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Orbit: Poems - Hardcover

Zarin, Cynthia

 
9780451494726: Orbit: Poems
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0451494725 ISBN 13: 9780451494726
Verlag: Knopf, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

With Orbit, prize-winning author Cynthia Zarin confirms her place as an indispensable American poet of our time.

In this, her fifth collection, Zarin turns her lyric lens on the worlds within worlds we inhabit and how we navigate our shared predicament—the tables of our lives on which the news of the day is strewn: the president speaking to parishioners in Charleston, the ricochet of violence, near and far. Whether writing about hairpin turns in the stair of childhood, about the cat’s claw of anxiety, on the impending loss of a young friend, or how “love endures, give or take,” here is the poet who, in the title poem, “bartered forty summers for black pearls” and whose work is full of such wagers, embodied in playing cards, treble notes, snow globes, and balancing acts. Zarin reminds us that the atmosphere created by our experiences shapes and defines the orbit we move through. Along the way, she is both witness and, often indirectly, subject—“I do not know how to hold the beauty and sorrow of my life,” she writes. This book is an attempt at an answer.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CYNTHIA ZARIN was born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia. She is the author of four previous collections, including most recently The Ada Poems, as well as a book of essays, An Enlarged Heart, and several books for children. She is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. A winner of the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, she teaches at Yale and lives in New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

flowers

This morning I was walking upstairs

from the kitchen, carrying your

beautiful flowers, the flowers you

brought me last night, calla lilies

and something else, I am not

sure what to call them, white flowers,

of course you had no way of knowing

it has been years since I bought

white ­flowers—­but now you have

and here they are again. I was carrying

your flowers and a coffee cup

and a soft yellow handbag and a book

of poems by a Chinese poet, in

which I had just read the words “come

or go but don’t just stand there

in the doorway,” as usual I was

carrying too many things, you

would have laughed if you saw me.

It seemed especially important

not to spill the coffee as I usually

do, as I turned up the stairs,

inside the whorl of the house as if

I were walking up inside the lilies.

I do not know how to hold all

the beauty and sorrow of my life.

meltwater

A gang of foxes on the wet road, fur

gaggle, the gutter a Ganges, gravel

rutting the glacier’s slur and cant. Old proof,

the past can’t solve itself, endlessly drawing

its stung logos spirograph. You see

the fox I cannot see; even the children

can see her, vixen and her babies

delicately picking their way along

the white line of the tarmac, the rain

rubbing out their shadows. I want you

as I want water, rain crocheting moss

from mist, sulfur on the pines’ crooked limbs,

hapless as the selkie who hums to ­herself—­

no one believes in her but there she is.

faun

The faun you can see

her lariat of bone unfolding

the faun in your arms

her legs buckled

moon-­mouth

velvet, her breath keyed,

water

rasping the bridge

barnacles ringing the pilings

—­black pearls,

the ­faun’s breath spiral,

circling your head,

the Horn of Africa

pausing

—­digitalis,

cinquefoil, starburst

pulsing

to where we walked

to the end, to what we

thought was the end.

mirror

My fate to meet my eyes where I’d meet yours,

this early morning streaked with soot

mottled where your dreaming hand should put

my hand to rest on your still waking brow

jibing the night’s ­storm-­battered prow

heaven’s third power, that makes another fast

be one of two, then, the scow safely ­moored—­

(eyes shut) wish that was for me first be last.

orbit

je vais voir l’ombre que tu devins

—­mallarmé

That evening when you were standing by

the shelves and song came back to you after

a long silence, never broken even once

but for a shadow crossing your path, a murmur

of some ­long-­ago breath, speeches as nursery rhymes,

St. Crispin or the children chanting, please you,

night and day, or the stained glass of the bay

as it opened for you when the tide rose

to meet the twilight. But never asking for you,

who had become a bystander, salt caked

by salt to a pillar and even then slipshod

with the truth. That swerving eel whose charge switches

the current is you, not another, slick

tail—­remorse—­caught in its own mouth.

*

The house a shell and not a shell. Dreaming,

I stop at each turn of the stair, ­kite

winder, the balustrade’s tipped ladder tracking

infinity, each door a lid shut tight

my damp snail foot, proboscis, wrack fishtail.

How can I swim up so many stories?

On the landing, furs. Gloves. A walking stick,

Grandfather in his overcoat, clearing

his throat, the winter smell of carnations.

I tried to write it down but lost. Missed tread.

Footfall of what the dead said. Don’t, or do?

All ear, I have no hands. Lunatic hero,

the hermit crab who keeps me company

turns me over, nebulae, on my back.

*

All day a playing card at the kitchen stair’s hairpin,

seven diamonds, each red gem a step, Mnemosyne’s

daughters, ­sun-­sprockets, whirring to make you listen.

On a sequined pillow from Bombay, our Una’s

papoose doll sits up beneath The Book

of Justice, a ­pop‑up fugue whose page unfolds

a toothpick temple, each strut a reliquary,

its cellophane banner sheer petroleum.

By midnight, the card picked up: tears, ­doom-­bringer,

futility: the owl asking its question

to the barking of dogs. Rusks and cardamom.

If Chronos comes to Hecate’s door, what use

is squabbling? ­Yew-­eyed, the cat mews the stair,

her footprints red after she steps on glass.

*

Dusk. Bee’s Sea of Monsters butts the ­chair—­

its shiny cover wreathed with lashing tails

while eight steps up, the ­kite winder, littered

with gilt ribbons, sails into Whitehall’s ­helter-­

skelter. I sit “on the stares.” Fight or flight?

Downstairs, on pink ice, powdered ginger

spackles the Victorian ­mold’s flutes with gold,

red lily pollen, prodded, makes us all

Macbeth. Tonight’s story? Trawling for loot,

wan Elnora, “A Girl of the Limberlost,”

pulls from her torn pocket a scrimshaw boy,

a locket, a painted ­top—­each butterfly

she nets a flustered treble note. We’re not

good at being good, nor being ­“good-­at.”

*

The fireplace log breathes fire, pooled amber,

bejeweled topaz lighting a goblet. The air

is sap. Dragon, the pine log shatters to

a monkey face, two knots for eyes, ­then—­gone.

What else eats itself alive? The child, not

eating, rattles her shark spine, wind chimes

for Belsen’s banging door that only shuts.

North, the smudged mill towns carbonize, each one

dilated, black iris beneath the day’s

cloud-­muddied brow, horizon’s dorsal fin

snow grey, as if the flooded dawn held dusk,

the shark’s inamorata sunset’s skinned

knuckle try at holding ­fast—­gunpowder

sky that drinks smoke from an hourglass.

*

Each one Echo (spitting image of Narcissus

in diminuendo), the seven sisters play

bridge on their ­upside-­down card table,

their meteor ­go-­cart running on a firecracker.

Their swaged tablecloth is the snow sky settling

on the dark town. Who could do wrong? The eye

of the world opens and shuts. Remember

the legs under the table, silk and suede,

pine bark, sharp hooves, clattering? We spoke

in whispers, hardly ­breathing—­house of cards

where every breath disturbs the dreaming portraits.

Shuffle the deck. The prince’s tiny twitching

dog is dreaming us: dust and ore, secret, alive,

animal, just past vision’s humming line.

*

Why can’t I want anything I want? But,

Cosmo, I do. Posthumous, our loves

outlive us: hardtack, lemons, sassafras,

soap-­skiff floating in the claw foot tub,

the windlass a girl blowing bubbles.

Would that we’d known? A whitened cloud

of peppered moths, the children’s old de teum

dim the lamp and singe the too light...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0451494725
ISBN 13 
9780451494726
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
96
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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gpsr@libri.de

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