Curated by Suzanne Lummis
The American Heritage dictionary
defines close-up as: 1. A photograph or a film or television shot in which the
subject is tightly framed and shown at a relatively large scale. 2. An intimate
view or description.
ABIDING MYSTERY
Three Poems from
Best American Poetry 2003
Citizens, this will
not do: when I put a search on “poetry” and “mystery” a porn site tops the
list. Or at least it looks to be that – I didn’t click. What info appears
suggests there may be an X-rated model out there working her way through college
under the alias Ms. Poetry Mystery.
That’s always the
way of it. Many want to appropriate the idea of poetry, its charged aura, its
mystery – or else they just like the word “poetry”. But few want to support it,
or read it. The cheap phonies.
After that list
came many sites offering poetry books and mystery novels.
I’d had in mind
some reference to this: the abiding mystery around which so many poems revolve.
Poets touch upon it, gesture towards it, but, wisely, almost never try to solve
or resolve it, the way the mathematician, physician or private investigator
strive to solve the equation, diagnose the problem, or crack the case.
Poets survey a
realm of mystery I hardly know how to name. I can only say it has to do with
the oddness of life on earth, the fluid and shifting nature of perception, one’s
own curious fantastical existence, and the confounding, unaccountable existence
of others. (And it seems others do exist because often when I dial a number a
voice speaks out of the receiver – hello?)
 The current Best
American Poetry, guest-edited this year by Yusef Komunyakaa, holds many
poems of mystery, but it was one by the great poet of the Midwest,
Ted Kooser,
that gave me the idea to pursue this theme. "In the Hall of Bones" speaks
to the very thing I’ve been describing (or touching upon, or gesturing to).
It’s one of these wonderful poems whose purpose unfolds suddenly in its last
lines.
The poems by
Philip
Levine and Brigit Pegeen Kelly seem not only to the broach the areas of
consciousness and perception but also the mystery of the writing process. In
his author’s note Philip Levine tells us that he’d begun this quietly affecting
poem in order to describe “a joyous gift in a lonely time,” invoking “the Havana
I’d known one summer fifty years before…but another series of nightly walks
intruded & darkened the poem: those taken years later in the old working class
barrio of Barcelona during the terrible Franco years.”
The way a
poem-in-progress can shift from its assigned place to some other, without our
foreknowledge or permission – now that’s a mystery.
Brigit Pegeen
Kelly’s "The Dragon", while seemingly set right here in the physical world,
may be the most unearthly of all – and it grows stranger with each reading. It
haunts. And it explains nothing. Kelly’s author’s note says only that, “…the
most significant aspect of the revision process involved letting go of the
elaborate frame I had constructed,” implying at one time the piece had been
book-ended by material that would have tipped us off – that this was a dream, or
it was imagined, or a witnessed event, or a metaphor for something, or…
I put a search on
“bees” and “carry – carrying” to see what I could turn up. I learned about all
kinds of well-named bees – cellophane bees, sweat bees, digger bees – but
nothing about bees that can carry a snake. At least I didn’t turn up a porn
site.
Some mysteries are
best left unrevealed.
- Suzanne Lummis
"Answer
Like a House Burning Down"
IN THE HALL OF
BONES
Here we store the
reassembled
scaffolding, the
split, bleached uprights,
the knobby corner
locks and braces
that held up the
mastodon’s
bag of wet leaves
and the ivory
forklift of its
head. Over there are
the planks upon
which lay the turtle’s
diving bell, and
the articulated
rack that kept the
dromedary’s hump
from collapsing
under the weight
of its
perseverance. And here is
the basket that
held the clip-clop
pulse of the
miniature horse
as it dreamed of
growing tall enough
to have lunch from
a tree. And then
here’s man, all
matchsticks, wooden spoons
and tongue
depressors wired together,
a rack supporting a
leaky jug
of lust and worry.
Of all the skeletons
assembled here,
this is the only one
in which once
throbbed a heart
made sad by
brooding on its shadow.
THE MUSIC OF TIME
The young woman
sewing
by the window hums
a song
I don’t know; I
hear only
a few bars, and
when the trucks
barrel down the
broken street
the music is lost.
Before the darkness
leaks from the
shadows of
the great
cathedral, I see her
once more at work
and later
hear in the sudden
silence
of nightfall
wordless music rising
from her room. I
put aside
my papers, wash,
and press
to eat at one of
the seafood
places along the
great avenues
near the port where
later
the homeless will
sleep. Then I
walk for hours in
the Barrio
Chino passing the
open
doors of tiny bars
and caves
from which the
voices of old men
bark out the stale
anthems
of love’s defeat.
“This is the world,”
I think, “this is
what I came
in search of years
ago.” Now I
can go back to my
single room,
I can lie awake in
the dark
rehearsing all the
trivial events
of the day ahead, a
day that begins
when the sun clears
the dark spires
of someone’s God,
and I waken
in a flood of dust
rising from
nowhere and from
nowhere comes
the actual voice of
someone else.
THE DRAGON
The bees came out
of the junipers, two small swarms
The size of melons;
and golden, too like melons,
They hung next to
each other, at the height of a deer’s breast
Above the wet black
compost. And because
The light was very
bright it was hard to see them,
And harder still to
see what hung between them.
A snake hung
between them. The bees held up a snake,
Lifting each side
of his narrow neck, just below
The pointed head,
and in this way, very slowly
They carried the
snake through the garden,
The snake’s long
body hanging down, its tail dragging
The ground, as if
the creature were a criminal
Being escorted to
execution or a child king
To the throne. I
kept thinking the snake
Might be a hose,
held by two ghostly hands,
But the snake was a
snake, his body green as the grass
His tail divided,
his skin oiled, the way the male member
Is oiled by the
female’s juices, the greenness overbright,
The bees gold, the
winged serpent moving silently
Through the air.
There was something deadly in it,
Or already dead.
Something beyond the report
Of beauty. I laid
my face against my arm, and there
It stayed for the
length of time it takes two swarms
Of bees to carry a
snake through a wide garden,
Past a sleeping
swan, past the dead roses nailed
To the wall, past
the small pond. And when
I looked up the
bees and the snake were gone,
But the garden
smelled of broken fruit, and across
the grass a shadow
lay for which there was no source,
A narrow plinth
dividing the garden, and the air
Was like the air
after a fire, or before a storm,
Ungodly still, but
full of shapes turning.
Read Los Angeles Poet
Dinah Berland's
letter reflecting on Kelly's poem.
The Best American Poetry 2003, from Scribner Poetry, is guest edited by
Yusef Komunyakaa and the series editor is David Lehman.
 Ted Kooser
was born in Ames Iowa, 1939, and has published eight collections of poetry, the
most recent being Braided Creek (Copper Canyon, 2003), a conversation in
short poems with poet and novelist Jim Harrison. He is also the author of
Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (University of Nebraska Press,
2002). He’s a visiting professor at the University of Nebraska.
 Brigit Pegeen
Kelly was born in Palo Alto, California in 1951. Her books of poetry are
To the Place of Trumpets (Yale University Press, 1988) and Song (BOA
Editions, Ltd., 1995). She teaches in the creative writing program at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
 Philip Levine
was born in Detroit, Michigan, 1928, and – after establishing the famed writing
program at FSU – now teaches one course a year at New York University. His most
recent book of poetry is The Mercy (Knopf, 1999). In 2002 the University
of Michigan Press published two of his prose works: So Ask: Essay and
Conversations and a paperback edition of The Bread of Time: Toward an
Autobiography.
Ready for Their Close-Up
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