Second Empire

by Richie Hofmann

  the alchemy of someone else

  to rise in me. Sitting with you on the terrace,

  I scarcely noticed. Bats tacked blackness

  to the sky, erotic and detached

  as Japanese tattoos. One by one, stars broke

  sharply into the harbor

  like silver extracted from lead in a bowl.

  ABENDLIED

  All the animals in the city: blood

  in a butcher’s window. Beneath

  a butcher’s stoop. A white parrot

  in an opera lover’s bedroom:

  keeping watch, telling. I hear them all.

  Even a family crest above an entrance

  studded with bees. Even a lion

  with a ring in his mouth. Even the lips

  troubled with knocking.

  MIDWINTER

  Wearing Wellington boots, we followed the retriever

  along the perimeter of the property.

  Just that morning a man and his son

  had brought in firewood from the fallen tree.

  Through barberry: a small clearing

  in the woods, hollow like the inside of a cello.

  I walked around a tree stump, like Mustardseed.

  After sunset, we looked through a square window

  into the stark cabin where Jean writes.

  In a bubble in the antique glass, the sky swirled—

  reflected like a sequin, like summer even,

  though it was New Years Day, and the world

  was dusky, and the dog, the house, the woods, the books—

  they weren’t even ours.

  THE GATES

  The crystal doorknob coils

  back. Light

  shifts into

  a new pattern

  on the ceiling, as it did

  from time

  to time, when

  the swallows left

  the tree outside the window,

  when there was a tree—

  How else

  can I describe your leaving,

  farfetched

  as it seems?

  GATEKEEPER

  In another time, the choice

  might have been depicted as two gates:

  Open the one, and it is winter.

  Snow covers the cobblestones, the spires,

  the December markets shrill

  with lettuces. Snow covers the butcher’s stoop,

  the little chapel. The iron gates at the far edge of the city, of sleep—

  I thought I saw you there.

  Open the other, and it is winter.

  I can tell because the lion’s mouth is filled with snow.

  In a room, my lover presses a photograph of the city

  against glass, and fastens

  the back of the frame, which has hinges also, and opens

  and closes.

  EGYPTIAN COTTON

  Once nothing separated us but the gossamer

  of sheets—white and gauzy in the summer, when a world

  of heat blew in, inflating

  the curtains into the room that was his

  and mine, when no one else was there—

  nothing between the body, whose hot-bloodedness,

  whose frailty I had come to know

  the duration of my life,

  and the body

  he drank cool water with, the body he salted, mile after mile

  along the coast, fucked me with, with which

  he told me what troubled him

  —the two of us in our bed

  of Egyptian cotton.

  The sea reflected us, our human emotions.

  Then the sea refused us, like the sea.

  AFTER

  When the sun broke up the thunderheads,

  and dissonance was consigned

  to its proper place, the world was at once foreign

  and known to me. That was shame

  leaving the body. I had lived my life

  from small relief to small relief, like a boy pulling a thorn

  from his foot. Wet and glistening,

  twisting toward light, everything seemed

  recognizable again: a pheasant lazily dragging

  his plume; the cherries dark and shining

  on the trellis; moths hovering cotton-like

  over an empty bowl; even myself,

  where I reclined against an orange wall,

  hopeful and indifferent, like an inscription on a door.

  IMPERIAL CITY

  From the outset I hated the city of my ancestors.

  I was fearful I’d be put in the dungeon below

  the cathedral. The best example of the Romanesque

  a guide was saying in German in English in French

  where are buried eight German kings four queens

  twenty-three bishops four Holy Roman Emperors

  all of whom used this bishopric on the river as the seat

  of the kingdom. On the old gate at one end a clock

  told an ancient form of time. I sulked along behind

  my parents as the guide gave facts about the war

  with the Saracens about the place where the Jews bathed

  about the child like me whose father the Peaceful

  having already produced an heir by his first marriage

  could marry for love.

  Notes

  The four “Sea Interludes” take their titles from Benjamin Britten’s interludes from his opera, Peter Grimes.

  “Three Cranes”: The quoted passages in section 3 are taken from Hart Crane’s letter to Waldo Frank, dated April 21, 1924, reprinted in O My Land, My Friends: the Selected Letters of Hart Crane, edited by Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber.

  “Illustration from Parsifal”: See Willy Pogány’s illustrations in the E. W. Rolleston translation of Wagner’s Parsifal published in 1912. This poem is for J. D. McClatchy.

  “Scene from Caravaggio”: Derek Jarman’s.

  “Erotic Archive”: The italicized line is from James Merrill’s Mirabell: Books of Number.

  “The Ships”: From the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (“The Deeds of Divine Augustus”), a funerary inscription written for Augustus’ death in A.D. 14.

  “Braying”: See Psalm 39 and Proverbs 27.

  “Second Empire”: The line “inhaling avidly the absence…” translates a line from Alda Merini’s poem “Apro la sigaretta.”

  “Night Ferry”: Some language in this poem was suggested by Myfanwy Piper’s libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera version of Death in Venice.

  “Midwinter”: This poem is for Emily Leithauser.

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