No Sign

Peter Balakian

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780226784076
• eBook ISBN: 9780226784106
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

New poetry collection from Peter Balakian, author of Ozone Journal, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
 
In these poems, Peter Balakian wrestles with national and global cultural and political realities, including challenges for the human species amid planetary transmutation and the impact of mass violence on the self and culture. At the collection's heart is "No Sign," another in Balakian's series of long-form poems, following "A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy" and "Ozone Journal," which appeared in his previous two collections. In this dialogical multi-sectioned poem, an estranged couple encounters each other, after years, on the cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades. The dialogue that ensues reveals the evolution of a kaleidoscopic memory spanning decades, reflecting on the geological history of Earth and the climate crisis, the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, the Vietnam War, a visionary encounter with the George Washington Bridge, and the enduring power of love..
 
Whether meditating on the sensuality of fruits and vegetables, the COVID-19 pandemic, the trauma and memory of the Armenian genocide, James Baldwin in France, or Arshile Gorky in New York City, Balakian's layered, elliptical language, wired phrases, and shifting tempos engage both life's harshness and beauty and define his inventive and distinctive style.
 

Three

No Sign

1.

He: Is it night already?

She: No.

He: Did our house fall down?

She: What happened?

He: Is it you?

2.

He: Yes.

She: Why should I believe you?

He: Doesn’t geology put us in our place?

---

*

He: We appeared in the age of fission:

vaporized bodies, ionized dragonflies, shadows printed on stone.

She: Japanese cities burned in my dreams.

I saw the newsreels in class

decades later—

He: We’re back here on the Palisades cliffs—staring at Manhattan—

remember when the Sauternes was liquid gold?

3.

She: In the beginning there were alpha particles and gamma rays.

We always see daylight through the kitchen window near dusk

We can’t forget how dusk turns the hydrangea deep blue.

We can’t forget the glowing dioxin sun—the no-gaze,

morning bright blue agent-orange sky—even now—after all.

4.

He: Godard called Hiroshima mon amour Faulkner plus Stravinsky—

She: Remember: at the Angelika—September smell of light rain

warm sidewalks shop awnings late summer—

He: The noren curtains opened, the noren curtains closed.

We stared at kanji, birds, sketches of roofs, a tree

the lovers walked through the curtains either way

time shifted like breeze through eye sockets

She: They said goodbye and the noren curtains opened

and the past was a burning city

seen in silence, just images on screens.

Lui: What did Hiroshima mean to you?

Elle: The end of the war, fear and terror that it could happen to us,

then indifference—astonishment that they dare do it—

then it became an unknown fear—

5.

She: We’re standing—

on an underground channel of molten rock

that fed volcanic eruptions 200 million years ago.

Earth = axis = spinning = two selves—swerve—possibility

He: Take Pan, all day we’ve played around with him.

She: Here we are—lying on Gaea.

He: Top of a volcano—molten basalt cooled and hardened

we’re on the sill still, and rock is never still—

She: The sill’s eastern edge = Palisades cliffs, one version of home.

6.

He: Unified land mass—Pangea—Earth as whole—

She: Pan and Gaea = bridging self with other.

7.

He: Remember the blizzard of letters—

commas, question marks, dashes, words cut in half

on the subway walls at 4th—after we talked out the movie

you said—one view of the post-war:

a burger and a shake, a jukebox and a neon rainbow on the wall.

8.

He: If you said it was molten rock, I believed you.

If you said the molten rock was once underground

and created volcanic eruptions 200 million years ago,

I believed you.

If you said the eruptions covered 4 million square miles with

basalt lava, I didn’t flinch.

And if the lava blasted gales of carbon dioxide and sulfur into the atmosphere,

I got the general idea.

I got the general idea that there were long volcanic winters after and after—

like sci-fi on a screen in a movie house at the beginning of time

when the reception was perfect.

She: Listen to Gaea: “We broke apart—200 million years ago—end of Triassic—

magma rose from deeper in the earth

intruded into the sandstones and shales, then the molten rock spread, cooled, hardened,

then—I was a sill overlaying softer rock—and the softer rock eroded.”

9.

He: The look of ionized skin of the two lovers in bed

—the caressing, the trick of the camera

—irradiated light: those oboes and violins—

and the skeletal flutes—same as Night and Fog—

Lui: You saw nothing.

Elle: I saw everything.

Elle: How could I have not seen it?

Lui: You saw nothing in Hiroshima.

10.

She: Can you imagine the perfect eruptions until the clouds dissolved—

and the ocean became acidic like a white-out gale and

the atmosphere heated up until most of life on Earth

was impossible?

Did you get the picture of T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• ONE
• TWO
• THREE
• FOUR
• Notes