No Shape Bends the River So Long

Beth Marzoni, Monica Berlin

Description

WINNER OF THE NEW MEASURE POETRY PRIZE, Selected by CAROLYN FORCHÉ | Free Verse Editions, edited by Jon Thompson | “What to make of this grand experiment over months and miles of river by two poets, not one—Monica Berlin and Beth Marzoni—plus whatever third spirit they’ve invented together? Like music from the 8th century written by Anonymous, that haunting ubiquitous voice, these poems feel unsettlingly interchangeable, keep coming like the country’s longest river dream-documented here in a rich rush, dense with repetition and sorrow by poets who ‘think like a glacier or a stone, sand . . . years / like consistent rain.’ The Mississippi never had better companions or more devoted ones, save Mark Twain perhaps, or more to the point, his troubled, star-crossed Huck. The sense of human and nonhuman history, even prehistory stuns, keeps bothering this shared-solitary work. ‘Wake to any weather & know that / long ago there also was.’ I’ll take that as rare solace.” —MARIANNE BORUCH

Sujets

• Themes
• Subjects
• Poetry
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 06 janvier 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602356283
• Langue: English

Extrait

No Shape Bends the River So Long
Monica Berlin & Beth Marzoni
Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621
© 2015 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berlin, Monica, 1973-
[Poems. Selections]
No shape bends the river so long / Monica Berlin & Beth Marzoni.
pages cm. -- (Free Verse Editions)
“Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize.”
ISBN 978-1-60235-626-9 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
I. Marzoni, Beth, 1981- II. Title.
PS3602.E75776A6 2015
811’.6--dc23
2014050098
Cover design by David Blakesley
Cover Image: “Out There” (60” x 72”; oil & acrylic) by Laura Newman, courtesy of the artist & the Collection of Andrew Bellas & Rachel Jones.
Page 93: “Map of ancient courses of the Mississippi River, Cape Girardeau, MO - Donaldsonville, LA.” Plate 22-6.” Harold N. Fisk, 1944. US Army Corps of Engineers.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paperback and ebook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [e-mail].

Contents
Dear So & So—
Air so lousy with it everything’s made heavy-thick
Maybe just as clouds make their own streets
Today hoisted onto our tired backs in worry, today
Some day we’ll wake to find some day no longer
If we have to we can live in much smaller rooms, drift banked
So, it happens again: snow replaced with nothing & this somehow
All the particular places we’ve known window sometimes & sometimes
Where we stand, here a line of doors
&
Time another limb down & another
Wake to what we long ago learned to call
By the shoulders, tonight
Because even in narrowing light there
Maybe because everywhere we look trees already chalk
Imagine we can hear winter breaking its hold on the river & how
After epiphany comes ordinary time & after coming to
Begin not with coastline, not with harbor or cove. Begin
&
So, the day will become a small boat
After unhanging the walls & undressing windows beneath our cupola
& So, like a map, scale matters, & the river
Now everywhere’s always a show played for easy laughs
Light we’ve known: a sky & such & never
The fact arrives: every future
Cold snaps summer in half the same day someone
To reach the river we cross & keep crossing sometimes,
Again, & its slow rise
Inside the levee, call it a state
Another well-lit day & the river
&
That your August sky somehow suddenly
Another rainy day, this city, this weather
O city of one ways & cemetaried hillsides, we’ve lived so
So, to stop ourselves from lowering into the pull, we
That flat blue plaster sky curves us
When even the easiest phrase turns threadbare, washed out
Here the only flicker is street lamp, then sputtered out, but there
Any highway will turn out night
Put this road in perspective & what we see might
Night the sky really was
For the eleven-mile stretch of river not quite
Just over another bridge everything riveted left & rushing, the way
&
When the rain says wait, says not so fast, says this season we’ve measured in so many
So, we’ve sworn off everything these long months & tried
Days like water, air
Once, the nomenclature of boulevard & thoroughfare turned common
Say Old River & only the locals will pause to call up
En plein air the fields themselves
Took on nearly the length of the river & almost as much water
When we cross the river carrying the river
Against arranged line & proportion, in defiance of
Tributaries & Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Free Verse Editions


Dear So & So—


Air so lousy with it everything’s made heavy-thick
& dishearted we’ll turn down the news. Dishearted by the rush of alongside & what is, what
we’ll hear scorched & think scoured, here swallowed, silted. Humbled we’ll corner-fold
those pages, map the measure it would take to burn off all this too muchness . Fire has its own
idiom—its sentence turns, becomes another kind of weather on our tongues. So, all this talk
to buttress the palate against some awful caving in. We’d rather the music
of loss quiet. If only a needle after the album’s end. If only
a phone booth, that other era overseas, a coin’s tinny drop. If before
all sound rushes back then every disaster we’ve known gathers up
that space in the static of if . As in, if the wind turns. As in, if the rain holds
or if the bridge cannot. Then then kicks up its storm in our chests leaden
where dishearted didn’t begin but stays on. Because fire season & then sputtered out,
because gone under & all bears down, called or not. Edges singed or worn
thin or too saturated, because will run out of names come winter. Because so many places
we recognize or think that we do until the river changes its mind. Or
sixty years late & twelve miles from where it crashed, the plane & its crew surface.
That glaciered silence heaves off any grief we might call mass grave, call memorial
turned monument turned natural wonder. Maybe just as clouds make their own streets
everything finds its reflection in the sky & this one’s no different: spring’s always been
a loaded promise. Maybe flood’s always our most natural disaster & not just in this
story—raised by levee & wrung from swamp—where the river’s already at
the door & thunder’s building another wall of rain. & maybe everything’s just
running behind, just below the main updraft, a season away or passing
over when prairie swamps. Or when cloud

cover in the valley, that common low
status deck of sky, mistaken, returns May to winter & the states hang temporarily
closed & board up again as if bearing down isn’t just a storm but an end we’ve been
holding off all these years with something

not unlike prayer. & maybe suspension
is not unlike wonder in the human hand, miracle by lock & by dam called navigable
acreage, or settling because turn is a pervasive

structure—long & ancient as any river
& as quickly effaced. What suspends fracture critical before collapse & plunge & fallen
steel & closure. What barges up river to tow away wreck. Then is a span brought in,
temporary, after. So, maybe really means

nothing’s not urgent, crumbling, razed to
foundation or soaked clear through rot, then lights flickering, then power-down
& what’s left: look up to map the avenues these days it seems sun can’t find a way
into or out of or through & in that darkness we might find all we’ve forgotten. An hour without
any news but what prints itself across the window, no torrent—only the street in a moment paused &
held, framed, where we’ve slowed startled by the noise of so much sudden.
Where silence we’ve come to the improbable boundary maybe
sheds, especially early morning, then a deepening sorrow of light
that casts afternoon into just another doorway to walk through that quickens into
nightfall, lonesome into the stuttering street, lamp & generators hum after wind, after downpour or flash
flood, after this & again & again & after even & that Today hoisted onto our tired backs in worry, today
in mouth sounds & the soft moan from pipes.
Today guttural made sense: revisions even rain will allow & today left no choice
& won’t remember how heavy. The air from another impossible will crank the heat
& knocking to life begins to sound out home. Worse things this
shuddering & off the wires—. Shouldered into morning, even if it means even if
at bay or made landfall . Even if leaning in the hollowed out
stick of a tree the neighbors have left morning nests fragile.
We talk light like it’s a solid thing until it breaks, sepias, then tend toward water
—to wave & lap & wave. Until too far up to our necks & barely treading & tide
threatening even high ground, that pull more gravity than gravity, then turned fierce & another name
the list won’t repeat; everything else will —darkness & fire spreading
from roof to chimney to treetop to roof to roof, & everything’s filled up
the eavesdrop, passing old watermarks, waist- deep—& the ocean grown
wide, devouring even rivers, & even reminds us how foolish any name, even recalls it.
Even takes it back for itself & we’ll name even that taking back & So, gone, even
what bridges we built for crossing. Some day we’ll wake to find some day no longer
needs convincing. The life we’re living will just be hours,
however unrecognizabl