Bernard - Romanticism: poems

ALSO BY APRIL BERNARD POETRY Swan Electric Psalms Blackbird Bye Bye FICTION Pirate Jenny Romanticism APRIL BERNARD W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON to my mother and father Contents I The Going The cloth edge of certainty has shredded down to this: God and love are real, but very far away. If I go to Istanbul, will I return? That is not one of the permitted questions. When I go to Istanbul, how will I bear to return? I could slip into the small streets that lead away from the souk, then run east to the high plain and the Caucasus Its all alone, the returning, the going. The cloth, a soft holland whose blocks of blue and lemon once cheered me in a skirt, now dries dishes.

God and love are very far away, farther even than the mountains in the east. The Paper Goose is sticky-winged, the beast of my sorrow oiled by fear coming off my fingertips, working the dull folds to stiffen and blot. The beast of my sorrow crumples and wads; it will not unfold into fluttering pennant, flowing water. Instead, all recalcitrance, it sinks as sorrow. Greedy Thing, we called the dingo bitch who hung around the camp, mustard brown with black streaks and filmy eyes. At night she ate the chickens, feet and heads.

Her ruff rose spiky when she menaced the children until they gave her their sandwiches. We threw stones, which she always licked, once or twice, in case. A Chthonic Deity drags behind her a cloud sack, grey and purple, which leaks perpetually and never empties: She wishes to go aloft, but she is not a sky-god, she is of the earth and her name cannot be spoken through the choke of rain. Beagle or Something The composers name was Beagle or something, one of those Brits who make the world wistful with chorales and canticles and this piece, a tone poem or what-have-you, chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one whose eye lids and sockets have been rashing from tears. The music occupied the car where I had parked and then sat, staring at a tree, a smallish maple, fire-gold and half-undone by the wind, shaking in itself, shocking blue morning sky behind, and also the trucks and telephone wires and dogs and children late to school along Orange Street, but it was the tree that caused an uproar, it was the tree that shook and shed, aureate as a shaken soul, I remembered I was supposed to have onefor convenience I placed it in my chest, the heart being away, and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking, golden-orange, half-spent but clanging truer than Beagle music or my forehead pressed hard on the steering wheel in petition for release. Waking Alone is sad and valuable instruction.

It happens often in the night, as my chow-dogs ghost still performs her sentry patrols: Every hour or so, snorting herself awake to visit another doorway, falling again into snores, blocking all means by which a stranger might come. Pull the Water Lily up by its long snake stem into the boat. And more: Dozens of lilies, armloads of twining stems, a wet haul white and gold and green. Again the boat pushes into the weeds. I have asked for more than water to drink. Renunciation takes time.

Since life is even more finely calibrated than a Henry James story, I find I must resolve to lose repeatedly yet not believe myself. Satan and all his works is easy; but there are no rites to assist me here. Straw Flowers arrive as good as dead, yet surely white roots once wetly fingered soil, green stem began with flexible waist. What mistakes arise from the hint of water: In Sonora, after one rain, a bean seed disrobed to greenish flesh, before the gesture arrested at drought. To the Knife I think I hate Ben Hecht, or Hitchcock, or myself for surely we are the ones who made those lovers dance badly, fiercely, in Notorious , where I discovered myself a long time ago, before I learned the finish of the dance could never be a box-office-pleasing slow dissolve to kissing. No; my dance like theirs properly never ends, it is a danse apache to the death, so much violence to reason in lovers kissing and sighing, because they love because its impossible, and pretending a happy ending is just an excuse for more kissing.

My mouth, his mouth, to the Brazilian sway and bite of impossibly tender jaws, jewels and fingernails incising the shadows intimate with jacaranda and the darker smells, we lovers who believe love possible as a temporary proposition only; who can be intimate with the flesh, we ask, when we are already intimate with death? Flesh deliquesces, first with desire, then with death. I cant intimate to another even by words where my passions knife skate on the edge of death, cool on the checkered floor of dissolution. Not being able to love for longnow thats the knife to run your fingertip along, as maracas shakey-shake; heres a solution to every fat-headed guy full of pain who never would say, Im a fat-headed guy full of pain, a dissolution of dolce de leche to bile noir on the tongue of my own ever loving self. When I say its all a lot of hooey, I mean forgive me. I mean its doomed for never. Literature and the lesser candy-land arts filled me with that hooey to which a daddys girl succumbs forever more: The love like a slap, the slap called love, the furious refusal: Hooey.

Did you know that Cary Grant loved me even more than he loved Ingrid Bergman? His eyes, black vortices in the samba night, found me there, in my dark, and promised me nothing more. In a Stolen Boat, push off what seemed safe: The fishing dock, pitch pines, children glazed to sheen by ruthless summers. Past the jetty, past the past, to open sea all violet and green, that choppy path between doom and luck Put your back into it, and row. II The Heroine in the Novel Early Days Rucked-up knickers, standing in the pond with a cheesecloth net. Frogs and the golden Japanese carp she caught from the stock the groundsmen had added that spring. (She is Abigail, her novel is Under the Rose by Langley Boisvert, published in London in 1886.) Hair-tossing was a habit, and ringlets pulled back under a blue straw bonnet. (She is Abigail, her novel is Under the Rose by Langley Boisvert, published in London in 1886.) Hair-tossing was a habit, and ringlets pulled back under a blue straw bonnet.

Oh, and that laugh, a merry laugh it was, and her eyes often danced , I am afraid. But she had a chin like a prize fighter. Out and About Three soldiers committed suicide in her first season when she turned them down. It was remarked that two were captains, one a colonel. Rank, of course, meant nothing to her. After she jilted the son of an earl, the scandal sheet demanded: Lady or Tiger? She found that unbecoming and, briefly, trimmed her claws to the nub.

What they could not know, she too was unable to know, the nature of herself being unknowable to her nature, veiled, that is, woman who is not known and will not be known until it is too late and still she will not be seen, she will be unknowable and even when she looks in the mirror she sees not a thing. Except those ringlets, glossy chestnut ringlets. Settled Abigail acquired banker husband, then boy, then twin girls, and full household staff. The cares of ceaselessly apportioned foods and drinks. The occasional frisson of rucked-down knickers in the conservatory, muffled giggles from the old row-boat. The stars and a sort of domestic helium carried her through the faceted vertiginous glare of dinner, through salmon russe and those silly young men, the hobbledehoys who needed a firm hand.

She was said to be quick-witted but unquotable, with a voice like sun melting morning hoarfrost. A scent, chiefly citrus and ambergris, was mixed in Paris for her exclusive use, and it was known that she herself directed the terms of the new trade treaty with Austro-Hungary. Indiscreet And yet it got out of hand. She was misled into thinking this one safe because he was, of all things, tow-headed. It was not accessible to her imagination that sun-spreckled skin and mild grey eyes would exact a payment, and from her . The unravelling of her garments ensued: The small house in Islington where she was exiled with her girls while her son was sent away and her husband continued to make money but with the aid of other female hands.