In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

Revival

R E V I VA L f o r g r e g o r y c o r s o (1 9 3 0 – 2 0 0 1) It’s good to be dead in America with the movies, curtains and drift, the muzak in the theater. It’s good to be in a theater waiting for The Best Years of Our Lives to begin. Our first night back, we’re here entertaining a hunch our plane did crash somewhere over the Rockies, luggage and manuscripts scattered, charred fragments attempting to survive the fatal draft. To be dead in America at the movies distracted by preview music in dimming lights. I never once thought of Alfred Deller or Kathleen Ferrier singing Kindertotenlieder. It’s good to be lost among pillars of grass. I never once thought of My Last Duchess or the Pines of Rome. Isn’t it great here just now dying along with azaleas, trilliums, 93 myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox? It’s good to be a ghost in America, light flooding in at this moment of never coming back to the same person who knew certain things, certain people, shafts of life entering a kitchen at the end of an age of never coming back now. To hear reports on the radio, something about speed, they say, accelerated history. It’s good to share molecular chasm with a friend. I never once reached for Heisenberg or The Fall of the Roman Empire. On this day in history the first antelope was born, remember The Yearling, like that, but the footage distressed, handheld. A hard, closed, linear world at the edge of caricature, no memory now of the New Science or On the Origin of Species. It’s good to feel hunted in America. To be the son of a large man who rose out of depression and the middle world war, poverty and race to loom in mid-sixties industrial American air, survived classic notions of the atom, to think to be. The official story walks down the street, enters bars and cafes. 94 Plays. Airs. Stars. To sing a song of industry, having forgotten Monty Clift was beaten for reading Ulysses. It’s dark in a theater, hoping to say never return to the moment of return, as a hollow ring from Apollo 13 sinks back to burn into the atmosphere which made it, huh. How come all the best thoughts are images? How come all the best images are uncanny? What’s the use of The Compleat Angler, searching for effects at the bottom of a lake next to a shoe slick with algae, at the base of a cliff with pine needles and a rotting log? I was talking about rending, reading, rewriting what is seen. Put the book down and look into the day. I want an art that can say how I am feeling if I am feeling blue sky unrolling a coronation rug unto the bare toe of a peasant girl with vague memories of Jeanne d’Arc, or that transformation in Cinderella. Where is your mother today? I think of you, soft skin against soot. How much has the world turned since you were a girl in Troy? In these parts both widow and banker are diminished, something outside the town defeated them. 95 In these parts neither possessed their life. This pageant demands too much, that we work and not break, that we love and not lie, and not complain. It’s good to not break in America. To behave this time never once looking into Chapman’s Homer, or quoting the Vita Nuova translated by Dante Rossetti. No, I am thinking blurry faces, a boy, girl, looking at New York harbor for a first time, soil in pockets, missing buttons, needing glasses, needing shoes. It was war. A capital experience! Investing in narratives of working up from the mail room, basement, kitchen. It’s good to believe in the press kit sailing away from rear-projection tenements like a car ride after a good fix, offset by attractively angled shots, neo-cartoonish, with massive distorting close-ups, part lockdown, part interest rate, part plant, part machine. Part dazzle? Lulls and high sensations. I always wished I could be funny ha-ha, 96 instead of “he’s a little funny,” if you get...