June-tree

New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000

Peter Balakian

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780060556174
• eBook ISBN: 9780062032454
• Subtopic: American Drama

FROM DYER’S THISTLE (1996)

August Diary

8/1

From here groomed fields and clumps of trees,
a silo of corrugated tin and a white barn blur.

Unseasonable cool days,
high, blue, a few clouds like ripped pillows
as if this were a lip of the North Sea

and I could look out and imagine Denmark.
But I’m in my office three floors up.

8/3

In Armenian there’s a word—garod—rhymes with “maud.”

The beautiful ones are not faithful
and the faithful ones are not beautiful—

a student said that about some Pavese translations,
here in my office.

Should I tell you what garod means?

8/5

What’s happening in Spitak and Sarajevo and the West Bank
is splayed like the cortex of a silicon chip in the fuzzy air.

Maria, the physician from Armenia, was 25 & had one plastic arm and one real arm. I met her in East Hampton on the deck of a house on the dunes.

After the earthquake she had no husband,
no parents, and only one child.

“I’m in a good mood today,” she said, “let’s talk about
something else.” I poured her an Amstel Light.

8/10

The coolness intrudes—
month of wind-sprints and retching for the coach.
It comes back like nerve ends after surgery.

Along a country road cicadas rattling.
Chicory and sweet pea intruding on the ripe barley.

I picked up some seed packs from a junk shop on Rt. 20,
a tomato blazed in red ink/1926, Fredonia, N.Y.

8/11

What’s between us? The red ink of the tomato?

How does an image stay? Or is it always aftermath?
The way deep black reflected the most light in Talbot’s first calotypes.

But garod: tongue of a snake,
meaning exile, longing for home.

Thomas Wedgwood got images by getting sunlight
to pass through things onto paper brushed with silver nitrate:

wings of a dragonfly, the spine of an oak leaf—
fugitive photograms. But he couldn’t stop the sun
until it turned the paper black.

Stop the light before it goes too far?

Or is desire what garod means?
Longing for a native place.

8/17

Maria said she was learning how to connect nerve endings
in the hand so hands and arms would work again.
There were so many in Armenia without working hands and arms.

At the end of each dendrite is a blurred line
like the horizon I’m squinting.

Image of the other:
light-arrested; not the image of ourselves.

8/21

After digging scallions one day Dickinson defined freedom:
Captivity’s consciousness, so’s liberty.

Maybe garod is about the longing for the native place
between two selves.

8/22

I love the brute force of silence in Roger Fenton’s
Sebastopol from Cathcart’s Hill, 1855. The Crimean inner war.

The artlessness of silver is like my tongue in your wet space,
or like the news photos that bring us the pressure of disaster.

Beloved topography,
garod then must mean yearning.

Is that how we loved under the rattling Nippon porcelain,
in the light calotyped by the fire escape?

8/25

garod: the grain chute that spills
into a dark barn which is endless,
like the self when it’s out of reach.

Are we so lonely that a constellation
could blacken and fill up that same barn,

and that be me or you?

But still we’re piss and oats and stock in there.
We’re like civet, who wouldn’t love it.

8/31

the new glass-plate pictures:
transparent as air, Szarkowski wrote

like windows

the fragmentary, scruffy, particularity
of real living behind them—

Physicians

1

Above school kids in Episcopal
jackets cherubs are singing
to the beautiful fake lapis
of St. John the Divine

and from this side chapel
I see through the blue
to the 6th floor of St. Luke’s
where my father’s heart caved in.

In the thirties my grandfather
made his rounds three floors down.
In the weak sun the black rocks
by a shepherd’s robe seem piled

like fat medical texts
or small suitcases full of Dickens
in German my grandfather translated
to learn English so he could pass

his exam in the Empire State,
to use his silver instruments
on the eyes ears nose and throat.

In a snapshot he’s large-eyed, glazed,
as if he should’ve followed
his cousin, the Bishop, to a cave.

Instead he climbed down
the catastrophes of New World
faces, the warped shapes
that flare up the senses.

Tubes lit in the throat.
The auscultated fog
of the ear tuned
to pass the pitches

of the world. I think of him
scoping the cochlea,
that purgatory
where the screech

of a yellow Checker
and the mute twittering
of Satchmo’s horn
were white light.

Down the ducts of joy and pain
my grandfather called tears
(not lachrymae Christi),
but the fissure between two continents

that sent him with Armenia’s
refugees along the junked canals,
the Dardanelles, the Atlantic.

Eye to eye with a lens,
he could see the retina’s
orange spot,
and it was a floating nation.

On a clean meta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• New Poems
• From Dyer’s Thistle (1996)
• From Reply From Wilderness Island (1988)
• From Sad Days of Light (1983)
• From Father Fisheye (1979)
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Peter Balakian
• Author’s Note
• Copyright
• About the Publisher