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Overview
Recipient, 2011 MacArthur Fellowship and Guggenheim Fellowship
A. E. Stallings has established herself as one of the best American poets of her generation. In addition to a lively dialogue with both the contemporary and ancient culture of her adopted homeland, Greece, this new collection features poems that, in her inimitable voice, address the joys and anxieties of marriage and motherhood. This collection builds on previous accomplishments with some longer poems and sequences of greater philosophical scope, such as “On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia.” Stallings possesses the rare ability to craft precise poems that pulsate with deeply felt emotion. Like the olives of the title, the book embraces the bitter but savory fruits of the ancient tree, and the tears and sweetness we harvest in our temporary lives. These poems show Stallings in complete command of her talent, able to suggest the world in a word.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810152267 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2012 |
| Pages: | 80 |
| Sales rank: | 690,887 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Olives
PoemsBy A. E. Stallings
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 A. E. StallingsAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-5226-7
Chapter One
The Argument
Olives
Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet,
For fruits that you can eat
Only if pickled in a vat of tears—
A rich and dark and indehiscent meat
Clinging tightly to the pit—on spears
Of toothpicks maybe, drowned beneath a tide
Of vodka and vermouth,
Rocking at the bottom of a wide,
Shallow, long-stemmed glass, and gentrified,
Or rustic, on a plate cracked like a tooth,
A miscellany of the humble hues
Eponymously drab—
Brown greens and purple browns, the blacks and blues
That chart the slow chromatics of a bruise—
Washed down with swigs of barrel wine that stab
The palate with pine-sharpness. They recall
The harvest and its toil,
The nets spread under silver trees that foil
The blue glass of the heavens in the fall—
Daylight packed in treasuries of oil,
Paradigmatic summers that decline
Like singular archaic nouns, the troops
Of hours in retreat. These fruits are mine—
Small bitter drupes
Full of the golden past and cured in brine.
Jigsaw Puzzle
First, the four corners,
Then the flat edges.
Assemble the lost borders,
Walk the dizzy ledges,
Hoard one color—try
To make it all connected—
The water and the deep sky
And the sky reflected.
Absences align
And lock shapes into place,
And random forms combine
To make a tree, a face.
Slowly you restore
The fractured world and start
To re-create an afternoon before
It fell apart:
Here is summer, here is blue,
Here two lovers kissing,
And here the nothingness shows through
Where one piece is missing.
Recitative
Every night, we couldn't sleep—
Our upstairs neighbors had to keep
Dropping something down the hall—
A barbell or a bowling ball,
And from the window by the bed—
Scaling sharply in my head—
The alley cats expended breath
In arias of love and death.
Dawn again, across the street,
Jackhammers began to beat
Like hangovers, and you would frown—
That well-built house, why tear it down?
Noon, the radiator grill
Groaned, gave off a lesser chill
So that we could take off our coats.
The pipes coughed to clear their throats.
Our nerves were frayed like ravelled sleeves,
We cherished each our minor griefs
To keep them warm until the night
When it was time again to fight;
But we were young, did not need much
To make us laugh instead, and touch,
And could not hear ourselves above
The arias of death and love.
Sublunary
Midsentence, we remembered the eclipse,
Arguing home through our scant patch of park,
Still warm with barrel wine, when none too soon
We checked the hour by glancing at the moon,
Unphased at first by that old ruined marble
Looming like a monument over the hill,
So brimmed with light it seemed about to spill,
Then, there! We watched the thin edge disappear—
The obvious stole over us like awe
That it was our own silhouette we saw,
Slow perhaps to us moon-gazing here
(Reaching for each other's fingertips)
But sweeping like a wing across that stark
Alien surface at the speed of dark.
The crickets stirred from winter sleep to warble
Something out of time, confused and brief,
The roosting birds sang out in disbelief,
The neighborhood's stray dogs began to bark.
And then the moon was gone, and in its place,
A dim red planet hung just out of reach,
As real as a bitter orange or ripened peach
In the penumbra of a tree. At last
We rose and strolled at a reflective pace
Past the taverna crammed with light and smoke
And people drinking, laughing at a joke,
Unaware that anything had passed
Outside in the night where we delayed
Sheltering in the shadow we had made.
Four Fibs
1
Did
Eve
believe
or grapple
over the apple?
Eavesdropping Adam heard her say
to the snake-oil salesman she was not born yesterday.
2
Miss,
this
is not
Bliss. Wisdom
is not the abyss,
but visceral innocence. Kiss
the windfall of the world, she heard him whisper, or hiss.
3
Not
me,
not me!
cried all three.
"You shall creep the earth.
And you shall labor giving birth.
And as for you, you shall toil and sweat for all you're worth."
4
Cross
your
heart and
hope to die,
stick a needle in
your eye. That is the awful oath
of childhood, chapter and verse, genesis of the lie.
The Compost Heap
It waxed with autumn, when the leaves—
Dogwood, oak, and sycamore—
Avalanched the yard and slipped
Like unpaid bills beneath the door.
In winter it gave off a warmth
And held its ground against the snow,
The barrow of the buried year,
The swelling that spring stirred below.
In summer, we'd identify
The volunteers and green recruits,
A sapling apple or a pear
That stemmed from bruised or bitten fruits.
And everything we threw away
And we forgot, would by and by
Return to earth, or drop its seed
Take root and start to ramify.
We left the garden in the fall—
You turned the heap up with the rake
And startled latent in its heart
The dark glissando of a snake.
The Dress of One Occasion
The dress of one occasion in its box
Belongs to yesterday and to tomorrow—
But not to this day slowly turning yellow,
For better or worse, among the cotton flocks.
Disembodied now and ghostly pale,
Mummified in tissue easily torn
As though the flimsy pattern of a dress,
It's packed away—for what, you cannot guess—
Stored perhaps for someone not yet born
(You cannot see the face behind the veil)
The day of its occasion growing stale
And brittle as a triangle of cake—
Most innocent and decadent of frocks
Because solemn and frivolous—the fluff
That blows away from dandelion clocks,
The lace of time, that shifty, subtle stuff
That only time itself knows how to make
Out of the body's loom, the velvet marrow.
One Saturday in May, you thought the blue
Above your heads was yours to keep and new,
When really it was something old, to borrow.
Deus Ex Machina
Because we were good at entanglements, but not
Resolution, and made a mess of plot,
Because there was no other way to fulfill
The ancient prophecy, because the will
Of the gods demanded punishment, because
Neither recognized who the other was,
Because there was no difference between
A tragic ending and a comic scene,
Because the play was running out of time,
Because the mechanism of the sublime
To stay in working order needed using,
Because it was a script not of our choosing,
Because we were actors, because we knew for a fact
We were only actors, because we could not act
Telephonophobia
We joke about it. Really, you're annoyed
To make some call I should make on my own—
It doesn't bite, you say. That isn't true.
We keep it on a leash; it isn't tame.
It stalks us in our sleep. And when at last
Some shy, unbidden happiness arrives
That triggers its alarm, it's not for you.
I bring it to my head, it speaks my name:
Old anger pours like poison in my ear—
Or information, cool as dates on stone,
Rocks in its smooth, black cradle. I avoid
The thing, because it holds what I most fear:
At any hour, the future or the past
Can dial into the room and change our lives.
The Argument
After the argument, all things were strange.
They stood divided by their eloquence
Which had surprised them after so much silence.
Now there were real things to rearrange.
Words betokened deeds, but they were both
Lightened briefly, and they were inclined
To be kind as sometimes strangers can be kind.
It was as if, out of the undergrowth,
They stepped into a clearing and the sun,
Machetes still in hand. Something was done,
But how, they did not fully realize.
Something was beginning. Something would stem
And branch from this one moment. Something made
Them each look up into the other's eyes
Because they both were suddenly afraid
And there was no one now to comfort them.
Burned
You cannot unburn what is burned.
Although you scrape the ruined toast,
You can't go back. It's time you learned
The butter cannot be unchurned,
You can't unmail the morning post,
You cannot unburn what is burned—
The lovers in your youth you spurned,
The bridges charred you needed most.
You can't go back. It's time you learned
Smoke's reputation is well earned,
Not just an acrid, empty boast—
You cannot unburn what is burned.
You longed for home, but while you yearned,
The black ships smoldered on the coast;
You can't go back. It's time you learned
That even if you had returned,
You'd only be a kind of ghost.
You can't go back. It's time you learned
That what is burned is burned is burned.
On Visiting a Borrowed Country House
in Arcadia
for John
To leave the city
Always takes a quarrel. Without warning,
Rancors that have gathered half the morning
Like things to pack, or a migraine, or a cloud,
Are suddenly allowed
To strike. They strike the same place twice.
We start by straining to be nice,
Then say something shitty.
Isn't it funny
How it's what has to happen
To make the unseen ivory gates swing open,
The rite we must perform so we can leave?
Always we must grieve
Our botched happiness: we goad
Each other till we pull to the hard shoulder of the road,
Yielding to tears inadequate as money.
But if instead
Of turning back, we drive into the day,
We forget the things we didn't say.
The silence fills with row on row
Of vines or olive trees. The radio
Hums to itself. We make our way between
Saronic blue and hills of glaucous green
And thread
Beyond the legend of the map
Through footnote towns along the coast
That boast
Ruins of no account—a column
More woebegone than solemn—
Men watching soccer at the two cafés,
And half-built lots where dingy sheep still graze.
Climbing into the lap
Of the mountains now, we wind
Around blind, centrifugal turns.
The sun's great warship sinks and burns.
And where the roads without a sign are crossed,
We (inevitably) get lost.
Yet to be lost here
Still feels like being somewhere,
And we find
When we arrive and park,
No one minds that we are late—
There is no one to wait—
Only a bed to make, a suitcase to unpack.
The earth has turned her back
On one yellow middling star
To consider lights more various and far.
The shaggy mountains hulk into the dark
Or loom
Like slow, titanic waves. The cries
Of owls dilate the shadows. Weird harmonics rise
From the valley's distant glow, where coal
Extracted from the lignite mines must roll
On acres of conveyor belts that sing
The Pythagorean music of a string.
A huge grey plume
Of smoke or steam
Towers like the ghost of a monstrous flame
Or giant tree among the trees. And it is all the same—
The power plant, the forest, and the night,
The manmade light.
We are engulfed in an immense
Ancient indifference
That does not sleep or dream.
Call it Nature if you will,
Though everything that is is natural—
The lignite-bearing earth, the factory,
A darkness taller than the sky—
This out-of-doors that wins us our release
And temporary peace—
Not because it is pristine or pretty,
But because it has no pity or self-pity.
Chapter Two
Extinction of Silence
Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Ascribed
to Martin Luther
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons,
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?
Two Violins
One was fire-red,
Hand-carved and new—
The local maker pried the wood
From a torn-down church's pew,
The Devil's instrument
Wrenched from the house of God.
It answered merrily and clear
Though my fingering was flawed;
Bright and sharp as a young wine,
They said, but it would mellow,
And that I would grow into it.
The other one was yellow
And nicked down at the chin,
A varnish of Baltic amber,
A one-piece back of tiger maple
And a low, dark timbre.
A century old, they said,
Its sound will never change.
Rich and deep on G and D,
Thin on the upper range—
And how it came from the Old World
Was anybody's guess—
Light as an exile's suitcase,
A belly of emptiness:
That was the one I chose—
Not the one of flame—
And teachers turned in their practiced hands
To see whence the sad notes came.
Country Song
Death was something that hadn't happened yet.
I was driving in my daddy's pickup truck
At some late hour, the hour of broken luck.
It seeped up through the dashboard's oubliette,
Clear voice through murk—the radio was set
Halfway between two stations and got stuck.
But the words sobbed through, and I was suddenly struck
Like a gut string in the key of flat regret.
The voice came from beyond the muddy river—
You know the one, the one that's cold as ice.
Even then, it traveled like a shiver
Through my tributary veins—but twice
As melancholy to me now, because
I'm older than Hank Williams ever was.
Sabbatical
He has been underground
These seven years, but he will not rise
The way the cicadas will,
Punctual and shrill,
Casting off the gold film from their eyes,
Raptured out of their translucent shells
To stun
The leaded windows of their wings with sun,
Their voices riding on the heat like swells,
A rattling of broken bells,
Their sudden silence giant as a sound.
The Ghost Ship
She plies an inland sea. Dull
With rust, scarred by a jagged reef.
In Cyrillic, on her hull
Is lettered Grief.
The dim stars do not signify;
No sonar with its eerie ping
Sounds the depths—she travels by
Dead reckoning.
At her heart is a stopped clock.
In her wake, the hours drag.
There is no port where she can dock,
She flies no flag,
Has no allegiance to a state,
No registry, no harbor berth,
Nowhere to discharge her freight
Upon the earth.
Handbook of the Foley Artist
For the sound of distant thunder,
A father frowning,
For the smack of sarcasm,
Pop of bubblegum;
For a sudden summer downpour,
Sizzle of bacon,
For the sound of somewhere else,
Freight train at 2 A.M.;
For the sound of snoring,
Bees in the lilac bush.
For the sound of insomnia,
Eyelashes against a pillowcase;
For the sea's din,
Blood's hush in the cochlea of the ear,
For the screak of a seagull,
The playground's rusted swing;
For the sound of birth,
The radio between pangs,
For death,
Static of flies;
For dry bones,
Fig trees clattering in the wind,
For the vowel of the wind,
A dog left out in the yard;
Crumple paper
For the fricative of fire;
For the gasp of an opened letter,
Strike a match;
Take the telephone off the hook
For the sound of no answer.
For the sound of a broken heart,
Crack a joke.
Extinction of Silence
That it was shy when alive goes without saying.
We know it vanished at the sound of voices
Or footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises,
Though it could be approached by someone praying.
We have no recordings of it, though of course
In the basement of the Museum, we have some stuffed
Moth-eaten specimens—the Lesser Ruffed
And Yellow Spotted—filed in narrow drawers.
But its song is lost. If it was related to
A species of Quiet, or of another feather,
No researcher can know. Not even whether
A breeding pair still nests deep in the bayou,
Where legend has it some once common bird
Decades ago was first not seen, not heard.
Blackbird Étude
for Craig Arnold
The blackbird sings at
the frontier of his music.
The branch where he sat
marks the brink of doubt,
is the outpost of his realm,
edge from which to rout
encroachers with trills
and melismatic runs surpassing
earthbound skills.
It sounds like ardor,
it sounds like joy. We are glad
here at the border
where he signs the air
with his invisible staves,
TRESPASSERS BEWARE—
song as survival—
a kind of pure music which
we cannot rival.
Lines for Turner Cassity
Librarian with military bearing,
You've left us poems critics call unsparing,
A wit not merely clever but hard-bitten.
Sometimes I hear you utter overwritten,
And even at this distance, there's no choice
But hear the word in that distinctive voice,
Not circumflexing drawl, diphthonged legato,
But southern, brisk, particular staccato—
Inimitable voice—for never cruel—
Impatient only of the pompous fool
And vagueness that gesticulates at truth.
Clear and styptic as a dry vermouth,
You taught the courtesy of kindness meant
By shaming false and floral sentiment.
Death's crude arithmetic only exacts
The estimate of flesh and bone for tax;
You it has taken—and yet misconstrued—
For it has left us your exactitude.
Funereal Stelae: Kerameikos, Athens
In the Museum of Sorrow stand
The marble dead on either hand:
Each seated formally on a chair
In profile, with a mild, blank stare.
Others come to bid good-bye,
To shake hands, turn aside and cry
Into the folds of cloak or sleeve;
A huntsman leaves a hound to grieve,
Its tail tucked under, ears drooped low.
Sisters, brothers, parents go.
And everywhere, that silent noise,
The votaries of children's toys:
Clay dolls, tops with painted rings,
And four-wheeled horses pulled on strings.
Beyond the air-conditioned rooms,
The grassy suburbs of the tombs,
With tortoises humped here and there
Beside the foot-worn thoroughfare—
They hunker on these patchy lawns
Like scattered helmets made of bronze,
The verdigris of ancient war.
A stream meanders as before
Through reeds and stone, steady as grief
And graving Time, its low relief.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Olives by A. E. Stallings Copyright © 2012 by A. E. Stallings. Excerpted by permission of NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS. 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
I. The ArgumentOlives
Jigsaw Puzzle
Recitative
Sublunary
Four Fibs
The Compost Heap
The Dress of One Occasion
Deus Ex Machina
Telephonophobia
Fear of Happiness
The Argument
Burned
On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia
II. Extinction of Silence
Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Ascribed to Martin Luther
Two Violins
Country Song
Sabbatical
The Ghost Ship
Handbook of the Foley Artist
Extinction of Silence
Blackbird Etude
Lines for Turner Cassity
Funereal Stelae: Kerameikos, Athens
The Cenotaph
Pop Music
III. Three Poems for Psyche
The Eldest Sister to Psyche
The Boatman to Psyche on the River Styx
Persephone to Psyche
IV. Fairy-tale Logic
Fairy-tale Logic
The Catch
Two Nursery Rhymes
Containment
Accident Waiting to Happen
Dinosaur Fever
Tulips
Alice in the Looking Glass
Umbrage
Hide and Seek
Sea Girls
Listening to "Peter and the Wolf" with Jason, Aged Three
The Mother's Loathing of Balloons
Another Bedtime Story
OLIVES [as afterword or on back cover-would not be in contents]
Acknowledgements