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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
The poet - a man of the world in the widest sense - reflects and in reflection relives the intense experiences that shaped him and that have shaped our modern world. Salvage at Twilight ends with 'Deposition', a harrowing elegy in five parts: the beloved endures 'her Nile of pain'; the lover attends as she is treated, the last scene postponed until the two selves are quite differently refined. His editor has written, 'Dan Burt's poetry, like his prose, explores themes unusual in contemporary literature, using a language that is precise, nuanced and mordant. And he risks traditional forms, his sonnets and quatrains mastered and masterful.'
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Seitenzahl: 89
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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3DAN BURT
Salvage at Twilight
for John Kerrigan
‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus! –
Why look’st thou so?’ – With my cross bow
I shot the Albatross.
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Acknowledgments
Some of the poems in this book were previously published in Bateau, Commonweal, Clutag Five Poems Series, The Eagle, Johnian Poetry, Newsletter of the Institute for Advanced Study, New Poetry V, Paula Rego 80th Birthday Tribute (A Rudolf publication), Poetry Archive, PN Review, and the Times Literary Supplement.
Contents
SLAG
10
Thief
Dad taught me to steal when I turned twelve.
In white apron over butcher’s coat
hiked-up a foot to clear the sawdust floor,
pencil stub on trussing twine
dangling from a buttonhole,
boyhood snatched and left behind,
I was hammered into a counterman.
Smile, say ‘Help you ma’am?’,
give her odd weight
(even’s too easy to calculate)
and add five percent to every sale,
or the Chains will eat our lunch.
Long ago I forgave his lies
that made me a thief so he could buy
a Jersey skiff, flash a two-inch roll,
and Mondays after Schvitz visit his trull.
But the customers don’t pardon me:
should grandee, politician, fellow praise
service I’ve rendered, building raised,
once more across the counter shoppers stand
empty bags in outstretched hands,
Blondie, with her seven ragged kids,
baggers, dailies, handy-men,
discount coupons crumpled in their fists,
the working or redundant poor
I stole from weekly at his store,
stare, point, till I turn aside,
crimson, drop my eyes, and convert
laudation that should shrive me into dirt.
Primer
Mom slides two bucks
into the beat cop’s palm
to ignore her Chevy
by the hydrant,
then goes to her weekly manicure.
Dad’s sawbuck
buys the checker’s wink
at the way-bill he should clock
for unbilled items,
like the hams chucked in our truck
along with our order on the loading dock.
Yeah, two-bit bribes,
but they knead and mould
the plastic mind of an eight-year-old.
Impostor Syndrome
An hour south of Wall Street,
past tulips, toddlers on swings,
cyclists, runners, Frisbees tossed
by girls in shimmering orange shorts,
I walk to the Institute library
to borrow the Shorter OED
laid by to welcome my stay.
A lay guest here before,
haunted by my familiar hissing
You have no business in this place,
today a librarian’s courtesy, and spring,
muffle that devil at my ear
until it’s almost impossible to hear
You’re a wannabe from a trading floor.
Traitor
For even life in exile… is not as bad
as life alone in one’s own country.
The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig
Two-ton eagle above the stairs,
soldiers cradling M16s,
flags everywhere,
the Consul’s Why?,
the oath I swear
to absolutely and entirely
renounce my… nationality,
murmur Traitor, as I stand,
cancelled blue passport in hand,
a grey haired alien on foreign land.
Forty years doubts brewed in me
about Yankee Doodle verities
poured into us as kids,
corroded loyalty to hostility,
and left no choice at last but quit
the homeland I never fit.
I feel no remorse,
but wonder, nonetheless,
how Dreyfus felt, braced
on the square at l’Ecole Militaire,
sword snapped, disgraced,
reviled for what he did not do,
though faith, not fury, stood him askew.
Worship
My heroes have always been cowboys,
and still are, it seems…
Willie Nelson
I idolised three simple men,
the seaman Holmes, the boxer Joe,
the hit-man Uncle Al, and from
their lives knocked up a creed
I lived by in the streets, a hymn
to seas’ remorseless harmonies,
rage, and cold control.
To finish me took fifteen years,
a Grand Tour through four trades,
in six cities under three flags.
I fell in with thieves: double-
dipping bureaucrats, bent lawyers,
peacock generals in a libel case.
When these acid travels ended
my saints were slag, my brows knit,
and all my hymns re-writ.
Late Self Portrait
Venus fades; I stretch, rise,
shit, down pills, exercise,
blink till an image clarifies
that ego will not recognise –
sallow, ruptured, rag doll’s guise,
melting jowls, pecs, gut, thighs –
and with hospice hope avert my eyes.
PRACTICE
18
Texaco Saturday Afternoon Opera
But this or such was Bleistein’s way
T.S. Eliot, ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’
Talk sputters out, house lights lower,
a white wand rises with the scrim
and I see Chick not Lohengrin,
white coat and apron amid clutter,
salt beef, herrings, dills in brine,
rye bread piles three feet high
crusted with mountaineering flies,
stone streets outside his deli lined
with trash, graffiti walls and doors
where derelicts in newsprint quilts
doze like rank question marks on silt,
Cadillacs, pimps, and fat arsed whores:
childhood holograms that contain
lunch break sights when I worked with Dad.
Two decades on, a Yale law grad,
I’ve come back, first class, by plane
to survey all with widened eyes –
dying neighbourhood, dying shop,
anglicised surname a prop
above steel grates – unrecognised
until I interrupt the Jew
making sandwiches. Danila?
I puff up to launch my vita…
A radio warns curtain’s due,
his welcome turns apology:
It’s starting now, I’ve got to go,
the Met’s doing ‘Seraglio’. 20
The store goes dark, the patron keys
the lock and leaves me curb side, stunned,
complacencies of law courts undone
by an old shop keeper’s passion.
Practice
We learned law was a calling
to build the new Jerusalem.
No one taught about the galleys
where this ancient craft is plied.
Up, back, down, pull,
up, back, down… Keep your time
in six-minute segments, a shit’s
a billable event. What matters
is will it work and what’s the risk.
Remember, rainmakers make partner.
You need not ship in law firms long
before your eyes burn reading briefs,
head throbs tracing labyrinthine codes
eighty hours a week,
and conscience daily coarsens
swinging between the tholes
of what’s allowed and client wants,
as callus by callus you sweep into the dark.
Doktor Darker’s Storage & Laundry
The window at his back cast him in shadow;
a Jugendstil desk kept visitors at bay.
He did not stand when I entered, or rose to go,
and sat silent, a grey patron at a tired play
listening to me invoke secrecy.
His raised palm cut me off: Yung man,
I don’t care how your client makes money,
or who he is, but by law must ask two kvestions:
duss he sell arms, or deal drugs? Und I
don’t care vhat the answer is. Numbered
accounts, bearer bonds, gold pried
from teeth perhaps, lie locked in vaults under
our feet, till need or death brings settlors or heirs
with claim cheques for the launderer upstairs.
Singing School, 2009
Greed, for lack of a better word,
is good… the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Gordon Gekko, Wall Street
To start, we’ll have champagne, quail eggs, paté
de campagne; next, line caught bass, jugged hare;
haricot verts, pommes Dauphinoise to share;
two espressos, dopio, one sorbet…
a City gent, lawyer in tow, ordering
lunch in a winter of wealth’s discontent.
Dark Bloombergs, dealing rooms, silent
shops, signs shouting Liquidation, Closing
Down, play no rôle in his recitation:
So trades went south; the Fed had to save us;
shit happens. Just don’t fuck with my bonus.
(Slap… slap… slap… the clap of palm and truncheon.)
The host inclines his head, and sidles to
his question, flicks crumbs at the caster
set like a pawn between them, cups an ear:
can he claw another rock or two
from deals he did that decked economies,
cash for a Koons, perhaps, he’ll have to store?
This is the lyric of the jungle floor,
a hymn to labyrinthine strategies
conjuring Xanadus from acronyms,
testosterone, that goads the proud to fraud,
and concupiscence, robed like a bawd,
garrotting sympathy and tempting prison.
from EVERY WRONG DIRECTION
Hucksters
Arrogance is a foul disease. Like cancer, it blows no trumpet to announce its presence. Success breeds confidence that rots to hubris, the way colon cancer sprouts in an intestine and spreads through the peritoneal cavity till it kills you. By the time you realise you’re infected, you’ve made the mistakes that will destroy you. Arrogance is the winner’s cancer.
Higher education, and what came with it, were a giddy ride. Few think me college material in 1960, when the good offices of a high school teacher secure my place at a workingman’s college in Philadelphia. Four years later I’m at Cambridge, five more and I graduate Yale Law School. Philadelphia’s top law firm gives me a three months’ signing bonus to choose them over competing firms.
In the summer of 1965, 18 months after a broken neck will likely leave me a permanent quadriplegic, I sail the Atlantic east to west with three other men on a 39-foot ketch. Four years later I sail it again, west to east, on a different 39-footer.
Imperceptibly, I begin to assume I’ll win every fight, get whatever I desire. The one thing beyond my power to have, one woman’s love, I never accept, and dwell on for the rest of my life. Superior, un-humbled, I show up 2 September 1969 for my first day as an associate at Morgan Lewis and Bockius, which we called ML&B.
