Slate eBook Club Editions
January 2003

Fragment C.K.Williams
Two Days David Lehman
Epigram 16 J.V. Cunningham
Parkersburg Mark Halliday
Bonsai, Golden Lotus Yusef Komunyakaa
Tichborne's Elegy Chidiock Tichborne
Views of Schubert Lorrie Goldensohn
Elegy for the Saint of Letting Small Fish Go Eliot Khalil Wilson



Fragment
By C.K. Williams
Posted Wednesday, July 3, 1996, at 12:30 AM PT

This time the hold-up man didn't know a video-sound camera hidden up in a corner

was recording what was before it or more likely he didn't care, opening up with his pistol,

not saying a word, on the clerk you see blurredly falling and you hear--I keep hearing--

crying, "God, God," in that voice I was always afraid existed within us, the voice that knows

beyond illusion the irrevocability of death, beyond any dream of being not mortally injured--

"You're just falling asleep, someone will save you, you'll wake again, loved ones beside you. ..."

Nothing of that: even torn by the flaws in the tape it was a voice that knew it was dying,

knew it was being--horrible--slaughtered, all that it knew and aspired to instantly voided;

such hopeless, astonished pleading, such overwhelmed, untempered pity for the self dying;

no indignation, no passion for justice, only woe, woe, woe, as he felt himself falling,

even falling knowing already he was dead, and how much I pray to myself I want not, ever,

to know this, how much I want to ask again why I must, with such perfect, detailed precision,

know this, this anguish, this agony for a departing self wishing only to stay, to endure,

knowing all the while that, having known, I always will know this torn, singular voice

of a soul calling "God!" as it sinks back through the darkness it came from, cancelled, annulled.



Two Days
By David Lehman
Posted Thursday, January 16, 1997, at 12:30 AM PT

The sky was a midnight blue
velvet cloth draping
a birdcage and no moon
but the breeze was whistling
and the sound of a car
on Valentine Place was
the rush of a waterfall
on the phone in New York City
and that's when the muse
turned up with curly brown locks
she was a poet, too, and wanted
me to give her an assignment
she was willing to trade
fifteen minutes of inspiration
in return for a phone call
from Frank O'Hara in heaven
sipping espresso and Irish whiskey
and then a morning swim
we had so much energy those days
we needed to burn some up
before we could paint



Epigram 16
By J.V. Cunningham
Posted Thursday, January 1, 1998, at 12:30 AM PT

The classical form of the epigram has found some brilliant practitioners in English, though the form is not much talked about by critics and examples are not much anthologized. John Donne, Robert Herrick, and Ben Jonson wrote some great ones, and later so did William Wordsworth. The master in the 20^th Century was J. V. Cunningham. In No. 16 from the group he collected as "A Century of Epigrams," the meaning is packed, yet clear, the sounds (I particularly admire the way "idea" echoes "I" in the third line) are rich but do not swamp the meaning; the movement of pauses between units of different length varies against the pentameter line in a way that adds grace to the sounds. The poem has the brevity and snap that define the epigram as a form.
--Robert Pinsky

The dry soul rages. The unfeeling feel
With the dry vehemence of the unreal.
So I, in the idea of your arms, unwon,
Am as the real in unreal undone.



Parkersburg
By Mark Halliday
Posted Thursday, January 7, 1999, at 12:30 AM PT

I will arise now and put on a black baseball cap and go
to Parkersburg. It will fit me,
the cap will, and it will be black,
the sneakers on my feet will be purple,
and I will not have shaved for three days.
The day will be rainy and cool
and I will wear an old jacket of pale wool
that was once my Uncle Lew's.
And go to Parkersburg.

On a bus I may go
or in an old car full of tapes--
Elmore James. Fred McDowell.
The Kinks. Into the town of Parkersburg
on a day so rainy and cool. And I will be
terrifically untroubled if anyone thinks I am strange,
in fact everything about this day will be a ratification
of how I am not them; and my manner, though courteous,
will tend to make them suspect that they are boring.
They will wonder why they have no purple sneakers. Cool

and lightly rainy in Parkersburg
and me all day there exactly as if my belief
had long been firm; not forgetting for one minute
how I felt listening to "I'm Different" by Randy Newman
years ago and the sacred tears in my eyes at that time.
I and my black baseball cap will enter a tavern

and there we will read a French poet with such concentration
it will be like I am that guy. Then pretty soon
in another tavern it is a Spanish poet whom I read
with similar effect. Parkersburg!
Oh my Parkersburg ... And I swear,
though I might not meet a lonely marvelous slim woman
with black hair, it will still be as if I did.



Bonsai, Golden Lotus
By Yusef Komunyakaa
Posted Wednesday, January 5, 2000, at 12:30 AM PT

Grafted to composure, a courtesan
Sways like a willow, & the sap
Stuns into a fierce singing
Snipped to mourning twigs

& trained bones. Divining rod
Cut from one musical limb
& limp. Wounded into beauty,
This root-bound unblooming

Breaks mid sentence & falls through
The bottom of chance. The trees stop
Limping when someone chops down a grove
To make an idea live, stealing breath

From a lotus raised out of a half sleep,
A shiver goes through hand-painted silk.
Stunted into green pleas, the whimper
& laugh grow into each other.



Tichborne's Elegy
By Chidiock Tichborne
Posted Wednesday, January 3, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT

This poem was apparently written in the Tower of London by the imprisoned Chidiock Tichborne, a young Catholic conspirator against Queen Elizabeth, the night before he was executed. Whether this account is true or not, whoever wrote the poem achieved an amazing force of plainness. The poem shows how powerful unadorned language can be and what genius it takes to give such language emotional bite. Tremendous feeling is generated by the directness, the straightforward hammering of repeated formula and refrain, above all the plainness of language: Except for the contestable exception "fall'n," the poem is written entirely in words of one syllable! It feels as if the poet has no time for anything but stark truth—and that feeling is attained by writing so artful that it seems nearly artless.
—Robert Pinsky


Written with his own hand in the tower
before his execution

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain;
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fallen and yet my leaves are green,
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made:
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.



Views of Schubert
By Lorrie Goldensohn
Posted Tuesday, January 8, 2002, at 1:32 PM PT

All golden wood, this concert hall
Is small and hushed;
we rush to the last seats
and fetch up on the wrong side,
not facing the keyboard.

Our eyes, stepchildren in this art,
yield to our ears;
the whole vast instrument interposes
between us and the musician:
only his lopped trunk
framed in the rectangle
where the brace-stick
meets the piano's raised lid.

Now the light, bouncing,
breaks from his elbows
flying apart, his sudden arms
ending in a gleaming cuff;
high up in the air, the pink
back of his hand, triumphant.

Down in the guts of the Steinway
the hammers trip
on the grillework of the strings;
miniature seal heads,
they lunge at the wires,
tapping and trembling,
boosting the rich rallies,

the stop-and-go of the music
lifting us up by the ears,
thing of no body compelling the body.

Now we can make out the black-clad knees,
and spot how his two black shoes
move in the brief forest
of piano legs and pedals.
It is well that we understand
how low and small the place
from which the large
tumult of Schubert rises.

Our pianist broods above
the intrusive servant of his will,
its black mahogany canceling for us
his voice, heart, lungs, and belly—

welcome our picket whose arms bear arms
deep into the country of abandon.

Now the braided thirds leap,
coil, and carom off the floorboards,
a shaking Steinway lid
struggles with its unseen load,
the treble thrill a little
gargle in its throat,
we can feel him tease it,
tease out the white
velvet of a bass pianissimo—
and then the melody,
all the repeats intact.

Unbearable sweetness! a deft
finger touches an eyeball
withdrawing a pleasure so sharp
its only analogue is pain.

Pulling at our faces,
the homeless flood of notes
looks for the waters
at rest in us; it
wheedles the tears out,
brings us to our feet,
the pianist from behind his piano,
who hears the thunder of our hands
and finished, lets his own hands dangle.



Elegy for the Saint of Letting Small Fish Go
By Eliot Khalil Wilson
Posted Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 10:05 AM PT

I. You too might step into a puddle of fire,
or splash through a stream of glowing lava
where only moments before you were barefoot
in your kitchen after a late night of too much wine
and, nearly naked, frying bacon at the stove.

A burn like this is a different thing the doctor said
and I can believe it. I was a different thing.

I was a man with an unquenchable oil well fire on his feet
that would blaze up as the medicine ebbed.
And the skin curled over, brown-red,
too much like the meat I was cooking in the pan that I dropped
—an irony not lost on even the youngest of nurses
drinking and bacon don't mix
she kidded as I healed.

Yet had my wounds burned like Vulcan's forge
they'd be a distant fire in light of the child
behind the glass in the opposite bed.


II. Where were you saints when the fire first licked his hands?
Hadn't he in living prayed to you?

I want the saint of ice cream trucks
to turn off the carnival, climb down, and explain it all—
account for all the betrayers—
The saints of reachable branches and bank envelope lollipops,
the saints of his mother's cool arms, of new basketball shoes, and professional wrestling.
The saints of tree forts, pocket knives, and stadium food.
The saints of waffles and eyebrows and box turtles.
The saint of jam.
The saint of his own bed.
Where were you saints of wheelies and rodeo clowns and rockets?


III. I was at home when the sepsis took him
and they wheeled him to that all-light room
and when they covered his face.

Yet I had seen his grafts and debridements,
the twice daily baths and dressings,
and the shock at that last turn of gauze
—how the fire bit at his summer legs and arms—
black skin, blacker still, and red.

I was there to see the lost mother
who would live in fire for the child she had known.
There to see all who entered shake their heads
as if wondering as I wondered
how so small a thing can carry such pain
—pain that pushed through the morphine push—
—pain that conquered even those numbing Nordic gods—
Vicodin, Ativan, and Tylox.

It is not my place.
He was not my child,
and I could never speak to him,
but hold him out of the fire.
I would not have him burned again.

Give him back to rocking water,
to pendulum down through the fingers of the sun.
Let the ocean run his veins and heart—
full, then empty, then full again.

Or return him to the folding ground,
face up to the sky.
A boon for dreamlessness,
this petty thief of time.