Sing Sing Sing

Poems

Bruce Murphy

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1990
• Print ISBN:
  9780814754610
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814761076
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Sing, Sing, Sing is unlike any recent first collection by an American poet. It goes against the grain of contemporary fashion by replacing prosaic narrative with a lyricism both symbolic and mysterious. This poet can appreciate experience as "the open/End of a bag fill/With ordinary things," yet also he has an ear for "a watch that goes on ticking/Underground," the shadow of history that lies across the present. Murphy manifests a sense of responsibility for protecting the spirit of lost people and lost things. But in their concern for posterity, his poems use language to forge a memory of the future. This ethical impulse, "the voice of the conscious heart," gives rise to a poetry which is, even when most admonitory, compassionate. Murphy explores our involvement in history as its doers, sufferers, and writers. Hence his poetry is at the intersection of the personal and that sense of our anonymity together in which "anyone can write my story," The title, Sing, Sing, Sing, hints at the imperative music that characterizes these poems.

II

LEAVINGS

1.

A cold day. We have snow.

Mind dissipates

In steam

From manholes

In the street

Or, like a ball bounces high

And fails to return

2.

Sitting in a coffee shop

I see your lips move

But your words are like the drone

in a shell

And when I look in your eyes

I see a few stars

Rushing in the waste spaces

3.

Perhaps I always knew

That dream could be my life;

A rusty plain like iron,

As if the sea had turn to iron

And rusted.

I stumbled, a child

Into the beginning or the end

Memory as yet unpeopled:

Here is only space

Where anything might be.

Bring something out of this iron place.

4.

The rain falling in the afternoon

Began as snow.

O is the shape of the gray, round

Mouth of this day

In the metro

A saxophone tears up the tracks

Words I fear burn in my pocket

Like a coal that I will not touch

5.

Farther than I’ve ever gone

Farther than I wanted

The day seemed like a nightmare

A crystal of salt in my eye

The word fate—

And that night

I killed a man in my sleep

6.

In fire my body crumbled

Like a log when flame unlocks

Its hidden geometry

We were driven up a long road

Paved with anthracite

Under a contused sky

I looked back then on the way we had come

Charred fields snow

And in the end I was not saved

7.

Under the tin roof of January

I carry my ribs in front of me

A candelabra lighting my way

But I don’t know where I’m going

My guide dissolves in the moonlight

8.

Yesterday, torment

Today a certain lightheadedness

Now I could gather

Handfuls of sparks

And bind them in me like sheaves

Before they died

I open my mouth to speak

And it is full of birds

9.

I sat on my bed

And looked blankly out the window

Blank

Apart from myself

The world had no meaning

I waited for life

To drain back in

That was only a moment ago

If that door opens before you

Do not look for the door closing behind

LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

The tentative greenness of emerging spring,

A beguiling cloud that taunts an almost cloudless day,

The optimism of the occasional brisk car.

The air does not shake, though everywhere

Gravity, collapse, and implosion;

And the day goes on doggedly,

Payed out like a line.

Time grinds at the heart of a distant sun

But cannot set an end to anything,

Not the blackened star

Nor the stone in my hand that cannot quit working

Amid this placid afternoon,

A stone shot through with nothing, like

Today. The last thread clinging to a burning spool.

FORGIVEN

To stumble out on a morning like this

And find the day already prepared,

I know enough to know gratitude.

Here are things for use—

Black coffee, and cigarettes.

The tap rusts in the kitchen,

The bones of the night before

Shift in the sink.

And as I sit here alone, a bird

Comes to the porch in front of me

And lands in the snow on a railing

Just the other side of the screen,

Testing the woof of ice.

I walked barefoot in the snow once,

I waded in October pools, learning the art

Of being where I don’t belong.

What if everything I’ve said and put down

Seems like nothing this morning?

I don’t mind. A brown bird

Pushes his breast in the snow,

Then flies away like bread.

I am vacant, and happy.

LENINGRAD SYMPHONY

The broken cup of the night lies in shards

Where it fell, overturned, filled too full.

With a sheaf of notes I sweep it away.

The day can begin the dull business of rain.

The wind touches the dropping sheets

That become for a moment the beaded curtain

Of a seraglio, then just drops again.

Remembered things overflow the cistern

That was meant to hold them, Mnemosyne,

A fugue burst like a sail in the wind.

I grab o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• I
• II
• III