Two
poems from Anthony Deaton's Voice, Compass, Clay
followed
by a note on the author
After
Troy
Not
quite putting on what little power or knowledge
pigeons lay claim to, she nonetheless
bids them come.
Launched off cornices,
cathedral
arches, they glide
through the gelid air in loose spirals, filling the square.
Their
wings beat a thin flat thunder.
She's
drifted in from the soot-marbled
housing blocks piled across the Vistula,
making
her tramline pilgrimage among the other pensioners
who
haunt the Old Town's benches.
Strewn about her feet are crumbled bits of bread
crust
and each cupped palm she extends offers more.
The
birds pullulate around her ankles,
roost on her shoulders. Aloof from the others,
one
fatted pigeon mounts the faded
purple
beret she wears against the late October freeze.
This is when I steal the photo.
All
day I've kept the camera hidden inside an overcoat pocket,
afraid
reducing Warsaw's rebuilt bell towers
and cobblestone vistas to thirty-six
frames per roll
would give me away as something I can't help
not
wanting to be. Yet I cannot resist the old lady
capped and gowned, as she is,
in feather.
She lifts her arms to either side. The unmindful pigeons crowd,
peck
along her flightless limbs, mocking her gravity
as they alternately spread
and fold their wings.
Or maybe it isn't mockery, but a mutual love that keeps
them
flapping
there and holds the woman still,
engenders in that coupling a dream of union,
where
one light step might shift their weight to sky.
.
.
On
the General Principles of Knot Tying: An Elegy for the Body
Port with the tossed deck, clinging
To the net webbed between coiled lines,
We
lean. Our faith in bracing and ballast
As
the sky washes down upon us,
Cloud into spindrift. To know knots
You must
know danger,
Our
skipper said. Safe passage
Is a day's work. Hauled salmon.
The hold brims
humpies and sockeye,
Their
wriggle-flop bodies of fin
And petaled skin we sweep below.
While one would
be enough for me,
One
stilled eye enough to hold back
From the long fresh water feed of coastal streams,
We
bend to commerce. And the water rises,
As
if to beg us quit. And the water
Rises until a body is finally
Caught at
cross-purposes between
The
ship's steady toil
And the unstoppable spillage of net
Into the wake of
our endeavor –
A
body. My body,
Snatched, rigged right up the boom,
As if it were a flag.
An
exquisite signature. O,
What now? Now, white hospital light.
Who dreamed
it would end here among hemostats,
Nasal
cannuli? The scooped arc
Of the spatula-needle noses through-
And-through
its long transaction, closes
The
serried, open wound. Swage
Follows. Needle point. Over and again.
This is
the knot that finally binds.
©
Anthony
Deaton is a Foreign Service Officer currently serving at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus,
Syria. His poems have appeared in such journals as the Gettysburg Review,
the Paris Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. The recipient of
a "Discovery"/The Nation Award and the Campbell Corner Prize in Poetry,
Deaton is also the author of Rhumb Lines, a fine arts chapbook published
by Sutton Hoo Press.
"After
Troy" first appeared in The Nation, and "On the General Principles
of Knot-Tying: An Elegy for the Body" first appeared in the Paris Review.
