Weather Report
The airports were out of order,
the rain a curtain rising.
S.O.S. messages from the Sahara
baked the cities like gobbets of dough.
How does love fare? Every night
the government wrote two columns—
pro, anti—for the papers, then flipped
a coin. In the middle of the capital,
an angel with a fiery sword appeared.
The trains no longer ran on time.
Elderly Churchyard
The flint shone most
like glass in that angled
light, as if the blue
were Holbein’s lapis,
dug from mountains
in Afghanistan, or merely
a minor Annunciation.
The front pushed east,
a dark bolt of fabric
partially retired.
The churches divided
between those piled
from local stone
and invaders displaying
a sad love of marble.
The sign of empire falls
like shadow, but what
it leaves looks like theft,
the shadow of theft.
The Ministry of Fear
“There was something about a fete which drew Arthur Rowe irresistibly, bound him a helpless victim to the distant blare of a band.”
Not memory,
the fringe or fury of it.
The red two-room
schoolhouse, Arbor Day
tree outside, the raven-
haired girl in her party dress
twirling to show off
the crinkly crinoline,
a boy kneeling beneath
to see what kept
the funnel-shape rigid.
I knew nothing
of underwire or underwear.
September 13, 1865
“She pin’d in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.”
In the ornate chair,
elbow upon a carved table,
cheek supported by a fist,
she reads, lost in mid-
Victorian reverie—
or posed at the studio
in Regent Street. Her dress
dyed the sable of mourning
argues for melancholy.
The quotation penciled
onto the back of the carte de visite—
Shakespeare, not Tennyson—
surrenders to the creamy
emotion of the slouch-
hatted poet. The faint
blush on her pale cheek
may be a flaw in the paper.
Beneath a regnant lion
the photographer’s name falls:
Adolphe Beau, Photographie Artistique.
Even the artist must have his due.
Attic
Through toxic dust-motes in the gloaming,
every breath breathing fire, I saw
that 45 ravaged by roach and silverfish—
not the indestructible vinyl but the paper
sleeve by Steadman, hoary spatterer
of ink Cruikshank and Leech would embrace.
Midwestern Air
Having cruised the local bars,
after midnight the neighbors
would bang into their apartment
and turn up the stereo, full bass
across the dirt-strewn alley,
their open windows ten feet away.
Summer, by day a hundred
in the shade. Ninety in the dark.
We had to keep our windows open.
All night, all summer, ears glued
to John Paul Jones’s amp, we had
front-row seats at a Led Zeppelin concert.
Sans Culotte
That woman on the Place de la Something
each morning in her gray weeds wielded
her twiggy broom as if shooing mice,
the cobbles slick with dew or the spray
of the dawn water-truck. Donning
no Phrygian cap, no Bardot or Deneuve,
she aged into her beauty like a monument
unnoticed but unmissed. Dawn after dawn,
I watched for her, never to be shamed
into marble or the yellow linen gown of Liberté.
Bare-breasted, one hand lifting the Tricolore
like a rag, she would have done honor
to Marianne, standing to her task.
Whaling Town in Drydock
From the poultry yard, one could hear the squawking of the chickens as the
servant girl chased them down in order to cut their throats.
—Madame Bovary (Lydia Davis trans.)
Darkness arranged the skirts
of the pine woods. The icy marshes
groveled, graveled, in the cold.
Gulls stalked the trash heaps,
forming conspiracies, against
whom or what remained a mystery.
The winter was one long dole-line,
peeling dories overturned, laid up or out,
exotic seashells awaiting the call.
Coorte’s Asparagus
Heat seeped through the upper sashes,
that glowing ardor of summer.
The rich retreated to the shore.
Troy was like that, and Rome—
Hector herded his horses to cool mountain
pastures somewhere, as Pliny lounged
in breezes on the Gulf of Naples.
Zeeland suited the artistic disposition,
the cities no less noxious as heat
rose in gouts of disease, the artist
lifting his hand only at the last gasp
of summer, when peach and strawberry
and medlar briefly graced the table.
On the walls of Pompeii, still lifes
concealed death in one of her guises,
like Coorte’s asparagus, spears at the ready,
bound in cord like thoughts of war,
death leaning against the frame.
Giacometti’s Mutt
Slouch-shouldered, nose to the ground
like a lead putter, body a ragged armload
of dirty laundry, he slinks along
like a PFC going AWOL, expecting
to be caught. The beast’s been gutted,
yet he persists, tail half-mast,
pointing only to what’s left behind.
How long must he keep walking?
Stage Door
Even the past had a past. Once brothel,
later a hatter’s on a street of hatters
where a man could walk without hearing
seductive whispers through painted shutters,
the ruin hovered in dreams of a city
dialed back—at each corner, steaming
horses hitched, empty lots piled head high
with manure. We live for the long decline.
Despite fluted Ionic columns of Tuckahoe,
that half-wrecked brick Federal
on Greene Street kept its dirty secrets.
Think of Hepburn fluting, The callah lilies
are in bloom agayn, like a bad actress,
later with the quaver of a star.
The future comes without a bill of sale.
❂
WILLIAM LOGAN's most recent book of poetry is Rift of Light (2017), and his most recent book of criticism Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History (2021). He teaches at the University of Florida.