Maryann Corbett is the author of two chapbooks, Dissonance (Scienter Press, forthcoming) and Gardening in a Time of War (Pudding House, 2007). She is a co-winner of the 2009 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and her poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Measure, The Lyric, Candelabrum, First Things, Blue Unicorn, The Raintown Review, Christianity and Literature, The Dark Horse, The Barefoot Muse, Unsplendid, and other journals in print and online. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and works as a legal-writing adviser, editor, and indexer for the Minnesota Legislature. Since 2008 she has served as the administrator of Eratosphere, a popular online forum for poets, especially those specializing in metrical verse.
Rereading Book IV
Sting of a memory, roused from its coils in the roots of the Latin:
raising my voice to my teacher, right there in the hallway. I lost it—
my grip on the weave of the grammar, the veiled indirectness of footnotes.
Red-faced, incensed at her hint that not all of the weeping was Dido's.
Calling Aeneas a jerk and a rat, almost shouting that duty,
piety, vows to the gods were all lies.
And her face. And her eyebrows
(bristly and white and just visible under the edge of a wimple)
knitting. Then both of us suddenly silent. The bell. And then moving
stone-faced toward chemistry class, while across on the opposite stairwell,
slouching, a certain young perfidus carefully stared at his loafers.
First published in The Dark Horse
Northeast Digs Out from Record Snowfall
All up and down the coast, where Saturday
a generous snow came down, an ancient magic
appears this morning: Every hack reporter
in every local rag now lifts the lyre
in lieu of pad and pencil. In New York,
it is a milk-white morning; snow transforms
the straw-drab landscapes into winter postcards.
Southward the mood is darker: like a cloak
of madness falls the snow, like one of those
quiet obsessions you read about in stories.
Figure and trope and image sift, drift over
the dailiness of the papers. Even where
the gods are feebler, on the weather page,
the lyric muse now takes the words by storm:
fierce winds and dazzling whiteness, thigh-deep drifts,
adjectives blowing thick and piling fast,
and under everything the sonorous meter
of radios intoning cancellations.
Those few lost souls with no poetic spark
wander the parks and murmur, staring upward,
so quiet and so lovely, and their awe
is duly reported, being perhaps the news
most worth reporting. Beauty changes us,
calling up wonder from our deepest selves
to its right place: page one, above the fold.
From Gardening in a Time of War
Prophesying to the Breath
I'm tired of it, this labored breathing. Tired
of phlegm and coughing and the fight for air,
bent double on the landing of a stair,
in wheezing gasps where nothing is inspired.
Tired of the silence next to me in bed
when measured snoring suddenly goes still;
of counting a nervous one, two, three until
it starts itself again. Tired of my dread.
I want it back: the confidence in air—
ruah, pneuma, spiritus—the breath
that stirs the vocal folds of nuns in choir.
The breath that Is. The sound of something there
guiding this gusty round of birth and death.
The rush of driving wind. The tongues of fire.
First published in First Things
Speak, Memory. Or Not.
This cute café, these college kids at a table,
this brunch I'm sharing with my children's crowd.
I tick off novelties amid the babble—
tattoos and piercings, earphones up too loud—
but jeans are changeless, and the young men's hair
is long, as achingly long as it was back then.
(I clamp my mouth shut tightly. Fair is fair;
this is their time; these are my daughters' men.)
And talk rehashes topics I'd have heard,
subject for subject, several decades gone:
the war, the sexes (almost word for word),
politics, jobs, the same mad rattling on—
I will decline to comment. They don't need
my sage advice, nor do they need to know
this priceless and expensive life they lead
was lived already. Or how long ago.
First published in Measure
Light, Motif
June night. Light hangs late for us, porch-swing lazy.
Truck goes by with the windows open, spilling
blue notes, tenor saxophone lines unwinding
into the twilight.
Corner. Turning. Gone.
But the world is altered
now, because those measures of hopeless longing
tumbled on us under this sky whose blue notes
lean into nighttime.
(Lolling summer, you with your long vacations,
lawns and pools and languorous blue-note evenings,
hear it? Here: your end, in a dying line of
saxophone solo.)
First published in Alabama Literary Review
Chiller
Seven a.m. The hunter's moon
a scarface falling down the sky
in knife-edge dark. A siren sounds
its bad suspense film leitmotif.
In porch light on the paving stones,
trench-coated for my working life,
I pull the doorknob (opening scene,
take twenty thousand), turn the key.
The dead hand of a pin-oak leaf
crabwalks across the alleyway.
First published in The Lyric