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Overview
In Zorba's Daughter, the 14th volume in the Swenson Poetry Award series, Elisabeth Murawski speaks from a vital and unique sensibility, finding in ordinary images an opening to the passion of human courage in the face of deep existential pain and ambivalence. These poems awaken our joy as well as guilt, our hope as well as grief. They often evoke a sorrowful music, like the voice of mourning, but even in pointing to "the black holes of heaven," Murawski turns our gaze upward.
Zorba's Daughter was selected for the Swenson Award by the distinguished poet Grace Schulman. An icon of the literary scene, Schulman is acclaimed for her searching, highly original, lyric poetry, as well as for her teaching and her influential tenure as the poetry editor at The Nation, (1971-2006). Harold Bloom calls her "one of the permanent poets of her generation." Richard Howard says, "she is a torch."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780874217971 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2010 |
| Series: | Swenson Poetry Award , #14 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 93 |
| File size: | 257 KB |
About the Author
Elisabeth Murawski holds an MFA from George Mason University and is a well-published poet. Awarded a Hawthornden fellowship (2008), as well as residencies at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Achill Heinrich Boll Association, she is author of the collection Moon and Mercury and two chapbooks--Troubled by an Angel and Out-Patients. Over 200 of her poems have appeared in journals that include Yale Review, New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Field, Ontario Review, Antioch Review, Southern Review, Dubliner, Poetry Northwest, and others.
Read an Excerpt
ZORBA'S DAUGHTER
poemsBy Elisabeth Murawski
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Elisabeth MurawskiAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-795-7
Chapter One
ZORBA'S DAUGHTERNight boasted it was eternity. But here now through the brown links of trees the sun spills dawn.
Light's turn (dice on a table) to be eternal, a current to feed her house, abruptly wake her like a thief. Who
will teach her divine collaboration? Who will love her dirty hands enough to leave her head unshaved?
She goes barefoot as the sky, nectarine slice on a spoon, sweet coral carnation, little fish
with wings in her heart, tempted to fly from the spear she cannot escape, resolved
to die like Samson braced against the pillars of the temple, roaring for his eyes.
ON ARRIVING AND DEPARTING
The moon is an ellipse half-hidden by a silo. Dry leaves rasp like paper.
I hold a microphone close to the calf in the cow's belly. Where is
the one pure thing? A train whistle wraps itself around
the wooden house, around the calf 's heartbeat. Am I leaving the farm
or arriving? The red of the barn in moonlight turns gray
as the devil's face when he sniped at Schubert writing the four impromptus.
NORMAL: A SURGICAL LOVE SONG
The lamp's frayed cord. Wet skin. The shock enough to knock the baby out and blow
a fuse. Where did she go? Was there a bear or owl to guide? An arrow
to annihilate? The mother smears lard on rye bread. Sprinkles it with sugar. The two
oldest siblings sail records a half inch thick from the attic. The father, drunk,
snores loudly on the couch. King, his vicious German Shepherd, lies pagan and alert
at his stocking feet. The baby finds her thumb. Her eyelids flutter. She drifts within reach.
SAFEWAY VIA DOLOROSA
The woman's hand cranes over the lot, drops, in possible selection, lifts again, momentarily
empty, put off by blackening leaves. Didn't Anne Frank choke on rotting lettuce?
How could a head of leaves so rabbit-pelt soft and light possibly drop at the same rate
as a rock? She tears off a bag to stuff the lettuce in. At the moment of choice,
a couple with a cart nearly knocks her down. The woman frowns at the display, something wicked
in the way the lettuces are turned on their sides, the icy bed. Children dying
in the fetal position. She sneaks a leaf into her mouth. It tastes like a hiding place.
THE INTERVIEW
I found her floating in the wishing pond, all those pennies on the bottom shining like stars.
They had to pry her from my arms. oh those hollyhocks, tall and smug, I cried beside,
the mocking tiger lilies, freckled as the Irish cop who came to the house.
She was three. She loved to feed the ducks scattered crusts. That cop
kept pestering me for the name of the town with the wishing pond,
the name of the cemetery. When I said I forget, he smirked like a hollyhock.
Accused me of bearing false witness, inventing a sister for my sons.
Fickle ducks. Crowding me now for bread. I'm not the dead girl.
WINDY CITY
I consider alternatives to never playing the piano, to never making it to the Louvre. I consider
black ribbons in my hair for the downhill skier, for the amaranthine village overstocked with doves.
Before this very pool- finding my voice, believing in my knees, the cushion on the floor,
in the song on the roof and the windy noise of cars- I am turning into leaves. How deep is this pool?
Endless as the mornings of the world. What do I touch there? A hand. A root system.
THE LIVING ROOM, MY SISTER WROTE, HAD SEVEN WINDOWS
We are at risk, historians. Who's to say details we select
are soft enough, harsh enough? How much do we distort? My sister,
who counted windows, could not remember if I fell, if the hall
were yellow. Why do some count windows, others not? My graying
baby brother chews the ice cube in his drink, repeats himself:
we were not abused. I want to pull his sagging shoulders back
to breathe, to save his heart. Silent, I am yellow as the hall.
BEFORE THE AIR BECAME THE JOURNEY
It is Good Friday and I am seven. I don't understand the priest who speaks in Latin or in Polish, but I like the hopeful smell of candles burning.
Inching forward on our knees, we sway and shuffle towards the giant crucifix propped at the railing. The men's heads are bare. The women wear babushkas. Everywhere I look there are soles of shoes.
My turn. I stand and stretch to reach the bleeding instep. An altar boy wipes away my kiss with a white handkerchief.
I bow my head to imitate the old man who on Sundays stays for all the Masses, locked in place at the altar rail, face buried in his hands, hunched over and sad as if, like me, he'd done everything wrong.
Someone like him, I think, could stop the nails from going in.
HOME BURIAL SCENE
I faced the stony flesh my flesh could not be here without and did as I was told, kissed
her forehead, touched the spotted hands lassoed by rosary beads. Too young to prize the Poland
in her nose and chin, I stood beside the metal box she must be hiding in and listened to
the wax hiss down to glass. I watched the mouth death played strange tricks about,
the lips a line pulled thin as Mama's eyebrow. In every empty room I faced her language in the dark.
There were too many vowels. They stung like accidental tears. They rolled like ice cubes off her tongue.
WEDDING FALL-OUT
Ten, I wore a red hat to the wedding, red the color of weeping. Mine,
the bleak house, the torn face-card. My sister flew from our street like a stained-
glass butterfly. I wanted her back, protection from the king of the turning
doorknob. Hope had spots on its skin like an old person's. I climbed a ladder
made of sand and forgetting. I lost the sky, decades of clouds. The clay-
footed saints I turned to cackled and shuffled, twirling their blue umbrellas.
CHICAGO SPELLING BEE CHAMPIONSHIP
Only a handful of finalists remained. My turn to stand alone behind the microphone, pronounce, then spell, pronounce again my word. "Persuasion."
After "autocracy," which I'd never heard before, after "mayonnaise," whose double "n" must have registered unwittingly from the Hellmann's jar, this was easy. "P-E-R"
I said, confident, smug hare napping. "S-V ..." and caught myself in the turtle's dust, the irretrievable "v" flying out over the footlights into the darkened assembly hall to sympathetic gasps from the audience. No second chances.
I stumbled out the rest and stepped down. If Ma reproached, mercifully I've forgotten. To the rock and sway of Cicero Avenue's dirty red streetcar, I could hear my mistake
land again and again in the same circle of hell reserved for the misspelled, the misbegotten.
Scant comfort now to read the OED says "u" is a differentiated form of "v." That Latin manuscripts written in capitals used only the V,
as in JVLIVS CAESAR. Was I Calpurnia in a previous life? Dyslexic? For years
I berated myself for that slip of the tongue. Unable to forgive, too ashamed to admit it ever happened, I kept turning one mistake round and round in my head as if it were my life.
PUELLA
The spotted wine- brown of her blood stared back like a sentence would
when she couldn't read, its bird's-foot tracks on her girlish
underwear breaking and entering. Her wooden tongue
clacked in her head. A child was dying in her shoes. With her lips
she formed the word "why," but the waves outshouted her
as they always did, caressing her ankles, biting her skin with salt.
THE MOON ACADEMY
You fly into the sky wary as a rose that's never bloomed this high. The moon comes up rich and full.
She asks you: why are you lost in the kingdom of the flying horse? Why are the hats of your dolls tilted and cross with the bells of the Angelus?
I am tossed, you say, like a child's rubber ball. But the child is gone before the ball comes down. The child is stolen, hidden in the deep woods. (I have written in hatred all over my mother's clothes.)
The sky darkens. The moon disappears. You come back to earth but when you walk it's with the heavy feet of movie monsters. The cradle scene of straw continues to burn.
To hold your own you must open to the moon's changes. You must push off again like a sea from the shore leaving a trail of shells behind for light to follow.
THE FISH
Wide as my body, half as tall, the fish lolled under a rowboat tied to the pier, its movements, had the water been air, like a fat Chinese kite's, hovering.
In a movie, sinister music might have played finding such a fish- groan of cellos and basses. But then there was only the hot summer silence of the afternoon gripped at random by a dog's distant barking.
The fish's belly was yellowed by the sunlit water. I couldn't see its head.
Distracted by a divebombing dragonfly, I turned just for a second, then looked back. The fish was gone, the brown-gold water empty as the shrine of a god no longer prayed to.
I decided not to tell. Who'd believe me anyway- a fish that huge in muddy Lake Como!
My secret then, to pull up through the years, symbol of all I saw and didn't want to see.
BLUE LADY
I shocked her when I said I liked to study wars.
What I meant was those orderly lists in the text of causes and effects,
not bloodshed. But I couldn't explain.
Anymore than I could say to her blue was my favorite color because of her eyes.
Blue is cold my mother said, handing me her needle to thread.
Grown, I would buy her dresses in shades of cornflower, royal, delphinium.
THE POTATO LOVERS
of course, I hushed. It's what they wanted. My eyes were dry as powder.
Good dog, I buried grief that night in the funeral parlor.
Paternal hugs stored in a trunk, not yet tagged unseemly,
would be held against him later, rotting cloth of a suit no longer
a la mode. I'd mourn in sleep, spend a lifetime wondering
what it was I needed to forgive. And draw crooked trees afloat,
without roots, believing in the strength of men, hearing again and again
Mama's carping judgment from the widow's throne: I knew she'd crack.
PRIZE
She looks at me through a caul of forgetfulness. Does she want to be
understood? She who could not watch her own mother die
but locked herself in the bathroom, vomiting. I ask myself
why should I? She was like the morning glory's trumpet
in late afternoon, disappointingly folded in on itself,
hiding her heart from view. I stroke her hand, its skin
thin as a petal, knowing she will never play the music I hoped for.
FOR THE CAT ANTHONY
What better time to happen than the spring? Who is my mother? Who is my father? our cat, part Manx, his tail cut short by God, was killed by a car in front of our house. Anthony was three, never gelded, named by my son
without knowing what it meant to me, this son so fond of animals, so in tune with spring and innocence, I could not tell him Anthony was a bad choice, the only name of my father- boozer, short-fused trucker too poor for a car. That he'd sit at table, tense as a lion's tail
batting air, and I'd wait for the tail to suddenly stop, his fist flying out at one son or another. I often dream of losing my car. I have no happy memories of the spring. Always lilacs turning brown and the breath of my father stopped now, and no he was never an Anthony
to my mother, but a Tony, and no Anthony either of Padua, greeting a guest, so the tale goes, with the infant Jesus on his arm. My father dead, the last night of the wake his eldest son hushed my howl and it wasn't spring but December and there was snow on the car.
I remember sitting quietly in the car thinking blue horse thoughts of Anthony who'd been so cruel and hard to love in spring or any season. What stifled him like a stubby tail? our cat was buried in the garden while my son said requiem prayers to his father
in heaven. I screamed the night my father died, waking my aunts sleeping over. When the car hit the cat, the driver apologized to my son and all night I cried, I thought, for Anthony to come back, to purr and stretch again, tail a twitch of fur. I'm not prepared, ever, for spring.
So many years with a spring without my father, I finally tell my son what's in a name, the tale of Anthony not hit by a car.
DUSKY
This time I walk it off in the mall. The slit of light, the eyes, the lip. I study sandals under glass,
pearls harvested like fruit, a veil white as salt. The rats came out at night,
shapes rippling like the coalman's belly in the fun-house mirror.
His feral hand gripped mine and I froze. O little girl, I love you singing
to the pigeons and the peonies overrun with ants. Afraid of stairs,
the everlasting dark stars fall from. When he lifts you up, go limp
as a rabbit in the black pot that held your sister for the photo.
Think of the Monarch skimming the pasture, landing on the honey-colored cow.
ON FORGIVING THE GREAT PRICE
Hope in shreds, a medal torn from a soldier's chest. A book in the fire. Pearls
whisper in their shells like the hush of rubber soles in corridors. Who
will guide our hands to write between the lines? The face beneath the rubber mask
hides still another face. A photo within a photograph. Stacking Russian dolls. Heart
in a quiver, about to be fed to the bow. Tree for a target on some green mountain
where a reed plays in a wind scattering sheet music. Wood of the cross, the god in the box
set free. The blue and white world slips out of reach and the dark womb of the stars
enfolds us for its own, a gown knitting itself about the sins of the fathers.
FRIGHTENED BY ITALY
This prowling place of dark wine and lilies has no ceiling, leaves a trail of broken cameras. Where is Francis and his bleeding sun? The upside down Il Duce swings and swings a bitter incense. Titian paints himself into yet another crucifixion scene. The little Goretti girl who wore nothing special to her murder, fell ripe as a blood orange to the molester's knife. The earth shifts in place. Rage rivers out and preserves at the dinner table all those family members homely as grape leaves stamping out life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ZORBA'S DAUGHTER by Elisabeth Murawski Copyright © 2010 by Elisabeth Murawski. Excerpted by permission.
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