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Overview
In this stunning collection of poems, Mary Jo Bang jettisons the reader into the dreamlike world of Louise, a woman in love. With language delicate, smooth, and wryly funny, Louise is on a voyage without destination, traveling with a cast of enigmatic others, including her lover, Ham.
Louise is as musical as she is mysterious, and the reader is invited to listen. Bang, whose first collection was the prize-winning Apology for Want, both parodies and pays homage to the lyric tradition, borrowing its lush music and dramatic structure to give new voice to the old concerns of the late Romantic poets.
Louise in Love is a dramatic postmodern verse-novel. The poems, rife with literary allusion, take journeys to distant lands. And, like anyone on a voyage without a destination, they are endlessly questioning of the enigmatic world around them.
“One of the finest poets of her generation.” —Marjorie Perloff
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802196569 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 97 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ECLIPSED
The crimped beige of a book, turned-down corner.
The way an eclipse begins with the moon denting the sun's liquid disk, taking a first bit then more and more and. Leaving a regal rim, a dim spared portion, a shiver. How cold she was as the cloud covered the cuckoo-land,
birds batting the tree fringe. Fitful caprice.
Foolish, yes, they were, those birds, but clever too.
A nostrum of patterning rain had fallen beforehand ceding the hibiscus buds bundled and in disarray. In the news p. Nostradamic foretelling of retinal damage written in novelese.
Wasn't the skeptic invented to nourish an interest in science?
Yes. The puma swallows the sun, only to spit it back out.
Diaphragmatic heaving. Base emetic act.
The puky little sun glowing to a glare. Puissance.
One's own right hand teaching one to look, to see, to leap upon some notional premise.
Louise placed the next-to-night glasses on the table.
It is, she said, so over. But it wasn't.
Specters they would be rooted eighty-two years in the same spot waiting for another and then an offhand remark and one by one
(which is the way death takes us, he said)
they took their shadows and went out of the garden and into the house.
SHE COULDN'T SING AT ALL, AT ALL
Louise said. No subtle cadences capturing birdnote nor the melancholic "My Love Is in a Light Attire." She could speak well enough but to sing was to vivisect the ear's dear pleasure desired.
Ham suggested canasta or a hike to a hillock. The other reminded no night-over camping — Lydia was soundly allergic to that.
Charles Gordon proposed a boat ride to a big, big lake and a stroll in the Parc d'Avenir. They heard an April angelus tolling its sixes,
a sure sign that the winter demon was down.
It was now a matter of waiting for the haughty naughty beguilement of warmth.
They were standing on the balcony when Louise was tossed not a rose or two with flayed edges but an entire bouquet of hibiscus (a horde of bishops huddling at the heart of each). Below them, a boy sweeping —
sheep, sheep, sheep — looked up and souffled Lydia a kiss. Oh, it would be a good day, wontn't it?
Life flung riverward and on and on the baby boat floating, spinning in the hope current,
someone singing "Sometimes a bun, sometimes only a biscuit."
THE DOG BARK
Louise peered into the corner of the cabinet of fossilized delights: mandragon manikin, a dried mermaid,
assorted dog barks of crass appetites.
It was six and dark early. Don't forget numbers, Ham said,
are only examples: one and two with their sterile marriage,
three with its tattooed face. That year the gifts were lustrous:
a bear with the head of a horse, small nipples, flowers in its ears. Louise said, Who doesn't love
the sound of scissor snips and free-for-all terms of endearment?
The dog, they named Lucky
To Be Alive, and refused to let it be altered.
BELLE VUE
Gorgeous that pillar, that post — both spiraled with lashes of laurel. And between the two, four couples fashioned past fumble.
The party wanted the night sand to swallow their prints so they drove to the beach.
Back home, the filament blinked in the lamp
by which Louise sat reading a book about sleep.
Six knobs controlled the night but the day,
the day, she read, was rudderless,
an eggbreak knowing no bounds but becoming an edgeless eye fluttering open at the sound of a siren,
a peony shaken — each petal a shower of instant truths.
Wake up. One wanted to hear the sky — a river turned sidewise.
The wrist's tiny veinlets sunk
while gravity's gooseherd gathered the minion capillaries. Wake up, wake up. The filament flickered again,
a forecast for certain. Sunrise would be
...
riddled with sound. At irregular intervals, rain.
The same letters one day would read Charlotte; Charcot, the next; and then
charcuterie. Coincidence.
A grid over every window erased by the lack of light.
In the everworld of art, even the lettuces' red leaves stayed suspended between dissolves. Eye and idea, a rope at the waist. She was held —
not by the text, but by the pretty pictures.
THE STAR'S WHOLE SECRET
Did she drink tea? Yes, please. And after,
the halo of a glass gone.
A taxi appeared out of elsewhere.
Five constellations, Louise said,
but only two bright stars among them. Soon, Ham said,
the whale will reach the knot of the fisherman's net;
the moon will have its face in the water.
And we'll all feel the fury of having been used up in maelstrom and splendor.
Mother did say, Louise said, try to be popular,
pretty, and charming. Try to make others feel clever. Without fear, what are we?
the other asked. The will, said Louise. The mill moth and the lavish wick, breathless in the remnant of a fire.
KISS, KISS, SAID LOUISE, BY WAY OF A PAY PHONE
To the other who'd been left behind.
The city was unlucky in cloudy and chance of.
Routing the enemy, following a route.
What does it mean, Mary Louise,
that the mall in Midcreek will open in May?
They were getting away
to nature, conveyance as a form of diffidence.
Every avenue, said Ham, still ends at perception.
There is a point, said Louise, when one will act or won't
even know what she's missed.
She was wearing a wig and suit of blue serge and looked somewhat like that section
of a symphony written in the alphabet soup of C and B-neath. The road was a ribbon on the bright canyon bed. Clever twin, said Louise,
to those who know how to follow a scheme that avoids the end of the senses before there can be a begun. She saw: a blue car leaving
...
at three; a blue car returning at four; an odd-looking man leaning against an ornamental Japanese pine.
They stopped at the house on the top of the hill,
lit like a candle-house cake. I hope, Ham said,
there's a fire station deep in this forest.
Forest? What forest? she said.
Don't you see —
it's a fantastic sea where nothing but nothing can save us.
THE DIARY OF A LOST GIRL
Four diphtheria deaths, then fire, now five named lakes with tranquil looks. Yet rampantly mad.
A lunatic shriek from a ruffian
child. One oar wrestled a mob of shore fringe, another,
the wet underbirth. And madness,
was it afflicted by demons? Or stricken of God? Or vision,
thrown on an empty mirror, and there you were?
Later, upstairs — the lakes packed away in pearly cases, the coppery spin of a high skyward
arrayed against a leaded window — the chiasmic question recurred. She recalled shy little lessons from a girl named Renee on the unattainable freedoms
of the flesh. In the dining room, they would crumple over the table like paper angels if anyone raised an eyebrow.
Otherwise, they leaned against scenery — looking down at their Bonniedale shoes as if they were in love with nothing else.
THE ANA OF BLISS
Heat rush of heaving. The heart throbbing in the inner ear, wrists twined with a red thread of electricity, lustered response.
O Ham, she said, and swooned in the rattled reunion and sudden summer of thunder.
His mouth was the yes that was wished on,
feet angled in. He said, My but aren't we?
Si, she said, aren't I
a rampant array of negatives bashed and belittled?
Come in, come in, my little passion flower, he would often say.
An elevator's assuasive ascent, Icarus clicks between floors. A head turned as she entered the door.
...
Did you hear what I said? he said. You would be so easy to love. Indefatigable mortar —
bitumen or pitch. An irreversible welding.
Wasn't this what is bliss?
A CAKE OF NINETEEN SLICES
She was aware of the alarm clock in the throat of a buff-colored bird with black head.
It's lovely, isn't it, the way stasis and darkness disappear at the rapids? Or change. Yes, change.
Do you want a slice of cake? I do, I do.
The boys broke into the mansion,
setting off bells that had just been installed.
I would like to show you that tree in the forest where moss bleeds the bark in a most peninsular way.
Twelve years had been shed by the time it was over.
She stood on a rise overlooking a road alongside a lake that flowed into another,
and another, and another like hours babbling their latebreaky news.
And everything, Louise said, has its own specificity,
the bird is simply a bird, and thus.
Ditto the murmuring missionaries, their misguided zeal that forever results in a hereness unused to its thisness,
a real of no real appeal.
LOUISE
It was sepia, Louise said with a hint of nostalgia. Henna, he'd said, after seeing a facsimile of the world-famous photo of the woman who had dyed her hair red. Down, she said, descending the rungs of the ladder that led them right to the door of new depths. Depiction, she said, surfacing in order to say it and fracturing the spell under which they swam in the moment that ended an eon ago. Swans, she said, referring to the needle-neck birds black and white that lined the aisle down which one walked to get to the river on which they were skating away.
LIKE A FIRE IN A FIRE
They were difficult to find. It was summer so they were dust dry and sky blue. Lighter, liminal, quite likely to follow a line completely lacking in depth.
Louise dreamed a clowder of cats was eating yesterday's dinner of snapper and fennel. Ham dreamed a hand was playing a tin-can piano note twice too many times.
The other lay awake listening to a radio static at the base of the stapes deep in the damaged right ear.
Soon, August would trade its heat
for September's cool shroud. The loose weave, a seize, Louise said,
through which the tail will fall through: dysthymic October,
deathy November.
December, a drear pentimento — unveiling the mouth at abeyance, the mind at undone. Boneheap, rock beach,
birdie girls crooning in swan-feathered caps.
O seasons, O castles, Ham said, there's still the slight flutter of blood in an outlying vein, light trained on a landscape of shoulder with faint smell of soap.
DOES MRS. HUNT TEAR LINEN STRAIGHT AS EVER?
Louise, lying half dressed on a hideabed, said she wasn't going but the other insisted, so they all went and inquired for the boat to the Isle.
They expected a dog with a magnificent hairdo and a boy balleting over a roof, a circular saw
(buzzing, its affect).
Instead, they found blooming Furze ... a low Water Water ... one Nymph of Fountain, swans ruminating,
ditto donkeys, men and women going gingerly along.
The wind threw a hissy fit and Louise grew vexed and tired. These are not little instances, she said,
but possible outcomes of a story that cannot include us
(each to be ticked off in turn with an x'ed "Yes, go ahead"
or an absent "No, not yet").
Since the tale would advance without them,
she suggested they procure some fatal scissors
and cut the thread that held them there.
Does Mrs. S. cut bread and butter neatly as ever?
the other asked. And Ham cried out, à propos of nothing,
For God's Sake, let us sit upon the Ground!
TIME SPEEDS, SAID LOUISE, WHEN A FEVER RISES
A phantasmagorical twilight outlined the skyscape:
a braced structure of cases and frames.
You look tired, the other noted.
And the saying, of course, made it so.
She was now in high dudgeon. What she needed, she said,
was caprice and a cocktail shaker.
A slim satin dress sewn tighter than truth.
The danger of languid and largo, Ham said,
was that of an egg left leaning against a white wall.
He suggested the game where giraffe meant mischief caused by absence of thought; octopus: deep end,
a downfall. Fan: flirtation; comb: a false friend.
A fork in the shadow of a cup denoted conclusion was about to be reached. Of course, the practice was more than the theory and some symbols doubled the odds:
acorn, for example, could be either instant success or someone would soon burn a bridge.
LOUISE IN LOVE
Much had transpired in the phantom realm:
Are we whole now? Louise asked.
I think we are, the other said.
And from the mirror: no longer blue in the face, and vague;
only destiny's dove bending a broke wing and beckoning.
The ride had been open and long, the car resplendent.
What rapture, this rode into sunset. This elegant end where a band tugs a sleeve,
a hand labors with an illusion
of waving away a thread. And then they came to something big: down the block, winking red lights and a crowd of compelling circumference.
They were one with the woman, her rosacea face,
the snapdragon terrier, ten men in black helmets, a man supine on a stretcher. O the good and the evil of accident.
...
They were wary, and justifiably so. The mind says no,
Louise admitted, but the heart, it loves repetition and sport:
cat's paw from under the bedskirt,
dainty wile, frayed thing,
fish hook.
OH, DEAR, WHAT CAN THE MATTER BE
Louise let the other go first.
They passed through the turnstile singly: one sheep,
two sheep. It was too too much:
the meek hand on a banister,
eventual pigeons insisting first this way, then that.
Music coursed a curtained sidewalk.
She'd like to escape into it, but today was a turncoat.
Was this fair? Gravity holding her
while silence egged her on.
Amazing, she said, how even the bound foot walks in a pinch, an economical shuffle —
draggle and scrape. And the mind never rests;
even in sleep, it mimes mother or mayhem.
A moment of abstraction and the green stain on a wall becomes a relief map of Kansas. Listen!
Were those the strings of an orchestra?
Or the melody of a coming attraction?
Louise sighed. It is true, she said,
some sums are not easy to reckon.
THAT WAS ALL, LOUISE SAID, EXCEPT FOR
The dalliance of springboards,
the lingering impression of an off-black blouse.
Facts, said Ham, too often confide an edifice with no hint of what hides behind.
They had just come from seeing the clairvoyant.
She told them that like Clint Eastwood,
Louise had been born on an eclipse.
Since her moon was in Sagittarius, she could live
in a foreign country if ever she chose. In the cafe,
the service was slow: the waitress had taken up smoking and a bald man was asking for more.
Across the street, a building stood facing its final demise.
A mud-spattered window in a double-hung door was all that divided outside from in.
To Louise, the conversation seemed all too familiar —
I feel, she said to the other, like a sheet grown soft with the deadweight of difficult sleep. She turned her head
(She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was
like a hyacinth ...).
What you are, said Ham, is beauty.
Empty, she said. No inbreath, no eyeblink.
AND NO SIGN WILL MARK THE MIDPOINT'S PASSING
You will go on a long journey. Louise first heard it said behind a curtain of bead. Then came a need to know how and now to wander an empty room, asking:
Is this to be believed? Green water leaning against an immovable tree. A tack in her shoe had shimmied its way to the top.
The eyes, she said, on a well-behaved route are ultimately blind. The lung, quite naturally,
is a rooted structure.
Who sleeps, goddess of love and war.
Harlot and pure, storehouse and empty.
Her breast a stone bowl, her shoulders clean, and uncovered.
She lay on her back, receiving the silk drip of sleep as it was poured from above. Over her, stars being made — hydrogen cooling in columns of ash,
...
diamonds condensing. Awake, she said,
I love shaping my mouth, then waiting to speak.
The day was subsiding like the small drama of a drawer
pushed into an oncoming slot.
On a shelf, oddments took up an overlay of dust. The bed by the window caught whatever bit of weather came its way.
SHE LOVED FALLING
A car was coming to pick her up.
In order not to waste moments, Louise was making a fuss with a feather duster, plumage relieved from a pheasant.
She was making a most unpleasant mess,
banishing dust motes from light-laden beams.
She stopped to slip
the canary bird back in its cage,
remodeling its feathers with the back of her fingers.
Nothing in nature alarmed her.
A bow in the shape of a butterfly festooned her blunt cut.
Last night she had fainted, revived in time to see a fixed star flickering behind the frill
of four green fronds banded together by a cheap rubber band. The faint had been a falling,
sudden and tender as the doctor in leather
...
who crossed the room to come to her aid. He said he knew all about critical care and the way lungs let air in and out.
Today, the temperature had declined
in the wake of a heat wave. Dawn had been admirably mired in a message meant only for her. Here, it said, fall here.
Into love's sweet looking glass.
TO SAVOR THE SEQUEL
Both happy and simple sad, the hesitant gamut of where the lovetrain could run — there and back, there and back, followed by the predictable
fade-out and that might be savored as well, but not likely.
She compared it to dropping through an infinitude of slow lacerations.
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love —
a hive hum ongoing in the hear ear.
How could that be a thing of pure pleasure?
A fast-footed dance down the hall that gave onto a vast view of hell. A bell at the door,
a beloved's name just above it.
Come in, come in. And she did as always enter and she wished as always after that the sequel might be seen (might be felt) as a form
of recreation, a game tied by two match-match opponents instead of a chair and a window,
a wisp of ice running through her. The on-going on-going,
...
she opened the window wider, picked up her pen.
Dear X. Dearest X. What was there to say?
She rose and would no longer write.
The impulse had leaped over an edge,
an undulate verge, ever near, into which would sometimes fall a tear or two, and however many feelings.
Excerpted from "Louise In Love"
by .
Copyright © 2001 Mary Jo Bang.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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
Acknowledgments,
ECLIPSED,
SHE COULDN'T SING AT ALL, AT ALL,
THE DOG BARK,
BELLE VUE,
THE STAR'S WHOLE SECRET,
KISS, KISS, SAID LOUISE, BY WAY OF A PAY PHONE,
THE DIARY OF A LOST GIRL,
THE ANA OF BLISS,
A CAKE OF NINETEEN SLICES,
LOUISE,
LIKE A FIRE IN A FIRE,
DOES MRS. HUNT TEAR LINEN STRAIGHT AS EVER?,
TIME SPEEDS, SAID LOUISE, WHEN A FEVER RISES,
LOUISE IN LOVE,
OH, DEAR, WHAT CAN THE MATTER BE,
THAT WAS ALL, LOUISE SAID, EXCEPT FOR,
AND NO SIGN WILL MARK THE MIDPOINT'S PASSING,
SHE LOVED FALLING,
TO SAVOR THE SEQUEL,
TOO LATE, LOUISE SAID, MEANS,
HERE'S A FINE WORD: PRETTIPLEASE,
YOU COULD SAY SHE WAS WILLFUL, BUT COMPARED TO WHAT?,
THE PENGUIN CHIAROSCURO,
THE MEDICINAL COTTON CLOUDS COME DOWN TO COVER THEM,
THE STORY OF SMALL CARS,
LEXICON LOUISE,
LOUISE SIGHS, SUCH A LONG WINTER, THIS,
TRAVEL IS EASY BY TRAIN,
A PORTRAIT OF LOVE,
THE RAVEN FEEDS REYNARD,
WHAT IS A MOUTH?,
NIGHT FALLING FAST,
DARK SMUDGED THE PATH UNTRAMMELED,
A HURRICRANIUM, HE SAID,
CAPTIVITY,
THEY CHIRP, THEY WHISTLE, AND WORDS,
INCONSEQUENT MOMENT,
ETCHED, TETCHED, TOUCHED,
IN THE QUIETER AFTERMATH,
ON TO THE ONSLAUGHT: A LITTLE MILLENNIAL DIRGE,
RITUAL GESTURES,
SO THIS,
THE STILL KNIFE STILL SUSPENDED,
LYDIA'S SUITE: ONE WITHOUT HAS TWO OR THREE WITHIN,
1. O DEJECTION,
2. TO RETAIN THE ARRANGEMENT,
3. SHE WENT OUT INTO THE CLEAR COAST,
4. EXQUISITE CORPSE,
5. NIGHT AND NAIL,
6. ENCHAINED,
RAPTURED,
HAM PAINTS A PICTURE TO ILLUSTRATE AN EARLY LESSON: O TRAUMA!,
INTERRUPTED BRIEFLY BY A BORROWED PHRASE, THE SCENE PROCEEDS,
THEY WERE THAT AND THEN,