Recorded Books Inc. - Louise in Love

LOUISE IN LOVE

Also by Mary Jo Bang
Apology for Want

{POEMS}

by
MARY JO BANG

Copyright 2001 by Mary Jo Bang

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bang, Mary Jo.
Louise in love : poems / by Mary Jo Bang.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9656-9
I. Title.
PS3552.A47546 L68 2001
811.54dc21 00-057794

Design by Julie Duquet

Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

for TIMOTHY BERNARD DONNELLY

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals in which these poems, sometimes in an earlier version, first appeared:

Conduit: Louise, Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be, Too Late, Louise Said, Means, and What Is a Mouth?;

Denver Quarterly: Ritual Gestures and They Were That and Then;

Fence: The Dog Bark;

Gettysburg Review: The Ana of Bliss;

Harvard Review: That Was All, Louise Said, Except For;

Jacket: The Diary of a Lost Girl, The Penguin Chiaroscuro, The Medicinal Cotton Clouds Come Down to Cover Them, Dark Smudged the Path Untrammeled, and A Hurricranium, He Said;

Kenyon Review: Travel Is Easy by Train, Kiss, Kiss, Said Louise, by Way of a Pay Phone, and Does Mrs. Hunt Tear Linen Straight as Ever?;

New American Writing: A Cake of Nineteen Slices and Louise Sighs, Such a Long Winter, This;

The New Republic: Like a Fire in a Fire and Time Speeds, Said Louise, When a Fever Rises;

The New Yorker: The Stars Whole Secret;

Paris Review: She Couldnt Sing At All, At All, So This, and The Still Knife Still Suspended; Partisan Review: Night Falling Fast;

Ploughshares: Ham Paints a Picture to Illustrate an Early Lesson: O Trauma!; Poetry Review: To Savor the Sequel and Etched, Tetched, Touched; Slope: In the Quieter Aftermath;

TriQuarterly: Heres a Fine Word: Prettiplease and The Raven Feeds Reynard;

Verse: Belle Vue and Enchained;

Yale Review: Night and Nail.

The Dog Bark, Like a Fire in a Fire, Louise in Love, and The Stars Whole Secret appeared in The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Michael Collier, ed. (University Press of New England, 2000).

Many of these poems were written during a period of residency at Princeton University made possible by a Hodder Fellowship awarded by the Council for the Humanities, for which I am extremely grateful. Thanks are also owed to The Corporation of Yaddo and to the Chateau Lavigny for residencies. For suggestions and encouragement along the way, many thanks to Stephen Burt, Claudia Rankine, Monica de la Torre, Mac Wellman, and Mark Wunderlich. And special (and eternal) thanks to Richard Howard for his confidence in my work. Ham Paints a Picture to Illustrate an Early Lesson: O Trauma! is for Michael Van Hook.

The italicized lines in Does Mrs. Hunt Tear Linen Straight as Ever? come from letters of John Keats [to his brothers (15 April 1817); to Leigh Hunt (10 May 1817)]. The italicized lines in That Was All, Louise Said, Except For come from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. The italicized lines in And No Sign Will Mark the Midpoints Passing are adapted from an incantation to the Babylonian goddess, Ishtar. Night and Nail contains deliberate, but slanted, echoes of Keatss Ode to a Nightingale. Enchained borrows the phrase Much have I travelld from Keatss On First Looking Into Chapmans Homer. The italicized lines in Raptured come from Book II of Keatss Hyperion: A Fragment. The italicized lines in Interrupted Briefly by a Borrowed Phrase, the Scene Proceeds come from Book I of Keatss Hyperion: A Fragment.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

LOUISE

LYDIA, sister of Louise

HAMILTON GORDON III (HAM)

CHARLES GORDON, brother of Ham

ISABELLA, a child

THE OTHER

The crimped beige of a book, turned-down corner.
The way an eclipse begins with the moon
denting the suns liquid disk, taking a first bit
then more and more and. Leaving a regal rim, a dim
spared portion, a shiver. How cold she was
as the cloud covered the cuckoo-land,
birds batting the tree fringe. Fitful caprice.
Foolish, yes, they were, those birds, but clever too.
A nostrum of patterning rain had fallen
beforehand ceding the hibiscus buds bundled
and in disarray. In the news p. Nostradamic foretelling
of retinal damage written in novelese.
Wasnt the skeptic invented to nourish an interest in science?
Yes. The puma swallows the sun, only to spit it back out.
Diaphragmatic heaving. Base emetic act.
The puky little sun glowing to a glare. Puissance.
Ones own right hand teaching one to look, to see, to leap
upon some notional premise.
Louise placed the next-to-night glasses on the table.
It is, she said, so over. But it wasnt.
Specters they would be
rooted eighty-two years in the same spot waiting
for another and then an offhand remark and one by one
(which is the way death takes us, he said)
they took their shadows
and went out of the garden and into the house.

Louise said. No subtle cadences capturing birdnote
nor the melancholic My Love
Is in a Light Attire. She could speak well enough
but to sing was to vivisect the ears dear pleasure desired.
Ham suggested canasta
or a hike to a hillock. The other reminded
no night-over campingLydia was soundly allergic to that.
Charles Gordon proposed
a boat ride to a big, big lake and a stroll
in the Parc dAvenir. They heard an April angelus tolling its sixes,
a sure sign that the winter demon was down.
It was now a matter of waiting
for the haughty naughty beguilement of warmth.
They were standing on the balcony when
Louise was tossed not a rose or two with flayed edges
but an entire bouquet of hibiscus (a horde of bishops
huddling at the heart of each). Below them, a boy sweeping
sheep, sheep, sheeplooked up
and souffled Lydia a kiss. Oh, it would be a good day, wontnt it?
Life flung riverward and on and on
the baby boat floating, spinning in the hope current,
someone singing Sometimes a bun, sometimes only a biscuit.

Louise peered into the corner of the cabinet