The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by A CLOSER LOOK: D. Nurkse
Dennis Nurkse is the author of ten collections of poetry, most
recently A Night in Brooklyn (Alfred
A. Knopf, 2012). His Estonian father worked for the League of Nations in Vienna
and his mother was an artist before escaping Nazi Europe during World War II
and settling in New York. He's received a Whiting Writers' Award, the Bess
Hokin Prize from Poetry, grants from the National Endowment for the
Arts, and a Tanne Foundation Award. He's taught at Sarah Lawrence College,
the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing, and Rikers Island Correctional
Facility. Nurkse also works for human rights organizations, writing on human
rights issues, and was elected to the board of directors of Amnesty
International USA.
—Glyn Maxwell On Poetry Dennis Nurkse turns on lamps. When in his poems, we find ourselves awash in the light of the voice, its intimate encounters with others, with the self, with what's possible, what's unexpected, in this human world made of relationship. His recent books firmly establish his as a major voice in American poetry. Most recently, A Night in Brooklyn elicited this from Philip Levine:
After I read D. Nurkse's last collection of poems, The Border Kingdom, I told myself there was no one in the U.S. who could write a better book. Well I was wrong, there was a poet who could and recently did publish a better book, the same D. Nurkse. A Night in Brooklyn, his newest collection, finds him on home territory—he was for a time the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn—he should be the laureate of the Western Hemisphere. He possesses the ability to employ the language of our American streets, shops, bars, factories, and any place else and construct truly lyrical poems, sometimes of love, sometimes of anger. He can be wonderfully large and inclusive: "In these long slant-lit streets, she says, / you will find factories that once made shoehorns, / waffle irons, or pearl cuff links and store front churches / where voices adored the living God while tambourines clashed a little behind the beat . . ." from "Twilight in Canarsie," which finally gets the poem it deserves. The voice behind these poems is certainly Nurkse's, but more often than not I feel it's that deepest voice we hear rarely if ever and then only in poems, the voice of those closest to us, those we love and care for and who—because they are human–remain mysteries: "All my life I have been dying, of hope and self-pity, / and an unknown force has been knitting me back together." No one is writing more potently than this. [from the Ploughshares blog, December 7, 2012] And here's how Jody Bolz responded to Dennis' new book this past spring when introducing him at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for a celebration of Poet Lore's 124th birthday: In Dennis Nurkse's astonishing new book, A Night in Brooklyn, one scene reappears with the intimacy and eeriness of a recurring dream. Two lovers lie together (and separate) in a room that's theirs or not theirs—in a city that's familiar or foreign. There's a window or a mirror in which time is passing: dusk, dark, dawn.
Beyond the room, the relentless business of The City: labor, commerce, celebration, distraction, devotion, betrayal, conflict. Are the lovers safe or unsafe? Is their love safe or unsafe? How will they locate themselves in the world?
Beginning with Shadow Wars in 1988, Dennis Nurkse has given us ten books of poetry that might be read as a long meditation on such central human questions. Intimacy and estrangement, home and exile, memory and loss, insight and bafflement, a fragile peace and open warfare: these are the opposing forces that animate his beautiful, unsettling poems.
What makes this art and not philosophy—art and not psychology—is the abundance of keenly observed details, images of work and the rituals of daily life. The dream-like world is lodged within the recognizable world with its rough barstools and dingy doorways, its belt sanders and grinding wheels, its pigeons, parks, and tenement stairs. The city's real—and the city is a metaphor.
Almost 30 years ago, Poet Lore published a poem called "Ovid in Exile" by a young writer whose name was surely new to the editors. In it the exiled Roman poet contemplates his condition: "The road home is a knife," Dennis Nurkse wrote,
or a shard of broken china forced against a vein: the other road is grassed over, a shimmer in the endless plain, a fold in the map.
Which way to go? Or is the state of exile—the in-between, the present moment—all we can be sure of? The last poem in his new book frames the problem another way. "Return to the Capital" ends with the image of a man and a woman waking together and confronting two reflections in a mirror. The questions they ask might as well be our own:
if this is happiness, how shall we leave it, if this is grief, how to enter it, if this is just a rented room, where are the doors, the stairs, the streets, the endless city. D. Nurkse: A Selection of Poems 2002-2012
from A Night In Brooklyn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012):
Waking in Greenpoint in Late August
We wanted so much that there be a world as we lay naked on our gray-striped mattress, staring up at a trowel mark on the eggshell-blue ceiling and waiting, waiting for twilight, darkness, dawn, marriage, the child, the hoarse names of the city— let there be a universe in which these lovers can wash at the pearling spigot, and lick each other dry.
The Dead Reveal Secrets of Brooklyn
We are frequently asked, what is death like?
Like tossing a frisbee in Prospect Park, making sure the release is free of any twitch or spasm— any trace of the body's vacillation— willing the disk to glide forwards of its own momentum, never veering, in a trance of straight lines.
Like waiting in traffic at Hoyt-Fulton waving away the squeegee man with his excessive grin and red-veined eyes.
Lying under your lover in Crown Heights and divining a stranger's face in the dark flash of her pupils.
Growing old in Kensington on a block that reeks of dry cleaning where you nod to three neighbors and avoid the stare of a fourth though a single brindle-tailed cat patrols every dark garden.
Remember, death does not last, not even a breath, whereas the city goes on forever, Cypress Hill, Gravesend, Bath Beach, avenues screened by gingkos, vehemence of domino players hunched over folding tables,
range on range of padlocked factories that once made twine, hammers, tape, and now make small nameless articles which we use to bind, shatter or seal, here where there is no self, no other world, no Brooklyn.
The Present
We made models: this is a moment of happiness, this is a maple-shaded street, its yellow median line littered with double wings: some day we might know such things in our real lives, not just in desire.
We invented Cherryfield, Maine, nine pearl-gray Capes with sagging porches held together by coats of gesso. Behind the scrim of birches the Middle Branch River glittered like the galvanized roof to a tackle shed.
We were quick and replicated a shack with a chalk sign CHUBBS SMELTS CROAKERS; there was barely time to read it before it whirled into the past. And she who was driving said, we know the coming disaster intimately but the present is unknowable.
Which disaster, I wondered, sexual or geological? But I was shy: her beauty was like a language she didn't speak and had never heard.
Then we were in Holyfield and it was the hour when the child waves from a Welcome mat, his eyes full of longing, before turning inward to his enforced sleep. We waved back but we were gone.
The hour when two moths bump together above a pail of lures.
The hour when the Coleman lamp flickers in the screen house above the blur of cards being shuffled and dealt amazingly fast.
All my life I have been dying, of hope and self pity, and an unknown force has been knitting me back together. It happens in secret. I want to touch her and I touch her and it registers on the glittering gauges that make the car darker and swifter and we come to the mountains and this is all I ever wanted:
to enter the moth's pinhead eye, now, and never return.
Letter From Home
1 She writes: we would have voted against the war but all the candidates opposed it.
We joined a march in dead of winter. Weekend clerks gathered to applaud, clapping to warm their numb hands. In the tenements, hand-lettered signs supported us.
The soldiers said, we will not fight, and the generals, there is no cause. Whom would we invade? she writes: we were the greatest power, perhaps of all time. Then the war began in the corner of the eye. At first it was mild and demanded nothing. Now to want to die would be a privilege. Now the invasion writes these words and can't stop.
2 They practice torture here, she says, in the hospital, in the maze of corridors color-coordinated for the insides of the body. The laws allow it, but only as a last resort. Only if the city might be destroyed otherwise.
3 We've created an external mind, she writes. It has made our world small as a withheld breath. If you want a weapon you have only to imagine it.
4 Still a window blazes all night. Still the cars pass.
from The Border Kingdom (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008): Albi 1299
Because I could not admit we know God through suffering I was sealed up in the wall. They left a gap in which my body could curl like a fetus, and a little sky, which they filled in brick by brick, and perhaps it troubled the masons to be immuring a human being because they whistled loudly, a trowel shook, mortar spilt. Yet it was a tight course. I knew better than to press against it. When the dark closed in I lay listening to my pulse louder, louder, and the distant voices singing—I knew better than to guess the words or listen for my name.
Then I was the wall itself, everything the voices long for and cannot have—the self, the stone inside the stone.
Ben Adan
The American commanded me in gestures, dig a hole.
He tossed me a shovel but the blade had dulled and the haft was splaying so I had to rein in that strange wild energy as I opened the earth to my shins, then my knees.
At thigh-depth I found a layer of black loam and a tiny blue snail that seemed to give off light.
The agent called my name. High above, he mimed a man kneeling, hands clasped in prayer.
He must have knelt himself because I felt the muzzle pressed against the shallow furrow behind my left earlobe— a part of my body I never knew existed. He pulled the trigger.
But I know it is just a technique to soften my resistance— perhaps in a moment he will lift me up and hold me trembling, more scared than I and more relieved.
The Missing
We filled the streets, squinting upward, shading our eyes, searching for the towers, or more planes, or rescue choppers, and a great silence built
until a girl whispered, blood. She asked her lover to stand still, used his back for a drawing board and wrote on a paper bag Give Blood—instantly
a line formed, then many lines, twelve blocks east to Bellevue, eighteen north to Saint Vincent. We chose one and waited, gossiping with our neighbors.
We had a place, a function, something invisible inside us was needed desperately; we watched with envy and deep longing
as the rare blood-types strode toward the head of the line calmly, swinging their arms, commandos to the rescue. Then the word came back, no wounded.
Parousia
When we were in the same room as the gods there was little to say. Do you like twilight? Do you need the touch of the other's body—the absolute other? Mostly we stared at their wingtips which were burnished and stamped with strange almost-holes. How could they stand the suffering of the fly trying to walk across the sheen and camber of a brimming Campari glass? It would happen to us, but it was they who had to watch and watching is hardest. Only a breath away, they showed no desire to vanish though the silences that opened were volatile as the shadows of the last exhausted dancers. Which do you prefer—time or lightning? We could hear the clink of the chandelier trying to work its way loose from the vaulted ceiling, a cello tuning sharp in an inner room, and curried almonds being gobbled— that was us, our voracity, but the gods said nothing: their politeness is like their love: glass wall between us and midnight. We pitied them. It is not safe on that side of eternity. Worse than watching is waiting while the waiters sweep up the party hats and dark lights of snow tumble in the immense gilt-framed mirror.
from The Burnt Island (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005): Space Marriage
1 Our starship blew up between Alpha Centaur and the Second Quadrant but we could not die because we had stolen the god's codes:
so we kept traveling deeper into the future just ahead of our bodies and when we had sex
we felt ourselves scattering: there in the galactic cold where the immense numbers begin to rotate slowly
we put on the robes of the night sky.
2 An alien had imprisoned me in that lunar module that was just the thought I and he fed me what I would eat and mated me with the one I loved:
strange ordeal there in the Second Quadrant in Spica's radio-shadow where the gravity of time pulls dreams from a sleeper's mind:
bitter confinement naked on a falling stone.
3 We built robots who built robots that had a little of our hesitation, our fatigue, our jealousy, our longing for Alpha, peace, nonbeing . . . They covered our long retreat, those machines, that looked like can-openers or outboard motors, but with the guilty air of husbands and the god's fixed stare.
4 It was a system: we loved each other, the war began on Vega, we watched the hurtling lights, and the silence drained us.
5 Out of spit and dust we made two lovers who set fire to the earth.
Hymenoptera: The Ants
1 They say we are descended from the wasps. Can't you feel it? Once we had a house in the sky and swooped with a terrifying drone.
Now we are sentenced to this silence in which our acts become our language.
We carry the bodies of the dead into the underground hives and keep our paths swept.
We walk the wilderness in broken circles searching for the seed that contains tamarack, Burnt Island, the high crests flashing with evening.
Since we lost the Kingdom to time alone, we make ourselves always purer, more obedient to the will (we have no tablets), carving our doors and lintels deeper underground.
2 There is one who is huge, and stoops, and counts, as if those zeroes were the seed. To baffle him we make subtle mistakes— we entomb a fleck of dung among the fathers, or wrap mica in strange paper shrouds and tend it like pupae.
3 We build a city, and after five years and many dynasties, unbuild it, and erase our complicated scents so the earth smells just of rain.
We send our Queen on her wobbly flight with her entourage of suitors— tiny jawless males who will never eat in this world—
we who have wings only in death.
4 Our wars are fought in the desert, without mercy, but somehow sleepily— perhaps the sun makes us drowsy?
The plan is, we grip the enemy with our jaws below the waist and try to saw him in two. He reciprocates.
Sometimes he dies of thirst, loneliness, distance from the colony, and we must return to our duties with those mandibles gripping us, without anger, or with the anger of the wind.
This is the whole problem of victory: the severed parts go on thinking.
5 The fire ants have built an empire high above us.
We know their generals— Arcturus, Aldebaran— and their pupae, the Pleiades.
For a thousand generations they have planned to invade us from that golden hive.
And we have built an absolute weapon— silence—when it is perfect it will abolish them and the earth, and the kneeling watcher whose lips frame such immense numbers.
We have wings in death.
Origins of Desire
after Lynn Margulis
1. Anima
This is the groundwork: Autopoiesis, constant creation of the self from sunlight.
But gender varies like the breeze and sex like tides.
Thousands of quasi-sexual fathers might fuse and form our body, just visible on a net-veined leaf.
We might cannibalize each other and the indigestible rind become the partner.
Or we might trade genes for male and female like beads or playing cards.
But we are each built of water locked in a membrane.
The same comet-tail sperm in starfish, gingko, and human.
2. Red Giants
Hydrogen caught fire in the forge of the nebulae and fused to carbon—
our element, pliant, ready to combine with any foreign body:
magnesium, calcium, contaminants released in the great explosion that lit the sky like a match
before there was a mind to understand the advantages of annihilation.
3. Archean Microbes
When the dust-cloud rolled back from earth we died of radiance— the sun burnt holes in the inmost braid of DNA.
Light-nourished, light-poisoned, we migrated into rock or traded little damaged pieces of self between each other,
enshrining separation inside us, creating the blueprint for an absolute stranger.
4. The Unlit Room
The mind is a story that found a way to tell itself—but who is the confidante, who the eavesdropper, who gropes for a switch along this invisible wall?
In our narrow bed we hear the catch of the other's breath, faint Muzak, an ice machine, a late goose honking toward the idea of south.
Between five and six we whisper our presentiment— great herds going blind in Patagonia, a moth species extinguished at every breath.
We exaggerate a little. Those extra zeroes hold our reprieve. Perhaps it is too late: we can still make love and cat-nap toward dawn.
But even if we close our eyes we are still married.
The Granite Coast
We are like you because we scrape these boulders with sharp coiled tongues which we unroll progressively as our mouths wear out: when you open us you find the cliff inside us though we are tiny as an eyelash;
we are like you because we are born by the billions and float into the open ocean— as if we were entering our own plenitude which is the certainty of death and the slim chance of sunlight— and the ones who never return are the faint roar in a sleeper's ear;
we too make little threads mysteriously in our genitals to hold us to the ledge, and in our nests we weave mica and our victims' bones;
we are kin to you because the great tides advance and retreat inside us— though you may call it salvation or adaptation, it is a circle in which the living and the unliving, the souls and anti-souls, grow their intricate spiral shells;
We are I, I, I— there is only one of us and with our frail tentacles we build the dawn sky.
We are helpless on this sea full of thinking knives and coral shards nibbled by ravenous flowers.
We wage war on ourselves and drift through our armor like cloud shadow.
We graze on each other and the limbs grow back secreting dark sugar.
The gull will destroy us and the plumed worm Amphitrite make a home in our eyes.
Yet our bodies are shaped exactly like the resting-place, we fit in each other like silence in desire, we live another second or much less, less than a blink,
until the code comes to know itself and the mind dreams another mind that will survive it there, in the bright curtain of spray.
from The Fall (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002):
Cat's-Eye
My father waved goodbye. I didn't wave back, scared I might drop my new cold smoky marble.
At the core a spiral glinted and coiled like a small windy flame turning in on itself.
That night my mother shook me from a dream, whispering he was dead, he was dead, he was dead, as if to teach a language, and I answered: he is dead.
Even in sleep my hands had not opened.
A Couple In Garden City
1 Great Love, like a hostile parent, always watched us to see if our nails were clean, if there were crumbs at the corners of our mouths—
imperious Love, irascible, muttered about a catastrophe we would never know, close and remote as a lit window—
you will never know how I suffered in Logos because of your ignorance
and we lovers unbuttoned shyly in the night of war and amazing wealth, sad for each other, telling each other little jokes to make it easier, wanting nothing except twilight:
but that Love always with a project: the darkest night; sharpest pencil; softest pillow; cruelest betrayal;
so we blessed each other in a language we invented, more silent than thought, each word backlit as in a dream where there is no choice but kindness,
and that Love, furious, searched among the laws for a single name, erased on the day we met.
2 The rake splayed on the lawn, a hose glittered over daffodils, the brillo pad circled the dish, smoke hovered above the chimney, the comb journeyed with many setbacks through a forest of scented hair, and the voice cried in a dark room. If we were lost in a second of happiness, how bright will we burn in paradise?
Not even God may enter the past yet we sneaked there hand in hand and carved our names in the pith of the apple tree.
If loneliness were a taxi, I'd give it our old address: 1 Pison Drive, a block from Euphrates:
picket fence, gambrel roof, bent hoop, bug light, dangling tire, in the garage a bike with trainer wheels, waiting to take us to our father's mansion.
How We Are Made Light
Pity the visitors bent under shopping bags, who have kept their huge hats here where there are no seasons, who run from station to station with a question so inconsequential even we patients smile.
Admire the nurse and the aide who fill out a form, one beginning at the front, the other at the end, speaking of Bon Jovi; the doctors, washing side by side, discussing an even greater doctor;
most of all, revere the orderlies who have come from across the sea to wheel us through the corridors to a place where we will be tested, where we will finally belong even more inherently than here, where we will no longer be watchers but the matter itself, flesh and soul transposed to degrees on a scale of radiance.
At Holy Name
The fatigue of the nurse waiting with the bedpan, her mind drifting to a lover's sarcasm;
the unseen child crying; the panic of the fly caught in the embrasure of the window that does not open;
only these are real: yet I still feel my mother's hand cool on my forehead
and her comb untangling the snarls of a long dream.
Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |
