Ordinary Time: Poems

By Paul Mariani

With Ordinary Time, his eighth collection, the distinguished poet and biographer Paul Mariani shares a vision of the world in which the sacred and the quotidian mingle, sometimes quietly and sometimes with revelatory force. These poems treat not only the social and historical issues of the time--the poor, the marginalized, the casualties of war, the forgotten--but the importance of family and friends, especially in those moments we all share of illness and desolation. What saves us is not only beauty but the wit and humor to see the reader through.

A grandfather now, Mariani celebrates a new generation and remembers the dead. If the poems often deal with the ordinary--everything from memories of New York City back in the 1940s to the Mississippi Delta and the Canadian Rockies, to Sweden, the Baltic Sea, and finally Jerusalem--they do so under the shadow of the sacred, which these poems keep reaching out to with word after word after Word.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Slant Books
• Release date: Jan 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781639820320

Paul Mariani

Paul Mariani is the University Professor of English at Boston College. He is the author of eighteen books, including seven volumes of poetry and biographies of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and William Carlos Williams, which was a National Book Award finalist. His life of Hart Crane, The Broken Tower, was made into a feature-length film directed by and starring James Franco. He lives in western Massachusetts.

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ORDINARY TIME

Poems

Paul Mariani

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ORDINARY TIME

Poems

Copyright ©

2020

Paul Mariani. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Slant Books,

P.O. Box 60295

, Seattle, WA

98160

.

Slant Books

P.O. Box 60295

Seattle, WA

98160

www.slantbooks.com

hardcover isbn: 978-1-63982-031-3

paperback isbn: 978-1-63982-030-6

ebook isbn: 978-1-63982-032-0

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Mariani, Paul.

Title: Ordinary time : poems / Paul Mariani.

Description:Seattle, WA: Slant Books,

2020

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-63982-031-3 (

hardcover

) | isbn 978-1-63982-030-6 (

paperback

) | isbn 978-1-63982-032-0 (

ebook

)

Subjects: LCSH: Poetry

Classification:

PS3563.A6543 O73 2020 (

print

) | PS3563.A6543 (

ebook

)

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

01/17/20

Table of Contents

Tile Page

I

De Profundis

Silver Moon

O

What’s in a Name?

The Open Window

High Tea with Miss Julianna

Miss Julianna Revisited Twelve Years On

Sophia

The Stone My Grandson Gave Me

Gavin at Fourteen

Sixth-Grade Hockey on the Greenfield Rink

Little Anthony Leads His Massive Hound About

II

Mexico

Unconch

Pantoum for East Fifty-First

Johnnie Walker Black

In the Realm of Kings and Queens

Mrs. G’s Lesson Plan

When My Father Found Out I Wrote Poetry

Mothers’ Day, 2019

III

Those Shifting Sands

The Great Mississippi

Vieux Carré

Mardi Gras Seen from the Outside

The Sick Man

Coming Back from the Dead

Psalm for the Lost

Hornets’ Nest

On Luca Signorelli’s Self-Anointed Ones

Jeff Explains the Poetry of Money (With Some Added Wisdom from Walter)

IV

Mitzvah

The Silence of those Shadows

What the Waves Kept Telling Me

A Distant Purple

On the Way Home

They Too Go Round

Holy Saturday

What Happened Then

Acknowledgments

For Eileen, always there. Always there.

I

De Profundis

And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

A blank slate, an empty canvas, that sheet

of foolscap eight and a half by eleven long.

Bob Creeley—late minimalist,

hip puritan, wiping at his one good

eye—told me once was how a poem began.

Began, because there was no other choice.

And young James Franco, telling me how

he’d tried to recreate what Hart Crane

had done by staring at his own blank page

there on that Olivetti. He was recalling

something Ed Harris had once said:

how he wished he’d kept those two

minutes in the film he was making, where

Jackson Pollock stares unblinking into

the white canvas at the nothing that is there,

not unlike the Creator God who once stared

into the darkness covering the face, if face

it was, given the way the language works—

or doesn’t—that seems to call us from those depths.

That is, until the Spirit, the Arch Breath,

call it the Wind if you will, whipped over

those waters, as over some blank black canvas.

And, in time (if there was time back then)

God said, Let there be light. And like that,

like a switch turning on, there was light,

and the Lord saw it and called it good. And

where nothing was (if non-being can be said

to be) the trumpet sound of sound itself

began to sound. And it was good. And words

followed: the multifoliate pulse of Pythagorean

sound. Music is its name, what the ancients,

who seemed to know knew better than

we know (if we know anything at all)

called the Music of the Spheres. Then

lines. Lines of verse. Lines of paint as now

Pollock’s