Read an Excerpt
Anyone
By Nate Klug The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-19700-5
CHAPTER 1
WORK
It hides its edges
in speed, it has
no edges. Plus every time
he thinks he knows
it closely enough—can discriminate
centripetal force
from what gets sheared
straight off—
direction changes:
through stunned space the blade
snaps back,
turtles into its handle,
and starts over spinning
the other way.
All along the chopped-up sidewalk
(the need to keep
breaking what we make
to keep making)
the concrete saw
plunges and resurfaces,
precise as a skull;
it glints against
the small smoke
of its own work.
CONJUGATIONS
This early the garden's bare
but people pay to walk it,
at plots of budless brush
stop, as if remembering,
and stoop to mouth the names—
araucaria
araucana, monkey
puzzle tree, something
Japanese—each particular
ridiculous to be.
MILTON'S GOD
Where I-95 meets The Pike,
a ponderous thunderhead flowered—
stewed a minute, then flipped
like a flash card, tattered
edges crinkling in, linings so dark
with excessive bright
that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge,
the onlooker couldn't decide
until the end, or even then,
what was revealed and what had been hidden.
LETTER OF INTRODUCTION, SAMUEL PALMER TO HIS PATRON
Not a naturalist by profession—
though one does attend the need, now and then,
what could be called compulsion, even,
of first-rate distances; I mean
I like the look of light
ruffling mosses and knotgrass, the way
perception rambles to catch upon
the particular heat of an oak tree's
barky furrows: a life,
in other words, spent far from the globosities
of Art, and not without its own
excesses—those shy infrequent glimpses,
half-returned, of one
of the Tatham girls in town—which straightaway incite
the eyes' darting artilleries
beneath my spoiled spectacles.
P.S. Am looking for a wife.
THINKING
(after Virgil, Aeneid 8)
News comes from Latium
and now he has to decide; but thinking,
too quick for itself, splits as it starts,
it pours into one plan's form
then jars and recombines, as if
to elaborate his fate from every angle
were to understand it:
so the light
held within a copper bowl
of water, shaking back the sun
or a moon's glimmering particles,
will flit and work upon the walls
and crannies in an empty room,
rising to strike the ceiling, trembling,
though both water and bowl are still.
THE CHOICE
To stand sometime
outside my faith
to steady it
caught and squirming on a stick
up to mind's
inviting light
and name it!
for all its faults and facets
or keep waiting
to be claimed in it
DUSK IN JASPER COUNTY
Silos and the animals slowing
almost stumbling
among their shadows
hills fuzzed with a concentration of mist
so pale it cannot be darkness, then it is
as I-80 blinks
and unfolds
dumbly as a sea road
or certain sleeplessness
blank cracked ceiling staring back
at your desire
sick for several lives
and each at once
HOME
Whorl of underpasses, off-ramps,
freeways that splay
running sedans and tanker trucks
to odd-numbered interstates
with Indian names:
everything aiming
at everything
and just missing
in eternal roar and return,
sky fixed with the rickety
circuitry of an old roller coaster park
when we break
out of the airport tunnel—
ascension, assimilation:
even the wish
in the back of a cab not to think
comes with its own
moving pictures and music.
NEIGHBORS
The sounds dawn slowly
on the drifting brain,
steaming up through the flooring and flecked carpet
like an unidentified, but welcome, scent,
from their sources below
gently extending a circumference.
It might start, prolific mornings, around ten.
More often, though, I didn't hear them
until well into the afternoon,
a muffled two-part counterpoint, indistinct at first
from passing subwoofed hip-hop
or the delimber machine, stewing and rattling
several houses down—
how helpless,
how easily betrayed to their true worth
are the efforts of thought,
fidgeting among illustrious books
whenever the strangers' familiar sighs rise up.
TO EGNATIUS, WHO WON'T STOP SMILING
(after Catullus)
Picture him on a defendant's bench in Rome:
a lawyer clears his throat,
shuffles folders,
preparing to rework an old tearjerker
while the whole crowd leans in, silent, intent
—except for one Egnatius,
smiling like an idiot,
thinking how white his teeth will appear
to all these people. Or at the funeral home,
paying our respects
to the young dead captain,
a touch on the shoulder and whispered lie
to his sobbing mother—happen to turn
and see Egnatius,
hovering in the corner
by the cheap cheeses: there's that wandering gaze
and shit-eating grin again. Anything could be
going on, anywhere;
Egnatius will be there,
clueless as to his illness, smiling. Short Sabines,
fat Etruscans, Lanuvinians who have black skin,
and those of us native
to Verona, we each keep
our teeth reasonably clean—and hidden.
We've heard, Egnatius, where you come from.
And it seems it is the custom
in your Spain, after one awakes
and pisses, to wash out the mouth with one's own urine.
So from now on, whenever you show up at something,
your bared chompers enviably white,
we'll all take it as a sign
you must have drunk an extra cup that morning.
JON'S JOG
At Maspeth Creek, he cuts
his familiar unexpected path
along the old offal docks, dodging wrack
and the yawning delivery truck,
following hunches in a dawn haze
while the drifting grit and airborne
oils, the night soil smell
that never quite left this part of the borough,
begin to work into his skin
like strange fuels, driving him
back up towards the big avenues,
alleys shrugging off shadow now
as a bodega owner unlocks, locks, and unlocks
a stuck grate, until the sallow glare
of the Boar's Head factory reappears,
marking the turn onto his street:
home early, his roommates still asleep,
skin itching with dust and sweat
and the first reckless edges of a fire
which is not change, but may contain it.
ADVENT
In the middle of December
to start over
to assume again
an order
at the end
of wonder
to conjure
and then to keep
slow dirty sleet
within its streetlight
PARADE
Fourth of July, New Hampshire
As with this Jet Ski family
braiding the lake
with bigger and bigger shocks
until the one
car-sized one
cuts his engine
and, following him, for an instant
they all coast
through silences
of self-made
rain—
how much violence
is required now
to carve,
out of the general
livable quiet,
independence?
A MESSAGE
(after Kafka)
So it runs: the Emperor, on his deathbed,
has a message for you,
humble subject, insignificant shadow.
With his left arm, now his right,
the holy messenger must fight
his way down the palace staircase,
past the coiled snake
of the waiting crowd: soldiers, beggars,
boys on tiptoes—could he reach the open
fields how he would fly, how soon you'd hear
the welcome chatter of fists
at your door. He's cleared
the inner chambers, still has the gardens to cross,
a second outer palace, more stairs,
new set of gardens, an outer palace.
It goes on like this for hundreds of years.
If at last he should limp through
the ultimate gate—never, it can never happen—
he'd see outstretched before him
the imperial capital, center of the world, rustling
with red wine and shit and music.
Here, nobody can make it, least of all
a corpse's courier. But you sit
at your apartment window, whispering
such a story into evening.
LULLABY ON ELECTION EVE
Let the salt night stir
among cinder blocks
and the old Caterpillar plough in the yard,
realty signs unhinged since Irene;
let snow, like a sandstorm
or Operation New Dawn,
cancel the low motel roofs, then the cars,
and prepare less predictable shapes.
No reason for us to have been here,
no messages but in sleep.
LOST SEASONS
1.
Squared into neat fires
edging the lawn,
maple leaves scatter
at the first swell of storm:
pile tops, like tile roofs,
lifted, assumed
into one brief
funneling garland of seed
that lurches above the pavement.
Tomorrow, a fretwork
of muddy leaf prints:
new birds crowding the dark.
2.
Streaked red by woodchips
and stacked contiguous
either side of the curb
like model mountain ranges
or near a drain grate islanded
in a stubborn, clinging scarp:
driveway gravel,
duff, two months of doggy marks
pressed together
until the ridges glitter
with a peeling spray-paint sheen
dry as Styrofoam—
too brittle now to melt
they'll wait, nearer air
each day, then disappear
one warm and sudden rain.
SHIFTS
Bridgeport Hospital, Connecticut
Glassed in behind
the grill station's steam,
she chops and shovels
the daily specials,
calling each woman mami,
each man baby.
* * *
Twenty-year-old
shot in stomach, arrived
dead on gurney 1:16 a.m.
The shrinking immaculate room.
And one at his chest
who kept pushing, pushing
as if knocking,
awaiting breath
or the right time to quit.
* * *
Irish Blessings!
on the new balloons
at Jazzman's Café.
Cards for every sort
of accident and holiday.
43 to 42; 68 degrees.
"Whaddya, havin' a baby?"
* * *
Schine 7 hallway traffic
eyeless as a city sidewalk:
nurses wrapped around their charting
booths, tuxedoed marching
food service, timid priest.
Then off the hall, behind a door,
through dividing curtain and sheets
her everywhere-audible "fix me
motherfucker fix me."
* * *
Dying shyly,
a nurses' favorite
juggled his breath
mask, shifted
its pale face
across his face,
deliberating
between competing
concealments.
* * *
Swiping in, a nurse named Dave
turns his baseball cap around.
IN CALICO ROCK, ARKANSAS
Matthew 26:73
From No Jake Brake
and No Barn Burn
on to Peppersauce
and Greasy Slim
old East Calico
now a ghost town
so anyone's language
shall reveal him
decrepit stones
once City Jail
tells iron sign
the words still welded
kept and lost
in Calico Rock
NOVITIATE
for Matt (Brother Isaac)
Entire Thursdays in your room.
Morning's easy, now afternoon
with its sense of sand leaking
from your fist: holes in prayer
everywhere you'd already filled them.
Breathing out, you think
not of the Psalms but lazy dogs
as sunlight forks and darts
across the floor—ambiguous flashes
of oak roots under water
or, lacunae intact,
a scroll from Qumran,
swallowed by a bunch of passing clouds.
A superior knocks at four,
speaks the sound
of someone else's name,
leaves a small meal by the door.
GIFT
Not easy ever
once you have been shocked
to place your index finger
on exactly the same spot
yet you are compelled,
indulged (by whom?), into
repeating yourself—you
who have been called
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Anyone by Nate Klug. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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