For History Class

11. She moves the binding thru her fingers
from a dirty "toy koise" blanket
such small stakes within the endless.
Given what's real of the dream
the terrible dream
bad people inside the house,
she has murder on her mind
bloodied raped and strangled
girl a-bled
smallish non-adult
a small girl-mouse
deed and dead.
What can be said?
Nothing can be said.

12. These euphonies that croon us
spoon us, good fortune us
take our children into changelings
replacing them by fleshy pockets
sutured tight to ™Disney,
shod by other children,
captive stitchers making sneakers.

13. Negatives fitted
stereoptic no, no, no
infinitely suggestive on the field you run
trying boxed erasures, code words
bid goodbye to anything, and leave,
1984 will one day look so odd
Shepherds drift in and out;
songs are heard and lost

Like a check-off list
a trunk for camp, no hugs,
sign up for
materialist trademarks
disobedient engorgements
verbal anorexia
bubble-gum rock
and endless school projects
about drugs.

14. bright gusts dark gusts streak gusts
and purple line
of unreadable waste
in the phases of bitterness
monosyllabic, semi-courteous—
o why so angry youngish one
pulling long lithe
length of where to go to get
away, to which I had
to pull one wobbled bow across the strings
sounding yes the coruscating tremble of
unpersuasive melody of stay.

big sagebrush, yeah
mule's ears, yeah

forgive.

15. The butterflies of morning are not
the butterflies of afternoon.

The butterflies of morning are black, lustrous,

with white marks round their wing, White Admirals

black, blue-brown, with brushstrokes white:

"the adults are greatly attracted"
to blossoms of bramble
or Marbled white like

checkered black writing on a page.

The butterflies later are nymphies, orange
with dusky mottled spots and squiggled confusion.
Silver-washed Fritillaries—
sometimes backed
by "extensive silvery-golden suffusion."

16. Of joy, always joy
of disturbed, always disturbed
and of can't find, cover-laden paths
and of no justice, and of Koré

as Koré

proserpine porcupine
round spiny needles shoot out.
The dignity of the Koré, deep smile inside ironies,
wrapped in crimson.

17. I wanted my poetry to be simple
apple simple; I wanted to state
flat things straight,
which you won't believe.

Indeed, "Shepherd's devise
she hateth as the snake"
which remindeth me of your thinking
on the poem,

as well as on the snake:
"I'm so not running down that road again!"

Yet an apple is complex.
For round one tree there are a dozen more
Their names are Lightning Rod, Strawberry, Axis,
and Levels of Departure. Are Granny, Fiji.
Their names are StoneWood
Unico
Coolness,
Doctor of Germantown,
and Targa Card.
And any poem is only as simple as these.
Which means,
bluntly, it's not.

18. So therefore, I've got riddles:
Where is the place from which one sees
the tiniest inch or itch of sky?
Where is the field
whose flowers folded letters inside,
regal messages?
These answers might be
"at the bottom of a well"
and "crocus saffron mark."
or "buddilea O of red"
that butterflies aim into with their snouts
drinking. Nectar as regal in its uses
as any alphabet, to help
brush powdery colors through the world.

Say the answer's "poem" to both riddles.
Can this trailing talus spell
tell anything, given
its detritus and vertigo in lines,
its uneven velocity of signs?
Where is recto, maybe easy to tell?
Where is the verso, toll of the turn re-rounded?
What sits under or beside the verse
with lucid foreknowledge of effective tasks?
Who speaks for the feather door?
Are the riddles now solved,
or more confounded?

19. Thyrsis versus
(verse, you'd say)
Corydon, a sporting event in song.
And Thyrsis talks about the ugly more:
garden uneven, dead things, scruff,
the sooty, the cold, the herb sour
the ginestra scratchy, prickly stuff
not praising the grass for softness,
but says straight that it's hay hard
filled with ants and wrack
undoing human work,
biting spiders from cottony egg sacs
needling casings of some nasty thistle,
fake oat, false strawberry, cheats,
nothing of clear and limpid sweets.
Thyrsis sings it dry: dry land, dry brush,
thorns on sweet unreachable berries of more
brilliant fig tree covered with brambles
invasion of spoilers,
wolvish allusions to danger,
and itchy conditions.

Thyrsis is the realist
not to decorate his age
but to resist a certain kind of
pretty poetry picture.
It's said he tried too hard.
Therefore Thyrsis loses.
The victor:
flopsie mopsus Corydon.

But still there are those
who watch the fruiting pear
on the border,
and early into ripeness
sneak through their
neighbor's property
secretly at dawn to strip the tree
and leave no piece of fruit for her.
Can poetry not speak of that?
Wrongs of the world, ruthlessness,
servitudes and injustices?

But why only of that;
can one not hope
for more than what is here?
So poetry is mesh and weave
of C & T, the contenders;
their flocks merge in one shop
("greges Corydon et Thyrsis in unum"
maybe "drove their flocks together"
or perhaps the shepherds
together were tending their flocks
before contending).
I mean,
inside the poet C & T debate,
and never stop.

20. On the edge of the edge.
Pilgrim how and what I be
I had been on a long brooding journey with seedlings
and then there was you,
mid-line as if we were both dreaming
a dream of fairy-tale sufficiency and pleasure,
the coat of the lamb gone red
its scarlet wool, already dyed a-leap
amid rainbows of sheep,
colored especially violet and saffron
never before seen, except here in the poem.
And in the fallow that really is
soft shoots hard shoots browse and bristle
milky-fine hair seedy clouds
sail out free from extra-purple thistle.

21. Five varieties of buzzing—
the beige the brown the black the gold the sphinx
choirs of lavender paint sticks to orchestrate
hear the waving hum of work
the back and forth of shade and light.
Four stories on a quartered screen
short oaks and small foxes
eclogues are about
political resentment in
the shadow
of power;
they are taking
my little plot of green.

Who works for whom,
sharecropping or freehold,
what kind of work
does "the mother,"
and does poetry
save the land?

Lycidas says he
"was told" it did—
conservancy
from these hills
to over there, that line of trees
the ladder of relationships
tending a little plot
when really everything must change
but still must tend it right and well,
or not.

The questions remain
and remain riddles.
What does this do?
If anything.
Without a solution.
The speaking of what is?
of what you hope may be?
Being happy in the world
and loving rivers
ivy green and overmuch
bright as healthy water
weaving through the laurel
unsorted wildness of hope
launched in the hopeless world as such.
Incipe, parva puella.

To Koré Simone DuPlessis July-August 2001

Notes to "Draft 53: Eclogue"

— Rachel Blau DuPlessis

< back to Volume 1 Number 1, Fall 2002