The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by A CLOSER LOOK: Marianne Boruch
In this issue we take A Closer Look at the poetry of Marianne Boruch. She has shared with us a generous selection from both her Poems: New and Selected (Oberlin College Press, 2004) and her recently published sixth collection, Grace, Fallen from (Wesleyan University Press, 2008). Attention is a beautiful thing, and much in demand. Probably more of us want it than know how to give it. Marianne Boruch's recent Poems: New and Selected has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: She sees and considers with intensity. Her poems often give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to notice. . . . Trusting observation, having the ideas and feelings emerge as continuations of that action of noticing—where others might force a sentiment or a bit of philosophizing onto things—may be a mark of genuine poetry. Thus did former poet laureate Robert Pinsky call our attention to the work of Marianne Boruch in his Washington Post "Poet's Choice" column on April 24, 2005. I offer his words as a means of alerting those readers not familiar with her work to be alert as they engage the poems themselves below. Marianne Boruch's sensibility draws us into closer contact with this time and place we inhabit through those nuances of perception granted to the genuine poet and, beyond sometimes, into the strangenesses that lurk within our times and places and ourselves. Her poems reward the reader open to experiencing the particular world created by each poem. As the poet Barbara Ras has recently observed about Grace, Fallen from, "Marianne Boruch attends to mystery, to absence, to our all-too-human frailty and folly. Yet in reckoning with what we lack, she floods her poems with intelligence, ripples them with humor, and instills in them a musical, sensuous abundance." Marianne Boruch is a Professor in the Department of English at Purdue University and founded its MA/MFA program in creative writing. She has taught at Purdue since 1987 as well as in the Warren Wilson College MFA program. Over the past two decades she has published a series of rich, distinctive collections of poetry: Grace, Fallen from, Wesleyan University Press, 2008 Ghost and Oar, Red Dragonfly Press (chapbook), 2007 Poems: New and Selected, Oberlin College Press, 2004 A Stick that Breaks and Breaks, Oberlin College Press, 1997 Moss Burning, Oberlin College Press, 1993 Descendant, Wesleyan University Press, 1989 View from the Gazebo, Wesleyan University Press, 1985 She has also published two illuminating collections of essays: In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations,
Trinity University Press, 2005 Poetry's Old Air, "Poets on Poetry" Series, University of Michigan Press, 1995 Marianne's poems appear widely in such journals as The New Yorker, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, The Antioch Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Partisan Review, The Yale Review, and The Paris Review. I. from Poems: New and Selected (Oberlin, 2004) THE HAWK He was halfway through the grackle when I got home. From the kitchen I saw blood, the black feathers scattered on snow. How the bird bent to each skein of flesh, his muscles tacking to the strain and tear. The fierceness of it, the nonchalance. Silence took the yard, so usually restless with every call or quarrel, titmouse, chickadee, drab and gorgeous finch, and the sparrow haunted by her small complete surrender to a fear of anything. I didn't know how to look at it. How to stand or take a breath in the hawk's bite and pull, his pleasure so efficient, so of course, of course, the throat triumphant, rising up. Not the violence, poor grackle. But the sparrow, high above us, who knew exactly. ELEGY Before the basil blackened. Before plates slept in their cupboard. Before the streets were snow. Before the song started in the throat or crept sideways into the hands that hold the cello or the moon spilled to nonsense all over the floor. Before color composed itself to twenty names for blue, or was it green or was it red? Before seeds entered the ground to transform themselves. Before cake was eaten, before the icing bubbled up and crystallized. Before all that sugar. Before shells when things were moving in them and the sea made a noise. Before our son grew so eye to eye. Before worms made their fiefdom in the compost. Before sleep refused the night and the clock kept ticking. Before the hospital took the soul from the body, dark from dark, and the long drive home. Before the dog stopped mid-bark to bark and the cat rose from her stretch, unblinking. Before every moth in the flour stilled its wings. Before the stain, before its memory in the wood grew wider. Before the garden gave everything to weeds. Remember that, O charm to forget, to go back, to vanish? Before the dead appeared at the edge of my vision. Before the grace to be broken was broken. SYMPATHY I drag this big bed to the window which takes years probably as garden spills, as birds darken, the tree outside slips into her farthest ring, heave of new bark, water, wood air. I think she listens so near the window, pressing her strange light. I sing o ragged quilt over the whole world, meaning to say: such is my simple grief, this great dim street glistening with boys. How their mothers thin them down, calling them home, quiet baseballs, a few blue stones. What secrets in a boy, pitching the last gladness high into evening: curve, cut, I hear it fallen at the window, crying to be let in. MY SON AND I GO SEE HORSES Always shade in the cool dry barns and flies in little hanging patches like glistening fruitcake. One sad huge horse follows us with her eye. She shakes her great head, picks up one leg and puts it down as if she suddenly dismissed the journey. My son is in heaven, and these the gods he wants to father so they will save him. He demands I lift him up. He strokes the old filly's long face and sings something that goes like butter rounding the hard skillet, like some doctor who loves his patients more than science. He believes the horse will love him, not eventually, right now. He peers into the enormous eye and says solemnly, I know you. And the horse will not startle nor look away, this horse the color of thick velvet drapes, years and years of them behind the opera, backdrop to ruin and treachery, all innocence and its slow doomed unwinding of rapture. DELPHINIUM Near the exquisite vulgarity of the chickens, delphinium casts passion inward, until it purples into rich targets. This one is lame, splinted up with a split rod, quickly like someone lit a fuse and stepped back. All day the wind's been low static and near the house the sound of men fixing the chain saw. Delphinium could care. About this, or rain, or the chickens busy complaining, outraged about everything, and dropping themselves fitfully into mounds of dust. They'd bury themselves if they could, eyeing the woods through their little ball bearings. The delphinium never angers. It learns quietly, by rote: stars are stars. Better to keep grass down, forestalling violence. The pine is a brother, sardonic and plain. Genius deepens, a deep blue thing, too rapid to see completely. I am this blue, the delphinium knows vaguely, I am poisonous. The delphinium loves the sound of that: poisonous, like the true gift perpetually offered. THE KINGDOM Long afternoons in bed, we loved to talk about the woman on the EL, remote as a rabbit and that intense, who froze at every stop until the train leapt up and knocked us back. But she'd lunge forward in her seat, pedal in a fury we never biked with, even uphill or after dark, while the thing wheezed and clanked and roared on to the next station. She'd ease as the speed let up, sucking air like a swimmer, shrinking down to her curious deadpan. Our room floated then, nearly out its window at anything so strange, your arm relaxed, cool across my belly. We'd think of her—that woman wild again, that whole train back, rattling off its here and here and henceforth: Lincoln Avenue, Armitage, Oak Street's dazzling deadend beach. Not ours, of course. Of course, hers. Or so she thought, glaring ingrates at us once in some station's high-dive calm, ennobling herself for the next great surge. An unmade bed for days, that bed, dusk settling like sugar turning a water glass sweet and murky. We thought of her a lot, the way we wondered everything: not love exactly, not that, more what that woman say, say when released, she looked down at her kingdom— sure those obvious streets, but such alleys, glittering and twisting . . . . TREE Its disguise was ugliness, and ants in cheap parade, up and across, and electric wires cut right through at a heartless angle to keep Walter Cronkite on at the neighbors' so proud of their TV. Thick, thick as too much of too many summers is thick, three and a half kids to get human arms around it. In the dark, it rose up like the drawing of a tree a girl might make to scare her mother. I was there. I was almost asleep but the moon—or was it a porch light left on all night? What I didn't know is what I still don't know, that one loves ugliness as one loves beauty, which is to say, how the dead love because they've given up on love: the ants? okay, really—broken branches? fine, fine . . . . II. from Grace, Fallen from (Wesleyan, 2008) (copyright 2008 by Marianne Boruch and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved.) STILL LIFE Someone arranged them in 1620. Someone found the rare lemon and paid a lot and neighbored it next to the plain pear, the plain apple of the lost garden, the glass of wine, set down mid-sip— don't drink it, someone said, it's for the painting. And the rabbit skull— whose idea was that? There had been a pistol but someone was told, no, put that away, into the box with a key though the key had been misplaced now for a year. The artist wanted light too, for the shadows. So the table had to be moved. Somewhere I dreamt the diary entry on this, reading the impossible Dutch quite well, thank you, and I can translate it here, someone writing it is spring, after all, and Herr Muller wants a window of it in the painting, almost a line of poetry, I thought even then, in the dream, impressed with that "spring after all," that "window of it" especially, how sweet and to the point it came over into English with no effort at all as I slept through the night. It was heavy, that table. Two workers were called from the east meadow to lift and grunt and carry it across the room, just those few yards. Of course one of them exaggerated the pain in his shoulder. Not the older, the younger man. No good reason to cry out like that. But this was art. And he did, something sharp and in the air that one time. All of them turning then, however slightly. And there he was, eyes closed, not much more than a boy, before the talk of beauty started up again. A MUSICAL IDEA At the second light, you turn, the boy tells me. I turn. A musical idea. Turn then, when a light in any house goes on. Dark end of the day on the street. Dark late afternoon in November. In any kitchen—revealed: the hum starts in the freezer, down the lower shelves, takes the stove back to its fire. The sink is an absence: one tea-stained cup left to seed. I live somewhere. But to walk away is a musical idea. Because a corner means make a profile to however once you were. Once a child, I kept turning full-faced into everything, never saying a word. You like to think that, my brother says. I heard you plenty of times. And you were hiding. HAPPINESS: THREE DEFINITIONS 1. Can you be too happy? Put some in a box. Tape it. Put it on that shelf over there. Come Sadness, little dog no one likes but you're sweet, you are, in your way. So I go to the woods with that dog. I don't teach it anything. Not heel, not fetch, not protect me from monsters. He hardly looks back at me, never brings me a stick to throw past him to the river. The river doesn't shine in these woods. Doesn't make a sound. There’s an old washing machine in it. A couple of shoes. Or three. No match for any other, one with laces drifting above it, like some languid sea creature, tentacles bleached, wayward, not caring a bit if the fisherman comes with his net or not. I'm that happy. I don't care either. 2. Which leads to a question. Can happiness make you stupid? (I love stupid, said Stupid. What? said Smart. But that's a different story.) The world looks great without sepia, without eye trouble, the moon, one moon. And all this blinding daylight, just what we wanted, yes? Question: do you relish or endure? Two curious adjustments on the lens. Or three: it depends, you said or I said, not sure what to fix for dinner. (Did we remember limes? cilantro? coconut milk?) Meanwhile, how stupid to qualify stupid, said Stupid. Or was it Smart at the window, talking to no one in particular, squeaking the balloon into the shape of a duck or a windmill. 3. In fact, things happen in threes, said everyone after the second disaster (those strokes, that trainwreck—you name it—an earthquake, a flood). We eyed the room, each other, checking the door—is it locked for the night? Then I slept and dreamt people walking in lines, carrying their picket signs: no third thing! I could belabor this. I could say as my long ago friend did: how do you get there? First you go there! Then laugh myself sick. Or tell that dog: no, Sadness. You have to stay home. You can't nuzzle the leaves with me all afternoon. But the way he looks up, out of focus, so eye to eye. SNOWFALL IN G MINOR Overnight, it’s pow! The held note keeps falling. And only seems slow. Because it's just frozen rain, what's the big deal? the checker in Stop and Shop told me. Save warmth like stamps. The fade of their color in the 1920s. Airmail. The pilot with his skin-tight goggle helmet on his miniature head could be snow-blind. All heads are small. Mine's lost as a thimble in this weather. Where a finger should be and be sewing, every thought I ever thunk. I love the word thunk. Never used. It lands, noisy metal in a bucket. That’s the last of it. No echo for miles of this snowfall—as in grace, fallen from, as in a great height, released from its promise. WHAT GOD KNEW when he knew nothing. A leaf looks like this, doesn't it? No one to ask. So came the invention of the question too, the way all at heart are rhetorical, each leaf suddenly wedded to its shade. When God knew nothing, it was better, wasn't it? Not the color blue yet, its deep unto black. No color at all really, not yet one thing leading to another, sperm to egg endlessly, thus cities, thus the green countryside lying down piecemeal, the meticulous and the trash, between lake and woods the dotted swiss of towns along any state road. Was God sleeping when he knew nothing? As opposed to up all night (before there was night) or alert all day (before day)? As opposed to that, little engine starting up by itself, history, a thing that keeps beginning and goes past its end. Will it end, this looking back? From here, it's one shiny ravaged century after another, but back there, in a house or two: a stillness, a blue cup, a spoon, one silly flower raised up from seed. I think so fondly of the day someone got lucky and dodged the tragedy meant for him. It spilled like sound from a faulty speaker over an open field. He listened from a distance. God-like, any one of us could say. FEBRUARY That sparrow on the trash again, one leg missing, he alights and drops down, alights in this cold, and crooked, drops down again though he could fly. He has to, most of the day I imagine, into its exhaustion, those moments he finds a window sill or a patch of old leaves under some overhang, his one leg, good wire, pulled under him, feathers puffed out—swollen thing, ridiculous— for warmth. All the lives I might have had: this one, oh, this one. O GODS OF SMALLEST CLARITY If only those perennial opposites, the bully and the sweet worried one slept, kept sleeping. Not side by side, not the lion and the lamb, just that most ordinary blind passage, brief and profound, as it happens all over the planet. I mean the prince who's happy with gardening, and the other kind plotting someone’s downfall, each going under for the night. Which is to say, not our usual taking turns at it, not Greenwich or daylight savings or eight flight hours from here equals five hours early or late but right now, this minute, by my marvelous powers of desperation and delusion, it's soldier and monk, Sunni and Shiite, republican, democrat, all Muslims and Christians and Jews and those of us quietly not anything to speak of, no reason or rhyme or respectively about it, no tit for tat but every one sleeping. And the president curled fetal, his aides and think-tankers all twitching in their dreams as dogs do, on the scent or the chase, hours, many hours to come. For that matter, the Pope is drifting off and the greeter from Wal-Mart, and the magician come out of a long day's practice in a sword-crossed box rests now, exactly like the oldest woman asleep on her side, empty as the young docent at Ellis Island already certain it's robot-work, telling the country’s vast sad story of promise and trouble. And I think so many miners home from their dark to this gladder one, sprawled out on their beds where exhaustion is fierce, no longer patient. Every child in the world sleeping too, hunger, once there was, but not here in this dream, no gunflash, no flood. Every mother minus panic. Every father finding his daughters, his sons right where they should be. Even the torturers gone into that place they might nightmare what they’ve done. But not yet, not for a moment. And of those who were done to, for them the rope and hood and diamond-toothed wire, all banished a few hours, forgotten as dream is, in this, the real dream to ink it out, beyond reach. Believe me, I want to see the despicable go down as much as you do, and the innocent shine. But that's sleeping too. Or so I try, an experiment which may be stupid, full of less not more, as in pointless, as in hopeless, as in less than nothing because—o gods of the smallest clarity, let nothing happen for an hour, for six hours. Rage. Let that sleep too, its sorrow no longer a brilliant rant, no longer anything, a wash, a confluence of great waters seen from a distance, the horizon a matter of on and on where a speck out there might well be a boat, the figure at the oars untangling and stretching out. One eye closed, then the other: welcome no moon, no stars. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |
