THE STOLEN LIPSTICK

There's something reminiscent of James L. White's The Salt Ecstasies in Laura Jensen's Memory. Something so confessional and vulnerable, as if the poems can barely be spoken aloud. They have a private spell, one that memory casts, with its difficult but necessary moonlit weights and departures. Here's the last two stanzas of White's "Lying in Sadness":

"It's dark.

You exhale a fist of memory.

I love you like weathering wood

in a room of empty pianos.

When you return to something you love,

it's already beyond repair.

You wear it broken."

It's this sense of impossible return, the struggle of similes to find the right image to say the right feeling, and the nostalgia, the homesickness, that make me feel Jensen and White are related. I can't get one out of the other, even though White's book is filled with a lover's elegies and Jensen's is written to her self as a woman alone.

I haven't read her before. Oh I've listened to the myths, heard the stories of some crazy lady in a muumuu wandering AWP, been to the blog that is something of a bird's picking of lines, a nesting in pieces, straws, ribbons, facts. I've touched Bad Boats, and almost bought one when I was an undergrad, when the book was still in bookstores, but I hadn't the good sense to steal it.

Today I took Carnegie Mellon's new edition of Memory out to the beach, and though I was struck by the rooted feminism of the book, which Kevin Prufer points out in the foreword, I was more struck by how it results in witchy announcements from the kitchen, from the single woman in the world, from the girl-child. In fact, it's one of the quieter things I love about the book: Jensen's uncanny ability to return us to the woodlands, half-dressed. The woman alone, I think, is rare in books. I didn't even know I craved it until I read her. Poems like "West Window" ("It is all here in a cluttered cache / my luck, my dreams, and privacy.") or "Last Saturday of the Year" which ends with a description of a chair: 

"I stop for coffee. 

The chair seat is beautiful. It is round

with a pattern of water lilies, cattails,

flags, pale brown on a brown ground." 

You'd never know, with such adoration and careful attention to the beauty of the chair seat, that the same poet wrote these lines just a stanza before:

"And it is noon. A cock crows.

Christ.

It is like a thin wolf crying."

Jensen is tonally masterful, and the ease with which she sees, with which her poetry moves from the adoration of a thing to its almost terror-full description, for me, is bewitching. She is the mother we fear. I say what I mean. Her poem "Lipstick", for example, ends in the terror of abstraction and recognition:

"Of me there were single hairs, brown with damp.

I was looking up. In the white air by me

there was printed an emblem in a black square,

a signature. I was what was there."

 . . . . . . . .

I'm sure I should say more, but the waves are so imaginary I have to touch them, I have to hurl my half-nude body at their cool wall. Then, I'll walk out of the green foam like some new kind of wet discovery. I'll have to peel the dying seaweed from my calves. My skin will be stinging in all this light, cathedrals of salt and empty applause.

. . . . . . . . 

Of course my favorite poems are always mythic entertainments and fairy tales, poems for children. My favorites get their children baked into pies and eaten. My favorites get lost and thrown into prison. My favorites are orphaned:

PACTHOULI

If every man were a clove and ginger

man, all smiles while the storm shook the glass,

if every cookie shaped like a horse

could tempt snow into cedars and paths,

if the candlelight looked down on 

a real person made of flour and spice,

there he would be, all plaid and patchouli,

striking her harmless as gratitude,

harmless as a little chipping bird

at heart, that when he comes close, must fly.

She made her saints of bone, each multiple

and dinosaurian, all those fragments

enormous in possibility. The hands

of the scholar fell together in sleep,

spooned soup by daylight, lived and breathed

to die. The moon paused when she looked

its way, a mask on the sky. Light is not

a disguise for darkness, not yet, not

in her mind, not this day, in her present,

while out of a candle breathes his scent.

It is a waste of time, following men,

but what else can you do, if you do not

know the way to trap one? She followed him

out to the snow in her argyles, in that 

town that had winter, knowing she was wrong.

But what is a little light in the window?

What is a circle of flour, little mounds

of soda and salt, recipes like prayers 

but the old pursuit? He's the gingerbreadman.

You cannot catch him.

. . . . . . . .

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!

. . . . . . . . .

STOLEN REVELER

. . . . . . . . . .

I finally have summer, which is more a feeling than a season. More morning sunlight without any ache, more hummingbird sewing the air, more eucalyptus hiding its bones in green tea leaves and yellow wood curls, the fringes embroidered by golden needles, more spiderweb and gleam, more crashing in the distance that isn't death, how softness arrives, more absence isn't. Blue.

I took Donald Revell's latest book, A Thief of Strings, out to the beach, not really sure that I'd read it. I loved the title and I love his third collection, New Dark Ages, which is mostly evenly written narratives and strict stanzas. Strings is an Alice James book, three sections, 68 pages. Lyrics. Visions. I read the book a section at a time, getting down on my knees to blow the Pacific, bodysurfing salt, his lightning and dark glare. Dug my feet in the sand and read some more. "The sky was very near" writes Revell, and I'm with him. Color is a guitar string. Sunset is the killing Adagio of our time. Revell, I think, is staring into the star of dew, and seeing 

"A prism that is

Cool as a leaf, cool

And vaporous as grass

When grass goes home."

. . . . . . . .

I'm really surprised by how much these poems stay with me. I love their deep but playful contemplations. I like the lines I don't understand, even more when they're paired with lines I do: 

"I want to go to the Garden of Eden to die. 

Happiness and Despair are of one mind. 

And the Devil is another evergreen burr-marigold gentleman."

I'm reminded in his work of Yeats' preoccupation with symbolism and myth. It's an oddly religious book, without being religious. Revell is at the core of something. The light transparent skeletons of leaves. White, rare. The soul of green, that is holy. "What is a good place" he asks, "to break down to die / To ask such a question / Is one heaven" In some ways Revell is interested in origins and human feeling. What drives us to experiences like love or spirit:

TO THE JEWS

I am the grass I dreamed I was.

Atalanta,

From inside a drop of dew

Comes the speed to outspeed you.

I have seen it.

Imagine something like a cloud, but like diamonds too.

The human eye began as grass.

In the first mornings, 

Water raced out of the air

Becoming Soul, who is the speed of things.

I lay my head onto the ground.

Is my dog a god because he kills a rabbit?

I lay my head beside the broken animal.

Our eyes meet. The world belongs to him.

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

One of my favorite poems reminds me of the nature of seasons, that depart with part of us forever. "It will be a glorious spectacle" he writes in the title poem, 

"and I will be the only one there to enjoy it. No stems, no roots anymore, a glorious spectacle, and the meadows so many mirrors signaling with bright lights frantically. It has never been done." 

Beauty and death are never far apart, inside one another, twin.  My happiest poem in the book takes a religious holiday of a brutal death as its title and boyishly writes it. This is the entertainment of the dreaming self. We dream for ourselves our own dangerous, but good beginning:

GOOD FRIDAY

The clown is hurt between two trees.

His circus went far away, and they are happy there

With many animals, living by the sea.

Here, the low bushes are like little pigs,

And the flowers fierce, with great teeth in them.

I see no animals in the sky, but my mother does.

I see lights under the ground at night.

I hear them digging sometimes, and I know

One morning very early when the house is sleeping

Creatures no one has ever seen here

Will come up through the floors.

Their faces will be fires. Their fur will smell of earth

And of secret white things, buried a long time. 

If I go with them, I will never die.

. . . . . . . .

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!

. . . . . . . . 

STOLEN CROCUS

. . . . . . . .

The first collection I ever read by Gerald Stern is Bread without Sugar. What I remember about it now is Stern's positioning of voice--that's too technical and annoying--his movement in the poem that is always marked by left and right sides. In his left hand an ache, in his right a fist of bright crocus.  I love how these poems flex, in short and long lines, in great fat poems that are somehow bouyant: 

"This is how I bent

my head between my knees, the channels and veins

pumping wildly, one leg freezing, one leg

on fire.  That is the saxophone

and those are the symbols; when it gets up here 

the roar of the waves is only a humming, a movement

back and forth, some sloshing we get used to."

Even in these few lines we see Stern's characteristic associative and nervy locomotions. Always anchored by the body, always made elegant by some mental abstraction that dramatizes large and small perspectives, always the sense of humor that weighs beauty with the grotesqueries of our mortal limitations in song. His books feel large and overwhelming, unrelenting, I go numb. It's rare that I could read straight through. They're heady, too perfumed, dizzying, narcotic. Strong.

I've been a deep, enthusiastic fan of his since that first book, and made myself studious admiring the longer poems, "Hot Dog" especially. So much so that I was shocked and bliss-hit by a few short poems in the New Yorker a few years ago--the poem "Sylvia" I immediately set out to memorize. These poems were thrilling for me because I found them surprisingly, even uncharacteristically short, though they don't lose any of Stern's gusto or sting. In his latest books, American Sonnets and Everything Is Burning, he's written some of his strongest, sharpest lyrics. Short bursting bulbs, little flowers, little suns.  

His newest collection, Save the Last Dance, is a great collection that continues these short blossoms, surprising like a flock of crocus in a concrete alleyway. What I love about this book is how it flexes Stern's abilities. It begins with one of these harsh little beauties and ends with the longer poem "The Preacher", first published by Sarabande as a chapbook. In between are stout lyrics broken by longer poems of short singing couplets. The poem "Before Eating" is both fun and lovely: "Leave me alone, / I want to worry; // make me lamb chops / make me curry." This is not to say that Stern abandons any serious thought--this book is all brain: song philosophy. The first lines of the final poem, the long poem in the book, "The Preacher", are contemplative, elegaic lines that consider existence in a fashion relative to theoretical physics:

"As if the one tree you love so well and hardly

can embrace it is so huge so that with-

out it there might be a hole in the universe

explains how the killing of any one thing can

likewise make a hole except that without

its existence there was neither a hole nor not a hole"

It's true that the title to the book feels sentimental, self-indulgent. And it is! But in a serious, true manner. That poem, "Save the Last Dance for Me" is one of my favorites in the book. Stylistically it's reminiscent of poems in Stern's earlier collection "Last Blue" for the length of its lines. The poem concerns Stern's memory of saving a little Chihuahua from drowning in a sewer and being unable to remember the little dog's name:

"though he who weighed a pound

could easily fall into

the opening, such was our life

and such were our lives the last

few years before the war when

there were four flavors of ice cream

and four flavors only; I'll call him

Fatty; I'll call him Peter;

Jésus, I'll call him, but only

in Spanish, with the "h" sound,

as it is in Mexico;

Jésus, kiss me again,

Jésus, you saved me,

Jésus, I can't forget you"

. . . . . . . . 

Speaking of dogs, song, and philosophy, the first poem of the book is another of my favorites:

DIOGENES

Diogenes for me and sleeping in a  bathtub

and stealing the key to the geneology room

close to the fake Praxiteles and ripping

a book up since the wrath had taken me

over the edge again and you understand

as no one else how when the light is lit

I have to do something. I couldn't hold my arm up

for nothing, I couldn't stand on the top step

barking--I'll put it this way, living in a room

two cellars down was good, I got to smell

the earth, I carried a long red wire down

with a bulb attached--after that it never mattered.

. . . . . . . .

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!

. . . . . . . .