The Constructor

Poems

John Koethe

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780060956356
• eBook ISBN: 9780061972751
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women Authors Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

"John Koethe's The Constructor is a scrupulous, elegant account of the meditative intellect as an instrument continually registering the passage of time. Exquisitely modulated and brutally honest, these poems would be harrowing were they not so seductively beautiful. No one writing in this country today sees as deeply as Koethe into the tears that lie at the heart of things, and no contemporary investigation of the life of the mind may be called complete that does not accommodate the lush intricacy of his terrifying recognitions."
-- George Bradley

"I prize John Koethe's intimate expanses and unsettling reveries, his tender contemplations and odd mental landscapes. He is an heir to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and, like them, he gives us the sensation of thinking itself, of a certain fleeting, daily, solitary consciousness rescued from oblivion and held aloft."
-- Edward Hirsch

Mistral

I.

There seems to be, about certain lives,

A vague, violent frame, an imperceptible

Halo of uncertainty, diffidence, and taste

Worn like a private name that only God knows,

Echoing what it hides, that floats above a bottomless

Anxiety that underlies their aura of remote calm.

The intense half-dreams accumulate behind a smile;

The mind hesitates in its reflection, but remains alone.

Part of their story is an emptiness that isn’t there,

But that holds the rest in a kind of desperate embrace

Until the rest is still, and the loneliness reverberates

With the breathing of an almost human kind of peace.

But the contentment is imaginary, and the tenderness,

Like the tree in God’s mind, a figment of contemplation.

The feeling alters or the memory wanes, leaving the mind

Still waiting aimlessly, in the light trance of time,

While the incidents shine on a receding screen,

Or a remark hangs, or some impulse lingers unfulfilled

While love fades, until only a deep difference lasts.

Sometimes at night, when the past opens and the buried

Longings wrap themselves in colors, it almost starts

To seem as though another form of life were possible:

That although anger and love are real, the smaller,

Transitory emotions are real too, and more alive.

Day brings a sense of distance and the schematic moods

Of the depicted life—vacuity, release, and friction,

But behind the friction and the pretense of indifference,

A conception of life as infinitely far away. And the sense

Is sharper, the imagination unrelenting in its isolation,

Yet sometimes, after a walk on a fine morning or a quiet

Meal in the little restaurant, absorbed, for a moment,

In the fleeting pleasures of the afternoon.

2.

Somewhere in the initial, lost experience of fiction

There is a phase of detachment, a dense, irrational

Feeling of enchantment mingled with a sense of loss

So abstract that it must have made the differences

Between memory and the imagination seem almost unreal.

Life wanders or the mind strays, but the story holds,

With the flat, incantatory tones embodying the desire

For consecrated moments and the need for repetition

In the same reflexive images, but becoming stranger,

Until they start to seem something like other people,

Or like figures in some stylized tableau set vaguely

On a coast in midsummer, with the sun shining madly

And the houses strung like pearls above an azure sea.

He was sitting on the terrace with a group of friends,

Lost in another of those vacant, sentimental reveries

About aging and the afternoon, or about how intricately

The summer day ends, or about clothes, or about light.

Along the beach a few waves moved, as the summer people

Watched the gulls descend in slow, exhilarating glides.

Now and then he made a desultory remark, just to amuse,

But his mind was elsewhere, quietly contemplating some

Provisional conception of himself, paradoxically young,

But with some of the details rendered slightly indistinct

By too much passive sensation, and the bright, distracted

Conversation getting more private every year from an excess

Of gin and sun, yet the overall bearing marvelously alert,

Even in repose: the delicate, angular head, rich-old, with

Light, dry hair and eyes that lock and suddenly look away;

The thin, impeccable English shirting; the expensive skin.

He was forty-eight, and still waiting for somebody to adore

Without wanting, or without the ultimate possibility of loss.

His life felt as though it were always just about to start

Or end, or about to become relatively clear; but for now,

Temporary alliances would do, and the minor moods that last

All afternoon, waiting upon the mild exigencies of summer,

Rehearsing the fashionable despondencies, or trashing N.

He was all alone, with a range of sympathy unable to extend

Beyond the glass sphere of consciousness, where he lived

In an illusion of the complacency he’d always wanted, like

A dreamer clinging tightly to what he doesn’t have anymore,

Or the mind instinctively reflecting what it can’t become.

And then gradually it started to slip away, leaving him

Like someone in his own imagination, fabricating his past,

Breathing in the fragrance of depleted rage and each day

Looking forward helplessly, in perplexity or pain, until

He was beyond forgetting. But he kept it for a while, like

The love he’d held in his hands, then lost in wealth and

Memory abandoned it to tenderness, to the magnification

Of feeling, and to the solitary pretense of regret.

He continued to inhabit his imagination, but with a sharp

Sensation of the way time passes, while its illusion lasts.

He began to think of his life as an interminable preparation

Cast in the form of a reminiscence, with an extended part

In the present tense intended for the contemplation of those

Light boats, and with a phase of indifference followed by a

Sense of exhaustion and a perfunctory ending, for that was

How, eventually, his own renaissance was going to come:

Not in a flood of inspiration, but through an interval of

Change so long that it was going to feel like the meticulous

Development of one constant theme. And then one day

He realized he’d lost the past. There wasn’t any

Inevitability anymore, and the imaginary differences

That used to seem so final didn’t matter now—

There was just life, but part of his soul was dead

And the rest was waiting in the garden, where a little

Breeze rustled the paper lanterns. Maybe later a

Kind of character would emerge, but that would have

To be in the imagery of another life: the vague,

Abstract affairs, and the distracted way

Love swept the ruins; the play of conversation

And sunlight on a tessellated floor;

The buried stairs.

3.

Deep inner dark

Where the violence gleams and the indifferent

Face that only God sees looks up from the water

With its relentless smile, while its features shatter

And float away and its lineaments start to disintegrate

Into shimmering light and dark passages, which one day

Were going to come to seem like elements of happiness.

Sometimes the fragments can illuminate the enormity of the years

And how the soul is lost in them, as in a form of memory

In which there aren’t any disillusionments or dreams,

But where it can be seen in its entirety, in an impersonal perspective

And without feeling, or lifted out of its isolated context

Like an inert thing and suspended there until the vertigo subsides

And the illusion that the years converge on it returns.

In dreams, or in these moments of distraction that derive from dreams,

Sometimes the waiting can begin to seem so real that the illusion fades

Into the security of home, as though everyone else had gone

While the night-light had continued burning, and the future

Had been tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Sunday Evening
• The Saturday Matinee
• Pining Away
• “I Heard a Fly Buzz…”
• The Other Condition
• Mistral
• The Waiting Game
• Between the Lines
• Threnody for Two Voices
• Un Autre Monde
• A Perspective Box
• The Advent of the Ordinary
• What the Stars Meant
• The Constructor
• Fleeting Forms of Life
• Au Train
• The Lake of White Flowers
• A Parking Lot with Trees
• Permissions Acknowledgments
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Other Books by John Koethe
• Copyright
• About the Publisher