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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226110639 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 03/17/2014 |
| Series: | Phoenix Poets |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 88 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.70(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Reel to Reel
By ALAN SHAPIRO
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-11063-9
CHAPTER 1
WHEREVER MY DEAD GO WHEN I'M NOT
REMEMBERING THEM
Not gone, not here, a fern trace in the stone
of living tissue it can somehow flourish from;
or the dried up channel and the absent current;
or maybe it's like a subway passenger
on a platform in a dim lit station late
at night between trains, after the trains have stopped—
ahead only the faintest rumbling of
the last one disappearing, and behind
the dark you're looking down for any hint
of light—where is it? why won't it come? you
wandering now along the yellow line,
restless, not knowing who you are, or even
where until you see it, there it is,
approaching, and you hurry to the spot
you don't know how you know is marked
for you, and you alone, as the door slides open
into your being once again my father,
my sister or brother, as if nothing's changed,
as if to be known were the destination.
Where are we going? What are we doing here?
you don't ask, you don't notice the blur of stations
we're racing past, the others out there watching
in the dim light, baffled,
who for a moment thought the train was theirs.
REEL TO REEL
Passed on to me after my brother's death,
My name in marker on the see-through plastic
Of the giant reel, on which the melody
But not the words of "Jeepers Creepers" breaks off
Halfway across the bridge into my voice
At nine, with two friends on the tape, three boys,
Three voices on the tape, three high-pitched in-
Distinguishable voices hamming it up
Together on some day I can't remember
In a far corner of the playroom where
My brother every evening sang the words
While the tape recorder played the melody,
Every evening no matter how tired he was,
No matter what else he needed to be doing,
Or wanted to do, despite the pleas, the sulks,
The tantrums, because he had a gift, she said,
And, fine, if he didn't want to honor it, fine,
His choice, he could kiss it goodbye, for all she cared,
But one day he'll realize what he's lost, one day
He'll wish he'd listened to her—one day, that one
Day each day shaken at him like a club.
Which voice is mine? Who's there with me? What's left
Of that day, of any day of all those years
In the cramped house: two reels, one thin, one fat,
And brown tape threaded through the housing, which,
When you hit record, sounded (if you said nothing)
Like water rushing far off underground,
Turning the reels too slow to ever see
The thin one fatten or the fat one thin.
And "Jeepers Creepers"—that was his specialty,
His show stopper, what he always opened with,
Her little Mel Tormé, her Buddy Greco,
So cute, so sexless, she could eat him up,
When he was on stage: the adorable red blazer
With bright white piping on the lapel, white pants,
White patent leather tap shoes, straw hat, and cane.
I see him when I hear the melody,
And somehow I hear every word he sang,
But not him singing on those evenings half
A century away, no single one
Of which I can remember anymore.
"Where'd you get those peepers, jeepers creepers,
Where'd you get those eyes" that hated me
Every evening as they couldn't not
Because I didn't have a voice or gift
To be alone inside the spotlight of,
No fear of any day that lay in wait
To make me sorry. "Gosh oh git up
How'd they get so lit up ... how'd they get that size ..."
The slow reels changed without appearing to.
"Woe, woe, woe is me, got to get my cheaters on"
The moment when the tune breaks into nothing,
No words, no music, the hush a sound of water
Rushing underground, until a boy
Laughs while two others wrestle for the mic,
And then all three are laughing, hamming it up—
"Heavens to Mergatroid!" "A wise guy, hey!"
Just that, those seconds, "gosh oh gee oh," just
The voices of a ghostly slapstick now
From reel to reel to ferry us across.
THE FAMILY BED
My sister first and then my brother woke
Inside the house they dreamed, and so the dream
House, which, in my dream, was the house in which
I found them now, was vanishing as they woke,
Was swallowing itself the way the picture did
Inside the switched off television screen.
It was the nightmare picture of them sleeping
As if alive beside me in the last
Room left to us, the nightmare of the picture
Suddenly collapsing on the screen
Into the tick and crackle of the shriveling
Abyss they were being sucked away into
By having wakened, while I, alone now,
Clung to the screen of sleeping in the not
Yet undreamt bedroom they no longer dreamed.
WAVE
Of and not of
water, moving in water
through it
while the water lifts in place
as it passes
buoy and boat, the way hands
in one row
rise as one to fall
as the next
row rises, in a phantom
billowing of
and not of, in and other
than, across
the stadium, over the bed
in the flapped
sheet rippling as it's drifting down.
Sine and swerving cosine
of the starling
cloud, of the shock waves
of the bomb blast,
of the slithering snake or the snaking
river which somehow
is the same shape as the building pressure
of the urge of
the desire in the middle of which
the air, too,
atom by atom, rises and falls
with the cries cried
at the same time from your lips to my ear,
and from mine to yours.
THE GATE
There in the last before
of early late,
when our bodies become both garden
and unlocked gate,
both the children playing hard
and the game they play,
so lost in playing that
they couldn't say
what turns in the sensation
of sensation turning
from long and slow—just when?—
to sudden burning,
burning in taste and touch
so thoroughly
that my skin tastes of you,
and yours of me—
and taste is scent and scent
is everywhere
enveloping us like
an atmosphere
of briefest having that
we can't believe
up to its breathless end
will ever leave
until it does, and in
the dark we find
the children we thought we were
left far behind—
back in the garden while,
beyond the gate
that's gone as soon as entered,
soon shrinks to late,
and play to pulse receding
to withdrawn kiss
to garden bed now just
the bed it is.
AGING LOVERS
Shaking the chill
off starts with you
pretending not
to know I watch you
while I watch you
pretending not to,
in the lamp-lit
twilight we prefer,
that we can both
half hide in—
because it suits
what sags, what shrinks,
and leaves us free
to think I'm watching
you be watched
by me in secret
as you unbutton
now and now unhook
untie let
slip so nonchalantly I
can hardly stand it
while I pretend
I can because
that's how it quickens
in you to the
shimmying out
of and the sliding
off and down
to only shadows
falling all
around bare skin
that though goose-
fleshed and shivering
won't be rushed, no,
it just takes longer
at this stage
to shake it off,
the chill, the change,
the sudden cold
front heightening
the heat it meets
at last under
the covers I
am lifting up.
THE CAVE
Imagine the electric
Air ways
Suddenly visible,
All of them
Everywhere like
Neurons firing
Kaleidoscopically
In air, the empty
Air we move
And breathe in
Crosshatched now
And crisscrossed
Like a planetary
Nervous system
Passing through
The very bodies it
Began as, as if
There were no bodies,
Every hate and
Love cry of the body
Old and young,
Long dead and dying,
Scribbling their lightning
Urgencies at once
In all directions
In an inverse
Of the parable where
Inside is outside,
And lights are shadows
Of us flashing at us
Over bright
Cave walls of air.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Your face as an unbroken
line of moments
reaching back from
old to young to
unrecalled and
unrecallable
beginnings—your face
at any and every
moment all along
that daisy-chain
of faces changing
even while each face
is bordered by
identical versions
of itself—the
transient sameness
of the face before
and after just a
slower kind of
cloud drift
ever young
till not, and never
old till old,
improbably
as hand from paw
from wing from fin
("How? When?") day by
indistinguishable day.
ON THUMBING THROUGH SMITH'S
RECOGNIZABLE PATTERNS OF HUMAN
MALFORMATION
to Annie Dillard
And what of the bird-headed dwarfs
on page 657, the naked boy
and girl in a bleak light
on a shameless table, propped up
side by side by a single hand,
by a thumb and finger?
What of the boy's chest, or the girl's,
no wider than a deck of cards,
each face no longer than a thumb?
What of the normal eyes
made huge by the shrunken
features? Or the wick-
like legs they cannot
straighten, the twisted arms,
the smile as sweet as any
that only the girl
is smiling, still too young
to get it, as she holds her arms up
high as if for an embrace
and not because she had been told to
for the picture for the textbook
so we can see them better,
smiling as if pretending so
could make it so,
while the older boy, who gets it,
his mouth like crimped thread,
grimacing, as he looks away,
won't look into the camera—
looking away as from
a small unpleasantness
he grudgingly gives in to
for his own good,
though he can't see how
or why, the helpless
rageful dignity of looking
elsewhere, as if it were
the body only, and not
him caught naked
there on page 657
of the 1000-page book,
unhoused, unhouseled
on a metal table, in the blameless
wrong of a design he gets,
he gets it, if not all the time
and everywhere, then there
and then, when the camera flashes
fixing him inside the isn't
of what everyone else is,
which is why he isn't
smiling like his sister, no,
not now, not here, not
even if asked to, he won't
be like the other smiling
children in the book,
who smile like children
even while being spit
out onto the page by what
beyond the page outside
the book is deeply
drinking all the others in.
TAUNG CHILD
What led you down, first mother, from the good
dark of the canopy, and then beyond it?
What scarcity or new scent drew you out
that day into the vertical-hating flatness
of the bright veldt, alone, or too far from
the fringes of the group of other mothers
following the fathers out among the herds
and solitary grazers, the child clinging to your back
when the noiseless wing flash lifted him
away into the shocked light as the others ran?
Two million years ago, and yet what comes
to me, in time-lapse through cascading chains
of changing bodies, is not the tiny skull
I'm holding, not the clawed out eye sockets,
his fractured jaw, but you, old mother, just then
in that Ur-moment of his being gone,
what I've felt too, on crowded streets, in malls,
if only briefly, in the instant when
the child beside me who was just there
isn't
before he is again, that shock, that panic,
that chemical echo of your screaming voice.
GRAVITY
Pervasive ghostly
whatnot of the
felt invisible
streaming back
and forth of massless
particles that
anything with mass
reels out of itself
to reel in whatever's
smaller (how, by
what means, pulling
with what, or
pressing?) along
lines of force
in fields of
force that lessen
never quite
to nothing over
infinite distances,
at all times, in all
directions where
there's no direction
and even light is
sucked like a body
into the densest
hole of it, or curls,
photon by photon,
at its horizon like
a flock of starlings—
and in the dream
vision of its utter
opposite—which is
not grace—you are
the object only,
the merely acted
on, subjected
to, dumb thing
at rest, in nothing,
nowhere, immoveable,
or moved
so continuously
forward at the
same speed it's
the same as rest—
it is the nightmare
of the absence of
all sense of this
way or that or
fast or slow, which
suddenly you
wake from, falling
without time
enough to reach
for anything
between what's rushing
from you and
what's rushing up.
IN WINTER
Broad leaves of bittersweet enveloping the dead
and dying trees, flourishing up the trunks
and out across the lower branches to
the few abandoned nests they haven't yet
invaded: every leaf now almost seeming
to signal something to no one about the never
to be disentangled moment of itself,
how all their surfaces flash and go dim
all morning, in and out of focus, too bright,
too dark, too suddenly or slowly now
in ever varying miniscule degrees
of sun and shade too subtle to be named
changing before my eyes across what also
changes before my eyes without my seeing,
like the bloated carcass of the squirrel
caught in a crook of branches, bloated, seething
with little scavengers that carried it
away in sun and shadow as it shrank
invisibly to nothing but this flattened
wisp of dark between the flashing leaves.
Leaves signaling about it, whether they are or not,
something about what can't be thought about,
impenetrable, irreducible,
as the recurring no time of the ice
you dream between you and an open door
you cannot enter, where the ones you come for,
look for, and even think you see inside it
looking out, are looking out, but not
at you, and only briefly, from a dark
that all at once is darker for the ice
that flashes up so brightly that it blinds.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reel to Reel by ALAN SHAPIRO. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 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
AcknowledgmentsOne
Wherever My Dead Go When I’m Not Remembering Them
Reel to Reel
The Family Bed
Wave
The Gate
Aging Lovers
The Cave
Thought Experiment
On Thumbing through Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation
Taung Child
Gravity
In Winter
Disaster Movies
Beach Towel
Law of Motion
Absolute Zero
You
Emissary
Dialogue
Two
Homeric Turns
Three
The Bridge
Politics
Angel
The Open Door
Grace
Spooky Action at a Distance
Phantom
Saint Christopher
Whatever Else They’re Singing
Scatter
SunThe Not Lord