Miracles slip past us, Anne Carson

 

Lines

While talking to my mother I neaten things. Spines of books by the phone.

Paperclips

in a china dish. Fragments of eraser that dot the desk. She speaks

longingly

of death. I begin tilting all the paperclips in the other direction.

Out

the window snow is falling straight down in lines. To my mother,

love

of my life, I describe what I had for brunch. The lines are falling

faster

now. Fate has put little weights on the ends (to speed us up) I

want

to tell her--sign of God's pity. She won't keep me

she says, she

won't run up my bill. Miracles slip past us. The

paperclips

are immortally aligned. God's pity! How long

will

it feel like burning, said the child trying to be

kind.

 

-Anne Carson

 

This is from Carson's book of 2005, Decreation, in a section titled 'Stops', which includes several poems about her aging mother. The poem first appeared in The New Yorker.

 

I've been on a bit of an Anne Carson bender lately, mostly rereading, but not entirely. 

The Tragedy of Y

"Well, murder or no murder, all I can say is--thank God for the Mad Hatters!"

That's a reporter who's just been berating Inspector Thumm.

A couple of days before a trawler had fished up York Hatter's body in the New York Harbor. He'd disappeared from his house on Washington Square six weeks before, and from the condition of the corpse--fingers too battered for a fingerprint, face cut up beyond recognition--it seemed he'd been in the water the whole time. The identification was made from the clothes--and a suicide note on the body, in York Hatter's handwriting.

At this point, the dedicated mystery reader (and one anonymous New York reporter) will go, hunh, sure.

Still Thumm, one of New York's finest, unhappily lets it go as suicide until there's a clear murder attempt a month later at the Hatter household. Then he calls in Drury Lane, retired actor and amateur detective who had solved the earlier Tragedy of X. 

There are two more murders to come and one attempted before Drury Lane unwillingly reveals the culprit.

This has the clever conceit that there's a witness, Laura Campion, in the room when the first murder is committed, only she's blind, deaf, and dumb. What could she have perceived? How can she communicate it? 

I enjoyed this, and it shows up on lists of best mysteries, but it isn't as good as The Tragedy of X. I knew from Laura Campion's clue who had done it, and so the final explanation went on too long for me. Still fun! It's recently been reissued (with the cover shown) by Penzler Publishing as an American Mystery Classic.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1932). Spooky House. 

Douglas Dunn (#poetry)

 

Chateau d'If

Her photographs of white embrasures glow

Against impossible blue, the sea and sky

Contemptuous of how men fortify

The State's iniquity. I do not know

Exactly all we talked about or did.

I was wearing my blue jacket, my off-white

French slacks. She posed me as a blue vignette--

"Lean on these battlements, then turn your head."

I can't remember, but I can't forget

Our outing to the Chateau d'If, kept now

In these rectangles of a printed light,

Other than that she liked the day, and how

She said she'd read that book of martyrdom.

"Let's stay a while, then take the last boat home."

 

-Douglas Dunn

 

Douglas Dunn was a Scottish poet who died last Friday at the age of 83. I've featured him once before on the blog. This is from his book Elegies, which came out in 1985 and won the Whitbread Prize. The elegies were for his first wife Lesley Balfour Dunn, who died of cancer at the age of 37. She was an artist (not just photography--"infallible in art//That pleased her--water, oil, or lithograph" says another poem.)

 

Looking at an old photograph led Dunn to write this sonnet about a moment in their past. There are a number of other sonnets in the volume, though not all. Still most use some formal structure.

 

Chateau d'If is, of course, the prison/fortress in Marseilles' bay, where Edmond Dantes is sent early in The Count of Monte Cristo. Like Alcatraz, you can take a boat out to visit. 

 

 

 

It's only at the Chateau d'If moment that The Count of Monte Cristo is a book of martyrdom, but that suits the mood and the moment of the poem.