Prose

Ambitious Diminutives: La Fontaine and the Art of the Apologue by Eric Ormsby

The Book of Kings by Shusha Guppy

Poetry

JOHAN JACOBS, from William Kentridge's production of The Magic Flute, Brussels, 2005

"Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life"

                                  i

Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life
Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse
Of a saw-down tree, another time and lapse

That must have taken place around midsummer
Come swimming up, and the place, it dawns on me,
Could have been Grove Hill before the trees were cut,

Where I often stood with them on airy Sundays
Shin-deep in hilltop bluebells, looking out
At Magherafelt's four spires in the distance

Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation
About a love that's proved by steady gazing
Not at each other but in the same direction.

                                  ii

Quercus, the oak. And Quaerite, seek ye.
Among Green leaves and acorns in mosaic
(Our college crest surmounted by columba,

Dove of the church, of Derry's sainted grove),
The footworn motto stayed indelible:
Seek ye first the Kingdom...Fair and square

I stood on in the Junior House hallway,
There is a grey eye which will look back
Seeing them as a couple, I now see,

For the first time, all the more together
For having had to turn and walk away, as close
In the leaving (or closer) as in the getting.

                                  iii

It's winter at the seaside where they've gone
For the wedding meal. And I am at the table,
Uninvited, ineluctable.

A skirl of gulls. A smell of cooking fish,
Plump, dormant silver. Stranded silence. Tears,
Their bibbed waitress unlids a clinking dish

And leaves them to it, under chandeliers,
And to all the anniversaries of this
They aren't ever going to observe

Or mention even in the years to come.
And now the man who drove them here will drive
Them back, and by evening we'll be home.

                                  iv

Were I to have embraced him anywhere
It would have been on the riverbank
That summer before college, him in his prime,

Me at the time not thinking how he must
Keep coming with me because I'd soon be leaving.
That should have been the first, but it didn't happen.

The second did, at New Ferry one night
When he was very drunk and needed help
To do up his trouser buttons. And the third

Was on the landing during his last week,
Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm
Taking the webby weight of his underarm.

                                  v

It took a grandson to do it properly,
To rush in and surprise him in the armchair
With a snatch raid on his neck,

Proving him thus vulnerable to delight,
Coming as great proofs often come
Of a sudden, one off, then the steady dawning

Of whatever erat demonstrandum
Just as a moment back a son's three tries
At an embrace in Elysium

Swam up into my very arms, and in and out
Of the Latin stem itself, the phantom
Verus that has slipped from "very."

SEAMUS HEANEY

Three Poems by Avot Yeshurun

Avot Yeshurun (1904–1992), one of the major figures in Twentieth century Hebrew poetry, was born in the western Ukraine and moved as a child to Kranistav in Poland. In 1925, he emigrated to Palestine, where he worked as a watchman, swamp-dredger, fruit-picker, and construction worker, all the while evolving a jagged, highly individual poetic matter that reflects his sense of fracture and displacement. A typical Yeshurun poem is written largely in what he called "half-and-half" Hebrew—the broken variety spoken by new immigrants—but also contains bits of Yiddish, Polish, and even Arabic, with a few biblical locutions and scraps of the latest Tel Aviv slang thrown in good measure

Yeshurun's poetry was slow to gain recognition. One reason for this was the oddity of his Hebrew, with its neologisms, deliberate misspellings, and jumbled syntax. Another was his iconoclastic insistence on yoking the twin tragedies of the Jews and the Palestinians—he lost his entire family in the Holocaust, but in his eyes this loss was compounded by the dispossesion of Palestinian Arabs in the wake of the Arab-Israel War in 1948. With the publication of The Syrian-African Rift in 1974, however, his reputation as Israel's most seriously innovative poet was etablished. He went on to produce his greatest work in the following years, right to his death at age eighty-eight. The following poems are from his sixth collection, A Cappella Voices (1977).

GABRIEL LEVIN

My Body Goes

Up to my teens my body was
shut in clothes ever since I was born in the breach of a distant world.
A boy paused next to me, with his mother he went.
I remained in the breach of the world.

Why did the man remain why?
Because. Why because?
For why does someone remain
always because.

In clothes they displaced my body from afar welded
in a lead box from the breach of one world to the breach of another.
Outside only the head that stares and hears and the hands to make.
Except for this all is covered.

Only I see the body after so much
time. Frightened it will go. A wonder the heart still works.
The chest is covered and hairy and warm to
touch. The back smooth and chill. The back I didn’t see.

In principle I count on the spine watching over the clavicle.
However much I hear and read in books and lexicons
“And he took the bones from the graves”—I am happy
the bones are still in the back and the back watching over them.

Feet bare—where were they?
A bit larger than those of kids when covered
In shoes-who-knows-how-much time far back.
This too is walking in gloom.

Feet bare a bit larger than those of kids.
Their toes fist-raked caramelized mountains of lime.
And when I remove my shoes and check my soles and see lime hill toenails,
I see: good they were covered.

These hands. I can still remember,
Mother tied a red thread around my wrist.
The same fingers advance and retreat shy as a shattered snail-shell,
and the nails are bitten to the flesh.

A Poem in Connection

God of Abraham, you who know languages,
who spoke with my mother in an ancient tongue in Yiddish,
when you walked out on the Sabbath
among the stars,

my Hebrew isn’t clean.
My Hebrew’s slapdash and speaks slappidydashy nonsense, for it’s
          not sufficient.
I’m that someone who steps out at night in the garden in the
square on Dizengoff in the dark of words
that one can’t.

You who hear a tongue in seventy translations,
at night in the garden and in Dizengoff square,
Look: “Whad’ya buy?” “Mothballs for the closets.”
“I also want.”Today’s idiom. Tell you what? That’s what we’ve got.

Before placing a new infant into a new cradle,
first stick a cat, and rock until it leaps and scrams.
And me the contrary: the Yiddish barely out,
and right off panhandle seven beggars.

It’s true I say,“God of Abraham,” my mother’s prayer on Saturday
night. I’m no
bulkhead or glacier of faith. No.
Rather, I feel inside. No
I didn't dazzle before you.

Sometimes a man says
God of Avrum, and longs
for a woman. This too is for the good.
This too is for love

for him who counts the days
and sees her across and beyond the street and through dusklight in
her home and she isn’t there
and through the chestnut trees and doesn’t say hello and doesn't say
a word and isn’t jealous.

Here it's best to stop
And to change subjects. It’s out of line
to love a woman
to write woman.

From the prayer “God of Avrum”
and the love of a woman, something
so very far, strange,
and so wonderful.

Town Hall

The music raises voices lost in nature
and hidden from man.
Voices of the water before mighty waters streamed
from the beginning of the first quarter of the century to the
          beginning of the last.

Yesterday in the concert commemorating forty years of the orchestra,
the hall restored up to the very last minute and the hearing.
But one cord got stuck in the hall cieling, and still
sways like flax from some summer end to summer end.

As a memory the cord is born, but I've already forgotten.
Only it suckles        and suckles and cannot suckle itself.
Whenever I come to a concert, I sit under the roof
of the cord that lives alone in the dark. And you have to get used to
          the dark. Until you see it in the dark.Translated by LILACH LACHMAN and GABRIEL LEVIN

ALICE ATTIE, Untitled (Havana), 2001


STAR BLACK, Text Girl, 2003

Father Birmingham

Do you remember Father Birmingham
telling about the Sacrificial Lamb,
his little voice gigantic in the nave?
His septum looked like skin inside a pepper.
He loved the tale of Damien the Leper.
He stressed good works and giving, and we gave.

Bottomless glasses that, removed, laid bare
a foggy, oddly vulnerable stare,
the red, lined neck that smelled of aftershave—
sure, I remember Father Birmingham.
He's an important part of who I am.
He taught me not to be but to behave.

JOSHUA MEHIGAN

PHILIP PEARLSTEIN, Richard Howard, 2005

The Blessed Elias and the Worm

The Blessed Elias,
who never was made a saint,
within his first year atop the pillar
to which he retired
from the sinful world's ground level
noticed sign of the presence
of the parasite that would be with him
all the rest of his days.
First he rebuked it.
He tried the usual purgatives.
When medicine failed,
he fed it sand and little stones
to teach it the unappetizing nature
of the material sphere.
When its tail, or head,
for who could tell which,
emerged through an abcess,
he wrapped it around
a twig, as advised,
and turned the twig at intervals
to draw out (gently)
its growing length;
they say his self-denial was such
that he'd wind out one new inch in the time
when a man of normal habits
would have twisted out a dozen.
The Blessed Elias reminded the worm
it had chosen a poor host indeed.
HE preached it many sermons.
After much prayer and meditation,
often concerning whether
the mortification of his flesh
improved the worm in any way,
the Blessed Elias resolved that this was not
an affliction sent to test him,
but one of God's creatures.
And because in his years on the pillar
he adhered to a vow
of silence on all matters excepting faith,
the followers who supplied his meager requirements
were dumbly amazed to hear one day
his voice come down
without its rasp of certainty, saying,
“Perhaps it would like some figs.”

SARAH LINDSAY

JACQUELINE MORREAU,
The Children's Crusade: Massacre of the Innocents, 1981


MAJA MUNK, A Mother and Her Son with Friends Outside a Dispansary, After Receiving Medication (Toch, Phou State, Sudan), 2002

What the Evangelist Should Have Said

An American evangelist, preaching salvation,
said it was like being on one side of a river, Jesus
on the other, arms long as forever reaching
to lift you over. But we only knew Hope River,
Sally Waters River—only knew rambling brooks
running through the can as river, a thing
you could jump over, or make your way across
on stones. We had no imagination of Mississippi
or Delaware, rivers so wide they held ships.
A savior with magic arms was pointless.

What the evangelist should have said, was:
Is like when de river come down just like suh
and you find yuself at de bottom,
slow breathin unda de surface, speakin
in bubbles, growin accustomed to fish
and deep and dark and forever—salvation
is de man with arms like a tractor
who reach in fi pull you out of de river,
press de flat of him hands gainst your belly
and push de river out of you.

KEI MILLER

All Over Ireland
                                                            Snow was general all over
                                                            Ireland...
                                                            James Joyce, "The Dead"
 
What's general all over Ireland is definitely not snow. Sandbag-
bulky rain clouds, about to burst their banks, close in sulkily on
all four provinces, allowing them no quarter, flushing them out.
 
Rain adds layers of flab to the river where anglers in oilskins
prospect for trout. A downpour drowns the banter of two neighbors.
A course inspection at Leopardstown leads to cancellation.
 
Rain climbs hills on which foot-rot sheep, dipped in precipitation
graze with a lamb or two in tow. Rain, not snow, is what blurs
perspectives at furze-lined tourist beauty spots in Kerry and Mayo.
 
Rain meaning whatever was sent to torment the couple humping
home a heavy bag of groceries, each grasping a plastic handle.
Rain not snow. On a ruined castle crumbling like a water biscuit.
 
On a heifer lying low with its drooling mouth full. On a mangy stray.
On a blinking lake. On roofs where zinc tanks corrode and starlings
practice courtship rites. On a night nurse in the sodium-lit car-park.
 
The man carrying a wicker basket of racing pigeons to the station
takes a beating from the rain, as do the sleek racehorses making
a run for it in the beech-hedged grounds of sheiks-owned studs.
 
Rain is general too in the village near the landfill quarry:
it's pensions day in the sub-post office; the creaking door
of a derelict thatched cottage plays its last post in a gale.
 
Rain joins isolated farms where border collies answer to each
other's barks, like gossip passed from mouth to mouth. Rain
plinks on the glass dome shielding plastic roses on a grave.
 
It touches the raw nerves of gaudy window boxes, drums liquid
fingers on the corrugated transit warehouse where cattle destined
for live export to dry Libya or Egypt await their marching orders.
 
It tries the patience of the foreign film crew hankering for a break
in clouds, and lodger for whom a limp window-envelop
marked Don't Delay! Save Money Now! is the day's only mail.
 
Rain hammers the builders' hut as a bricklayer shuffles the deck.
Damp patches afflict the Old School Restaurant and the Rectory
B & B. Drains back up in the side-street panel-beater's yard.
 
Rain, berating windows, wants to pour out its feelings to a room
where a blue screen-saver flickers like a gas flame while a youth
revises for the Garda exam. It spoils a wedding party's photos
 
The minimum-wage man expertly meshing empty supermarket
trolleys is well used to the rain. So too is whoever arranges
the optimistic beachball and bucket display at the seafront kiosk.
 
Tub-thumping rain, snubbing the prayers of grain farmers, finds
a welcome in the striped metal barrel at the downpipe and tops
the highest-ever levels measured at Belmullet since records began.
 
People rush from the bus as if fleeing a catastrophe. Some wear
soaked newspapers as headgear. A woman, doggedly taking her
constitutional by golflinks, pauses under the awning of an oak.
 
Rain pesters the baffled Latvian au pair, on the deserted platform
who fumbles for her contact number. It falls on the church hall that
is now a lottery-aided heritage center for a town down on its luck.
 
The breadman delivering catering pans to the electroplating unit's
canteen has never seen such rain. Not since yesterday at least
when it seeped through the felt on his flat-roof kitchen extension.
 
The pelt of the Atlantic Ocean receives the rain like a protective
spray on a pair of crocodile tassel loafers. A brightly-pegged
row of tracksuit bottoms sags on a housing estate clothesline.
 
Tomorrow, yet again, instead of snow, the forecast will hold out
the promise of a dull day everywhere, with rain and drizzle,
cloud formations like the brain tissue of a compulsive mind.
 
Rain is general all over Ireland. Rain falls along the James Joyce
Bridge. On the house where Bartell D'Arcy's song caused grief
one distant Christmas. And upon the living and the dead.
 

DENNIS O'DRISCOLL