Signs & Wonders
JOHNS HOPKINS: POETRY AND FICTION
John T. Irwin, General Editor
Signs & Wonders
Poems by Charles Martin
This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the G. Harry Pouder Fund.
© 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2011
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martin, Charles, 1942–
Signs & wonders: poems / by Charles Martin.
p. cm. — (Johns Hopkins: poetry and fiction)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-9974-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8018-9974-5 (hardcover: alk. paper)
I. Title. II. Title: Signs and wonders.
PS3563.A72327S54 2011
811′.54—dc22 2010042463
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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TO JOHANNA
Contents
Directions for Assembly
I/ THE LIFE IN LETTERS
The Flower Thief
Souvenir
Some Kind of Happiness
The Sacred Monsters
Words to Utter at Nightfall
Mind in the Trees
Autopsychography
Support
East Side, West Side
1/ Vermeer at the Frick: His Mistress and Maid
2/ John Koch at the New-York Historical Society: The Party
To Himself
Brooklyn in the Seventies
This Organizing Solitude
Theory Victorious
II/ SOME ROMANS
On a Roman Perfume Bottle
Ara Pacis
Ovid to His Book
Three Sonnets from the Romanesco of G.G. Belli
1/ The Good Soldiers
2/ The Spaniard
3/ The Coffee House Philosopher
III/ NEAR JEFFREY’S HOOK
The Twentieth Century in Photographs
Poem for the Millennium
Who Knows What’s Best?
Getting Carded
For the End of the Age of Irony
Near Jeffrey’s Hook
Foreboding
After 9/11
After Wang Wei
Poison
Acknowledgments
Signs & Wonders
Directions for Assembly
Signs is a noun (as in DO NOT DISTURB);
Wonders (as in “with furrowed brows”), a verb.
I/ The Life in Letters
The Flower Thief
At last he struck on our block and snatched
Geraniums out of the flowerpots
And window boxes we had left unwatched,
Plucked the plants whole, took flower, stem and roots,
Danced down the street in glee and merriment,
Every so often letting out a whoop,
Asperging us with soil mix as he went,
Until he settled on an empty stoop.
And there gazed on his prizes, fascinated
By something in them only he could see,
While those who called the local precinct waited,
Watching him with or without sympathy.
He learned the essence of geranium.
We learned that the police don’t always come.
Souvenir
1/
Somehow it had escaped
By the time that we had flown
Back to New York City
And on to our new home---
That slender insect, shaped
From a green husk of corn
Twisted until crickety
On a cobbled street in Rome.
2/
A Chinese emigrant,
Perched by a cardboard box,
Fashioned these vegetal
Crickets and grasshoppers;
His wiry fingers bent
And tied the sheathes to flex
In forms that would appeal
To bargain-hunting shoppers.
3/
Bagged up in plastic, tied
With little wire collars,
Like goldfish in their bowls
Waiting for adoption,
Each silent cricket vied
For euros or for dollars
And waited to be sold:
It had no other option.
4/
If it had been poverty,
The dull incessant grind
Of want which went unheeded,
That snatched up and replanted
Him here in Italy,
What put it in his mind
To sell what no one needed
And almost no one wanted?
5/
Was it just ignorance
Of the foreign market---
That and the optimist’s
More than half-filled glass?
“What every Roman wants
Is a good cornhusk cricket---
With a few deft ties and twists
My dream will come to pass!”
6/
That isn’t even funny:
He sleeps on a low cot in
A single crowded room
On the shift assigned him.
He owes his landlord money.
He fears he’s been forgotten
By his family back home:
Will Good Luck ever find him?
7/
Perhaps: Que sera, sera.
But now among the fakes,
The faux Gucci scarves and shoes,
The double-A batteries
And plastic ephemera,
He stands by his box and makes
A life he did not choose,
From what would otherwise
8/
Be overlooked as waste
(As he himself might be
In this world’s new order):
But how shall the genuine
Not be wholly effaced
From life and memory
And taught to slip the border---
How, if not by design?
Some Kind of Happiness
A windblown grain of happiness
Has just now taken residence
Between the moistened surfaces
Of eye and lid: I blink and wince,
Not recognizing it as such,
And then I grimace to expel
What I can feel but cannot touch,
This moonlet torn from Planet Hell,
Whose photo, magnified, would show
A wilderness of jagged peaks
And icy crevices below.
It threatens to stay on for weeks,
And with no fixed plan traverses
The jellied pond that runs with tears,
Paying no mind to my curses.
Then suddenly it disappears.
What kind of happiness was this?
One more likely than another:
Briefly here, abruptly gone---bliss,
If not unalloyed with bother.
The Sacred Monsters
The legend, built up over many years,
That told of how the spells the monsters cast
Reduced the hapless children to hot tears
And left the grown-ups they became aghast
And swaddled in unmanageable fears
Originating in the nightmare past---
That legend needs revising, it appears,
Now that we see the monsters plain at last:
How this one, backed into a corner, snarls,
While that one rears to strike, but must give way
Before these oldsters from the suburbs, clad
In polyester leisurewear, who say
How pleased they are to be here.
Then, “Mom, Dad, I’d
like you both to meet my good friend Charles…”
Words to Utter at Nightfall
So here I am in Oakwood, a funeral
park built in 19th-century Syracuse,
tracing out names while windblown snow swirls
another failed quest for immortality
come to completion under a polished grey
stone---but tonight I halt before it,
stopped by its one-word inscription: utter
*
“Utter?” Say what, I ask myself cluelessly:
If utter had been somebody’s cognomen,
who would have raised this stone, neglecting
either a given name or initials?
And UTTER lacks apparent connection to
any of many words it may come before:
“bliss,” say, or “rot”---intensifying
joy in the outcome, or indignation
at learning that oblivion isn’t a
concept, merely. When once we eliminate
noun and adjective, only verb is
left to consider. So I consider
UTTER a sharply worded imperative,
bitten in stone, unknown as to origin,
aimed, it may be, at finding someone
who goes off rambling in cemeteries,
hoping to be instructed by randomness,
hoping, among the dead ends so evenly
spaced out in ordered rows, to find the
one that might signify: Here continue
*
Easy to say, but where is continuance?
For certain, unaccompanied UTTER is
awkward at best---an unvoiced, barked-out
syllable trailed by a schwa, dissolving
in the thin night air, cold and companionless,
unheard by anyone, unresponded to.
Take it, then: weave it into measure’s
ancient invention, this shopworn form, now
frayed at the edges, far from original:
use it to make an evensong utterance,
passed on by one whose heartfelt wish is
not to have either the first or last word
Mind in the Trees
I was of three minds
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
—Wallace Stevens
But Wallace, what if there were, say,
Three hundred of them in one tree?
Of how many minds would you be?
I saw three hundred here one day---
Not blackbirds, since not every black
Bird’s a blackbird---these were crows,
So densely driven, you’d suppose
The branches of the tree would crack.
Yet the tree didn’t seem weary
Of bearing them without a fuss---
One of the few eponymous
Oaks of Oakwood Cemetery.
The next day came three hundred more
And formed a second colony
On branches of another tree;
They spread across its upper floor.
Day after, a prodigious din
Proclaimed the transfer was complete:
All the tall trees across the street
Appeared to have been settled in.
This was in autumn. They had flown
From the bare cornfields west of us
To spend their nights in Syracuse.
At first light they would be long gone.
I’d have to have a mind of crow
To tell you where it was they went,
Although I think that their intent
Was plain enough for us to know:
To feed as well as they were able
On gleanings from some barren field,
Or test what a town dump would yield
In scraps scraped from a kitchen table.
From where they’d been, they’d all fly back
To our neighborhood and roost
Right around dusk: a sable host,
A giant beating wing of black,
Dissolving until each crow finds
Its nightly perch.
Regarding their abidance
in our area,
I was myself of several minds:
Their raucousness by night and morning,
The paintballs of their excrement
(Mixed, it would seem with fresh cement)
That dropped among us without warning,
Clearly would not gain them favor.
What would, then? Their ability
To make do on the little we
Allow them, and, indeed to carve a
Niche, however scant and dire
From our gleanings and our rot
Speaks well of them, though we may not.
It’s also easy to admire
The way they seem to get along,
The nice civility each shows
(Or seems to show) his fellow crows,
And there’s the beauty of their flight
Whether they glide, now high, now low,
Or struggle though grey squalls of snow,
Racing against impending night;
Or when they form a canopy,
A treetop-level aggregate---
Each one a fine black cuneate
Shape on the lemon yellow sky;
It seemed each little mark they made
Was capable, collectively,
Of making one text of each tree,
A book whose upturned page displayed
The tree’s own thought.
And then, one day,
The first or second day of spring,
At sunrise, all of them took wing
At once and hoarsely flew away,
Not to return until next fall
With a noise like blackboard-grating chalk.
I’m practicing a crow-like squawk
To greet them when I hear their call.
Autopsychography
Fernando Pessoa, Autopsycographia
The poet knows just how to feign.
So very thorough his pretense is,
That he pretends to have the pain
He honestly experiences.
Those who read the poet’s verses
As they read them, keenly feel
Not the two pains he confesses,
But just their own, which is unreal.
So round and round in every season,
Upon its tracks this gaily smart
Toy train goes on, beguiling reason,
And it is called the human heart.
Support
Support is what the film of oily dust
Is put upon and slowly bonded to
Until it forms a thin, ambivalent crust
That disappears when there comes into view
Whatever we are here today to see:
A vase of flowers, Wolfe dying at Quebec,
A virgin with an infant on her knee,
Some woman grinning at Toulouse-Lautrec.
If it cannot be said to face the wall,
There’s nonetheless a wall or ledge or shelf
Supporting
it, though the provisionality
of that support says that support itself
Moves through such portals, all of which depend
On yet another and so never end.
East Side, West Side
1/ Vermeer at the Frick: His Mistress and Maid
Light flickers gaily over those surfaces
that, in this painting, represent what, if not
beauty and pleasure, health and value?
Framed by the background, the homely servant,
whose downcast glance suggests her uneasiness,
presents a note appearing to startle her
seated mistress, who must have found it
either unwelcome or unexpected
if not unwelcome. We cannot ever know
if what she had begun writing one lover
was interfered with by another’s
well-timed or untimely importuning.
Soon, other readings, each just as possible,
will come to press their claims on the spectator.
But we can say no more for certain
than that there has been an interruption;
unconscious act and conscious reflection were
caught as she touched her chin with the fingertips
of her left hand, while from her right, she
let the pen drop to the covered table.
So, if I claim Vermeer must have wanted this
uneasy painting read as a secular
Annunciation, where the one picked
happens to be neither maid nor maiden,
I mean it just as a thought experiment:
there’s not the slightest hint of submissiveness
in her demeanor, and the drama
played out about her is her own doing.
Nor do I find it even implausible
to see the maid as angelic messenger:
in an Annunciation, brightness
flows into darkness, and so transforms it,
while here, a girl constrained by her poverty
briefly enters a plane of great privilege;
whatever right she has to be here
is one that she has been granted merely.
But this is not about the inequality
inherent in a common relationship,
nor will some god reduce the mistress
to the sealed chamber of his abidance:
This is about the free play of consciousness
in steady light that limns and illuminates
those whom it falls upon: the favored
few, constrained only by what they’ve chosen.