Night Street Repairs

By A.F. Moritz

To read A.F. Moritz is to find out what it means to be alive at this juncture of history. These poems are mansions, both derelict and opulent. Wander in with the mind open and hear what the ages, humanity, and the myth of progress have wrought.

Night Street Repairs contains necessary meditations on time, modernity, and our current situation as a society of appetite flirting with self-destruction. Many voices act as vigilant witness to our urban wastes and wastefulness.Moritz's unmistakable cadences -- magisterial, philosophical, and funny -- mingle among the ancients, the Bible, Leopardi, Montale, and Rilke as he extends his already prestigious and singular poetic project.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2004
• ISBN: 9780887849282

A.F. Moritz

A. F. Moritz has written fifteen books of poetry, and has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. His collection The Sentinel won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award, and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 of the Year. He lives in Toronto.

Book preview

I

THE THINGS UNJOINED

WOMAN IN ASTRAKHAN

Unreal extravagance of an image, say,

the astrakhan gates of night, which opened out

far off, in the poet’s Spanish. Yet one day

as I read, it seemed the gate of my own thought,

and through it and through the fallen autumn fans

of gingko leaves, near a would-be chaos of drops

flung up in lighted pencil jets and arcing

back to a fountain, she entered and passed by.

Her extravagant gait that threw loose breast and knee

and head too wide, as on a plunging boat

amid gale wind, wave foam, blue sky, and frigid sun,

spoke of pure pleasure in the day, insane

maybe, but willfully if in torment free.

Then softly, as I watched across my book,

there entered me the smoke-curled black, the thick

knotted and plushy night-black of her coat,

and of her hair, her bag, her sock and shoe,

all black, like a gate or shadow of a gate

in the late light, and through it her black sashay,

and in her wake the bright black squirrel, who

came neatly folding the gingko leaves till he

held many at once in his mouth to bring away.

THE STORYTELLER

… he that of repetition is most master…

— Wallace Stevens

She is determined that we later

should find her without looking in

the storm’s remains. Her body strikes her

with the gloss of promise — radiant tongue,

it’s telling its own story of her:

persistent health, eternal welcome song,

going its merry, metaforming all

into her lovers. It bares and contradicts her.

But she’s determined and succeeds to tell

things her way: unemployment’s pain,

the poor, the unreliable, confusion

of strengthlessness and its double in the brain.

She’s finished. She is Tom in it,

melding herself with memories of her brother,

but then outside in the theatre of the sleet

next to the grocery store she meets another

who calls himself Tom, who thrusts

pins, wooden pricks, and sprigs of rosemary

into his naked arms, writing

on the foolscap parchment illegibly

in automatic loops of blood.

"Is all, then, already said

and done? she says. Repeated

from scarred mouth to scabbed mouth

to mouth torn (my own but another one)

by the more-than-ancient, the prealphabetic wind?

A story decaying, mortified, unknown

but carried out storm to storm, blown

age to age to this one now?" She sees

that she will never be able to recall

this story for it shouts all the time and how

can you ever remember, have leisure to remember,

the one who will not leave you? O never

would this story become yesterday’s

and over with and she be left alone

remumbling it silently, keeping her vigil

against its coming back once more to repeat

its plot in her. Never would she

forget (for how can you forget

the one who screams in the way?)

and have clean ground in silent ears,

the dictator now dead, and be

new in what she told and said,

or imagine she was new, forgetfully

repeating what she’d vanquished in forgetting.

Namely, what always repeats. The lying whining

from a true misery

crouched beside a door. Like a mirror where,

for the first time today,

like a thousand times before, you glimpse

your unknown back: the shadow,

the opening, the hourglass, the mole, the scar.

You drag it with you,

and look at it askance,

tend it a little, when you can, and dream

you are admired for it. It has two pillars,

a rising and a falling action,

a wide expanse, a column

surmounted by an eyeless head,

by a wild growth — like a ruin

with an accidental garden,

birds flourishing up on some shattered

architrave, cornice, or frieze. But who

is you? So throwing her food

into the bin that collects things for the poor

and from the grocery store

retracing her steps, the storyteller sees

her story on the table

and some red wet leaves

her boots have printed on the floor.

Standing there she considers (without changing)

beginning, body, and conclusion,

while Tom’s dictation by the door

and the storm’s going on restore

the lust in her for strange continuation.

MEMORY OF A FRIEND

Through these same rusting girders these same stars

have risen, turned, returned ten thousand times

since I first followed you into this vast pit

of piled materials and shrouded engines,

walled off and locked, as dark was thickening.

Somewhere near here is where I fell behind,

or looked away, a moment only, lost you,

and you went on oblivious, or