The Book of Sediments

Madeline DeFrees’s poem “The Book of Sediments” appeared in our Fall 1983 issue. Her last collection, Spectral Waves, was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2006; DeFrees passed away last year.

Beside my bed the lamplight glows: a glass base
filled with shells containing
news of ocean. Each shell encloses what the sea
says to the listener. Each whorl and coil
reflects the secrets there.

Echo and Narcissus.
He falls in love with the image: his vision
flowers. She pines away for the other: nothing
left but the voice. The sun-drowned
sepals in the old stereoscope we called
a stereopticon: two complementary views—right
eye and left—caught on film the brain
registers and light fuses to a third dimension.

We let those wave-lengths tell us what the world
means, a corollary of echo-
location: different densities sending bulletins
from underwater. Ship Harbor Inn: we slept
above the Sound—frogs and crickets
a fluttering circle on the ear’s horizon. That
one long note, the foghorn
cutting in and out of sleep.

Waves know their
burden of heavy minerals by weight. Neatly,
they sort them out in ocean’s bed of separate
deposits: gold from monazite, red
garnet from zircon. Disaster always in their
wake, waves stumble on
sifting platinum from chromite, grain by grain.
Some, considering the ocean

prospect, have made
themselves minor profits. Others
have gone for broke. Isn’t that Gruber, there
next to the breeches’
buoy? The 300-pound quarryman we left, too fat
to fit in, refusing to be tied? His mid-
section circled by two life-preservers,
he made it finally in a bo’s’n’s chair, the first
to pass dry-shod.

And now the ferry docks
briefly at Shaw Island: a brown-robed nun,
Franciscan in pill-box hat with veil attached,
runs down the gangplank in sandals.
Clank of heavy chains, and then the double
dissolve into Friday

Harbor and the Whale Museum
where we saw a brain three times our size.
Remember the days we took to let the sea settle?
Bald Hill and Dinner Island? Cape San Juan
and Sunset Point. I tried the public
telephone: a killer whale
was on the line, and everywhere we looked was
light and water.

—from “The Light Station on Tillamook Rock”

The post The Book of Sediments appeared first on The Paris Review.

from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2bHHkzk

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

The Rejection Plot

Print from Trouble , by Bruce Charlesworth, a portfolio which appeared in The Paris Review in the magazine’s Fall 1985 issue. Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they? — the rejection plot spoils everything upfront:...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog