Dana Gioia - 99 Poems

not love, but you, the shadow of love, fashioned

from quiet and quotidian things, glimpses

of rooftops, alleyways, of open windows

where lovers first espy the imminence

of their own loving, or from sickroom skylights

with their careworn parade of painful days,

the shadowy refuge that vanishes

the way a wild duck, shot in mid-flight,

drops suddenly to vanish in the marsh,

just a few feathers drifting in the air:

I am a shimmering reality

that has no purpose,

unless you return, love, shadow of love,

o cherished sleep, and grant me your repose.

(From the Italian of Carlo Betocchi)

Our story is an old story, the tale of two,

Who met in our feverish, infallible youth

And woke transfigured in a world made new.

We walked through gardens of such stark perfume

That merely breathing left us drunk for days.

We rolled in brambles with our skin unbruised.

We shined in sunlight and in moonlight glowed,

As radiant as angels drawn by Blake.

How could such fiery brightness not explode?

The aspens shimmered, and each blade-like leaf

Slashed at the slopes until the freshets bled.

The mountains were not larger than our grief.

I don’t know why I tell myself this story,

Except that it is spring again outside

When bent oaks briefly blossom into glory.

Oh, yes, it was a story beyond telling,

And so it had to end, as legend required

In blood and tears and fire, the grim fates smiling.

We had our years of ecstasy and rage,

And then moved back to other tamer tales.

But my hand still burns touching this page.

Most of what happens happens beyond words.

The lexicon of lip and fingertip

defies translation into common speech.

I recognize the musk of your dark hair.

It always thrills me, though I can’t describe it.

My finger on your thigh does not touch skin—

it touches your skin warming to my touch.

You are a language I have learned by heart.

This intimate patois will vanish with us,

its only native speakers. Does it matter?

Our tribal chants, our dances round the fire

performed the sorcery we most required.

They bound us in a spell time could not break.

Let the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep

our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy.

What must be lost was never lost on us.

The new poems in this collection, sometimes in slightly different versions, have appeared in the following journals: “An Old Story,” “Come Back,” “Monster,” “Progress Report,” and “Style” first appeared in the Hudson Review; “Household Gods,” “Title Index to My Next Book of Poems,” and “My Handsome Cousin” were published in Radio Silence; “Homage to Soren Kierkegaard” appeared in First Things; “Marriage of Many Years,” “Sea Pebbles: An Elegy,” and “Vultures Mating” were published in the Sewanee Review; and “Film Noir” and “Meditation on a Line from Novalis” first appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review. “Homecoming” is a revision of “The Homecoming” from The Gods of Winter. “Most Journeys Come to This” was originally published in Daily Horoscope under the title “Instructions for the Afternoon.” “Film Noir,” “My Handsome Cousin,” and “Homage to Soren Kierkegaard” also appeared in limited editions by Aralia Press. Artichoke Editions printed a folio edition of “Sea Pebbles: An Elegy.”

The author wishes to thank all of these editors and printers for their generous support.

The poems in this volume were selected from my first four collections supplemented by fifteen new poems, one of which is very long. 99 Poems has been arranged by theme, not by chronology, because it is designed for the reader rather than the scholar. Within each section, however, the poems appear in chronological order with the new work at the end. The index lists the volumes in which the individual works originally appeared.

— DG

DANA GIOIAwas born in Los Angeles in 1950. He received his B.A. and M.B.A. degrees from Stanford University. He also has an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. For fifteen years he worked as a business executive in New York before quitting in 1992 to write full-time. He has published four earlier collections of poetry— Daily Horoscope (1986), The Gods of Winter (1991), Interrogations at Noon (2001) which won the American Book Award, and Pity the Beautiful (2012). Gioia’s first critical collection, Can Poetry Matter? (1992), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame University and the Aiken Taylor Award for lifetime contribution to American poetry. From 2003 to 2009 he served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. An essayist, reviewer, and translator, Gioia has also published fifteen anthologies of poetry and fiction. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California. In 2011 he became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California.