The Regret Histories

Joshua Poteat

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780062412249
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie américaine

This powerful and provocative new installment of poetry is a recipient of the 2014 National Poetry Series Prize, as chosen by Campbell McGrath.

The National Poetry Series's long tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser-known poets delivers another outstanding collection of poetry by Joshua Poteat. Through an investigation of the haunted spaces where history collides with the modern southern American landscape, The Regret Histories explores themes of ruin and nostalgia, our relationship to a collective past, and the extraordinary indifference of time to memory. For thirty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Marie Howe, and Sherod Santos.

ONE

DRUG DEPARTMENT

I’m looking for a story that will light

my way out, a star in the sycamore’s grass,

taken from night and nothing and limbs cut

back from the wires. It is not summer,

there is no mist on the streets.

The yard, vacant with ivy and nest, wears brown,

and the streetlights. The sycamore is the loudest tree,

its bark lifting the hard wind like the saint

who prayed to the east and failed, parchment

spread on the monastery roof. Help me

spelled out in supplicant ink, roaring through

clots of frost. Look at us, late winter, pulling dead

branches from the fence at night to avoid the neighbors,

poison pushed under the shed for the rats.

Let’s surrender all illusions of spirit, because it deceives us.

The spirit is not air, even in its highest form,

no matter who sparks the flame.

Tonight, I suffer from not knowing

how to suffer. Tomorrow will be the same.

There used to be pills to cure this affliction.

Early decay, feebleness of will, Wonderful Little Liver Pills.

Beef, Iron and Wine for the poorest blood, for fever

of the known and unknown world.

The sycamore leans its branches on the telephone lines.

To hear them on the phone, those manuscripts of bark

breathing the wires, does nothing for my courage.

This is how you become a saint: translate the ruins,

wherever they sleep. Bloom the tulip tree early

and watch bees gather in the sleet. There is no abyss,

no oblivioned ocean. Just a landscape, like this one,

born from a river and seven hills, bones under

the hospital cobbles, ghost rope taut in the gallows.

The glad bees orphan their hive, too soon and unwise.

It isn’t death I want, but it isn’t life, either.

DEPARTMENT OF PURCHASE & DISEASE

Ghost in the yard, early morning,

the hammock swinging on its own. Rather,

I saw myself reflected in the window

and wanted it to be a ghost, early morning,

the hammock filled with wrens.

Any sign would be enough.

The childhood fear returns, you’re thinking,

nostalgia buried within, held to the shallows,

but it’s more complicated.

This is 1900.

There are many things to purchase.

There’s more than just dying here.

Disease is a good enough excuse,

but this isn’t disease.

We just don’t know we’re changing,

or what we’re changing into.

TINTYPE

Between the new ruin

and the old,

clover spreads like milk

through the folds.

LIGHTING DEPARTMENT

Soon into the night with him.

— BORIS PASTERNAK

There are bulbs made now to match the light of 1900,

7-watt filament barely a flame, soft as a fever’s ear,

where sepia is made, where milk is drawn by cloth

and whale, and moths turn their brief heads from the woolens.

Dark was different then—pure, indivisible, a nothingness

moving toward us out of the stars. Afternoon came

unbroken, July in the trees, tallow and beeswax, nothing

the dark couldn’t handle. Twilight is what hurt the most,

when the soul pulled the body to the low sky

and every good thing looked inward, belonging

not to itself, but to another older province,

early owl, open field, children in the foliage,

briar and rust. It was a time when lamp blisters

were healed with a round of butter or boiled jewelweed

rended from sewer banks. Little puck lamp burning

lavender and clove, 90 cents. Library lamp

bright as 75 candles, $6.50.

The century lends its light to the evening

so that it might have substance, or sight.

The little white throats of pigeons lined up

in the eaves, the new gaslights on 25th Street

imitating the old gaslights, our faces young

in the warmth, something I might already believe.

It’s amazing sometimes to find I’m still not dead

here. The gunshots have become almost friendly,

talkative neighbors building a new tongue,

and the shotgun shells dropped outside the market

roll unspent and certain in the wind. I moved into my life

to take it apart, stars dismissed like years

and two fireflies above the crepe myrtle.

Where my house was built a grave was found,

grave of another house, and under that, another grave.

Louis Kahn asked, What do you want, brick?

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