Dimensions: 6.3000(W) x Dimensions: 8.7000(H) x Dimensions: 0.6000(D)
With Orbit, prize-winning author Cynthia Zarin confirms her place as an indispensable American poet of our time.
In this, her fifth collection, Zarin turns her lyric lens on the worlds within worlds we inhabit and how we navigate our shared predicament—the tables of our lives on which the news of the day is strewn: the president speaking to parishioners in Charleston, the ricochet of violence, near and far. Whether writing about hairpin turns in the stair of childhood, about the cat’s claw of anxiety, on the impending loss of a young friend, or how “love endures, give or take,” here is the poet who, in the title poem, “bartered forty summers for black pearls” and whose work is full of such wagers, embodied in playing cards, treble notes, snow globes, and balancing acts. Zarin reminds us that the atmosphere created by our experiences shapes and defines the orbit we move through. Along the way, she is both witness and, often indirectly, subject—“I do not know how to hold the beauty and sorrow of my life,” she writes. This book is an attempt at an answer.“Essential reading for those seeking magic on the page . . . J.M.W. Turner comes to mind. In particular Turner’s late-stage work, when issues of craft have long been resolved and what we see if pure feeling, sublime and urgent.” —Library Journal (starred review)CYNTHIA ZARIN was born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia. She is the author of four previous collections, including most recently The Ada Poems, as well as a book of essays, An Enlarged Heart, and several books for children. She is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. A winner of the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, she teaches at Yale and lives in New York City.flowers
This morning I was walking upstairs
from the kitchen, carrying your
beautiful flowers, the flowers you
brought me last night, calla lilies
and something else, I am not
sure what to call them, white flowers,
of course you had no way of knowing
it has been years since I bought
white flowers—but now you have
and here they are again. I was carrying
your flowers and a coffee cup
and a soft yellow handbag and a book
of poems by a Chinese poet, in
which I had just read the words “come
or go but don’t just stand there
in the doorway,” as usual I was
carrying too many things, you
would have laughed if you saw me.
It seemed especially important
not to spill the coffee as I usually
do, as I turned up the stairs,
inside the whorl of the house as if
I were walking up inside the lilies.
I do not know how to hold all
the beauty and sorrow of my life.
meltwater
A gang of foxes on the wet road, fur
gaggle, the gutter a Ganges, gravel
rutting the glacier’s slur and cant. Old proof,
the past can’t solve itself, endlessly drawing
its stung logos spirograph. You see
the fox I cannot see; even the children
can see her, vixen and her babies
delicately picking their way along
the white line of the tarmac, the rain
rubbing out their shadows. I want you
as I want water, rain crocheting moss
from mist, sulfur on the pines’ crooked limbs,
hapless as the selkie who hums to herself—
no one believes in her but there she is.
faun
The faun you can see
her lariat of bone unfolding
the faun in your arms
her legs buckled
moon-mouth
velvet, her breath keyed,
water
rasping the bridge
barnacles ringing the pilings
—black pearls,
the faun’s breath spiral,
circling your head,
the Horn of Africa
pausing
—digitalis,
cinquefoil, starburst
pulsing
to where we walked
to the end, to what we
thought was the end.
mirror
My fate to meet my eyes where I’d meet yours,
this early morning streaked with soot
mottled where your dreaming hand should put
my hand to rest on your still waking brow
jibing the night’s storm-battered prow
heaven’s third power, that makes another fast
be one of two, then, the scow safely moored—
(eyes shut) wish that was for me first be last.
orbit
je vais voir l’ombre que tu devins
—mallarmé
That evening when you were standing by
the shelves and song came back to you after
a long silence, never broken even once
but for a shadow crossing your path, a murmur
of some long-ago breath, speeches as nursery rhymes,
St. Crispin or the children chanting, please you,
night and day, or the stained glass of the bay
as it opened for you when the tide rose
to meet the twilight. But never asking for you,
who had become a bystander, salt caked
by salt to a pillar and even then slipshod
with the truth. That swerving eel whose charge switches
the current is you, not another, slick
tail—remorse—caught in its own mouth.
*
The house a shell and not a shell. Dreaming,
I stop at each turn of the stair, kite
winder, the balustrade’s tipped ladder tracking
infinity, each door a lid shut tight
my damp snail foot, proboscis, wrack fishtail.
How can I swim up so many stories?
On the landing, furs. Gloves. A walking stick,
Grandfather in his overcoat, clearing
his throat, the winter smell of carnations.
I tried to write it down but lost. Missed tread.
Footfall of what the dead said. Don’t, or do?
All ear, I have no hands. Lunatic hero,
the hermit crab who keeps me company
turns me over, nebulae, on my back.
*
All day a playing card at the kitchen stair’s hairpin,
seven diamonds, each red gem a step, Mnemosyne’s
daughters, sun-sprockets, whirring to make you listen.
On a sequined pillow from Bombay, our Una’s
papoose doll sits up beneath The Book
of Justice, a pop‑up fugue whose page unfolds
a toothpick temple, each strut a reliquary,
its cellophane banner sheer petroleum.
By midnight, the card picked up: tears, doom-bringer,
futility: the owl asking its question
to the barking of dogs. Rusks and cardamom.
If Chronos comes to Hecate’s door, what use
is squabbling? Yew-eyed, the cat mews the stair,
her footprints red after she steps on glass.
*
Dusk. Bee’s Sea of Monsters butts the chair—
its shiny cover wreathed with lashing tails
while eight steps up, the kite winder, littered
with gilt ribbons, sails into Whitehall’s helter-
skelter. I sit “on the stares.” Fight or flight?
Downstairs, on pink ice, powdered ginger
spackles the Victorian mold’s flutes with gold,
red lily pollen, prodded, makes us all
Macbeth. Tonight’s story? Trawling for loot,
wan Elnora, “A Girl of the Limberlost,”
pulls from her torn pocket a scrimshaw boy,
a locket, a painted top—each butterfly
she nets a flustered treble note. We’re not
good at being good, nor being “good-at.”
*
The fireplace log breathes fire, pooled amber,
bejeweled topaz lighting a goblet. The air
is sap. Dragon, the pine log shatters to
a monkey face, two knots for eyes, then—gone.
What else eats itself alive? The child, not
eating, rattles her shark spine, wind chimes
for Belsen’s banging door that only shuts.
North, the smudged mill towns carbonize, each one
dilated, black iris beneath the day’s
cloud-muddied brow, horizon’s dorsal fin
snow grey, as if the flooded dawn held dusk,
the shark’s inamorata sunset’s skinned
knuckle try at holding fast—gunpowder
sky that drinks smoke from an hourglass.
*
Each one Echo (spitting image of Narcissus
in diminuendo), the seven sisters play
bridge on their upside-down card table,
their meteor go-cart running on a firecracker.
Their swaged tablecloth is the snow sky settling
on the dark town. Who could do wrong? The eye
of the world opens and shuts. Remember
the legs under the table, silk and suede,
pine bark, sharp hooves, clattering? We spoke
in whispers, hardly breathing—house of cards
where every breath disturbs the dreaming portraits.
Shuffle the deck. The prince’s tiny twitching
dog is dreaming us: dust and ore, secret, alive,
animal, just past vision’s humming line.
*
Why can’t I want anything I want? But,
Cosmo, I do. Posthumous, our loves
outlive us: hardtack, lemons, sassafras,
soap-skiff floating in the claw foot tub,
the windlass a girl blowing bubbles.
Would that we’d known? A whitened cloud
of peppered moths, the children’s old de teum
dim the lamp and singe the too light evening
and turn the sky’s slashed moiré tangerine.
I bartered forty summers for black pearls—
the cat’s black tail, scorch mark, rounds the kicked
shut door. On Wings Neck two deer eat and graze.
I slip and water slops the stairs. Where I am
met is meat. What we knew we know was there.
*
The light through the wicker chair makes star-crossed
diamonds on the coffee cup, each watery
crystal quartz alit tells lies or makes
things up. What will I do with my life?
Rolled up the map of Angers—somewhere else—
resists, its antique blue print paper folds
an origami house on fire, its routes
and rivers set ablaze, the blown up center—
court, steeple, winding stair—a burnt out
charcoal spyhole. Between the lines? In
the kitchen of the dragon king, the hooked carp,
speaking, has one wish: life as we know it.
Know-nothing, the curling paper serpent
sheds his printed skin but leaves me mine.
*
Tea-smoked duck on a sugar stick, at
the restaurant where in the dream I changed
tables and changed tables. Everything M. gave me
was a box—a glass box with pink transparent sides,
a cloisonné parfumerie.
Do you want these boots? the dream said. I walked for miles
through racks of shoes, among the voodoo dolls—
but those are Martin’s, I said. But who is Martin?
Then woke—I am half turned away—to rain,
and didn’t think, a meal half-cooked, the stove aflame,
duck legs puckered running red, the cat left out all night
drenched and I—you don’t think, who have failed
everyone I love, my hair a fright wig
my heart a bat that bangs its head.
*
Shellacked with ice, the street a cracked snow globe
whose magic pool drips serum. Mystery or venom?
Reading aloud in our cocoa-cum-coffee cloud,
Miss Stanton, stepdaughter of Woking, Surrey,
drops her veil. It’s not sorrow she feels, but terror,
then comedy—the bull butting his maze
of twigs, the baboon rattling the bedroom door.
Is love labor? Pacem, heart-ease. Our shadows
slip. In the ashram’s hand-thrown toffee bowl
(our guru has a sweet tooth, he likes M&Ms)
the narcissus, one-eyed, strains against
its makeshift chopstick stake to bloom. My pen,
leaking, blots and counts to ten, its indigo
dilation drawing water rings on the ceiling.
*
Ships’ time, the East River’s septet of islands,
each triangle mast raised to a tin star.
The wind settles. Scant block from the cold bank,
my love, bell-ringer at ten, at five, star-hive,
diminishes to a speck, the wind’s fugue
tripling her internal rhyme. That watermark
white quartz I kept, Mab’s stone, whose ripples
whet the air her horses reined, her rune her wand,
your eye for mine—your taloned verses held
small birds in air until they sang. When you
turned to speak I bit my tongue and thought
not mine. Come to me now. Heaven’s geometry
is hesitation’s proof; the triangle’s sharp
note—tin hitting crystal—makes us stop.
*
The cranberry bogs—plush seats at La Fenice,
but the sky’s aria after weeks of rain?
Bee sting, a swarm of buttercups, mercury
monogrammed with fever. Three wishes?
Even the simple know to ask for more—
the baby’s hand a star, the blinded
measuring snake a Möbius strip. Whom did Clotho
strangle but herself? Too many things
are possible in this world, Lachesis.
Fall is summer’s bronze wing, it soars, then dips.
Even Atropos is unpredictable—
a knife makes a fiddle of a breastbone,
a torn field mouse flicking rubies. My life
be my life, scarecrow punting at the moon.
*
Transit of mist, the blistered, peeling trees—
ice in the doorway makes us slip
and grab the brass knob that will and will not
turn. To choose a book is to choose—what?
Mrs. Dalloway, by the telephone,
steps out and shuts the door, the sky above Hyde Park
rickracked with clouds. Slight wind. Boot lifted above
a rainbow puddle. Do you remember?
We took a stick and twirled the gutter’s oily
pond until the colors parted, Joseph’s
coat, ragtag, the early sunset’s bagatelle.
Love, if I could look at you—our life bleeds
into every corner; the sky’s lavender lozenge
window, future tense, stores everything we do.
*
What rainbow amounts to anything?
The bracelet’s lanyard on my wrist—woven
manacle, one a summer, for mama—
faint blush of mold on the sky’s scud rim,
the horizon a bird blind high above Longnook
all bluff, the dune bowling down meteors,
its fatal hollows scored by falling timber,
spawn ghostwriting the low-tide mark.
Where are my happy loves? Right from wrong,
the simple past, asperity a rough
Venus, a mermaid and her twin seal
self, the bloodred wax that stamps the letter
a welt on her fern tail, an x marking
the spot where the light was.
summer
for Max Ritvo
i
Three weeks until summer and then—what?
Midsummer’s gravity makes our heads spin
each hour a gilt thread spool, winding through
the second hand, gossamer fin de semaine,
fin de siècle, fin slicing the water
of the too-cold-to-breathe bay, molten silver,
then receding as if we hadn’t seen it,
sultan of so long, see you tomorrow.
Dead man’s fingers, lady’s slippers, a seal
who swims too close—too close for what? The needle
swerves. Our element chooses us. Water
fire, air, earth—the rosebush, Lazarus,
hot to the touch, gold reticulate, is love’s
bull’s-eye, attar rising from the rafters.
ii
If I could make it stop I would. Was it
the crocodile Hook feared, or was it time?
The hour’s arrow never misses, the gnomon,
glinting, cuts the Day-Glo sun to pieces.
In the ultraviolet palace of the Mermaid King
his girls wear scallop shells, one for each year
on their turquoise tails. Even they have birthdays,
why not you? Death, hold your ponies with one
hand, and stay awhile. On my desk, the lion’s
paw lamp scavenged from the winter beach,
its poppy-colored shells like the lit scales
of an enormous Trojan fish . . . teeth chattering,
its metronome time bomb tsk tsk—
when is giving up not giving in?
iii (child’s pose)
When Alice pulled the stopper, did she get
smaller, or did the world get larger? In
the bath, your nose bleeds a bouquet of tissue
roses, white stained red—adolescence
is to overdo it, but really? Thirty
stories up, our birds’-eye view is
the hummingbird tattoo on your bare head,
wings beating, too tiny and too big to see,
your wire-thin profile drawn upright, bones
daring the air, marionette running on
the brain’s dark marrow, tungsten for the fireflies’
freeze tag. Due south, the Chrysler Building’s gauntlet
holds a lit syringe. We do and do not change.
Let me go from here to anywhere.
iv
That’s it for now. And so we turn the page
your poems standing in for you, or—that’s
not it, what’s left of you, mediating
between what you’d call mind and body
and I, by now biting my lip, call grief,
the lines netting the enormous air
like silver threads, the tails of Mr. Edwards’s
spiders with which they sail from ledge to branch
“as when the soul feels jarred by nervous thoughts
