The Literary Piano

Marginalia, by Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Cyclone Plotting, by Felicity Plunkett

The danger is that we’ll drink this one quick drink too fast. The
danger is that one vodka beckons, flirting, to the next. The
   danger
is that, catching vodka’s white wave, I could spill, purple. The
   danger is
that I will become a nest of Matryoshka dolls, falling out of
   myself. The danger is that
your umbrella, stripping its black veils one by one, will spoke
   my eye. The
danger is that the rain, hard, will fill the streets with people,
   pushing. The danger
is that with the smallest shove I’ll miss my train. The danger is
that your every gesture, like a Cocteau film, must be
   deciphered. The danger is that
if I’m not lifted out of this hot storm everything will open,
   slippery and roof-shaking.
The danger is that I have invented you, and your hip bumping
   mine promisingly. The
danger is that the rain will wash away my lightning-flash
   glamour. The danger
is that you feel my softening. The danger is that you know it
   already. The danger is
that my rained-on hair cannot pretend to be a satin sheet.
   The danger is that
the only umbrella I have is paper, crimson and stuck in my
   third drink.
The danger is that I am well out of my depth in this gutterless
   downpour. The
danger is that you feel the mercury’s rise and rise. The danger
is that you don’t feel its rise, retaining your leather-jacketed
   cool. The danger is
that I am making this up out of nothing. The danger is that.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond, by e. e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

A Young Poet, by Jane Miller

For begging beauty
one can hardly blame the artist

sleeping like butter in the sun
taking no action for action

some prefer being a yellow rose petal
I learned when I traveled

the young poet saying a prayer
is a form of panic

The Novel as Manuscript, by Norman Dubie

                     —an ars poetica


I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps 
like immense museum masterpieces
patchwork
wrapped in linen, tea stained,
with hemp for strapping…

these colored stamps designed for foreign places
were even printed during famine—
so when they vanished, so did the whole
Soviet system:
the Berlin Wall, tanks from Afghanistan
and Ceausescu’s bride before a firing squad.

It had begun with the character of Yuri Zhivago
in a frozen wilderness, the summer house
of his dead in-laws, his 
pregnant mistress asleep
before the fireplace
with flames dancing around a broken chair, piano keys
and the gardener’s long black underwear.

Lara lying there. A vulgar fat businessman
coming by sleigh to collect her for the dangers
of a near arctic escape…

But for Yuri, not that long ago, he was
with celebrity, 
a young doctor publishing a thin volume
of poems in France, he was writing
now at a cold desk
poems against all experience
and for love of a woman buried
in moth-eaten furs on the floor—

while he wrote
wolves out along the green treeline
howled at him. The author of this novel,
Boris Pasternak arranged it all. Stalin would
have liked to have killed him. But superstition kept him from it.
So, the daughter of Pasternak’s mistress eventually 
is walking with a candle
through a prison basement—
she is stepping over acres of twisted corpses
hoping to locate her vanished mother…
she thinks this reminds her of edging slowly
over the crust on a very deep snow, just a child who believes 
she is about to be swallowed by the purity of it all,
like this write your new poems.

(Source: poets.org)

The Hurricane, by William Carlos Williams

The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You
have your heaven,
it said, go to it.

On the Nature of Understanding, by Kay Ryan

Say you hoped to
tame something
wild and stayed
calm and inched up
day by day. Or even
not tame it but
meet it halfway.
Things went along.
You made progress,
understanding
it would be a
lengthy process,
sensing changes
in your hair and
nails. So it’s
strange when it
attacks: you thought
you had a deal.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Sysiphusina, by Shira Dentz

place where i gulp,

a tiny back room

somewhere distant and indistinct,

or a small house off a backroad &

cozy with little turkish rugs, crayon-colored furniture and things,

dollhouse-size, but alive,

flexing wide like a spongy sea creature

or lung. forming want.

[ ]

i try plying it with different tastes—tea, chorizo, avocado, nuts—

but nothing doing;

no more than opening and shutting windows

stalls the mount to heat frenzy and returning chill;

the gape stays still,

shadowed like Humphrey Bogart in a trenchcoat on some staircase

(stirring for a cigarette)

Language Mesh, by Paul Celan*

Eye’s roundness between the bars.

Vibratile monad eyelid
propels itself upward,
releases a glance.

Iris, swimmer, dreamless and dreary:
the sky, heart-grey, must be near.

Athwart, in the iron holder,
the smoking splinter.
By its sense of light
you divine the soul.

(If I were like you. If you were like me.
Did we not stand
under one trade wind?
We are strangers.)

The flagstones. On them,
close to each other, the two
heart-grey puddles: two
mouthsfull of silence.

*Trans. Michael Hamburger

(Source: donnafleischer.wordpress.com)

The Tempest, Act V, Scene I [Where the bee sucks, there suck I], by William Shakespeare

Ariel sings

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Memory Town, by Anne Carson

In each one of you I paint.
I find.
A buried site of radioactive material.
You think 8 miles down is enough?
15 miles?
140 miles?

Twentieth-Century Master, by Peter Boyle

He leant across the lectern
in the half light.
Like a bird from the sky
speaking its precise ornithological name
he lowered his enormous eyes
and unfolded paper with the open hands
of a delicate butcher.
Five faces threaded their earnest gaze
upon his brow,
listening.

Later on he was caught with a cat in an embarrassing photograph.
Rumours surfaced
of love affairs with underage girls
and their mothers
at the same time.
A frontier was redrawn.
An army changed sides.
He adjusted his palette
slightly.
Instead of listening
he invited looking.
Some journalist
getting in wrong
stated that his right ball was bigger than his left.
The Central Committee sensing political implications
placed an interdict on the dissemination of his images.
Eight hundred and fifty thousand people
queued up in the snow
to see a retrospective of his masterpieces.

Art is loneliness. 

(Source: poetrylibrary.edu.au)

A Short History of the Apple, by Dorianne Laux

The crunch is the thing, a certain joy in crashing through
living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days.
— Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert, 1929

Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.
Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.
Eve’s knees ground in the dirt
of paradise. Newton watching
gravity happen. The history
of apples in each starry core,
every papery chamber’s bright
bitter seed. Woody stem
an infant tree. William Tell
and his lucky arrow. Orchards
of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.
Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.
Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.
Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.
The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.
Snow White with poison on her lips.
The buried blades of Halloween.
Budding and grafting. John Chapman
in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward
Expansion. Apple pie. American
as. Hard cider. Winter banana.
Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet
by hives of Britain’s honeybees:
white man’s flies. O eat. O eat.

Study for Love’s Body, by Katherine Larson

I. Landscape with Yellow Birds

The theories of Love
have become tremulous and complicated.
The way snow falls or Saturn revolves
repeatedly around some distance
where space is nothing
yet still something that separates.

Never mind time. Caterpillars
have turned the fruit trees
into body bags. The children paint
the mandibles of fallen ones with
silver meant for nursery stars.
Without the immense responsibility
of sympathy, these small deaths
are nothing more than
artifice. Like a single magnolia
in a cut glass bowl
we have no idea where
our roots went so suddenly.

II. Architecture in Ruins

Third floor of the doll factory,
ferns suck carbon
and sharper chemicals from air
near the women working.

They’re hunched over tables
of warped wood. 
Half of everyone is painting
eyes and lashes on porcelain heads, the rest
are threading hands to sleeves.  

Outside in the courtyard
a smattering of doves rise.
Have you ever wanted to
kiss a stranger’s hands?

III. Gardens Without Bats or Moss 

Gauguin writes to Theo van Gogh that in his painting he wants to suggest
the idea of suffering—without ever explaining what kind.

IV. In Stone Archways

The light is spilt green milk, which is languorous
as the red monkey Gauguin painted

by the brown body of Anna
the Javanese. At the Chinese Market

I buy two red teacups and a can
of coconut milk. I think—

Gauguin wouldn’t know
how Anna loved that monkey

and sang to him late at night.
Everywhere the sea screams

at me. A great pink slab of octopus arm,
beside it, babies seasoned in orange spices.

Such symmetry! Surely they swam
through the night like thirsty

flowers. I think you had it right
when you said love is the mathematics

of distance. Split like a clam on ice,
I feel raw, half-eaten. I rot

in the cold blue of the ego,
the crushed velvet of Anna’s chair.

**

As published on AGNI Online, 2010, via indigenousdialogues.