The Book of Hours
Description
"Marianne Boruch's work has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention."-The Washington Post
"[H]er patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler's sense of facet and flaw."-Poetry magazine
Endearingly strange, unsentimental, and uniquely structured, in true Rilkean fashion The Book of Hours questions the meaning and significance of everything from the flaws of human interaction to perfect posture. Unrelenting honesty and exacting description are coupled with the trials of a dying mother, saint shadows, birds, and "shit drying to chalk."
My mother's body to wires, to tubes
and their liquid, days she turned toward me
or away, winter but so much sun
from car to door. I followed it past nurses
at their station talking movies, who's good
in one and not the other. Gown tied
at the back and neck, she slept beside
a window. I wedged my chair there, reading,
looking up, reading,-who knows what
I read-her legs bruised, thin, arms battered
by the doctor's needle. Her face. Can I
say this plainly now? There was light
as she grew less. She drifted to it.
I'm not hungry, not religious, I'm in a spot,
she told me one afternoon then
closed her eyes to that radiance again.
Marianne Boruch grew up in Chicago and earned a masters degree from the University of Massachusetts. She teaches at Purdue University and at Warren Wilson College. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
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Content
- Intro
- Note to the Reader
- Contents
- One may read it walking: lauds and matins
- 1
- I thought the tree
- I don't like this coolness, she said
- Three kinds of sudden equal three
- At the laundromat, his close-cropped hair
- To live in the bird guide, the yellowthroat's
- The poem puts on its hair shirt, four lines
- I lost my pen, I lost my keys
- My mother's body to wires, to tubes
- 2
- Stopped behind a school bus, I saw
- I don't know, he said, I guess it's
- The usual tacky mosaics one finds
- I'll give you a body that won't die
- He was touched or he touched or
- To make a life inside, you
- She stood there unquiet: a road
- On rain-washed paper dried, ink
- 3
- It includes the butterfly and the rat, the shit
- Some dreamily smoke cigarettes, some track
- You've been walking
- I am so pissed, said god, maybe
- In a town I didn't know, yes, I'll wait
- Not gracious but hair the wren
- In the hospital parking lot
- So big deal, so you find it sort of
- 4
- My heart, its breathing hole
- A storm darkens the room, rain
- I do the cat thing, really the dog thing
- On days god had nothing to say
- Wish and ache, emphatic
- The mosquito brings you blood, it
- Leaf multiplies to tree to make
- Some world. No start to it but
- 5
- I woke in rain to old war footage
- Worry, not to worry, comes
- The suffering of the masters, Chekhov wrote
- One gets tired, middle of the day
- Let's review the fog suit
- Memory must be viral
- I've had it with poems, he said
- Those visits home, the way the young
- 6
- Past sixty and pounds over, she
- Note the sky, the voice said. Some say
- They collect skulls and go by boat
- Honest-to-god color, god said, for artists
- In the crosshairs of mystery, they
- The computer screen, day or night
- There once was a shoe and a coat
- Like the silkworm. Is it
- 7
- It isn't that serious before dawn, trees
- You say you turn off the jet
- Life Studies II: this pencil, this paper
- They've made the old fishery
- Birdsong, face it, some male machine
- All this water, what to do with it
- Those from the garden, orphaned back
- The screech owl's little horse
- 8
- Nothing doing, none of it painted, she said
- The loon with two chicks
- Heads-up! the voice double-whammied him
- When's a fork a spoon
- So they do, they dive in
- Is this a mantra? mantra of
- The lake, clouds patch it dark
- A shadow. And the bird feigns a broken wing
- About the Author
- Acknowledgments
