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The Stars of Earth
The STARSOF EARTH
new and selected poems
by Emily Grosholz
W O R L D G A L A X Y P R E S S An imprint of Able Muse Press
Copyright ©2017 by Emily Grosholz First published in 2017 by
Word Galaxy Presswww.wordgalaxy.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews. Requests for permission should be e-mailed to [email protected] for the attention of the Word Galaxy Press editor.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930375
ISBN 978-1-77349-001-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-77349-005-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-77349-000-7 (digital)
Cover and interior book drawings by Farhad Ostovani
Cover & book design by Alexander Pepple
Word Galaxy Press is an imprint of Able Muse Press—atwww.ablemusepress.com Word Galaxy Press 467 Saratoga Avenue #602 San Jose, CA 95129
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Yves Bonnefoy, Maxin Kumin, Frederick Morgan, and Donald Davie
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Contents
A Year (2016)
5 OctoberLove’s Shadow 5Ode to the Butterflies 6First Piano Lesson 7Among Cosmologists 8The Always Coming On 9Where the Wild Things Are 10
11 NovemberNovember 11In Praise of Fractals 12The Choir 15Canvassing for Mr. Obama 16What a Poet Wants 17
18 DecemberTwelfth Night 18Technical Divination 19The House of Trees 22Justice 23Holding Pattern 26
27 JanuaryNot Summer 27The Warning 28Days of 1983 29
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On Painting 31The Kitchen Window 34
35 FebruaryNo Moon 35Forsythia 36Morning Delivery of The Times 37While You Lay Sleeping 39Ut musica pictura 40Snowdrop 41Elegy 42Counterpane 44
45 MarchSpring Cleaning 45Two Meditations on Stone 46What I Forgot, What I Could Not Forget 48Leaving the Garden 49Goodbye to State College 50
51 AprilApril 7, 2011 51On Pilgrim Hill 52The Beautiful Game 54Mind 56Leaves and Clouds 57Where I Went, and Cannot Come Again 58
59 MayNot Roses 59Uncertain 60Insomnia 61Two Passages from Colette 62Just a Star 64
65 JuneSilver 65The Art of Glassblowing 66
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Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms Converge South of the Taklamakan 67
Primary School 68The Stars of Earth 69
70 JulyHere and There 70Sunset 71Citizens 72Astronomy 73Kisses 74Equal and Opposite 75
76 AugustDaylilies 76Letter from Châtel-Montagne 77Abbey Road 78The Tallinn Ferry 79European Paper 80Yesterday 81
82 SeptemberBut They Come Back Again 82Four from the Berggarten, Hannover 83Elegy for the Tussey Ridge: Fracking Comes to Central
Pennsylvania 86Bittersweet 87The Dream of Chaucer 88Roses 90
The River Painter (1984)
95 Gathering of Friends, after the Fall of the Sung Dynasty97 On an Album Leaf by Ma Yuan98 The River Painter101 Belleville, Paris, France
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Dinner in the Courtyard 10197 rue Compans 101Souvenir 103In the Garden 104The Last of the Courtyard 105
106 GreeceOn the Ferry, toward Patras 106Galerie Orphée 107In Medias Res 108
109 Covering Ground: Bicycling, Running, HikingRuins at Jumièges 109Marathon 110Spring Fever 111Edgewood Park 112Following the Dordogne 113Remembering the Ardèche 115Ithaka I 115
117 ScienceThe Dissolution of the Rainbow 117Goethe in Verona 118Birds, Trees and Lovers 120
122 GermanyThe Poet and the Canal 122To Cathy Iino 124Letters from a Gardener 126Letter from Germany 131On the Loss of My Mother’s Jewelry 132
134 MortalityAllhallows 134In the Light of October 136Rodin to Rilke 137The Return 138
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Shores and Headlands (1988)
143 The Gold Earrings145 The End of Summer147 Nietzsche in the Box of Straws151 Exchanges154 Vagabondage in Sonnets
Saint-Germain, Paris, France 154Raschplatzhochstraße, Hannover, Germany 154Mediterranean 155On the Untersberg, Salzburg, Austria 156Siesta 156The Old Fisherman 157
158 Letters from La PlataLetter from La Plata I 158Interval 159Letter from La Plata II 160Exile 161Letter from La Plata III 162Theories of Vision 163Letter from La Plata IV 166The Carnival of Dreams 167Two Variations on a Theme 168
171 Roman ElegiesSide-lit 171In the Abruzzi 172The World as Will, Idea, Grappa, and Pigeons 173Another Song 174
175 PhilosophyAfter Timaeus 175Perceptual Acquaintance 175Letter from Durham 176
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180 ProthalamiaThe Outer Banks 180Open Secrets 182The Ratio of Green 183The Courtyard Revisited 185The Tempest 186The Cliffs at Praiano 188
Eden (1992)
193 On Spadina Avenue195 West Wind196 Commuter Marriage201 Waiting for News of Jackie’s Firstborn202 Elegy203 Pilgrims205 Revisiting Philadelphia
Dark Tents and Fires 205Boundaries 207Sidonie 209Secret Places of Forrest Lane 210The Neolithic Revolution of 1956 211Legacies 213A Poem for Polly 214Life of a Salesman 217
219 Revisiting ParisSymmetry 21972 rue Lepic 221Belleville Revisited 222
223 A SonListening 223Thirty-Six Weeks 224
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Autumn Sonata 226Romance 227
229 CassisThe Outdoor Market at Cassis 229Excursion to the Third Calanque 229Rain or Shine 231
233 HomeThe Pot of Basil 233Eden 235The Shape of Desire 237Proportions of the Heart 238
The Abacus of Years (2002)
243 The Abacus of Years245 Anna247 Rondo, Andante249 Ben
Where the Sky Used to Be 249Through the Darkness Be Thou Near Me 250Real Bullets 251The Great Blizzard 253Revisiting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher 255
256 RobbieAccident and Essence 256Adopting Robbie 257Robbie Discovers Rain 259Robbie Discovers Puddles 259Saying Farewell by the Bridge over the Snow River 261Robbie and I Discover Painting 262Tour of the Flower Depot at Sanary-sur-Mer 263Letting the Children Fly 264
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265 William and Mary-FrancesPutting on the Ritz 265Finitude 266Pirates of the Caribbean 267How Things Change 269Fixtures of Smoke 270
271 EnglandAfter the Revolution 271Trying to Describe the Reals in Cambridge 272The Freestone Wall and the Walled Garden 273What Rembrandt Saw 275Willows 277A Bouquet for Buffalo 277Coming Home from England 279
280 More PhilosophyIn Praise of the Humanities 280Brancusi’s Fish as a Figure of Thought 282Rationalism 283Café on the rue Gay-Lussac 284Days of 1984 285Weathering 285Rivers 286The Historian’s Pursuit 290Signing the Darkness 291Ithaka II 292Watering 293
295 Acknowledgments
The Stars of Earth
A Year (2016)
5
October
Love’s Shadow Lately the subject of my thought is time:How time flows like a river, if it does,Or like a house of crystal, stands immobile,Or ceases where the very smallest creaturesDance without houses, clocks, or bankless streams. Here is my birthday, carried round againBy the tall star-crossed cycles of the moon.Love’s shadow brightens as the day beginsAnd then grows longer, whether we believeThat time is real or just a dream of things.
6
Ode to the Butterflies
Spinoza says you’re pure theology: O crazy butterflies aloftDrinking the last of autumn’s flower-wine, as if you thoughtThere’s no tomorrow, as if chicory, vetch and daisiesWeren’t on their long last legs, as if the field and forestMammals weren’t headed underground, as if the coldestSpells won’t cast themselves on us before October’s over.But party, party, party! Spinoza says you’re somehowCutouts of God’s great fabric—matter—divine confetti Thrown necessarily up in just these handfuls that I seeRight here, right now, and so am I, this slower bodyEarthbound as you distractingly, disarmingly, are not.Mode of the same sweet attribute, just one amidst an infinite,Uncountable swarm. So we are all eternal, little buddies!Succession is illusion, look: the sheer cloud-shadow stipple,Breezes that shake the goldenrod, your upward-gusting trios,We’re all in this together and like God we’re always here!
7
First Piano Lesson
For Leslie Beers
For years they have been pressing the white keys,Sometimes the black, occasionally, haphazardlyGreat fingerfuls together. But whereExactly was the music, they wondered? Gone.
Today they built a bridge from C to GAs if across Giverny’s garden pond.Perhaps it is a rainbow? G to C,Aural, slant-visible, inevitable, clear.
They stand amazed around the grand pianoCapable at last of lifting upFrom sound’s long restlessness the drippingGlittery net of intervals and in its knotted strings
That golden fish, a song!
8
Among Cosmologists
For Sarah Shandera
Breathlessly, with a shrug and a vague gesture,Empty hand palm up, collecting somethingFrom empty space that is by all accountsNot empty, rather like the four-dimensionalSurface of an n-dimensional cauldronWhere bubbles form and wink out of existence,The young expert on galaxies suggests,“A hundred billion?” However the next SloanSurvey announces the count of galaxies—Red-shifting as they leave us past the tallImplacable vast light cone we cannot seeBut know it marks the boundaries of seeing.
“Doesn’t it keep you up at night, this outwardRush of galaxies fleeing themselves and usInto the infinite arms of the multiverse?”I ask. “Oh, no,” she answers, catching her breath.“What keeps me up is our recurrent failureTo know the universe before inflation,Or offer quantum mechanics a foundation.It’s not the future, but the hidden past.It’s not what’s overhead, but underneath.”
9
The Always Coming On
The sun is closing in on the horizon,Light pocks the highway like a rain of gold,And I rush through at seventy, seventy-five.My husband sees me squint and asks, perhaps,His baseball cap might help? But I persistIn blocking out the lightfall with my fist,When suddenly the road shifts north northwest,The hills get higher and the sun eclipses.Those lines return: how swift, how secretlyThe shadow of the night comes on. MacLeish.
He sailed to Persia in the nineteen-twenties,A diplomat who hoped to help dismantleThe opium trade, but fruitlessly. He leftBewitched, recalling afterward the spellOnset of evening cast across the desert,Great vistas of time and space, of dynasties,So swiftly, silently engulfed, and thenOnly the nomads with their tents and fires.
I have to turn the headlights on.The hills’ deep emerald fades to blue,The sky’s cerulean edge to mauve;My hair falls sideways past my nape,White as a ghost, and just as thin.I have to turn the headlights onTo see how far the highway goes,To pierce the darkness, secret, swift,The wayward evening, losing lightAnd warmth, direction, solace, home.
10
Where the Wild Things Are
The fields around my country house are sownWith soy and corn. Though corn is fringed and bearded,Sways with the wind and shudders, speaking in tongues,Its husks and stalks a sheer archaic murmur, lostTo living memory but able to haunt us still,And soy is low and green and generally silent,They’re the main crops that cash out for our farmers.So we can’t blame the farmers; they have to live.
And here and there a browsing cow or twoMunches through yellowing hayfields, which distractsThe eye with color and barnstorms the nose.Yet all in all the crops are sad, and boring:They won’t feed hungry children or restless piglets,Only the international lust for energy in anyForm, at any cost, a kind of chlorophyllic burn.That’s why, when I go walking across the valley,
I’ve learned to stick to weedy border farm roads,Hard to pursue, reverting to vetch or bramble:Those roads where wilderness asserts itselfIn miniature, where clouded sulphurs clusterNear puddles, and those butterflies we like to callCoppers, purples, blues, bits of the visible spectrumLighter than air, go tumbling over the clover,And mingle with satyrs, nymphs, and painted ladies!
11
November
November
For Dick Davis
My friend, it seems as if we know at lastWe won’t be here much longer.Crossing the mountain of a hundred yearsWe’ve gained the shadow side. Against our facesBoreas falls, the breath of nothingness.
The Chinese sages recommend reflection:Characters like willowsBend to the river where cold water flowsUnceasingly, changing its fluid mindWith every passing cloud or boat or leaf.
What’s left behind? Only a few brief verses.Come to visit soon, and drink a glassOf wine and watch the woods behind my houseDecant the autumn moonOverblown and gold on the horizon.