Speculative Music: Poems

By Jeff Dolven

Jeff Dolven’s poems take the guise of fables, parables, allegories, jokes, riddles, and other familiar forms. So, there is an initial comfort: I remember this, the reader thinks, from the stories of childhood . . . . But wait, something is off. In each poem, an uncanny conceit surprises the form, a highway paved with highwaymen, a school for shame, a family of chairs. Dolven makes these strange wagers with the grace and edgy precision of a metaphysical poet, and there are moments when we might imagine ourselves to be somewhere in the company of Donne or Spenser. Then we encounter The Invention: A Libretto for Speculative Music,” which is, wellsurreal, and features a decisively modern, entirely notional score, sung by an inventor and his invention, which (who?) turns out to be a 40s-type piano-perched chanteuse who (which?) somehow knows all the words to the song you never knew you had in you. The daring of this collection is not in replaying the fractured polyphony of our moment. Speculative Music gives us accessible lyrics that still manage to listen in on our echoing interiors. These are poems that promise Frost’s momentary stay against confusion” and, at the same time, provoke a deep, head-shaking wonder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Release date: Nov 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781936747849

Book preview

How Do You Do?

All hands are out on the street today,

straining against the leashes of forearms.

Little concerned with us, they leap

to greet each other, tangle and clasp,

a subtle suction, like a kiss,

then off again in a friendly game

of overlord and underdog

we only understand in part.

Sometime later, folded in prayer,

or contemplation, right says to left,

if anything should happen to me

you’ll know, won’t you, what to do?

and left says to right, you’ve always kept me

friendless and illiterate.

We really ought to get them to shake,

but it’s not clear that they fit that way.

Folding Star

(a star rising at folding-time;

an evening star)

My book as it lapses into the bath

  unminded, relaxes,

and now the stitches give, and the pages

  petal and fan

as though it were being eased of some pain:

  of someone’s pain

it had not known of. Soon the ink,

  diluted, trickles

out with the slurry of cooling bathwater

  prattling down

through a succession of widening pipes

  to pool somewhere,

too cold now to bathe in, somewhere outside

  where the sheep are gathering

past their bedtime—pausing to drink,

  and drinking too much.

Above them an apoplectic star

  turns on itself:

once and again, quarto, octavo,

  impressively dense.

The sheep talk freely in the dark.

  The foundering shallows.

O I have taken too little care of

  care of this.

Frigidaire

I’m writing this from inside my refrigerator.

Increasingly, it’s where I go when I need to think.

It turns out that the light in here is always on,

and in this shadowless space, it’s easy to be good.

The obvious practical challenges are readily solved

with two or three air holes and a down jacket,

so I can focus on my main concern: that good,

being a single light reflected everywhere,

so bright and uniform you never see a shadow,

forbids you to know the many things that lie in darkness:

the insides, the behinds, of which the lying shadows

have an intimate and almost carnal knowledge.

Here, at least, I can take a proper view of the problem,

distracted only by that buzzing light, like a fly,

like a shadow you could pinch between your fingers,

pop into your mouth. It tastes like your mouth must taste.

The Whale-Road

For DGB

I set out early on the whale-road,

and it was a fine day for it.

  The way was clear, and my hands were sweet

with ambergris.

I could tell he’d passed not long before:

a river of strong salt air

  buoyant like an epsom bath

trails in his wake.

It lifts my spirits! I have high hopes

I’ll catch him yet on the whale-road,

  for though he’s strong, he labors somewhat

up the hills

on account, I’m sure, of his carnival girth

and his hurdy-gurdy breathing,

  those Sunday lungs,