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Overview
"The delicate arc of these poems intimates—rather than tells—a love story: celebration, fear of loss, storm, abandonment, an opening forth. Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna Warren
This debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary.
Antique Book
The sky was crazed with swallows.
We walked in the frozen grass
of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep.
Trees shook down their gaudy nests.
The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow.
I was jealous of the river,
how the light broke it, of the skein
of windows where we saw ourselves.
Where we walked, the ice cracked
like an antique book, opening
and closing. The leaves
beneath it were the marbled pages.
Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781938584305 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Alice James Books |
| Publication date: | 10/12/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 100 |
| Sales rank: | 329,839 |
| File size: | 658 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Second Empire
By Richie Hofmann
Alice James Books
Copyright © 2015 Richie HofmannAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-938584-30-5
CHAPTER 1
Idyll
Cicadas bury themselves in small mouths
of the tree's hollow, lie against the bark-tongues like
amulets,
though I am praying I might shake off this skin and be
raised
from the ground again. I have nothing
to confess. I don't yet know that I possess
a body built for love. When the wind grazes
its way toward something colder,
you too will be changed. One life abrades
another, rough cloth, expostulation.
When I open my mouth, I am like an insect undressing
itself.
Three Cranes
1.
Wading low through marsh and grass,
quick and cautious, the crane, too,
knows this: there is a freedom
in submitting to another. Cranes mate
for life. With necks outstretched,
they take flight, a double arrow's stab
of silver, released and then gone.
I have searched for nourishment
in you, like a long, black beak
in the earth. How was I to know
what I would find there? Every night,
we shrieked our presence to each other,
desire or grief lacquering us onto our lives
like birds on a paneled screen.
2.
All winter long, the men built
another bridge, stacking slabs of metal
and concrete near the barrier island
where we lived. I was worried we had fallen
from each other. Silent on the beach,
we watched machines hoisted on and off
the earth. Standing one-legged in the marsh:
a crane, all steel and orange light,
binding the horizon.
What will become of us? I almost said.
Gulls wove in and out of the cables,
shrieking up and down within the stacks,
in unison, I noticed, with our breath.
It almost looked like a living thing.
3.
Lying on my stomach, reading
Crane's letters again, I felt a hand
behind me. Orange light pressed
the window. The hand that touched
my shoulder was yours ("I know now
there is such a thing as indestructibility").
Your confessor, I listened for your breath
("the cables enclosing us and pulling
us upward"), but felt only the ceiling fan,
and traffic, somewhere, chafing against
a wet street. Then, your lips on my neck
("I think the sea has thrown itself upon me
and been answered") before I closed the book
and turned my body under yours.
Egyptian Bowl with Figs
In the Egyptian gallery: dried fruit left in a bowl,
as if time and beetles and a dead king
had chewed around them,
picked the fig flesh
from his teeth, wiped clean his gaudy, painted lips,
before his body was brushed with resin, a ball
of linen lodged in his mouth, in his rectum;
before a hairless priest pulled the brain out through the nose
with a hook.
So much history is painted in gold
on a golden door, the rest carried off in the floodplain,
or covered with earth, dropped in ceremonial jars
with the dead king's brain,
or into bowls of clay
and sycamore, like this one, which held me
for an hour, wondering how long a handful of figs
could nourish a man, myth-like.
But I am young.
My hair is the color of antique coins. No one I've loved
has died. How can I know or say what hunger is?
Capriccio
From the leafy, walled-in courtyard beside the house,
where fountain water trickled
from a river-god's mouth
into the unseasonable heat of that afternoon, we watched
the heavy bees, clumsy in their flight, humming
against the bricks and orange tree blossoms.
Everywhere we walked, you would point out how the
Japanese
honeysuckle clung
to the walls and fences.
Each star-shaped flower scattered its breath into fragrance,
which the heavy air held around us,
until, as if no longer able,
a downpour,
all the aroma flushed away in the sky's own sighing —
Imperium
As if yoked in a wooden beam, our bodies cross into the
thrall
of the river,
whose name means red —hooves and sandals
with iron hobnails hammered
into the soles, one after the other
into the muddy water. We move at first like light on brass.
Now like a legion. Now a piece of the river
being crossed.
Illustration from Parsifal
While resting in the dim-lit inner study,
I pulled a book down from the shelf —a dusty
old retelling of the opera, its once scarlet
cover crumbled now, faded to a claret's
brittle blood-purple. With care, I spread
a page, as one draws back the drapes,
not wanting to be seen. Inside, a youth, golden-haired,
marches undaunted toward his longed-
for future, the margin's blank. Beyond it, the treasure
he seeks. Walking at his back, two austerer
figures: a woman, who grips one dangling tress
of his tawny pelt as her lowered head rests
against his shoulder, and an old man, his beard
meager on a face pinched by hunger for bread,
who carries on his spindly shoulders the past
and in satchels at his side. He taps
the garland of fine-penciled earth with his tapered
staff, as if to stir the souls of those who predate
this moment — under the red dust, the veil
of aging paper, those people who no longer live.
First Night in Stonington
So rare in this country to pace the streets
of another century, to wander and survey
gray alleys, cobbled by colonists and pilgrims,
and crooked houses later built for fleets
of Portuguese fishermen, whose heirs, today,
received the bishop's yearly blessing: sailors' hymns
and holy water. In the town square, someone
has set a cannonball, the balding, black veneer
freckled with rust, on a tapered pillar embellished
with the date of its arrival, a battle won
by port-merchants and innkeepers' wives. All here:
these long-dead people's memories, cherished
and chiseled into iron.
In this apartment, too,
another story preserved in the black chair
where no one sits; in boxes stuffed with photographs,
loose buttons, and playing cards; the faded blue
of Japanese prints. A book, open like hands in prayer,
rustles when the window draws a breath.
Fresco
I have come again to the perfumed city.
Houses with tiered porches, some decorated with shells.
You know from the windows that the houses
are from a different time. I am not
to blame for what changes, though sometimes
I have trouble sleeping.
Between the carriage houses,
there are little gardens separated by gates.
Lately, I have been thinking about the gates.
The one ornamented with the brass lion, I remember
it was warm to the touch
even in what passes here for winter.
But last night, when I closed my eyes,
it was not the lion that I pictured first.
Allegory
As it was for the ancients, it would be for me: songs written
down
in pictures. The one about the trees on fire
when I came upon them, and the grass flattened around me —
that was what I saw.
The trees are like a fresco,
I thought, insofar as they are gold and tell a story.
At the Palais Garnier
We always arrived late,
sometimes in masks. You wore a sword
at your side. The heads that watched
our little pageant were busts of the great composers
and not men lined up for the executions.
The style was Second Empire,
but the Empire had already fallen
by the time the façade was finished.
The casts changed seasonally
like our lovers. I remember,
through black-lace fans, Hänsel & Gretel
eating a garish cake in the darkness.
We covered our mouths
when we laughed at the children trapped
in the house of sweets. We ate cake at intermission
in order to stay awake.
Scene from Caravaggio
Meanwhile, the artist's hand
spreads black against black,
the rest of him offscreen, grinding
colors — divine wine for the lips, underside-
of-watercress for the skin — glancing back toward me,
as if I am in the picture.
Watching him, alone
in lived time, I feel anachronistic, like the fedora
he wears, the cigarette he holds
against his lips with two fingers.
The screen I watch is a canvas strewn
with nudity, with the taken-
down, everything happening all
too late. The artist paints an angel, posed
on a box with a quiver,
though in the glow of the film, I can see
he is only a model with props in a studio.
Artificial light
burns in the stillness,
chiaroscuro. The other half
veiled and equivocal, like the room
in which I myself am staged.
In which the screen illuminates
my mouth and forehead and eyes.
In which the difference between an angel
and a boy with wings is real.
MIRROR
You'd expect a certain view from such a mirror —
clearer
than one that hangs in the entry and decays.
I gaze
past my reflection toward other things:
bat wings,
burnt gold upon blue, which decorate the wall
and all
those objects collected from travels, now seen
between
its great, gold frame, diminished with age:
a stage
where, still, the supernatural corps de ballet
displays
its masquerade in the reflected light.
At night,
I thought I'd see the faces of the dead.
Instead,
the faces of the ghosted silver sea
saw me.
Antique Book
The sky was crazed with swallows.
We walked in the frozen grass
of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep.
Trees shook down their gaudy nests.
The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow.
I was jealous of the river,
how the light broke it, of the skein
of windows where we saw ourselves.
Where we walked, the ice cracked
like an antique book, opening
and closing. The leaves
beneath it were the marbled pages.
Description
Where you were, everything was becoming ice.
The paved courtyard, the windows looking out onto it.
You traveled back and forth between buildings on a bus,
passing trees and umbrellas
inverted in the wind. You moved back and forth.
I was elsewhere, in a small studio
painted white so many times the walls were thick with it.
Once a poet told me, Your eyes are whores.
Once description was all I thought I needed
to bridge things. And snow shawled the branches.
And you took the keys from your pocket. And snow feathered the grass
which was mine to remember and forget.
Amor Vincit Omnia
Some nights, we lived that way: like a horse
carrying his rider, unseen, into a village —
There was nothing to do there but memorize
each other.
Returning, we smelled of where we'd been:
the markets, the metal troughs, the trees,
the hands that touched our heads.
October 29, 2012
Nothing changes at the seaside house.
You wait out this tempest in the Windsor chair, away from the windows.
There are books for your eyes:
one about Pound as a young man, one with photographs
of glaciers. For your hands:
frozen dough thawing. Towels in the dryer.
There is music; a crate of CDs you purchased
when you were younger, when you resisted solitude by
listening
to massive collaborations:
32 violins, 6 French Horns, 8 double basses, a piccolo.
The one on top is Mahler's fifth,
conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who was buried
with that score across his heart. Someone extinguishes
the lamps along the beach. Mahler drowns out
the weather against the roof.
Keys to the City
Didn't rain choke the animal throats
of the cathedral sputter
against the roofs of the city didn't the flight
of stairs rise up above the cobbled street
didn't the key clamor
in the lock flood
the vestibule with clattering didn't we climb
the second flight
toward the miniature Allegory
painted on the ceiling
and touch the flat-faced girls
winged part animal
who did not flinch and did not scamper
Bright Walls
It was not penitence I sought, standing outside
the bedroom in the old apartment
where you had spent the night alone.
To bend, to kneel before some greater force —
that was no longer what I wished.
Clouds blew in from the coast, and I felt
the sun abandoning the window behind me,
making the bright walls suddenly colorless,
obscuring everything, for a moment,
that I wanted. When I finally entered,
I saw you still asleep — a wet strand
of hair tucked behind your ear, the husk
of your body — and lingered there for a minute,
before walking upstairs to shut the windows.
Erotic Archive
We sleep in his bed
among his silent books.
Though I never knew him,
I've spent my life thinking it's his ghost
I belong to.
We pass his books
between us. We read inscriptions
meant for him. We record them
dutifully. Remembering
the blue room of an evening,
I look past the window
the light changes through,
past the boats
with their tied-up sails and canvas covers.
The window shows
the sea as unattainable
and distant as art,
our lovers far away.
The Harbor
Afterwards everything whitened
like paper or breath —
The room was suddenly anchored to itself,
the chains stopped groaning.
I knew I could not leave with you.
The sea outside was like the sea
on the map. A sea-god was blowing
into a crosshatched arc of sails.
Purple
From the Phoenicians, they learned to extract
the color from shells.
When their dogs ate sea snails along the coast,
their dogteeth were dyed purple — that's how the Phoenicians knew.
To darken it,
the Romans added black, which came from soot, from scorched wood,
which abounded, one imagines, in an empire.
The Ships
from an inscription of Augustus
"All the Germans
of that territory
sought by envoys
my friendship
The far reaches
of what any Roman had ever seen
opened to me
the mouth
of the Rhine the water
swallowing the gold
colored hulls
What gods
would I find in the forests
in the riverbanks
scattered
with precious stones
I sailed my ships
on the sea dark
and full of meaning
When
our sails first caught
the wind
of the Cimbri it was rough
as their language
I watched
their shirtless oarsmen
maneuvering
the oars
I watched the ships
running their fingers
through the water
of the Roman people"
Braying
Now is the time we hear them coming back,
when the first sunlight drops to the field
like an animal being born, slick and shivering
where it falls. Their hooves grind against the earth,
wheat is pounded in a mortar
with a pestle, freed from its husks and impurities.
What wickedness clings to me, it sticks
to the last. I will keep my mouth with a bridle.
Fly
What the richest man in Rome feared most of all,
Pliny tells us, was losing his sight. The man wore Greek
charms
around his neck in order to prevent it. He carried a living fly
in a white cloth that he might keep seeing.
Perhaps he thought the fly's many eyes were a blessing.
Apologizing, devising elaborate rituals — what
will I carry? I have been counting ways
of keeping you.
Second Empire
The water, for once,
unmetaphysical. Stepping over
the stones, you pulling
your shirt over your shoulders.
The flesh-and-
blood that constitutes you
could have been anything and yet
appears before me
as your body. Wading out again,
I am a little white omnivore
in the black water,
inhaling avidly
the absence of shame.
We lie on our backs
with our underwear on.
The soul is an aristocrat.
It disdains the body,
staring through the water
at the suggestion of our human forms.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Second Empire by Richie Hofmann. Copyright © 2015 Richie Hofmann. Excerpted by permission of Alice James Books.
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
• Title Page,• Copyright,
SEA INTERLUDE: DAWN,
I,
Idyll,
Three Cranes,
Egyptian Bowl with Figs,
Capriccio,
Imperium,
Illustration from Parsifal,
First Night in Stonington,
Fresco,
SEA INTERLUDE: PASSACAGLIA,
II,
Allegory,
At the Palais Garnier,
Scene from Caravaggio,
Mirror,
Antique Book,
Description,
Amor Vincit Omnia,
October 29, 2012,
Keys to the City,
SEA INTERLUDE: STORM,
III,
Bright Walls,
Erotic Archive,
The Harbor,
Purple,
The Ships,
Braying,
Fly,
Second Empire,
Night Ferry,
SEA INTERLUDE: MOONLIGHT,
IV,
The Surround,
Abendlied,
Midwinter,
The Gates,
Gatekeeper,
Egyptian Cotton,
After,
Imperial City,
? Notes,
? About the Author,