Grotz - The needle: poems

Houghton Miffl in Harcourt
BOSTON NEW YORK
2011

Copyright 2011 by Jennifer Grotz

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grotz, Jennifer.
The needle : poems / Jennifer Grotz.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-44412-3
I. Title.
PS 3607. R 675 N 44 2010
811'.6c22 2010025570

Book design by Brian Moore

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To take objects out of their royal silence, one
must use either a stratagem or a crime.
ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

The Needle

I

The Icon

Landscape with Town Square

Alchemy

The Pearl

The Sidewalk

Late Summer

The Nunnery

Boy Playing Violin

The Umbrella

Not Body

The Cigarette

The Staircase

II

The Window at Night

Silence

The Eldest

Landscape with Osprey and Salmon

He Who Made the Lamb Made Thee

The Ascension

Landscape with Parking Lot

Rescue

Landscape with Arson

The Woodstove

The Field

The Fly

III

The Mountain

Ghost

Aubade

The Ocracoke Ponies

The Clouds

The Jetty

Love Poem with Candle and Fire

The Record

Mistral

Pharos

Medusa

Most Persons Do Not See the Sun

Sunrise in Cassis

Acknowledgments

"When your eyes have done their part,
Thought must length it in the heart."
SAMUEL DANIEL

...Thought lengths it, pulls
an invisible world through
a needle's eye
one detail at a time,

beginning with
the glint of blond down
on his knuckle as he
crushed a spent cigarette

I can see that last strand of smoke
escaping in a tiny gaspabove the table where
a bee fed thoughtfully
from a bowl of sugar.

World of shadows! where
his thumb lodged into
the belly of an apple,
then split it in two,

releasing the scent that exists
only in late summer's apples
as we bit into
rough halves flooded with juice.

Memory meticulously stitches
the market square
where stalls of fruit
ripened in the heat.

Stitches the shadows stretched and
pulled across the ground by
the crowds pigeons
seemed to mimic

in their self-important
but not quite purposeful
strutting,
singly and in droves.

Stitches the unraveling
world where
only vendors and policemen
stood in place.

Beginning with gold around the edges
and ending with the eyes' sorrowful gaze,

the face of a Madonna with child
makes a dark mirror of what you are to feel:

the temporary but desperate way
a part of you is wounded

until the hurt becomes a lens. Inside you is a city
the mosaic spells out with tiny precious stones

across the ceiling and the walls.
And the city has its currency: every tessera is a coin

you must struggle to spend by looking,
the way rain slowly covers every cobblestone on a street.

A camera won't work: the tourists' feeble flashes
cannot ascend high enough, cannot take in

the Madonna's head tilted in thought,
the baby happy and silent like a secret.

One way to survive is to be a little piece of scenery
Among the mirabilia of the square, spending one's time

In an outdoor caf while a weather system of people
Drips ice cream on the ground. At day's end you leave

Simply for the pleasure of the next morning's return,
Of rounding the corner to see the jostled chessboard of tourists
Underneath the church's towers.

Every day the breakdancers come with their pathetic boom box
To spin and convulse and do whatever gymnastics they can muster

Next to the requisite sad accordion-player, and even a gypsy
Who beseeches and curses bewildered passersby.

On one corner, a tiny ancient church keeps its doors open,
Letting a summer carnival enter the dark altar

While, just outside, the soap blowers wave wands long as fishing poles,
Gingerly releasing the huge trembling globes
Which rise fiery and iridescent like souls.

So stubbornly do we congregate that even in lightning and thunder
We sit strangely unalarmed, eating our chilling omelets
While canvas umbrellas flap and the rain sprays our tables in gusts.

And afterward, the wet and gleaming square seems slowly rubbed dry
By the bolt of blue-gray velvet the sky unspools above.

It is hard to know which view is really reality: the square itself, wiped clean
Of all the people, or the incomprehensible shuffling of the people

Who are incomprehensible and shuffling all over the world, all the time.
Either view scours the heart, keeps down its wild romantic notions.

All day the city went on being a city we traversed
as if it could be conquered by touch,

leaning against stone walls and wrapping our fingers
around rails overlooking the river.

And all through the city, the day went on being a day
blazing ruthlessly, even when it started to rain,

and the devil beat his daughter all afternoon
until sparrows stirred the cauldron of sky

and dusk doused the flames in greenish smoke.
That was more or less the recipe to make night,

when the city writes its unspendable wealth inside us.
When a pebble becomes a bright coin on the sidewalk,

where a black ermine scurries under a car
to replace motor oil rushing into the gutter.

And I become a bird squeezed in a boy's dirty palms
while you digest an iron egg of dread,

the empirical result whenever moonlight
takes shadow to be her lawfully wedded husband.

One's fate in this city is to come and become and be overcome.
In each of us a mad rabbit thrashes and a wolf pack howls.

You were seen once, in a dim light.
Two hands held your face and then two blue eyes

met yours, you could see them in the act of looking
and then you saw them see at the same time you felt it,

that you were being seen
and not until this happened did you know

this was something you required and also
that each of you had become a stranger.

Then you understood why animals take looking
as a sign of aggression. Two pairs of eyes

struggled against each other. And also the stranger's hand
behind your ear, but no memory of the back of the earring

sliding off, just of your own eyes
exhausting themselves in a looking back

you could almost translate, if you could say simultaneously
I am starving and I am not afraid of you.

There was nothing like agreement. It might even have been a war.
The eyes did not relent, not until dawn arrived

and you were alone again, when you began to imagine
sleep was the stranger returning

and only then allowed its delicious possession
to overtake you. It cost one pearl.

Amid foot traffic and cars, morning sun blares off storefront windows
while workers are digging up the sidewalk. Waist-deep in the ground,
one of them holds something up for the others to see.

Everything halts as they inspect it: round, crusted with earth, crumbling.
Even the pigeons seem curious, gathering at the lip of the hole,
adjusting their footing on the spill of rocks to crowd in for a look.

Look how carefully the workers hold their discovery,
passing it back and forth, no one wanting to set it on the ground,