My Bishop and Other Poems (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Collier, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022657086X ISBN 13: 9780226570860

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Think of a time when you’ve feigned courage to make a friend, feigned forgiveness to keep one, or feigned indifference to simply stay out of it. What does it mean for our intimacies to fail us when we need them most?

The poems of this collection explore such everyday dualities—how the human need for attachment is as much a source of pain as of vitality and how our longing for transcendence often leads to sinister complicities. The title poem tells the conflicted and devastating story of the poet’s friendship with the now-disgraced Bishop of Phoenix, Arizona, interweaving fragments of his parents’ funerals, which the Bishop concelebrated, with memories of his childhood spiritual leanings and how they were disrupted by a pedophilic priest the Bishop failed to protect him from.

This meditation on spiritual life, physical death, and betrayal is joined by an array of poised, short lyrics and expansive prose poems exploring how the terror and unpredictability of our era intrudes on our most intimate moments. Whether Michael Collier is writing about an airline disaster, Huey Newton’s trial, Thomas Jefferson’s bees, a piano in the woods, or his own fraught friendship with the disgraced Catholic Bishop, his syntactic verve, scrupulously observed detail, and flawless ear bring the felt—and sometimes frightening—dimensions of the mundane to life. Throughout, this collection pursues a quiet but ferocious need to get to the bottom of things.

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Michael Collier is director of the creative writing program at the University of Maryland and the author of seven collections of poetry, including An Individual History, a finalist for the Poet’s Prize, and The Ledge, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

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My Bishop and Other Poems

By Michael Collier

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2018 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-57086-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Meadow, 
A Wild Tom Turkey, 
Strands of Hair in a Used Book, 
Three, 
Jefferson's Bees, 
Early Summer, 
To a Lemon, 
Len Bias, a Bouquet of Flowers, and Ms. Brooks, 
Emily Dickinson, 
Koi, 
Boom Boom, 
My Bishop, 
Anecdote of the Piano in the Woods, 
Vitalis, 
The Storm, 
My Father as a Maple Tree, 
Last Morning with Steve Orlen, 
Funky Stuff, 
To Isabella Franconati, 
Bronze Foot in a Glass Case, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

MEADOW

Moments that were tender — if I can use that word — now rendered in memory's worn face, have names attached and, less vivid, places that are more frequented than present places. Four decades is not so long ago, when facing an open window, hands braced against the sill (moonlight on her back) and, outside, grass in furrows, or so it seems to me who's never left for long that window or looked much beyond the meadow and yet have continually wondered what she was looking at, having never, as far as I can see, looked back.

A WILD TOM TURKEY

When he's in the yard he's hard to find,
not like when he stands in the stubble
across the road brewing his voice

with deeper and deeper percolations
of what sounds like "I'll fuck anything
in feathers," stopping now and then

to display his fan and perform a wobbly
polka, chest heavy as he breasts forward
but never closing on the hens who stay

in wary steps ahead, conversing only
with themselves, their spindly heads foraging,
measuring the distance that frustrates

his occasional flustering leaps so that
when they reach the street, their scurry
provokes him to fly, as if he's both

bull and matador, charging and turning
in the air but landing in a bounding,
rolling heap, which sends a rafter of them

deep into the grass, where after much silence,
what happens sounds like murder.


STRANDS OF HAIR IN A USED BOOK

One light, the other dark
  lie together

(an asymmetrical parenthesis)
  on page 15 of Green Business,

by John N. Morris (Atheneum,
  1970) — poems

if read too quickly
  might seem out of fashion,

like these strands of hair
  that are the least evidence

of who the readers were,
  young or old, male or female,

alive now or dead, who,
  perhaps, together or alone,

aloud or silently, had read line 12
   ("What to make of these markings")

as they combed fingers
  through their hair, leaving

behind what the poem leaves,
  an almost

invisible presence.


THREE

1. Awl

As the butt fits
the palm, the elbow
the force, its words
and its work, its
look is its use,
the point of the tool —
leather and wood —
sharp tongue
piercing thought,
stopped and stuck,
a chad of light
punched, not torn.

Stylus minus lead,
you lead by threading
the thread, like reason's
reason, turning right
sends you left, a
needle without eye
upright on your
handyman's bench.

2. Flannery O'Connor & Robert Lowell

"The element of ham in me seeks release."
And that's as the eyes of a peacock fan
look back at you even as the peacock
struts away, picking up each long, rebar-
like leg, such high-stepping, majorette behavior
danced out on those pea-gravel walks, such
beauty, such faith in the cruel miracles
of Lourdes with its piles of canes and crutches
and its unforgiving braces with broken straps.
If you never walked again, if your limbs
stayed disfigured, at least you weren't "inert,
gloomy, aimless, vacant, self-locked," like Lowell,
"a fascinated spirit watching the holocaust
of irrationality, apathy tormenting apathy."

3. The Menagerie at Versailles: Haiku from Samuel Johnson's Diary

The rhinoceros:
skin folds like loose cloth doubled,
big as four oxen.

Camel or dromedary,
both with two bunches,
others with one bunch.

Aviary very large,
the net, black thin wire,
airy and empty.

Cygnets, all tame but restless,
black feet on dark ground.
Halcyons or gulls?

Black stag of China, small.
Lions very tame,
tigers very tame.

The rhinoceros:
yellow horn broken.
The brown bear put out his paws.


JEFFERSON'S BEES

They can cause you a lot of trouble and much pain,
these exotics known by natives as the white man's flies,
but you wouldn't think of it as sorrow or grief,
all that joyful industry they seem to generate,
everyone doing a job, everyone, as my mother
used to say, "at their rank and station." She who had
the orders of angels in mind, she who called
Brazil nuts nigger toes — not all the time, though once
was enough to pass that thinking on to me.

* * *

From his reading he noted Laplanders prepare pine bark
as a substitute for sugar and wondered how far north
bees might live, what routes of migration the harbingers
could survive ahead of the settlements.
No mention of the native Bombus, yellow-banded,
scallop-winged, and veined like beveled glass, not heliotropic
like the Apis but up and out at dawn, working
to the edge of night, grappling and hugging the stamens —
the flowers sometimes buckling from their weight.

* * *

If then we can take from our Bees, a considerable
quantity of their superfluous Honey and Wax
without injuring them; if they will work for us
another, and many other Years, and every Year
pay us fair and reasonable Contributions; why
should we treat them with unnecessary Cruelty
and hurt Ourselves by a Greediness, that will turn
to our Prejudice? No true lover of Bees ever lighted
the fatal Match, that was to destroy his little Innocents.

If you guard them from Accidents, and save them from Poverty,
they will continue, by Succession, to the End of the World.
So it is written in "COLLATERAL BEE-BOXES: Or, a New,
Easy, and Advantageous Method of Managing Bees," 1757,
which Edmund Bacon, his overseer, who kept a stand
of more than forty hives, employed, although no records
detailing the perilous, sweet, invasive harvests survive.
Only a sketch shows the boxes near the outhouses,
north and south, adjacent the poultry yards.

* * *

Two centuries later, they stand east of the house, below
the Loop, almost out of sight, four hives in an enclosure
and two or three more off to the side, less protected,
a little beyond the greenhouses, facing as they should sunrise,
and, like everything at Monticello, restored to an idea
that has not survived its own foreclosures, having been based,
at least in the management of bees, on fostering spring swarms
while suppressing those in late summer, when the blossoming
is over and the workers vie for space with their honey.


EARLY SUMMER

    When I put my nose into an open hollyhock...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022657086X
• ISBN 13: 9780226570860
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 91
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland