Richard Diebenkorn, Girl in White Blouse, 1962

 

From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine

By Rosanna Warren

 

I.

 

When his dogs leapt on Actaeon, he

cried (did he cry out?)—He flung

 

his arm to command, they tore his hand

from the wrist stump, tore

 

guts from his belly through the tunic, ripped

the cry from his throat.

 

That’s how we know a god, when the facts

leap at the tenderest innards, and we know

 

the god is what we can’t change. You

stood over me as I woke, I opened my eyes, I saw

 

that I’d seen and that it was too

late: the seeing

 

of you in the doorway with weak electric light

fanning behind you in the hall, and my room and narrow pallet steeped in shadow

 

were what I couldn’t change, and distantly

I wanted you, and, as distantly,

 

I heard the dogs, baying.

 

 

II.

 

And yet the fountain spends itself, and it is

in the clear

 

light of its losing that we seem

to take delight:

 

you dipped your hand in its running braid

to sprinkle my forehead, my lips.

 

Garden deities observed us: three nymphs

with moss staining their haunches, a pug-nosed faun.

 

The wound in water closed

perfectly around your gesture, erasing it,

 

so that only the glimmer, swiftly

drying, on my face recalled

 

our interruption

of the faultless, cold, passionate, perpetual

 

idea of the stream’s descent—

which, unlike ours, would always be renewed.

 

 

III.

 

I kissed a flame, what did I expect.

 

Those days, you painted in fire. Tangerine, gold:

one would have had to be a pilgrim to walk

through that wall of molten glass.

 

And purification

could be conceived, if not

attained, only after many years,

 

in autumn, in a fire greater than yours,

though menstrual blood still tinged the threshold

and our ex-votos were sordid—scraps of blistered flesh

 

taped to kitsch prayer cards—and neither of us knew

the object of this exercise, except

having, inadvertently, each of us, burned

 

we recognized the smell

of wood smoke, the slow swirl

flakes of wood ash make in heavy air;

 

and we were ready, each in a private way, to make

the gifts the season required.

Mine was the scene

 

of my young self in your arms,

eyes in your eyes, clutched in the effort

to give each other away—when I glimpsed

 

behind your pleasure, fear; behind

fear, anger; and knew

in a bolt some gifts

 

conceal a greater gift.

I have kept it. Now I am ready to give it back

into darker flame

 

in this season of goldenrod, the ardent weed,

and Queen Anne’s lace in its mantilla of ash.

And yet, how lumpishly, how stupidly I stand.

 

How much that is human will never burn.

 

 

IV.

 

And if you should answer?

I listened, years before I knew you, to the whine

of wind through the high stony pastures above my childhood village;

 

I breathed lavender and thyme and burned my bare legs

on nettles, scraped them on thistles, and rubbed

the sore skin till it reddened all the more. When we

 

walked the uplands together, you burned your hand

and I kissed the crimsoning nettle-rash. “We are the Lords of need,”

you said Hafiz said,

 

and I believed you, and we were.

In the rugs of your country, carmine is crushed

from insects, cochineal; saffron gold

 

is boiled from crocus stamens; and indigo

of heaven and fountain pools is soaked, hours upon hours,

from indigo leaves. “Like the angel Harut,”

 

you said, “We are in the calamity of love-desire.”

The angel is chained by neck and knees, head down, in the pit of Babel

for falling in love. Your carpets

 

told a different story: scarlet and saffron

blush as in Paradise, and God reveals himself

in wine, flame, tulips, and the light in a mortal eye.

 

All night you held me, sleepless, on my childhood cot in the stone house;

all night the wind seethed through crags and twisted olive trees,

high on the scents of thyme and goat droppings. “All night,”

 

Hafiz sang, “I hope the breeze of dawn will cherish the lovers.”

But the breeze of dawn is the angel of death.

You are in your far landscape now, I am in mine:

 

the wind complains and I can’t understand the words.

And if you should answer?

You, ten years away, in a different wind.

 

“We are in the calamity,” Hafiz sang. “But tell the tale

of the minstrel and of wine, and leave time alone. Time

is a mystery no skill will solve.” We should

 

thread words like pearls, you said, and the grateful sky

would scatter the Pleiades upon us

though we couldn’t see, and that was long ago.

 

 

V.

 

The carpet is not a story. It is a place,

garden of crisscrossed pathways, labyrinth,

fountain, pool, and stream.

 

As though the fabric had ripped at the vanishing point

at the top of the street

of ashen façades and slate-sloped roofs, you stepped

 

through the gap, out of your own world.

I had already lost my world.

We met in a torn design

 

which we tore further, pulling the tall warp,

thread wrapped tightly around our fingers until it bit the flesh

and the rue de Lille unravelled.

 

I know about design: it’s my job,

arranging other people’s letters in star charts

that phosphoresce in the dark between the closed covers of books.

 

You knew about design from the holes

blown through your country.

We spoke in a language of no country on earth.

 

You moved slowly, in shadow, teaching the shadows

to echo my name. You ripped my shirt at the neck.

Was it The Beloved I held, holding you?

 

Down the middle of the carpet the river

weaves a thousand gray glimmers into the deeper green.

The river knows about mourning; that’s its job.

 

How many years has it practiced? With such fleet fingers. A man

woke me at dawn this morning, sobbing and cursing in the street,

reeling from sidewalk to gutter and back again.

 

On my long gray street, the rue de Lille, where I still live.

 

 

 

NOTES: Anne Verveine is an imaginary French poet. She was born in 1965 in the village of Magagnosc in the Alpes Maritimes, and attended the lycée in Grasse. She never studied at a university. She lived obscurely in Paris, avoiding literary society and working as a typographer and designer for a small publisher of art books. She published a few poems in provincial journals, but no book of her own work. She was last seen hitchhiking in Uzbekistan in August 2000; is presumed kidnapped or dead. Anne Verveine’s sister found these poems in notebooks in the poet’s small apartment in Paris after her disappearance.

I translate them.

 

 

“From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine” from Departure,

W. W. Norton & Co., 2003

 

______

On September 25th, 2012, at 4:30pm Rosanna Warren, Bain-Swiggett Vis­it­ing Pro­fes­sor of Poetry, will be reading and discussing her work in McCosh 40 as part of the Princeton Contemporary Poetry Colloquium‘s guest speaker series.

 

By James Tate
for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others–the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the others–it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger’s life,
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,
I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us.

—

On Wednesday, March 28, 2012, at 4:30PM, James Tate will read with Zadie Smith in McCosh 50 as part of the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series.

The valley
edge by edge
bare field by field
I walked through it through you

rain by rain
cold by cold
root absence
and the purposeful cold

Eye opened
slow
but what is slow

–Jean Valentine, from Break the Glass (Copper Canyon, 2010)

by William Carlos Williams

Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow

changed by white curtains―
Smell of cleanliness―

Sunshine of late afternoon―
On the glass tray

a glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which

a key is lying―And the
immaculate white bed

Poetry@Princeton is on a bit of a break this summer, but we’ll be back when classes start in September. In the meantime, we’ll try to post events to the Calendar as we hear of them, so it wouldn’t hurt to check the site periodically throughout the coming months.

The second biennial Princeton Poetry Festival will be taking place on Friday, April 29 and Saturday, April 30 in Richardson Auditorium.

Readings and discussions begin on both days at 2pm. Advance tickets may be purchased through University Ticketing at 609.258.9220.

If you haven’t already checked out the schedule, you should do so here.

Want to hear more about Poetry at Princeton? Check out this video by Nick Barberio in which poets from Princeton talk about poetry and read their work.

by Major Jackson

XIX.

That moment in church when I stared at the reverend’s black
kente-paneled robe & sash, his right hand clasping the back
of my neck, the other seizing my forehead, standing
in his Watch this pose, a leg behind him ready to spring,
his whole body leaning into the salvation of my wizened soul,
I thought of the Saturday morning wrestlers of my youth who’d hold
their opponents till they collapsed on a canvas in a slumberous
heap, and how it looked more like a favor, a deed, though barbarous,
a graceful tour out of this world, that chthonic departure
back to first waters, and wondered what pains I endured
in Mr. Feltyburger’s physic’s class, worshipping light, density, mass,
preferring to stare long at snowdomes or the carcasses
of flies pooling above in the great fluorescent cover, and how beds
are graves, my mother and father kissing each other’s head,
their cupped faces unhurriedly laying the other down,
and how all locked embraces light in my mind from below
in blue-neon like you’d find on the undercarriage of sports cars,
and then what came was the baker stacking her loaves,
one by one, into little coffers, and Desdemona’s
last surrender to Othello’s piercing glance, and Isaac shown
a militia of clouds over Moriah, and the dying we submerge
in a baptism of pillow, and how we always loiter at this verge,
there, between rising up and falling back, as in now, this tank
of sound I swim in, gripped between the push and yank
of his clutch, caught in that rush of tambourines next to solemn
trays of grape juice and bits of crackers held by deacons when
the reverend, serious as a pew, whispered, “Fall back, my son. Fall.”

—-
from Hoops by Major Jackson. New York: W.W. Norton & Company 2006.
On Wednesday, April 6 at 12:30 p.m. in McCosh 40, Jackson will be reading from two long poems, “Urban Renewal” (from Leaving Saturn and Hoops) and “Letter to Brooks” (Hoops).* The reading will be followed by an intimate discussion between Professor Jackson and students & faculty. Lunch will be provided.

This lunchtime reading and conversation is proudly sponsored by the Princeton English Department’s Contemporary Poetry Colloquium.

*Complete copies of these poems are available in McCosh 22.  Professor Jackson’s essay “A Mystifying Silence” is also highly recommended reading.