Beautiful Shirt

Cloistered

CLOISTERED Woman on a bench seen from behind, backgrounded by the river at her feet, is torn apart by shadows. The ivy falls silent as she speeds downriver, a dialect of only yes, an affirmation merely to have appeared there. Where politics begin, the imitation has already ended, the weeded purposes of early life already gripped down and arising to cover the walls, the windows, the taller bread of your mouth with shade. The whole exterior died earlier. Passing from fortress to monastery via the public garden, it wanted to be paid. I would have paid to bring you ivy. I studied the mountain whose easel is not delirium. Where history catches fire or appears,uninvited, in the photograph taken in Amsterdam, burned in America, muted by the damage which is also one of the instruments, a part, even the most beautiful, of the orchestration, no paradise is false. Your passport stamp surrounds you like a halo. When they find the pieces, the politics begin again. 56 A muted contract of ascension preys upon innocence which in its turn preys upon the idiot pilgrim at the river's edge or at the foot of a mountain. I came a long way in a loose vein of broken petals to be a stranger now. 57 This page intentionally left blank U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS OF NEW E N G L A N D publishes books under its own imprint and isthe publisher for Brandeis University Press, Brown University Press, University of Connecticut, Dartmouth College, Middlebury College Press, University of New Hampshire, University of Rhode Island, Tufts University, University of Vermont, Wesleyan University Press, and Salzburg Seminar. Donald Revell was a National Poetry Series Winner in 1982 for his first book of poems, From theAbandoned Cities (1983). In 1985 he won a Pushcart Prize. His collection New Dark Ages (Wesleyan, 1990) won the PEN Center USA West Award for Poetry. His other honors include a Shestack Prize from American Poetry Review and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Revell has also published The Gaza of Winter (1988) and Erasures (Wesleyan, 1992). His work has been selected for three editions of Best American Poetry. Until recently he was editor of Denver Quarterly. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Utah. Beautiful Shirt was completed during a Guggenheim year in The Netherlands, southern France, and the Ozarks, where Revell travelledso that he "might be distanced from familiar voice and language in order to make poems entirely dependent upon immediate physical and verbal circumstances." L I B R A R Y OF C O N G R E S S C A T A L O G I N G - I N - 1 ' U B L I C AT I ON D A T A Revell, Donald, 1954Beautiful shirt / Donald Revell. p. cm. — (Wesleyan poetry) ISBN 0-8195-2216-3. — ISBN 0-8195-1219-2 (pbk.) I. Title. PS3568.E793B43 1995 811'.54—dc20 94-20492 @ ...