The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Three): Donald Revell [by Angela Ball]

SENESCO SED AMO

         “Starlight is almost flesh.”—Basil Bunting

One life, not one among
A thousand others of quail
Like tipsy mandarins crowding
The cold of a low wall
Along a line of trees, the angel
Promised me and nothing
More, nothing to weigh.

Menippus and Lucian
Be with me now as I
Feel my way among
Misted pillars and ghosts
Of breath on upper Broadway.
A quick kiss in the crosswalk is
More to me than mankind.

There is no middle ground.
There is our empty bench.
There is the stoop of pigeons.
Either I have been alone
Every hour of my life or
Never once, not even
One moment, and the mist rising.

Angel, how stern you have become.
Stricken, almost as strange as Uruguay
Against traffic in the middle distance,
You stride, and there is bread in your step
And sunlight ground into fine powder.
All the same, I feel comforted.
The sharper the mist, the sweeter the hour.

For good reason, enormous windows
Gape the walls of our museums.
Brancusi’s woman asleep awakes to see
Riotous sunlight feeding the air
Because air is what becomes of light
When no one is looking. Only myself,
And I have never been alone until now.

The stern angel gives me bread and the courage
Of satire. Crossing the street towards me
Menippus and Lucian extend their arms,
And birds alight upon their arms, shitting,
Cooing. What is mankind to me
When I have remembered a kiss in the night sweats
Against the traffic, without a breath of air?

The word “steadfast” comes to mind, a word
Like “dusk”, awaiting its formal elegy
In abandoned train-yards. Little fires
In bins are all that remains of English.
I step into the crook of the wing of my
Steadfast angel. I catch the scent
Of newly washed hair, and she says to me

“Shelter here.” Satire is shelter in extremis.
Christ has the dispatch of it, having
Inscribed bitter verses upon human eyes
For angels’ delight and the increase
Of crooked human sleep. Let mankind sleep
Forever. Christ has suffered enough,
And my angel is clean enough to kiss. We kiss.

--Donald Revell

Donald Revell is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently of White Campion (2021) and The English Boat (2018), both from Alice James Books. Revell has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Verses, and Verlaine's Songs without Words. His critical writings have been collected as: Sudden Eden: Essays;  Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has twice been awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Having previously taught at the Universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, Donald Revell is currently a Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

About the poem ....it's my beginning adventure into old age, an adventure I've always imagined would lead to one of those benches on the medians in upper Broadway. And there I'd be joined by other embittered curmudgeons, such as Menippus, such as Lucian. Still, I would hope for bitterness to be eased somehow by love--love remembered as a first kiss on upper Broadway, or an elder love as beautifully avowed by Bunting in "Briggflatts,” or love as the angel who appeared to me on the morning of the day I wrote the poem. --Donald Revell

The New York School Diaspora, Part Twenty-Three: Donald Revell

Donald Revell’s “Senesco Sed Amo,” a walk on workaday “upper Broadway,” both celebrates and enacts mystery and its sotto voce operations. As we follow this poem, a parallel life is with us; a body we know but from reports; a spirit that traces our outlines. Like dark matter, otherness outweighs the familiar, its unknown gravity tugging at our sleeves. Birdlife around us, we “feel our way” in the mixed company of an angel and (at the poet’s request) two ancient cynics, Menippus and his acolyte, Lucian, that arrive in a crosswalk, arms extended, “And birds alight upon their arms, shitting, / Cooing.”

The seven lines of the poem’s rooms are the seven twists of wire holding champagne’s cage; the seven heavens that progress and abide; the seven leagues of our loneliness, its injuries and salves.

“There is no middle ground,” says the poem.

     Either I have been alone

     Every hour of my life or

     Never once, not even

     One moment, and the mist rising.

The poem’s title (in English, “I Age but I Love”) is from Ezra Pound’s great Pisan Cantos, written in implausible circumstances, alone in the bare grace of a prison yard under stars. This context is part of “Senesco Sed Amo”’s alternation between harshness and benediction, its vision of “a kiss in the night sweats / Against the traffic, without a breath of air.”

In our mixed state, words are called forth as companions, are mourned:

    The word “steadfast” comes to mind, a word

     Like “dusk,” awaiting its formal elegy

     In abandoned train-yards. Little fires

     In bins are all that remains of English.

In a poem this ineffable, kin to the most lucent John Ashbery joined with Rainier Maria Rilke; joined with Brancusi’s women ovally asleep on the sides of their glowing faces; joined with Basil Bunting’s (in his great Briggflats) young lovers under rain, old lovers indoors breakfasting on scones laved with bacon fat; repetition steadies us. The word “steadfast” reappears as the “steadfast angel” offers her wing and “the scent / Of newly washed hair.”

Donald Revell’s calm, generous, and exhilarating “Senesco Sed Amo” leaves us with a vision of shelter, with satire (like cynicism) as hedge against circumstance, and with the swift logic of love’s union: “And my angel is clean enough to kiss. We kiss.”

--Angela Ball

Comments

[JQ Zheng]

Angela's analysis really helps me understand this poem and makes me see a continuation of influence from Ezra Pound to Basil Bunting and then to Donald Revell. The quote from Bunting is a nice one, and this line from the poem is my favorite: "The sharper the mist, the sweeter the hour."

[sarah gelder]

I agree that Angela's analysis made this poem so vividly real. Also I had never previously considered Doanald Revell a New York School poet but now I see her point and her mention of Ashbery.

[Kevin Thomason]

"Christ has suffered enough, / And my angel is clean enough to kiss."--My favorite line from the poem. Angela's description of the lines as the "seven leagues of our loneliness, its injuries and salves" is perfect. Thanks for continuing to showcase these poems!

[Angela Ball]

Thank you, JQ Zheng, for your generous comments.

Thank you, as well, Sarah Gelder, for your words here.

Kevin Thomason, I appreciate what you have to say here.