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    June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000
    June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000
    June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000
    Ebook204 pages3 hours

    June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000

    By Peter Balakian

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    About this ebook

    Prize-winning poet and New York Times-bestselling author Peter Balakian offers the best of his previous poetry, as well as thirteen new poems.

    For three decades, Peter Balakian's poetry has been praised widely in the United States and abroad. He has created a unique voice in American poetry -- one that is both personal and cosmopolitan. In sensuous, elliptical language, Balakian offers a textured poetry that is beautiful and haunting as it envelops an American grain, the reverberations of the Armenian Genocide, and the wired, discordant realities of contemporary life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 2, 2010
    ISBN9780062032454
    June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000
    Author

    Peter Balakian

    Peter Balakian is the author of Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Memoir and a New York Times Notable Book, and June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974–2000. He is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University and teaches at Colgate University, where he is a Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities.

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      Book preview

      June-tree - Peter Balakian

      Photosynthesis

      The slips of the day

      lilies come off.

      The wind blows

      in from Vermont,

      blows the silk kimonos

      off the delphiniums,

      blows the satin cowls

      off the jack-in-the-pulpits.

      Let it blow

      the detonated-pollen

      green, acid-rubbed,

      plumed and rotting day—

      blow into the leaves

      their silver undersides

      wet you at night.

      Slide your tongue

      into the green dark

      so you can see the ultraviolet

      scars on the goldfields

      where the bees come in the day.

      The night air rises

      like steam

      from a mud-pot,

      and you see nothing.

      Hear no voice.

      See no light.

      Just yourself

      staring back at you

      in middle age,

      as if the novocain

      of the sea urchin

      froze your lids.

      You see the window

      you built

      where you placed your hands

      and broke your turquoise jars

      and saw the stones

      of scalding yellow

      where the steam had burned

      things back to where your private lust

      and your longing for history

      were colorless, and the blood

      of the dianthus was gone.

      You see your life rise

      and slide away like steam,

      feel a goat-tongue

      lost in a mountain

      wet you down.

      The Tree

      You wandered into the shade

      where the mulberry leaves

      were soft and etched,

      where something that looked like worms

      copulated in sooty black,

      and the light made tracery

      on the dead pond.

      Because the Jews left Babylon

      for a rainless place,

      because men were hung in the margins.

      Because Christians were booted

      out of town—

      the lance of a spire opens a chapter.

      If you watch the letters

      you’ll see a flamingo twitch,

      the pond’s scum ruffle

      like a page.

      Yorkshire Dales

      I came to forget the sentimental death of Vallejo,

      the frozen rooms of Yerevan,

      and the precious blood symbolized by the Pelican.

      I came to forget the sky is dome-like and opens

      (who could still believe that at my age?)

      As we trip on limestone rocks,

      my daughter says, "up here everything’s perfect,

      the world is gone."

      I came to forget the limestone anyway,

      and my name given to me by history.

      Everywhere there was clean blue light this morning.

      Everywhere cars were pumping exhaust

      over the narrow stone-walled roads.

      My son says, why is there something instead of nothing?

      Past the lines of dried blood on the dale

      I can see the Brontë parsonage,

      I can see the faded green damask walls

      and the Regency table in the dining room

      where Charlotte, Emily, and Anne wrote hunched under coverlets and shawls.

      The air fills with the sound of baby-boom melodrama

      as if it rises like steam from the rocks of a hot bath

      operatic, spastic, fluttering tongue

      isn’t that Jackie Wilson? my wife asks—

      isn’t a wing inside the heart bloodless?

      Can you say higher and higher up here?

      Are the ventricles of sound dome-blue like the sky?

      for Antonia and Nigel Young

      Killary Harbor

      I drove through the narrow Gods—

      privet and cholesterol, or

      Irish creamery butter as the waiter

      called it, as it shaved another day

      off my life. There was no salt

      and antimony, just lumpy roads

      through Meath and Leitrim.

      The sky was a show of flashing

      mirrors as day broke on Rosses.

      Tide out and weed like cow pies

      on the shore. The punt down and

      the EEC on the horizon,

      as I read in the guidebook about pilgrims

      climbing St. Patrick’s barefoot

      every summer.

      Out of the fog a man in Wranglers and

      spurred boots, clean-shaven, a cigarette

      in hand, waved me down.

      Scrum-faced house at the end of the bay.

      Hop in, I said. "You lookin’

      for where John Wayne made The Quiet Man?"

      No. Americans? Yep. "Don’t look it.

      You Jewish too?" No.

      I-talian? No.

      The fog was lifting off the fern-scalded

      mountains across the bay, and the sheep

      marked red and blue looked like sweaters.

      "Grace O’Malley hijacked British

      ships up here, and the Choctaws

      sent $500 during the famine. Not a fuckin’ penny from the U.S."

      We passed the rusted hulls

      of fishing boats and the scaffolding

      of floating mussel beds.

      "The Downing Street Accord is lots of

      shit; Adams’ a frog on an oil slick.

      When Lord Haw Haw broadcast for the Nazis

      from right here, do ya think he was

      a traitor or a patriot?… to us, I mean?"

      I couldn’t bring myself to tell him

      I was on sabbatical and looking for

      a place to write.

      "They’ll turn the bog to Marks & Spencer anyway."

      I’m looking for Knock-Na-Rae.

      "Maeve’s mountain? Two hours from

      here in the other direction."

      I dropped him at the scrum house

      half roofless and cracked,

      where the sky seemed lower than the rocks

      and the hills the color

      of red sheep.

      for Denise and Matt Leone

      In Armenia, 1987

      Into a basalt cavern   I wandered

      where the moon slid like a water snake

      in white skin through the gullies

      to the blonde and furry wheat.

      I dug toward the damp smell   of a water channel—

      found a shard   of a cross

      its lacework   a system of streams   wound into stone—

      grapes and pomegranates   pomegranates

      and grapes   pulpy in my hands.

      Palmettos sawed my palms.

      A rising moon in the moss-grown   stone mirrored the light

      where winged griffins, those talismans of blood

      flew into the arms of Christ.

      Down a gully   like a volute

      I found a way   to the dry clay of the border

      where a scimitar cut the horizon.

      Pegasus flew   out of the tufa walls

      into the white shroud of Ararat

      and the ringing bells   slid into the scree.

      Down there   I felt my name disappear.

      Lowlands

      North Sea’s just over there,

      the Flemish waitress said. You can see

      everywhere but you can’t see anything,

      then the headlights make the fog a little gold

      the way the maples turn

      in my yard back in the upstate valley

      where my son dives in a leaf pile

      on his way to school with his friends,

      and I keep turning his ritual over in my mind:

      two pills of chemo at night,

      6 MP it’s called, so familiar now like a ham and cheese sandwich.

      Tomorrow when I drive north to Bruges, he’ll get his shot

      of methotrexate—nutriphils, platelets, the invisible

      hooks between cells. On my book tour in Amsterdam

      an Indonesian

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