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Privileged
Winter
trees, brooding, self-absorbed.
The slow bright spot lost in the yellow leaves,
and
the birds that rush from the rooftops.
I dreamed of the sea in early summer
before
the tourists made their deadly rounds.
The composition of the day, ruined.
Tables,
chairs, newspapers folded neatly.
I envy
their measured lives—
the bicycle, propped against the trellised wall,
the
café, and its happy jingle of silverware.
I’m talking about the wine taken for granted
when
bombs shatter your neighbor’s house,
and all you want is a glass, a candle—
anything that vaguely resembles
the habits that keep you grounded
when
there is nothing left for you to do
except wait, and smoke,
crouched
in the corner of the hallway,
until the clarity of light lifts its ugly mask:
How noble art thou…
This
morning,
I woke up thinking of Chekhov,
pouring
his afternoon tea,
the cherry orchards,
shimmering
in the wet sun.
Perhaps it explains that dolorous note, right at the end,
that sad
string, plucked,
like so many leaves, falling,
and that
even the first blow of the axe—
cannot reach the wound
that
heals us.
Small Tree
after the photographer, Albert Renger-Patzsch
Perhaps it's the absence of color
that draws him near to this tree.
It is small, thin, and like a stark crow —
it waits for no one.
There is a white field and a white sky
turns beneath the branches.
The first rains have not yet come. And yet
it is winter. There is no sound from the
distant
shots, or the hospital filled
with the wounded...
Not a breath of wind, no birds or
perpetual smoke
from the empty houses in the village.
Perhaps he imagines the sky as a
frame of silence?
The tree, a sort of contrast, a line
drawn with chalk.
He has waited a long time to find this tree,
alone, in a somber moment.
Imagine the moon — as he adjusts the lens,
his subject focused into deeper light so that it's almost dark
a few yards back from the branches.
Is it not like a small boat,
drawing us close to the shore?
Remembering Giotto
After all, the night could only
afford a little rain
through folds of light,
and who could argue with the
sleep-walkers,
climbing back into their cars,
like clock-work?
Or Blake, for that matter,
who painted Newton under the ocean.
***
All morning I watched the
long-billed Dowitcher
pull across the lake,
the flat surface, with its glass of
dualism,
played the sun like music
from a different age.
It still captivates us—
Giotto's blue sky and leafless tree,
distinct from the burning-
away-angels.
Less clear than a memory, anyway, of
failure
and sickness of heart.
The way lovers will imitate the lost
summer
of darkness,
the slow rise out of the self,
unhealed—
for the time being,
(fog lamp in the pepper trees,
and all the corners of the fresco.)
But it's hard, sometimes, to settle
for anything less.
***
It's hard to remember
not to take it all for granted.
So I look, for the rest of the
morning,
with my binoculars focused on the
purple finch,
the poppies on fire.
The gulls begin their ballet in
grand strokes
Now all at
once,
they have risen together, floating
slowly upward,
closer than I imagined to Dante's
angels,
closer than I imagined
to light.
From The Other Side of the Night
Maybe it's true
that the nights are merely a temporary shift of color?
I can't say what
was going through her mind,
my mother at the
window,
washing the same dish for 15 minutes,
mesmerized by the
snow's hush in the red pines,
as if the body were
left momentarily
to its mechanical strings
and the soul rose
out of its frame like a cool rain in the open light,
a flurry of geese
tipped like a thousand candles—
until something
snaps,
like a parachute, and all the squares of acreage
grow larger and out
of focus,
the sad narration
of forks, spoons and left-over words,
propped up and
waiting on the table,
like a Chekhov
play.
____________
Some of us simply
tip our hats to the door,
like P.B. Shelley
in his storm-lit boat, like Socrates,
raising his cup of
hemlock,
much like that
character in Bukowski's Barfly,
toasting
cheerfully,
To all my frien-n-n-n-n-nds!
with one last swig
and then he buried the axe for good.
Did he actually
believe he was going from here to the Intelligible?
And why did he hope
to meet with Agamemnon?
Did the hemlock
rush to his brain—
or just to his heart?
In any event, he
died, feeling a whole lot better without us,
leaving his body to
the women to wash, and the sun,
crossing the
Acropolis,
Apollo, in a dome of trees.
____________
Time forgives no
one,
not even Agamemnon's cruel thrust,
forcing himself
into the frightened slave girl,
Achilles' loss.
____________
In the distant
field,
a chorus of silence,
in the distant
rock,
a chorus of ruin,
in the distant
trees,
a chorus of slumber,
in the distant
wind,
a chorus sings of ghosts.
____________
Some nights,
when it's clear you've left forever,
when everything
slows down long enough to feel its grief,
burning like the
morning's river,
I let the dark fall
upon the sweet grass, inch by inch,
I let it fall and
fall until the rain gives up,
until the night
proves otherwise.
It's like a tide
that takes you in,
always out and farther away
than the playful
yelps of the seagulls.
Whatever you see is
lost to a bit of sky, a field of ambiguity,
the window that
faces north,
the
perhaps of some distant moment…
cold as November's
stars.
Jacqueline Marcus'
debut collection of poems, Close to the Shore, was published by Michigan
State University Press (December 2002). Jacqueline Marcus' poems have
appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, The Journal, The Ohio Review, The
Literary Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Poetry International and elsewhere. She
teaches philosophy at Cuesta College and is the editor of ForPoetry.com.
For a complete biography, click
here.
"Privileged" first appeared in Faultline,
"Small Tree" and "The Other Side of the Night" first appeared in The
Cider Press Review, and "Remembering Giotto" first appeared in Mid-American
Review.
Click here
to read more poems from Close to the Shore.
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