Photo by Nathanaël Desmeules on Unsplash
Sour Grapes
That fall we were always
out of wine, and that night
especially we knew we had
to have something and I threw on
a tee shirt and ran downstairs
while you waited in the apartment
where we'd already polished off
the last two bottles of 99c Montepulciano
d'Abruzzo, one down the gullet
and one gone off into vinegar
then down the drain, end of our first-ever
case that taught us the term
bottle variation. Street lights
glowed white while fall starved
the city trees leafless as telephone poles
but the shop was closed and I could see–
through the window where the lights
had dimmed–the wine guy whose name
I can't remember had already locked the door
and was gone. There was the '82 Margaux
I had promised myself when you said yes
gleaming in the window like an ornament,
before all that came later, the kids and the divorce
and the second lives, all the wine
gone down the drain into the sad lights
of that city which doesn't exist
any more if it ever did outside
of movies and our illusions.
Later we found out some guy
had been forging a lot of high-end wines
by pouring plonk into dusty bottles
and artfully arranging labels and corks,
and the Margaux we never had
was probably, in the window of that store
whose name I still can't remember, a fake.
Assessment
In Las Meninas it's either the dwarf
or the self-portrait that burns through the frame--
the Infanta with the foofy pink dress seems like
the cause of the painting but that's just the way
with art and magic--the misdirection that earns
the paltry pesetas of survival. What would Velazquez
have painted if he didn't need commissions and patrons
or the satisfaction of anyone but himself? Even the worst painters
aren't paid what they're worth. Someone once estimated
only about five poets in America
can live off poetry. Maybe
I'm making that number up. It could be
too high, as Stevie Wonder sings. The rest of us
live off it, too, poetry, I mean,
but in a different way. Tomorrow I will have to read
twenty-eight student essays on a Keats poem,
split firewood for an hour, drive to Brattleboro for milk and wine,
do a load of laundry, respond to an already forgettable
professional development workshop, zoom with deans,
pay a mortgage, write to my son in Spain. None of these--
as Elizabeth Bishop writes in "One Art," a poem in which she disguised
if not misdirected from the generating subject, which is
her alcoholism--will bring disaster. Probably because
there are so many other disasters rising
around us like the sea level from an overheated earth
being denied by overheated rhetoric. Yesterday a colleague
said, "There are only two grades at this school,
A and Not-A." That colleague was me. I try not to wonder
what grade this poem might receive, or any poem. "Dear Mr. Keats,
your Hyperion has some interesting images
and nice language though it fails ultimately
to cohere, B minus." Van Gogh didn't even wait around
to find out what grade “Crows over a Wheatfield”
might earn, but shot himself in the field
the next day, a C minus suicide. The real subject
of that painting was neither birds nor grain
but the angular blue-black strokes of lowering sky
just like the one even now on this sill
bearing down on the strangled thrum
of these failing pigeons here like the blazes.
At the Fencer’s Club
The masks turn these tots
into houseflies or bees,
faces meshed and stingers
turned outward, partnered up
in practice to stab
with bated foil and breath
into friends. Only connect
indeed. Dressed and buckled in
like chefs or psychiatric patients,
they shuffle and lunge.
Shouting coaches
trail their own medals
behind them, a history
of silver and bronze ages,
teaching a new generation
to keep their right distance,
--steely arguments unpacked
of all their metaphor—
but still, with their bent
and blunted points, to touch.
Offer
North of the strip where my daughter climbs
glaciers of clouds alone on her first trip abroad,
I steal along the choked labyrinths of Queens, potholed parkway
I have made of love and self, traffic of distance
that is our company and destination. Tires crackle
like the irritation of applause no one has the taste or faith
to cut from live recordings. The heater chuffs against a cold
that fills the membrane of March like a zeppelin.
What a blessing to imagine we can fly through
the winter wind of a piled up sky
and under the mirror of constellations,
peel open the grammar of another world,
to plunge so confidently into the ether,
betting everything on the instruments’
parable of the runway, a point to touch down.
I remember my own first flight, the muse of altitude
laying her cool palm on the back of my neck, hollowing
my bones until I was weightless as a sparrow
with the savor of being aloft and between,
an exalted nowhere, and so believed
I could transcribe like a native the ancient dialect
of clouds or gloss the lexicon of atmospheres,
a time when the opaque wall of the universe seemed
to break into the articulate cool of a spring morning.
Now in the quiet tumult of stop and go on
a crumbling expressway, here is what I can give,
O my daughter–a few syllables between us strewn
like crumbs along the cracked pavement of the way home.
Harry Bauld is a writer, translator and painter who was educated at Columbia University. His poems have won prizes and appeared in numerous journals in the U.S. and the U.K. He was included in Best New Poets 2012 (UVa Press) and has performed in New York and elsewhere as a magician and jazz pianist.