Museum Pieces - Beloit Poetry Journal

More documents

Recommendations

Info

ROBERT FARNSWORTH Middle Age Too early to fetch my son from his lesson, I pull under the pines by the reservoir, to find on the radio that most rarified contrivance, opera: scheming, swordplay, sorrowing song, pageantry, misapprehended love. Something addles that tenor’s heart. That soprano’s prayer is burning. Under a sheen of top melt, the white lake is developing a treacherous map of spring. Uncertain borders, and for cold chambers locked below, random spotlights. Lost in their own sufferings or joys, even when briefly twined in duet, the voices seem so isolated, abstract, pure. Yet they sing about marriages, about love that would swim or soar past the conventional, the bleak. New happiness, new health. Heart truth, refracted out of so much artifice. It’s almost spring—time again to wonder if I can still believe in not knowing better, in marriages of metaphor, in the sudden, wild plunges love demands, in beautiful causes punished toward triumph. O gamuts of the spirit so extravagantly voiced! Listen. But just as words defeat the quest for the absolute, so melody dazzles as much as constitutes a passion for essence. It’s opera. And that’s ice turning back into a lake. Twenty years I have believed my work in this world is to sing it back, believed. It’s too late to know any better. But I don’t plunge anymore where it’s forbidden. I listen only from a distance to love’s wild credos. This, now, this is too much, this entombed aria, that we cherish most because it’s too late; she won’t be saved, hauled up hand over hand by an ardent angel, into the light of spring. Once, years ago, in the presence of a woman, I wept, as was my wont then, over some piece of music, what I don’t recall. But if she remembered that moment now, I wonder if she’d suppose it just theatrical, or a souvenir 20 Beloit Poetry Journal Fall 2002 ➝
ROBERT FARNSWORTH of some zeal she’d once loved in me. Almost as old as I once thought I’d ever be, I’d like to live quietly now beside this lake the law forbids me to swim, listen hard to the owlhaunted darkness of the pines, and in spring to the creak and drift of this empty stage, as it melts into bright dishevelments of wind. 21 Beloit Poetry Journal Fall 2002
Page 1 and 2: Beloit Poetry Poetry Poetry Journal
Page 3 and 4: BELOIT POETRY JOURNAL Fall 2002, Vo
Page 5 and 6: CONRAD HILBERRY Path to the Cabin I
Page 7 and 8: CONRAD HILBERRY adjusting for the c
Page 9 and 10: MICHAEL CASEY ssssssss keep in shap
Page 11 and 12: ERAN WILLIAMS Between Troy and Rome
Page 13 and 14: ALMITRA DAVID Write that my father
Page 15 and 16: ALMITRA DAVID The guard has more th
Page 17 and 18: ALMITRA DAVID ill-positioned, breec
Page 19: BECKY DENNISON SAKELLARIOU Math Is
Page 23 and 24: KURT LELAND 2. Traveling Exhibition
Page 25 and 26: MEBANE ROBERTSON Was calling, and o
Page 27 and 28: ALBERT GOLDBARTH 27.000 Miles These
Page 29 and 30: ALBERT GOLDBARTH or A. or Q. or T.
Page 31 and 32: ALBERT GOLDBARTH The Atomic Balm; T
Page 33 and 34: ALEXIS LATHEM dove. The gray tips o
Page 35 and 36: JASPER BERNES Chiasma Halloween and
Page 37 and 38: ALAN BROOKS The Translator She sat
Page 39 and 40: BOOKS IN BRIEF work. Here’s an ex
Page 41 and 42: BOOKS IN BRIEF rarely but tellingly
Page 43 and 44: BOOKS IN BRIEF is always Partch, li
Page 45 and 46: BOOKS IN BRIEF (2) Mad Daddy (Stagg
Page 47 and 48: BOOKS IN BRIEF woman hanging on bel
Page 49 and 50: BOOKS IN BRIEF say.” Thus the lin
Page 51 and 52: BOOKS IN BRIEF darks and lights, it

Museum Pieces - Beloit Poetry Journal

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?