The Eternal City: Poems
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About this ebook
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.
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.
Read more from Kathleen Graber
Correspondence Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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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
&