Intaglio

Ariana-Sophia M. Kartsonis

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781631011283
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2005 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

"The image evoked by Intaglio, this first collection by Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, rests on a paradox, one perhaps central to the poetic impulse itself: that design can be shaped by what is cut away, by the loss that surrounds it, so that what is missing creates the negative space which raises the figure in relief, presents it to sight, and touch. Relief: a word whose two meanings—one artistic and material, the other emotional and intangible, together suggest how art engraves meaning."— Eleanor Wilner, Judge

"Intaglio is a remarkable new book by a haunting new voice. Freighted with music and beauty, even the simplest lines are memorable: 'There is this heron in a hush of lift / and my eyes are filled with it.' In the lift, there is also a lyric pressure, an inner intensity which evokes the best kind of madness: 'Let Nothing be that / which bitch-slaps the heart, / for the heart, like a hospital, / is a many-winged thing.' Kartsonis has offered up a vision both playful and painful, all of it lit with the eerie glow of her brilliance. What a lovely and terrifying offering. What an extraordinary introduction to this new poet." —Laura Kasischke

"With Intaglio, Kartsonis carefully incises the sensuality of history onto the fleet attentions of the day. And onto loss, onto bereavement, she incises the incredible, now credible, luxuries of everlastingness. This is a formidable debut, lavish in its mind and loves." —Donald Revell

I

At this time let me somehow bequeath
all the leftovers to my daughters and their daughters.
ANONYMOUS

CARAVANSARY

We were victims of the circus dance.

Painted and perfumed, trounced out and about,

we figure-skated on thin niceties

served up on water crackers with a side of brie.

We were hoteled like complimentary shoeshine mitts

polishing off the evening

from a bottle with a tiny ship inside.

We grieved the trapezists. They grieved

the possible sky. Ambassadors of altitude,

we cried, there are things realer than this

bellydance with gravity. The sign propped

in a plate glass storefront read: WE MAKE SKIMPY BRIDES.

If the issue at hand is love

then batter my heart you three-faced dog.

Batter my heart, deep-fry it,

serve it to the fire-eating lizard girl.

Tell your circusy self a word in the hand

is worth two if by the see-if-I-care.

No one gyrates anymore.

The globe spins stupidly alone.

So we circle in for the thrill.

Step right up, step right up, Madame Tsigana said.

Pull from sundown every bloody apricot,

there’s more everything ahead.

VANISHING ARMENIA

All spring swallows enter your father’s home,
through its crushed windows.

DANIEL VAROUJAN

I. If we met on the street

in a foreign language,

who would it belong to?

I’ve never tasted your language

except on the tongue

of one sweet Armenian boy

who told me, Greek,

Armenian, same thing.

I know he lied; we are both

a proud, proud people.

I know he meant the kiss to seal

the space and I let it.

And I know he told the truth too:

he meant the suffering

that sends us half into a grave

when someone dies.

We don’t believe in quiet passage;

scream back, kick, claw,

Take this, we say, Take that,

and death obliges, takes everything,

comes back for more.

We hide where we can:

between the pine-scented sheets

of the book one man gave me as a gift,

the imaginary travel guide book I gave him.

Peering through trellised fingers,

we say we can’t see each other.

We know better and still we love.

II. Summer, 1993, Kusadasi, Turkey

My little sister and I in Ephesus

on tour with old men, their anger

still smoking: These are Greek ruins,

now they charge us to look at them. Those Turks.

Five hours we wandered,

through shops and ruins,

ogled young Turkish vendors,

suede-bodied men.

No women anywhere.

Christina recalls the flinty look

in our father’s eyes when she came home

and spoke of their beauty

(and they were dark fires

—in their eyes, dusty dark hair,

eyes like gold-lit-afternoon-lichen-mossy-forests).

They marched through our villages,

our father said.

Stone-eyed, amber and olivine,

(they are a half honey-colored people).

You dropped my heart,

they said to the tourist women

and we heard wrong, started looking

on the ground for a fallen hat.

His beauty felt like something alive,

my sister said on the bus back

to the ship we’d reboard to our father’s country.

(She meant the doll seller, a young boy

holding a doll to the bus window

and calling out, I give you

beautiful girl, I give you.)

Understand this, our father said, we don’t forget.

We slept heavily that evening,

woke sweat-drenched and thirsty,

woke dreamy-eyed with impossible cravings:

chocolate glass, breadfruit,

the so-slow sweetness of honey

against dusken shoulders.

We swallow hard and the taste stays.

I mean they were lovely men.

They cut our country like a big cake

a slice here, there, they devour us, our father said.

It was summer and we wore sheerness,

filmy skirts, floated down Turkish streets,

imagined invisible women

in the windows watching.

We wore a veil of that fine Ephesian dust home

as a second skin and we shimmied sticky-skinned,

our hands, our mouths full of honey.

Dreamed our father there, gentle,

gone suddenly fierce:

They will never be our people.

Anything but a Turk.

Bring me home anything….

III. February 14, 1997

I was three years outside of this life,

moving from my hometown, my sisters,

one boy born on Valentine’s Day,

all left behind.

I was three years outside of today,

a warm day for winter,

but this is the Valentine I dreamed:

a book of poems

by an Armenian woman

who wrote of your words

under a foreign moon,

a wild, foreign moon.

In this lighting, everything’s foreign,

our words, this town,

the body of a lover returns

as the body of a poet

killed in a square

nearly a century ago.

It’s like nostalgia before the fact,

before there’s anything to long for.

Like using past tense for a thing

you’d only wished for.

I never knew, I never knew

I only know it’s Friday, Daniel,

I want what I want: a heart

embroidered with your words,

a book that smells of his house,

just one of the stones

they used to bring you down.

ALLUVIAL LITURGY IN CRAYON

The house opens like a blouse.

This way the windows are jagged stars,

an inward drawn breath.

Draw the house correctly

so that even without them:

t...