Poet's Corner: three by Carolyn Forché
Apr. 14th, 2022 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stonepicnicking_okapiThree by Carolyn Forché, who is the only poet I'll post this month that I've actually met. She came to my university when I was an undergraduate. Here are three from In the Lateness of the World [2020]: "The Museum of Stones," "For Ilya at Tsarkoe Selo," and "Light of Sleep."
The Museum of Stones by Carolyn Forché
These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir–
stones, loosened by tanks in the streets
from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, horneblende,
agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of a city’s entombment, stones
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,
those that had flown through windows, weighted petitions,
feldspar, rose quartz, blueschist, gneiss and chert,
fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe
of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,
stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children,
stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary of stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode and hail,
bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,
stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,
stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin and root,
concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immoveable and sacred
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.
For Ilya at Tsarkoe Selo by Carolyn Forché
We stand at the casement window of Pushkin’s Lycée.
These are the desks where Pushkin wrote, his chalkboards, his astrolabe.
Snow falls from here into the past and vanishes on golden minarets.
Snow recedes from the birches. A lesson writes itself in winter chalk:
On the day Michelangelo died in Rome, Galileo was born in Pisa.
Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died. When they searched for
the poet Kabir, they found nothing beneath his shroud but a sprig of jasmine.
Man is like the statue whispering about the marble chiseled from his mouth.
You are the guardian of this statue, standing in your silent world.
The year Isaac Newton died, there was a barn fire during a puppet show.
Kabir says all corpses go to the same place, and the world has fallen
in love with a dream. This life is not the same as your other life.
We are here now in one of the shrines of the silver poets.
You are one of the silver. The snow is a white peacock in a Russian poem.
Light of Sleep by Carolyn Forché
In the library of night, from the darkness of ink
on paper, there is a whispering heard book to book,
from Great Catastrophe and The World of Silence
to The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, a history having
to do with aerial leaflets, air raid papers,
bills of mortality, birth certificates and blotting papers,
child lost-and-found forms, donor cards, erratum slips,
execution broadsides “liberally spattered with errors of all kinds”
sold by vendors at public hangings, funeralia, with drawings
of skeletons digging graves and inviting us to accompany
the corpse of x to the church of y, gift coupons, greeting cards,
housekeeping accounts, ice-papers to place in windows
for the delivery of blocks of ice, jury papers, keepsakes,
lighthouse-dues slips for all ships entering or leaving ports,
marriage certificates, news bills, notices to quit, oaths, paper
dolls, plague papers, playing cards, quack advertisements,
ration papers, razor-blade wrappers, reward posters,
slave papers, songbooks, tax stamps, touring maps,
union labels and vice cards left in telephone boxes,
warrants and watch-papers used to keep the movements
of the pocket watches under repair free of dust,
wills and testaments, xerography, yearbooks and the Zoetrope
disk also known as the wheel of life wherein figures painted
in a rotating drum are perceived to move, faster and faster
whether dancing, flying, or dying in the whirl of time.
The Museum of Stones by Carolyn Forché
These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir–
stones, loosened by tanks in the streets
from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, horneblende,
agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of a city’s entombment, stones
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,
those that had flown through windows, weighted petitions,
feldspar, rose quartz, blueschist, gneiss and chert,
fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe
of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,
stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children,
stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary of stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode and hail,
bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,
stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,
stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin and root,
concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immoveable and sacred
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.
For Ilya at Tsarkoe Selo by Carolyn Forché
We stand at the casement window of Pushkin’s Lycée.
These are the desks where Pushkin wrote, his chalkboards, his astrolabe.
Snow falls from here into the past and vanishes on golden minarets.
Snow recedes from the birches. A lesson writes itself in winter chalk:
On the day Michelangelo died in Rome, Galileo was born in Pisa.
Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died. When they searched for
the poet Kabir, they found nothing beneath his shroud but a sprig of jasmine.
Man is like the statue whispering about the marble chiseled from his mouth.
You are the guardian of this statue, standing in your silent world.
The year Isaac Newton died, there was a barn fire during a puppet show.
Kabir says all corpses go to the same place, and the world has fallen
in love with a dream. This life is not the same as your other life.
We are here now in one of the shrines of the silver poets.
You are one of the silver. The snow is a white peacock in a Russian poem.
Light of Sleep by Carolyn Forché
In the library of night, from the darkness of ink
on paper, there is a whispering heard book to book,
from Great Catastrophe and The World of Silence
to The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, a history having
to do with aerial leaflets, air raid papers,
bills of mortality, birth certificates and blotting papers,
child lost-and-found forms, donor cards, erratum slips,
execution broadsides “liberally spattered with errors of all kinds”
sold by vendors at public hangings, funeralia, with drawings
of skeletons digging graves and inviting us to accompany
the corpse of x to the church of y, gift coupons, greeting cards,
housekeeping accounts, ice-papers to place in windows
for the delivery of blocks of ice, jury papers, keepsakes,
lighthouse-dues slips for all ships entering or leaving ports,
marriage certificates, news bills, notices to quit, oaths, paper
dolls, plague papers, playing cards, quack advertisements,
ration papers, razor-blade wrappers, reward posters,
slave papers, songbooks, tax stamps, touring maps,
union labels and vice cards left in telephone boxes,
warrants and watch-papers used to keep the movements
of the pocket watches under repair free of dust,
wills and testaments, xerography, yearbooks and the Zoetrope
disk also known as the wheel of life wherein figures painted
in a rotating drum are perceived to move, faster and faster
whether dancing, flying, or dying in the whirl of time.