Louise in Love

by Bang, Mary Jo

• ISBN13: 9780802137609
• ISBN10: 0802137601
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-12-14
• Publisher: Grove Press

Summary

In this stunning new collection of poems, Mary Jo Bang jettisons the reader into the dreamlike world of Louise, a woman in love. With language delicate, smooth, and wryly funny, Louise is on a voyage without destination, traveling with a cast of enigmatic others, including her lover, Ham. Louise is as musical as she is mysterious and the reader is invited to listen. In her world, anything goes, provided it is breathtaking. Bang, whose first collection was the prize-winning Apology for Want, both parodies and pays homage to the lyric tradition, borrowing its lush music and dramatic structure to give new voice to the old concerns of the late Romantic poets. Louise in Love is a dramatic postmodern verse-novel with an eloquent free-floating narration. The poems, rife with literary allusion, take journeys to distant lands. And, like anyone on a voyage without a destination, they are endlessly questioning of the enigmatic world around them.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Eclipsed	3	(1)
She Couldn't Sing At All, At All	4	(1)
The Dog Bark	5	(1)
Belle Vue	6	(2)
The Star's Whole Secret	8	(1)
Kiss, Kiss, Said Louise, By Way of A Pay Phone	9	(2)
The Diary of A Lost Girl	11	(1)
The ANA of Bliss	12	(2)
A Cake of Nineteen Slices	14	(1)
Louise	15	(1)
Like A Fire in A Fire	16	(1)
Does Mrs. Hunt Tear Linen Straight As Ever?	17	(1)
Time Speeds, Said Louise, When A Fever Rises	18	(1)
Louise in Love	19	(2)
Oh, Dear, What Can The Matter Be	21	(1)
That Was All, Louise Said, Except For	22	(1)
And No Sign Will Mark The Midpoint's Passing	23	(2)
She Loved Falling	25	(2)
To Savor The Sequel	27	(2)
Too Late, Louise Said, Means	29	(2)
Here's A Fine Word: Prettiplease	31	(1)
You Could Say She Was Willful, But Compared to What?	32	(2)
The Penguin Chiaroscuro	34	(2)
The Medicinal Cotton Clouds Come Down to Cover Them	36	(1)
The Story of Small Cars	37	(1)
Lexicon Louise	38	(2)
Louise Sighs, Such A Long Winter, This	40	(2)
Travel is Easy by Train	42	(2)
A Portrait of Love	44	(2)
The Raven Feeds Reynard	46	(1)
What Is A Mouth?	47	(1)
Night Falling Fast	48	(2)
Dark Smudged The Path Untrammeled	50	(2)
A Hurricranium, He Said	52	(2)
Captivity	54	(1)
They Chirp, They Whistle, And Words	55	(2)
Inconsequent Moment	57	(2)
Etched, Tetched, Touched	59	(2)
In The Quieter Aftermath	61	(1)
On to The Onslaught: A Little Millennial Dirge	62	(2)
Ritual Gestures	64	(1)
So This	65	(1)
The Still Knife Still Suspended	66	(1)
Lydia's Suite: One Without Has Two Or Three Within	67	(7)
O Dejection	67	(1)
To Retain the Arrangement	68	(1)
She Went Out Into The Clear Coast	69	(1)
Exquisite Corpse	70	(1)
Night and Nail	71	(2)
Enchained	73	(1)
Raptured	74	(3)
Ham Paints A Picture to Illustrate an Early Lesson: O Trauma!	77	(2)
Interrupted Briefly by A Borrowed Phrase, The Scene Proceeds	79	(2)
They Were That And Then	81

Excerpts

Chapter One

ECLIPSED

The crimped beige of a book, turned-down corner.

The way an eclipse begins with the moon

denting the sun's liquid disk, taking a first bit

then more and more and. Leaving a regal rim, a dim

spared portion, a shiver. How cold she was

as the cloud covered the cuckoo-land,

birds batting the tree fringe. Fitful caprice.

Foolish, yes, they were, those birds, but clever too.

A nostrum of patterning rain had fallen

beforehand ceding the hibiscus buds bundled

and in disarray. In the news p. Nostradamic foretelling

of retinal damage written in novelese.

Wasn't the skeptic invented to nourish an interest in science?

Yes. The puma swallows the sun, only to spit it back out.

Diaphragmatic heaving. Base emetic act.

The puky little sun glowing to a glare. Puissance.

One's own right hand teaching one to look, to see, to leap

upon some notional premise.

Louise placed the next-to-night glasses on the table.

It is, she said, so over. But it wasn't.

Specters they would be

rooted eighty-two years in the same spot waiting

for another and then an offhand remark and one by one

(which is the way death takes us, he said)

they took their shadows

and went out of the garden and into the house.

SHE COULDN'T SING AT ALL, AT ALL

Louise said. No subtle cadences capturing birdnote

nor the melancholic "My Love

Is in a Light Attire." She could speak well enough

but to sing was to vivisect the ear's dear pleasure desired.

Ham suggested canasta

or a hike to a hillock. The other reminded

no night-over camping--Lydia was soundly allergic to that.

Charles Gordon proposed

a boat ride to a big, big lake and a stroll

in the Parc d'Avenir. They heard an April angelus tolling its sixes,

a sure sign that the winter demon was down.

It was now a matter of waiting

for the haughty naughty beguilement of warmth.

They were standing on the balcony when

Louise was tossed not a rose or two with flayed edges

but an entire bouquet of hibiscus (a horde of bishops

huddling at the heart of each). Below them, a boy sweeping--

sheep, sheep, sheep --looked up

and souffled Lydia a kiss. Oh, it would be a good day, wontn't it?

Life flung riverward and on and on

the baby boat floating, spinning in the hope current,

someone singing "Sometimes a bun, sometimes only a

    biscuit."

THE DOG BARK

Louise peered into the corner of the cabinet

of fossilized delights: mandragon manikin, a dried mermaid,

assorted dog barks of crass appetites.

It was six and dark early. Don't forget numbers, Ham said,

are only examples: one and two with their sterile marriage,

three with its tattooed face. That year the gifts were lustrous:

a bear with the head of a horse, small nipples, flowers

in its ears. Louise said, Who doesn't love

the sound of scissor snips and free-for-all terms of endearment?

The dog, they named Lucky

To Be Alive, and refused to let it be altered.

BELLE VUE

Gorgeous that pillar, that post--both spiraled

with lashes of laurel. And between the two, four

couples fashioned past fumble.

The party wanted the night

sand to swallow their prints so they drove to the beach.

Back home, the filament blinked in the lamp

by which Louise sat reading a book about sleep.

Six knobs controlled the night but the day,

the day, she read, was rudderless,

an eggbreak knowing no bounds but becoming

an edgeless eye fluttering open at the sound of a siren,

a peony shaken--each petal a shower of instant truths.

Wake up. One wanted to hear

the sky--a river turned sidewise.

The wrist's tiny veinlets sunk

while gravity's gooseherd gathered the minion

capillaries. Wake up, wake up. The filament flickered again,

a forecast for certain. Sunrise would be

...

riddled with sound. At irregular intervals, rain.

The same letters one day would read

Charlotte; Charcot, the next; and then

charcuterie. Coincidence.

A grid over every window erased by the lack

of light.

In the everworld of art, even the lettuces' red leaves

stayed suspended between dissolves. Eye and idea, a rope

at the waist. She was held--

not by the text, but by the pretty pictures.

THE STAR'S WHOLE SECRET

Did she drink tea? Yes, please. And after,

the halo of a glass gone.

A taxi appeared out of elsewhere.

Five constellations, Louise said,

but only two bright stars among them. Soon, Ham said,

the whale will reach the knot of the fisherman's net;

the moon will have its face in the water.

And we'll all feel the fury of having been used

up in maelstrom and splendor.

Mother did say, Louise said, try to be popular,

pretty, and charming. Try to make others

feel clever. Without fear, what are we?

the other asked. The will, said Louise. The mill moth

and the lavish wick, breathless in the remnant

of a fire.

KISS, KISS, SAID LOUISE,

BY WAY OF A PAY PHONE

To the other who'd been left behind.

The city was unlucky in cloudy and chance of.

Routing the enemy, following a route.

What does it mean, Mary Louise,

that the mall in Midcreek will open in May?

They were getting away

to nature, conveyance as a form of diffidence.

Every avenue, said Ham, still ends at perception.

There is a point, said Louise, when one will act or won't

even know what she's missed.

She was wearing a wig and suit of blue serge

and looked somewhat like that section

of a symphony written in the alphabet soup

of C and B-neath. The road was a ribbon

on the bright canyon bed. Clever twin, said Louise,

to those who know how to follow

a scheme that avoids the end of the senses

before there can be a begun. She saw: a blue car leaving

...

at three; a blue car returning at four; an odd-looking man

leaning against an ornamental Japanese pine.

They stopped at the house on the top of the hill,

lit like a candle-house cake. I hope, Ham said,

there's a fire station deep in this forest.

Forest? What forest? she said.

Don't you see--

it's a fantastic sea where nothing but nothing can save us.

THE DIARY OF A LOST GIRL

Four diphtheria deaths, then fire, now five named lakes

with tranquil looks. Yet rampantly mad.

A lunatic shriek from a ruffian

child. One oar wrestled a mob of shore fringe, another,

the wet underbirth. And madness,

was it afflicted by demons? Or stricken of God? Or vision,

thrown on an empty mirror, and there you were?

Later, upstairs--the lakes packed away

in pearly cases, the coppery spin of a high skyward

arrayed against a leaded window--the chiasmic

question recurred. She recalled shy little lessons

from a girl named Renee on the unattainable freedoms

of the flesh. In the dining room, they would crumple

over the table like paper angels

if anyone raised an eyebrow.

Otherwise, they leaned against scenery--looking down

at their Bonniedale shoes

as if they were in love with nothing else.

Copyright © 2001 Mary Jo Bang. All rights reserved.