Donald Revell - There are three: poems

Cover

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There Are Three

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WESLEYAN POETRY

Also by Donald Revell

Beautiful Shirt (1994)

Erasures (1992)

New Dark Ages (1990)

The Gaza of Winter (1988)

From the Abandoned Cities (1983)

TRANSLATION:

Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire (1995)

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POEMS BY

Donald Revell

Wesleyan University Press
PUBLISHED BY UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND
HANOVER AND LONDON

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Wesleyan University Press
Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755
1998 by Donald Revell
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
CIP data appear at the end of the book

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank the editors of the following journals, which offered many of these poems their first publication: American Letters & Commentary, American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, No Roses Review, Ohio Review, Partisan Review, SFSU Review, Southwest Review, and Volt.

"There Are Three" also appeared in The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry: 19941995, published by Sun & Moon Press.

In addition, the author thanks The National Endowment for the Arts for a fellowship that helped to make the completion of this book possible.

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to Benjamin Brecht Revell

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A Branch of the Discipline1

Overthrow3

Upon Diagnosis8

Inquire9

Societies Can Be Improved. Societies Cannot Be Good.10

Homage to Mrs. Jane Lead11

Elegy12

Above13

My Father14

There Are Three15

To the Lord Protector16

A Cold September23

A New October24

Extinction25

Thanksgiving for a Son26

Advent27

A Clasp28

Once Divided29

Scherzo30

Fewer Than Music40

The Memory of New England41

Hypethral42

A Day of Crisis No a Quiet Day43

Outbreak44

No Difference I Know They Are49

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Page 1

The red forest is
eager to be seen.
The red fragrance
travels a great distance,
meaning nothing in
general, but in
particular fatal
and entirely personal.
The soul at present
matters less than
instinct, its
later instrument.
Of the 47 nesting
herons displaced
by recent storms,
47 died.
The red forest maintains
perfect silence, eager
to be seen without
distraction. In clear
heavens of destruction
it aborts the unspoken
words so easy to defy.
The soul is a nest.
The soul catches the wind
between numerals. Once
I was eager to remain outside

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forever, and once I did.
The future bent
the boughs to breaking.
They cracked silently,
one last thing.

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1.
On such a night, the stars could not consent to constellations.
My ambition was
at once to stop
dreaming and begin
to sleep, to make
a clear distinction
between the ache
of privation
and cold surfeits
of black sleep.
A calf defecating onto the sleeping head of another calf
instructed me the useless distinction intervening a desert
of joy a desert of defilement. It was no dream. On such a
night, the stars pour down soil through their names.
My ambition was
at once to stop
the river upstanding
the open sea refusing
all surfeits.

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2.
Remember unequivocally the instance of mercy,
never prayer. The grammar makes deep channels
and useful islands, the overthrow of swimmers
recurring, undisguised. Mercy remains aloft.
Afterwards will
be nothing to pray.
The broad wake
of so many drowned,
weightless but heavy
with downdraft, did
not say words.
The sum of their pains in pain no more upon the world
undressed all sums. And into all such nakedness hurry
the prayerful, quick to flaw what does not make reply.
On such a night
I saw an earth
above the earth so
long as there was light
until it was gone.

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3.
Two alone beside a park:
one is the art school.
Two alone and then a playfield:
one is my hotel.
When the light was gone and the grammar of the congregation
grew accustomed to darkness, only then could the renovation
of sums, nakedness and mercy excel the ocean.
Couples undress in their hotels.
One alone undresses in the art school.
A surplus of privation
renovates the sex of each
into the earth of all.
Night nevertheless. Consenting if amazed, I dreamed a dream
of flying, a haphazard innocence impossible to divide among
the agonies of surface and the soils of the unecstatic air.
Ambition is disgrace.
Although I could not pray,
I chose to pray badly.
Of course it was ugly.

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4.
Ambition inquired,
are you the martyred
ocean or infrequent rain?
Of course it was ugly.
Of course my savior
was weathered by rain.
What remains of the crucifix
is a grinning spoon.
Very soon now, the untethered reason of John Calvin
will roam at large in beautiful cities and kill men.
Undressed in a hotel
in Holland the naked vowels
in black and black pallor
copulate like seaways.
Undressed in the art school
in Amsterdam and inwardly
the martyr howls.
She is teeming, inwardly.
An unlikely Puritan likewise howls for her.

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5.
At dawn my nature,
remarkable bird
tethered amid predators
alarmed my loving.
On such a morning
decline is lofty.
Teeming inwardly,
consenting to nothing,
the calf wakes,
ambition wakes,
the insensible swimmer
breaks the air.
Inspired is no way in.
Prayer and uniformity
are no way.
In each in daylight
a desert intervenes,
and then a dream divides