Green is the Orator (6 page)

on the rough-to-touch.
Come back

it goes

come back
.

It is late when the rummage gets underway. The air smells more

of earth than decks. Dockhands brag

to pretty bonnets, cormorants spear at wavy profits.

Now for a password

to work at all. For “walnut” to open

a single star.

I'm done with the worst of cursed and cursing.

When the wind stands me up

so I do not fall, I'll forget which psalm

works against which sin.

Lap the evening water where it blackens. Cat where I cannot see

habit the light in cells. Morning would have a river in its mouth.

Oil of the flower's every step. Never a word, neither a star—

but blue to the end of remembering.

Up in the middle of the yard

is a fishing net being mended in good light. So that even

  the atheist's novel was a place to choose to live.

Bound together for motion in sunshine, the pages felt more

than a few lives long. Flowers orange

and joyful-yellow, but stuck in dusts

of human traffic, the jewelweed & touch-me-nots

  could release

their contents

at the slightest brush.
It is better—it shall be better with me

because I have known you
.

Can I hope to say it

  in any case? To blossom is thoughtless—

so we barely leave room

for each other to blossom.

Summer: the wild carrot umbel went to seed.

Summer: the wild carrot umbel could recite

  the bird nest's negative space. I am not afraid

of the concave shape. These were our common names—

the names for which

we had something in common.

I borrow my book title from a line in Wallace Stevens's poem “Repetitions of a Young Captain.”

“Greeting Osiris” excerpts, used as epigraphs for section markers 1, 2, and 3, come from Normandi Ellis's translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead:
Awakening Osiris
© 1988 used with permission of Phanes Press, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC .

SALT MARSH, THICK WITH BEHAVIORS

The Comma landing in and flying out of the sentence “A woman should behave herself naturally” is a species of butterfly and also a punctuation mark that alters, ever so slightly, some lines borrowed from
The Philadelphia Story:

JARDINS SOUS LA PLUIE

After one of the 1967 Ceri Richards paintings by this title.

SWEET HABIT OF THE BLOOD

I borrowed this phrase from George Eliot.

COMING TO THE FESTIVAL OF THE GOD OF BOUNDARIES

Termine, sive lapis sive es defossus in agro
stipes, ab antiquis tu quoque numen habes
.

Terminus, whether you are a stone or a stump buried in the field, from ancient days you too have been possessed of numen. (
OVID
,
Fasti
, Book 2)

Thanks to Juliana Froggatt and Richard Gridley for help with this translation.

RECESSIVE

This poem is an attempted conversation with the “Janicon” series of artist Paul Feiler.

SUNRISE WITH SEA MONSTERS

After the J. M. W. Turner painting.

THE BAD INFINITY

Written after a geological walking tour of the Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio.

MISCELLANY

Peter Mark Roget kept a classification notebook when he was only eight years old. One of the section headings was “Different Things” (a miscellany). This poem works with synonyms for the word
miscellany
, and with miscellaneous items from my own notebooks.

A GENERAL DISCRIMINATION OF SYNONYMS

… far less do I venture to thrid [
sic
] the mazes of the vast labyrinth into which I should be led by any attempt at a general discrimination of synonyms. The difficulties I have had to contend with have already been sufficiently great, without this addition to my labours. (
PETER MARK ROGET
)

ANTONYMS & INTERMEDIARIES

In many cases, two ideas which are completely opposed to each other, admit of an intermediate or neutral area, equidistant from both; all these being expressible by corresponding definite terms. (
PETER MARK ROGET
)

FIRST INSPIRATIONS OF THE NITROUS OXIDE

All the language in this pantoum is Roget's, taken verbatim from two sources: from a report he made to the Pneumatic Institute following his self-administration of the gas and (in smaller portions) from his introduction to his
Thesaurus
.

SECOND INSPIRATIONS OF THE NITROUS OXIDE

My information about Roget comes from D. L. Emblem's biography,
Peter Mark Roget: The Word and the Man
(New York: Thomas E. Crowell, 1970). This poem is for Jane Grogan, who, at age ten, made this sentence in response to grammar homework:
The musician has many guitars, but tonight he strummed his green guitar
.

DISHEVELED HOLINESS

Borrows from Whitman's “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and directly quotes T. E. Huxley (aka “Darwin's Bulldog”). In his book
Coleridge's Metaphors of Being
(Princeton University Press, 1979), Edward Kessler used the phrase “disheveled holiness” to describe Coleridge's sense of divinity.

AGAINST THE THRONE AND MONARCHY OF GOD

Title taken from line 42 of Milton's
Paradise Lost
(Book 1, “The Argument”).

ACOUSMATIC

This poem is for Mark and Elizabeth.

THE ORATOR'S MAXIMAL LIKELIHOOD

In statistics, “maximal likelihood” is a method used to fit a mathematical model to data. Estimating maximal likelihood helps to tune the “free parameters” of the model to real-world data.

THE BEAUTY OF WHERE WE HAVE BEEN LIVING

This poem is for my goddaughter, Lucy (May 25, 1994–July 21, 2006). The title is drawn from Robert Duncan's “Salvages: An Evening Piece”:
The tide of our purpose has gone back into itself, into its own counsels. And it is the beauty of where we have been living that is the poetry of the hour
.

INTRINSIC

Only something that has no history can be defined
is taken from Nietzsche.

WORK

Homage to William Morris, author of the utopian socialist novel
News from Nowhere;
designer of the Evenlode textile pattern; and all-around good thinker: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

SUMMER READING

The atheist is George Eliot. The novel (from which I quote) is
Daniel Deronda
.

I am very grateful to the journals that first published these poems, some in slightly different forms and by slightly different titles:

 

“Under the Veil of Wildness” is reprinted in Camille T. Dungy et al., eds.,
From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems That Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great
(New York: Persea Books, 2009).

I want to thank my family, friends, students, and teachers. For sending me all the way from China a stamp of “gladness” (“Ru Yi”—or, “the heart's content”) with complementary bright red ink, I want to give very special thanks to Qun. Thank you for sharing this stamp—and brightening its way—so generously. Thanks also to Chris Flint, whose careful translation of passages from “The Spiritual Canticle” of St. John, though they do not ultimately appear in the book, were not for naught!

NEW CALIFORNIA POETRY

For
, by Carol Snow

Enola Gay
, by Mark Levine

Selected Poems
, by Fanny Howe

Sleeping with the Dictionary
, by Harryette Mullen

Commons
, by Myung Mi Kim

The Guns and Flags Project
, by Geoffrey G. O'Brien

Gone
, by Fanny Howe

Why/Why Not
, by Martha Ronk

A Carnage in the Lovetrees
, by Richard Greenfield

The Seventy Prepositions
, by Carol Snow

Not Even Then
, by Brian Blanchfield

Facts for Visitors
, by Srikanth Reddy

Weather Eye Open
, by Sarah Gridley

Subject
, by Laura Mullen

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs
, by Juliana Spahr

The Totality for Kids
, by Joshua Clover

The Wilds
, by Mark Levine

I Love Artists
, by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Harm
., by Steve Willard

Green and Gray
, by Geoffrey G. O'Brien

The Age of Huts (compleat)
, by Ron Silliman

Selected Poems, 1974–2006: it's go in horizontal
, by Leslie Scalapino

rimertown/an atlas
, by Laura Walker

Ours
, by Cole Swensen

Virgil and the Mountain Cat: Poems
, by David Lau

Sight Map: Poems
, by Brian Teare

Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy
, by Keith Waldrop

R's Boat
, by Lisa Robertson

Green is the Orator
, by Sarah Gridley

Writing the Silences
, by Richard O. Moore