Logan - Madame X

A LSO BY W ILLIAM L OGAN POETRY Sad-Faced Men (1982) Difficulty (1985) Sullen Weedy Lakes (1988) Vain Empires (1998) Night Battle (1999) Macbeth in Venice (2003) The Whispering Gallery (2005) Strange Flesh (2008) Deception Island: Selected Early Poems, 19741999 (2011) CRITICISM All the Rage (1998) Reputations of the Tongue (1999) Desperate Measures (2002) The Undiscovered Country (2005) Our Savage Art (2009) PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,
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Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in Penguin Books 2012 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright William Logan, 2012 All rights reserved Pages xi and xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Logan, William, 1950 Nov. 16 Madame X / William Logan. p. cm.(Penguin Poets) Poems.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60342-0 I. Title. PS3562.O449M33 2012 811.54dc2 2012023584 Printed in the United States of America Set in Adobe Garamond Designed by Catherine Leonardo Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON For Sharon Dunn and Collette Adams

Birmingham Poetry Review: August Rhapsody; Dies Irae; The South in the South; Carolina Quarterly: On the Suburbs; Cincinnati Review: D-Day; Columbia: Atlantic Ocean. Winter. 1954.; Siringo in the Appalachians; Gettysburg Review: Spring Run Aground; Harvard Review: The Field; Hopkins Review: Book Thirteen; Kenyon Review: The Imitation of Things Familiar; Winter Without Memory; Little Star: The Sunny South; Modern Review: RSVP; New Criterion: A Death at Badenweiler; The Old Story; Summer in the High Purpose of Clouds; New England Review: Leap Year; The War, the War; New Republic: In the Confining Hour; New York Sun: Sodom; New Yorker: Any Old Kind of Aunt; For an Old Girlfriend, Long Dead; Geckos in Obscure Light; Notre Dame Review: And Now for Something Completely Different; The Crane Among Its Minions; The Fens as an Action of Grace; Poetry: The Eels of the Lagoon; On the Wood Storks; The Other Place; Trespassing; Poetry Northwest: Blues; Spring on the Bill of Lading; Salmagundi: Along the Autumn River; Henry James Visiting Ashburton Place, 1904; London. High Summer.; To the Ghost of an Old Girlfriend; Sewanee Review: General Custer on New York Island; Lady Hester Stanhope; Mrs. Custer in Washington City; Spring On Guard; Smartish Pace: After Sappho 58; Southwest Review: Madame X; 32 Poems: After Sappho 31; TLS: By the Closed Museum; The Hedgehog in His Element; On the Hedgehog; Spring in Odd Weather; Winter in the Old School; Warwick Review: Dolores; Yale Review: The Back of a Girl in Florence; Spring in the Preliminaries; Winter of Falling Temperature. Four Fragments of the Odyssey first appeared in Homer in En glish, ed.

George Steiner (Penguin, 1996). Socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahabs soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom! M OBY -D ICK Keep your mind off the poetry and on the pajamas and everything will be all right. G REGORY P ECK IN R OMAN H OLIDAY

T HE H EDGEHOG IN H IS ELEMENT Miserable, bullying, armed to the teeth, like a Sherman tank forced out of the brush or St.

Sebastian bristling with arrows. S PRING ON THE B ILL OF L ADING There grew a confusion in the chrome-yellow crease through storm clouds, on the tarnished silver fields. Arched trees lay in a scribble of nightfall. May had brought Impressionisms paid-for agenda, peace filling the muddy ditches, at a price. Bomb fragments steeped with turnips in the furrows; the new potatoes nestled a rusty grenade. The tidal sky shut down like a gray wave.

Some dawns, a single-minded crow kept watch on brazen clouds lit like chinked edges of shields. The sudden mirror of a stream repaired the cold narcissus beds. Our frail sun faltered, a halogen bulb beneath the proud scar-tissue, one amputated flare, then the absent dark. T HE F ENS AS AN A CTION OF G RACE The calm settles lightly on grasses, limestone knobs, the fall of a rail line proved like a Roman road, as if it knew where its best interests lay, but were in no particular hurry to get there. Yanked on a cord, the startled pheasant knows nature by nature is obscene. What of the irreverent farmhouse, the callous vans, the calm and curious clouds? These too have their place, if only to be scraped from the picture at last.

There is a stoniness beyond even these, requiring the flicker and scent of ceremony, or catalogues cool in their atonements, or merely a bush speaking in tongues. M ADAME X John Singer Sargent, Madame X Visitors scarcely glance at her now as they pass by. I imagine a half-audible sigh escaping her pursed and self-confiding lips like the thrum of certain stately ships that, having weighed anchor, never come to port. Her feelings, no doubt, were of the finer sort. In modestys immodesty, she averts her gaze through the crackled oils concealing haze, a woman who touched up her ears with lavender powder, her skin the shade of Delmonicos clam chowder, the waist pinched narrow as a wasps, not cinched tight until you could hear her gasp, her dress exposing, in cold dcolletage, the Alpine-slope breasts, which were briefly the rage. Hers was sometimes called a professional beauty, which implies a certain impersonal duty to a beauty evanescent as morning vapor.

The painter thought her face like blotting paper. You can see, alas, how it would end. Those who rise so high rarely have grace to descend. A century on, my students low-cut jeans have the effect of a match on gasoline, flaunting like a cold slice of mutton a naked four inches below the belly button, a strip of flesh that asks the old question. (Is nothing more sexual than a taste for suggestion?) Poor Madame X, in her day, was far bolder originally the right strap had slipped off her shoulder. B Y THE C LOSED M USEUM The lions faced away from the noble Greek criminal pillars, guarding what stood behind them.