- Royal Observatory, Greenwich
What was I when I entered
if not a trampled, galloping heart,
panic’s velvet hemorrhage,
walls expanding as a pin-hole aperture,
rotunda of lens and mirror, spoke inside me,
voice fluxing in a stairwell – altered –
& honeyed lindens in river-shimmer,
two charry, burnished domes wrought by Wren,
stairs of glassy scrapers, cranes, the slurring plane trees,
hedge froth, & plosions of nests that are born old
panned in dazzling deployments around me,
my love a dockland scape of wind,
houseless and sun-blinded as clouds and gulls?
How to return to any contracted hour
except by this impossible clock,
enchanted chassis of the world within?
London
Regents Park
Evening stalls in the willows
across the Canal, road
of mossy, sunken gates,
fretted carp needling
bluntly the blue shallows,
silver compass-wakes of swans,
this one black with crimson beak,
the air full of noises, mora mora,
or does my heart delay?
Resigned or restless, I know
that leaving is a long way
sutured by streets I must cross
into the bowered allée.
Then the Outer Circle
whose iron palisade
I follow as last light clasps
the gold dome of the mosque.
More birds. And, from a deep recess,
unintelligible voices,
mezzo forte, muffled laughter
from the open air theater;
then a racket that could be
an animal sprung,
spirituel, or the cry of someone
with “charms o’erthrown.”
Now the harp of the high gate,
traffic, its tempestuous applause.
Venice / Venus
Her blue dress is a lagoon so secret
we say golden dogi of submerged, mussel-flocked
palace pilings for gondola of western mountains.
We say fecal sterol and hydro carbon trace
for tide-flushed avenues, inflexion of cistern.
Roof terrace gilt & lit with champagne flutes
translates conical fortress of candled magnolia
scuttling with roosting cardinals,
fondaci rife with odor of Levantine cinnamon.
Her voyage is a hundred islands
stitched by bridges, exemplary infinite streets
whereon in private bridal train only the moon provides,
in chainmail wake, a clue to her consensual deeps.
Acattolica Cemetery, Rome
“Should he die the law will demand him to be opened”
– Severn, of Keats
Split his nightingale, vassal body
in Y-shaped flaps from shoulders to pubic bone,
to see for oneself the lesioned twin rags
phthisic thorax, lungs & half-strung cavity
months past prognosis. But where was he at all
in that “posthumous life” of last days?
Feverish at dawn, two cups of fawn mucous
streaked with clots, Bernini’s frozen
Fontana della Barcaccia in the piazza
rushing his ears with phantom,
bacchanal fleams of bloodletting,
Severn slouched in stolen sleep over a book,
& she appearing again, whose blue ink
in stricken hand called even the chamelion poet
back to pain, back to life –
I come – I see, as thou standest there – .
Why not, then, see this last sentence
as “from myself” – all secrets revealed
but F.’s unopened letters, sealed inside,
then under cover of first light, by Roman law,
as two bells open the day’s mouth,
shoulder him over stairs, through streets,
to this final cot of shadows,
daisies, violets in alien turf,
even as police begin their work,
scraping floors, walls, sills,
and, with consuming flames, burning his bed & door?
Insomnia Binge
No escapes in this Ought, this nadir
pre-dawn zip, nada, glacial theater,
clock face whose elbow-length black glove
minute hands refuse the quick remove
of spangled velvet, the body whole again, re-cast,
what a relief, and the house lights up at last.
Instead the stage crowds with invisible
instants milling dully, stalling the irresistible
move to tomorrow despite eyes restless with witness.
It’s an easy trick, the disappearing woman.
But she’s been at it all night. Despondent? Low?
Bored? Shouldn’t we know,
since it’s our escapade, too, head here,
legs there, toothed blade poised endlessly in air?
Copyright 2006 Lisa Russ Spaar
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of Blue Venus: Poems (Persea Books, 2004) and Glass Town: Poems (Red Hen Press, 1999), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. Twelve of her new poems appear in Exquisite History: The Land of Wandering: Poems & Prints (The Printmakers Left, University of Virginia Press, 2005). She is also the author of two chapbooks of poems, Blind Boy on Skates (Trilobite/University of North Texas Press, 1988) and Cellar (Alderman Press/University of Virginia, 1983), and is the editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia UP, 1999). She is editing an anthology of London poems, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press in 2007. Her work has appeared in many literary quarterlies and journals, including Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Image, Shenandoah, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Spaar is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she is an associate professor of English.
