Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing. Marianne Boruch

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

      back to us from the future, frozen

      medievals, high-wire beings not of this earth

      stretched, stunned to bone-limit, made possible again

      by what they cannot bear to see. Now. Which is

      lifetimes ago. I lose track of my transitions.

The Painting

      Two brush-stroked boats, so-so weather, more detail

      forward than aft, heavy

      on shaded bits as

      simple reflection, the mast dropping in water blurred.

      Blur it more, gloom it up, says the teacher.

      Use a rag and something stingy.

      To look and look, is all.

      Salt, fish air at dawn, turpentine. Or evening, that one.

      To remember the past as

      this painting remembers — beautiful, a little dull.

      And maybe it was.

      In fact, water can turn out demanding. Not staying put,

      too much at odds in that glitter.

      And people expect a quiet thing to hang on a wall

      to forget their own noise.

      That old guy bumming cigarettes for real

      looked the part of another century, the ancient fisherman

      contentedly mending nets in a time

      with time to retie knots. So we

      like to believe. And some would

      sketch him right in, work him over like an afterthought,

      historical. Better yet, to comment

      ironic or just short of it. With him, without,

      finally the worn reliable straightforward

      sea, harbor, dream. Also this

      for the record — three, not two boats. And those

      warehouses weren’t pink, didn’t

      watery-ache like the shadow they cast.

      To be an artist, the best part — you, you’re in

      and then it’s the same

      but you’re not the same. Smoke

      from a factory on the other side, a small one

      but billowing soot and ash anytime, a bad idea.

      Or a good one, meaning

      world. Which could threaten. Or end.

      Go for a larger, darker resonance. The teacher

      saying