Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing
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About this ebook
A starred review in Library Journal says this about Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing: Only a poet as accomplished as Boruch could make such beautiful verse while leading us through the everyday, of life’s subtle, steady shiftings (the bird’s hunger, seeking shape’). If the opening image of a pool filled with cruelly dredged up roses bespeaks quiet assent (I stood before them the way an animal/ accepts sun’), the next poem turns immediately to progress (and hence progression) as a modern invention beyond the heaven-and-hell alternatives; finally, the poet concedes, I lose track of my transitions.’ In fact, transition defines us. Here, a static painting gives way to between and among,’ a simple typeface never yields a perfect copy, and even in a medieval score, two exquisite quavers are connected by a slur. Highly recommended.”
"Marianne Boruch's work has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: She sees and considers with intensity."The Washington Post
"Boruch refuses to see more than there is in thingsbut her patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler's sense of facet and flaw."Poetry
In her tenth volume of poetry, Marianne Boruch displays a historical omnipresence, as she converses with Dickinson, envisions Turner painting, and empathizes with Arthur Conan Doyle. She looks unabashedly at the brutality of recent history, from drone warfare to the disaster in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. Poems that turn her gaze towards childhood, nature, animals, and her own poetics are patches of light in the collection's chiaroscuro.
From "Before and Every After":
Eventually one dreams the real thing.
The cave as it was, what we paid to straddle
a skinny box-turned-seat down the middle, narrow boat
made special for the state park, the wet, the tricky
passing into rock and underground river.
A single row of strangers faced front, each of us
behind another close
as dominoes to fall or we were angels lined up
politely, pre-flight
Marianne Boruch is the author of ten collections of poetry. She is the 2013 recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and has taught at Purdue University since the inception of their MFA program. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Marianne Boruch
Marianne Boruch is the author of five poetry collections and the essay collection Poetry’s Old Air. She has published poems and essays widely in the Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Nation, and other magazines. She teaches in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and in the Department of English at Purdue University, and lives in Purdue, Indiana.
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Book preview
Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing - Marianne Boruch
I
Progress
These gargoyles can’t get enough of the view
stuck to their cornice, ratcheting out
open-mouthed as some
desert hermit on his pillar, fifth century.
Such a vision, probably horrific. The gargoyles
take it straight to the river
over giant trees. A kingdom. If there is
a river. Or a kingdom. If I walk that direction —
how a lock knows its key, how the key’s
little nicks and bites code fate: not unlatch but
continue, not release but come through.
Because it’s ancient: there is
no progress, only a deepening. Or not even that.
I heard progress is a modern invention, post–
bubonic plague. Right up to the airplane, the double sink
and running water, earlier
the milking stool, and monogamy in some places.
But Dante leapt
at it, his Purgatorio, thanks to before, when —
wasn’t it simple? Just heaven
or hell, friend. Sorry.
Thumbs up or down. Perfect weather or it’s endless
awfulness.
How does it work, this new
Purgatory business, Dante didn’t ask exactly
but dreamt first. Fabled searing
second chance lodged in the brain’s ever-after
means to be left, reimagine, watch
whole bits burn off. Memory
needs sorrow. Even stone at its most
mend-and-loss molecular level moves, and the hard
secret parts of us know that: tooth, skull,
envy, the stubborn vertebrae, guilt worn down by
exhaustion, by despair you walk with,
and long enough. Like a month. Like years.
It’s never simple. I learned what happened: gutters
replaced gargoyles. Those creatures sick of
siphoning rain off the roof with their long throats
stayed to scare evil out of the world, to be
merely beautiful and grotesque up there. Or they caution
back to us from the future, frozen
medievals, high-wire beings not of this earth
stretched, stunned to bone-limit, made possible again
by what they cannot bear to see. Now. Which is
lifetimes ago. I lose track of my transitions.
The Painting
Two brush-stroked boats, so-so weather, more detail
forward than aft, heavy
on shaded bits as
simple reflection, the mast dropping in water blurred.
Blur it more, gloom it up, says the teacher.
Use a rag and something stingy.
To look and look, is all.
Salt, fish air at dawn, turpentine. Or evening, that one.
To remember the past as
this painting remembers — beautiful, a little dull.
And maybe it was.
In fact, water can turn out demanding. Not staying put,
too much at odds in that glitter.
And people expect a quiet thing to hang on a wall
to forget their own noise.
That old guy bumming cigarettes for real
looked the part of another century, the ancient fisherman
contentedly mending nets in a time
with time to retie knots. So we
like to believe. And some would
sketch him right in, work him over like an afterthought,
historical. Better yet, to comment
ironic or just short of it. With him, without,
finally the worn reliable straightforward
sea, harbor, dream. Also this
for the record — three, not two boats. And those
warehouses weren’t pink, didn’t
watery-ache like the shadow they cast.
To be an artist, the best part — you, you’re in
and then it’s the same
but you’re not the same. Smoke
from a factory on the other side, a small one
but billowing soot and ash anytime, a bad idea.
Or a good one, meaning
world. Which could threaten. Or end.
Go for a larger, darker resonance. The teacher
saying so says
never an extra boat either.
I heard things once, blurring out of sleep
or some other elsewhere to
none of us the same. The same what?
After. As in, between and among now
for a long time.
The Breathing
Think back with a shovel, bend,
do that.
Who’s breathing through these tubes now?
So this is how you
plant trees in Scotland all afternoon.
We take instruction. The translucence
of it. Each plastic cylinder the exact shade of
a stem tall and suddenly wide, slipped
over sapling after sapling
sunk into earth, tied, staked against wind.
The mallet comes down.
January. A wee walk, we’re told,
to get here. Fields this old,
the lives that lived. To ask anything
is to lose the question —
Hills plus sheep plus cold. Air like wet gauze
but sun, a bright accident.
Still: who’s breathing through these tubes now.
I see plain enough, upright
nether-vents, their cool green
so many rows made
in the making. Barely trees at all
hidden, each incandescence.
It’s the shovel, abrupt.
It’s the fierce
stopped, to fierce again
the suck, the lift up
to go deep
a stunned thing.
It must draw them, the dead.
Both the violence and the ceasing must
remind them.
Because haven’t they come
to lie here, their half-light just visible under
old stalks and grass. Dusk, with its
new dead and old dead…
And true, isn’t it — that
we’ve pleasured them. True that our
hammering in breath
is another breath.
Not that I love you, the mouths they had