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    Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing
    Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing
    Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing

    By Marianne Boruch

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    About this ebook

    A starred review in Library Journal says this about Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing: Only a poet as accomplished as Boruch could make such beautiful verse while leading us through the everyday, of life’s subtle, steady shiftings (the bird’s hunger, seeking shape’). If the opening image of a pool filled with cruelly dredged up roses bespeaks quiet assent (I stood before them the way an animal/ accepts sun’), the next poem turns immediately to progress (and hence progression) as a modern invention beyond the heaven-and-hell alternatives; finally, the poet concedes, I lose track of my transitions.’ In fact, transition defines us. Here, a static painting gives way to between and among,’ a simple typeface never yields a perfect copy, and even in a medieval score, two exquisite quavers are connected by a slur. Highly recommended.”

    "Marianne Boruch's work has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: She sees and considers with intensity."The Washington Post

    "Boruch refuses to see more than there is in thingsbut her patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler's sense of facet and flaw."Poetry

    In her tenth volume of poetry, Marianne Boruch displays a historical omnipresence, as she converses with Dickinson, envisions Turner painting, and empathizes with Arthur Conan Doyle. She looks unabashedly at the brutality of recent history, from drone warfare to the disaster in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. Poems that turn her gaze towards childhood, nature, animals, and her own poetics are patches of light in the collection's chiaroscuro.

    From "Before and Every After":

    Eventually one dreams the real thing.

    The cave as it was, what we paid to straddle
    a skinny box-turned-seat down the middle, narrow boat
    made special for the state park, the wet, the tricky

    passing into rock and underground river.

    A single row of strangers faced front, each of us
    behind another close
    as dominoes to fall or we were angels lined up
    politely, pre-flight

    Marianne Boruch is the author of ten collections of poetry. She is the 2013 recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and has taught at Purdue University since the inception of their MFA program. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateOct 17, 2016
    ISBN9781619321649
    Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing
    Author

    Marianne Boruch

    Marianne Boruch is the author of five poetry collections and the essay collection Poetry’s Old Air. She has published poems and essays widely in the Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Nation, and other magazines. She teaches in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and in the Department of English at Purdue University, and lives in Purdue, Indiana.

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      Book preview

      Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing - Marianne Boruch

      I

      Progress

      These gargoyles can’t get enough of the view

      stuck to their cornice, ratcheting out

      open-mouthed as some

      desert hermit on his pillar, fifth century.

      Such a vision, probably horrific. The gargoyles

      take it straight to the river

      over giant trees. A kingdom. If there is

      a river. Or a kingdom. If I walk that direction —

      how a lock knows its key, how the key’s

      little nicks and bites code fate: not unlatch but

      continue, not release but come through.

      Because it’s ancient: there is

      no progress, only a deepening. Or not even that.

      I heard progress is a modern invention, post–

      bubonic plague. Right up to the airplane, the double sink

      and running water, earlier

      the milking stool, and monogamy in some places.

      But Dante leapt

      at it, his Purgatorio, thanks to before, when —

      wasn’t it simple? Just heaven

      or hell, friend. Sorry.

      Thumbs up or down. Perfect weather or it’s endless

      awfulness.

      How does it work, this new

      Purgatory business, Dante didn’t ask exactly

      but dreamt first. Fabled searing

      second chance lodged in the brain’s ever-after

      means to be left, reimagine, watch

      whole bits burn off. Memory

      needs sorrow. Even stone at its most

      mend-and-loss molecular level moves, and the hard

      secret parts of us know that: tooth, skull,

      envy, the stubborn vertebrae, guilt worn down by

      exhaustion, by despair you walk with,

      and long enough. Like a month. Like years.

      It’s never simple. I learned what happened: gutters

      replaced gargoyles. Those creatures sick of

      siphoning rain off the roof with their long throats

      stayed to scare evil out of the world, to be

      merely beautiful and grotesque up there. Or they caution

      back to us from the future, frozen

      medievals, high-wire beings not of this earth

      stretched, stunned to bone-limit, made possible again

      by what they cannot bear to see. Now. Which is

      lifetimes ago. I lose track of my transitions.

      The Painting

      Two brush-stroked boats, so-so weather, more detail

      forward than aft, heavy

      on shaded bits as

      simple reflection, the mast dropping in water blurred.

      Blur it more, gloom it up, says the teacher.

      Use a rag and something stingy.

      To look and look, is all.

      Salt, fish air at dawn, turpentine. Or evening, that one.

      To remember the past as

      this painting remembers — beautiful, a little dull.

      And maybe it was.

      In fact, water can turn out demanding. Not staying put,

      too much at odds in that glitter.

      And people expect a quiet thing to hang on a wall

      to forget their own noise.

      That old guy bumming cigarettes for real

      looked the part of another century, the ancient fisherman

      contentedly mending nets in a time

      with time to retie knots. So we

      like to believe. And some would

      sketch him right in, work him over like an afterthought,

      historical. Better yet, to comment

      ironic or just short of it. With him, without,

      finally the worn reliable straightforward

      sea, harbor, dream. Also this

      for the record — three, not two boats. And those

      warehouses weren’t pink, didn’t

      watery-ache like the shadow they cast.

      To be an artist, the best part — you, you’re in

      and then it’s the same

      but you’re not the same. Smoke

      from a factory on the other side, a small one

      but billowing soot and ash anytime, a bad idea.

      Or a good one, meaning

      world. Which could threaten. Or end.

      Go for a larger, darker resonance. The teacher

      saying so says

      never an extra boat either.

      I heard things once, blurring out of sleep

      or some other elsewhere to

      none of us the same. The same what?

      After. As in, between and among now

      for a long time.

      The Breathing

      Think back with a shovel, bend,

      do that.

      Who’s breathing through these tubes now?

      So this is how you

      plant trees in Scotland all afternoon.

      We take instruction. The translucence

      of it. Each plastic cylinder the exact shade of

      a stem tall and suddenly wide, slipped

      over sapling after sapling

      sunk into earth, tied, staked against wind.

      The mallet comes down.

      January. A wee walk, we’re told,

      to get here. Fields this old,

      the lives that lived. To ask anything

      is to lose the question —

      Hills plus sheep plus cold. Air like wet gauze

      but sun, a bright accident.

      Still: who’s breathing through these tubes now.

      I see plain enough, upright

      nether-vents, their cool green

      so many rows made

      in the making. Barely trees at all

      hidden, each incandescence.

      It’s the shovel, abrupt.

      It’s the fierce

      stopped, to fierce again

      the suck, the lift up

      to go deep

      a stunned thing.

      It must draw them, the dead.

      Both the violence and the ceasing must

      remind them.

      Because haven’t they come

      to lie here, their half-light just visible under

      old stalks and grass. Dusk, with its

      new dead and old dead…

      And true, isn’t it — that

      we’ve pleasured them. True that our

      hammering in breath

      is another breath.

      Not that I love you, the mouths they had

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