From:DOUBLE
CROSSING: NEW & SELECTED POEMS
A Poetry Book Society
Recommendation – Summer 2004
Bloodaxe Books
One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been
- Sophocles
Procrastinatin’ Blues
You’re
not in love with lists, the kind
Dead organised with a
running jump on time.
No, that’s not you.
You’re Eleventh Hour, right down to your toes.
The clock says eight -
on time - so wait
‘Cause you’ll be
miserable until it’s half-past eight
And you’re Eleventh
Hour, dear, still trackin’ down your clothes.
You’re feelin’ pretty
great!
Somewhere, in the musty recess of your mind there lurks a date
But that’s weeks old,
oh baby, that’s how the Eleventh Hour goes.
While
empires burn. You know that if we had a tardy tax
You’d be, for sure,
Eleventh Hour, payin’ big-time through the nose.
Don’t you just hate
When pals don’t show?
Leave you standin’ at the gate
Eleventh Hour Style?!
How dare they change which way the river flows!
Aw hell: better lay
some bait
To get them out the
door so they’re the ones who’ll have to wait
‘Cause don’t you know,
nothin’ happens till the Eleventh Hour shows.
In case the
clock is fast
And you surprise
yourself on time, well, just keep walkin’ past,
Cross the street and
walk Eleventh Hour Avenue, where no one knows.
Hey, there’s cargo, and
there’s freight
and which is which
you’ll never know; the hour’s never late
until Eleventh Hour’s
gates swing open then swing back and start to close
- ain’t it a crime -
with you the last
behind the last in line
Eleventh Hour, not a
soul behind. You can’t deny exactly what you chose.
Go on. Back-pedal at a
frenzied rate.
But you’ll still face
an undone masterpiece. Consider fate
Finally, now that it’s
the Eleventh Hour, and a chill wind blows.
Go To Top
The Buddhas of Bamiyan
cannot compete with an authentic God,
should never bear the face of even the false God.
You, who are as arrogant as the usual man,
may love more deeply the pity of a headless,
footless Buddha of Bamiyan – even doubly so.
You, who can meditate only bodily,
don’t deserve the pelvis of Buddha.
God is the greatest practitioner of art
and her favourite sculpture is a modest man.
Like the Venus de Milo
(if you are the man who dwells on her),
the twin Buddhas of Bamiyan,
armless, can still embrace Afghanistan unbroken,
embrace those who would rather die than keep
each Buddha from divinity: its vanishing trick.
You who have a mind to, who can think as loftily
as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, can miss them but let them go.
Imagine all the fragments whole again,
and our signature on the empty sky.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan
like the Venus de Milo,
are much more beautiful without their feet
but if your gaze soars upwards
how not too upward? How?
Go To Top
Brooklyn Bridge
(designed by Roebling and finished by his daughter-in-law Emily)
This one’s mine: not a nail-less Bridge of Sighs
nor a stage, where enemies or film crews shoot
but trembling on a net of “wheres” and “whys”,
part Asses’ Bridge, part Al-Sirat, less Iron Brute,
more hunkering church, grown from Gothic grey,
its cables spun from spiders bred in books.
That dark harp was made for me to play.
And however dark, I couldn’t help but look
at ever darker slights, their height and girth
stringing me high above the traffic’s hum.
I was harnessed by a yoke of fear, from birth,
less myself while adding to that sum -
the way the architect’s now ailing daughter
laid her father’s body, right across the water.
Go To Top
Acknowledgements
All of the following
poems appear in Double Crossing: New and Selected Poems
(Bloodaxe) a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which can be obtained at
Blooodaxe
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852246618
or via the Poetry Book Society
http://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/book_detail.asp?idno=1671
Some
of these poems first appeared in the earlier volumes
One Two II (Wrecking Ball Press 2003)
Bargain with the Watchman (Oxford University Press
1997)
The English Earthquake (Bloodaxe 1992).
These books are
available on Amazon or via web booksellers such as:
http://www.fetchbook.co.uk/search_Eva_Salzman/searchBy_Author.html
For further
details, and more sample of poems, see Eva Salzman's web-pages at:
http://www.evasalzman.com
Copyrights @ Eva
Salzman |
One Two
When one becomes two, what will you do?
– attributed to Jesus, Gospel of St. Thomas
I
Döppelganger
The Rastafarians don’t say ‘we” but ‘I and I”
They say that on the day when he appears,
the day you’re face to face with your own double,
subtract your remaining days and years.
From the very start, dear brother, I was troubled.
Nine months before drawing a single breath
I was living with my own death.
II
Helen’s Sister
Once they know I’m beauty’s twin
at the party door, I’m in,
if only so they can compare
roses to hips hardened by winter air.
Nine months perfectly in tune
with the sharer of our mother’s womb -
you’d think that beauty’s shadow would earn
one brief victorious public turn.
In Sparta, I’d be second-rate,
without a date,
and if in my part of Athens
nothing much happens
(even the migrating birds
like euphemistic words
or an air-blown lover’s kiss
- false and paltry - give this part of town a miss)
still, I’m a big fish in a tiny pond,
twin to a natural blonde
but at least a reference for men’s desire,
the heat of the missing fire.
While our strong and handsome brothers
wrestle with each other
on top of Ulysses’ mast
(Male ego, vanity and brass!)
it’s Helen’s Fire completes the sum,
for she’s the portent of the worst to come.
She’s the corposant which starts
the charge between all lovers’ parts.
If beauty’s an affliction,
then men and women love addiction.
Here, the evening creeps
across the place where my lovers sleep
then rise to leave me instead
once daylight steals the Helen that I’d had them bed.
When it comes to beauty, the world knows best
and the Trojan war’s the test.
Any woman would slay a thousand soldiers
not to get older.
Note:
In classical mythology, Castor and Pollux were the twin
sons of Jupiter and Leda, just as Helen of Troy is the daughter of Zeus and Leda
in Greek legend. Castor and Pollux were also the names given by Roman sailors to
St. Elmo’s Fire, or the corposant phenomenon, when the flame effect on the mast
of a ship appeared double. This indicated that the worst of the storm was over.
A single flame, called Helen’s Fire, signified that the worst of the storm was
yet to come.
Go To Top
Lucky Strikes
Her father was smoking fortune's cigarettes
in those gondola days. Golden boy. Teacher's pet.
Though he had far too many areas of expertise.
Chances are he found the morels, dismissed the lesser trees
she found beautiful, identified the tiny bird on the furthest branch.
Then there was the oyster ritual - the salt-water brooks
running into the sink, a childish lop-sided set of the mouth
as he jimmied a blunt knife into the weakest part of the hinge.
It changes, doesn't it; the chateauneuf becomes a binge
alone, at night, as he fingers the leaves of someone else's books
after the actress's brush-off, the failed business-lunch.
All his minuscule reputations will retire, migrate south
to homes in Florida, where the girls are less amazing, less amazed
and his bird-counts lengthen into the darkening glade.
Anschluss
We summered in the lap of Peconic Creek,
one of the thousand warm cloisters in the bay.
Low tide slung out its most generous shore,
peppered with the breath-holes of soft-shell clams,
clumps of mussels knotted deep in the reeds.
But the neighbours opposite, in a smooth finesse,
deal themselves the acres we thought to own:
our marsh rewritten into the flawless sand
of Pine Neck, where new money grows gold potatoes
and folds the fields, like egg-white, into condominiums.
Their sleek pine dock has stilts, fresh as bread-sticks,
thin and snappable; chiffon floats out from motorboats.
We yaw in their wake, thumping the waves. An oar
divides the seaweed as we row hard, just to stay still.
Go To Top
Bye-Bye
I’ve said it so many times
it’s almost comfortable pain:
from the acid ones,
from the short and the cool, the fiery kinds,
the irresistible re-winds.
I could call it life, crying for it or him
to muzak and departure bells,
down angular concourses, a plastic lounge, in rain
I’ve said it so constantly.
The salt seasons the luggage smell,
the arrival/departure lines,
the engine’s whine, a slow farewell
and the kind of good-bye which hasn’t a name.
Don’t the experts call sublime
how the red wine’s bleeding at the rim
denotes its place and age, maturity?
And it was never the break, but the refrain,
coming and going - half lost, half saved -
so you drown repeatedly with each new wave
just to rise to go that way again.
Go To Top
Copyrights @ Eva
Salzman
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