Unshod Quills

Poems on America and Somewhere Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond.

Old America

The angel above the fountain had not yet descended
when the upstart, carved, brownstone facades
on the new uptown square had begun to decay.
My grandfather might have seen him pitched into place,
so clumsily genteel, Santayana would have smiled.

Gentility outgrown, he wears the stigmata now:
chipped wing, hollowed robes, broken nose,
eroded face and hands
kissed into being
by spray on stone.

With little left to guard, the boughs
that shaded him are gone:
a few leaves drift in the basin
or mold themselves to his sides…
transients, from a place still green,
leaving a lacework of stains
on fragile stone.

Now the upraised palm
that was meant to hold back time
yearns
for its bodiless perfection:
mottled fingers
weathered away –
and he, a fable
in this treeless square.

Faraway
(Ann Arbor, 1968)

Often he used to wonder, after a sleepless night,
why he should gaze down from the attic window
watching the sun burn the mist from October streets.
He knew that the contours of the small city
would never emerge as he dreamed ‑
although the dream shifted from morning to morning:

A winding street on a small hill, pale, stuccoed facades
arching over rough colonnades,
dark women leaning from darker windows,
casements pushed open, refracting the light …

A long shady boulevard lined with clipped trees
and clumps of round tables with neat checkered cloths,
a couple embracing, old men playing chess,
an accordion’s whine floating over slate roofs …

These never were his, but only, each morning,
the grid of straight streets in his own wooden town.

*

But those streets were kind to him, hiding their lines
with a ragged flourish as veils of leaves
cast a mottled aureole of yellow and red
over drowsing cars and peeling front porches
where slat swings hung from creaking chains,
and the tinkle of wind‑chimes climbed
into the sparrows’ cries, into the beat of their wings,
and even the year’s threadbare fashion had glamour:
unbound hair floating over bare shoulders,
ripple of cotton, swish of tanned legs ‑
he was not clever, but still he looked,
and sees these things now,
and sees these things now…

Author Biography

William Ellis received his Ph.D in Literature from Boston College, then taught humanities at Vanier College in Montreal. He has retired after  seven years as the Senior Foreign Expert of the English department at Sichuan University. There, he offered courses in Western Intellectual History, Art History, European Literature, and Canadian Studies. He was awarded the Sichuan Province Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. He is now backpacking around the world for a year with his wife, Denise (Chen Yu).  He is the author of The Theory of the American Romance, an Ideology in American Intellectual History, nominated in 1989 for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize. His poetry has been published in Mala, Chengdu Grooves, and Unshod Quills.  Contact info: elliswa@hotmail.com.

On Somewhere Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond

Postscript to “Places”

(for Karolina Majkowska and her students)

Imagine a small boy lying
on the deep-shag carpet of his living
or rather his parents’ living or rather
the bank’s living room floor.

He is looking at, studying, a map,
thinking what it must be like to live
someplace else. After hearing
his grandpa say a Danish prayer,
his great-grandmother coughing out German,
his other Bohunk and Polack elders,
he realizes, young, he is of the world
and not of a country or race.

The boy soon tires of pronouncing
his name for Anglophiles — he knows it
doesn’t fit the language he was born to master.

Later, he gets a spinning globe
to accentuate his maps, plays a game
holding his finger on it as it spins
and wherever it stops is where he’ll go someday.
Cartography is therapy, he thinks, and so he begins
to listen — to really listen — to from
where came who and what and why.

In time, he’ll write a poem titled “Places.”

Author Biography

Jason Mashak (b.1973) lived in Michigan, Georgia, Tennessee, and Oregon before moving in 2006 to Prague, Czech Republic. He has two mostly Slovak daughters with whom he derives much inspiration. His first book of poems, Salty as a Lip, was anointed Most Poetic Book for Haters of Poetry in 2010 by Black Heart Magazine. An expanded, 2nd edition of the book is forthcoming by Haggard & Halloo (Austin, TX) sometime in 2011. Mashak’s writing can be found in numerous journals and anthologies, including a few in Czech translation.

A sonnet on the theme of America and a translation of Rilke on the theme of “Somewhere Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond.”

Eclogue

I heard a soldier on NPR speak
of an Afghan widow who, in a field
of blooming poppies, stooped low in the mud;
she’d been at her work for hours: “Crazy,”
he thought, watching the white dress go blood red
with flower stains of decollated bulbs
with a curious amount of leisure.

As in a gallery patron’s treasure
hunt, where each find is found, say, like the daubs
of Hofmann’s blasted and fragmented bed
of sanguinary chunks, lit by hazy
afternoon, she’d toss with a horrible thud—
he realized only later—the gross yield
of a land mine, which made the basket leak.

The Death of the Poet

There he lay. His pale face, propped up, then fell
to balk at the steepness of the pillow
as the world and what of it one can know
were being ripped from his senses ever so,
relapsing through a year of listless hell.

Those who saw him then did not know the grace
with which he was at one with all of this—
these thises: This depth, this meadow, and this
water that was being put upon his face.

On his face, there came indeed a vast tide
wanting him and looking for him with care;
his mask is, with the fear no longer there,
as tender and open as the inside
of a fruit spoiling in the outside air.

Sonnet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Mark Olival-Bartley

Der Tod des Dichters

Er lag. Sein aufgestelltes Antlitz war
bleich und verweigernd in den steilen Kissen,
seitdem die Welt und dieses von-ihr-Wissen,
von seinen Sinnen abgerissen,
zurückfiel an das teilnahmslose Jahr.

Die, so ihn leben sahen, wußten nicht,
wie sehr er Eines war mit allem diesen;
denn Dieses: diese Tiefen, diese Wiesen
und diese Wasser waren sein Gesicht.

O sein Gesicht war diese ganze Weite,
die jetzt noch zu ihm will und um ihn wirbt;
und seine Maske, die nun bang verstirbt,
ist zart und offen wie die Innenseite
von einer Frucht, die an der Luft verdirbt.

Rainer Maria Rilke
1875-1926

Author Biography