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7 New Poems by Jared Carter

New Orleans: the Degas House

It is, like everything else in this city,
a place of secrets. With the sun glinting
through the live oaks, the shutters
halfway closed, the brick walkways
worn to uniform smoothness, it is
a place of shadows.
                                A place of figures
framed by empty corridors, of far vistas
shown in paintings long removed and only
kept here in copies – glimpses of fields
and gardens, children brought together, seen
through an open doorway, their aprons clean
and starched, unnaturally white.
                                                    Rooms
suspended in time: subjects holding poses
for long intervals. The young gentleman –
the cousin, the invalid – steps back, brush
in hand, studying the shadows. Before him
sits one who sees no shadows, who keeps
a stillness all her own. 
                                     From her, from
such perspectives, he begins to learn.
Eventually this place, this light will be
left behind, but everything else remains.
Outside, the peculiar veiled brightness.
Within, the cool, high-ceilinged rooms.

A Piece of Ice

Moments after they wheel you
into post-op recovery, you can’t
sit up, can’t move – but someone
slips you a piece of ice. “Something
to suck on,” the nurse says, and she
might as well have given you a bar
of platinum.  On your parched tongue
it’s deliciously cold –
                                    and suddenly
you’re standing with the other kids
beside the truck, while the ice-man
in his leather cape takes his pick
and chips at fifty pounds of ice –
slivers flying everywhere – until
it breaks in two, and all the kids
are reaching out calling “Me me me!”

Two Silver Maples

You, who have grown to this great height,
who have reached down into the earth,
who have looked out and recognized
others like yourselves, holding up the sky –

You, who for so many years have sheltered
small creatures in your branches, have been
home to birds and insects, to squirrels
hidden high up, to moles among your roots –

You, who have lasted, who have collected
the past springs and winters, and written them
in widening circles deep within you,
who have kept that record, and borne witness –

You we humbly ask for your forgiveness
for what we do now, which is to end your life
here on this planet – this ground we both share,
and that we, too, will take leave of, in time.

Now you will go into a darkness that is
beyond the earth, even beyond the sky,
but in our hearts it will be as though you
still stand in the sun, in the wind and the rain.

            Knight

 

Never straight, always devious,

            these forking paths

That branch into sheer mayhem. Thus

            the white queen’s wrath

 

Confounded, the rook’s juggernaut

            derailed, the sly

And unrelenting bishop cocked

            a snook – that I

 

Might ride at last into the sun,

            pockets swollen,

The old king roasted until done,

            the bride stolen.

            Kokoschka

I will return, and hold you close

            within my arms,
And cherish you, until the boasts

            and fierce alarms

Of life will trouble you no more.

            Beyond the wind’s
Relentless flow, we’ll find the door

            that lets us in,

And there in secret will prepare

            and entertain
Such marriages as earth with air

            and fire with rain.

            Keats


That gesture of the offered hand?

            Since it would now
Close upon emptiness, we can

            imagine how

The fountain, near the steps below,

            whispered sometimes
In ways he thought – or longed to know –

            might have been rhymes

He sought to gather once, like sheaves

            that stand in rows,
Or random stalks the reaper leaves

            for those bent low.

            Negative


Found in a drawer, held up to

            the screen, to try
To puzzle what is there. Look through

            to sun and sky

Eclipsed, the shadows now ablaze,

            faces dark, light
Inverted by its fixing. Days

            caught in that bright

Abyss are gone – are gauzy wings

            in amber, kept
In a drawer, among those things

            best to forget.
 

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