Drought-Adapted Vine Read online

  Drought-Adapted Vine

  ALSO BY DONALD REVELL

  Tantivy

  Last Verses (translation)

  The Bitter Withy

  The Illuminations (translation)

  The Art of Attention

  A Thief of Strings

  A Season in Hell (translation)

  Pennyweight Windows: New and Selected Poems

  Invisible Green: Selected Prose

  The Self-Dismembered Man (translation)

  My Mojave

  Arcady

  There Are Three

  Alcools (translation)

  Beautiful Shirt

  Erasures

  New Dark Ages

  The Gaza of Winter

  From the Abandoned Cities

  © 2015 by Donald Revell

  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: 978-1-938584-29-9

  Cover art: Bartram, William. Travels, 1793. Plate 27, “Bartram’s Evening Primrose.” Courtesy of the Sterling Morton Library, The Morton Arboretum.

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Alice James Books encourages you to calibrate your e-reader device settings using the line of characters below as a guide, which optimizes the line length and character size:

  Geminiani selected five. With brides invisible, innumerable

  Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. Doing this will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accomodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems may be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the line break will be marked with a shallow indent.

  CONTENTS

  • Title Page

  • Copyright

  • Note to the Reader

  I

  1. Chorister

  2. A Shepherd’s Calendar

  3. Alphabet City: An Autobiography

  4. Beyond Disappointment

  5. In Paradise Alone

  6. Letters to an English Friend

  7. “Ridiculous winter flower”

  II

  1. The Creation of the Stag

  III

  1. To Shakespeare

  2. Debris

  3. The Library

  4. They Are Not Making Anything. They Are Working.

  5. Pitty-Pat

  6. Mountain’s Edge

  7. France

  8. After Clare

  9. Borodin

  10. New Colors

  11. Tantivy

  12. Graves Variations

  13. Deluge

  IV

  1. The Watteau Poem

  V

  1. Olney Hymn

  2. For John Riley

  3. Black Madonna

  4. The Cattle Were Lowing

  5. Hunting

  6. Gihon

  7. Air and Angels

  8. To Heaven

  9. Encantadas

  10. Foxglove

  • Book Benefactors

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank the editors of the following for giving many of these poems their first appearance in print:

  Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day

  American Poet

  The American Poetry Review

  Bat City Review

  Catch Up

  Conjunctions

  Connotation Press: An Online Artifact

  Fifth Wednesday Journal

  The Literary Review

  New American Writing

  Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (Second Edition)

  Plume

  Poetry

  Unstuck

  VOLT

  FOR JAMES LONGENBACH

  I

  …what we changed

  Was innocence for innocence…

  —The Winter’s Tale

  Chorister

  Cello or clarinet, it was smoke, smoke,

  Just as Paradise fading over time at the road’s

  End is a black and white photograph

  Of Paradise. Elementary schoolboy

  Leaning into the hedgerow somehow still,

  Such am I. A car passes. And then no

  Traffic at all, for hours, for years it seems.

  Make a little music, boy. Light a cigarette

  Found in the roadway, a sign from God.

  I remember the bitter taste of small berries

  Before the summer began, and then

  A bitter taste again in early autumn. Sweetness,

  A little portion, like a wisp of smoke

  Mistaken for music. A lonely car

  Is all the traffic ever comes. Walk on.

  I am entering a photograph fades with me

  And no one else. Ahead, a derelict

  Sound in the shape of cellos disappears

  Into pale, gray foliage. Childhood’s

  Amazon River hounded out of church,

  Out of the painfully small portion

  Of ripe berries any soul can find,

  Empties into Paradise one white boy.

  A Shepherd’s Calendar

  A boy’s face above a bicycle

  One hour after sunrise

  Riding west-south-west insists

  Out of marred and moving whiteness

  Wisdom consists entirely

  Of afterwards, of far ahead

  Where time is finished with itself

  Just as the mountains over there

  Are finished with the sun. For now,

  Joy. For an hour at least,

  The effortless white of the wheels.

  Boy, to mar is to marvel.

  To be the wound of the sun

  On Time’s face is beautiful.

  Alphabet City: An Autobiography

  AUGUSTINE

  God is in the kitchen drawer,

  And His love is infinite.

  BEES

  Are dying everywhere, and it

  Will be the death of all gardens.

  CHILDREN

  Are bees.

  DANTE

  Has a box of crayons he’d like to share.

  EVERYWHERE

  There is one flower

  Afraid of the sunlight.

  FEAR

  Desolates the colors,

  Pigment of bees, pigment of children.

  GUEVARA

  Has a magical book. When

  Someone reads it, she becomes a bird

  No soldier can harm.

  HEART

  Is a hollow island

  With hands of its own.

  Those hands crush the heart.

  ISOLDE

  Is making her Christmas list

  At the kitchen table. From time to time,

  She pats the enormous dog at her feet.

  JESUS

  Held a buttercup beneath my chin.

  There’s no going back.

  KENTUCKY

  I’m just saying, in the middle of the night

  I’ve seen horses thrown into fires,

  And they were all praying together.

  LOVE

  Ask St. Augustine.

  MIND

  Not what I thought you were. I thought

  You were myself, a step away. But no,

  You are that crazy flower in Christ’s hand.

  NEW

/>   York.

  ORIGINAL

  If only God had built a little house for Himself

  Beside the apple tree and lived in it.

  PLATO

  Soccer cheese bum. I tried to teach my infant son to say

  “Socrates is a bum.”

  QUIET

  Not this side of extinction.

  ROBERTA

  Was my sister’s name. It was she

  Hung the bigger children on a fence for me.

  SISTER

  Come back.

  TIME

  Why can’t we be friends? I remember one time

  I was walking through Central Park and left

  No footprints in the snow. We were friends that day,

  Weren’t we?

  UNDERHILL

  Was the name of our subway station,

  Entirely above ground. It was also

  Our telephone exchange.

  VEINS

  Little veins are bursting all over my legs

  Like spiders bursting in the trees.

  WHITMAN

  Tell me, did you mean it? Is death really

  As wonderful as you say?

  XANADU

  “Sloppy Joe’s” sounds just about right. But still,

  It would be foolish to forget that Coleridge

  Was the best of us all.

  YELLOW

  The flowers have feasted upon bees and children.

  Z

  Alive still alive.

  Beyond Disappointment

  Ascending through yellow broom and sluggish

  Red-brown wasps, I find the new house.

  In no way does it resemble the old.

  Let there be no comparisons then.

  No kisses before or shirt-sleeves after.

  I pull the comforter over my head,

  And it is warm. The women spinning

  In the next room weep as they spin.

  Hence and farewell valediction: “life’s journey.”

  It makes no sense. The children mock us with it.

  A typewriter beneath the Christmas tree

  Calls to the ice caps. Illustrated monthlies

  Burn in the wasps’ burnt nest. It is

  Such perfections make the sun to rise.

  In Paradise Alone

  The very wasp of flowers is ago,

  Almost ago; there’s one, then one is two.

  Some weeks from now, an hour

  Writes it. Down in a book it goes,

  Into the cluster, purple wings folded

  Upon its breast which, after all, a shadow

  Gnaws, knows. The one is two, distantly,

  Never to know a wasp so close, a thing

  As near as flowers. Time makes strangers.

  The wind comes close to the ground, taking

  Colors of bested soil into daylight.

  The wasp unfolds. Flowers sing for joy,

  “One at least! One at least!” Tatterdemalion my.

  Letters to an English Friend

  1.

  No want of empire, only

  Of wings, of true career.

  Say mavis: match to strike.

  Say threshing floor:

  The republic evermore.

  We are killing each other,

  Not skating. These are

  The last days and no

  Kidding. The undersong

  Perfected me, adored you.

  Hart and hind, heart in hand.

  William James places a white hand

  Upon white Henry. The picture

  Sets fire to the hair

  Of two oceans.

  2.

  Wild fires out of control

  In the ill spirit of

  This summer’s charity:

  An election year, in-

  Finite specimen hours.

  Martin, you meant beauty

  By wasps and lake water,

  As I by dragonfly

  And fires. Out of control,

  Out of control and still

  Not free. America

  Rhymes all with algebra.

  No wings for you or me.

  No water for the fires.

  3.

  The loan is the Lazarus

  Rain also saying late

  Autumn into the tree

  Whose one reply is

  To flower to flower

  Out of sequence as

  There is no sequence now

  Not any longer

  Lazarus rhymes with Jesus

  As James with Andrew

  In between the syllables un-

  Wind the winding sheet

  Autumn comes again

  Anymore hot for it hot

  4.

  Or lifts, as love was said to do, its shower.

  It all comes round: Heraclitus, us;

  Marvell, us; Hudson and Ouse.

  I was thinking of death and of

  Its curious elections. But love!

  Unspoken illicit love in the lotos rose,

  One and the same, is a shower too.

  And so the visits to the grave

  Are women, arms akimbo,

  Smiles below ground. I

  Will send a picture too, if you

  Will call our river by a briar name,

  Entire lifetimes in the swimmer’s sound.

  5.

  Mine are the lesser trees

  Nevertheless look upwards

  Into the paloverde the topmost

  Frivol branches a balloon

  Blue for a boy my birthday

  Remembered in heaven by

  Christ of the lesser trees.

  I cannot join you in Italy

  But a Desert Father

  A sort of fritillary noising

  Balloon bellflowers only

  This June morning gives me

  An errand to give to you—

  Taste two of the wines in Orvieto.

  Which is the greener? Which is the color

  Of summer straw after all the green has gone?

  “Ridiculous winter flower”

  Ridiculous winter flower

  More perfect butter

  On the ground the disused

  Ground beloved

  Must survive must live to tell

  Another orphan

  Something raised us

  Out of the dust

  Something gave us color

  A gold also tender

  I shall not tell its name

  I’m tired

  Laughter and piano teacher

  Ridiculous winter flower

  The gate’s wide open now

  II

  Is it a time to wrangle, when the props

  And pillars of our planet seem to fail,

  And Nature with a dim and sickly eye

  To wait the close of all?

  —WILLIAM COWPER, “The Task”

  The Creation of the Stag

  I dreamed the red chapel uncompleted, tall

  In its iron graphic scaffolding.

  Manhattan was two cities, and the chapel

  Colored them red: birth and death; arrival

  And departure. My mother was glad. Pointing

  Up into the sky where a zodiac

  Pinwheeled at her pleasure, she showed me

  Taurus and Gemini, Scorpio

  And Gemini covered in fresh paint.

  Christ will stand there, just there, as today

  Color and tiny, hazardous stars hang

  Intervening fires. The middle of life

  Is nothing. A nuclear pinfold frightens

  Children frightened already. The chapel there

  Rises above all of it, is a new deer.

  Canary-yellow corduroy trousers

  Embarrass the dream, as though a city

  Were made of wine stains, red, my mother’s wine,

  The yellow of imagined birds

  My father’s disaster, his paint, his car.

  The Gemini, with Taurus between them,
>
  Smile. The chapel is in need of repair.

  Smile. Rome was built in a day like today.

  Only look into the sky to see

  The pattern of God’s pleasure—

  Palette and planchette, color wheel—

  Whose center never moves beneath the weight

  Of the center. To the right is treason;

  To the left, blindness. Between the Gemini,

  Someone turns to ask: “Why are you crying?”

  Here is a plate with an alphabet

  Of flowers. Here is a zodiac.

  I weep for the Gate of Kiev, for death

  Saluting death with bells, backwards into

  Things unfinished, like martyrdoms, from which

  Cities arise only to be captured

  By scaffolding. A man named Modest mourns

  An architect called Victor. In the limousine

  (For this is a procession—every poem

  A procession) a pretty girl smokes. Outside

  Of the car, clouds darken invisible

  Windows. Cruelty is not a game here, not