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    The Eternal City: Poems
    The Eternal City: Poems
    The Eternal City: Poems
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    The Eternal City: Poems

    By Kathleen Graber

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    Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

    With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber’s award-winning second collection of poetry brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 1, 2010
    ISBN9781400836109
    The Eternal City: Poems
    Author

    Kathleen Graber

    Kathleen Graber teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker and the American Poetry Review, among other publications, and her first collection, Correspondence, was published in 2006.

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      Book preview

      The Eternal City - Kathleen Graber

      Notes

      Tolle! Lege!

      Here's the spring

      And with it transmogrified

      Yataro becomes Issabo.

      —Issa

      In truth, I have less faith in the gods than I do in the chair

      I passed one night set out with the trash on John Street,

      even though it seemed to me then to be already beyond saving

      & I was too tired to try to lift it & carry it away.

      Stripped of its cushions & fabric, the frame, by moonlight,

      looked like some primitive technology, a fragment

      of the heavy plough scientists dug from a Danish bog

      & dated through pollen analysis to the 4th century B.C.—

      the wooden wheels they knew it had had having long since

      turned into peat. What I know of conversion

      I learned while cleaning the sticky shelves of the icebox,

      a glass sheet exploding as one end hit the sink's hot suds.

      For a single moment, as fissures crackled along the body,

      I held something both whole & wholly shattered,

      then, form gave way, it broke a second time, & was gone.

      William James loved best those changes that burst upon us.

      He hardly cared that they rarely stuck or that Augustine

      in the garden had been preparing all of his life to be seized.

      Hearing the children chanting, pick up & read, pick up

      & read, the Saint's eyes fell upon the Epistle to the Romans,

      written by Paul, the one who, having seen the Savior

      revealed on the road to Damascus, left even his name behind.

      Outside, men are clearing the lawns, blowing the last

      of winter's leaves into copper hills before shoveling them

      into the bed of a truck. They've been at it all morning,

      laboring a long time to unswaddle one acre of earth.

      They pass the window & everything churns, as if the room

      has been swept up in a blizzard of wings. When, decades ago,

      in a dilapidated tenement slated for demolition, I caught

      my own reflection in a heavy mirror affixed to a wall,

      I smashed it & packed my pockets with as much of myself

      as I could. Later, I poured the bits into an old milk bottle

      & gave my idol a battered doorknob for a head. Augustine

      believed he could almost glimpse that greater kingdom

      wavering before him. Aenigma, he writes, suggesting the face

      in the mirror, though his mirrors would have been bronze

      & someone somewhere would have spent all of his days

      pounding the world into something that small & shiny

      & thin. And still, it is not easy to make out what is sought.

      Someone somewhere is, even now, delicately turning

      the maple spindles of a chair at a lathe. The landscapers

      drive off & all the little houses resettle—

      the way plovers in the dunes, having stood to stretch

      their throats into the diffuse light of spring, ease down again

      into the reeds. And so it is with the disquieted self, which,

      startled almost at the start from itself, seems always now

      to be awaiting its own return. The soul, Augustine reminds us,

      loving itself, loves what is lost. He recalls the shepherd

      who upon finding the missing lamb raises it up

      & strides home happy. Mile after mile, he rejoices

      beneath his burden of flesh. He bears the warm belly

      across his glad shoulders. The pink mouth bleats at his ear.

      I

      The Magic Kingdom

      And as in the daily casualties of life every man is, as it were, threatened with numberless deaths, so long as it remains uncertain which of them is his fate, I would ask whether it is not better to suffer one and die, than to live in fear of all?

      —Augustine, City of God

      This morning, I found on a slip of paper tucked into a book

      a list of questions I'd written down years ago to ask the doctor.

      What if it has spread? Is it possible I'm crazy? I've just returned

      from Florida, from visiting my mother's last sister, who is eighty

      & doing fine. At the airport, my flight grounded by a storm,

      I bought a magazine, which fell open to a photograph

      of three roseate spoonbills tossing down their elegant shadows

      on a chartreuse field of fertilizer production waste.

      Two little girls emptied their Ziplocs of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish

      onto the carpet & picked them up, one by one, with great delicacy,

      before popping them into their mouths. Their mother, outside

      smoking, kept an eye on them through the glass. After my cousin died,

      my father died & then my brother. Next, my father's older brother

      & his wife. And, finally, after my mother died, I expected

      to die myself. And because this happened very quickly

      & because these were, really, almost all the people I knew,

      I spent each day smashing dishes with one of my uncle's hammers

      & gluing them back together in new ways. It was strange work,

      & dangerous, even though I tried to protect myself—

      wearing a quilted bathrobe & goggles & leather work gloves

      &

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