Scriptorium Read online

  THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES

  The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the

  publication of five collections of poetry annually through five

  participating publishers. Publication is funded annually by the Lannan

  Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, Barnes & Noble, the Poetry

  Foundation, the PG Family Foundation and the Betsy Community Fund,

  Joan Bingham, Mariana Cook, Stephen Graham, Juliet Lea Hillman

  Simonds, William Kistler, Jeffrey Ravetch, Laura Baudo Sillerman, and

  Margaret Thornton. For a complete listing of generous contributors to

  the National Poetry Series, please visit www.nationalpoetryseries.org.

  2015 COMPETITION WINNERS

  Scriptorium

  By Melissa Range of Appleton, Wisconsin.

  Chosen by Tracy K. Smith. Publisher: Beacon Press.

  Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last

  By Justin Boening of Iowa City, Iowa.

  Chosen by Wayne Miller. Publisher: Milkweed Editions.

  The Wug Test

  By Jennifer Kronovet of New York, New York.

  Chosen by Eliza Griswold. Publisher: Ecco.

  Trébuchet

  By Danniel Schoonebeek of Brooklyn, New York.

  Chosen by Kevin Prufer. Publisher: University of Georgia Press.

  The Sobbing School

  By Joshua Bennett of Yonkers, New York.

  Chosen by Eugene Gloria. Publisher: Penguin.

  for my grandmothers

  Edith Mae Davis Range

  (1907–1995)

  Ena Gay Ritchie Pierce

  (1921–2007)

  CONTENTS

  Foreword, Tracy K. Smith

  Verdigris

  Labyrinth, Chartres

  Ashburnham

  A Skiff of Snow

  Orpiment

  Negative Theology

  Kermes Red

  Flat as a Flitter

  Navajo Code Talkers, WWII

  Tyrian Purple

  Pigs (see Swine)

  Ofermod

  Lampblack

  Fortunes of Men

  Nicodemus Makes an Analysis

  Biblia Pauperum

  Minium

  Anagram: See a Gray Pine

  Solidus of the Empress Irene, AD 797–802

  Incarnational Theology

  Woad

  Hit

  Vernacular Theology: Mechthild of Magdeburg

  To Swan

  Ultramarine

  Crooked as a Dog’s Hind Leg

  All Creation Wept

  The Giants’ Sword Melts

  Gold Leaf

  Cento: Natural Theology

  Regionalism

  Scriptorium

  Shell White

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  FOREWORD

  Each of the poems in Scriptorium is a marvel. What may likely strike you on the first read is Range’s remarkable facility with form. She moves nimbly, naturally, with comfort and acrobatic delight through the rigors of sonnets, villanelles, anagrams, cento, and the like. She submits joyfully to the whims of rhyme, allowing music to exert its will upon her train of mind, and she does so with such virtuosic ease that you may not even detect it on a first read. But what you will feel more than any of this, I am certain, is an urgent usefulness. These are poems for which form is not an end in itself.

  All the many formal commands to which Range’s poems gladly bend are in service of something urgent, something having to do with a view of language as a means of survival. In this sense, Range’s work reminds me of the phrase “the Living Word,” the very thing that ignited the piety of medieval monks; only here it is made up of words that fit in the mouths of “drunkards, / bruisers, goaders, soldiers, / braggers” and their kind. What we say and how we say it, Range urges her readers to see and claim, tells us who we are and who we’ve been. Our voices mark our time, but they also guard a place for us in time, which is to say, they keep us alive.

  Among the things this particular voice seems entrusted with keeping alive is the voice of Appalachia, what the poet claims as her “hillbilly” legacy. Not academically or anthropologically, but as a kind of earnest commemoration, a claiming of kin. And that’s not all. Range reanimates Old English, which she assures us “has a word for our kind / of people.” And she initiates us into the language of the brightly colored illuminations once meant to serve as vehicles for Christian belief. She casts her eye and ear in every direction, asking, “Must one sing of this?” And answering, “One must.”

  Traditionally, a scriptorium was a room where monks sat copying manuscripts. The word calls to the sense of what is precious, what must be made and remade, what one could give one’s entire life to preserving. How elegant a corollary for the work of the poet, and of this poet in particular, whose most sacred text—the one inspiring the most rapt devotion—is the very vernacular we live, love, grieve, fumble, and forgive in.

  Tracy K. Smith

  VERDIGRIS

  Not green as new weeds or crushed juniper,

  but a toxic and unearthly green, meet

  for inking angel-wings, made from copper sheets

  treated with vapors of wine or vinegar,

  left to oxidize for the calligrapher.

  When it’s done, he’ll cover calf-skin with a fleet

  of knotted beasts in caustic green that eats

  the page and grieves the paleographer.

  There’s copper in my brain, my heart of hearts;

  in my blood, an essential mineral.

  Too much is poison. Too much air imparts

  sickness to the script—once begun, eternal,

  its words forever grass in drought. Nor departs

  my grief, green and corrosive as a gospel.

  LABYRINTH, CHARTRES

  Most days the labyrinth’s covered

  up with folding chairs, but Fridays

  it’s open even to unbelievers.

  Our docent says the labyrinth is not a maze,

  that the pilgrim cannot lose her way

  coiling toward the center rose.

  My pastor friend and I are chaperones,

  here to help field-tripping kids

  weave the ancient circuit that the masons

  made without diversions or dead ends. “One pathway

  in, the same path flowering out,”

  the docent says, “so that you cannot stray.”

  My friend instructs our group: “Release,

  receive, return.” Kids wind along the stone

  with palms upturned, seeking the peace

  they’ve been told radiates from the roundels,

  the buttresses, the crypts, the statues

  of virgins, saints, apostles.

  Above us, glaring from the western wall,

  Christ the Judge rides on a cloud

  of glass, grabbing sinners for his hell,

  the righteous for his heaven,

  part of the gospel that the craftsmen

  fractured into windowpanes.

  Shining through the quatrefoil, the wounds

  the glaziers cut and set

  into Christ’s feet and hands,

  sun pools blue and scarlet

  on the floor, dappling the medallion

  where, the legend goes, penitents

  and priests walked on their knees.

  Now anyone can walk here,

  including the faithless, whom God always sees.

  The kids circle the path, they pray

  as if prayer was a right and not a grace,

  they turn upon the way (my friend will say)

  of the blest, those who can trust in Chri
st’s name.

  He’ll remind us, “We’re pilgrims, not tourists,”

  though the admission is the same.

  ASHBURNHAM

  With a name like that,

  the librarian shouldn’t have been surprised

  when late night hearth-sparks

  kindled mantel-tree and wainscot,

  turned the hallways to tinder,

  cindered the vellum

  already almost too fragile to touch—

  an antiquarian’s collection

  amassed when the monasteries

  were dissolved, when books

  were flung from scriptoria, torn

  parchment used for bootblacks’ rags.

  A gospel, an epic, a charter aflame,

  the only copies thrown from a window

  when the librarian could no longer wait

  for the bucket brigade;

  the next morning, schoolboys

  pocketed the black and buckled scraps.

  The poem about the seafaring hero,

  bound into a larger volume

  of monster-tales and marvels,

  smoked as if from dragon-fire,

  parts of the tale already worm-eaten,

  and though the restorationists

  cleaned and pinned the leaves—

  fire-brittle, water-warped—

  to a line to dry, the story kept

  disintegrating, its margins

  crumbling further at each touch,

  leaving scholars less to copy

  of what was already less a copy

  than a shadow—the original

  unpreserved, irretrievable

  the instant the pen quenched

  the harp: a smoldering

  smothered, a ruin of the tongue.

  A SKIFF OF SNOW

  Not a boatload but a sift that barely sticks—

  the flour sloughed from a rolling pin,

  flakes scarce as skiffs in a landlocked state.

  In the ballads brought over

  with the Scots, women pine for word

  of a lover or a son put out to sea,

  a skiff of song scabbing the ground

  beneath the willow when they’re buried,

  beneath the ocean when they’re not.

  My father on a ladder doesn’t sing;

  he cusses, banging boards

  onto the wind-scrapped barn,

  roof half off, wood give out, sky

  spitting snow, salvaging

  his daddy’s daddy’s daddy’s work—

  and before him, even, a man

  who didn’t row, he walked here

  (when this was barely Tennessee)

  from New Jersey, and before that,

  his father drifted in from Holland,

  England, Germany, or France

  (the family trees disagree

  about which accent

  got mangled into mine).

  When I left my mountain home to hitch

  to cities, I became a hick,

  my skiff of twang scuffing the air,

  breaking on scoffers’ ears like ships

  busting on rocks. My granddaddy,

  on a job in Cincinnati, drinking up

  his paycheck, heard “You must be one of them

  hillbillies” soon as he opened his mouth

  to ask the baseball score;

  he replied, “They is two kinds of people

  in this world, hillbillies and sons

  of bitches—so what does that make you?”

  Then he slugged the feller one,

  or got slugged, depending

  on who’s telling it.

  “It’s a-skiffin’,” we say,

  to mean there’s not much,

  there won’t be much, and it’ll be gone

  in two shakes. It’s untelling

  where it goes. It’s untelling

  who’ll tell it once it’s gone.

  ORPIMENT

  King’s yellow for the King’s hair and halo,

  mixed if the monastery can’t afford

  the shell gold or gold leaf to crown the Lord,

  to work the letters of his name, the Chi-Ro,

  in trumpet spirals and triquetras, the yellow

  a cheap and lethal burnishing, the hoard

  not gold but arsenic and sulfur. The Word

  curves in compass circles, and again I follow,

  tracing on yellowing vellum my dread

  of this intolerant composition,

  this gold that cannot coexist with lead,

  this God who prefers extermination—

  of false prophets, golden calves, and other gods

  before him—to the wideness of devotion.

  NEGATIVE THEOLOGY

  I get the call about my grandmother. Maybe it is nothing.

  A dark spot on a screen: someone says, “Pray that it is nothing.”

  On the surgeon’s gurney, swaddled in blue—

  she’s lost how much blood? Like you, she weighs nothing.

  Pseudo-Denys says to cast off all images, all qualities of you.

  So the sculptor chips marble away into nothing.

  The preacher speaks over my grandmother,

  half her colon gone, where? He lays hands on nothing.

  Unlight, Undark, Unfather, Unson,

  Unholy of Unholies—all your names stray into nothing.

  In the ICU, she vomits everything but the ice.

  Unknowing I know her, a body on its way to nothing.

  The star points on the monitor collapse to a line,

  Ray of Divine Darkness, ray searing all light to nothing.

  Cast off all images, even those that seem flesh, seem true.

  “Jesus paid it all,” says the preacher. Did he pay it for nothing?

  Unmother, Unlover, Undoer, Undone—

  like you, she won’t have a name. Two can play at nothing.

  My mother calls my name, asks me to pray.

  When you’ve got nothing to say, better to say nothing.

  KERMES RED

  Called crimson, called vermilion—“little worm”

  in both the Persian and the Latin, red

  eggs for the carmine dye, the insect’s brood

  crushed stillborn from her dried body, a-swarm

  in a bath of oak ash lye and alum to form

  the pigment the Germans called Saint John’s Blood—

  the saint who picked brittle locusts for food,

  whose blood became the germ of a crimson storm.

  Christ of the pierced thorax and worm-red cloak,

  I read your death was once for all, but it’s not true:

  your kings and bishops command a book,

  a beheading, blood for blood, the perfect hue;

  thus I, the worm, the Baptist, and the scarlet oak

  see all things on God’s earth must die for you.

  FLAT AS A FLITTER

  The way you can crush a bug

  or stomp drained cans of Schlitz out on the porch,

  the bread when it won’t rise,

  the cake when it falls after the oven-door slams—

  the old people had their way

  to describe such things. “But what’s a flitter?”

  I always asked my granny. And she could never say.

  “It’s just a flitter. Well, it might be a fritter.”

  “Then why not say ‘fritter’?”

  “Shit, Melissa. Because the old people said ‘flitter.’”

  And she smacked the fried pie into the skillet,

  and banged the skillet on the stove,

  and shook and turned the pie

  till it was on its way to burnt.

  Flatter than a flitter, a mountain

  when its top’s blown off:

  dynamited, shaved to the seam,

  the spoil pushed into hollers, into streams,

  the arsenic slurry caged behind a dam,

  teetering above an elementary schoo
l.

  The old people said “flitter.” They didn’t live to see

  God’s own mountain turned

  hazard-orange mid-air pond,

  a haze of waste whose brightness rivals heaven.

  When that I was a little bitty baby,

  my daddy drove up into Virginia

  to fix strip-mining equipment, everything

  to him an innocent machine in need.

  On God’s own mountain,

  poor people drink bad water, and the heart

  of the Lord is a seam of coal gouged out

  to fuel the light in other places.

  The old people didn’t live

  to give a name to this

  kingdom of gravel and blast.

  Lay me a hunk of coal

  on my flittered tongue

  to mark the mountains’ graves,

  to mark my father’s tools

  quarrying bread for my baby plate,

  to mark my granny slapping dough

  as if with God’s own flat hand.

  NAVAJO CODE TALKERS, WWII

  When “turtle” is a tank, a bomber

  “chickenhawk,” when a Marine’s

  a kid who’s got a mouth on him

  his country never cared to learn,

  a war can be won. Not

  eighty years after the Long Walk

  tried to crush it to a stutter

  it was pronounced a gift

  to the military, this language

  they tried to scrub out with lye

  or beat out with belts

  at Indian boarding schools,

  its tones rising and falling

  to switch the meaning,

  too liquid and difficult

  to be broken. When America’s

  “our mother” and death’s

  spelled “deer, eye, axe,

  tooth, horse” (the cryptograms

  never written, always spoken);