文章基本信息

标题：After workshop
作者：Jones, Rodney
期刊名称：The American Poetry Review
印刷版ISSN：0360-3709
出版年度：1996
卷号：Mar 1996
出版社：World Poetry, Inc.

After workshop

Jones, Rodney

To write lucidly of a broken engine, a comical funeral,

A bad marriage, or flooding street, surely there must be

Some good in all of that, and then to stand at the bar

And know the unrevisable world, the television on,

And a dozen working men shouting at the game,

From which one woman turns in a parody of despair,

And proclaims the death of poetry, but I think of Rilke,

That he should live, in the scuff-marks breath leaves,

Even on the translations of words I never heard spoken,

Carried on a river flown long ago into a sky no one alive

remembers;

That the voice is the fiber of the self and a dumb vessel

Loss has hollowed into a smooth instrument of pleasure;

Not that we will die less for having spoken frankly,

Even if it is no more than the style of a windowsill or door

Entered secretly in the whisper vault of an uncharted breeze;

Not that the wind, as it declares its public secret

Would leave one signature in our flesh. But we say

The things it has shaken, the nerves' clear compass,

The politics of trees, as though the ego's sly decorations

Would invite guests across the closed borders of years

When we will have to be more than words to take their coats

And serve them drinks and food, and yet must be words

Offered into the nature of things, as ashes float down

While the broom goes about its thoroughly ordinary business;

Must say the work of a usual day and the streets we know;

Must say, too, the extraordinary detonation that did not

happen,

For how could we have ever been a jot more than nothing

There at the rag and mischief end of history

If we do not bring back from the vision of that last day

Some remnant of the god who would go on beyond us;

The ideals frisked of magic, and words raining on things

Who wants to hear them now, as the game ends, the ice

In the glasses spread feathery coils of clarity and a general

Shuffling to the bathroom announces the songs of love,

Stupid songs, but the songs everyone listens to after midnight,

The songs that make the poets sad, though two women,

Perhaps because they are drunk, come out of the shadows

And dance in front of the jukebox, woven to each other,

And weaving, slowly and bravely, promising immortality.

Rodney Jones's fifth collection of poems, Things That Happen Once, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin. He teaches at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.