Ozone Journal

Peter Balakian

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226207032
• eBook ISBN: 9780226207179
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

from "Ozone Journal"
 
Bach's cantata in B-flat minor in the cassette,
we lounged under the greenhouse-sky, the UVBs hacking
at the acids and oxides and then I could hear the difference
 
between an oboe and a bassoon
at the river's edge under cover—
trees breathed in our respiration;
 
there was something on the other side of the river,
something both of us were itching toward—
 
radical bonds were broken, history became science.
We were never the same.
 
The title poem of Peter Balakian's Ozone Journal is a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself, recounting the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists in 2009. These memories spark others—the dissolution of his marriage, his life as a young single parent in Manhattan in the nineties, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS—creating a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience. Bookending this sequence are shorter lyrics that span times and locations, from Nairobi to the Native American villages of New Mexico. In the dynamic, sensual language of these poems, we are reminded that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is both global and ancient; but we are reminded, too, of the beauty and richness of culture and the resilience of love.

Two

OZONE JOURNAL

1.

I woke to CFCs humming out of coils.

I woke to a compressor in my head

and the compressor in the wall that made cool air come out of the vents—

couldn’t sleep—downloaded photos of the day,

to stare at them, as if the sky were something I could breathe in:

not good times by the sea, but—desert-blue and cracked ground,

some tumbleweed blowing into my jeans;

green signs of Arabic letters looked like beautiful tributaries,

as they faded out along a road going to the Iraqi border,

where oil refineries were firing on the horizon,

where a border is a road: ending and beginning.

2.

All day I was digging Armenian bones out of the Syrian desert

with a TV crew that kept ducking the Mukhabarat

who trailed us in jeeps and at night joined us

for arak and grilled goat under colored pennants and cracked lights

in cafés where piles of herbs glistened back at me.

I passed out from sun and arak and camel jokes

in a massive hotel, my room opened to the Euphrates

that was churning in the moonlight.

3.

When I woke I was dreaming back to the ’80s on Riverside Drive

where Ani was born on a bright spring day,

in a decade of money and velvet when the plastic voice of Sinatra

floated through fern bars where we lounged

with wine spritzers and lemon-drop martinis.

It was silver palette and more than cuisine

with its encoded sense of ending

and the smoked sable at Barney Greengrass

where we took Ani for brunch

on Sunday when the morning was lit up and open,

4.

—dreaming back to days

(why here on the black Euphrates at 4:00 a.m.?)

after our life went up in a blue flame as the gas jet died

and—we were gone to each other—

the walls silent and the floor boards echoed;

the U-Haul came and my books got rained on—

and the flags were rippling for Saint Gennaro.

Thisbe and Pyramus disappeared as myth and symbol

and that summed it up.

5.

Those days (no dream) the squeaky cassette going—

on Jerry in Riverdale. When I arrived the sky was graphed

through phone wires and Amtrak cables.

I was sitting beneath shelves of uncut-masters—

the 78s of 1940 when Jerry cut the modern LP

and found the lost Hot Jazz of the ’20s—

I was staring at hanging Armenian rugs and the river glare

on a photo of Miles Davis—almost liquid in the sepia emulsion

of 1947 when the smoke spiraled into Three Deuces on 52nd

at a table with Sterling Brown and Gillespie and Jerry—

and he put it (in his hammered speech), “John Hammond

was so hated by the musicians, Miles cut him out of the photo and pasted

Dizzy in—but that was before I got Miles interested in Cage.”

6.

By noon I was leaning on the cotton white hospital wall,

gazing at the islands of purple lesions on

David’s slightly swollen leg, the edema rising

in his groin, the sheets strewn and the IV

dripping blue down the snaking plastic tube.

My year of magical thinking looped down

the drain of my brain: “Take care, cousin.”

I blew him a kiss,

7.

before I was back at the English department table,

feeling the post mortem of the modern:

the paradigm critique essential but the artifact

thrown out with the bathwater.

Over-fetishizing indeterminacy,

or depressed expression of late capitalism?

Get Foucault and Trilling in bed—

give peace a chance.

Gorky said, take a flat brush

and work it till there are two hairs left.

8.

Light comes diffuse out of itself over the Euphrates

from the hotel room veranda—irrigated farmland/yellow tint/

veins running through furrows/snaking green patches—

9.

and I see David’s eyes flat and glassy;

his voice through Xanax

was a silk kerchief through a ring—

memory was focus, detail, the thing—

the way sun lit up brownstone—

the way a Burgundy was a whiff when the cork pops

and the air is Tiffany and evening comes

with its mix and synthesized backing tracks.

Pigeons flew into porch lanterns

and the spring synth notes of Donna Summer,

as the cold and hot pianos melted into riot bombs of

strobes and the dust of white powder:

off Columbus on 71st in the ’70s.

10.

When I walked under the canopy of the Ansonia

I saw your hand in the restoration of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• One
• Two
• Three
• Notes