Supernatural Love Poems 1976-1992

by Schnackenberg, Gjertrud

• ISBN13: 9780374527549
• ISBN10: 0374527547
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-10-16
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

The poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg, whom William Logan once called "the most talented American poet under the age of forty," published her first book of poems in 1982. She has since become one of our most respected authors of verse. Schnackenberg's first three books, collected in Supernatural Love, show the thrilling evolution of a unique voice in today's letters. From an early mastery in which precision and heartbreak are inseparable, her poetry accelerates book by book through the searching, dense, and metaphysical imagery--as well as the cascading syntax--which have become her signature. Whether we are witnessing her classic portrait of Darwin in his last year or discovering the vertiginous brillance of her elegy for the Byzantine monuments of Ravenna, we find in Schnackenberg gemlike poems offered as visionary documents, unmistakable in their glittering range and passion--and never the same twice.

Author Biography

Gertrud Schnackenberg was born in Tacoma, Washington. She graduated from Mount Holyoke, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from that college in 1985. She has also received the Lavan Younger Poets Award (judged by Robert Fitzgerald) from the Academy of American Poets, and the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Table of Contents

Portraits and Elegies	1	(3)
Laughing with One Eye	3	(22)
Nightfishing	5	(2)
Intermezzo	7	(2)
Walking Home	9	(1)
A Dream	10	(1)
Bavaria	11	(3)
The Bicyclist	14	(1)
A Dream	15	(1)
Returning North	16	(3)
Rome	19	(1)
Winter Apples	20	(1)
A Dream	21	(1)
``There are no dead''	22	(3)
Darwin in 1881	25	(8)
19 Hadley Street	33	(24)
Dusting	35	(1)
Elizabeth and Eben, 1960	36	(2)
Elizabeth and Eben, 1940	38	(2)
Summer Evening	40	(1)
Elizabeth, 1905	41	(1)
The Picnic, 1895	42	(1)
Thanksgiving Day Downstairs, 1858	43	(1)
Thanksgiving Day Upstairs, 1858	44	(1)
The Living Room	45	(2)
The End of the World, 1843	47	(2)
Halloween	49	(1)
Samuel Judd, 1820	50	(1)
The Paperweight	51	(1)
The Parsonage, 1785	52	(2)
The Meeting in the Kitchen, 1740	54	(1)
Ebenezer Marsh, 1725	55	(2)
THE LAMPLIT ANSWER	57	(76)
Kremlin of Smoke	61	(10)
The Self-Portrait of Ivan Generalic	71	(2)
Signs	73	(1)
Two Tales of Clumsy	74	(7)
Imaginary Prisons	81	(20)
Complaint	101	(1)
Sonata	102	(9)
Paper Cities	111	(7)
Snow Melting	118	(3)
The Heavenly Feast	121	(5)
Advent Calendar	126	(3)
Supernatural Love	129	(4)
A GILDED LAPSE OF TIME	133	(4)
PART ONE: A Gilded Lapse of Time	137	(40)
PART TWO. Crux of Radiance	177	(50)
Annunciation	179	(9)
Soldier Asleep at the Tomb	188	(9)
Angels Grieving over the Dead Christ	197	(6)
Christ Dead	203	(6)
Tiberius Learns of the Resurrection	209	(8)
The Resurrection	217	(4)
The Dream of Constantine	221	(6)
PART THREE. A Monument in Utopia	227	(36)
Notes	263	(12)
Index of Titles	275	(2)
Index of First Lines	277

Excerpts

Excerpt

1. NIGHTFISHING

The kitchen's old-fashioned planter's clock portrays

A smiling moon as it dips down below

Two hemispheres, stars numberless as days,

And peas, tomatoes, onions, as they grow

Under that happy sky; but though the sands

Of time put on this vegetable disguise,

The clock covers its face with long, thin hands.

Another smiling moon begins to rise.

We drift in the small rowboat an hour before

Morning begins, the lake weeds grown so long

They touch the surface, tangling in an oar.

You've brought coffee, cigars, and me along.

You sit still, like a monument in a hall,

Watching for trout. A bat slices the air

Near us, I shriek, you look at me, that's all,

One long sobering look, a smile everywhere

But on your mouth. The mighty hills shriek back.

You turn back to the hake, chuckle, and clamp

Your teeth on your cigar. We watch the black

Water together. Our tennis shoes are damp.

Something moves on your thoughtful face, recedes.

Here, for the first time ever, I see how,

Just as a fish lurks deep in water weeds,

A thought of death will lurk deep down, will show

One eye, then quietly disappear in you.

It's time to go. Above the hills I see

The faint moon slowly dipping out of view,

Sea of Tranquillity, Sea of Serenity,

Ocean of Storms... You start to row, the boat

Skimming the lake where light begins to spread.

You stop the oars, midair. We twirl and float.

I'm in the kitchen. You are three days dead.

A smiling moon rises on fertile ground,

White stars and vegetables. The sky is blue.

Clock hands sweep by it all, they twirl around,

Pushing me, oarless, from the shore of you.

2. INTERMERZZO

Steinway in German script above the keys,

Letters like dragons curling stiff gold tails,

Gold letters, ivory keys, the black wood cracked

By years of sunlight, into dragon scales.

Your music breathed its fire into the room.

We'd hear jazz sprouting thistles of desire,

Or jazz like the cat's cry from beneath

The passing tire, when you played the piano

Afternoons; or "Au Clair de la Lune."

Scarlatti's passages fluttered like pages.

Sometimes you turned to Brahms, a depth, more true,

You studied him to find out how he turned

Your life into a memory for you.

In Number 6 of Opus 118,

Such brief directions, Andante, sotto voce :

The opening notes like single water drops

Each with an oceanic undertow

That pulled you deeper even as you surfaced

Hundreds of miles from where the first note drew

You in, and made your life a memory,

Something that happened long ago to you.

And through that Intermezzo you could see

As through a two-way mirror, until it seemed

You looked back at your life as at a room,

And saw those images that would compose

Your fraction of eternity, the hallway

In its absolute repose, the half-lit room,

The drapes at evening holding the scent of heat,

The marble long-lost under the piano,

A planet, secretive, cloud-wrapped, and blue,

Silent and gorgeous by your foot, making

A god lost in reflection, a god of you.

3. WALKING HOME

Walking home from school one afternoon,

Slightly abstracted, what were you thinking of?

Turks in Vienna? Luther on Christian love?

Or were you with Van Gogh beneath the moon

With candles in his hatband, painting stars

Like singed hairs spinning in a candle flame?

Or giant maps where men take, lose, reclaim

Whole continents with pins? Or burning cars

And watchtowers and army-censored news

In Chile, in the Philippines, in Greece,

Colonels running the universities,

Assassinations, executions, coups--

You walked, and overhead some pipsqueak bird

Flew by and dropped a lot of something that

Splattered, right on the good professor, splat.

Now, on the ancient Rhine, so Herod heard,

The old Germanic chieftains always read

Such droppings as good luck: opening the door,

You bowed to improve my view of what you wore,

So luckily, there on the center of your head.

Man is not a god, that's what you said

After your heart gave out, to comfort me

Who came to comfort you but sobbed to see

Your heartbeat zigzagging on a TV overhead.

You knew the world was in a mess, and so,

By God, were you; and yet I never knew

A man who loved the world as much as you,

And that love was the last thing to let go.

4. A DREAM

Death makes of your abandoned face

A secret house an empty place

And I come back wanting that much

To ask you to come back I touch

The door where are you it's so black

The taste of smoke is smoke I back

Away when creeping lines of fire

Appear and travel faster higher

Where are you and beneath the floor

God turns the gas jets up they soar

The way flames soar and I should run

And blackness burning like the sun

All empty underneath my hair

I start to chuckle where oh where

My brimming eyes don't understand

I press my grin against my hand

(Continues...)

Copyright © 2000 Gjertrud Schnackenberg. All rights reserved.