Night of the Republic Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I. NIGHT OF THE REPUBLIC

  Gas Station Restroom

  Car Dealership at 3 A.M.

  Supermarket

  Park Bench

  Downtown Strip Club

  Hotel Lobby

  Race Track

  Dry Cleaner

  Shoe Store

  Stone Church

  Playground

  Gym

  Indoor Municipal Pool

  Hospital Examination Room

  Senior Center

  Funeral Home

  II. GALAXY FORMATION

  Triumph

  Forgiveness

  Conductor

  Edenic Simile

  Close to You

  Galaxy Formation

  III. NIGHT OF THE REPUBLIC

  Amphitheater

  Museum

  Bookstore

  Barbershop

  Post Office

  Convention Hall

  Government Center

  Courtroom

  The Public

  IV. AT THE CORNER OF COOLIDGE AND CLARENCE

  Beloved

  Flowerpot

  The Family

  Light Switch

  Sickbed

  Coffee Cup

  Cigarette Smoke

  Piano Bench

  Dryer

  Bathtub

  Family Pictures

  Color

  Faucet

  Bedroom Door

  Solitaire

  Cellar

  White Gloves

  Shed

  Hallway

  The Doorbell

  Notes

  Copyright © 2012 by Alan Shapiro

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shapiro, Alan, date.

  Night of the republic : poems / Alan Shapiro.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-547-32970-3

  I. Title.

  PS3569.H338N54 2012

  811'.54—dc22 2010049850

  Book design by Patrick Barry

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The author thanks the following journals, in which these poems, or versions of them, first

  appeared: Bellevue Literary Review: "Galaxy Formation." Burnside Review: "Race Track,"

  "Barbershop." Forward: "Dry Cleaner," "Senior Center." New Ohio Review: "Indoor Munici-

  pal Pool," "Downtown Strip Club." New Republic: "Car Dealership," "The Public," "Govern-

  ment Center." The New Yorker: "Solitaire." Ploughshares: "Bookstore," "Park Bench," "Stone

  Church." Poetry: "Gas Station Restroom," "Supermarket," "Bedroom Door," "Sickbed." Slate:

  "Triumph." Smartish Pace: "Close to You," "Edenic Simile." Tikkun: "Convention Hall."

  "Municipal Pool" was selected for The Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses

  (2011).

  I also wish to thank the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North

  Carolina for a fellowship that gave me time to write several of these poems. And as always

  much gratitude and love to the friends whose criticism has made this book so much bett er

  than it otherwise would have been.

  For Reg Gibbons

  I. NIGHT OF THE REPUBLIC

  Gas Station Restroom

  The present tense

  is the body's past tense

  here; hence

  the ghost sludge of hands

  on the now gray strip

  of towel hanging limp

  from the jammed dispenser;

  hence the mirror

  squinting through grime

  at grime, and the worn-

  to-a-sliver of soiled soap

  on the soiled sink.

  The streaked bowl,

  the sticky toilet seat, air

  claustral with stink—

  all residues and traces

  of the ancestral

  spirit of body free

  of spirit—hence,

  behind the station,

  at the back end of the store,

  hidden away

  and dimly lit

  this cramped and

  solitary carnival

  inversion—Paul

  becoming Saul

  becoming scents

  anonymous

  and animal; hence,

  over the insides

  of the lockless stall

  the cave-like

  scribblings and glyphs

  declaring unto all

  who come to it

  in time: "heaven

  is here at hand

  and dark, and hell

  is odorless; hell

  is bright and clean."

  Car Dealership at 3 A.M.

  Over the lot a sodium aura

  within which

  above the new cars sprays

  of denser many-colored brightnesses

  are rising and falling in a time lapse

  of a luminous and ghostly

  garden forever flourishing

  up out of its own decay.

  The cars, meanwhile, modest as angels

  or like angelic

  hoplites, are arrayed

  in rows, obedient to orders

  they bear no trace of,

  their bodies taintless, at attention,

  serving the sheen they bear,

  the glittering they are,

  the sourceless dazzle

  that the showcase window

  that the showroom floor

  weeps for

  when it isn't there—

  like patent leather, even the black wheels shine.

  Here is the intense

  amnesia of the just now

  at last no longer longing

  in a flowering of lights

  beyond which

  one by one, haphazardly

  the dented, the rusted-through,

  metallic Eves and Adams

  hurry past, as if ashamed,

  their dull beams averted,

  low in the historical dark they disappear into.

  Supermarket

  The one cashier is dozing—

  head nodding, slack mouth open,

  above the cover girl spread out before her on the counter

  smiling up

  with indiscriminate forgiveness

  and compassion for everyone

  who isn't her.

  Only the edge

  is visible of the tightly spooled

  white miles

  of what is soon

  to be the torn-off-

  inch-by-inch receipts,

  and the beam of green light in the black glass

  of the self-scanner

  drifts free in the space that is the sum

  of the cost of all the items that tonight

  won't cross its path.

  Registers of feeling too precise

  too intricate to feel

  except in the disintegrating

  traces of a dream—

  panopticon of cameras

  cutting in timed procession

  from aisle to aisle

  to aisle on the overhead screens

  above the carts asleep inside each other—

  above the darkened


  service desk, the pharmacy, the nursery,

  so everywhere inside the store

  is everywhere at once

  no matter where—

  eternal reruns

  of stray wisps of steam

  that rise

  from the brightly frozen,

  of the canned goods and foodstuffs

  stacked in columns onto columns

  under columns pushed together

  into walls of shelves

  of aisles all celestially effacing

  any trace

  of bodies that have picked

  packed unpacked and placed

  them just so

  so as to draw bodies to the

  pyramid of plums,

  the ziggurats

  of apples and peaches and

  in the bins the nearly infinite

  gradations and degrees of greens

  misted and sparkling.

  A paradise of absence,

  the dreamed-of freed

  from the dreamer, bodiless

  quenchings and consummations

  that tomorrow will draw the dreamer

  the way it draws the night tonight

  to press the giant black moth

  of itself against the windows

  of fluorescent blazing.

  Park Bench

  Behind the bench the drive,

  before the bench the river.

  Behind the bench, white lights

  approaching east and west

  become red lights

  receding west and east

  while before the bench,

  there are paved and unpaved

  pathways and a grassy field,

  the boathouse, and the playground, and the gardens

  of a park named for a man whom

  no one now remembers

  except in the forgetting that occurs

  whenever the park's name is said.

  Left of the bench there is a bridge

  that spans the river

  and beyond the bridge around a bend

  floodlights from the giant dry goods

  that replaced the bowling alley

  that replaced the slaughterhouse

  are dumping fire all night long

  into the river; but here

  where the bench is,

  the river is black, the river

  is lava long past its cooling,

  black as night

  with only a few lights

  from the upper story of the trapezoidal

  five-star hotel across the water

  glittering on the water

  like tiny crystals in a black geode.

  Haunt of courtship,

  haunt of illicit tryst; of laughter

  or muffled scream, what

  even now years later

  may be guttering elsewhere on the neural

  fringes of a dream, all this

  the bench is empty of,

  between the mineral river that it faces

  and the lights behind it speeding white

  to red to white to red to white.

  Downtown Strip Club

  Its night is all day long;

  the neon GIRLS out front go dark in sunlight,

  while inside the cruciform stage

  has stripped down to blackness,

  in which the vertical

  poles at the end of each transverse arm

  stand naked and lonely.

  Cold here is the cold on the faces of the presidents

  on bills the absent hands

  have pushed toward each body bending over

  in a gown of brightness;

  cold is the heat of the shadowless

  shadow play of hands and legs

  up and down along the poles,

  and the hands retreating from the money,

  and the hands in pockets dreaming,

  or dreaming later on another body;

  the heart of the cold is the opposite of what it is,

  cold as the fire

  through the day of its night

  in the firing line of bott les

  waiting for orders

  on the shelf above the bar.

  Hotel Lobby

  Light the pursuer, dark the pursued.

  Light wants to fill dark with itself

  and have it still be dark

  so light can still be filling it.

  Light pours from the massive shining of the chandelier

  over the bronze boy bending beneath it

  to the bronze pool where a watery face

  is rising to meet his as he bends.

  Light the pursuer, dark the pursued,

  along the naked back and arms,

  the hands, the fingers reaching

  for the rippling features, just

  beyond, just out of the grasp of

  into and out of, and across

  the marble floor and pillars,

  to the tips of leaves, and up

  the lion claws of chair legs and sofas and

  over the glass tops of tables in the lounge,

  light losing dark by catching it,

  dark giving light the slip by being caught,

  on elevator doors, down every

  blazing hallway to the highest floor,

  the farthest room, and through it

  beyond the pulsing colors of the muted screen,

  from hip to hip in a loose twilight

  of sheets no longer shifting.

  Race Track

  Oval of all

  desire, desire's

  inside track, its

  fast track, ceaseless

  since there is no

  starting gate

  no finish line,

  the tote board blank,

  the winner's circle empty

  Phantom out of Vagrant by Unbridled

  blacknesses of outdoor

  betting windows

  like a row of eyes

  shut tight and

  dreaming of the

  urgent little bills

  no hands shove

  under the glass

  across the counter—

  and of the hands

  too that open

  all day to close

  all day to open

  to what's never

  quite so keenly

  held than in

  the just before

  just after

  Pleasure Ride out of Nightmare by Recall

  a band was playing,

  the grandstand all

  ablaze with flowered

  dresses underneath

  a preen of hats

  parading in a Breeders'

  Cup of bodies—was it,

  could it have been

  today? Just hours ago?

  Whirlaway out of Day Star by Forego

  Dry Cleaner

  Inside the giant room

  the air is like the air inside

  the smallest closet,

  stuffed full and locked.

  The plastic wears the clothes

  that wear no bodies

  that hang from the inverted roller

  coaster of the conveyor

  that conveys them nowhere now

  throughout the store

  but where they are

  above the yellow bins of bags

  of other clothes awaiting

  transport

  to the big machines, the solvent

  stringencies that purify them for the final

  clarifying steam.

  What clings

  like memory to the crumpled-together sack—

  cloth of pant leg

  cuff or collar

  tomorrow will be churned away

  and pressed

  into forgetfulness

  till one by one the spilled-on dripped-on merely worn

  will rise

  in an aphasia of transparency

  to sheer raiment, untouched


  children again of light!

  Even the numbers

  tagged to belt loop lapel or label

  will be a vestige only

  of a vision of

  that heavenly

  first room before

  the rooms they moved through

  on their way to here,

  immaculate bright showroom

  in which the very eyes that looked

  the hands that reached

  were singing, "World

  invisible, we view thee

  World intangible

  we touch thee

  World unknowable

  we know thee

  Inapprehensible

  we clutch thee."

  Shoe Store

  The new shoes not wanting to be old shoes

  climb the walls;

  diagonally

  in diagonal rows,

  there on the stalled

  stair master

  of each narrow shelf

  shoe after shoe

  is climbing undiscourageably up

  to the boxes they get no closer to

  stacked high above them.

  They climb they plod

  they run in place

  all through the night

  from whatever's coming

  from beyond the window

  across the marble

  of the mall to fill them each

  with alien purposes

  that pass all day

  below them in the carpeted scuff

  and shuffle, in the wingtips

  thumbed and creased

  down aisles

  dead-ending in a mirror.

  They want to escape, these

  leather infants of Sarguntum,

  they want to climb back

  into their boxes

  under the precious tissue where,

  tongue-tied

  in the unlaced laces

  laced together,

  they can rest

  in perfect darkness

  forever on a shelf

  too high to reach.

  Stone Church

  A space to rise in,

  made from what falls,

  from the very mass

  it's cleared from,

  cut, carved, chiseled,

  fluted or curved

  into a space

  there is no end to

  at night when

  the stained glass

  behind the altar

  could be stone too,

  obsidian, or basalt,

  for all the light there is.

  At night, high

  over the tiny