Model of a City in Civil War

Poems by

Adam Day

Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game.

— Theodor Adorno

The house itself is none of these appearances: it is… the geometrized projection of these perspectives and of all possible perspectives, that is, the perspectiveless position from which all can be derived… not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere.

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful acknowledgement to the editors of the following publications, where these poems, sometimes in different versions, first appeared:

AGNI: “The Children, the Grass” (published as [Here are the Children]” and “Combine”

Antioch Review: “Hiding Again, in London”

Carolina Quarterly: “His Dementia”

Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art: “Sarclet” and “Dakota”

Colorado Review: “Condensation Cube”

Copper Nickel: “Blind Attis”

Crab Orchard Review: “Snow in a Gdansk Courtyard”

dcomP magazine: “The Revolution”

FIELD: “Water from the Same Source”

Forklift: Ohio: “He Speaks of Old Age” (published as “Old Age”)

Gulf Coast: “Anoosh’s Obituary for Himself, to His Son”

Handsome: “The Mayor in Sky Blue Socks” (published as “[Deer herd in the icy fields]”)

Hotel Amerika: “Apprehended at a Distance” (published as “[The colorless lake, buoy bells in fog]”) and “Model of a City in Civil War” (published as “[A diorama of a city in civil war]”)

Indiana Review: “Fårö” (published as “The Dinner Party”)

iO: A Journal of New American Poetry: “Time Away” (published as “Shark and Dog”)

Jelly Fish: “Elebade”

Kenyon Review: “Diorama — (Scarlet and Liver)” (published as “Gallows Portraits”) and “Family Romance”

Madison Review: “Sleeping with Uncle Lester”

Mid-American Review: “The Kinghorse Butchertown Brawl”

Louisville Review: “Strapping”

Margie and Verse Daily: “The Cow”

Meridian: “Before the War”

New Madrid and Verse Daily: “Clean Lines, Diffuse Lighting” (as “Mother’s Hair”)

New Orleans Review: “The Insomniac”

North American Review: “We Lived Above a Key Shop”

Pebble Lake: “The Leaving” and “Winter Inventory”

Poetry London: “A Plateau of Excellence”

Roanoke Review: “Coming In at Night” (as “Coming In from the Back Porch at Night”)

Salt Hill: “Orr’s Island”

Still: “Washing My Old Man” (as “Washing Father’s Feet”) and “Now and Forever” (as “Badger Philosphes”)

Subtropics: “In Mourning” (as “Badger in Mourning”)

Sycamore Review: “A Polite History” and “ ” (as “[From such material it is almost impossible…]”)

Third Coast: “Smoke”

Third Coast: “Winter Fever” (published as “The Good Winter”)

TYPO: “Unease”

The following poems first appeared in the chapbook, Badger, Apocrypha, published as part of the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship series: “Winter Nights,” “The Revolution,” and “In Mourning.”

My deep thanks to the wonderful team at Sarabande, and to everyone else who has supported me and my writing, many of whom I have the honor to call friend: Philip Levine, David Alworth, Ellyn Lichvar, my son Alistair Day, Kathleen Graber, Cathy Wagner, Cal Bedient, Fritz Ward, G.C. Waldrep, Bruce Smith, Hannah Gamble, Ashley Capps, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Tom Sleigh, Sarah Arvio, David Lehman, James Tate, Heather Patterson, Aleks Karlsons, Kathleen Driskell, David Baker, Sumita Chakraborty, Sven Birkerts, Timothy Donnelly, Jeffrey Skinner, Breth Fletcher Lauer, David Lynn, Alice Quinn, Maurice Manning, Jillian Weise, Don Bogen, Joshua Poteat, Tony Hoagland, Sally Connelly, Martha Greenwald, Josh English, Jeff Hipsher, Ben Lord, Philip White, Lisa Williams, Jason Schniederman, Michael Estes, David Harrity, Kyle Coma Thompson, Broc Rossell, Mark Neely, Greg and Beth Steinbock, Gayann and Robert Day, Elizabeth Hamsley, Tony Hamsley, Sam Sims, Ken Walker, Michael Cooley, Scott Ward, Jay Baron Nicorvo, Mitchell Waters, Taylor Roberts, John James, Jessica Farquhar, Amy Attaway, Jessica Worthem, Anthony Carelli, Colleen Ammerman, Will Lobko, Madeline Schwartz, Robin LaMer Rahija, Makalani Bandele, Sean Patrick Hill, Duncan Barlow, Kathy Barbour, Kari Kalve, Alen Hamza, David Ebenbach, Kyle McCord, Ellie Schilling, and the crew at Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville.

Special thanks to the Poetry Society of America, New York University, the University of Houston, and to the Kentucky Arts Council for their generous support.

BEFORE THE WAR

I was a woman before the war—

we took the arms of our enemies

and swung them from our crotches.

And lived with them there

until, like ticks, they grew inward, and we

were the first men. But we didn’t want

those stolen limbs anymore, and so tried

by force to give them back, hoping

the fists would come alive inside

women and grab hold. But when we were done

the arms only hung dumbly

between our tired legs, shrinking in time—

a useless door handle, a hung shadow

we walk upon.

MODEL OF A CITY IN CIVIL WAR

Men carry a mattress retrieved

from a dumpster past the flooded

foundations of an unfinished

high-rise, an old woman catches

a pigeon in the folds of her dress,

the dead smile and rise from swimming

pools or stand at attention

on stamps. The landscape can’t believe

it’s real — there is no ground

beneath it, like what mirrors do.

The velvet-curtained walls

of a movie theater. On screen

the hanged men speak

to one another from broken

necks, and the aspen leaves

show white in the dark.

COMBINE

Captain Nazret helped the Communists overthrow Haile

Selassie and when

he discovered his wife’s infidelities sewed her into bed

as she slept

and moved his family to the Isle of Man, where he retired

and began losing

his mind, so that one All Hallows’ he pasted a mustache

onto the pastor’s

sorrel mare and rode it through the cobbled streets of Cregneash

saying to the costumed kids,

“Come pet comrade Stalin.” Children loved the old

syphilitic because

he’d show them his stomach’s gnarled track of surgery scars, because

of the violet-backed

sunbird he kept until the neighbor’s cat, with wet green eyes,

reached a paw

through the cage bars, and snagged the bird on one hooked claw

so that a crosshatch

of feathers and blood tattooed the tile floor. That night kids drugged

the Siamese

with cough medicine and stapled it by the scruff to its owner’s

picket fence.

On a Siberian expedition, Nikolai Bryukhanov brought the wrong

food for the sledge-dogs,

so they had to be killed. But not by the squeamish Commissar.

On the third day

of Bryukhanov’s trial, Stalin sent a note with accompanying

illustration that read:

“To the members of the Politburo, For all the sins, past and present, hang B.

by the balls. If they

hold out, consider him acquitted by trial. If they don’t, drown him

in the river.”

Here sits Queen Anne at Hockley Hole, London

for the dog and bull show.

A rope is tied ’round the root of the bull’s horns and fastened

to an iron stake,

its slobbery gray nose blown full of pepper to enrage it before

it’s baited. Meanwhile,

men hold dogs by the ears. Let loose, the goal for the dog is to hold for all

hell to the bull’s

snout — the most sensitive spot other than the genitals—“If a bull had balls

hanging from its face

they’d be attached to his snout.” Now, either the dog remains

fixed, or is thrown

tearing out the flesh it has laid teeth on. The bull, a skeptic in dialogue

with hope, works

to slide a horn under the cur’s belly, and throw it, so that a dog’s side

is often ripped open

entrails protruding like wet sausage—“Yes, it provides much joy

for the community,

and the animals certainly gain a sense of dignity in achievement.”

Goya’s “Portrait of the Family of Charles IV”: intermarriage preserved

the family’s wealth

and the compact features of mongoloids. Deformed by a hunting accident,

Charles — subsidiary

to his wife, his mouth full of gravel — spent his power slowly collecting

watches and wrestling

with grooms in the stables — like male otters, they bite each other’s necks,

drawing blood, but

thick layers of fat prevent serious injury. We see only the profile of Doña

Carlota Joaquina,

the King’s eldest daughter, more oversexed than even her mother, whose “chief

renown was for a readiness

that kept her in a state of tropical humidity as would grow orchids

in her drawers

in January” (“My mouth may be scalded but I’m still noticeably wet,”

she wrote a lover.)

Tennessee Williams had a little black dog named Bibbles whom

he kept as a minotaur

keeps his women — he set to kicking it one day because the creature

seemed to him

too promiscuous, too “Whitmanesque” in its affections. Seventy-one

and choking

on the cap of a medicine bottle — nothing like the brass bit in a horse’s spit-foamed

mouth, nothing

like the rough-trade neck-ties that had gagged him. Tell us a joke; tell us a story

to make us all

laugh. The cops: “If that’s aspirin on your dresser, what’s the needle for?”

Him: “I can’t stand the taste

of the stuff.” Tennessee — the eternal that is ever-present in our midst. Sexually

incontinent. Panic

insomnia, tooth-rot, green liquid pouring from the bowels. Still

he has a physical

presence. You could imagine him hitting someone. “I don’t think it’s sex

I want. There’s no great

hankering for that. It’s the quiet, humdrum dread of coming up alone to this little

room at night, to that

emptiness where God would be if God were available. And going to bed and turning

my face to the wall.”

ANOOSH’S OBITUARY FOR HIMSELF, TO HIS SON

Armaan, during the Revolution your mother

left, and I was asked to strangle a collaborator:

baggy-trousered, with a stoat-face. The house’s pink wallpaper

was covered with maids and horses. Over the shower curtain

his wife’s pantyhose hung. Chair-tied, sweat ran the rims

of his glasses. A lamp threw cold light, promises

were made. I’m a father. Drunk, I adjourned to the driveway

to shovel snow. There were spider webs of moisture

in the trees and hedges. For coffee, I used ice cream

in place of the missing milk, sick of what I knew…

As for your mother, Armaan, I can only say I feel better

about her infidelities when I’m well-dressed. And I am.

WINTER NIGHTS

Walking from the house into a field

of snow, the moon eases from its blue

blouse, half-blinded by the hills. Eider

shadows skate past the pond boat

overturned on shore. There is

the fatty scent of pine, like the smell

of marrow. Things are blooming

that shouldn’t yet. She reaches up

to her shadowed face to touch

something real but imagined, like

some invented criminal pleasure,

like making a virtue of a flaw.

HIDING AGAIN IN LONDON

The streets, black with rain, I walk

past the British Museum to University College,

where the Socialist Workers Party is screening Land and Freedom.

I sit in the audience, looking

for women — confusing jargon: class intercourse,

sexual warfare — aware of the probability

of defeat. We can’t know much

of each other. I fell in love with Marx

several years before, though, in life, he despised

the lower classes — as we despise ourselves — making him

one of us. How could he not be—

writing Engels for ten pounds here, twenty pounds

there. Boils, jaundice, grippe; three children

dead of poverty; bread and potatoes

for days; and not an unbroken piece of furniture

in the house. He writes a friend, “I was so depressed

last night that I would have put my head

in the oven, if I wasn’t too frightened of the children

to go into the kitchen. After the anarchists

and communists lose to Franco the lights

come up, stout is served in the student annex,

where I talk with two Argentine friends about anything

but politics or exile, the añoranza: soccer mostly, and the black

girl across the room, Elizabeth, who is looking

at me, and away, and back again. Outside, she tells me

about her professor-parents, her home in Sussex

where sweet William pins itself to the slats of the front porch,

where she walks out to horse-stables in the morning

in jodhpurs and a tank-top. Then, scattershot

of car horns — a hand suddenly unpocketed, the hairs

on our arms touching — even at night, the riot

of poppies in spring. Beside our confused feet

a lung-sore bum with his Guardian tent and cardboard mat

is sleeping, as I push her breasts up beneath her sweater.

Months like this passed before I left for Stockholm

carrying the anonymous thing that we’ve always

known without having learned,

that we’ll lose, that speaking into silence, our gods,

parent-ghosts, and lovers will not

hear us. Still, call after him. Awkwardly call this man,

“Bear,” of all things, as his family did, through hob

and tobacco smoke — just up from bed, he’s still sitting

in his study on the Isle of Wight, where he has put

his head down, the blue capillaries under skin

as thin as rice paper, with the hard-focused eyes

of a man one week at the bottom of a lake—

and what is the vocabulary for that, how

can words deliver affection; I say it is raining

over the mountains and mean I am rolling onto my side

to fall asleep next to you.

SLEEPING WITH UNCLE LESTER

We walked from town to her land

through clotted darkness

and frozen pastures, heads brushing

bottles hung on low branches. The old

kitchen, cut by a line of ragged shirts

and socks, smelled like wet bark. Jars

of fruit salts and redcurrants, tins

of dried onions and parsnips rattled

when we walked. We went to bed,

that’s all. I woke with her uncle Lester

beside me, slack-chinned and thin, face

and neck a wash of white stubble

and the high turpentine of fetid sweat.

Lester’s wife died when their Chrysler

broke down as she hemorrhaged

from miscarriage. I got up

on my elbows; out the window

was the background of an otherwise dull

family photo: blue skies and egg shells

blown across a bald yard, rain pattering

the stinking fine dust, and steam billowing

up from somewhere — a tree

of backlit breath, and Lester’s grindy voice

like the cold of close metal, “Hey, dunghill.

Lookit — you’re blockin’ the view.”

THE LEAVING

There is the rain on the copper

roofs, there is the click-shuff

of red heels on concrete, the voice

of a ruddy-faced neighbor

above, calling after her husband.

In their apartment, the pillows

still sleep-dented and sour

with breath. The headless straws

of aster stalks hang above

the credenza, beside the battered

front door. There are the bridge’s

rust-water icicles, its bands

of moss seaming a forgotten

cobblestone sidewalk. There is

the river in thistle-gray cowlicks,

and the husband above it, deciding.

WINTER INVENTORY

I look out at the river in cakes of ice

sliding violently over one another,

speaking a language remembered

from another of earth’s ages, and almost

understand that speech as human, some

body of absence struggling with itself

under bridge lights. And remember

a winter spent driving a heatless car

with a patchwork quilt thrown over my legs

until more than a ghost of warmth existed

and I was alone on a country road under

a nothing sky with stubbled fields

and telephone poles flashing past

and the sense that if I closed my eyes

I might remain sitting, speeding along,

no car, and soon no road, and perhaps

the trees evaporate and the telephone polls

sink deep into hard earth and nothing

then but myself, and a river far off, and the name

of someone, and still no better understanding.

WATER FROM THE SAME SOURCE

Knuckles stripped

to a skinned goat’s head—

the nearly vacant fingers

of barge workers; when you left

I was wire-jawed

and shut-in from surgery.

Going back out, sinking

into subway tunnels, I was reminded

how easy it is to forget the world

is inhabited mostly by others.

I’ve got three joints

in my shirt pocket, and we’re kicking ash

from our shoes in the pointless

heat, smashing a ditch’s discarded bottles

in the night, so that their wreck

spreads in cinders over the blacktop

like silage spilled into moonlight, like

something you might want.

ELEBADE

When I woke

I felt fine for a minute.

Set the table, saw myself

rise and go. First rise

and stand, holding

the table. Then sit

again. Then go. Start

to go.

Motionless pines

we’d built, stirred.

Blind October

inching up. No wife

raising hell

when she came. Empty

or almost empty beast.

Bull down. Bad heart.

BLIND ATTIS

Her lover was a black bear

whose empty eye-sockets rattled

with pebbles. And though

he should not have existed, she believed

as she believed in stones that fell

from high places. She knew

when he had been with others

because he loped through the pines

and lindens smelling like a mudbound

whale. One night under

the stars strung out behind a haze

of brushfire, he slept clutching

a claw-scratched rosary.

And she climbed, brushing

her stark nakedness along his coarse

length, to the soil-rimmed holes

in his head and found no manic

bestial glow, but the dark

behind cracked lantern slides. And he rose

and like a husband he cut her—

“I will love you more when I am older…

if I let you live,” she breathed

into his pricked ears. Each night

she took a bit more blood

from him, until he woke

under a crooked moon

and reached to maul her crouching

black figure. But she had taken

his paws, and biting, she whispered

into the folds and long darkness

of his ear, “If you return again it will be

through the eyeholes of birds,” for whom

she left the pink jigsaw of his hatcheted

remains steaming in the morning.

SMOKE

I dreamt your childhood wound, softened

in bathwater, had reappeared,

an ochre-blue puncture at the heel—

dimpled star spreading to uneven

points. It held in its shadow

a leaf stem, beetle-brown. I pulled it

from your foot and it brought more leaves

littering the bath. Soon you were

a tub of dogwoods and blackthorns

I gathered and carried out

to the grass between the crocuses

where I stood over you, bit of earth fleeing

into smoke, spelling nothing above the yard.

TIME AWAY

A female cardinal has taken up a limned branch

but her prey has flown inside, with me. Tonight, on the phone

I fought again with my son’s mother. She has become

so used to my cruelty that it is simply questioned

and assessed. I used to surprise myself. A friend reads

a story I’ve written, finding the main character “deplorable.”

There are a lot of things I don’t tell him. Earlier,

I passed the ostensibly intelligent woman with pock-marked

cheeks, who works at the bookstore down the block, who

has lived here her whole life, so whose only remaining

chances are those who move here, or return after

years away. Out back, sheaves of silverweed and Indian pipe

sink and buckle into mud. During grad school there was a string

of suicides in the school library. One jumper from the atrium

fell silently to land at the feet of my student. She told me

about his breathing, was nervous about taking some time away

from classes, and came to ask if that might be okay. “Yeah,”

I said, “that would be okay.” I’ve moved and come back so many

times. By December the backyard will be a moist cushion

of decay, bits of spider, robin, and mouse carcasses. One day,

I’ll pack up what little I own that’s unbroken and move

to Montana. For now, I put off going home — there is

nothing but empty conversation, and the historical moment.

The first time my father got in my face, and for once

I came closer, I turned away only to throw

an antique dresser across the bedroom, before inviting him

to hit me — all he could do was threaten to call the cops, the brittle

embarrassing admonishment of middle-age. I feel sure I won’t

find anyone, now. I’ve settled into that a bit. And I find myself

attracted more and more to pregnant women — I’m familiar

with their bodies — the solid, outsized stomachs, and darkened

nipples, and maybe I think this time I could get it right.

THE CHILDREN, THE GRASS

Here are the children, tall as knee-high grass,

who will climb the mornings into bed with you

to make the day loose and foolish, and the sea

not so far away. They are soft as warts of moss.

And still they are ignorable, which suits.

It is not easy to know how best

to move yourself from one place

to another but they will help.

They rinse your arms, feet and face

with seawater, provide a pocketful of almonds.

UNDERCOVER

The train to Trieste — Schiele, fifteen,

hoisting his sister’s

suitcase onto the rack, a wash

of cold light flushing her face like breath

traveling across

glass. Lost in fog, the windows

would not give their faces back. Her sleeping feet

brush the skin above

his socks, and outside, the honeysuckle

like a pattern of blood repeating itself

around a fence.

Lincoln, depressed, flickering

about the edges of the woods for weeks—

his eyes’ snow-lashed

halo, and his gun — like his uncle Mordecai,

a hermit who kept a dog named Grampus

and hundreds

of pigeons — here are their elaborate houses

with gables and columns, far from the double-bed

above a general store

where Joshua Speed and long Ishmael lie

for four years like brothers. Far from what will swell

and blacken

at Gettysburg. In the glow of low fire on charred brick

sweat-pale Adolf Schiele is laid out,

in a railway

official’s dress uniform, syphilitic, a dagger

at his side. Not burning the family’s stocks

and bonds. Not storming.

Not breaking down the door to a lightless room

that hides Egon and his sister, his first and best

model, simply

developing film. Plaster cast brains, hydrocephalic

skulls, and weight scales — Alphonse Bertillon comes

every workday

to the Laboratoire Anthropologie, to his

father’s skeleton hanging from the wall

like some mobile

of the Pleiades, as if the bones’ equilibrium

could keep him from slipping beyond reach. Young

urchins, three sisters,

sit in Schiele’s studio. They sleep, comb hair,

pick their ears, pull at dresses — the raw mottled

flesh of inconvenient

limbs, bruising, impassive, the vent of ribs beneath

thin skin. John Brown had the eyes of a goat,

and beating

his sons, forced them to strike back

as often as he struck. Brown called his killing

“work,” watching

in the late moonlight while his sons

and others knocked as lost travelers on the nightdoors

of anti-abolition families

and cut their men to pieces — like opening

a seed-bag — while the women slept, the ground alive

where bodies fell, black

scars on dark grass, and when it rained the smell

came into the houses. A child

with the shambling

gait of a circus bear, Clyfford Still’s family

in South Dakota was digging a well and they needed

someone to go down

to see the condition of the pit. It smelled like

the faint decay of overripe almonds—

the way his father

smelled in from the rain, the deep creases of his hands

and coveralls traced with night-crawler soil. “They put

a rope around my ankle,

tied a simple knot, and dropped me down head first.”

APPREHENDED AT A DISTANCE

The colorless lake — buoy bells

in fog; groaning, algaed pylons.

The impractical sand, clouds hanging

in dystrophy. Blue trees below the struts

of a radio telescope. A hare racing

through the tide. Eels dead and alive

sold from back of a truck. A preacher

stumbling over a mastiff, like a little man;

the insinuation of a human on a chain—

the slobbering aperture. A street sweeper

swinging his broom like a scythe. A starling

speaks and goes. Like someone who has a choice.

SNOW IN A BRICK COURTYARD

On a kitchen window’s slate ledge,

a swallow, white chest dusted orange

from the moth in its beak. Across

the courtyard, a black dog perched

atop its house, one ear pricked

to the wind. A rusty nail

sticks up from a sodden

half-buried plank, shocking the snow

with a faint russet pulse. And a child’s

distant croup-cough seems to stir

snow from frost-glazed branches.

Here is the cloud-helmeted sun, and here

is the world smoothed and close

to the eyes, like the gleam of cupped hands

bathing a face above a sink’s darkening basin.

WINTER FEVER

… which even now Jack

was preparing. When he knelt

at the roof’s edge and threw

crushed ice over the yard

it began to snow

all over town, and I saw

milk running in sheets

down a blackboard, children swerving

through the darkness

in their underwear,

and Marcus riding the carousel’s

bearded seal — bending to whisper

into its ear, his long upper lip

flat and sweating.

It was the coldest night

of the year — the cats were in heat.

THE COW

Snagged in a barbed fence, bands of phlegm

at my lips, having already left

flesh on the humming wire, I imagined

myself capable of standing. With hands

like the absent farmer’s — with his vulgar

pride in mediocrity, his waterlogged

pornography, and Great Dane called Hamlet—

instead of these clumsy, mud-clotted hooves.

In work boots — a tattoo of snow in the pattern

of a paddlewheel on my coat — clipping

the farmer and his people above the ankles,

like mallards, from the frozen pond, impaling

them with straightened bedsprings

for posing — their eyes train windows,

blank and daubed with pollen, their bodies thrown

over my shoulder, legs bundled like iris stems.

THE INSOMNIAC

The pig with the black feet is an insomniac.

Long ago kids left a mask filled with leaves

in the yard. Now the insomniac wears it—

leaning his head down, snuffing, it sticks

to his moist snout, and he’s Marlon Brando.

We find hidden, delicately stripped orange

skins, candy wrappers, and shredded letters

that name him, Albert. He’s like a Russian—

enormous, vulnerable, perhaps tragic—

a lover of darkness: snow-capped trashcans,

coal bins, ships’ holds, sinkholes. He wanders

in the nightwoods for days, sending back

sounds like the ripple of radio voices

until it’s not Christmas, just one more day

and he hangs by his slick black feet, unzipped,

the warm wet release lipping his chin.

Never indiscriminate in his passions

he understood being human, the chasm

between the classes, but never condescended,

even when he must have known he’d be eaten

on paper plates with potatoes and a couple of carrots.

WE LIVED ABOVE THE KEY SHOP

When I was a child

father came home

with hands for us. Before,

it was our faces

to the plate — now

we could eat

with ease. Our feet

he smuggled home

just in time for us

to begin school. Imagine

my sister and I,

only a spectral space

between our ankles

and cold linoleum. Eyes

came days later

but those he stole

from the Vietnamese

couple down the street—

they screamed after him

in their language

to bury them

at the seashore with crab claws

and the scales of shad. We saw

that first day of classes,

the walleyed cruelty

of our peers — an overweight

boy strapped in

a Miss Somewhere sash—

and something shrunk

inside of us so small

that sparrows were born

from our faces and blew about

until they crumbled and we

caught them on our tongues

but were always unsatisfied—

it’s hunger we were born with.

CLEAN LINES, DIFFUSE LIGHTING

Sometimes the old man cut

mother’s hair; there were limits even

to his failure. Other times, when

we were in the mood that someone

should pay for what we found

intolerable — field mice, threatening

rain, a shout in the street — he

might even cut himself. He was

so mild he began to snow. It’s all

made quite beautiful now, really,

with clean lines and diffuse lighting.

COMING IN AT NIGHT

He butts her, with bathwater in the divot beneath her nose, this cat

of ours, and washes his face of her, fur curled back

like a moist leaf.

Between thumb and two fingers I rub his ears, as coarse

with dirt as a snail’s etched shell.

And here, because of the closeness

of the night sky, cicadas’ wings seem enormous, sweeping things.

Far from here, seagulls hover above stairs that descend into water.

We have never been so far from shore.

Yesterday, she and I climbed

our house’s forest of rafters to the highest windows to see

how much desert we could see.

Thistle, thistle, black swallowtail,

cottonwood that signals, finally, a creek nearby that we walk out to,

and watch

its bottom-layer of detritus, dusted with mud, waves

upward, loosening memories of cold green hills,

lamps swinging

over them in darkness. The smell of warm bricks and the rain

on them. And on the mill’s dam a shard of broken bottle

flashing, and the black shadow

of our cat rolling by, waiting

for fish heads thrown

into the canal — the creases between my nails and fingers filled

with blood

from the cleaning. Walking in from the porch, she is lying

in bed — like my own hands looked at long enough, she becomes

strange. On the roof the copper vane is tacking in strong wind.

Quiet breathing,

flushed ears, errant hairs thick as wet grass, the webbing

between her forefinger and thumb thin as bleached leaves.

And perhaps later we walk out over the sand, without waking, pounding

out some secret we bury in desert darkness.

WASHING MY OLD MAN

The pads of his palms are cool and mapped

with wet creases like blades of grass. His figure

arranges itself in my head. His is the sleep

of furniture. There were lots of times

I didn’t love him. But it’s been said I look

like him, or a famous director. The French

always say things are the same when

they aren’t, at all. Someone asked him once,

“Which god do you mean?” “Yours,

if you like,” he answered. That he was sometimes

horrible and still lived, that he was

often horrible and somehow we loved him.

HE SPEAKS OF OLD AGE

Eighty, I’m up at eight, bathe

and trifle about until lunch. After,

I have a cup of bourbon and coffee,

It makes my mind race. I’m seeking

help. Do I get breathless when I exercise?

I’d hardly know. I have reached the age

now when my daughter can beat me

at croquet. It took me a long time

to become a human being. I can’t say

I have a lot of hope

for the whole thing. I procrastinate

by answering email. My neighbors

judge me now entirely on the cut

of my coat; but we’re all equally poor

so the verdict is softly given.

Beside my bed the radio plays; I read

Malone muert. My world is fairly floorboardish.

Outside, the drab reiteration

of brickwork, dahlias spring

from a moldering mattress, charred

timber litters the leaf-brindled rainwater.

My favorite room is the kitchen,

though I’ve given up on eating—

I’ve gotten to where I don’t like

to have food in my mouth, and heaven

is the moment after constipation.

I’ve grown not ugly, but entirely

unattractive. Bathing now, my eyes

are drawn to the wide-wrinkled, two-potato

sack at my crotch. Though, you’ll be

happy to know, even now my sex life could

fill more than one wet holiday weekend. Still,

passive as a toilet, I want my God back.

HIS DEMENTIA

Hands clapped flat between

knees I slept as the old man

shuffled through the French doors

and grabbed my shoulder—

rolling over, he slipped his hand

into mine — skin like black cabbage,

the skin of one badly burnt.

He leaned close — eyes green marbles

under ice, and I could see beside

the long darkness of his ear’s tunnel,

a blue sore like a decomposing berry,

and he said that he wanted Houdini

in the Hippodrome with Jennie

the elephant, and his black stack

of scratchy Red Seal albums

for the crank Victrola, and the dunes

and cut & pressed glass ruins

of a coastal town. I let him into bed,

and we listened a long time

to the furnace — I sang Caruso

into his good ear, until he began nodding

and I escaped from my skin leaving it

beside an old, deaf, nearly-blind man,

a palsied pile of nylons, a world of snow.

IN MOURNING

My father was inconsiderate enough

to die. A barrister, he loved

his wig. The criminals liked it too. No one wants

to be sent to prison by someone wearing

a t-shirt. They cut his carotid in autopsy

and asked if we had a scarf he might wear

for the funeral. So he lies in state

like Liberace. The rings won’t fit

the swollen fingers. On his sixtieth

he planted his face in the cake. When

the undertaker isn’t around I run him through

the range of motions — the pulleys

and cranes of his knees still creak. I’ve never

seen god in the face of a sleeping girl

or anywhere else. The old lovely bastard.

NOW AND FOREVER

I’m not wary of myself, or others,

but myself in the presence

of others. It might be safest

to stay home and read. Saturn’s rings

become the cast-iron balcony

of a house seen from everywhere,

on which inhabitants of the planet

take the air in the evening.

None of us is more alone

than another, and still no comfort

in it. I have never clutched anything…

at dusk deliriously. Sunlight

on stones is nothing like laughter

and still there is nearly enough.

FÅRÖ

After Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna

The snag of meeting new people

is that you’re asked to care about them—

nightmares, affairs, surgeries. Outside,

twenty-five sheepbells like wind chimes.

Nail bucket won’t stay on the roof. Boys hung

a small dog from a low branch — it’s cries covered

by gulls. Got the noose knot right. Took him

down live. That night I’m invited to dinner; tie

and black jacket. Swedish gin, discreet charm. Two

women with overbites god-talking, and a job

in a turtleneck. Shadowed interiors before snow-lit

casements. Leave a door ajar and there are

questions. Miss a fellow’s funeral, the bones’ll

never know. Frost-eaten pinecones. Muck-boots

in the green wetwhite goose shit, passing a butchers’

rack: lamb flanks, hog’s heads, a small shack humid

with horse piss and fish. If a rocks glass is thick

enough it makes a good sound when it breaks.

THE KINGHORSE BUTCHERTOWN BRAWL

Fifteen and scared, stabbing

a thick-necked skinhead

in Solovairs and a mule coat—

the quick resistance and crack,

sound like a hoof on gravel. He davened

back on his heels. The dumb, bird-shot

shock of his mouth

and the boggy slot, petering out

a bloody puddle. I rolled my tongue

around in my mouth a second,

then split. After twenty blocks

of cold I stopped

to wipe my hands and felt bad

but not sorry yet.

DAKOTA

They took him

in their car

to the 4400 block

of ____ Avenue,

near the airport,

where they left him

behind a utility

shed. The older

one driving. They

put a plastic bag

over his head

before they shot him

above the left ear. He

must have thought

they were going

to suffocate him.

A POLITE HISTORY

Walking through ice-seamed streets

to a theater, a streetcar full of talking

bodies passed a woman, before a column

of tanks rolling towards the town square

to confront a revolt. The woman

waved at the soldiers, and at that moment

she was tempted for the first time to join

them. It was not that the woman, with her

small breakable nose, tolerated the cruelty

of such a struggle in the hope

that it would bring a prosperous future:

the harshness of the violence was simply

endorsed as a sign of authenticity, three

or four times bigger than an opera.

THE REVOLUTION

The signal was a girl’s raised

gloved hand to her red hair. So, it spread

along the rye fields, through the alfalfa

and dusty roads, to our homes, like birds

barking in the hollows of the hills. We were

rebels; or when generals were killed,

the generals. Sometimes the military

were better rebels. We were the products

of our own ideas: being rough

is a game. Unseen loudspeakers drowned

protest in canned laughter and waltzes. Men

patched wounded women; like pregnancy

it was an unfair competition. Captured

or capturing, condemnation followed

upon execution. What’s lovely about war

is its devotion to thoroughness

and order. It keeps count. At the end

we got down and tasted the forest floor,

holding the place where someone

was before, stood in dead shoes,

understanding the mathematics of it, the finite

sets of odd cardinality, below the pirated

nest of a titmouse and eight pink-white eggs.

DIORAMA — (SCARLET AND LIVER)

There is Mussolini in his tight,

rough-wood coffin,

shirtless on pine shavings. One eye opened. Swollen face

pancaked, his mouth a singed, lipless stretch.

“Despisal of the bourgeois is the beginning of virtue…,” wrote Flaubert.

and wondered why we laugh

at affliction.

Maybe it’s because that thing

that sits with us at breakfast—

that eland — and looks back at us

from the bathroom mirror, and sleeps

even in our coat pockets,

that thing intimate and unfamiliar, a someone

unknown

who we will enter or be entered by, is,

finally.

The miniature American flag waves

from the blue, snow-stranded Bronco’s antenna.

The fascists were hung by their feet — like the crooks and embezzlers

of medieval times—

from the girders of an Esso gas station

in the Piazzale Loreto. A far cry from the Mussolini

who sat in a chair at cocktail parties

holding his thumb out

for women to bite down hard on.

Closer to Goya’s Suerte de Varas

whose arena is littered with gored horses,

and a picador frozen amid a frenzied crowd

who stare at the bull,

its wounded shoulder a bloodburst,

balancing against stupor.

Out of decency

before the crowd in the Piazzale abused the bodies,

Clara Petacci’s skirt was tied tightly around her knees.

My great grandmother’s death

was communicated to me by phone

through an impatient orderly—“Mrs. has expired”—

as if

she were a side of beef

or an embrace between lovers in an English gazebo.

Flaubert also said: “The most beautiful woman isn’t

beautiful at all

on the dissecting table, with her bowels

on her face,

one leg flayed, and an extinct cigar

reposing

on her foot.”

Turn the picture upside down

and the seven hanging fascists

with their arms outstretched

look much like their excited countrymen

screaming for a goal at the Stadio San Siro.

Fritz Haber

whose fertilizers increased the world’s food supply

sevenfold—Brod aus Luft;

whose gasses strangled allied troops in the trenches

of Ypres—Tod aus Luft;

whose wife, soon after, shot herself

in the heart with his service revolver, and the bullet

passing through her

made a sound like the gulls

baying outside.

There are men on the Esso station’s girders, communist partisans,

looking down

the bodies of the hanging dead,

as relaxed as steelworkers arguing baseball,

lighting cigarettes on a single steel beam, seventy stories

above Manhattan

in Ebbets’ Lunch on a Skyscraper. It’s the curling

fingers that give the dead away

as if in reaching for snow

instead they found sandpaper.

SARCLET

A gull with one wing dragging like a banner

humps down the ice-skinned cove. A thinning

man among the raw-boned cows, nostrils wide, salt burn.

Lung-colored water breaks like one hundred doors

slamming, shrinking shingles, and away.

Fat snow butts a fallen gutter. The overlong

cold-droozed grass slips from chapped hands thickening

in the naked wind, falling asleep at the line, sliding

darkly into pockets. As the eyes loosen

their bluish hold on the horizon, killdeer cut

over the dunes — the sky’s market light, the sun kneeling

between clouds in thin complicated continents.

THE MAYOR IN SKY-BLUE SOCKS

Deer herd in the icy fields. The mayor

in sky-blue socks hugs a chestnut,

biting the bark like a cube of sugar

between his teeth, but no tea coming,

just polite hatred, holding the place

where someone else had been, too dumb

even to scream. No one will ever love him

as that cat loved him. In this place night vanishes

men from the world; it’s no safer, nor

more attractive, but it’s improved appreciably.

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

Morning ferry

after a night

of carnations,

a deserved toast.

Now, the rail station

burning. Too much

wind and cigarettes.

Green night

in my hair. Eyes

all over.

A STRAPPING BOY

After Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal

I was the theatre

of a fairyland

restored to life.

When the waltz ended,

the two soldiers

disengaged themselves.

And each of those two

halves of a solemn

and dizzy block

hesitated, and happy

to be escaping

from invisibility,

went off, downcast,

toward some girl

for the next waltz.

ORR’S ISLAND

So small

my neighbor

last autumn. Shadow

lake. Moon half.

Light

save us. Shade

his backlit

outline. His dead

ages. Who’d fail

his girl of sixteen—

his son, Vietnam,

god, reason? He’d

sit out there

in the wind, come

dark. Long dead.

UNEASE

The sun wore out

the mesh of morning

air, wind pitched

among weeds, the hum

of ducks like government

buildings. The swelling

perfectly upholstered

nursing home, the trees

sucking at the heat.

Monkfish on ice above

the slow, slick fluid

at the curb. Cabs go on

moving over the streets

like a fog, as if invisible,

as the beaked policeman

idiotically crosses himself.

COMPORTMENT

From such material it is almost

impossible to create a picture

of life. What was the color

of the travel permit a sergeant

would have needed to get from spring

to fall that year? One strips for oneself,

a kind of masochistic self-inspection

with a scarlet-billed crane outside

the window. A natural celibate,

a kind of anchorite. An event

at the limits. Outside, daylight sits

shining beneath the fog above an island

like water on a rabbit’s ear. The body

is useful, then isn’t. One goes

and sits at the mahogany desk

as if nothing has happened.

CONDENSATION CUBE

After David Alworth’s “Bombsite Specificity.”

The best way to visit Kelvedon Hatch bomb shelter is in the new

Alfa-Romeo. With its four-wheel disc brakes,

luxurious interior and road-holding ability, it’s safe, fast and pleasant

to drive. Just follow the sign: “Secret

Nuclear Bunker.” ’60’s-era mannequins in Burberry with moving legs

and breasts, loitering in corridors. A skinny husband

in the craw of a cold bed, with a snore like a toothache. Tranquil tensions

escalated. With striptease the décor is always

more important than the person disrobing. Whatever chaos reigns above — fallow

fields, the ponds cowering—

life underground is snappy, ordered, austere. A zone of leisure. How war can be

productive; constellating Nixon in the kitchen, celebrating appliances

and amenities. Baked beans, tomato juice, Nescafé, a rational level

of dread. Outside, night’s cold,

object’s cold; no different from a church. Condensation on Plexiglas. Descending

from a slope of debris, children swarm

the ruins. False-feathered cardinals for floral arrangements, pressed

& colored glassware, garden

tools. Typhoid from seashells cleaned improperly. How stupid and forgettable

adults are. To conceive of the world

as a target. Like a cantilevered goldfish. To vie for spots in the only shelter

in the neighborhood. Nowhere else

to go but another part of the airplane. To photograph ourselves as humans; to see

ourselves as bullets and bombs

see us. Children embroidered in a rug like musical instruments abandoned

in a field. Seeing all the different moments

the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains; like soldiers looting a clock

factory. Participant-observers; innocent

nobodies. The incompleteness of the past; the ongoingness of history. Dogs eating grass

beneath the dripping trees; the smell

of a white dress rained on. It is a country which you can imagine, for it is

pretty like a picture, as it lies there

amidst its landscape, like an artisanal snow-globe, which it owns.

NOTES

“Combine” owes a debt to the following:

Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia by Jonathan Brent

Wyatt Prunty’s forward to The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia

John Worthen’s D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider

Peter Hall in “Demolition Man: Harold Pinter and The Homecoming,” by John Lahr, in The New Yorker

“Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry #88,” in The Paris Review, interview by Will Aitken

“Anoosh’s Obituary for Himself, to His Son” features a small detail taken from an apocryphal story of Robert Creeley being served coffee with ice cream in place of cream by Louis Zukofsky.

“Winter Nights” contains a phrase reconfigured from Knut Hamsun’s Pan.

“Hiding Again, in London” owes a debt to:

Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station

“Becoming the Emperor: How Marguerite Yourcenar Reinvented the Past,” by Joan Acocella, in The New Yorker

The Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service, by Alison Light

“Sleeping with Uncle Lester” borrows particulars from David Cone’s Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South.

“Elebade” borrows from Samuel Beckett’s last prose piece, Stirrings Still.

“Undercover” features details from:

Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness

Frank Whitford’s Egon Schiele

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France

David S. Reynolds’ John Brown, Abolitionist

“Unfurling the Hidden Work of a Lifetime,” by Seven Henry Madoff, in The New York Times

“Apprehended at a Distance” owes a debt to Elfriede Jelinek’s Nobel Lecture, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

“Clean Lines, Diffuse Lighting” borrows from E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel.

“He Speaks of Old Age” quotes briefly from:

“Domains: Sir John Mortimer: The Country Barrister,” by Edward Lewine, in The New York Times

Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust

William Feaver’s Lucien Freud

John Berryman quoting from a conversation he had with W.B. Yeats, as appears in “John Berryman, The Art of Poetry #16,” in The Paris Review, interview by Peter A. Stitt

“In Mourning” features detail from “Domains: Sir John Mortimer: The Country Barrister,” by Edward Lewine, in The New York Times.

“Now and Forever” features particulars from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and Maurice Merlea-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.

Fårö is a small Baltic Sea island north of the island of Gotland, off Sweden’s southeastern coast, on which Ingmar Bergman both lived and filmed many of his movies.

“A Polite History” uses specifics from Slavoj Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, and from the Graywolf anthology, New European Poets, edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer.

“The Revolution” borrows from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and “Putin’s Pariah,” by Andrew Meier in The New York Times. It also briefly paraphrases Walter Benjamin’s essay “Central Park,” one of his many writings on Baudelaire.

“Diorama — (Scarlet and Liver)” features detail from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.

Sarclet is a small crofting village near Wick on the eastern coast of the Scottish Highlands.

“Comportment” utilizes specifics from:

Beatrice Hanssen’s writing on Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher in Critique of Violence

Anthony Cronin’s No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien

Saul Friendlander’s Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”

“Condensation Cube” takes its name, and perhaps more, from the art object of the same name by Hans Haacke. It further borrows from:

Jean-luc Godard’s Pierre le Fou

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22

Tom Clark’s poem “Like musical instruments”

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

David Alworth’s “Site Specificity”

The Author

Michael Winters

Adam Day is the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, a PEN Emerging Writers Award, and an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. His work has appeared in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, AGNI, The Iowa Review, Poetry Ireland, Guernica, and elsewhere. He coordinates The Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia, Scotland, and the Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest.

Sarabande Books

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Content

Model of a City in Civil War
Poems by
Adam Day

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BEFORE THE WAR

MODEL OF A CITY IN CIVIL WAR

COMBINE

ANOOSH’S OBITUARY FOR HIMSELF, TO HIS SON

WINTER NIGHTS

HIDING AGAIN IN LONDON

SLEEPING WITH UNCLE LESTER

THE LEAVING

WINTER INVENTORY

WATER FROM THE SAME SOURCE

ELEBADE

BLIND ATTIS

SMOKE

TIME AWAY

THE CHILDREN, THE GRASS

UNDERCOVER

APPREHENDED AT A DISTANCE

SNOW IN A BRICK COURTYARD

WINTER FEVER

THE COW

THE INSOMNIAC

WE LIVED ABOVE THE KEY SHOP

CLEAN LINES, DIFFUSE LIGHTING

COMING IN AT NIGHT

WASHING MY OLD MAN

HE SPEAKS OF OLD AGE

HIS DEMENTIA

IN MOURNING

NOW AND FOREVER

FÅRÖ

THE KINGHORSE BUTCHERTOWN BRAWL

DAKOTA

A POLITE HISTORY

THE REVOLUTION

DIORAMA — (SCARLET AND LIVER)

SARCLET

THE MAYOR IN SKY-BLUE SOCKS

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

A STRAPPING BOY

ORR’S ISLAND

UNEASE

COMPORTMENT

CONDENSATION CUBE

NOTES

The Author

Sarabande Books