Invisible night, I see the shuttling of flames into embers, and then into the fine fruit of ash, when knowing becomes the childlike vice of unknowing. Maybe then, I’ll want to live the red silence of the west’s endless sunset. You’ll see me, forever, when I cut through the day. You’ll see me there, when I’ll cut very little.
35
Nick Courtright, an Ohio native, lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a music critic and interviewer for the Austinist, and teaches at Southwestern and St. Edward’s Universities. His poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in The Southern Review, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review Online, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among numerous others, while his Levis Prize-finalist manuscript, Likely Fates, is currently seeking a publisher. In his real life, he recently entered fatherhood. This book was designed by Justin Runge for Blue Hour Press, printed digitally, and distributed online. The text is set in Adobe Caslon, a variant based on William Caslon I’s renowned typeface.