Donald Revell

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations The bar in the commuter station The Title: "The Northeast Corridor" In his book The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye(2007), Revell called it “a title taken from newspeak and describing that cindery ganglion of railways between Boston to the north and D.C. to the southern end.” The term is used today by Amtrak. steams like a ruin, its fourth wall open to the crowd and the fluttering timetables. In the farthest corner, the television crackles a torch song torch song A sad or sentimental love song and a beaded gown. She is my favorite singer, dead when I was born. And I have been waiting for hours for a train, exhausted between connections to small cities, awake only in my eyes finding shelter in the fluttering ribbon of shadow around the dead woman singing on the screen. Exhaustion is a last line of defense where time either stops dead or kills you. It teaches you to see what your eyes see without questions, without the politics of living in one city, dying in another. How badly I would like to sleep now in the shadows beside real things or beside things that were real once, like the beaded gown on the television, like the debut of a song in New York in black and white when my parents were there. I feel sometimes my life was used up before I was born. My eyes sear sear To burn, to whither, or to dry up backwards into my head to the makeshift of what I have already seen or heard described or dreamed about, too weary not to envy the world its useless outlines. Books of photographs of New York in the forties. The dark rhombus rhombus A four-sided shape, like a parallelogram. The window is shaped like a diamond on its side. See Wikipedia . of a window of a train rushing past my train. The dark halo around the body of a woman I love from something much farther than a distance. The world is insatiable. It takes your legs off It takes your legs off Donald Revell wrote in his book The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye(2007), “One of my favorite euphemisms is ‘legless,’ meaning drunk” , it takes your arms and parades in front of you such wonderful things, such pictures of warm houses trellised trellised An architectural term, meaning enclosed or supported. In many cases, a trellis is a kind of open latticework on which vines can grow. along the sides with green so deep it is like black air, only transparent, of women singing, of trains of lithium trains of lithium Lithium (lithium carbonate) has been used as a psychiatric medication to treat bipolar disorder and manic depression. A play on “train of thought”; as the third lightest element, “lithium” may be used to describe a lightness or airiness, complementing “transparent.” on the awakening body of a landscape or across the backdrop of an old city steaming and high-shouldered as the nineteen-forties. The world exhausts exhausts Used here in both senses: to tire and to expel exhaust everything except my eyes because it is a long walk to the world begun before I was born. In the far corner the dead woman bows off stage. The television crumples into a white dot crumples into a white dot Older tube televisions, when turned off, would have its picture quickly dissolve into a small white dot in the center of the screen as the last train of the evening, my train, is announced. I lived in one place. I want to die in another.

I am looking at a smallpox vaccination scar In a war movie on the arm Of a young actor. He has just swum Across a river somewhere in Normandy Into the waiting arms of his rejoicing comrades. Of course, the river’s in California, And the actor is dead now. Nevertheless, This is the first of many hotels this trip, And I find myself preferring wars To smut on the networks, Even as I find myself reading The Pisan Cantos for the umpteenth time Instead of the novel in my bag. The poet helps me to the question: Does anything remain of home at home? Next day is no way of knowing, And the day after is my favorite, A small museum really perfect And a good meal in the middle of it. As I’m leaving, I notice a donkey on a vase Biting the arm of a young girl, And outside on the steps A silver fish head glistens beside a bottlecap. Plenty remains. The work of poetry is trust, And under the aegis of trust Nothing could be more effortless. Hotels show movies. Walking around even tired I find my eyes find Numberless good things And my ears hear plenty of words Offered for nothing over the traffic noise As sharp as sparrows. A day and a day, more rivers crossing me. It really feels that way, I mean I have changed places with geography, And rivers and towns pass over me, Showing their scars, finding their friends. I like it best when poetry Gleams or shows its teeth to a girl Forever at just the right moment. I think I could turn and live underneath the animals. I could be a bottlecap. Going to the airport going home, I stop with my teacher, now my friend. He buys me a good breakfast, berries and hotcakes. We finish and, standing, I hear One policeman saying to another Over the newspaper in a yellow booth "Do you know this word regret, Eddie? What does it mean?" Plenty of words over the traffic noise, And nothing could be more effortless. Catching a glimpse of eternity, even a poor one, says it all.

Before anything could happen, flecks of real gold on her mouth, her eyes more convex than any others, the ground spoke, the barrier of lilacs spoke. What sang in the black tree was entirely gold. Her chair was empty. New absence is a great figure dark as the underskin of fruit. At the center of the earth it surrounds and amplifies the dead whose music never slows down. She came by car. I came by train. We embraced. It was at the foot of a hill steeply crowned with apples and a ruined fortress. Imagination did not make the world. Sweetness is the entire portion. Before anything could happen, happiness, the necessary precondition of the world, spoke and flowered over the hill. When I was in Hell on the ruined palisade, either mystery or loneliness kissed my open eyes. It felt hugely convex, seeing and immediately forgetting. By contrast, what I imagined later was nothing.

The unsigned architecture of loneliness is becoming taller, finding a way farther above the horizontal flowering of the Cold War, the peonies and star asters of wild partisanship. I have a shambling gait and lonely hysteria, but no Terror. I am free to shamble past the vacant lot of my son’s conception, to shamble past the bar where I conceived adultery as a Terror that would be endless, flowering in great waves through air striated like chenille. I walk for a long time and try to conjure elsewhere in its early isolation. I cannot. It is all redestinated by the future like the loose balloons a janitor recovers at 6 am from cold light fixtures. The Cold War is ending. Buildings are taller and have no names. 1. The romance of every ideology torments the romance of another. How beautifully, in the beginning, in the gale and embrace of isolation, boys capered over a shambles and swore oaths. The scent of urine in the hall at home was righteousness. The beautiful nude obscured by dust in a paperweight was righteousness. Neglectful townships coming into steep flower just as boys were flowering needed the correction of righteousness, the horizontal slag of government by children. Only the insane allegiances endure. The mad counterparts are lovers passion cannot explain nor circumstances restrict to the dead zones of irony. A counterpart of end of the Cold War is adultery. A counterpart of loving a divided Berlin unto death is fatherhood, the doting maintenance of sons in vacant lots continuing the wars of rubble for righteousness’ sake and for the sake of nudes obscured by dust and vulgarity. Romance torments romance. The most beautiful moment of the twentieth century galed and embraced the acrid smoky air as the Red Army entered Berlin as Hitler shriveled in the gasoline fire as Red Army flags opened above Berlin safeguarding the ruins of a changeless future. Townships blackened even as they flowered. Loose balloons cluttered the low sky and sun. I walked for a long time and tried to conjure the form of kindness. It was a domestic animal confused in the tall grass. Boys set fire to the grass. History that opens flags opened the fire, and Berlin, divided from Berlin, began to love its children past all reason. 2. My son reads sermons of pain and writes on walls. He starves the ground he walks on, preparing a dead city to be worthy of its new flags, to shine as exploded windows shine, raining down for hours after the wrecking crews have gone. I have a lover now who hates children. The hatred floats inside of her, a weightless sexual pavilion of perfect form and perfect emptiness. I thought by making love to her I would conceive nothing but Terror, outrage upon outrage, a violence that would last my whole life and free my son. I was ignorant as a balloon. Across the luminous expressway, I see the shapes of charred tenements castellated, fading into the more tender shapes of night. It may be the last night in history. Tomorrow pulls down the Berlin Wall, pulls down my honor, and I return to my lover’s bed to float in a white condom, no longer my son’s father. Tomorrow describes everything in detail. It explains nothing. It does not teach my boy that tenements are better than the future, better that peace, more likely to produce brothers than are the glassy hands of mornings without end or walls denuded of their wire. In the dead zone of irony before dawn, only the cats cry, like martyrs in the flame. 3. Gates everywhere. The Brandenburg. The Great Gate of Kiev beneath which children stride onto an invisible crescendo disappearing into gasoline fires, emerging as the new shapes of righteousness in slow vans through the Brandenburg Gate. Oaths are secret because none suspects that they are kept. They thrust themselves towards us unashamedly, like the insane homeless, and we do not see them. In our loneliness, we see a chance for love in betrayal, not death. In our loneliness, we see the happy triumph of glassy hands in free elections, not the denuding of Berlin or wanderings of children in vans reduced by fire to black transparencies in the morning shade. When Joan of Arc surrendered to the flames she cried out “Jesus, Jesus.” Some years later, a failed magician who had loved her cried out “Joan, Joan” as the flames mocked him with a sortilege too easy to be unreal or profitable. I walk for a long time and try to conjure the form of loneliness without Cold War. It is ash upon ash, a chiaroscuro aloft and on the ground, completely still. Oaths are secret because none suspects the desperation of every object, the child in every atom of the misused world thrust towards us, crying out whatever sacred name it witnessed put to death on the ascending music of a wall. Our buildings are tall and have no names. The parks grow glassy hands instead of flowers. 4. Afterwards, the calm is piteous but insubstantial as a smell of burn that does not rise in smoke or dies with the fire. Imagine walking out of a house at sunrise and having to invent air, invent light from nothing but untriggered memory. All things beloved are recalled to pain. Air recollected from the wrists of girls braceleted for Confirmation, crossed. Light recollected from between the cars of night trains in a deep river valley where islands in the river glowed like swans. Air recollected form a ditch in flower. Light recollected from the sex of flowers in bare rooms, the grainy light of blondes. Air recollected from religion. Light recollected form the incensed clutch of bodies before sunrise in the oaths of a great and ignorant lost cause. Imagine walking out of a house at sunrise having spent the night in bed with a stranger. Aloft and on the ground the calm unfurls like flags without device or slogan. The inconsequence of the day ahead stirs airless atmospheres in darkness visible as daylight but without shade. Without Cold War, without the arbitrary demarcation of cause from cause, of light and air from the unsexed improvisations of memory, I cannot see to walk or breathe to breathe. Sex becomes applause. Sex becomes television, and the bastard avant garde of lonely architecture breaks ground at the unwired heart of a city that marks the capital of nothing now. 5. A scratchy, recorded call to prayer crosses the alley from one new building into mine. The consolations of history are furtive, then fugitive, then forgotten like a bar of music that might have been obscene or sacred once, in another city, in the days before today. My son is well. He works the public ground and needs no Antigone. My lover sits beside him at dinner, sharing a joke, unmapping the tall future and its unbiased children, reinventing the sexual pavilion to accommodate plague wards. Romance forgives romance. The early isolation of this gorgeous century disappears into good works. The future is best. To put a final stop to the grotesque unmercy of martyrdom and to the ruinous armies of mad boys whose government is rape, whose justice is a wall, revoke all partisanship, adjourn the Terror. The future is best. It unobscures the dusty nudes. It protects the river islands and their glowing swans. But when I need to die, who will light the fire? What names shall I cry out and what music burn to a black transparency in my heart? The unborn have been revoked. They will not be kind.

The climate thinks with its knees. When the wound opens, music suspires. Opening a gate, I gain the color below the roof tiles and the tree limbs. You gave me the late quartets a black bird and a white and the Garden of Eden. Your death belongs to anyone but me. I wonder so as not to forget. At night in Brooklyn, the tendrils of a white sex denuded the sky, shimmering at the tall needle- ends of buildings. The traffic was identical in the spring. I am protected by only music I cannot remember. Why is it that the best minds ended by composing fairy tales? Death swarms. There are many new beings, the odor of hearts. The order of the hour of mating ends. These are many new butterflies, and death is no longer to be eyed by a young girl, perhaps twelve years old, slyly, as though the future were a man’s sleeve or stride. I wonder so as not to end dinner in a farmhouse. We sat at a low table. Our host was dying but unaware, as she would be murdered the next day in a distant city. There is an out- side of language that is not silence. There is an outside of God that is not isolation, a domestic animal teaching a dying woman to hunt. A wound opens. A gate opens. Tendrils climb.

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat Cry “We are ripe, reap us!” —Ted Hughes I begin to think Actaeon never changed. The words that followed him, the poems That leapt upon him and left him for dead Were difficult exactly to the extent They were rational. It makes perfect sense For nakedness to give way to frenzy. And the poems, let’s be clear, were naked. Time was, questions were put, clear as water. The Goddess bathed, and time was the soft smile Of water catching the sunlight on her. And the sunlight, let’s be clear, was sheer murder. Into the same creature, no human word Leaps twice. Given to frenzy, nakedness Smiles upon the breaking of men and dogs. How easy to lose all patience with chaste things! Christ, I am hoping to hear from you Before the hunters and suicides make off with me. Christ, I am hoping to take your weapons To a tarn freezing in the death of me. I shall harry the moon there. I shall halloo. Bayed in the cross-tree is a lion too. In 1969 a red stag made A cobweb of moonlight in his antlers. For once in your life, pray without ceasing, Pray the stag safely by the lion’s tree. Actaeon never changed. Predator Is simply prey to nakedness and reason. The poems have been out hunting all the time. Then it is Friday. Frisk. You might as well. Seeing as the rapeweed, you might as well. The lion is no stranger. The belling Stag is as familiar as the moon, but a strange Suicide. Taken by legs, taken By sinews, kissing the cobwebs of moonlight, He prays the prayer I was not quick to say. Berries and hoardings, ermine horseplay short Of the new, short of poems no longer old As I knew them, leaving the small schools For the main campus rapeweed climbing, pale. It is Friday. Stars won’t cross. Actaeon Never imagined the frail, sheer speed Of meat. Christ, eat me. Nothing else makes sense. On the far Safe side of becoming, Metaphor Is all love, The pure being of each Nude above Perfect sense. I begin to hunt words. The tension The soft smile Of the Goddess eases A short while Reappears In a red stag’s terror. Metaphor Leaps and eats. It is not difficult. Love is meat. The dogs leap on Actaeon. He is human. I begin to think of Time as anything In the gift of humans or as sacrifice To the long uplift of lions in the blood. Now dogs tear deeply into the living flesh. Each moment is a visible agony, And still the godly human nature remains Unharmed. I never imagined the sheer frail Of fear so powerful. Legs and sinews turn Into flowers. Between her breasts, the Goddess Shelters one such, one blood violet alive. The porch of heaven is littered with color. As familiar as the moon, our humanness Crosses into heaven as the new poem. On the far side of becoming, a life’s work Begins another kind of work, but naked Of change. There are animals, water and trees. Nothing is recognizable in its old Skin, yet everything shimmers. I am afraid, Shrinking from the teeth of the cold water And from the howling trees. I perish at this point Down among dogs and upwards beside lion. The pieces of me are carried fast away By plot and rhyme. See Artemis bathing. The moonlight on her body is the mother Of God. It makes perfect sense. I am eaten And fed changeless into her breast, blood Violet alive. I remain your friend.

Linoleum and half a dozen eggs In 1960 Many towered Ilium A brand name and a shopping list too Memory distinguishes all things from Only nothing I was born and grew Rooms stacked up into houses A few trees (maples) welted in their seasons Wildly like sea birds in crude oil What amazes Me now amazed me always but never Often eyesight is prophetic instantly Seeing broken eggs on the linoleum In the kitchen 1960 I saw a broken lifetime further On as I see now my happy sister

Death calls my dog by the wrong name. A little man when I was small, Death grew Beside me, always taller, but always Confused as I have almost never been. Confusion, like the heart, gets left behind Early by a boy, abandoned the very moment Futurity with her bare arms comes a-waltzing Down the fire escapes to take his hand. "Death," I said, "if your eyes were green I would eat them." For what are days but the furnace of an eye? If I could strip a sunflower bare to its bare soul, I would rebuild it: Green inside of green, ringed round by green. There'd be nothing but new flowers anymore. Absolute Christmas. "Death," I said, "I know someone, a woman, Who sank her teeth into the moon." For what are space and time but the inventions Of sorrowing men? The soul goes faster than light. Eating the moon alive, it leaves space and time behind. The soul is forgiveness because it knows forgiveness. And the knowledge is whirligig. Whirligig taught me to live outwardly. Shoe shop. . . pizza parlor. . . surgical appliances. . . All left behind me with the hooey. My soul is my home. An old star hounded by old starlight. "Death, I ask you, whose only story Is the end of the story, right from the start, How is it I remember everything That never happened and almost nothing that did? Was I ever born?" I think of the suicides, all of them thriving, Many of them painting beautiful pictures. I think of boys and girls murdered In their first beauty, now with children of their own. And I have a church in my mind, set cruelly ablaze, And then the explosion of happy souls Into the greeny, frozen Christmas Eve air: Another good Christmas, a white choir. Beside each other still, My Death and I are a magical hermit. Dear Mother, I miss you. Dear reader, your eyes are now green, Green as they used to be, before I was born.

In three directions are two storms. I instruct the edges of my hands to become irises, to shatter in that way, in three directions. There's nothing behind me. Viols claw beneath our fences at the elevation of sound to pure unsanctity, the moment of simultaneity: airplanes seeming to collide and not colliding, the crow alighting in the manner of a seabird, the carbomb a more than momentary poppy. The bad total of death points one direction. It moves at the edge of my hand at the memorial service, viols useless now laid across their breasts, the attitude of submission. I was eating dinner in a tall room. I was the third guest. I felt a tightening in my asshole, and the yellow wine turned to red, turned to your hand on another's woven onto tapestry. How the month of June became our sons, so many bridges for one river, was the story always delighted you. The carbomb was faster. Simultaneous with the iris the viol shatters in three directions. Everything I have taken claws helplessly at sunlight that won't defend itself. The red one is the poppy.

When the world was loveliness I was A composer, Borodin, my left eye Level with the floor beside toy men. Wild work and havoc they made, Being glad. I could draw a line Would run straight through the minds of men, Being a sociable angel, Music before and after, blushing. Heaven is a nonsense entirely sensible. I was a child on the floor beside you, Making music, becoming small in the rosy Embrace of God’s best messenger. I loved your havoc and your hair.