Second Empire Read online

  © 2015 by Richie Hofmann

  All rights reserved

  Alice James Books are published by Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc.,

  an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington.

  Alice James Books

  114 Prescott Street

  Farmington, ME 04938

  www.alicejamesbooks.org

  eISBN: 978-1-938584-30-5

  Cover Art: Fernando Vicente - Serie Atlas - Grito, www.fernandovicente.es

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Alice James Books encourages you to calibrate your e-reader device settings using the line of characters below as a guide, which optimizes the line length and character size:

  You wait out this tempest in the Windsor chair, away from the windows.

  Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. Doing this will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accomodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems may be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the line break will be marked with a shallow indent.

  Contents

  • Title Page

  • Copyright

  SEA INTERLUDE: DAWN

  I

  Idyll

  Three Cranes

  Egyptian Bowl with Figs

  Capriccio

  Imperium

  Illustration from Parsifal

  First Night in Stonington

  Fresco

  SEA INTERLUDE: PASSACAGLIA

  II

  Allegory

  At the Palais Garnier

  Scene from Caravaggio

  Mirror

  Antique Book

  Description

  Amor Vincit Omnia

  October 29, 2012

  Keys to the City

  SEA INTERLUDE: STORM

  III

  Bright Walls

  Erotic Archive

  The Harbor

  Purple

  The Ships

  Braying

  Fly

  Second Empire

  Night Ferry

  SEA INTERLUDE: MOONLIGHT

  IV

  The Surround

  Abendlied

  Midwinter

  The Gates

  Gatekeeper

  Egyptian Cotton

  After

  Imperial City

  • Notes

  • About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank the editors of the following publications:

  32 Poems: “Bright Walls” (as “Untitled”), “Fly”

  The Adroit Journal: “Midwinter”

  The Common: “The Harbor”

  Cosmonauts Avenue: “The Gates”

  Denver Quarterly: “Antique Book” (as “Song”)

  Devil’s Lake: “Scene from Caravaggio”

  FIELD: “Imperium,” “Abendlied”

  Gulf Coast: “Description,” “The Surround,” “Gatekeeper”

  Harvard Divinity Bulletin: “Capriccio”

  Indiana Review: “Sea Interlude: Storm”

  Lambda Literary Review: “At the Palais Garnier,” “Egyptian Cotton”

  Maggy: “Purple”

  The Massachusetts Review: “Amor Vincit Omnia”

  The Missouri Review: “Sea Interlude: Dawn,” “Sea Interlude: Passacaglia,”

  “Sea Interlude: Moonlight”

  The New Criterion: “Illustration from Parsifal,” “Mirror”

  New England Review: “Night Ferry”

  The New Republic: “October 29, 2012”

  The New Yorker: “Idyll”

  The Paris-American: “Allegory”

  Ploughshares: “After”

  Poetry: “Fresco,” “Keys to the City,” “Imperial City”

  Poetry Northwest: “The Ships”

  Shenandoah: “Braying”

  The Southern Review: “Egyptian Bowl with Figs”

  Southwest Review: “First Night in Stonington”

  Tin House Online: “Second Empire”

  The Yale Review: “Three Cranes”

  “Fresco” was reprinted in T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

  “Braying” was reprinted on Poetry Daily.

  “Midwinter” was reprinted on Best of the Net 2014.

  “After” was reprinted in Best New Poets 2014, edited by Dorianne Laux and Jazzy Danziger.

  For generous financial and artistic support, the author thanks the Poetry Foundation, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, the James Merrill House, the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College, West Chester University Poetry Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. For encouragement, thank you to Natasha Trethewey, Mary Jo Salter, Emily Leithauser, Jacques J. Rancourt, Tarfia Faizullah, Lisa Hiton, and especially Kara van de Graaf. Thank you, Ryan Hagerty. Thank you, family.

  This book is for Ryan.

  SEA INTERLUDE: DAWN

  Smoke-green mist leans into the rocks,

  where fishermen whistle and mend their nets,

  practicing rituals of brotherhood

  before the luster of sky and sun,

  which flashes against the pale horizon

  with the oily turbulence of a swarm

  of herring. Above, the familiar gulls

  shriek the news of the world.

  The ocean gurgles a dead language.

  Standing at the water’s edge, I watch myself

  loosen into a brief, exquisite blur,

  like Antinoüs, nearly naked in the cold,

  in the morning gone adrift, turning away from love

  toward what he knows, even then, is loss.

  IDYLL

  Cicadas bury themselves in small mouths

  of the tree’s hollow, lie against the bark-tongues like amulets,

  though I am praying I might shake off this skin and be raised

  from the ground again. I have nothing

  to confess. I don’t yet know that I possess

  a body built for love. When the wind grazes

  its way toward something colder,

  you too will be changed. One life abrades

  another, rough cloth, expostulation.

  When I open my mouth, I am like an insect undressing itself.

  THREE CRANES

  1.

  Wading low through marsh and grass,

  quick and cautious, the crane, too,

  knows this: there is a freedom

  in submitting to another. Cranes mate

  for life. With necks outstretched,

  they take flight, a double arrow’s stab

  of silver, released and then gone.

  I have searched for nourishment

  in you, like a long, black beak

  in the earth. How was I to know

  what I would find there? Every night,

  we shrieked our presence to each other,

  desire or grief lacquering us onto our lives

  like birds on a paneled screen.

  2.

  All winter long, the men built

  another bridge, stacking slabs of metal

  and concrete near the barrier island

  where we lived. I was worried we had fallen

  from each other. Silent on the beach,

  we watched machines hoisted on and off

  the earth. Standing one-legged in the marsh:

  a crane, all steel and orange light,

  binding the horizon.

  What will becom
e of us? I almost said.

  Gulls wove in and out of the cables,

  shrieking up and down within the stacks,

  in unison, I noticed, with our breath.

  It almost looked like a living thing.

  3.

  Lying on my stomach, reading

  Crane’s letters again, I felt a hand

  behind me. Orange light pressed

  the window. The hand that touched

  my shoulder was yours (“I know now

  there is such a thing as indestructibility”).

  Your confessor, I listened for your breath

  (“the cables enclosing us and pulling

  us upward”), but felt only the ceiling fan,

  and traffic, somewhere, chafing against

  a wet street. Then, your lips on my neck

  (“I think the sea has thrown itself upon me

  and been answered”) before I closed the book

  and turned my body under yours.

  EGYPTIAN BOWL WITH FIGS

  In the Egyptian gallery: dried fruit left in a bowl,

  as if time and beetles and a dead king

  had chewed around them,

  picked the fig flesh

  from his teeth, wiped clean his gaudy, painted lips,

  before his body was brushed with resin, a ball

  of linen lodged in his mouth, in his rectum;

  before a hairless priest pulled the brain out through the nose

  with a hook.

  So much history is painted in gold

  on a golden door, the rest carried off in the floodplain,

  or covered with earth, dropped in ceremonial jars

  with the dead king’s brain,

  or into bowls of clay

  and sycamore, like this one, which held me

  for an hour, wondering how long a handful of figs

  could nourish a man, myth-like.

  But I am young.

  My hair is the color of antique coins. No one I’ve loved

  has died. How can I know or say what hunger is?

  CAPRICCIO

  From the leafy, walled-in courtyard beside the house,

  where fountain water trickled

  from a river-god’s mouth

  into the unseasonable heat of that afternoon, we watched

  the heavy bees, clumsy in their flight, humming

  against the bricks and orange tree blossoms.

  Everywhere we walked, you would point out how the Japanese

  honeysuckle clung

  to the walls and fences.

  Each star-shaped flower scattered its breath into fragrance,

  which the heavy air held around us,

  until, as if no longer able,

  a downpour,

  all the aroma flushed away in the sky’s own sighing—

  IMPERIUM

  As if yoked in a wooden beam, our bodies cross into the thrall

  of the river,

  whose name means red—hooves and sandals

  with iron hobnails hammered

  into the soles, one after the other

  into the muddy water. We move at first like light on brass.

  Now like a legion. Now a piece of the river

  being crossed.

  ILLUSTRATION FROM PARSIFAL

  While resting in the dim-lit inner study,

  I pulled a book down from the shelf—a dusty

  old retelling of the opera, its once scarlet

  cover crumbled now, faded to a claret’s

  brittle blood-purple. With care, I spread

  a page, as one draws back the drapes,

  not wanting to be seen. Inside, a youth, golden-

  haired, marches undaunted toward his longed-

  for future, the margin’s blank. Beyond it, the treasure

  he seeks. Walking at his back, two austerer

  figures: a woman, who grips one dangling tress

  of his tawny pelt as her lowered head rests

  against his shoulder, and an old man, his beard

  meager on a face pinched by hunger for bread,

  who carries on his spindly shoulders the past

  and in satchels at his side. He taps

  the garland of fine-penciled earth with his tapered

  staff, as if to stir the souls of those who predate

  this moment—under the red dust, the veil

  of aging paper, those people who no longer live.

  FIRST NIGHT IN STONINGTON

  So rare in this country to pace the streets

  of another century, to wander and survey

  gray alleys, cobbled by colonists and pilgrims,

  and crooked houses later built for fleets

  of Portuguese fishermen, whose heirs, today,

  received the bishop’s yearly blessing: sailors’ hymns

  and holy water. In the town square, someone

  has set a cannonball, the balding, black veneer

  freckled with rust, on a tapered pillar embellished

  with the date of its arrival, a battle won

  by port-merchants and innkeepers’ wives. All here:

  these long-dead people’s memories, cherished

  and chiseled into iron.

  In this apartment, too,

  another story preserved in the black chair

  where no one sits; in boxes stuffed with photographs,

  loose buttons, and playing cards; the faded blue

  of Japanese prints. A book, open like hands in prayer,

  rustles when the window draws a breath.

  FRESCO

  I have come again to the perfumed city.

  Houses with tiered porches, some decorated with shells.

  You know from the windows that the houses

  are from a different time. I am not

  to blame for what changes, though sometimes

  I have trouble sleeping.

  Between the carriage houses,

  there are little gardens separated by gates.

  Lately, I have been thinking about the gates.

  The one ornamented with the brass lion, I remember

  it was warm to the touch

  even in what passes here for winter.

  But last night, when I closed my eyes,

  it was not the lion that I pictured first.

  SEA INTERLUDE: PASSACAGLIA

  Pulling the rowboat into shallower water,

  you wedged an oar into the rocks. I squinted

  down at the fish, struggling to see them

  like a memory in which only part

  of a moment returns, the rest somehow unlit,

  blank like a swath of tiles missing

  from a Byzantine mosaic—a scar

  that will not reflect another century’s light.

  Later, when the boat and your body

  and the light have found their way,

  what will there be for me? Will the scales,

  elegant as hammered gold, shine through

  the water? Or will I have lost them already,

  fallen through my hands, every one?

  ALLEGORY

  As it was for the ancients, it would be for me: songs written down

  in pictures. The one about the trees on fire

  when I came upon them, and the grass flattened around me—

  that was what I saw.

  The trees are like a fresco,

  I thought, insofar as they are gold and tell a story.

  AT THE PALAIS GARNIER

  We always arrived late,

  sometimes in masks. You wore a sword

  at your side. The heads that watched

  our little pageant were busts of the great composers

  and not men lined up for the executions.

  The style was Second Empire,

  but the Empire had already fallen

  by the time the façade was finished.

  The casts changed seasonally

/>   like our lovers. I remember,

  through black-lace fans, Hänsel & Gretel

  eating a garish cake in the darkness.

  We covered our mouths

  when we laughed at the children trapped