BETWEEN US AND by Anne Carson
- Meri Utkovska
- Dec 27, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 9
BETWEEN US AND
BETWEEN US AND
animals is a namelessness.
We flail around
generically —
camelopardalis is what
the Romans came up with
or "giraffe" ( it looked to
them like a camel crossed
with a leopard ) or get the
category wrong — a musk
Ox isn't an ox at all but
more closely cognate with
the goat — and when
choosing to name
individual animals we
pretend they are objects
(Spot) or virtues (Beauty)
or just other selves (Bob).
Anne Carson, "Between Us And" from Red Doc>. Copyright © 2014 by Anne Carson.
Short Talk on Pain
Lawns and fields and hills and wide old velvet
sleeves, green things. They stretch, fold, roll away,
unfurl and calm the eye. Look lush in paintings.
Battles are fought on greens. Or you could spread
a meal and sup. How secretly they lie, floors of
distant forests. Next comes the grave, in many a
poem about green. But this is not a poem. This is a
billboard for frozen green peas. Frozen green peas
are good for pain.
Copyright © 2023 by Anne Carson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 25, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love
I like being with you all night with closed eyes.
What luck—here you are
coming
along the stars!
I did a road trip
all over my mind and heart
and
there you were
kneeling by the roadside
with your little toolkit
fixing something.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
Copyright © 2020 by Anne Carson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 10, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
V. Here Is My Propaganda One One One One Oneing On Your Forehead Like Droplets of Luminous Sin
Like many a wife I boosted the husband up to Godhood and held him there.
What is strength?
Opposition of friends or family merely toughens it.
I recall my mother’s first encounter with him.
Glancing
at a book I’d brought home from school with his name inscribed on the flyleaf
she said
I wouldn’t trust anyone who calls himself X—and
something exposed itself in her voice,
a Babel
thrust between us at that instant which we would never
learn to construe—
taste of iron.
Prophetic. Her prophecies all came true although she didn’t
mean them to.
Well it’s his name I said and put the book away. That was the first night
(I was fifteen)
I raised my bedroom window creak by creak and went out to meet him
in the ravine, traipsing till dawn in the drenched things
and avowals
of the language that is “alone and first in mind.” I stood stupid
before it,
watched its old golds and lieblicher blues abandon themselves
like peacocks stepping out of cages into an empty kitchen of God.
God
or some blessed royal personage. Napoleon. Hirohito. You know
how novelist Ōe
describes the day Hirohito went on air and spoke
as a mortal man. “The adults sat around the radio
and cried.
Children gathered in the dusty road and whispered bewilderment.
Astonished
and disappointed that their emperor had spoken in a voice.
Looked at one another in silence. How to believe God had
become human
on a designated summer day?” Less than a year after our marriage
my husband
began to receive calls from [a woman] late at night.
If I answered [she]
hung up. My ears grew hoarse.
How are you.
—
No.
—
Maybe. Eight. Can you.
—
The white oh yes.
—
Yes.
What is so ecstatic unknowable cutthroat glad as the walls
of the flesh
of the voice of betrayal —yet all the while lapped in talk more dull
than the tick of a clock.
A puppy
learns to listen this way. Sting in the silver.
Ōe says
many children were told and some believed that when the war was over
the emperor would wipe away their tears
with his own hand.
Copyright Credit: Anne Carson, "V. Here Is My Propoganda One One One One Oneing On Your Forehead Like Droplets of Luminous Sin" from The Beauty of the Husband. Copyright © 2001 by Anne Carson.
Source: The Beauty of the Husband (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2001)
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