Secretaries to the wordless moon,
Lying awake, together or apart,
Transcribing every touch or aching absence
Into our endless, intimate palaver,
Body to body, naked to the night,
Appareled only in our utterance.
THE APPLE ORCHARD
You won’t remember it — the apple orchard
We wandered through one April afternoon,
Climbing the hill behind the empty farm.
A city boy, I’d never seen a grove
Burst in full flower or breathed the bittersweet
Perfume of blossoms mingled with the dust.
A quarter mile of trees in fragrant rows
Arching above us. We walked the aisle,
Alone in spring’s ephemeral cathedral.
We had the luck, if you can call it that,
Of having been in love but never lovers—
The bright flame burning, fed by pure desire.
Nothing consumed, such secrets brought to light!
There was a moment when I stood behind you,
Reached out to spin you toward me … but I stopped.
What more could I have wanted from that day?
Everything, of course. Perhaps that was the point—
To learn that what we will not grasp is lost.
COME BACK
Come back, come back to me — now that I’m old—
not love, but you, the shadow of love, fashioned
from quiet and quotidian things, glimpses
of rooftops, alleyways, of open windows
where lovers first espy the imminence
of their own loving, or from sickroom skylights
with their careworn parade of painful days,
the shadowy refuge that vanishes
the way a wild duck, shot in mid-flight,
drops suddenly to vanish in the marsh,
just a few feathers drifting in the air:
I am a shimmering reality
that has no purpose,
unless you return, love, shadow of love,
o cherished sleep, and grant me your repose.
(From the Italian of Carlo Betocchi)
AN OLD STORY
Our story is an old story, the tale of two,
Who met in our feverish, infallible youth
And woke transfigured in a world made new.
We walked through gardens of such stark perfume
That merely breathing left us drunk for days.
We rolled in brambles with our skin unbruised.
We shined in sunlight and in moonlight glowed,
As radiant as angels drawn by Blake.
How could such fiery brightness not explode?
The aspens shimmered, and each blade-like leaf
Slashed at the slopes until the freshets bled.
The mountains were not larger than our grief.
I don’t know why I tell myself this story,
Except that it is spring again outside
When bent oaks briefly blossom into glory.
Oh, yes, it was a story beyond telling,
And so it had to end, as legend required
In blood and tears and fire, the grim fates smiling.
We had our years of ecstasy and rage,
And then moved back to other tamer tales.
But my hand still burns touching this page.
MARRIAGE OF MANY YEARS
Most of what happens happens beyond words.
The lexicon of lip and fingertip
defies translation into common speech.
I recognize the musk of your dark hair.
It always thrills me, though I can’t describe it.
My finger on your thigh does not touch skin—
it touches your skin warming to my touch.
You are a language I have learned by heart.
This intimate patois will vanish with us,
its only native speakers. Does it matter?
Our tribal chants, our dances round the fire
performed the sorcery we most required.
They bound us in a spell time could not break.
Let the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep
our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy.
What must be lost was never lost on us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The new poems in this collection, sometimes in slightly different versions, have appeared in the following journals: “An Old Story,” “Come Back,” “Monster,” “Progress Report,” and “Style” first appeared in the Hudson Review; “Household Gods,” “Title Index to My Next Book of Poems,” and “My Handsome Cousin” were published in Radio Silence; “Homage to Soren Kierkegaard” appeared in First Things; “Marriage of Many Years,” “Sea Pebbles: An Elegy,” and “Vultures Mating” were published in the Sewanee Review; and “Film Noir” and “Meditation on a Line from Novalis” first appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review. “Homecoming” is a revision of “The Homecoming” from The Gods of Winter. “Most Journeys Come to This” was originally published in Daily Horoscope under the title “Instructions for the Afternoon.” “Film Noir,” “My Handsome Cousin,” and “Homage to Soren Kierkegaard” also appeared in limited editions by Aralia Press. Artichoke Editions printed a folio edition of “Sea Pebbles: An Elegy.”
The author wishes to thank all of these editors and printers for their generous support.
NOTE ON THE TEXTS
The poems in this volume were selected from my first four collections supplemented by fifteen new poems, one of which is very long. 99 Poems has been arranged by theme, not by chronology, because it is designed for the reader rather than the scholar. Within each section, however, the poems appear in chronological order with the new work at the end. The index lists the volumes in which the individual works originally appeared.
— DG
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
DANA GIOIA was born in Los Angeles in 1950. He received his B.A. and M.B.A. degrees from Stanford University. He also has an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. For fifteen years he worked as a business executive in New York before quitting in 1992 to write full-time. He has published four earlier collections of poetry—Daily Horoscope (1986), The Gods of Winter (1991), Interrogations at Noon (2001) which won the American Book Award, and Pity the Beautiful (2012). Gioia’s first critical collection, Can Poetry Matter? (1992), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame University and the Aiken Taylor Award for lifetime contribution to American poetry. From 2003 to 2009 he served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. An essayist, reviewer, and translator, Gioia has also published fifteen anthologies of poetry and fiction. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California. In 2011 he became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California.