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Overview
Using various poetic modes, Yenser offers here a quatrain written to name a painting by Dorothea Tanning; a sequence of poems for his daughter; an excursive poem at once about Los Angeles and Baghdad and his father and a petty criminal; a group of prose poems set in penumbral bars; some postcards to a dead friend; and a meditation prompted by a sojourn on a remote Aegean island. The most unexpected work is an assemblage of quotations and glosses in the tradition of the commonplace book, except that in Yenser's hands these entries are densely interrelated
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226951348 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2006 |
| Series: | Phoenix Poets |
| Pages: | 96 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
BLUE GUIDE
By STEPHEN YENSER THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2006 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-95134-8
Chapter One
Loveknot (Flagrantis speculum veneris) Dorothea Tanning's painting I am flesh and flower That each other devour. Tongue-tied lovers know It's myself I swallow.
MRI: A Trance For my daughter So there I am at Tower Imaging (Imaging ... Yes, yes: I'm aging!), Drugged against the claustrophobia- O heart, O troubled heart-a live shell Of myself, levered into the bridal Chamber at last, so to speak. And I have left my metal- My watch and coins, my pen, my keys, My belt and zippered slacks-and donned a gown And though scared stiff been slid condemned As a condomed Phallus into a pulsing place, Where I lie listening through earphones To KKJZ-FM, Playing just then the Bill Holman Quintet Playing "Out of This World."
* * * Under the broadcast music, another's din: Percussive, pneumatic, Dionysian, Pounding in and out and in in some Code of its own, in some remorseless Morse, The pictures of my favorite feelings' quarters. We're looking at the plumbing, the PVC, And something called the Bundle of Hiss. We're eavesdropping on the heart's tick-talk, Enthusiastic tachycardia. I don't know how to phrase this synaesthetic cling. It's not at all clear what is happening, Or when. We're loading every riff with ore, Maybe. Or waiting to explode. Or maybe make A broken consort's music of these fears. * * * Now, as foretold, we go through several "phases- Or movements." Although I am motionless. Sedately terrified. My life aflow Behind closed eyes, I flatly fail Not to remember all these years ago, So long before you squeezed into our world, Crawling the passageway to Cheops' penetralia To find-nothing. A lidless sarcophagus, Emptier than a skull's eyeholes. * * * During the break between the Five That Thrive And Sweets and Trane, I hear cicadas, An eerie ostinato Making the breezy music of a Cretan olive Tickle the ear, until I pick up your great-grandpa's Blowhumming through his tissue-covered comb, As we drive by neat rows of winter wheat back home. And off in that past's future I make out The lonesome cricket who sits in, jams in, One evening in the Sunset Canyon Center In Westwood, California, So thrilled to find his finely calibrated Kind so finely celebrated, As William Merwin reads his poem called "Black Jewel." And now I hear some ice cubes, all whiskeyed up, Tinkling under Erroll Garner's right hand- Or is it my father's, as he sits listening To "Blue Lou" and "Misty" on a 78, Smoke unfurling from the other hand's brown Raleigh, And waiting for that last high note, pure as a tuning fork's. * * * Or say that one right now, right there, could pluck A single string of a Cycladic harp In front of the Temple of Athena Nike, Itself harplike by moonlight That night of the eclipse, When all around me calcined marble and bedrock, Polished by centuries of pilgrims' soles, Slippery as ice, black and white as tramped- through snow refrozen years back in Wisconsin, Shone up from underfoot Back at the moon, its maria like smog-eaten pits On a tumbled drum that Earth's dark swallowed As it must (The Emerald Tablet: "As above, So below") minute by minute. Minute By minute now the tranquillizer ebbs, And to my aging, still sublunar ear the tone Finally struck is just a smidgin sharp. It pricks this bubble, although another one Will one day lift and lovely drift me off (With all the trances, travels, and travails That, leaving you, I've imagined leaving you, Ravels and ravelings, recordings, The broken string Of my rebab, my suk Arabic, my taxi Greek Somehow restrung to sound in scheme and skein Notes that float across the bars)
Like something you chased yesterday across the lawn ... Today is not that day, and so they pull me out.
Spirare: Evening At Point Dume
Its origin's unknowable, But since in it one spirit leaves yet cleaves Unto another, perhaps the Proto-Indo-European, Itself perhaps a kind of verbal smoke ring Uttered with a glottal stop, Meant ghost and breath at once. Then it would be as though we were to find "Aphorism" and "horizon" rhizomatous, Sprung from some Ur-word meaning definition, And in the process to eliminate Limits between The flatly said and flatly seen And to illuminate by its black light Impossible conversations, As of sea and sky, In a kind of pastel spindrift or sfumato. As though to see how "diligence" bled into "elegance." As though to say "precocious" ripened merrily to "apricot" And deliquesced to "drupe," Or "stranger" once implied both host and guest (The former's home a hostile hostel Providing bread and fruit and rest) And rhymed with "ghost." As though to think that reddish, ashen, and blue-black All lived in "livid," one whole sunset And perfect plum of a word. As though, dear Helen, there were a surd, A tiny slice of P-I-E That meant indistinguishably To shine, to flash, to burn And in its flaming out, the shedding of its light, Limned "bleak" and "blaze" alike, And "blond" and "blink" and "blind"- Though never, ever "bland"- As well as "blank" and "black" and "blue" between. Or a flower to offer you: "Ghost's breath." Almost a spirea, like meadowsweet, Or hardhack, or bridal wreath. Almost an otherworldly flower. Aphrodite's, say. Maybe Persephone's. Not, dear God, Eurydice's.
Paradise Cove
My daughter in the coastal sunset asks for Plato. "Plato," She begs, "blue Plato, please, Plato" ... Finally, I understand And rummage from the picnic basket the Play-Doh, the blue can, And the pink as well-which henceforth I call "Aristotle." "Ariso'l, Ariso'l," she repeats-then, swallowing the glottal, "Aerosol," and there we are, playing with both ideas that there are. For one, this mixogamous world is all one thing, and for the other, This waxing unicity is always two (or more, which is the same, Since to rub two things together in a ruttish realm is to get others, And those yet others, viz. our daughters and their sons). The temporizing third idea-that these two are somehow one- Returns us to the first. So Marcus Aurelius thought. Maybe Lao Tzu. In any event, Nietzsche teaches that each thinker's goal and due Is to become as serious as a child at play, even as the sun sinks, Even when again the sun is setting-or rather, here in Los Angeles, City of Angels, City of Angles, the set is sunning-stunning, Even, in ever acuter, gentler rays that with the smaze Turn the horizon Technicolor pinks and blues, lavenders and zincs.
Helen's Zen Today you told us how a too-tight shoe Gave you such a headache in the foot. In your next breath you said you'd made a wish. I said, Why don't you wait till it comes true, So that it will, and tell it then? You said, You didn't think that you could do that. Why not? Because I wished that we would die together, You and Mommy and me, and when we're dead- I don't think that we talk. Well, I said- As for your foot ... By then you'd gone ahead, I think that maybe only souls go through, You know? You know, I said, you say "You know" Too much? Anyway, the soul, you said, I hope it has a belly button, don't you?
"Harmonie du Soir" Hampton's last concert in Santa Monica
That ever younger evening sky's pastel accord's A chord off Santa Monica Even now, deepening shades of spent Shadings, jazzy, night jasmine's pungent Fadings in up from Virgin's blue Through hues as interfused as tones in a harmonica To cobalt blue, to coalfire blue, to Coltrane blue, Smoky and chuffing, to blooming lavender of jacaranda Flowers that fail, that fall across lanai, gazebo, and veranda, Those years before your birth. A Santa Ana blew ... The stars came out ... kept coming out ... Above the dimming earth ... On stage ... For as above, so here below ... In "The 'Original' Stardust" the vibraphone solo: As cocky as cocaine with each angelic line Struck off in its constellation, And then snuffed out, as fine as that cocaine They used to stanch the pain Before they broke my nose that time to fix My broken nose, melody racing out in front, looping around The orchestra-balletic, teasing, like a fox- Until it's clear that it could go On forever and so starts Stopping, begins to Skip like a heart, or to limp Like Mother Killdeer in disguise, To double-hitch down to a kind of foxtrot, Hunted, haunted, caught, Danced with by the whole libidinous band An endless moment, then abandoned, As it must be, like Valéry's pure poem, A little lion, or unicorn, until the phallic horn Flares up like sunset, Ever so sweetly, compliantly, discreetly, Each gold or gilded gliding sound well worth its silent wait, To blow the by then barely, still Hardly flaming foxbreath out. There, now: play it at the wake, From flashes to ashes, from dusk to dust, As though in time with sacring bell and censer swinging- "Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir," Dans le beau de l'air du soir ... That's how I want to leave you when I must.
Tidepools: La Jolla Quick, mystic-this is the world's profoundest mirror. The girl in any of us leans a little nearer. You lean to it this evening, Helen Emily, Holding my hand, to glimpse us both, though dreamily, As like your breath that fogs my morning shaving glass It dries up seaward, leaving sea moss, black tape grass, Scary weeds-also a puckered seam of seaspray, A pinch of which you put your lips to, then spin away- Barefoot, braid swinging-from a broken breaker, your shrieks Bringing a cloud wisp's blush-brushed color to your cheeks, Then kneel again to moons and trumpets, scallops, dollars, And mermaid fans and purses, anemones and tiny stars. Another winter day, my love, when you are older, That is, when we're both older (half-bolder and half-colder), Maybe you'll walk back down here to this place- If whose precise location trafficky years erase From memory, no matter, since to it the sun Blazes a narrow path each cloudless day that's done- And see how I could come once more to recognize This world's whole hoard one evening in your filling eyes.
Chapter Two
Sfakian Variations
Postcards to JM
A goat's bell wakes us-he's in a tamarisk!- as the cicadas translate with their vibratos early light's moiré shimmerings rebounding from the bay into our high room's whitewashed plaster. So that's the news to ruminate at breakfast. No politicians abolishing disaster, no strings attached. Or à la Mallarmé, it's all pure music-physics, that is to say- and everything is strings that vibrate. * * * Melba toast, fresh orange juice, and coffee. A horiatikí saláta, bread, and beer. Ouzo with three ice cubes and appetizers and then a plate of "local fish" for dinner. And in the interims I read Cavafy, Stevens, and Yeats and worry that I hike too much just in my head through stubborn stonebrash herbs and common shrubs, dry and spiny, to swim in precious shallows-turquoise, sapphire. * * * This is a country for old men. Cicadas in Judas trees, and bumblebees among the bougainvillaea, succulents, a few native goldfinches in their cages hung above taverna tables. The beach is stony, the "ruins" hardly qualify, each trek sounds too austerely beautiful to take. And one might see from one's own balcony, which has the peaks as well as bay in view, a lammergeyer swoop to an old goat's carcass. * * * God gave out gifts to Crete: to Kissámos, wine heady as kisses; to Ierápetra, olives fleshy and sharp; dark cherries to Amári. When the swaggering Sfakiots at last appeared, their daggers gleaming, only rocks remained. -And how have you provided for our lives, they asked him.-Use your scrubby brains, God sneered. Can't you see those farmers work for you? * * * Beside our table on the littoral, as we're about to close the books this evening, the hill again stands pat, and the sun folds again, and the server folds our parasol, and water laps the rocks louder, begins to come into its own, a mood-a mode-that concentrates, that rocks the rocks awake to darker, colder colors, preparing to be serious, no longer marginal. To take us literally as breaths. We have to change our lives? We have to die. * * * Here in one poem, just "a few lines" (olígous stíchous), sixteen to be precise, anyone can find the crucial terms, several proscribed in English verse today, and in the order quoted now. "Tasteful" (kalaísthyton) and "polished" (leíon), constellated around the name of one Ammónis, they include "subtle beauty" (leptí emorphiá), "elegant" and "musical" (oraía and mousiká), and prove the "craftsmanship" (mastoriá) of Constantine Cavafy and inextricably his "grief" (lipí) and "love" (agápi) and everywhere his "feeling" (aísthima) "for our life" (apó tín zoí más), especially for one man, dead long before, exemplary poet and Alexandrian. * * * Mornings, a trance of cicadas, invisible, incessant. A weave of dense white noise, except it's really a translucent, gauzy green, the vibrant color water is near the shore at noon. An intense tinnitus, and like that last a hint to us, perhaps, of the sound eternity is- the great susurrus of silence avant la lettre, so to speak. Though it's here all the time. Usually we just don't notice. We hear it too in the inaudible voices, the traces of voices that we have heard and read. It's not after all as though they're not us. Cavafy says they come to us then fade like music at night. Another way to put it is that we fade into those who note us. We ventriloquize each other, perhaps. Although your ashes are half this world away, my friend, if you are anywhere, you're here. Sometimes you just don't notice. * * * Evening's tavernal transactions make one think that so much happens in between. It's in between, I mean. On CD Lady Day moans "Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose" and thus calls up Cavafy's masterly refusal, whose point I took from a loved book you gave to me decades ago. What I didn't take, I cannot say, as someone must have said. Cavafy said that to decline is to decline thenceforth, and I'm inclined, today, to agree. Yet there are negatives that we take confidently to our graves. * * * This could be paradise. Because one does not want to leave? Except one does not want to leave? Why, Zeus himself preferred to be interred here, as he was born here in an inland cave. But somewhere my airplane's on schedule. These days, these words, both fall so quickly into place I think I'll fall myself as Icarus fell right out there because he couldn't wait before I've made known what it is I do want. * * * Mín ksináchte, you inscribed my book: "Don't forget." A short but long Greek sentence. Don't lose the thread, Daedalus told Ariadne to tell Theseus. And yet, how not to do so, not even he could say, and his precocious Icarus forgot. When Theseus abandoned Ariadne, ripe, faithful, sleeping on the shore, the gods forgot him, so he forgot to change his sails from black to white, and so his anguished father died, misled. Never losing himself the thread, Daedalus solved the tiny labyrinth of a triton shell. As I think Pound, himself imprisoned by his own creation, might have remembered outside Pisa ("an ant's forefoot shall save you"). Mín ksináchte. And yet how not? The knotted phrase goes on through its own maze. I leave its book to my daughter, whose name is Helen. * * * Soon it will be the right time. The resident kitten, so affectionate at first blush, will turn out to be neurotically needy. The proprietors' adorable infant son will smile too little to be truly endearing. The plumbing, the mosquitoes, the seamier undersides of the local nightlife ... Time to dispose, dispense, pack up, reflect. Despair at how to take back all one would. Put things in order so the cleaning woman won't recall one badly, should one return. Write those few thank-you notes. There's nothing else, really, to do, at last. The sunscreen, the local maps, a guide book or two, the ferry schedule- one can leave them behind for now, for others. * * * Goats bawl and goats' bells clink and ice in the glass of ouzo tinkles back and that is all the music-even tzitzíkes rest and listen-anyone needs to face tonight, until the fog settles in, thick and muggy, though cold and clammy on the painted railing around the balcony that overlooks this whole small world one nearly overlooked and now can't bear to leave where the taverna lights grow dimmer by the minute now and then are hard to make out as a dwelt-on memory and then and now are gone.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BLUE GUIDE by STEPHEN YENSER Copyright © 2006 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsI
Loveknot (Flagrantis speculum veneris)
MRI: A Trance
Spirare: Evening at Point Dume
Paradise Cove
Helen's Zen
"Harmonie du Soir"
Tidepools: La Jolla
II
Sfakian Variations
III
Salle Archaïque: An Afterbeat
Ghazal: Of Names
Los Angeles Fractals
IV
Valedictions
Charles Gullans (1929-1993)
Joseph Riddel (1931-1992)
Doris Curran (1932-2000)
Lorna Roberts (1942-2001)
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
To Fall
Kerouacky
Across the Bar
Jumbo's Clown Room
Polo Lounge
Lunaria
Shutters
Numbers
Variations on Ovid
V
Inkles, Shreds & Scales
VI
Blue Guide