Chameleon Hours ( / % ) 0/%43 CHAMELEON HOURS E L I S E P A R T R I D G E THE UNIVERSIT Y OF CHICAGO PRESS Chicago and London e l i s e pa r t r i d g e was born in Philadelphia and educated at Harvard and Cambridge, where she was a Marshall Scholar, and at Boston University and the University of British Columbia Her poems have appeared in American, Canadian, and Irish journals, including Poetry, the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Southern Review, Southwest Review, Slate, the Fiddlehead, the New Quarterly, and Poetry Ireland Review Her first book, Fielder’s Choice, was published in 2002 A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, she has taught literature and writing at several universities and currently works as an editor and tutor The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2008 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved Published 2008 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-64791-3 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-64792-0 (paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-64791-9 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-64792-7 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chameleon hours / Elise Partridge p cm Poems ISBN-13: 978-0-226-64791-3 (cloth : alk paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-64791-9 (cloth : alk paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-64792-0 (pbk : alk paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-64792-7 (pbk : alk paper) I Title PR9199.4.P373C47 2008 811'.6—dc22 2007033072 ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 To Steve verray parfit Contents Acknowledgments • xi one Everglades • Two Scenes from Philadelphia Phoenixville Farm • 1959 • Group Portrait • The Artists’ House • 11 In the Barn • 13 Thirteen • 14 Two Monuments • 15 First Death • 16 Miss Peters • 18 Mia’s House • 19 Supermarket Scanner • 21 Temp • 23 For a Father • 25 Elegy • 26 The Secret House • 27 Caught • 29 One Calvinist’s God • 30 Plague • 31 • • vii • Tw o Gnomic Verses from the Anglo-Saxon • 35 Four Lectures by Robert Lowell, 1977 • 36 Sisyphus: The Sequel • 40 Philosophical Arguments • 42 Depends on the Angle • 44 Insights • 45 As I Was Saying • 47 Arcadia • 48 Rural Route • 49 Dislocations • 50 Song: The Messenger • 52 The Book of Steve • 53 August • 58 Buying the Farm • 59 Three Cancer Surgery • 63 Prognosis: 50-50 • 64 A Valediction • 65 Room 238: Old Woman and Hummingbird Chemo Side Effects: Memory • 68 Chemo Side Effects: Vision • 70 Childless • 72 Forty-Eight Years • 73 Granted a Stay • 75 First Days Back at Work • 76 Chameleon Hours • 77 Ways of Going • 78 Farewell Desires • 80 • viii • • 67 Four Home Is the Sailor • 83 For Jenny • 84 The Runt Lily • 85 Since I Last Saw You • 86 Five World War II Watchtower • 91 Crux • 92 Pauper, Boston, 1988 • 94 Vuillard Interior • 96 Where Your Treasure Is • 97 US Post Office, December 22 • 98 Two Cowboys • 100 Ruin • 101 Heron, Tampa • 104 Tested • 106 Epitaph for Diane • 108 Edwin Partridge • 109 Snail Halfway Across the Road • 110 From Feste’s Self-Help Book • 112 Unknown Artists • 114 Phoenix • 116 Snapshots of Our Afterlife • 117 Small Vessel • 118 Notes • 119 • ix • suddenly he rises up, hovering, trying to gauge how hard to ram; launches himself at the glass, thudthud, thud, bashes, jabbing, bounces, lunges, fumbles, slides with a BZZZZZT of rage sideways on its icelike slick, clinks upside down on a tin Buzzing, indignant, flips himself; quivering, probes the label’s blackberries with a doctor’s questing touch No—just papery twins Face up along the sill, crisping, three blue-black flies He trudges past them; stops; strokes his antennae, now weary, a man running fingers through thinning hair Maybe he’s closing his eyes, at wit’s end—for a second I have to serve the hive Rice-paper wings blur; tiny chopper, deliberate, he levitates; vibrates; aims his diamond head at the dazzle and drives, drives, drives • 107 • Epitaph for Diane Diane Jarvis Hunter She thrust herself at life, a honeybee thorax-deep in each quivering corolla; flew pollen-spangled each day back to the hive— willing, too, to go with what might happen, like seeds of roadside grass on Fortune’s scarf ferried to be sown elsewhere, and grow new • 108 • Edwin Partridge 1923–2005 Barely nineteen, volunteered for the war On a sweaty Pacific island monitored radar, hearing pilots rumble off into black; silently noted which friends didn’t come back One August dawn, only wind-rattled palms He was grateful just to sail home Later, with wife and sons, he’d scan the sky for blips of green— hummingbirds swooping to his feeder Each dusk, for them, he’d daub it clean A grin and a nod meant “Good.” Always the right word, or none He read to his sons, dried dishes, cleared neighbors’ drives, hewed their wood At eighty, quavering hands; teetering on each threshold Tenderly he’d loop his wife’s last dahlias with string so they could stand • 109 • Snail Halfway Ac ross the Road You haul your burdens tipped high— that notched, dinged brown shell a body shop–hopeless car— lugging, a Brueghel peasant, a kindling-scrounger’s cord: one stuck pine needle, awry There’s not a second to stall as you glide, scrunch, glide; your scalloped jelly-foot ripples, ripples, grips You lean toward the yellow line, a swimmer arcing for wall, heaving your tilting load past a black-diamond lariat— snake squashed to a figure-8 (a crow jabs the baked tail), his slanting saffron swiftness punished for seeking the road • 110 • Sets of oblivious treads bear down, bear down, bear down Jaunty on a laboring back you inch your history forward Bowsprit-antennae plunge, rise; safety’s ten lifetimes ahead • 111 • F r o m F e s t e ’s S e l f- H e l p B o o k Childhood You came into this world trailing clouds all right, they just happened to be big black ones In the castle you drank from a poisoned goblet and were changed into something even bears cringe at When you awake baling-wired in thorns, viceroys around you cobwebbed to their steins, moth-eaten ermines, a muttering king— what choice you have? Rapell down the turret with your cap and bells Adolescence Handed a baton in a bad-luck relay, you’ve overshot the cliff and are pinwheeling down, flailing in time to that whistling-wind keening that lets viewers know you will soon be compressed under a subsequent sequence of rocks Squashed into pleats a centimeter wide? Stride till you’re 3-D again • 112 • Adulthood You’re staggering through a dark wood, soundtrack a fugue Remember wrens risk a hand for a single seed, orchids can sprout from duff alone Executive Summary How many can you feed from your sourdough lumps? Each morning, braid a loaf Give them away • 113 • Unknown Artists In the picture snapped at the festival, she’s standing, fifth row, twenty-fourth from left, her face partly hidden by someone’s fedora She bourréed, stage left to right, in The Nutcracker He daubed a cow’s haunch into a master’s Nativity For an August Figaro, she lobbed her notes with the chorus’s into a pink-swirled sky The viola part she played at her quartet’s recital was carried home that night, by a couple whistling His winged saint, like a nuthatch inching down a pillar (fourteenth century, “from the workshop of”) survived in one corner of a dim museum open twice weekly at the curator’s discretion • 114 • The red scalloped tails of the kissing birds she’d inked on the baptismal scrip for that Mennonite child, April 1810, were admired again when a grizzled farmer, rummaging in his great-uncle’s cabinet, unrolled them, presented them to the county seat One poem he wrote was glanced at by a student riffling through a book, looking for something else, in the clammy stacks of her college library; like a purple lupine by a hiker’s dusty boot, it pleased her and refreshed her, before she trudged on • 115 • Phoe nix Wakes to a whiff of stale fireplace, ash flour-fine on her lids Flashes on feather-tips blazing, scorched-grass reek, eye-searing embers Fireweed rising Lurches to her feet, sooty pinions cramped, blistered leg still tender What conflagration? Shake out your wings • 116 • Snapshot s of O ur Af te rlife Light for traveling as cherry petals, we make the transition in impulsive gusts Or thread our way behind a wandering doe— a god of crossroads, avuncular, nods Islands erupting over thousands of years crown in mid-ocean Two petrels land Parallel beams piercing lint nebulae, jaunty twin lasers, we blaze past Pluto Crickets trading comments beneath a joint stone • 117 • S m a l l Ve s s e l A miniature boat found in a medieval hoard in Derry, Northern Ireland Like a gold-plated half avocado with a hatpin mast, bean-sprout rudder, oars slender as dragonfly torsos How fragile, our contraptions; uninsurable storms! What sail could we use? A petal? I trust in your arms • 118 • Notes Dedication: “He was a verray parfit, gentil knyght”—Geoffrey Chaucer, General Prologue, The Canterbury Tales “Thirteen”: “Heidens”—Eric Heiden, Olympic speed-skating champion “Miss Peters”: “You are a priest forever/after the order of Melchizidek”— Psalms 110:4; Hebrews 5:6, 6:20, 7:17, 21 “Four Lectures by Robert Lowell, 1977”: As a student in classes taught by Robert Lowell (1917–1977), I took detailed notes on his remarks about nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers When in a poetry seminar a few years later I was asked to write a dramatic monologue, I put some of Lowell’s words into verse “Philosophical Arguments”: Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778)—Italian designer, etcher, engraver, and architect, who published in 1749–1750 a series of prints, “Invenzioni capric di carceri,” depicting fantastical prisons “Depends on the Angle”: “sleep-of-reason monster”—“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” is the title of an etching by Francisco de Goya, depicting bats and owls flapping around a sleeper’s head “Song: The Messenger”: “Love dispatched its messenger, who summoned her to love him”—from Eliduc, in The Lais of Marie de France, translated by Glyn S Burgess and Keith Busby (Penguin, 1999) Marie de France, who flourished in the late twelfth century, is the earliest known French woman poet • 119 • “The Book of Steve”: “Are you a creature of good?”—adapted from Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, in Arthurian Romances, translated by William W Kibler (Penguin, 1981) In this romance, someone wandering through a forest meets a giant and asks him this question Shah Jahan—the builder of the Taj Mahal 10 Demande d’amour—This term is used for questions sometimes posed in medieval courtly literature, intended to provoke a discussion from the audience listening to the narrative being read aloud 11 “Whenever you look up, there I shall be .”—Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd This is what Farmer Gabriel Oak says to Bathsheba Everdene when he first proposes to her 12 “And I have found Demetrius like a jewel .”—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV.i.191–92 “Since I Last Saw You”: The poem used as an epigraph is “Seeing Off Yuan Er on a Mission to Anhsi,” by Wang Wei, translated by Red Pine, from Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse (Copper Canyon Press, 2003) The Chinese word for “willow” is a homophone of another word meaning “Stay behind.” Thus the Chinese gave friends willow catkins as parting mementos “Where Your Treasure Is”: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”—Matthew 6:21; Luke 12:34 • 120 • .. .Chameleon Hours ( / % ) 0/%43 CHAMELEON HOURS E L I S E P A R T R I D G E THE UNIVERSIT Y OF CHICAGO PRESS Chicago... (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-64792-7 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chameleon hours / Elise Partridge p cm Poems ISBN-13: 978-0-226-64791-3 (cloth : alk paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-64791-9... 70 Childless • 72 Forty-Eight Years • 73 Granted a Stay • 75 First Days Back at Work • 76 Chameleon Hours • 77 Ways of Going • 78 Farewell Desires • 80 • viii • • 67 Four Home Is the Sailor •