Smoke and Lila E-Book

Norm Sibum

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Smoke and Lilacs is full of play and shadow, whispered intimations of mortality and glances of humour, elegiac lyric playing against steely classicism, an easy modern vernacular eliding with timeless grace. Sibum's meditative narratives move between worlds, modern and ancient, the state of our civic order and the realm of love. Human love and lust exist within the forces of empire - Rome or America. Men and women continue to ask of life 'from what god does it come, / To what serendipity does it go / if chance is all and all there's been?', and the gods 'laugh at those who laugh at chance'. Across centuries, voices create a complex music from their moments on earth, the echoes of their 'gossip in the rain's cold light'.

Leseprobe

NORM SIBUM

Smoke and Lilacs

For Mary

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgement

From Propertius with Love

Smoke and Lilacs

Zin Town

The Prayer of Paris to Aphrodite

Mrs Cushing and Mr Box

After Ithaca

Mirthless in the Hills

God-like Calhoun

Presentiment of Death by Sunset

Sultry Night

Evening in the Garden of Lucullus

Briles on the Terrace

The Stone Balcony

Ode to a Gathering in the Mist

Protocols

To the Last Man Standing

To MK Lunar

Notes for John Keats in Rome

To Persius in Pimlico, Greetings

Embarkation of the Argonauts

About the Author

Also by Norm Sibum from Carcanet Press

Copyright

From Propertius with Love

Oh the days are inconstant, rich in betrayal, my language expert

In all-night kisses and your bad temper. What shall I make now

Of your lip, the sudden thundershower

Squalling across the gardens of Lucullus?

Sap that I am, optimist, I write you verse declaring my love

After I catch you at it, a swindler plying your buttocks.

‘Looking for something?’ you hiss. I am. Order in the cosmos. A little trust.

I want, oh I don’t know, the bliss to which I’m accustomed.

And I’m always in the market for a state

With a benign and friendly face.

Smoke and Lilacs

In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy

JGF

Bloomless now, the bush that winter

Could not kill, augurs heat and chance to come.

Shadow swallows shadow and

The clouds spit rain, memory a crouched figure.

The evening’s last lone sparrow pecks

At Mrs Orlow’s garden bed.

Thin plumes of smoke escape

The chimney of a neighbour.

The wind rising, maples sail,

Lilacs heaped on slender twigs.

He’s frantic in the green wood’s gloom

Where the temple gleams.

Betrayal and conflict, those arenas which

City life dulls through roiling progress, are so much gossip

In the rain’s cold light. Even so, Luigi wrote

How it goes hard on pleasure and art,

This time of ours. It’s hubris, delusional

To boast that one’s lot is enviable.

Who barbecues in this weather, whose patio –

That one sacred to fantasy and smoke?

*

Someone loves so as to get love. Somone pays the realm no mind:

The petty tulips, the petunia flowers, the laundry left out

On the line. Someone kept watch, the painted bough his prize

In the green wood’s gloom. Someone hunted down this sentry

And someone, in turn, got him.

The heron on the wind

Heads, no doubt, for its nest. We are woe and ritual death,

Our world more inclusive and less personal

With its bombs. The maples fling themselves

As if toward the far heavens devoid of us

Even as they’re bound and only bend.

Meat is grilled. Men and women laugh

And paroxysms of laughter, highhanded glee

Unhinge jaws, bring tears, shake abdomens.

*

But someone never has enough

And someone always has too little,

And someone, amidst the chaos, loves.

Someone is always disillusioned

With the law, with intransigence.

What can these people lack, they who have much

With or without creed, well-fed and scrupulous,

Triumphs vouchsafed, negations sensual –

Those that erupt in giddy hearts?

*

Memory is theatric – softshoe and mime –

To the mind and its shadow-play. A crouching figure would hear

The rustling of a leaf. But is it not a pleasant scene,

The storm moved on? The unassuming brick,

The sailing trees, the smoke, the rain, the lilacs