Swan Song

The last book this August is Swan Song, by Armen Davoudian (Bull City Press, 2020), which seems a perfect way to end this Sealey Challenge, with a sad, gentle, glorious burst of song at the end. And I read the whole bundle from Bull City Press, and its Frost Place Chapbook Competition. A fine gathering!

The poet grew up in Iran, and it was lovely to find that the title poem is a ghazal. Subtle yet tight rhyme ripples through the book. Ah, but the sad irony of the closing lines of "Persian Poetry": "Yet I study English poetry / because Persian would have been too obvious."

Swans drift through, or paddleboats in the shape of swans, as in "The Yellow Swan" and "Swan Boats." I found the coincidence of blue in "Swan Boats": "Time out of mind, this was our turquoise blue

     mind out of time, watching white thoughts come, go
     across a mirror which, unchanged by them,
     itself was change and could reverse the down-
     ward wish of light, the headlong wash of stone
     skipped on its current.

Lovely language, lovely reversals there.

This morning I woke early, found a wishing star on the horizon in a dip of trees, and wished what I always wish. I hope it comes true.

Séance in Daylight

 

August is fading, we've had a little rain, and Séance in Daylight byYuki Tanaka (Bull City Press, 2018) was the perfect and mysterious book to read for today in the Sealey Challenge. Look at that lovely, strange cover image by Kansuke Yamamoto, A Chronicle of Drifting (1949, gelatin silver print collage). There are several Japanese sources and inspirations in the book, plus Joseph Cornell, and an erasure of Tanaka's own dissertation, with echoes of The Waves (Virginia Woolf) and Nightwood (Djuna Barnes). All amazing and creating its own new drifting experience in reading...!

In another sad connection to What is the What, my simultaneous reading, I found a landmine on p. 5 of Séance in Daylight, in the poem "Death in Parentheses." I found ghosts and butterflies and the color blue in other resonances with the month's poetry reading. So much beauty, mixed with sadness, as in this couplet from "The Empire of Light":

     Soon I am going home. Changed, forgotten--
     a girl in a barren field, pressing twilight to her throat.

And this, from "Discourse on Vanishing,": "She tries / to capture a blue flower as it vanishes / in a garden."

My purple coneflowers are vanishing, except for the seedheads, left for the birds. But the sweet peas, planted from seed along the back fence, are finally blooming.

Blue Hour

You already know the coincidence of blue here, from the title and color of the book cover, which is a photograph from the series "My Ghost" by Adam Fuss. But here is the August coincidence from Blue Hour, by Carolyn Forche (HarperCollins, 2003): "Our windows faced east, and on August evenings, the sky was a blue no longer spoken." And it's also a Blue Monday in the blog.

The "blue hour," as the helpful Notes at the end explain, is "the light the French call l'heure bleue, between darkness and day, between the night of a soul and its redemption, an hour associated with pure hovering." It is the hour she would wake with her baby son. From the title poem: "When my son was an infant we woke for his early feeding at l'heure bleue--cerulean, gentian, hyacinth, delft, jouvence. What were also the milk hours."

Other favorite lines and phrases, some blue: 

"In the blue silo of dawn, in earth-smoke and birch copse / where the river of hands meets the Elbe."

"a confusion of birds and fishes"

"a memory through which one hasn't lived"

"a moment of bluesmoke"

"l'heure bleue, hour of doorsteps lit by milk"

"pinning their intentions to a saint's dress"

"meaning did not survive that loss of sequence"

"something broken and personal, a memory"

"the stories nested, each opening to the next"

I should have anticipated this, as Forche is a poet of witness, but I didn't expect how strongly Blue Hour, especially its long abecedarian poem "On Earth," would connect to the other book I am currently reading, What is the What, by Dave Eggers, a novel based on the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. He and other orphans walked from Southern Sudan to Ethiopa, hoping for aid and relief, witnessing terrible things, including the murder of parents, siblings, and friends, beatings, death from hunger and fatigue. Some of Forche's lines stuck out as something one of these boys might see: "in this camp, so many refugees" or "the little notebook of poems in the pocket of a corpse." "On Earth" has beautiful things in it, but also terrible things, a litany of everything that can and does occur. This couplet in it even matches the novel's title in a way:

     the what is? gives the wrong answer
     the what is? has ruined thought

as does the litany of "what" in the W section of the poem. And the ending, of the poem, since the beginning of the novel recounts a robbery:

     your things have been taken
     your things have been taken away

Saints

My copy of Saints, by Reginald Gibbons (Persea Books, 1986), with its faint scent of damp, belonged to someone else, is signed and inscribed, somebody local, now gone. I am reading layers of lines in it, what's written, how this book's previous reader may have received it, and my usual and ongoing connections to other poetry books I've read this August. As I mentioned yesterday, this title seemed like it might be good Sunday reading, and I turned first to a poem called "Sermon of the New Preacher," which is exactly that, a sermon, in prose. 

The preacher is exhorting his listeners not to make excuses for their crimes of the heart:

But Brother, you say. Brother, I have needs, I'm in trouble, or I'm in pain, or I have sorrows and worries and wounds! I'm in debt, and my son won't straighten out, and my wife doesn't love me the way she once did, Brother, I'm talking about me!

The marriage lament reminds me of lines in Corinne Lee's Pyx, and there is a similar loving wish for childen in Gibbons's "Elsewhere Children" but now for everyone's children, and the lost children of the homeless woman in a doorway: "As for wishing you always free of ordinary pain

     like a father's or a mother's, I might
     as well wish food into dead refrigerators
     and the warmth to come out of these store-windows
     into the street and do some good.

Gibbons's own tender domestic poems alternate with poems of public concern, several in Chicago settings I recognize, having lived there, and poems in other voices. "The Vanishing Point" shows us a man drawing "a severely rectilinear highway scene" in the subway station at Chicago and State. (Been there.) "American Trains" resonates with the train-riding poems in Dynamite, except Gibbons is mostly writing about passenger trains and Carlson-Wee was riding the rails via freight trains. Right up until the end, where the train also becomes metaphorical, I think:

     and there's the one you and I got on,
          that started downhill with the weight
          of what we felt and is still a plummet,
          always and always faster till it has us shaking,
          out of breath, scared... "A freight train,"
          I said when you asked me, "What is this?"

The section/long poem called "Saints" begins with an epigraph by Allen Tate: All violent people secretly desire to be be curbed by something they respect, so that they may become known to themselves. Gibbons incorporates the epigraph in the section called "In the Violent Ward," adding his own wisdom in the voice of the violent, or once violent:

     we can't be sure we want to get well---
     once you go out, time starts again
     your wounds may heal
     and you'll want to wound someone.

That does seem to be the way of it, so often. And Gibbons has also described and anticipated the current state of the political world in America in this stanza from his sad but rollicking "The Snarling Dog (A Song, Loud & Rough)":

     Have you heard people tell of the danger to us all
     when this one's elected or that one breaks jail?
     It's twice what you heard anyone tell
     and they got the snarling dog on a chain at heel.

Well, the dog days of August are officially, almanacally over, I guess, but I'll be out there today, forecast to be hot and humid, for the local Sweet Corn Circus, with circus gymnasts and steamed sweet corn in the streets, right after church.

Pyx

Finding the next book to read each day, here in the August Sealey Challenge, is sometimes entirely random, sometimes speculative or intuitive. As the weekend approached, I saw that Pyx, by Corinne Lee, and Saints, by Reginald Gibbons, books in my stacks in baskets (both coincidentally in the National Poetry Series) had titles tending toward potential Sunday reading. "Pyx" is a container for the Eucharist. When I opened Pyx to the first poem, "Lysistrata Motley," I found an immediate coincidence, since yesterday's poet, Jessy Randall, references Lysistrata in Mathematics for Ladies: "Oh, ladies, you hear what I'm saying loud and clear. / Have you read Lysistrata?" So Pyx it is!

But for today, Saturday, aka Slattern Day in the blog, not Sunday. (Though, truthfully, I have already done some housework.)

From "Lysistrata Motley," in Pyx, I learned: "The Egyptians jettisoned

     a mummy's cerebrum, knowing
     the heart should do
     all thinking.

Good to know, in all the ways. More coincidence: "Conveniently, the fabulous hat / appears // on the bed." Lines that bring back all the fabulous hats I saw last night in a production of Crowns, by Regina Taylor, with the Coalescence Theatre Project. And here's another: "Going over the falls / in a barrel / with the dreamed of, but born awry." Out of its context, but wonderful on its own, and evoking, for me, the cover of The Niagara River!

Everything connects, and a month of poetry confirms it!

The once again helpful notes at the end of Pyx alerted me to how the poem "After the Caves" connects to Helen Frankenthaler's Before the Caves and Frida Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Humningbird. The latter also connects with Lee's poem "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklet and Crow," which begins, "Loneliness / of coral. But beyond yonder window, a spoon bends," showing you the simultaneity of emotion and surreal images in Pyx. These lines from "After the Caves" hurt in themselves and made me seek out the painters and paintings:

          If born with plenary,

     the infant
     daughter might have had

     a rib like mine.
     Instead, this portrait

     of woman as table.
     Carved by opener

     of the body.

The next poem, "Our Lady of the Divine Sacrum," made me look up the word "picador," also the name of a publisher I like. A picador is a kind of horseman in a bullfight, like other figures (matador, toreador), one who lances the bull to keep his head down. I looked it up in an actual book dictionary in the middle of the night, sleep still awry (to use a word from one of the poems!). Will there now be nightmares?

Indeed, this book has its own logic, like a dream. I celebrate each time I connect, as if I might be interpreting the dream correctly. Having written a Bigfoot poem myself, I delight to read "As Bigfoot, I Interpret Our Heyday," even though it's a lament about a bad time in a marriage. I connect to "Excavation" in its relentless need to protect children, their vulnerability. These children have gone on a mock archeological dig:

          Like my shoveling toddlers, I want
     the world to be pristine,
     of my design--playground wounds like zippers, raptors
     that only kiss dumpling hands.

I do love the more "domestic" poems in Pyx, the tumbling love of children, as well as the overall love of language in it. I love how philosophy slips in gently, relentlessly, alongside the quotidien: "Since we reside in a garden, / there is no purpose / but pollen." And to see, or assume, that the marriage survives, there is continued family life! Or does it slip away?

          There was the night

     we wed, you feeding me marzipan pawpaws
     with your teeth. Our love

     not yet shrouded
     by time's daft--but accurate--disguises.

And, though not named as August, there is an August feel to the opening of "Substratum":

     Setting paper cups
     of Shiraz

     at yarrow's edges
     for the elves. The cicadas throbbing.

The cicadas are still throbbing here, where I am, in August.