Stay, Illusion Read online

  Stay, Illusion

  Lucie Brock-Broido

  Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2013

  This Is a Borzoi Book

  Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright ©2013 by Lucie Brock-Broido

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com/poetry

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This page–this page constitute an extension of this page.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96204-1

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-96202-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brock-Broido, Lucie.

  [Poems. Selections]

  Stay, Illusion : Poems / By Lucie Brock-Broido.—First Edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-96202-7 (Hardcover)

  I. Title.

  PS3552.R6145A6 2013

  811’.54—dc23 2013023978

  Jacket image: The Wilton Diptych (reverse, detail). Anonymous, 14th c. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

  Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

  First Edition

  v3.1

  For My Sisters

  Annie, Julie, and Melissa

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I

  INFINITE RICHES IN THE SMALLEST ROOM

  A MEADOW

  FREEDOM OF SPEECH

  YOU HAVE HARNESSED YOURSELF RIDICULOUSLY TO THIS WORLD

  CURRYING THE FALLOW-COLORED HORSE

  MEDITATION ON THE SOURCES OF THE CATASTROPHIC IMAGINATION

  HEAT

  DOVE, INTERRUPTED

  DEAR SHADOWS,

  SELECTED POEM

  LUCID INTERVAL

  OF TOOKIE WILLIAMS

  FOR A CLOUDED LEOPARD IN ANOTHER LIFE

  PAX ARCANA

  CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

  FATHER, IN DRAWER

  II

  EXTREME WISTERIA

  POSTHUMOUS SEDUCTION

  NOTES FROM THE TREPIDARIUM

  MISFITS

  IN OWL WEATHER

  HUMANE FARMING

  EIGHT TAKES OF TRAKL AS HIMSELF

  JUST-SO STORY

  SLEEKER, CURRIER

  MENTAL MUSEUM

  SILENTIUM

  A GIRL’S WILL

  THE STORY OF FRAULEIN X

  GREAT RECKONING IN A LITTLE ROOM

  UNCOLLECTED POEM

  GOULDIAN KIT

  III

  OF RICKEY RAY RECTOR

  SALT LICK IN SNOW

  MOON RIVER

  OBSERVATIONS FROM THE GLASGOW COMA SCALE

  RUBY GARNETT’S ORNAMENT, CIRCA 1892

  THREE MEMORIES OF HEAVEN

  RED THREAD

  DEATH XXL

  LITTLE INDUSTRY OF GHOSTS

  SCARINISH, MINGINISH, GRIMINISH

  THE MATADOR

  DOVE, ABIDING

  A GIRL AGO

  TWO GIRLS AGO

  GAUDY INFINITESIMAL

  HELLO BABIES, WELCOME TO EARTH

  IV

  BIRD, SINGING

  THE PIANIST

  ON HAVING CONTRACTED THE HABIT OF BELIEVING IN THE INTERIOR WORLD

  ATTITUDE OF LION

  CONSIDERING THE POSSIBLE MUSIC OF YOUR HAIR

  FAME RABIES

  LUCID INTERVAL

  THE ILLUMINATED KUNITZ

  WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE

  MEDIEVAL WARM TIME

  CAVE PAINTING OF A DUN HORSE

  MANDLESTAM

  NON-FICTION POEM

  CARPE DEMON

  FOR A SNOW LEOPARD IN OCTOBER

  A CAGE GOES IN SEARCH OF A BIRD

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  I

  INFINITE RICHES IN THE SMALLEST ROOM

  Silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.

  If it is written down, you can’t rescind it.

  Spoon and pottage bowl. You are starving. Come closer now.

  What if I were gone and the wind still reeks of hyacinth, what then.

  Who will I be: a gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple-size gray circle

  On the tunic of a Jew, preventing more bad biological accidents

  From breeding-in. I have not bred—

  In. Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not

  Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin.

  The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness.

  Blue-footed mushrooms line the walkway to my door. I would as soon

  Die as serve them in a salad to the man I love. We lie down

  In the shape of a gondola. Venice is gorgeous cold. 3 December,

  Unspeakable anxiety about locked-in syndrome, about a fourth world.

  I cannot presume to say. The violin spider, she

  Has six good eyes, arranged in threes.

  The rims of wounds have wounds as well.

  Sphinx, small print, you are inscrutable.

  On the roads, blue thistles, barely

  Visible by night, and, by these, you may yet find your way home.

  A MEADOW

  What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one

  Of the several contraptions I can turn on the off-button to at will.

  Yes, yes, of course it is an “Art.” Of course I will not be here

  Long, not the way the percentages are going now.

  He might have been

  Half-beautiful in a certain optic nerve

  Of light, but legible only at particular

  Less snowy distances. I was fixed on

  The poplar and the dread. The night was lung-colored

  And livid still—he would have my way

  With me. In this district of late

  Last light, indicated by the hour

  Of the beauty of his neck, his face was Arabian in contour

  Like a Percheron grazing in his dome of grass.

  If there is a god, he is not done

  Yet, as if continuing to manhandle the still lives of

  The Confederate dead this far north, this time of year, each

  Just a ghostly reason now. Of course there are reasons. One:

  Soon the wind will blow Pentecostal with the power of group prayer.

  Two: the right to bear arms. Three: he did not find my empathy

  Supernatural, at the very least!

  —Have you any ideas that are new?

  I was fixed on the scythe and the harlequin, on the priggish

  Butcher as he cut the tenderloin and

  When I saw this spectacle, I wanted to live for

  A moment for a moment. However inelegant it was,

  It was what it might have been to be alive, but tenderly.

  One thing. One thing. One thing:

  Tell me there is

  A meadow, afterward.

  FREEDOM OF SPEECH

  If my own voice falters, tell them hubris was my way of adoring you.

  The hollow of the hulk of you, so feverish in life, cut open,

  Reveals ten thousand rags of music in your thoracic cavity.

  The hands are received bagged and examination reveals no injury.

  Winter then, the body is cold to the touch, unplunderable,

  Kept in its drawer of old-world harrowing.

  Teeth in fair repair. Will you be buried where; nowhere.

/>   Your mouth a globe of gauze and glossolalia.

  And opening, most delft of blue,

  Your heart was a mess—

  A mob of hoofprints where the skittish colts first learned to stand,

  Catching on to their agility, a shock of freedom, wild-maned.

  The eyes have hazel irides and the conjunctivae are pale,

  With hemorrhaging. One lung, smaller, congested with rose smoke.

  The other, filled with a swarm of massive sentimentia.

  I adore you more. I know

  The wingspan of your voice, whole gorgeous flock of harriers,

  Cannot be taken down. You would like it now, this snow, this hour.

  Your visitation here tonight not altogether unexpected.

  The night-laborers, immigrants all, assemble here, aching for to speaking,

  Longing for to work.

  YOU HAVE HARNESSED YOURSELF RIDICULOUSLY TO THIS WORLD

  Tell the truth I told me When I couldn’t speak.

  Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship Or a child

  Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer

  In the 1930s Toward the iron lung of polio.

  According to the census I am unmarried And unchurched.

  The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.

  Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful

  Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of ice.

  I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.

  For whom left am I first?

  We have come to terms with our Self

  Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.

  CURRYING THE FALLOW-COLORED HORSE

  And to the curious I say, Don’t be naïve.

  The soul, like a trinket, is a she.

  I lay down in the tweed of one man that first frost night. I did not like the wool of him.

  You have one mitochondrial speck of evidence on your cleat.

  They can take you down for that.

  Did I forget to mention that when you’re dead

  You’re dead a long time.

  My uncle, dying, told me this when asked, Why stay here for such suffering.

  A chimney swift flits through the fumatorium.

  I long for one last Blue democracy, which has broke my heart a while.

  How many minutes have I left, the lover asked, To still be beautiful?

  I took his blond face in my hands and kissed him blondely on his mouth.

  MEDITATION ON THE SOURCES OF THE CATASTROPHIC IMAGINATION

  Green as alchemy and even more scarce, little can be known

  Of the misfortunes of a saint condemned to turn great sorrows

  Into greater egrets, ice-bound and irrevocable. The wings were left ajar

  At the altar where I’ve knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough

  As sugar raw, and sweet. From the outside, peering in, it would seem

  My life had been smooth as a Prussian ship gliding on the bridegroom

  Of her Baltic waters in a season of no wind. Tinny empire,

  Neighborhood of Bokhara silks, were you to go, I would stop—simply

  As a pilgrim putting down his cup. Most of my life,

  I had consorted with the unspeakable, longing to put my mouth

  On it. I was just imagining. I can be

  Resumed. Some nights, I paint into the scene two Doves,

  I being alternately one and then the other, calling myself by my kind.

  In the living will if it says: Hydrate. Please.

  Hydration only. Do not resume me then.

  HEAT

  In Belarus, the fourteen-year-olds one thin flight away

  Heard Oswald singing in the shower,

  In his cool American. It was 1959. In crush

  They sent a note to say how sweet

  A songbird he was then.

  Dear Girls, he wrote, I want very much to meet you, too.

  Four Novembers later not far from West Virginia, we were scooped

  Back home from elementary school in rain not-quite-yet snow

  To put our heads down in the mink-skin of our mothers’ laps.

  Open Carry is the law in Oklahoma now.

  I just feel more safe, said Joe Wood, cocked

  Among the waffles and the syrups and the diners

  At the diner there. On the jukebox, Lefty Frizzell

  Is singing “Long Black Veil” inside the flannel rain.

  Well back beyond the Iron Curtain, I write to you tonight

  From Minsk, where no child will ever cry into my lap, all seal

  And cashmere, chintz. I put my eye against the peephole

  Drilled so long ago through Oswald’s bedroom wall

  And see the leafless world all quietened.

  My little gun’s a Lady one. I just want to feel secure

  And I’m probably dead on. I want very much

  To meet you. I would be, as ever, yours.

  DoVE, INTERRUPTED

  Don’t do that when you’re dead like this, I said,

  Arguably still squabbling about the word inarguably.

  I haunt Versailles, poring through the markets of the medieval.

  Mostly meat to be sold there. Mutton hangs

  Like laundry pinkened on its line.

  And gold! —a chalice with a cure for living in it.

  We step over the skirt of an Elizabeth.

  Red grapes, a delicacy, each peeled for us—each sheath

  The vestment of a miniature priest, disrobed.

  A sister is an Old World sparrow placed in a satin shoe.

  The weakling’s saddle is worn down from just too much sad attitude.

  No one wants to face the “opaque reality” of herself.

  For the life of me.

  I was made American. You must consider this.

  Whatever suffering is insufferable is punishable by perishable.

  In Vienne, the rabbit Maurice is at home in the family cage.

  I ache for him, his boredom and his solitude.

  On suffering and animals, inarguably, they do.

  I miss your heart, my heart.

  DEAR SHADOWS,

  If it gets any darker in here no one will ever be able to see again, like cats

  With their eyes sewn shut at birth.

  I could barely stand to write what I just wrote just now.

  On the heavy walnut table—numbles for roasting on a truss of fire,

  The loin, a spit, an iron moving in a fit of blood.

  Here, sit in the lap of me and purr.

  Once in the imagination’s feckless luck, in the excelsior of living wild, I wore a pinafore

  Of linsey-woolsey cloth—knowing he was too shy to unbutton it in back.

  Miss Stein would never, not in this life, appear unto my vex of work.

  What is not ever said you can’t take back.

  Goats slaughtered young would have made the softest gloves for him, his hands.

  Pronouns are not to be trifled with, possessive ones or otherwise.

  (Mine is a gazelle, of course.)

  I am of a fine mind to worship the visible world, the woo and pitch and sign of it.

  And all that would be buried in the drama of my going on.

  SELECTED POEM

  Who was I—lying in the cattails and the milkweed’s flue,

  In the tiny adjectival prows of leaves of sugar maples and of great

  Oak trees; the burrs of newly dying things were in my hair.

  A girl in gentle murder in the bowl of being there.

  Nothing was rhetorical.

  Everything was sepia.

  It was a time when my father may have been alive.

  In the Gargoyle Store, I buy a gryphon off the rack.

  When I go home, I am Solange in Jean Genet’s The Maids.

  The production moves through the sooty basements of churches

  Full
of persons wrapped in the coppery leather limbs of methadone.

  Their arms are scarified and wracked with rain.

  I am still almost a virgin, technically.

  I have made promises I may not keep, go on with my

  Soliloquy and was some kind of beautiful.

  LUCID INTERVAL

  Tread very gingerly; you’ve used up almost all the words.

  Heavy worry about growing small again, but this time accidentally.

  Don’t be so fanciful. If you’d add those mustard-family vegetables

  To the pot roast It would feed so many more.

  Shepherds are still tender in a time of war.

  New lovers plagiarize say awkward things and yearn.

  My heart’s desire would be only to desire, but not to grasp.

  And not by yonder blessed celestial anything I swear.

  OF TOOKIE WILLIAMS

  A thousand inmates’ spoons for music

  While the paper kite flies like a boy-weed caught

  In wind from San Quentin to nestle in the next

  Prison and the next. Do not do this thing,

  The kite said,

  But not that gently on the page of it.

  No, said

  The Governor, Not if Mr. Williams won’t atone.

  Underground, a pen of clemency will not irritate

  The vellum of the night.

  There was a snag, the warden said.

  So enormous was Tookie’s arm

  The needle couldn’t enter it, eleven minutes poking

  There to find the vein,

  Thirty-six to put him down.

  Tookie was a big man,

  The warden said, But it’s only salt that stops

  The heart—you know—that simple.

  But if I say “simple” for example, I mean

  That in the private gardens

  Of our aristocracy, the animals are haltered in

  Or bled out broad by

  Day and when they take them down,

  The children are only very gently

  Sad, a habit of the class they were born to.

  Me, I am not “mean,” I’m told, only

  Vengeful, which is a relief to me, of course.

  The wind is kicking up now. Lung for lung.

  Soon I will be done for.

  On his last night here on earth, he took only milk.

  FOR A CLOUDED LEOPARD IN ANOTHER LIFE

  You were a seed still in Darwin’s left breast pocket,

  Not imagined yet, almost invisible in the felt

  There just above his heart,

  The bluey nubbin sleeping in a child’s

  Unmarred arms.

  Things vanish in the morning when we wake

  Like loam that only grows on buttermilk, at night.

  In April, a tiny feline on the ledges of a billow cloud,

  Or like the finch let loose in the mossery, you were ended