Nothing by Design (7 page)

for
Book
, upon a tiny,

leather-bound, gilt-edged tome

in which the words must be

unthinkably minute.

Are there really words in there?

The book, after all, is shut.

If I could step through the glass

of the museum case,

I’d shrink myself to fit

in that empty chair and put

those glasses on—whereby

I’d know whatever it was

I needed to magnify.

CRUSOE’S FOOTPRINT

At last he lays his head flat upon the ground, close to my foot, and sets my other foot upon his head, as he had done before; and after this made all the signs to me of subjection, servitude, and submission imaginable, to let me know how he would serve me so long as he lived.

                         —
DANIEL DEFOE
,
Robinson Crusoe

The poet who writes “free” verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself.

                                        —
W. H. AUDEN

And Elizabeth Bishop did it, in her “Crusoe

in England”: though she needn’t have scanned a foot

in writing it, every step was itself alone

and demanded whatever served. Sometimes she cast

her thought in sestinas; found at her typewriter keys

to set free memories otherwise confined,

or labored within a villanelle to find

lost houses, continents, like the geometer Crusoe,

whose world to map had no scale and no keys;

who saw the surf wash in, efface his foot-

print like a sandpiper’s. The melted cast-

les of sand we’ve made are in the end all one:

what company we have when we feel alone!

A solitary stroll on the beach to find

ourselves rewards us, largely due to the cast

supporting us from the wings, the backstage crew so

handy, the believable props, and the foot-

lights revealing the beaming spectators: keys

to our happiness, in which the fashionable quais

Auden wrote of slosh with talk about us alone.

We’re not, in fact, entirely sorry for the foot-

note-in-mouth disease of the critics who find

what was never there in two-dimensional Crusoe.

Surely he would have liked to attend the cast-

away party that followed him—the downcast,

austere “Robinson” poems of Weldon Kees

the suicide, or
Émile
by that crank Rousseau,

who thought he’d bring up a boy on Defoe alone.

Swiss Family Robinson
? There: we’ve defined

the branching tree-house of writing. Friday’s foot

is at his master’s head, and at the poet’s foot

the subject’s breathing: admittedly these are caste

systems, and guilty as charged, we the jury find.

No man is an island; we’re more like the Florida Keys—

a stanza of lines that each began alone.

Whoever free-floats, it isn’t versatile Crusoe,

who cast his dreams with people he hoped to find,

and through years without lackeys, never slept alone

given the draft at his foot, his
Robinson Crusoe.

LOST ORIGINALS

All his life he spoke of “lost originals,” as if he were reaching beyond his own civilization to the simplicity and grandeur of a remote past…

                         —
PETER ACKROYD
,
Blake

The window to the mortal world

shows mountain islands in the sea.

One of them rises at the same

slope the soul floats from the body

flat on the bed, in stony folds,

the profiled head propped on a pillow.

A second distant hill has curled

into a corner of the window

(more a mirror than a window)

precisely in the size and shape

of the other pillow at the foot

of the bed from which, now flying up

from feet of clay, utterly free,

the female soul looks down on man,

her weeping hair a kind of pity,

her breasts as round as sun and moon.

*

For a pittance he would illustrate

the poems of others, like
The Grave

by Robert Blair (forgotten now,

of the graveyard school). He would engrave

a scene like this to make ends meet,

or sometimes furnish a first sketch

for wretches like that Schiavonetti—

who wrecked this one, and couldn’t etch—

but beauty in the end was his,

for right was left, and black was white,

the world was flat and he went round

his cottage blessed with second sight,

like Catherine, his better half,

and when the visions would forsake

both of them, “What do we do then, Kate?”

“We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.”

*

Soul peeled like a printer’s proof

off the body’s copper plate.

Hands black as a chimney sweep’s

worked and with black hands he ate.

Raging at injustices

to all of humankind, yet placid,

steady with needle, burin, paint,

he brushed the pastel tones with acid.

The worldly took their patronage

elsewhere when he made them wait

for pages queerly old and new,

ahead of their time, and always late.

Time was of such little note!

Heaven came by
the infernal

method, corrosives, which in Hell

are salutary and medicinal;

birds sang their eternal song

and angels lodged beneath his roof.

Off the body’s copper plate

soul peeled like a printer’s proof.

*

Illuminations like stained glass

on paper, or like parasols

that shaded with a pale translucence;

enlightenment from Paracelsus

himself, beloved sage, who said

imagination is like the sun:

its light, intangible, may set

a house afire.
O let light in

from deities of every source—

the New and the Old Testament,

gods of the Greeks, the Romans, Norse,

gods of
wise heathens
, gods that went

so many eons back he had

to invent them, so to mourn their loss.

Saturated colors sang

prophecies. In
The Song of Los

he burned the institutions,
Churches:

Hospitals: Castles: Palaces:

(built, he wrote,
like nets & gins

& traps to catch the joys

of Eternity
) on a treated plate

and turned it, coining true from false.

“All his life,” the future wrote,

“he spoke of ‘lost originals.’ ”

*

London turned meanwhile, cog-wheeled

industry of speed; grinding

people up in mills, it spilled

William Blake on common ground.

Rest in peace, white chalk and red,

hammer and chisel, rest in peace,

aqua fortis, vinegar,

salad oil, and candle grease.

No gravestone for the great engraver.

Never mind. We’ll meet hereafter.

Catherine, who’d lost her beauty

to toil and hunger years before,

had posed a last time (
you have ever

been an angel to me
), and

sold his works to stay alive.

Let the future understand

he sat with her for hours together

daily following his death,

and she followed his instructions

from Jerusalem or Lambeth,

Bunhill Fields, Soho or Felpham,

Fountain Court, all was the same—

and soul, its twisted sheets in tatters,

rose up from its bed of letters.

Acknowledgments

A number of artists’ residencies helped me greatly in writing this book. I am grateful for a Bellagio fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and for several stays at the MacDowell Colony, one of which was supported by a Concordia Foundation fellowship. A period as a Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieri, as well as visits at The Whiteley Center, gave me time and peace to write.

My thanks to the editor of this book, Deborah Garrison, and to the editors of the following magazines and anthologies, where these poems appeared for the first time, sometimes in slightly different form.

The Atlantic:
“Out of the Woods”;
The Common:
“The Gods”;
The Cortland Review:
“Instrumental Riddles”;
Five Points:
“Cities in the Sky” and “Our Friends the Enemy”;
The Hopkins Review:
“Common Room, 1970,” “Fractal,” “Our Ping-Pong Table,” “Over and Out,” “Pair of Bells”;
Little Star:
“French Haiku,” “Nora,” “Voice of America”;
The New Yorker:
“Complaint for Absolute Divorce”;
The Plume Anthology of Poetry:
“Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.”;
Poetry Northwest:
“From a Balcony, Lake Como,” “It’s Hard to Say,” “Lost Originals,” “Unbroken Music”;
Sewanee Theological Review:
“Dr. Syntax and Prosody”;
Southwest Review:
“The Afterlife”;
Subtropics:
“No Second Try”;
3QR: The Three Quarter Review:
“Crusoe’s Footprint”;
The Yale Review:
“Constellations”;
The Warwick Review:
“Cardinal Numbers.” “The Seafarer” appeared first in
The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation
, edited by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto (Norton, 2011).

Dedications

“Morning Mirror” is for Ann Hulbert; “Pair of Bells” is for my friends at Civitella Ranieri; “Common Room, 1970” is for David Brown; “Fractal” is for Daniel Hall, Pengyew Chin, and Kannan Jagannathan; “The Gods” is for Stephen Kampa; “From a Balcony, Lake Como” is for Jean McGarry; “Cardinal Numbers” is for Emily Leithauser; “Our Friends the Enemy” is for Albert and Janet Salter; “Nora” is in memory of Nora Kornblueh; “The Afterlife” is for Hilary Leithauser; “It’s Hard to Say” is in memory of Gladys Leithauser; “Cities in the Sky” is in memory of James Rossant; “Over and Out” is for John Irwin; “Unbroken Music” is for Karen Chase and Caolan Madden; “Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.” is for Joseph and Carla Harrison; “Dr. Syntax and Prosody” is for Greg Williamson; “French Haiku” is for James Magruder and Stephen Bolton; “Instrumental Riddles” is for Claudia Emerson; “Crusoe’s Footprint” is for Mark and Bryan Leithauser; “Lost Originals” is for Gjertrud Schnackenberg.

A Note about the Author

Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She was educated at Harvard and Cambridge and taught at Mount Holyoke College for many years. In addition to her six previous poetry collections, she is the author of a children’s book,
The Moon Comes Home
, and a coeditor of
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
. She is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore.

For more information visit
www.aaknopf.com/poetry

Also by Mary Jo Salter

POEMS

A Phone Call to the Future
(2008)

Open Shutters
(2003)

A Kiss in Space
(1999)

Sunday Skaters
(1994)

Unfinished Painting
(1989)

Henry Purcell in Japan
(1985)

FOR CHILDREN

The Moon Comes Home
(1989)