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Overview
Originally published in 1975, The Carpenter at the Asylum was Monette’s first literary success. In this collection of poems, he writes with playfulness and candor of everything from fairy tales to the change of seasons. “All things glitter like fresh milk,” he writes in one poem. And indeed, these works pull a sparklingly strange beauty from everyday objects and experiences.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Paul Monette including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the Paul Monette papers of the UCLA Library Special Collections.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480473775 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 03/25/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 64 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Paul Monette (1945–1995) was an author, poet, and gay rights activist. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Yale University, he moved with his partner Roger Horwitz to Los Angeles in 1978 and became involved in the gay rights movement. Monette’s writing captures the sense of heartbreak and loss at the center of the AIDS crisis. His first novel, Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, was published in 1978, and he went on to write several more works of fiction, poetry, and memoir. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, the tender account of his partner’s battle with the disease, earned him both PEN Center West and Lambda literary awards. In 1992, Monette won the National Book Award in Nonfiction for Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, an autobiography detailing his early life and his struggle with his sexuality. Written as a classic coming-of-age story, Becoming a Man became a seminal coming-out story. In 1995, Monette founded the Monette-Horwitz Trust, which honors individuals and organizations working to combat homophobia. Monette died in his home in West Hollywood in 1995 of complications from AIDS.
Read an Excerpt
The Carpenter at the Asylum
Poems
By Paul Monette
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1975 Paul MonetteAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-7377-5
CHAPTER 1
The Girl in the Field
"I will not kindly leave you after all,"
she writes, but strikes it out. "What
else are we to uncover? We are of such
trifling cheer. It's finished. Where is
the highway your vagabond double walked
me down?" She drops her wide-brimmed hat
on the letter and stretches in the grass,
hollowing there in the ferns her head's
mild outline. She rocks like an urgent
child, ignores what quickening flowers
her hair has feathered. He wants me home
by twilight, she thinks, then smiles
like a fox in a foolproof hideout,
every blood dog shaken off and sent
circling. She tears it and goes home.
Deadlines unattended, we cast tracks
ahead suspiciously, draw out our one
idea piecemeal. She seldom says goodbye
tomorrow. And where she lay down, her
sharp silhouette has stayed one moment
and releases, all its precious emphasis
let go. The grass resumes its formless
diagram, the dusk lights shadowing it
in vagrant scribbles. There are no
marks or sanctuaries anyway. A salt fish
fossiled in the stone of a dry mountain
leagues above sea level tells us nothing
about the mountain. In that fish's fast
year of swimming, shells like ripe cheese
swelled and held fast in the peak ledges,
a cool blooming in the sea's tremendous
meadow. Each bald stone in your garden
is a mountain in the ground. This tells
us nothing of our delays, which dreams
petrify, which ones trace their figure
like a brief handprint in wet weather.
The Hornet
I don't fool around, for one thing.
Why, in a low flight, I seem to slice
the earth's glib flesh like a canker,
I care less and less. As summer cools
and ages in the gray woods' channel,
bite for bite the frost tears at all
things twice, once to flare the blossom
and again to interfere in every heat
a flower swallows. I am impossibly
bored by death. I keep up such an open
glutton's touch, I doubt my hounding
pouches will collapse until, held
in the sun's bright cycle, the light
levels of air are shut in ice. My
fantasy stunt: stowaway, high over
this quiver in the weather, I scout
the cockpit of a bomber. My hum at
the pilot's neck is undetected. When
I take him, he will be thinking, as he
aims his cargo, that even more chooses
him than the zero in night that tires
to nothing the fierce static of summer
lakes. I welt his eyes, he bawls with
an idiot disbelief, he is coming to
pieces. Anything venomous leans to the
lie of power; the doctor doubles the
dose, the patient drops, the doctor
knots his tie. And always to the dread
of nothing held on fire, like singing,
the next day's shriek for ease rises.
Hänsel to Gretel
Letting loose, the animals strike off
across the spring savannahs. We watch
their grief and inconsistent mating,
traveling on jazz like castoff gypsies.
Wait: creep beneath her windows, take
the measure of her magic first. These
houses lie under spells. Look: swamp
lilies in her dooryard, tea roses wind
in her step pots. Here is where she cools
her bread, the bone snakes coiling in
her combs. Here she thumps dry the dark
flotsam cloth she wears all summer long.
Come spread out your jigsaw souvenirs,
the cliff walks in linen shoes at Brighton,
the calling boatman by your hill window
in Amalfi. We steer clear of uplands,
our hunger is different. Just now I
hear the smart knocks and bells throng
in the beachboard towns. The ocean is
a clumsy maze at the borders of white,
light sea cities. Last night late I
crouched in the dry loam long past
midnight, rooting worms and slugs. No
hot winds are thinning in the hills.
I'm so foolish in my lederhosen.
Puzzles of all sorts engage us: move
this way, that, and notice as you go
the moon deer carved above the door.
Feel the sun on the footworn doorstone,
we're due away to the North tonight.
The riddle we're to tell is five minutes
long. Say the lady's name twice, turn
her haunted house to dust. Her animals
lurk in the rubble, many-headed, settled
in a tangle. They're the riddle's answer.
Some are minstrels and won't sing again.
Two Mutes Shopping
They check out, second nature, what
the opposition has in mind because
a man's least asking closes when they
clap their tongues like baffles. And
as he goes, supposing they are fools,
they work to their lips the marginal oh
that passes for an answer. So: a two
acre store where, welling at an enemy
pitch, the burr of others' open talk
amasses and demands nothing. Teemed at
its wide aisles and counters, crowding,
fan and fall off all a season's favors,
implicitly the stuff of jungle rubble
in a logical forest alive with racing
lizards. Righteous as a charlatan, she
pulls on scarf after scarf and circles
through the shoe shop like a duchess
while he waits. Or he models an oversize
coat, hunched like a greedy sheik who
weights in his vault the sleeves of
a courtesan's robe with rubies. Props
for the poetry of poses, then. They
are not keyed to the practical miracle
we picture them expecting. Something,
it is true, is building like a city
in them, and so tall it wrecks at each
perfection. They make it and make war
on its towers. Always, teetering on
the roof of what they want to answer,
they are, though they are sentries,
also full of sabotage and spying. Too
literal, they buy in the end only
a transfer of prisoners. Over that zone,
survivors, coupled in the aftermath,
madden, capable of any cry, never done
clasping in the city's shaken places.
Going Back
To JBD
Bones folded, dun skin, the lady in the metaphor
rots like blighted trees. This time she resembles
all our safe charades. I remember, before I left,
our morning walk, we heard a deer had panicked on
a bridge, hit headlong on a truck. Angular down
the embankment where the river view sloped weirdly
there I wanted to say how scared I was. Do you
remember, her teats were swollen, the bright gay
tongue lolling in separate bloom? Anywhere
three years later is amazing. Even the land will
keep its subtle laws, backdrop in spider hedge
and lane the sad altered faces of keepers, many
bad tenants and husbands. Every going forth, I
expect, is an accident, laid open gaudy and new
as the package on my knees. Going back, you'll
occupy your past like a lady confined in a ward
for her last treatment, her gorgeous body given
over to unholy fire. Head shaved, she passes
time in dreams of sunny men. Then, stark in her
ubiquitous disease, she lets in the milling
stream to powder her and dust her. All her willow
bones outwit her. Fleet men are nervous, sling
their deadeye gear about, they clutter narrow
mazes on the table. Who are they and their grim
paraphernalia? Way, come away, she says, her
spin and dwindle voice, we are not nearly what
we were. And all I have left of my early girl is
a penny album sketch. Noon at the summer fair,
the watercolor man paints her for a dollar, bald
and offhand. She corresponds to nothing new. Out
on the lawn they sell cheap, and uphill an hour
later, she watches the carnival town below put
out its girlish airs and turns innumerable times
to me. The fair cartoon I have of her I carried
like a gift in three years' expedition. The lady
in the simile above arranges her favors in bold
ellipses, turns along her way, and, static, names
her final hour, garish, keening like a lost pet.
We stay as distant as children, our bones a well
of collisions. We are none of us really familiar.
Starting Over
The years cluster in brave, precarious
ways, unoriginal and vain as lovers' vows
and never still. Death is an ordinary day
in the middle. But in spite of all this
time I wear like cape and doublet, I pull
out fully now and hurry spring. Mountain
herbs that struggle in an icebound land
and blow and swarm like clotted moss are
typical of my arousal. Oh, pledge nothing
to the shadow edge of things. Upcountry
they face winter head on, building their
bonfire on a frozen pond: be wary of what
paradox they pose. They bat their mittens
and pass mulled wine. The dog squirms,
dunks his snout in the slush. In camphored
woolens they glide about the firelight
and patronize the gibbous moon. Too sure,
are you too sure they thumb their Bibles
then? They don't. What thaws and flowers
is gospel, and they rollick when, across
their pasture, any temperate wind goes
rambling. Our ideas are furious instead,
bad drama, nightmare luxury. Only consider
the library burning in Egypt. Schoolmen
plaintive with their books conjure that
fire's flash, the learned men collapsing
there in the street. But surely it's a small
loss: I mean, the words that crouch like
targets in your head weren't, I expect,
on file there. What if a renegade scribe
walked in that bazaar and heard the sages
wrangling on the temple stairs, a cry like
pistolfire told on his bones? The fallen
scholars flinging themselves in the Nile
like dizzy heroines don't jostle a comma
from his sonnets. The desert cities fail
because they're meant to. Heedless there,
a nomad's awning snapping in the breezy
square, he annotates his tablets. Years
are the usual joke he etches there. Cold
dreams bloom in his wastrel's head: years
are hilarious voices full of ideas, heeded
in ruinous promises. Even in Alexandria,
he sees the clear shore lit by ice fires.
Thinking of Cindy
For a story take David, telling his summer
ardors. The fan girl and muscled shepherd
pour their honey food and show their bodies,
he aches after his God. Besides the vision,
his psalms take him apart, every place
he enters after that unready. Whatever's
in his head he wearies of delicious looks.
The fan girl and muscled shepherd, ready,
make a patient lotion, copy down nothing,
record no story. David, poised like a sweet
noon meal, seizes summer. He is immodest
as I am, moans like I do. Lately I
have taken to propping on windowsills
and brood over the paving under the trees.
Birds turn up in the night and try out
their idea. From my place all their intricate
suggestion works out fine. My myths are
like fretted acres of coastal shelf caught
against the undersea. Above it the beach birds
know no better, the sand wind is not easy.
In my dreams this month, I've seen us
swim backflash to sea. Really, I suppose, we'd
do enough to trade our books and read aloud,
sitting at a window seat in late evening
sun. If you were here, we'd suffer other
people's words together, figure out ours,
and after our tumbled fashion capture God.
This is one way to get ready. Listen, when
I tell you mine, say loud: "What a sweet
story." And later on: "Tell me it again."
Affairs
To SDJ
I learn another way to leave you
every day, though the outlaw heart
is holding out. The March winds
rein in their reasons, and they soften
slowly still and still get nowhere.
I can't go through with tantrums. Dead
lovers, drugged in public and precarious
with friends, retreat. They make it
to New York, where they disintegrate. I
straddle the cable web of a bridge
and reconsider, in case you want me. Thus
the magician, sawing his partner in half,
cuts close and wings her. Drunk.
But his partner doesn't wince or swab
the blood that flowers at her belly. They
open the box: she pirouettes on toe,
untouched. Someone, it is clear to her,
has got to preserve illusions. You want her
to quit? It's a job. If she wanted
to sleep beyond his chameleon hands,
alone, she would. Her past, because
it is the past, isn't her. There is
a painting you would like. Not much,
a blue and out-of-focus fog on water.
But done this way: the boats are stupid,
the fog overly rich. The loss of
line has left us nothing to see.
And don't give an artist advice. After
the show her eunuch friends, aghast
at the saw's bright teeth, tease her:
"The man you ought to have, lady,
would just as soon fumble for a song
at the piano. He won't go to work. You've
seen them, skeptical, living on cigarettes
and whiskey. They keep to themselves, and they
hate to be alone. Not ten minutes
at your body but they wonder when to
leave. They can't get enough, no matter
who you are." She knows, she knows, but
no word, you notice, about the hands.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Carpenter at the Asylum by Paul Monette. Copyright © 1975 Paul Monette. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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
Publisher's Note,I,
The Girl in the Field,
The Hornet,
Hansel to Gretel,
Two Mutes Shopping,
Going Back,
Starting Over,
Thinking of Cindy,
Affairs,
Narcissus in Love,
II,
Widower,
Summer Money,
In the Dream,
Drifter,
The Way Madness Lies,
The Monk's Hours,
The Carpenter at the Asylum,
III,
Contexts,
Keeping it Wild,
Small Towns,
October in Massachusetts,
Blaze,
Janis Joplin's Death,
Bathing the Aged,
Later Meeting,
Paris Days,
A Biography of Paul Monette,