Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing. Marianne Boruch

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СКАЧАТЬ Shade

      4  There Came a Point in the Brutal Winter

      5  Glint

      6  Aubade Off-Site, with Mirror and Self

      7  I Get to Float Invisible

      8  Island

      9  I Do Not Close the Curtains

      10  Reading in Bed

      11  Photo and Photo and Photo

      12  Six Tuscan Poets

      13  Track

      14  If Only

      15  Future Lives of the Past

      16  A Translation of Frogs

      17  What Held the Cathedral Aloft

      18  Whole Conversations as a Creature Almost Credible

      19  Walking Backwards

      20  The Art of Poetry

      21  Aubade Under

      22  The Sound and Silence of the World Now

        About the Author

        Also by Marianne Boruch

        Acknowledgments

        Copyright

        Special Thanks

Gift-Distant, Scratched

      Maybe a pool filled with roses someone

      uprooted before they bloomed fully.

      And I stood before them the way an animal

      accepts sun, the way an animal never

      thinks hunger will stop.

      It does stop. That’s the best

      I can say. You’re given a life.

      Each all every

      small part can’t be good, can’t be

      the worst of it.

      For instance, I couldn’t know why

      such a terrible thing, roses wrenched out of earth like that.

      They were floating.

      But an animal —

      to take in color like taste, flung petals drifting brilliant quick

      savored, any human thought

      somewhere distant, a scratched record,

      the old turntable in the house

      over and over, going bad.

      Comes wonder in that sound.

      Slip into a door

      to lift the needle. Or full-faced as daylight,

      stay in the yard.

I

Progress

      These gargoyles can’t get enough of the view

      stuck to their cornice, ratcheting out

      open-mouthed as some

      desert hermit on his pillar, fifth century.

      Such a vision, probably horrific. The gargoyles

      take it straight to the river

      over giant trees. A kingdom. If there is

      a river. Or a kingdom. If I walk that direction —

      how a lock knows its key, how the key’s

      little nicks and bites code fate: not unlatch but

      continue, not release but come through.

      Because it’s ancient: there is

      no progress, only a deepening. Or not even that.

      I heard progress is a modern invention, post–

      bubonic plague. Right up to the airplane, the double sink

      and running water, earlier

      the milking stool, and monogamy in some places.

      But Dante leapt

      at it, his Purgatorio, thanks to before, when —

      wasn’t it simple? Just heaven

      or hell, friend. Sorry.

      Thumbs up or down. Perfect weather or it’s endless

      awfulness.

      How does it work, this new

      Purgatory business, Dante didn’t ask exactly

      but dreamt first. Fabled searing

      second chance lodged in the brain’s ever-after

      means to be left, reimagine, watch

      whole bits burn off. Memory

      needs sorrow. Even stone at its most

      mend-and-loss molecular level moves, and the hard

      secret parts of us know that: tooth, skull,

      envy, the stubborn vertebrae, guilt worn down by

      exhaustion, by despair you walk with,

      and long enough. Like a month. Like years.

      It’s never simple. I learned what happened: gutters

      replaced gargoyles. Those creatures sick of

      siphoning rain off the roof with their long throats

      stayed to scare evil out of the world, to be

      merely beautiful and grotesque up there. Or they caution

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