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Overview
World Tree is in many respects, David Wojahn’s most ambitious collection to date; especially notable is a 25-poem sequence of ekphrastic poems, “Ochre,” which is accompanied by a haunting series of drawings and photographs of Neolithic Art and anonymous turn of the last century snapshots.
Wojahn continues to explore the themes and approaches which he is known for, among them the junctures between the personal and political, a giddy mixing of high and pop culture references, and a deep emotional engagement with whatever material he is writing about.
Winner of the 2012 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822961420 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Pittsburgh Press |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2011 |
| Series: | Pitt Poetry Series |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
David Wojahn is professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of Spirit Cabinet, The Falling Hour, Late Empire, Mystery Train, Glassworks, Icehouse Lights, and Interrogation Palace, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wojahn is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes, the William Carlos Williams Book Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the George Kent Memorial Prize, and the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, among other honors. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Read an Excerpt
World Tree
By DAVID WOJAHN
University of Pittsburgh Press
Copyright © 2011 David WojahnAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8229-6142-0
Chapter One
Scribal: My Mother in the Voting BoothStabbing the hole by Nixon's name, with a stylus on a chain,
like some scribe
in Lagash piercing wet clay slabs for the palace records. The count
for the priest king's
chariots & Amorite slaves must be exact. All day her adding machine
has purred, the shavings
litter the floor. Stylus through Nixon, stylus through Agnew. Two hours
she's waited in the wet
November snow of Minnesota & her cold next week will worsen
to pneumonia. Over
the churning columns she'll cough & pass out & waken in County General,
shrouded in an oxygen tent
where she cannot smoke. The count must be exact—14 lyres with
the heads of bearded bulls,
130 votives, 6 figurines of Marduk fashioned of hammered gold.
The water glass is trembling.
Beside her bed I hover, the clear walls of the tent breathe in & out.
Flicker of Cronkite,
of Nixon on the wall in black & white. He has a secret plan
to end the war.
She sleeps. The tent draws a breath & the joint I smoked
in the parking lot turns the light
a jack-o'-lantern orange. I tell myself in my teenage hubris
that I will not work on
Maggie's Farm like her. Ain't gonna work like her
to blindly serve.
But how her white ectoplasmic face looms back at me this morning
(breathe in, breathe out,
the tent's rise & fall) in the waiting room of Richmond Pediatrics.
All night Luke's coughed,
meaning the pneumonia's returned & the office radio oozes hate,
talk show & its porcine
fascist droning on. He has a secret plan to replace the Constitution
with gelignite.
Over us all it washes, the fine volcanic dust, over the fevered
toddlers of the suburbs
& their mothers in sensible shoes, over the Parentings
& Mademoiselles
& the parking lot minivans, the toxic "W"s affixed to their bumpers.
Breathe in & serve
breathe in & serve. A slab of plastic for the co-pay,
the computer station hums.
Cylinder seal & tapestry, ninety geldings in the palace stables. Nebulizer
spewing Pulmicort.
Pink amoxicillin, doctored to taste like bubblegum. seven double-headed
battleaxes, burnished bronze
now oxidized the color of pond scum. Blindly, blindly do we serve.
O Priest King, Dear Leader,
Jealous God. There hangs her scarlet car coat with its Nixon button,
bogus leopard skin along the collar.
She unzips the tent, she recovers. Manhattans prohibited for fourteen days.
The adding machine reanimates,
numbers coughing & the tapes scrolling out. She lives on, twenty more
deluded years. In the parking lot,
Rx in hand, I strap sleeping Luke in his car seat—streetlights, the yellow
& blood-red leaves, pasted
to the window by the rain. Let me serve him. Let me live on
twenty years. Let me stand
above the burial pits, their goods interred & catalogued, the miles
of dirt tamped down.
August, 1953
A nurse gathers up the afterbirth. My mother
* * *
had been howling but now could sleep.
* * *
By this time I am gone—also gathered up
* * *
& wheeled out. Above my jaundiced face the nurses hover.
* * *
Outside, a scab commands a city bus. The picketers battle cops
* * *
& ten thousand Soviet conscripts in goggles
* * *
kneel & cover their eyes. Mushroom cloud above the Gobi,
* * *
& slithering toward Stalin's brain, the blood clot
* * *
takes its time. Ethel Rosenberg has rocketed
* * *
to the afterlife, her hair shooting flame. The afterbirth
* * *
is sloshing in a pail, steadied by an orderly who curses
* * *
when the elevator doors stay shut: I am soul & body & medical waste
* * *
foaming to the sewers of St. Paul. I am not yet aware
* * *
of gratitude or shame.
I do know the light is everywhere.
Screensaver: Pharaoh
We had eaten the placenta in a soup that someone based on a family recipe
for menudo, though someone else—
it was Bill, I think—joked that it tasted just like chicken. This Year's Model
was brand new & the needle stuck
on "Lipstick Vogue," Costello snarling not just another mouth, not just
another mouth, until Joe
set down the bong & flicked the tone arm forward from the scratch.
& anyway, by this time
Amy was shouting from the bedroom that she'd finally gotten Star to sleep,
that the music should be
Mozart or something. I've forgotten the midwife's name, but she sat
sprawled on a patio chair,
the distant blink of Tucson down the mountainside. She held an iced Corona
& told us she was too worn-out
to drive the snaking foothill two-lanes home. Good dope, cheap champagne,
a soup of afterbirth:
everybody but the midwife garrulous & now Papageno was flapping
birdman wings in his mating dance
around fair Papagena. So the talk turned to duets—scholastic in the way
that stoner conversations go.
Whose placenta was it we slurped down with cilantro & a dash of cumin,
telling ourselves the taste
was not half bad—Amy's or Star's? & what about Derek, who now
had moved to Mykonos,
leaving his storied seed behind: what portion of the recipe was owed
to him? Now came the tricky part—
where did the soul inhere? The midwife rimmed her longneck with
a lemon slice & allowed
that we'd ingested perfection, the body's all-in-one: liver, kidney,
blood supply,
its vascular estuaries spidering from delta to sea, tasting not just of flesh,
but of the corpus entire,
which we all agreed was pretty far-out. Lord how I yearn sometimes
for those days of sudden
bedazzling insight, however false & addled. My eyes went Blakean.
By the firelight I watched
the quaking dance of souls, bi- & tri- & quadrifurcated & hovering among us
in a pea-soup fog,
lavish as dry ice a-swirl from a spliff. My soul, your soul, our soul.
The Oversoul broadcasting
its hundred thousand watts of Motown to the radio speakers of the whole
Southwest; Aretha Soul & Otis Soul
& Sam Cooke Soul. & Pneuma, weighing twenty grams of blazing light.
But then the tone arm
reached the aria's end. The LP clicked off. The room became
sleeping bags & pillows,
Mexican blanket covering a ratty sofa. The parts we didn't eat
we double-bagged
& carried to the dumpster, padlocked to confound the coyotes.
The midwife took the couch
& slept. & by the firelight the whole clan slumbered, the cave wall
throwing shadows. This was
thirty years ago. Where the business of the world has taken us
I cannot say. I reboot,
the pixels gather themselves & pulse at me. I could Google Amy,
Google Star, MapQuest
Speedway Boulevard & call up Derek's obit from the Sentinel.
But the screen instead
coalesces to a tomb painting of Pharaoh. Lordly he walks,
preceded by his vassals,
who bear his emblems & trophies, hoisted atop tall staffs.
Among them
is Pharaoh's placenta, preserved & flapping like an ensign.
Raised to the sky,
the crimson portal hovers in the wind. From it the God-King
fell headfirst into this world.
Ending with a Quotation from Walden
For three generations
their farmlands
withered
& the Anasazi
took to eating human flesh,
their enemies
First, then at last
their kinsmen.
A pattern
Of scored
& incised human bones
is evidence,
If you know how
to read the auguries
of microscopes.
Forensic:
from the Latin forensis,
the marketplace.
The forum
where debate was engaged,
where tricks
Of rhetoric & gesture
might enhance
your case.
But so much
is conjecture—
whose sad flesh
Was churned within
this white-ware pot?
Stranger
Or kin?
The Hated One?
The Beloved One whose touch
You'd stir to
in the dawn,
now portioned & shared
In ghostly ritual?
Or did you sunder bone
between your teeth
& gloating, ingest
the marrow of
your foe?
The innermost:
I wanted to live deep,
writes Thoreau,
& suck out
all the marrow
of this life.
Nazim
Perched with the chainsaw on the branch, he bends toward the trunk
as the others cry loco & the sawdust
fizzes toward his goggles, the engine seething & just when the branch begins
to sway & creak he's got
the motor off, earthbound again & chugging Gatorade, my twins
at the window, spellbound.
The hurricane's left downed trees for miles, power lines still tentacling the streets
though it's been weeks since
the eye passed over. Our crew's all Mexican save for him—Nazim from Istanbul,
whose namesake, he tells me,
is Hikmet the Poet. "They locked him in our prisons for years, Professor.
They didn't like Reds."
He hands the empty jug to me, stubbing a cigarette & grinning at the boys.
Because his English is better
than his Spanish, he talks with me while the others lunch. They have christened him,
el turco, el turco loco,
who steeplejacks the trunks in a manic dervish. They've been at it for days,
the felled oaks neatly stacked
in rows where the shed had been. The cherry pickers of Dominion Power
hover the streets & the boys
have learned to shout hola at spoons & neighborhood cats, at newel posts
& themselves & Nazim's
shown me pictures—the wife & daughters waiting in Istanbul, by the turbid briny
Bosporus Hikmet smelled but couldn't view
from the window by the ceiling of his cell. The boys prowl the living room,
shirtless in the heat,
a crescent moon of scar on Jake's right side, where they pried
his dead kidney from him
at six months; the jagged white skin glistens. Yesterday, Nazim pulled his T-shirt up
for Carlos & Pepe to view
the zigzag handiwork of his own operation, a kidney sold in Israel,
$4,000 American,
enough for passage to Miami where a brother, praise Allah, waited.
He joked about
the hospital food, kosher but not half-bad. Three years since he's seen his family
& maybe three years more
before he'll have the cash to send for them. "Not easy to wait that long,"
he tells me, "but possible.
Look at Hikmet." Thirteen years of prison, thirteen more of exile, dying in Moscow
on a day of wet spring snow:
How will they get me down from the third floor? he worried in a poem.
The coffin won't fit the elevator,
& the stairs are so narrow. Again he pulls the photo from his wallet,
giving thanks, even to the Brazilian
who owns his kidney, which rides a limo through the boulevards of Rio
& daily rubs against
a money belt thick with bills & floats beside a bladder streaming piss
into a marble urinal,
its gold-plated fixtures agleam. Praise Allah, as if justice & injustice could be
equally miraculous
& both as blissfully blind. Praise Mammon, Tribute & Elohim,
Praise Storm God
& the sultry Muse of Dialectical Materialism, Her earnest luster faded.
Nazim wipes his brow;
the air reeks of gasoline & in a penthouse by the Sugarloaf
a scowl with sunglasses
checks a beeper, orders barked into his cell. In Istanbul a woman wakes alone
at dawn to pack lunch
for her daughters to carry to school & in the poem a girl in Oakland reads,
Hikmet still rides the train
from Prague to Berlin, March 28, 1962, lighting his sixth cigarette
& listing the things
he didn't know he loved, among them clouds & rain & engine sparks.
The boys knock down
a Lego castle as the lights blaze on for the first time in weeks,
the microwave beeping,
TV flaring up with a nattering soap. They're at the screen door
shouting hola
as the chainsaws set themselves upon the last downed oak, the crew
intoning turco loco,
while Nazim teeters on a limb he cuts half-through before
he leaps back earthward.
Christ at Emmaus
Craquelure—the fine pattern of cracks formed on old paintings. It is
sometimes used to detect forged art, as craquelure is a hard-to-forge
signature of authenticity.
Now they recognize that He's the Risen One, something in His gesture
as he breaks the bread,
& the light as it plays through the glass, backlit by the dying sun,
His eyes closed for the blessing.
He is clothed in ultramarine, color-of-far-across-the-sea.
The serving plate & flagons
shimmer in the honeyed light. The tablecloth flares a dazzling whiteness,
though uncanny questions
& sorrowful mysteries remain. Not that He soon shall vanish,
not that their hearts
should burn within them as He talks, but how stiffly they pose beside Him;
the hand of Peter is a lifeless prop
& the serving woman's eyes are saucers, a treacly half-smile on her face.
Beyond the gilded frame,
it is 1938. Chamberlain with his shut umbrella steps off the plane
from Munich, waving his scrap
of worthless treaty. Lindbergh poses with Goering in the cockpit
of a Junkers 88, grinning
for the camera, his newly bestowed medal agleam. A studio doctor
taps on Judy Garland's arm
to find a vein—Methedrine & B-12, so her dance with the Tin Man
may continue. Frida Kahlo
spits out Trotsky's come into a washbasin of hammered tin.
Nanking smolders; Barcelona falls,
but here at the Museum Boymans, a lost Vermeer's unveiled.
The barbarous world
of signs & wonders has been barred at the door, replaced by Holland:
Four Centuries of Masterworks.
Opening night, & the crowd seethes around the risen savior.
From London, New York
& Buenos Aires, the critics have thronged. They compete
for superlatives;
they jostle for a better view & a tall dapper man, pencil-mustached,
waits his turn for his audience
with God. He is Han van Meegeren, though he himself is God
the Father, who begot His Risen Son
from a badly rendered Raising of Lazarus, seventeenth century, purchased at auction
for 1,400 guilders.
Three hundred years the dead man staggered from his tomb, only to be scraped
unceremoniously
from his canvas, meticulously as flaying. Wormhole, foxmark,
tabula rasa, the canvas now Malevich plain.
After eight bogus Halses & three ter Borches, he is ready to begin,
paint mixed with lavender
& lilac oil, & a foul-smelling plastic from America—Bakelite.
He saws the canvas down
to make it fit his oven. In a chair by the oven door, he sips schnapps
& waits for the cracks
to spider the window, the tablecloth, the luminous bread that pearls
with sunshine—craquelure.
& this time the recipe's correct. Now the second act commences,
papers falsified,
the provenance rigged, the usual story of desperate Jews
selling their birthrights
for passage to New York, the experts stunned before
"the greatest Vermeer of all."
Van Meegeren shoulders through the crowd. He stands before
his graven carnage,
his hypocrite double, his twin in purple robes, who will watch
the smokestacks
cinder the skies, & all the cites of the plain flare up in the night
with their chemical sheen,
the beaches running red. He will watch & wait.
Craquelure—
broadcast like radio waves, over the quadrants & the steppes,
the atolls & the shtetls
& the blazing chancelleries. A dazzling whiteness. Van Meegeren
pockets his pince-nez
& turns for home. The twenty-seven photojournalists are now
permitted their moment;
they kneel, stand & crouch. Almost in unison, the cameras crackle,
a writhing & enraptured light.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from World Tree by DAVID WOJAHN Copyright © 2011 by David Wojahn. Excerpted by permission of University of Pittsburgh 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
Contents
Scribal: My Mother in the Voting Booth....................3August, 1953....................5
Screensaver: Pharaoh....................6
Ending with a Quotation from Walden....................9
Nazim....................11
Christ at Emmaus....................14
For the Honorable Wayne LaPierre, President, National Rifle Association....................17
Self-Portrait Photo of Rimbaud with Folded Arms: Abyssinia, 1883....................19
Rolltop....................20
Napping on My Fifty-Third Birthday....................22
Quicken....................25
Fetish Value....................26
For Tomas Tranströmer....................29
Another Epistle to Frank O'Hara....................33
Self-Portrait as Sock Puppet....................36
Ode to Black 6....................37
Mixtape to Be Brought to Her in Rehab....................39
Jimmie Rodgers's Last Blue Yodel, 1933....................41
For Willy DeVille....................42
The Apotheosis of Charlie Feathers....................44
World Tree....................46
Ochre....................55
Mudlark Shuffle....................107
Freshwater Bay....................109
Letter to Eadweard Muybridge....................111
In the Domed Stadium....................113
Nocturne: Newark Airport....................115
A Decorated Ghost Dance Shirt....................118
Visiting Dugan....................119
Web Prayer for Milosz....................121
Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash....................122
Block Letters....................123
Sepulchre....................124
Talismanic....................128
Notes....................131
Acknowledgments....................134
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