Graham - Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some poems have appeared in the following publications:

Antaeus: Ambergris

Pearls
A Feather for Voltaire
On Why I Would Betray You

The Georgia Review: Jackpot

Ironwood : Tree Surgeons

Strangers
Harvest for Bergson

The Nation : How Morning Glories Could Bloom at Dusk

The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria
For My Father, Looking for My Uncle
Angels for Czanne
Netting

The Paris Review : Mirrors

Ploughshares : In High Waters

I Was Taught Three

Poetry Northwest: The Way Things Work

Mother's Sewing Box
Girl at the Piano (It Begins, What I Can Hear)
Tennessee June

The Virginia Quarterly Review : Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts

To Paul Eluard

Shenandoah: Whore's Bath

Agni Review : Now the Sturdy Wind

Missouri Review : One in the Hand

The New England Review : An Artichoke for Montesquieu

Paintbrush: Cross-Stitch

The Iowa Review: For Mark Rothko

The Geese

Water Table : Mind

The Slow Sounding and Eventual Reemergence Of
Syntax

NOTES ON THE POEMS

Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts: The title is from a passage in Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics ed., 1961: But he who is wisest among you, he also is only a discord and hybrid of plant and of ghost (p. 42).

To Paul Eluard: The poem is loosely inspired by Robert Motherwell's book, The Dada Painters and Poets, New York, 1951.

An Artichoke for Montesquieu: Some phrasing is influenced by Archibald MacLeish's Brothers in the Eternal Cold.

Mirrors : The second line is from Hollingdale's translation of Nietzsche, What can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going (bergang und Untergang) (p. 44).

Syntax: This poem is for Bill Graham.

I

THE WAY THINGS WORK

is by admitting
or opening away.
This is the simplest form
of current: Blue
moving through blue;
blue through purple;
the objects of desire
opening upon themselves
without us ;
the objects of faith.
The way things work
is by solution,
resistance lessened or
increased and taken
advantage of.
The way things work
is that we finally believe
they are there,
common and able
to illustrate themselves.
Wheel, kinetic flow,
rising and falling water,
ingots, levers and keys,
I believe in you,
cylinder lock, pully,
lifting tackle and
Crane lift your small head
I believe in you
your head is the horizon to
my hand. I believe
forever in the hooks.
The way things work
is that eventually
something catches.

I WAS TAUGHT THREE

names for the tree facing my window
almost within reach, elastic

with squirrels, memory banks, homes.
Castagno took itself to heart, its pods

like urchins clung to where they landed
claiming every bit of shadow

at the hem. Chassagne, on windier days,
nervous in taffeta gowns,

whispering, on the verge of being
anarchic, though well bred.

And then chestnut, whipped pale and clean
by all the inner reservoirs

called upon to do their even share of work.
It was not the kind of tree

got at by defaultimagine thatnot one
in which only the remaining leaf

was loyal. No, this
was all first person, and I

was the stem, holding within myself the whole
bouquet of three,

at once given and received: smallest roadmaps
of coincidence. What is the idea

that governs blossoming? The human tree
clothed with its nouns, or this one

just outside my window promising more firmly
than can be

that it will reach my sill eventually, the leaves
silent as suppressed desires, and I

a name among them.

WHORE'S BATH

But the water will not undress me, and where its coins on my body
accumulate,
the sun builds its church, the soap its greenhouse.
They need remain empty.

Oh when will the whole become a permanent mirage?
Kneeling, I
can go abroad into my face, making boththe real and its proof
disappear. What a fabric!

Yet what can it fashion, spirit unfastened to reveal
the blackest of urchins losing itself in its love of knots.
Lifting the pan, whitewater starts at the nape and disappears
into the waistline

absolving
each robing of skin
like the brazen descents of continents to water from the single idea
of their summit. The clean

is such a steady garment, such a perfected argument.
Where does it unfasten?
When I stand again I cast an exclamation mark onto the soil,
it is so adamantly

fragile. So believable.
What runs down my body now runs into other seasons than this
but the water is left to venture
round and round like a potential shadow, a suitor, though I

see nothing past the surface now, twisting my hair, a chord
interrupted. Where wind picks up,
crickets like rings
on fingertipsAt the last

what I desire is
nostalgia for a moment different from another's moment, undressed,
clean,
all that you cannot give away.

AMBERGRIS

Because our skin is the full landscape, an ocean,
we must be unforgettable or not at all.

Squids that are never seen alive surface
to follow the moonlight on the wateranything

that flees so constantly must be desirable.
In doing so they run aground or are caught

by their enemy the whale. Sometimes fishermen
hang paper lanterns on the prows of skiffs

and row backwards towards land. It takes
such a long time to believe

in evidence.
Consider the broken moon over the waves,

the missing scent of moonlight
on salt watereventually

pattern emerges. The giant squid
is rarely seen alive, but whalers often find it

dead in whales. There
it exudes the powerful fragrance,

its spiritsJoy, Fly By Night, Green
Paradisealways working towards

what must become the finished. Ambergris, what
was her name? it moves before me almost within reach

jasmine, lavender, bergamot, rose

TENNESSEE JUNE

This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything
and loves the flaw.
Nothing is heavier than its spirit,
nothing more landlocked than the body within it.
Its daylilies grow overnight, our lawns
bare, then falsely gay, then bare again. Imagine
your mind wandering without its logic,
your body the sides of a riverbed giving in
In it, no world can survive
having more than its neighbors ;
in it, the pressure to become forever less is the pressure
to take forevermore
to get there. Oh

let it touch you
The porch is sharply litlittle box of the body
and the hammock swings out easily over its edge.
Beyond, the hot ferns bed, and fireflies gauze
the fat tobacco slums,
the crickets boring holes into the heat the crickets fill.
Rock out into that dark and back to where
the blind moths circle, circle,
back and forth from the bone-white house to the creepers unbraiding.
Nothing will catch you.
Nothing will let you go.
We call it blossoming
the spirit breaks from you and you remain.

HYBRIDS OF PLANTS AND OF GHOSTS

I understand that it is grafting,
this partnership of lost wills, common flowers.

That only perfection can be kept, not
its perfect instances. Snap

dragon what can I expect of you,
dress of the occasion?

So I am camouflaged,
so the handsome bones make me invisible.

It is useless. Randomness,
the one lost handkerchief at my heart,

is the one I dropped and know
to look for. Indeed, clues,

how partial I am to bleeding hues,
to clustering. Almond,