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    Carnations: Poems
    Carnations: Poems
    Carnations: Poems
    Ebook76 pages29 minutes

    Carnations: Poems

    By Anthony Carelli

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    About this ebook

    In Anthony Carelli's remarkable debut, Carnations, the poems attempt to reanimate dead metaphors as blossoms: wild and lovely but also fleeting, mortal, and averse to the touch. Here, the poems are carnations, not only flowers, but also body-making words. Nodding to influences as varied as George Herbert, Francis Ponge, Fernando Pessoa, and D. H. Lawrence, Carelli asserts that the poet’s materials—words, objects, phenomena—are sacred, wilting in the moment, yet perennially renewed. Often taking titles from a biblical vocabulary, Carnations reminds us that unremarkable places and events—a game of Frisbee in a winter park, workers stacking panes in a glass factory, or the daily opening of a café—can, in a blink, be new. A short walk home is briefly transformed into a cathedral, and the work-worn body becomes a dancer, a prophet, a muse.
    ______



    From Carnations:
    THE PROPHETS
    Anthony Carelli

    A river. And if not the river nearby, then a dream
    of a river. Nothing happens that doesn’t happen
    along a river, however humble the water may be.

    Take Rowan Creek, the trickle struggling to lug
    its mirroring across Poynette, wherein, suspended,
    so gentle and shallow, I learned to walk, bobbing

    at my father’s knees. Later, whenever we tried
    to meander on our inner tubes, we’d get lodged
    on the bottom. Seth, remember, no matter how we’d

    kick and shove off, we’d just get lodged again?
    At most an afternoon would carry us a hundred feet
    toward the willows. We’d piss ourselves on purpose

    just to feel the spirits of our warmth haloing out.
    And once, two bald men on the footbridge, bowing
    in the sky, stared down at us without a word.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateMar 14, 2011
    ISBN9781400838240
    Carnations: Poems

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      Book preview

      Carnations - Anthony Carelli

      CARNATIONS

      THE SABBATH

      We weren’t speaking. It was snowing, temps dipping

      into the teens. You and I were playing Frisbee

      because we’d fought all day, and it’s a tonic

      to get outside and throw the sharp disk at one another

      with cold dumb hands. Then the animals appeared.

      Horses—male, I think—a pair of grayish steeds climbed

      the man-cleared path to the softball field

      in Prospect Park, where we stood at a distance.

      Wow: you said, horses, but I missed them at first.

      I was chasing down the disk that overshot, banked

      above and hissed in the sky, a flattened apple.

      I had had it. Baby, I almost said, "I’m trying

      to make a catch here." But I was stopped instead,

      lofted like the Frisbee. It was the word horses

      in Brooklyn air. It was their bodies in Brooklyn in 2007.

      Though what is the good of horses in Brooklyn in 2007?

      As the first came he bowed his head with one step

      and hoisted with the next, nodding like a drunk to nobody

      he knows; so slowly that, within the machinations

      of a single nod, I revised this scene a dozen times

      and made a fine behind-the-back Frisbee snatch

      to boot. And yes, I remembered the horses of Achilles,

      the chariot of Israel, and Emily’s toward Eternity . . .

      Sometime I’d like to discuss the horses at length.

      Meanwhile the second horse did whatever I say

      the first horse did, which is walk, and smoke breath,

      glimmer and gloom. They both shouldered through

      the intermittent aeons of twilight as mitigated

      by black tree shafts. There were riders, too—

      there must have been. They wore fancy sweaters—

      red, or was it blue? I even thought to go to them,

      gently, and stare into their eyes (the horses, I mean)

      to see the candles on the horse-shaped altar inside—

      horses are, perhaps, more lovely than a Frisbee

      —but that’s not what happened, Honey. This

      is our life: we fought until dark, we mastered

      our timing, you made that magnificent cartwheel toss.

      GLASS WORK SONG

      Well, he was no theologian,

      but when we were children

      my best friend’s father would speak of the lord,

      though only when given a question,

      so we asked him often.

                                               Otherwise

      his cantos were carried by a foreman’s voice

      so unlike our own—volume high

      to overcall the furnace howl, tone low

      to part and cross the shriek

      of those conveyors he left at five,

      and the shattered eardrum he didn’t.

      But ask of Golgotha,

      ask of the Good Samaritan,

      and the great voice slowed, faltered,

      bent, and broke finally, grunting to carry

      the words of the lord. Grace,

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