Shapiro - Night of the Republic

Copyright 2012 by Alan Shapiro

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.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shapiro, Alan, date.
Night of the republic : poems / Alan Shapiro.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-547-32970-3
I. Title.
PS 3569. H 338 N 54 2012
811'.54dc22 2010049850

Book design by Patrick Barry

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The author thanks the following journals, in which these poems, or versions of them, first
appeared: Bellevue Literary Review: "Galaxy Formation." Burnside Review: "Race Track,"
"Barbershop." Forward: "Dry Cleaner," "Senior Center." New Ohio Review: "Indoor Munici
pal Pool," "Downtown Strip Club." New Republic: "Car Dealership," "The Public," "Govern
ment Center." The New Yorker: "Solitaire." Ploughshares: "Bookstore," "Park Bench," "Stone
Church." Poetry: "Gas Station Restroom," "Supermarket," "Bedroom Door," "Sickbed." Slate:
"Triumph." Smartish Pace: "Close to You," "Edenic Simile." Tikkun: "Convention Hall."

"Municipal Pool" was selected for The Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses
(2011).

I also wish to thank the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North
Carolina for a fellowship that gave me time to write several of these poems. And as always
much gratitude and love to the friends whose criticism has made this book so much bett er
than it otherwise would have been.

For Reg Gibbons

The present tense
is the body's past tense
here; hence
the ghost sludge of hands
on the now gray strip
of towel hanging limp
from the jammed dispenser;
hence the mirror
squinting through grime
at grime, and the worn
to-a-sliver of soiled soap
on the soiled sink.
The streaked bowl,
the sticky toilet seat, air
claustral with stink
all residues and traces
of the ancestral
spirit of body free
of spirithence,
behind the station,
at the back end of the store,
hidden away
and dimly lit
this cramped and
solitary carnival
inversionPaul
becoming Saul
becoming scents
anonymous
and animal; hence,
over the insides
of the lockless stall
the cave-like
scribblings and glyphs
declaring unto all
who come to it
in time: "heaven
is here at hand
and dark, and hell
is odorless; hell
is bright and clean."

Over the lot a sodium aura
within which
above the new cars sprays
of denser many-colored brightnesses
are rising and falling in a time lapse
of a luminous and ghostly
garden forever flourishing
up out of its own decay.

The cars, meanwhile, modest as angels
or like angelic
hoplites, are arrayed
in rows, obedient to orders
they bear no trace of,
their bodies taintless, at attention,
serving the sheen they bear,
the glittering they are,
the sourceless dazzle
that the showcase window
that the showroom floor
weeps for
when it isn't there

like patent leather, even the black wheels shine.

Here is the intense
amnesia of the just now
at last no longer longing
in a flowering of lights
beyond which
one by one, haphazardly
the dented, the rusted-through,
metallic Eves and Adams
hurry past, as if ashamed,
their dull beams averted,
low in the historical dark they disappear into.

The one cashier is dozing
head nodding, slack mouth open,
above the cover girl spread out before her on the counter
smiling up
with indiscriminate forgiveness
and compassion for everyone
who isn't her.

Only the edge
is visible of the tightly spooled
white miles
of what is soon
to be the torn-off
inch-by-inch receipts,
and the beam of green light in the black glass
of the self-scanner
drifts free in the space that is the sum
of the cost of all the items that tonight
won't cross its path.

Registers of feeling too precise
too intricate to feel
except in the disintegrating
traces of a dream
panopticon of cameras
cutting in timed procession
from aisle to aisle
to aisle on the overhead screens
above the carts asleep inside each other
above the darkened
service desk, the pharmacy, the nursery,
so everywhere inside the store
is everywhere at once
no matter where
eternal reruns
of stray wisps of steam
that rise
from the brightly frozen,
of the canned goods and foodstuffs
stacked in columns onto columns
under columns pushed together
into walls of shelves
of aisles all celestially effacing
any trace
of bodies that have picked
packed unpacked and placed
them just so
so as to draw bodies to the
pyramid of plums,
the ziggurats
of apples and peaches and
in the bins the nearly infinite
gradations and degrees of greens
misted and sparkling.
A paradise of absence,
the dreamed-of freed
from the dreamer, bodiless
quenchings and consummations
that tomorrow will draw the dreamer
the way it draws the night tonight
to press the giant black moth
of itself against the windows
of fluorescent blazing.

Behind the bench the drive,
before the bench the river.
Behind the bench, white lights
approaching east and west
become red lights
receding west and east
while before the bench,
there are paved and unpaved
pathways and a grassy field,
the boathouse, and the playground, and the gardens
of a park named for a man whom
no one now remembers
except in the forgetting that occurs
whenever the park's name is said.
Left of the bench there is a bridge
that spans the river
and beyond the bridge around a bend
floodlights from the giant dry goods
that replaced the bowling alley
that replaced the slaughterhouse
are dumping fire all night long
into the river; but here
where the bench is,
the river is black, the river
is lava long past its cooling,
black as night
with only a few lights
from the upper story of the trapezoidal
five-star hotel across the water
glittering on the water
like tiny crystals in a black geode.
Haunt of courtship,
haunt of illicit tryst; of laughter
or muffled scream, what
even now years later
may be guttering elsewhere on the neural
fringes of a dream, all this
the bench is empty of,
between the mineral river that it faces
and the lights behind it speeding white
to red to white to red to white.

Its night is all day long;
the neon GIRLS out front go dark in sunlight,
while inside the cruciform stage
has stripped down to blackness,
in which the vertical
poles at the end of each transverse arm
stand naked and lonely.
Cold here is the cold on the faces of the presidents
on bills the absent hands
have pushed toward each body bending over
in a gown of brightness;
cold is the heat of the shadowless
shadow play of hands and legs
up and down along the poles,
and the hands retreating from the money,
and the hands in pockets dreaming,
or dreaming later on another body;
the heart of the cold is the opposite of what it is,
cold as the fire
through the day of its night
in the firing line of bott les
waiting for orders
on the shelf above the bar.