Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit

Timothy Donnelly

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780802139573
• eBook ISBN: 9780802196774
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"A strutting, dazzling, exhilarating" collection of poems by the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award–winning author of The Cloud Corporation ( The Village Voice ). In his critically acclaimed debut collection, Timothy Donnelly pairs an extraordinary gift for rhetorical exuberance with a stunning formal mastery. The title poem conjures an imaginary play, populated by objects, that forms an allegorical rendering of a single lifetime. In "Accidental Species, " he puts forth a remarkable statement about his own efforts as a poet, a humorous ars poetica by way of a heartbreaking lover's complaint. For its thoughtfulness, range, and sheer energy, Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit is a remarkable work from one of our most original young poets. "Filled with dreams both romantic and funny... [Donnelly's] self-deprecating surrealism is vivid and often touching." —Ken Tucker, The Baltimore Sun

ONE

TWENTY-SEVEN PROPS FOR A PRODUCTION OF EINE LEBENSZEIT

Let there be lamps of whatever variety
presents itself on the trash heaps. Let chance
determine how many, but take pains
to use only low-watt bulbs, and keep the lion’s share
flickering throughout the performance.
In particular, one gooseneck should pulsate religiously
on the leeward corner of an escritoire,
which is a writing table, or an unhinged door

suspended on sawhorses. These will be spattered
in a clash of pigments, signifying history.
Dust is general over all the interior.
You are very tired. You are very weary.
On the floor, one carpet, its elaborate swirling
recalling the faces of wind on old maps.
And let there be maps, at least half reimagining
the world according to a scattered century:

a shambles, patched. Now for the wall-clock
which hangs prodigiously over every act. Let’s rig it
so the hour revolves in a minute,
the minute in a blur. Grab hold of an enormous mirror
and mount it divinely—that is, too high to bear human reflection.
And what do you call it when you can’t endure
the scraping of the blades of all creation?
There’ll be a bucket of that, another for the suet,

a third marked SESAME but filled with sand.
Place this last a judicious distance
from the bamboo cage in which one ostrich, plucked,
stands Tantalus-style, its beak eternally
approaching the rim of the third of the buckets.
Does the bird want seed, or is it onto the trick
and terrified, frantic to bury its head in the sand?
Will it never end? But look who I’m asking!

Take your worry to the sofa, lie there.
There’s a pillar of books and a French periodical
on either side. Before you know it,
it’s always midnight. Now the owl of Minerva
takes its flight down the nickel wire.
Now a dampness pumps from the tightened fist
of a cold contraption, a sort of inverse
radiator, and you can’t control it, and it isn’t pretty.

Tell me you love me. There’s a severed hand,
or is it a fruit peel? Tell me you love me
and I make it mild. Take your panic to the sleigh-bed,
slump there. There’s a snatch of heather
and a cracked decanter on the starboard side.
Before you know it, it’s always never.
You know I hate it when you whimper, don’t you?
Now shut them big ambiguous eyes.

Now shut that cavernous cartoon mouth—
and here’s the sock to fill it, periwinkle!
You know I hate it when we don’t coordinate.
Now what’s that rapping at the shattered window?
It’s the only egress, I neglected to mention.
But here’s a rope with knots to help you shimmy down—
a dozen square knots, the last a hangman’s.
Now take your heaving to the curtains, part.

They’re dove gray, dolly, and fall like art.

AN INFLORESCENCE

1.
A rumbling, a spark; an inflorescence—

Aloha, Hibiscus! You glow through the gloam
in the blank of my soiled and grandiloquent
head, from a bed spread fertile with waste
that has waited too long for your purpose, churned
over and over by the seeking worm,
the nocturnally restless. A torment ago,
I made love to a form; I festooned it
with adjectives: beauteous, consummate, dulcet, plum.
A player is forced to make love
to a vagueness, a layer of foam. A torment ago,
I would not have presumed
your aroma, your nimbus, your ruby conundrum, but a riot
develops in the sluggish blood-pump,
and the cleaving of mist betokens a romance.

Hot ukulele! How do you do?
And you: beamy, beamy.

Where do you come from?
What fire, what flood?

What wild effluvium?
Did your kernel pass

through the tract of an auk
as it flew overhead?

You nod to me yes,
but the bird is flightless, pink coquette,

and I can’t believe you.

2.
Hibiscus, mon âme! You are governed by Venus, ambiguous,

frilled, and aware of your charm;
should the governor throw
a ball you will be there, the mistress
of many, but pinned to my arm.

I know a valley fair,
I know a cottage there
Hibiscus aroon!

A breeze is released
from your tropical pockets
Hibiscus aroon!

Stay, my irruption.
Will others excite you? There’s divan enough

for the pair of us only—
and paradise, paradise.

Come to me now with your exclusive stalk,
with your enciphered leaves. There are parts of me

naked and the tambourine grows rust impatiently.
Show me your rootstock, windlass, lavolta; mouth

phrases of fuchsia and the South Pacific into my deeply
attenuated ear. A torment ago, I made love to a form, I festooned it

with adjectives: curious, high-stomached, plausible, smooth.
A player is forced. There’s fossil enough to grease any engine,

but a storm develops on the azure plain, but the blathery palms
will drown us out that crowd us in, and I will not release you.

SONATA EX MACHINA

1.
Better to advance. Let the winds of the explosion
whip your pinions into motion, plough a happy

figure forwards into wheres and whens and hows
you have no words for a priori, but will upon

arrival—however used up from the flight, your inner
dictionary fattens to accommodate the new

accommodations, an appendix on the walls in which
you measure through the noise, in which

much / a dovecote / better to

keep quiet about the whole damn debacle
than to drop any hints and/or bitch about it outright.

The desired machine plays the smallest
sonata possible, an arrangement of gastro-

intestinal blips, and this only at night when the
program at night when the program skips,

when the noxious smokes of another day’s traffic
rise off the asphalt and fuck with the

filter you / disposable / change

every morning, absolutely every. The desired machine
will start itself and stop itself, will fuel itself

and fuck itself. It will right itself when thrown
off-kilter, and it will even change its own

damn filter. It would make itself if it had to, but it don’t.
That old-fashioned reveling in the general

situation grows less and less plausible as we
uncover the defects of natural laws, and see

the mess we’re / perpetual / in and how

one sumptuous decision delivered us thither.
At the steakhouse: yearning for the difficult,

weary of the offered, sick of the appetizer,
hot for the remote; dizzy from the cocktail,

apart from the ambience, tickled by the mishap,
hoping for another; distant in approach

but none’s the wiser, sharpened by the entrée,
hot from the cocktail, hoping for another,

nostalgic for / a dovecote / … THE APPETIZER!

2.
What are the traits that delineate the human?
Leave me alone. Allegorical, and

with a whore’s abandon, Philosophy knocks
at the cinquefoil of the world-side window,

one index bloody from the sticking to it, her dumb
wheeze the wisdom of the ancients, busted.

Having trundled the planet since embryonic,
she’s all tuckered out. —Heck, an anchorite’s

seclusion’s not / excuse me / contemptus

mundi necessarily, but a way of making manifest
one’s ineluctable apartness from that world

which one would love to be a part of and immediately,
but, seeing as that’s inconceivable, a wonder

which refusing, given even more technology—
Invite the lady in. She’s peddling consolation.

(What wanderlust has wrecked her skirts?
They’ve ceased to swish that certain way.)

3.
What wanderlust has wrecked your skirts?
They’ve ceased to swish that certain way,

that distingué, that way they did days halcyon,
what goings-on have been going on, keep

going on, that flounce’s flown, that fringe’s fled,
once chestnut brown went chestnut red, and now

it’s rust, Philosophy, and rusted skirts, they just don’t swish.
Your chestnut skirts—

Better to keep quiet. Corrosion starts
which can’t be stopped in the hidden parts—

in the joints, the folds, the seams, the borders.
Carnation, lily, lily, rose. The cloister’s moister

than the monks suppose. What grows there rots,
what rots there grows. Carnation, lily, lily, rose.

Whose first demonstration showed that thought
romps with the other diseases of the flesh, whose

second claimed that “ideal physical beauty”
proves incompatible with emotional growth and a full recognition

of “the coil of things,” whose chestnut skirts—

Better to advance. Suddenly 80 percent of all questions
are statements in disguise? The desired

starts itself and stops itself, fuels itself
and fucks itself. It will right itself when thrown

off-kilter, and it will even change its own
damn filter. Though I wasn’t fully present

at the meeting, I am sold. A w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• One
• Two
• Three
• Notes
• Acknowledgments