World Now
About the Author
Also by Marianne Boruch
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
Gift-Distant, Scratched
Maybe a pool filled with roses someone
uprooted before they bloomed fully.
And I stood before them the way an animal
accepts sun, the way an animal never
thinks hunger will stop.
It does stop. That’s the best
I can say. You’re given a life.
Each all every
small part can’t be good, can’t be
the worst of it.
For instance, I couldn’t know why
such a terrible thing, roses wrenched out of earth like that.
They were floating.
But an animal —
to take in color like taste, flung petals drifting brilliant quick
savored, any human thought
somewhere distant, a scratched record,
the old turntable in the house
over and over, going bad.
Comes wonder in that sound.
Slip into a door
to lift the needle. Or full-faced as daylight,
stay in the yard.
I
Progress
These gargoyles can’t get enough of the view
stuck to their cornice, ratcheting out
open-mouthed as some
desert hermit on his pillar, fifth century.
Such a vision, probably horrific. The gargoyles
take it straight to the river
over giant trees. A kingdom. If there is
a river. Or a kingdom. If I walk that direction —
how a lock knows its key, how the key’s
little nicks and bites code fate: not unlatch but
continue, not release but come through.
Because it’s ancient: there is
no progress, only a deepening. Or not even that.
I heard progress is a modern invention, post–
bubonic plague. Right up to the airplane, the double sink
and running water, earlier
the milking stool, and monogamy in some places.
But Dante leapt
at it, his Purgatorio, thanks to before, when —
wasn’t it simple? Just heaven
or hell, friend. Sorry.
Thumbs up or down. Perfect weather or it’s endless
awfulness.
How does it work, this new
Purgatory business, Dante didn’t ask exactly
but dreamt first. Fabled searing
second chance lodged in the brain’s ever-after
means to be left, reimagine, watch
whole bits burn off. Memory
needs sorrow. Even stone at its most
mend-and-loss molecular level moves, and the hard
secret parts of us know that: tooth, skull,
envy, the stubborn vertebrae, guilt worn down by
exhaustion, by despair you walk with,
and long enough. Like a month. Like years.
It’s never simple. I learned what happened: gutters
replaced gargoyles. Those creatures sick of
siphoning rain off the roof with their long throats
stayed to scare evil out of the world, to be
merely beautiful and grotesque up there. Or they caution
back to us from the future, frozen
medievals, high-wire beings not of this earth
stretched, stunned to bone-limit, made possible again
by what they cannot bear to see. Now. Which is
lifetimes ago. I lose track of my transitions.
The Painting
Two brush-stroked boats, so-so weather, more detail
forward than aft, heavy
on shaded bits as
simple reflection, the mast dropping in water blurred.
Blur it more, gloom it up, says the teacher.
Use a rag and something stingy.
To look and look, is all.
Salt, fish air at dawn, turpentine. Or evening, that one.
To remember the past as
this painting remembers — beautiful, a little dull.
And maybe it was.
In fact, water can turn out demanding. Not staying put,
too much at odds in that glitter.
And people expect a quiet thing to hang on a wall
to forget their own noise.
That old guy bumming cigarettes for real
looked the part of another century, the ancient fisherman
contentedly mending nets in a time
with time to retie knots. So we
like to believe. And some would
sketch him right in, work him over like an afterthought,
historical. Better yet, to comment
ironic or just short of it. With him, without,
finally the worn reliable straightforward
sea, harbor, dream. Also this
for the record — three, not two boats. And those
warehouses weren’t pink, didn’t
watery-ache like the shadow they cast.
To be an artist, the best part — you, you’re in
and then it’s the same
but you’re not the same. Smoke
from a factory on the other side, a small one
but billowing soot and ash anytime, a bad idea.
Or a good one, meaning
world. Which could threaten. Or end.
Go for a larger, darker resonance. The teacher
saying