Model of a City in Civil War Read online

  MODEL OF A CITY IN CIVIL WAR

  THE LINDA BRUCKHEIMER SERIES IN KENTUCKY LITERATURE

  © 2015 by Adam Day

  FIRST EDITION

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher.

  Please direct inquiries to:

  Managing Editor

  Sarabande Books, Inc.

  2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200

  Louisville, KY 40205

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Day, Adam, 1977–

  [Poems. Selections]

  Model of a city in civil war : poems / Adam Day.—First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-941411-02-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3604.A9798A6 2015

  811’.6—dc23

  2014028848

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-941411-06-3

  Cover by Jonathan Graf.

  Interior by Kirkby Gann Tittle

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

  The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Before the War

  Model of a City in Civil War

  Combine

  Anoosh’s Obituary for Himself, to His Son

  Winter Nights

  Hiding Again, in London

  Sleeping with Uncle Lester

  The Leaving

  Winter Inventory

  Water from the Same Source

  Elebade

  Blind Attis

  Smoke

  Time Away

  The Children, the Grass

  Undercover

  Apprehended at a Distance

  Snow in a Brick Courtyard

  Winter Fever

  The Cow

  The Insomniac

  We Lived Above the Key Shop

  Clean Lines, Diffuse Lighting

  Coming in at Night

  Washing the Old Man

  He Speaks of Old Age

  His Dementia

  In Mourning

  Now and Forever

  Fårö

  The Kinghorse Butchertown Brawl

  Dakota

  A Polite History

  The Revolution

  Diorama—(Scarlet and Liver)

  Sarclet

  The Mayor in Sky-Blue Socks

  The Birthday Party

  A Strapping Boy

  Orr’s Island

  Unease

  Comportment

  Condensation Cube

  Notes

  The author

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgement to the editors of the following publications, where these poems, sometimes in different versions, first appeared:

  AGNI: “The Children, the Grass” (published as [Here are the Children]” and “Combine”

  Antioch Review: “Hiding Again, in London”

  Carolina Quarterly: “His Dementia”

  Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art: “Sarclet” and “Dakota”

  Colorado Review: “Condensation Cube”

  Copper Nickel: “Blind Attis”

  Crab Orchard Review: “Snow in a Gdansk Courtyard”

  dcomP magazine: “The Revolution”

  FIELD: “Water from the Same Source”

  Forklift: Ohio: “He Speaks of Old Age” (published as “Old Age”)

  Gulf Coast: “Anoosh’s Obituary for Himself, to His Son”

  Handsome: “The Mayor in Sky Blue Socks” (published as “[Deer herd in the icy fields]”)

  Hotel Amerika: “Apprehended at a Distance” (published as “[The colorless lake, buoy bells in fog]”) and “Model of a City in Civil War” (published as “[A diorama of a city in civil war]”)

  Indiana Review: “Fårö” (published as “The Dinner Party”)

  iO: A Journal of New American Poetry: “Time Away” (published as “Shark and Dog”)

  Jelly Fish: “Elebade”

  Kenyon Review: “Diorama—(Scarlet and Liver)” (published as “Gallows Portraits”) and “Family Romance”

  Madison Review: “Sleeping with Uncle Lester”

  Mid-American Review: “The Kinghorse Butchertown Brawl”

  Louisville Review: “Strapping”

  Margie and Verse Daily: “The Cow”

  Meridian: “Before the War”

  New Madrid and Verse Daily: “Clean Lines, Diffuse Lighting” (as “Mother’s Hair”)

  New Orleans Review: “The Insomniac”

  North American Review: “We Lived Above a Key Shop”

  Pebble Lake: “The Leaving” and “Winter Inventory”

  Poetry London: “A Plateau of Excellence”

  Roanoke Review: “Coming In at Night” (as “Coming In from the Back Porch at Night”)

  Salt Hill: “Orr’s Island”

  Still: “Washing My Old Man” (as “Washing Father’s Feet”) and “Now and Forever” (as “Badger Philosphes”)

  Subtropics: “In Mourning” (as “Badger in Mourning”)

  Sycamore Review: “A Polite History” and “ ” (as “[From such material it is almost impossible . . .]”)

  Third Coast: “Smoke”

  Third Coast: “Winter Fever” (published as “The Good Winter”)

  TYPO: “Unease”

  The following poems first appeared in the chapbook, Badger, Apocrypha, published as part of the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship series: “Winter Nights,” “The Revolution,” and “In Mourning.”

  My deep thanks to the wonderful team at Sarabande, and to everyone else who has supported me and my writing, many of whom I have the honor to call friend: Philip Levine, David Alworth, Ellyn Lichvar, my son Alistair Day, Kathleen Graber, Cathy Wagner, Cal Bedient, Fritz Ward, G.C. Waldrep, Bruce Smith, Hannah Gamble, Ashley Capps, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Tom Sleigh, Sarah Arvio, David Lehman, James Tate, Heather Patterson, Aleks Karlsons, Kathleen Driskell, David Baker, Sumita Chakraborty, Sven Birkerts, Timothy Donnelly, Jeffrey Skinner, Breth Fletcher Lauer, David Lynn, Alice Quinn, Maurice Manning, Jillian Weise, Don Bogen, Joshua Poteat, Tony Hoagland, Sally Connelly, Martha Greenwald, Josh English, Jeff Hipsher, Ben Lord, Philip White, Lisa Williams, Jason Schniederman, Michael Estes, David Harrity, Kyle Coma Thompson, Broc Rossell, Mark Neely, Greg and Beth Steinbock, Gayann and Robert Day, Elizabeth Hamsley, Tony Hamsley, Sam Sims, Ken Walker, Michael Cooley, Scott Ward, Jay Baron Nicorvo, Mitchell Waters, Taylor Roberts, John James, Jessica Farquhar, Amy Attaway, Jessica Worthem, Anthony Carelli, Colleen Ammerman, Will Lobko, Madeline Schwartz, Robin LaMer Rahija, Makalani Bandele, Sean Patrick Hill, Duncan Barlow, Kathy Barbour, Kari Kalve, Alen Hamza, David Ebenbach, Kyle McCord, Ellie Schilling, and the crew at Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville.

  Special thanks to the Poetry Society of America, New York University, the University of Houston, and to the Kentucky Arts Council for their generous support.

  Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game.

  —Theodor Adorno

  The house itself is none of these appearances: it is . . . the geometrized projection of these perspectives and of all possible perspectives, that is, the perspectiveless position from which all can be derived . . . not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere.

  —Maurice Merleau-Ponty


  Model of a City in Civil War

  BEFORE THE WAR

  I was a woman before the war—

  we took the arms of our enemies

  and swung them from our crotches.

  And lived with them there

  until, like ticks, they grew inward, and we

  were the first men. But we didn’t want

  those stolen limbs anymore, and so tried

  by force to give them back, hoping

  the fists would come alive inside

  women and grab hold. But when we were done

  the arms only hung dumbly

  between our tired legs, shrinking in time—

  a useless door handle, a hung shadow

  we walk upon.

  MODEL OF A CITY IN CIVIL WAR

  Men carry a mattress retrieved

  from a dumpster past the flooded

  foundations of an unfinished

  high-rise, an old woman catches

  a pigeon in the folds of her dress,

  the dead smile and rise from swimming

  pools or stand at attention

  on stamps. The landscape can’t believe

  it’s real—there is no ground

  beneath it, like what mirrors do.

  The velvet-curtained walls

  of a movie theater. On screen

  the hanged men speak

  to one another from broken

  necks, and the aspen leaves

  show white in the dark.

  COMBINE

  Captain Nazret helped the Communists overthrow Haile

  Selassie and when

  he discovered his wife’s infidelities sewed her into bed

  as she slept

  and moved his family to the Isle of Man, where he retired

  and began losing

  his mind, so that one All Hallows’ he pasted a mustache

  onto the pastor’s

  sorrel mare and rode it through the cobbled streets of Cregneash

  saying to the costumed kids,

  “Come pet comrade Stalin.” Children loved the old

  syphilitic because

  he’d show them his stomach’s gnarled track of surgery scars, because

  of the violet-backed

  sunbird he kept until the neighbor’s cat, with wet green eyes,

  reached a paw

  through the cage bars, and snagged the bird on one hooked claw

  so that a crosshatch

  of feathers and blood tattooed the tile floor. That night kids drugged

  the Siamese

  with cough medicine and stapled it by the scruff to its owner’s

  picket fence.

  •

  On a Siberian expedition, Nikolai Bryukhanov brought the wrong

  food for the sledge-dogs,

  so they had to be killed. But not by the squeamish Commissar.

  On the third day

  of Bryukhanov’s trial, Stalin sent a note with accompanying

  illustration that read:

  “To the members of the Politburo, For all the sins, past and present, hang B.

  by the balls. If they

  hold out, consider him acquitted by trial. If they don’t, drown him

  in the river.”

  •

  Here sits Queen Anne at Hockley Hole, London

  for the dog and bull show.

  A rope is tied ’round the root of the bull’s horns and fastened

  to an iron stake,

  its slobbery gray nose blown full of pepper to enrage it before

  it’s baited. Meanwhile,

  men hold dogs by the ears. Let loose, the goal for the dog is to hold for all

  hell to the bull’s

  snout—the most sensitive spot other than the genitals—“If a bull had balls

  hanging from its face

  they’d be attached to his snout.” Now, either the dog remains

  fixed, or is thrown

  tearing out the flesh it has laid teeth on. The bull, a skeptic in dialogue

  with hope, works

  to slide a horn under the cur’s belly, and throw it, so that a dog’s side

  is often ripped open

  entrails protruding like wet sausage—“Yes, it provides much joy

  for the community,

  and the animals certainly gain a sense of dignity in achievement.”

  •

  Goya’s “Portrait of the Family of Charles IV”: intermarriage preserved

  the family’s wealth

  and the compact features of mongoloids. Deformed by a hunting accident,

  Charles—subsidiary

  to his wife, his mouth full of gravel—spent his power slowly collecting

  watches and wrestling

  with grooms in the stables—like male otters, they bite each other’s necks,

  drawing blood, but

  thick layers of fat prevent serious injury. We see only the profile of Doña

  Carlota Joaquina,

  the King’s eldest daughter, more oversexed than even her mother, whose “chief

  renown was for a readiness

  that kept her in a state of tropical humidity as would grow orchids

  in her drawers

  in January” (“My mouth may be scalded but I’m still noticeably wet,”

  she wrote a lover.)

  •

  Tennessee Williams had a little black dog named Bibbles whom

  he kept as a minotaur

  keeps his women—he set to kicking it one day because the creature

  seemed to him

  too promiscuous, too “Whitmanesque” in its affections. Seventy-one

  and choking

  on the cap of a medicine bottle—nothing like the brass bit in a horse’s spit-foamed

  mouth, nothing

  like the rough-trade neck-ties that had gagged him. Tell us a joke; tell us a story

  to make us all

  laugh. The cops: “If that’s aspirin on your dresser, what’s the needle for?”

  Him: “I can’t stand the taste

  of the stuff.” Tennessee—the eternal that is ever-present in our midst. Sexually

  incontinent. Panic

  insomnia, tooth-rot, green liquid pouring from the bowels. Still

  he has a physical

  presence. You could imagine him hitting someone. “I don’t think it’s sex

  I want. There’s no great

  hankering for that. It’s the quiet, humdrum dread of coming up alone to this little

  room at night, to that

  emptiness where God would be if God were available. And going to bed and turning

  my face to the wall.”

  ANOOSH’S OBITUARY FOR HIMSELF, TO HIS SON

  Armaan, during the Revolution your mother

  left, and I was asked to strangle a collaborator:

  baggy-trousered, with a stoat-face. The house’s pink wallpaper

  was covered with maids and horses. Over the shower curtain

  his wife’s pantyhose hung. Chair-tied, sweat ran the rims

  of his glasses. A lamp threw cold light, promises

  were made. I’m a father. Drunk, I adjourned to the driveway

  to shovel snow. There were spider webs of moisture

  in the trees and hedges. For coffee, I used ice cream

  in place of the missing milk, sick of what I knew . . .

  As for your mother, Armaan, I can only say I feel better

  about her infidelities when I’m well-dressed. And I am.

  WINTER NIGHTS

  Walking from the house into a field

  of snow, the moon eases from its blue

  blouse, half-blinded by the hills. Eider

  shadows skate past the pond boat

  overturned on shore. There is

  the fatty scent of pine, like the smell

  of marrow. Things are blooming

  that shouldn’t yet. She reaches up

  to her shadowed fa
ce to touch

  something real but imagined, like

  some invented criminal pleasure,

  like making a virtue of a flaw.

  HIDING AGAIN IN LONDON

  The streets, black with rain, I walk

  past the British Museum to University College,

  where the Socialist Workers Party is screening Land and Freedom.

  I sit in the audience, looking

  for women—confusing jargon: class intercourse,

  sexual warfare—aware of the probability

  of defeat. We can’t know much

  of each other. I fell in love with Marx