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Overview
Applause provides twenty vivid and evocative poems by Carol Muske-Dukes. In “Dream,” she seeks the past in reverie, along with bicoastal riffs on New York City and Los Angeles. “The Eulogy” paints the scene of a funeral in sunny California where a young man who has died of AIDS is laid to rest. In the title poem, a twelve-part journey through the ritual of applause, Muske-Dukes examines the power of a gesture—clapping—to transform oneself from individual to communal. “What a strange phenomenon,” she says, “to be single and plural at once, to feel joy and dread simultaneously, to wish to acknowledge publicly one’s anonymity.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480484825 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 58 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Applause
Poems
By Carol Muske-Dukes
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1989 Carol Muske-DukesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-8482-5
CHAPTER 1
Dream
It's my old apartment, Gramercy Park,
but then it's not. I know the three steps up,
the squeaking door, the foyer table
stacked with mail, I know the light falling
like jail bars on the tiles, my numbered door.
But when I turn the key, there's a disco,
strobes, my dead landlord serving drinks.
Or it's a skating rink, a nook at the Frick.
Today I woke from sorting something in my head—
a box of old mittens or scarves,
snowflake patterns, shooting stars.
Here I have a poster on my wall:
the sun in shades, a turtleneck of smog.
It isn't just a dropped stitch,
my memory's actively unfurnishing that flat—
why, I haven't a clue. But one, perhaps.
The time I stood, locked out,
on the snowy fire escape, looking through
the glass at my life: lamps, books.
coffee table, each self-contained photograph.
New York at dawn, my flame silk dress
feel improvised now—it was that interior
I'd fix in my sight forever,
climb down the icy rungs and not come back.
Freezing wind out there, stocking feet,
my dress filling like a bell—
then a newer, dizzying grip on things,
this sudden hungry wish for riddance,
to turn my back on space I'd made,
with the pathetic charm of the possessive,
mine and uninhabitable.
Summer Cold
By day, she's not so sick. She hits
the hound, then kisses him: nice dog.
He cringes, then his wolfish face lights up.
To me, she does the same. At two, her love
of power's in two parts: love and power.
Late at night, I hold her to my breast—
the wet indent her fevered head makes
stays pressed against my gown. She doesn't
have to ask, I wake with her. I hold
the mercury up to the light and read
its red suspense, the little trapped horizon
of her heat. Her slowed lungs draw
and empty. Below, on the lawn,
a hunched figure—dawn?—rakes the black
grass light, turns into a set of swings,
I hold her sleeping weight and rock
till something in the east throbs up.
Day, offering itself, then drawing back.
Day, commuting from a city remote as hell,
or health, where I remember living once,
for myself. Long before this little bird
filled its throat outside the beveled glass,
before the headlines stumbled on the step.
The Wish Foundation
O holy talk show host,
who daily gives us twenty minutes,
no holds barred, on loneliness,
who has provided, for my particular
amusement, this fat hairy man
in a T-shirt that says he likes sex,
pronouncing himself an "impressionistic
person": describe now for us the child
sent by the Wish Foundation. Hold up
her photograph, say haltingly, that
she died and is buried here,
as per her last request: to fly to
Los Angeles. Then to fly forever beneath
its shocked geologic expression.
To land in Los Angeles, like Persephone
descending the sunset stairs, out of a sky
the color of pomegranate, and through the curved glass
of the ambulance hatch—to be photographed through
the lengthening reflections of exit signs. Persephone
crossing eight lanes, in the rapids of pure oxygen,
descending, recasting the tidy shape of elegy.
Under the overpass, where kids throw
things down on cars, through the gates
and over the machined hills to machined
stones: descending to be where she wished to be.
Where on clear days you can see the city.
Where you can see down the coast
to the cones of the reactor, settling
on the slide, down to the famous rides
of the famous amusement park
where they load the kids into bolted seats
and spin them around a center fixed, but
on a moving foundation. O talk show host,
somebody had to imagine it: how
they would slide hard into what happens.
Fear and desire for more fear. No despair,
would you say? but that sense of black acceleration,
like a blacker wish. I'd say Grief put that new
dress on her. Grief combed her adorable hair.
Then: which hand said friendly old Death.
And she stepped away from the foundation
into a sky that all my life, dear
host, I've seen fill and refill
with indifferent valediction: overhead
those stupid planes from the base
flying wing to wing and their shadows
on the earth, somebody's stupid
idea of perfect symmetry.
Skid
Where the snow effigies stood
hard-packed and hosed to ice
in front of the frat houses,
in the middle of the little bridge
over the stopped river,
my leased car spun three times
before the chainless tires caught.
Each time round I saw a face:
the man who imagined he loved me,
the woman who confided in me,
the child who cried "no" upon meeting me,
as if he saw at once to what use
we put those vanishing invented selves.
The slurred tracks, ringed dark
on the outbound path, froze and unfroze
for weeks after the party to celebrate spring.
Down the road, the local museum
considered the Ice Age. The glacier
slid in and out of its lit shape
through a fan of color transparencies,
each ray labelled with an age, a thaw,
the gauged bed of the moraine. Showed how
the ice junkheap hauled the broken shapes
in which we live, cave and gully and flat.
And a further dissolution, part of
a shape we would not recognize for centuries,—
like the coins that tumble down the dark slide
to the weighted spar that triggers the mechanism
that lifts the needle to the jukebox disk: "Blue Moon"—
you saw it standing like an atomic field,
charged with particles: little "you"s and "me"s,
estranged suddenly from the vanity of their motion—
and the prefigured feel of it, music and moon,
turning full force into its mindless will
then stopping, my foot on the accelerator.
Box
Where her right index fingernail should be—
there is a razorblade—
and the black-haired inmate pushes
the smaller one to the wall.
I remember it happening as I came
down the hall, with my copy
of the The Voice That Is Great Within Us:
the two figures, one hunched over
the other, the blade hand hovering,
ablaze, then moving across and down.
Today, in the window,
a crystal spins on a bit
of fishline, throwing off light
like netted koi, shiny ruptures
on the ceiling. My small daughter climbs up
its trembling ladder,
extends her small beautiful hand.
In the perfect center of the glass
there is resistance to the image: a room
too brightly lit, in the basement
of the old House of Detention,
where I taught the dazzling inconsistencies—
Pictures in the Mind—
under the Watch Commander's
electric map: its red neon eye-slits
blinking each time a door cracked
within the walls. The women
gravely scrawling on Rainbow
tablets: not graffiti, but poems wrenched
from the same desire to own something—
to tie the tourniquet of style,
the mind's three or four known
happy endings clamped tight
on the blood jet. Love poems to a pimp,
for example: she would never say
he beat her. No, he held her close,
he was "capable of love"—
he was like the elegy
written for the little one
whose mother tried to make her fly:
he would stay suspended in the air.
No one would see that child
screaming, step by step, along the gritty ledge.
If she'd lived, she might have become
the one who thought she wrote songs
like Billie Holiday, or the one
who plagiarized peacefully, week after week,
the poems of Langston Hughes.
Nobody writes anything that moves
across and down the face
of mortal anguish. That cutting tool
found in no book nor
in the exquisite, denatured vision
of invention—page after page
of Pictures in the Mind—but
I taught it right after all.
There were images for her,
this mother,
taking back the face she made—
with her bright, revisionist blade—
too ugly, too fat, too stupid
to be loved
and an image for that sudden spidery blood
on the tiles, somewhere the red eye
tracking my impulse
as I pushed open the warning door,
then stood back, catching
the baby at the window—
her open hands, the moving light
she holds at the source
but cannot still.
The Eulogy
The man in the black suit delivers a eulogy
each page he turns, turns
a page of light on the ceiling,
because death mimics us, mocking
the eye's cowardly flight
from the flower-covered coffin
to the framed photo of the bereaved, alive.
It is not night.
It is California.
There are hibiscus dropping
their veined shrouds
on the crushed-stone path outside.
A gold cuff link blazes
as the eulogist raises his hands.
Shadows alter the ceiling,
the readable text.
There are two ways to meet death,
he says. One fearful,
the other courageous.
One day purposeful, the next hopeless,
A young man died because he had sex.
The eulogist speaks of soldiers under fire,
the cowards and the heroes.
The woman next to me cannot stop
weeping. I can find no tears inside
me. The cuff links beam
signals at us, above us.
The sun through the skylight
grows brighter and brighter:
Watch now, God,
Watch the eulogist raise his hands.
The rays, like your lasers,
blind the front rows.
The gifts love gives us!
Some of us flinch, some do not.
Ideal
Though my little daughter owns an Ideal farmyard
let me not direct her attention to
the bloody auction block, the rented backhoe
reversing the plow on the earth,
the iron of the farmer's hand dropped on nothingness.
I know that pain has its tradition,
the slaughtering blade,
the black blood pounded into the grain.
The dreaming animals that come to drink
at this trough understand no tradition,
but I can make the cattle speak
as mildly as they have ever spoken,
the night moths appear as harmless messengers.
The woman who is standing over there
under the tree near the fenceposts,
touching the carved initials—
she is harder to invent.
In a fairy tale, she would be the familiar,
privileged trespasser: she might even be what she is,
a former owner on disputed land.
See her eyes repossess the well,
the porch, the propped-up Ford?
A man in love with speed used to drive it,
its tailpipe a red comet
down the lonely roads. My daughter
wants to know who she is, how does she fit
in the picture, the green painted pasture?
Everyone thinks they can make her put down
the rags and the can of kerosene,
maybe the dear little local paper
will crown her queen of the burning trees,
the dynamited dam. It's written in
her two-word tattoo what she will do
and it's written to you
on such a bright night, moon on the fenceposts,
the cow lowing softly, the ideal sky
split open suddenly with stars.
Ex-Embassy
Sometimes, at dawn, I think I hear
the high sobbing cry of the muezzin
hanging in the sky before it's light
but then, I drop off to sleep again.
Behind us is the ex-embassy.
Its pool a blue mosaic through
our hedge. The old man
in robe and wrapped head no longer
comes to mop the tiled edge—
his whole morning's work
fragmented by our wall of leaves.
No arm in a rolled sleeve,
bending, lifting. No flashing sections
of aluminum pole fit into a blue mesh scoop
for whisking up floating petals.
No close up: like a Cubist inset,
a turbanned man sipping tea,
eyebrow and striped cup,
slice of a woman's profile
black half-veil, two eyes
yoked in khol moving in a hand-held
mirror. No sun machine-gunning
that round of glass. No part
of a lamb turning on part of a spit.
No peacock opening a bit
of its promiscuous fan.
No cook hurrying the meat
with jagged curses. No meat.
No god. No medallion front,
officially defaced,
the cornices deflagged
as bare, crude evidence
of our power to invade,
theirs to resist.
A For Sale sign likens it
to a house on a cloud,
a sunrise mosque. It has
patterned tiles with sickles
of wheat or hashish. And wickets,
a porte cochère engemmed
with rotating spots.
Maybe a neighbor, through
a closing door,
saw grown men cry out
in a frenzy, on a cold floor,
to a god no one comprehends.
No one comprehends how,
like the god of the broken, rusted lamp,
once out, uncramped,
he's not.
Not anything you could imagine
not any servant
but the familiar reductive infinite—
lines of fuel drums, phone wires.
Rolled up in the bottom of a child's red valise,
timing devices, threads of plastique ...
left behind for the doubters,
the personal grit of some other deity,
some intoxicating tattooed Allah
above the human ruins, head in hand.
Not that. Not this. In the garden,
a broken rope of amber beads,
within each separate bead
the lights of patrols go by,
elongate—the next night and the next—
what I don't know
but learn to dread
turns over slowly in my bed.
Intensive Care
—for Kathy and Jim
Then, at 3 A.M., I see her bend
over the stricken infant, her face
that face reproduced for us so many times
in art, as a historical moral:
whose love endureth even death,
whose beauty is forebearance.
Her face that mask of serenity
I see now derives simply
from a shattered will.
There is nothing left of pain or panic—
The TV on the wall tuned to a sitcom.
Her faith in life folded once, twice,
then passed, like a flag
over a lowering coffin,
into her waiting hands.
Far back in its unthinking regions
the brain latches its black shutters
against such improving light
as reason or resignation—the angel
beckoning at the burning gate.
She sees no reason not to draw up
the eyelids, to find herself
reflected in new immensity—
not mother but madonna,
not this child but that other child,
thriving again and returned here
for her to hold and sing to.
Perfectly formed in her arms,
blessed and saved, till the attendants
notice her powerful blind gaze,
till the machines start their desperate,
high-pitched complaints.
Pediatrics
When she came to visit me, I turned my face to the wall—
though only that morning, I'd bent my head at the bell
and with the host on my tongue, mumbled thanks.
Cranked up, then down in my bed—
I told the nurses jokes,
newly precocious, but too old
at twelve, to be anything
but a patient. I slouched in my robe
among the other child-guests of St. Joseph,
the parrot-eyed scald masks,
the waterheads and harelips,
the fat girl with the plastic shunt.
The old crippled nun on her wheeled
platform dispensed her half-witted blessings,
then was gone like the occasional covered gurneys
sliding by my numbered door. Gone
told me I'd go away too—
orderly as dusk in the brick courtyard:
the blank windows curtained one by one.
I could not abide that yearning face
calling me home. Like the Gauls,
in my penciled translations: I saw
Caesar was my home. Through the streets
of the occupied city, his gold mask rose, implacable.
In the fervent improvisational style of the collaborator—
I imagined pain not as pain
but the flickering light embedded
in the headboard, the end
of the snake-wire uncoiling from
the nurses' station. The painkiller winked
in its paper cup, its bleak chirp
meant respect should be paid
for the way I too wielded oblivion,
staring at the wall till six,
my gifts unopened in her lap,
the early dark deepening between us.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Applause by Carol Muske-Dukes. Copyright © 1989 Carol Muske-Dukes. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Publisher's Note,Dream,
Summer Cold,
The Wish Foundation,
Skid,
Box,
The Eulogy,
Ideal,
Ex-Embassy,
Intensive Care,
Pediatrics,
Vermont Farmhouse, 3 A.M.,
After Care,
Nineteen Seventy,
Monk's House, Rodmell,
Pick-Up Sticks,
Immunity,
Meal Ticket,
August 1974: A Tapestry,
Asbestos,
Applause,
About the Author,