Reading Dickinson / Summer ‘68

By Peter Balakian b. 1951 Peter Balakian

In the hermetic almost dark

under the fluorescent dizz

I found her broken nerves,

smoke coming off the dashes,

the caps like jolts to the neck,

the pried-open spaces between vowels

where the teeth bit off twine

and the tongue was raw then cool with ice.

The air of the stockroom after lunch

was the marbleized silence of the

small blank pages she stitched into privacy.

Air of paper and faint glue

bond, carbon, graph, yellow pads,

in the stockroom I could read alone—

the confetti of money dissolved on the blank wall.

After work, I slid the numbered poems

on blue mimeo into my playbook,

and felt the open field

the zig-zagging past cornerbacks,

the white lines skewed to heaven.

Excuse my mood—unbridled, chemical,

her scrawled messages smooth to the mind,

excuse my absence, again and yes, then, too—

the cold stone of the Palisades was there

after we split—

alone naked in the Hudson,

the water greasing me in the tepid, chemical mix,

before I returned

to the cement of 9W in my father’s Skylark

the night black and soundless within.

Source: Ziggurat (The University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Biography

Peter Balakian is the author of several collections of poetry, including June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974–2000. His recent book, Ziggurat (2010), wrestles with the aftermath and reverberations of 9/11. His poems have been widely anthologized, including in the 1985 Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, and have been translated into several languages. He has published essays on poetry, culture, and art in . . .

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