Without A Claim

by Grace Schulman

Overview

“Without a Claim is a modern Book of Psalms. Indeed, the glory in these radiant sacred songs meld an art of high music with a nuanced love of the world unlike any we’ve heard before. No matter your mood upon entering this world you’ll soon be grateful, and enchanted. In any such house of praise, God herself must be grateful.” — Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Failure and The God of Loneliness

Grace Schulman, who has been called “a vital and permanent poet” (Harold Bloom), makes new the life she finds in other cultures and in the distant past. In Without a Claim, she masterfully encompasses music, faith, art, and history. The title poem alludes to the Montauk sachem who sold land without any concept of rights to property, and meditates on our own notion of ownership: “No more than geese in flight, shadowing the lawn, / cries piercing wind, do we possess these fields, / given the title, never the dominion.” She traces the illusion of rights, from land to objects, from our loves to our very selves. Alternatively, she finds permanence in art, whether in galleries or on cave walls, and in music, whether in the concert hall, on the streets of New York, or in the waves at sea.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544073777
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/10/2013
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

GRACE SCHULMAN is the author many acclaimed books of poetry, including Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. For her poetry she has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Aiken-Taylor Award, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, New York University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and three Pushcart prizes. Schulman is a distinguished professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. She is a former director of the Poetry Center (1978–1984) and a former poetry editor of The Nation (1971–2006).

Read an Excerpt

1
 
Celebration

Seeing, in April, hostas unfurl like arias,
and tulips, white cups inscribed with licks of flame,
gaze feverish, grown almost to my waist,
and the oaks raise new leaves for benediction,
I mourn for what does not come back: the movie theater — 
reels spinning out vampire bats, last trains,
the arc of Chaplin’s cane, the hidden doorways — 
struck down for a fast-food store; your rangy stride;
my shawl of hair; my mother’s grand piano.
My mother.
         How to make it new,
how to find the gain in it? Ask the sea
at sunrise how a million sparks
can fly over dead bones.
 
The Sound

Accabonac, Shinnecock, Peconic, Napeague,
the creek, the bay, the stream, the Sound, the sounds
of consonants, hard c’s and k’s. Atlantic,
the ocean’s surge, the clicks of waves
collapsed on rocks in corrugated waters,
the crowd circling a stranded whale
sent by the god Moshup to beach at Paumanok.
The Montauks left us names. Their successors,
Millers and Bennetts, whose names are carved
on local gravestones, rode rough tides,
strung trawl lines for cod, and even on Sundays
parked vans by the sea and gazed in fear
until commercial hauls replaced their boats.
Surfmen gave names to streets that bag the tourists
who prize their charm. I hear old sailors rage,
in many languages, against cold winds,
the light now clear, now haze: Pharaohs and Mulfords,
whalers (names unknown), hurl throaty curses
that rise with the sound of waves and with the cries
of an ice-colored gull plucking scallops in shallows.
 
Without a Claim

Raised like a houseplant on a windowsill
looking out on other windowsills
of a treeless block, I couldn’t take it in
when told I owned this land with oaks and maples
scattered like crowds on Sundays, and an underground
strung not with pipes but snaky roots that writhed
when my husband sank a rhododendron,
now flaunting pinks high as an attic window.
This land we call our place was never ours.
If it belonged to anyone, it was
the Montauk chief who traded it for mirrors,
knowing it wasn’t his. Not the sailors
who brought the blacksmith iron, nor the farmers
who dried salt hay, nor even the later locals,
whale hunters, the harpooner from Sumatra,
the cook from Borneo, who like my ancestors
wandered from town to port without a claim,
their names inside me though not in the registries.
No more than geese in flight, shadowing the lawn,
cries piercing wind, do we possess these fields,
given the title, never the dominion.
But here we are in April, watching earth rise
with bellflowers that toll, brawl, call, in silence;
daffodils that gleam yellow through sea haze
and cedars at sunrise asking for flame
like a cake with tiers of birthday candles.
Come visit us by shore, up a mud lane.
Duck under the elm’s branches, thick with leaves,
on land deeded to us but not to keep,
and take my hand, mine only to give
for a day that shines like corn silk in wind.
We rent, borrow, or share even our bodies,
and never own all that we know and love.
 
Moon Shell

August, I walk this shore in search of wholeness
among snapped razor clams and footless quahogs.
How easily my palm cradles a moon shell
coughed up on shore. I stroke the fragments
as, last night, I stroked your arm
smelling of salt, scrubbed clean by the sea air.
Once you loped near me. Now, in my mind’s eye,
your rubbery footsoles track sand hills
the shape of waves you no longer straddle.
You inch forward, step, comma, pause,
your silences the wordless rage of pain.
But still at night our bodies merge in sleep
and fit unbroken, like the one perfect shell
I’ve never found and can only imagine — 
and crack when we’re apart. I clutch the moon shell,
guardian of unknowing, chipped and silent,
until I fling it down and feel its loss.
Broken, it fit my hand and I was whole.

Table of Contents

1
Celebration 3
The Sound 4
Moon Shell 8
Antiques Fair 9
Hurricane 11
Before the Fall 13
Variations on a Line by Whitman 15
Division 16

2
Letter Never Sent 19
Poets’ Walk, Central Park Mall 23
Street Music, Astor Place 25
Woman on the Ceiling 27
My Father’s Watches 30
Havdalah 33
Charles Street Psalm 35
Walking to Elijah 37

3
Hickories 41
Shadow 42
Yellow 44
Handel’s Messiah 46
Bells 48
The Last Crossing 50
At the Physical Therapist’s 52
Danger, 53

4
In Praise of Shards 57
Chauvet 59
Love in the Afternoon 61
The Visit 63
Whelk 65
Green River 68
Fool’s Gold 69

5
Abbaye de Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire 70
The Night Dancers 75
Cool Jazz 76
At the House of Jackson Pollock 77
Tattoo 79
God Bless the Child 81
100 83
The Printmaker 85
The Unbuilder 87