Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

Joshua Harmon

• Editorial: University of Akron Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN de la versión impresa: 9781931968928
• ISBN del libro electrónico: 9781937378615
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Política

Winner of the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is "a tender anti-epic, a grunge-tinged love song to America's benighted post-industrial heartland." Harmon's Poughkeepsie shimmers just beyond the borders of banal recognition. "If you're not part of the problem, / you're part of the lengthening / tragedy, " Harmon writes in an introductory pastoral, seeking out "the stray / detours and workarounds of the secret / city inside the more obvious one… on the outskirts of the absurd / attention to the material life." Poughkeepsie is that city of the heart where no one can look at anyone else "alone, " where "the noise of beauty" is a cop's bullet polishing off a "traffic-struck doe, " where "five dollars takes you anywhere in this town / except out of it."

TABLEAUX
POUGHKEEPSIENS

I lived in one place

and then I lived

in another until I came

to Poughkeepsie:

such comic historicizing,

like sweeping up nineteenth

-century dusts and the

twenty-first-century

cigarette that’s fallen

from behind someone’s ear,

or a spray of class C

pyrotechnics captured

in digital pixels from a clearing

in sparse woods, seems less

a misreading of the social text

than a chastisement of devotion

to our deleted shadows

Asbestos in carpet glue, beige linoleum in bedroom and living room, hallway and kitchen: the thinnest wisps of whatever boredom burns itself into, an insufferable inching toward wreckage. The man with a hand in your drawers is only checking for mice. The porch light’s gone, the door thrown open, and a dice game binds the ghostlier commodities to blown-out tires and traffic tickets, the smallest conveniences handed over a counter. A simplism: I have a lawnmower if you have money. A boy watching over the lip of his particular attachments: mediocre pen pal in the instrumental version. A mercy killing: the wall-to-wall. Deer step softly to the back window to receive all our coveted inadequacies. The estranged husband falls asleep in an armchair amid afternoon sun and taped cardboard boxes, then wakes to turn in for the night. All night, the train. And trees branch over the road in the precise shape of the absence of a truck’s right-angled trailer: so many pre-existing contentions.

A pole saw can reach far enough one doesn’t need a bucket truck to clear some sky. We’re cutting down our half of the tree, you can do what you like with yours. I’m exhausted raking orange needles and clearing dead leaves from my gutters, and anyway imagine summer sun ablaze on aluminum siding, or tracing the low winter sun’s arc all the way home, chimneys and telephone poles, long-disconnected television aerials weeping rusty smears on shingles, wind undoing old birds’ nests. All afternoon, a handheld circular saw slices wood pallets to fit a stove’s mouth. A pause goes on and on, more vacant than not, but ghosts do not hang from the birches of Christians who carve crosses into the faces of hollowed pumpkins encoded with incomplete legends. The children pile like puppies before the woodstove’s banked flames and curl themselves to sleep. Can we imagine another world? Pity keeps it going.

Cusp of July and August:

subtlety’s landscape of westward

decline, mountains bottoming out

in brick river-towns: the digital

thermometer registers more than we can

feel, the hyper logic of resale:

doe lifts hoof from hosta-bed,

a suburban orchestration: clattering

dice and dusk’s late sepia, urgency

of compressed air driving nails

under hard disk clouds’ silent quotations,

austere as hand-washed linens

Thin ribbons of cloud and half a ruinous moon

in an afternoon sky: meager sun gilds asphalt

briefly and slides out of sight as the furnace

kicks on again: in the tumult of equivalences

between split log and smoke, margin and note,

my knowledge unbraids itself from freed

finitudes: and whatever sense of the possible

the afternoon offers vanishes in a lethal twilight

broken by a single steeple, an abandoned

railway bridge spanning here and there, value

and use, the shapes this city assumes

Broken glass in the shape of

standing still on a side

porch: but Poughkeepsie

has the same shape

as an agonized self

-awareness: fingertips

against wall-shadow,

girl smoking in the kitchen

with the dishwashing crew,

narrative flukes like holding

a sign beside the divided

highway for the liquidation

sale: everything discounted:

if history has been

the consummation of keep

-sakes and solitude,

proficiencies in consent

and other remaindered

eventualities, the double

garage the ailanthus grows

through grows historical:

interpretation rusts

to depict the housekeeping

motel with riverview,

two-week stay’s currency of

handwritten diaries,

where an hour past checkout

the landlord collects

the television tipped into

weeds by the back door

The undercity rivers beneath cast

-iron covers: passage we know

only when set loose on windy

avenues ourselves: a world of nouns

in leaf-debris carried curbside

and the blunt animus of hammers

on vinyl machined into clapboards:

a confident inability to focus:

or a graph upon worm-eaten vine

leaves addled on frost-dead

stalks: progress’s ordinary commerce

gets stranded in this town’s vacancies

and intervening s...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Two Pastorals
• The Poughkeepsiad
• Tableaux Poughkeepsiens
• Hooker Avenue Serenade
• Recessive Variations
• For the Poughkeepsie Dead
• Two Pastorals (II)
• L’Envoi
• Notes