Ice

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Auteur

David Keplinger is the author of Ice and Another City. His collections of poems also include The Most Natural Thing, The Prayers of Others, The Clearing, and The Rose Inside. His translations include Carsten René Nielsen’s World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors and House Inspections, a Lannan Translations Selection; his most recent translation is Jan Wagner’s The Art of Topiary. Keplinger’s work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, and The Writer’s Almanac, and has been translated and included in anthologies in China, Germany, Denmark, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Keplinger has received support from the Soros Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Danish Arts Foundation. He has also received the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Colorado Book Award, the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, and the Erksine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Keplinger directs the MFA program at American University in Washington, DC.

Texte du rabat

"Ice is an index of findings from the places most buried by time-in permafrost or in memory-and their brutal excavations"--

Résumé

In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger’s Ice indexes the findings from memory’s slow melt—stories and faces we’ve forgotten, bones hidden in frost.

“I am asking how much more / I have to learn from this,” Keplinger writes. “You are asking that same question.” In these poems, he turns to our predecessors for guidance in picking apart the forces that govern modernity—masculinity, power, knowledge, conquest. Cryptic visitants arrive in the form of Gilgamesh, “searching for a way to stay in pain forever”; a grandmother mending socks, “her face in the dark unchanging”; Emily Dickinson, lingering at her window; a lion cub, asleep in ice for millennia.

With each comes a critique of the Anthropocene, our drive to possess the unpossessable. With each comes also the discovery of what—and who—we’ve harmed in the discovering. Ice shelves collapse. Climate change melts layers of permafrost to reveal a severed wolf’s head. A pair of grease-smudged reading glasses calls up a mother’s phantom. “I am sorry / for the parts you gave me / that I’ve misshapen,” Keplinger writes.

So is there “a point to all this singing”? Our ancestors cannot answer. The wolf’s head can’t, either. But sometimes, “out of the snow of confusion,” *something *answers, “saying gorgeous things like yes.” And the flowers “open up / their small green trumpets anyway.”

Échantillon de lecture

SMALL PINK READING GLASSES

 

American thing,

you are nearly invisible, folded up

like a bowtie, with the grease

of my mother’s nose still impressed

on the plastic nubs. How do you

do, metallic drugstore throwaway

which I have deemed important

to keep, more so than her glazed

Japanese vase I remember as muted,

as gray as the glaucomic curtaining,

which, after several rounds of bows,

she stepped behind.

POSSESS

 

Just when the rain opened up, just

now when I heard it like radio static

getting louder on the roof I thought

of how the confusions will be all

I may remember of my life, a few moments of bewilderment

in which I knew what being wild

meant, mounting to the volta, the bolt of

lightning and of how I found my father’s

navy yearbook among his best things

in the closet and opening it to a page

at random I saw he had circled in red

the word possess and wondered did he

think it was misspelled, or did he want

me to know his mind was taken

at the end and his body and it was not him

saying and doing and doing and saying

things. Or did he mean it as command

to possess myself as I have not come

to do or did he mean something else

I do not understand yet, the red circle

in an oval around the egg of light and

the word all soft bones inside.

ASSEMBLING THE BONES INTO THE BODY OF THE SAINT

 

At every visit it was snowing on the dead lakes

at the home of the mystic Roche de Coppens

a saint a very large man who’d broken his back

on a motorcycle and claimed to have healed himself

by some invention

he called prayer

 

I believed him I saw it myself he could walk and often

stood and stretched out his arms in a yawn

that’s how he mounted the bones

that’s how he healed himself continually daily repeating

but when I read the notes later I could not understand

my own words

 

Roche de Coppens I ask the hieroglyphic notebook

I ask the silence today is there a point to all this singing 

are you there are you still there and right away in my head

out of the snow of confusion there comes some equally

baffling answer in the voice of a large man yawning saying

gorgeous things

like yes

Contenu

I.

Ice 3
The Puppet Tiger That Masculinity Is 5
Canto 6
Almost 7
Near Yakutia 9
My Mother Remembers What Happened 10
Rocker 11
Irises 12
Lemming of the Ice Age 13
Ice Moons 14
Sketch of Wings in Gorham’s Cave 16
The Conger Ice Shelf Has Collapsed 18
Spartak the Lion Cub Lives under the Permafrost 20
Come and See 21
Traveling 23
At Osip Mandelstam’s Memorial Statue in Voronezh 24
Two Horses in a Field 25
The Ice Age Wolf That Love Is 26

II.

Chameleon 31
The Future of Desire 32
The North 34
Mirror, on the Night of Your Passing 36
American History in Místek 39
What It Could Be Like . . . 40
Adages for Dragons 41
Elation 42
Pomade 43
Small Pink Reading Glasses 44
Memory, a Snowfall 45
My Mother Reading Dickinson at the End 47
Erosion 49
Possess 51
American Thanksgiving in Místek 52
The Oar 53
The Fifteen-Year-Old Dog Surrender Is 57
Driving through Kansas at Night 58 Emerson 59

III.

Reading the Light Surrounding the Lark 63
Reading Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts 66
Reading Gilgamesh before Going to Sleep 67
Reading the Buffalo’s Face 68
Reading Jake’s Poems at the Southernmost Point 69
At the Museum of the Scalpel and the Ear Horn 70
Assembling the Bones into the Body of the Saint 73
At the Museum of Supernatural History 74
Reading James Wright in Martins Ferry, Ohio 75
Ghazal 77
Reading Light 78
A Hollyhock That Once Belonged to Stanley Kunitz 80
The Last Reader of the Poems 81
The Long Answer 82
Is 85
Sonnet 87

Notes *89
*Acknowledgments 91