Keats, de Beauvoir, and Niagra: Three from Gillian Osborne

Three Poems from Gillian Osborne






Secret Messages to Keats

1.

My dear Keats,

perhaps at one time you were

2.

the subject or a Sparrow

My Brother

awoke and found it

before my Window

3.

nothing startles me

4.

I take part in its existence

5.

beyond has a better opinion of me

than I deserve

My dear Keats,

Would we were

a throng

of spiritual Acorns

ethereal Pigs

and not rattlesnaked

into any more

for what is a squirrel

or a filbert

a violet!

Eagles?

should we be owls

I am a peacock

a few Catkins

& robin

retired

admire me

old Poets

In return

I have gathered

the pretty

Simone de Beauvoir

When I found the bookstore it was raining

and I was out of breath.  You were wrapping books in plastic sheaths. 

Stay forever, if you like, you said, and we slept side by side

in the children’s nook on a sheet of foam. 

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter made you leave home for France. 

The rest of us were Henry Miller

except for a certain infacility with words, drinking

every afternoon and puking in the parks where

you aren’t to tread on the grass. 

When I followed you to Italy in the spring you said

put down that book and look at the plum trees blooming out the window. 

But when I boarded a train for further east

you wrapped my books in wax paper because you said

I would do harm to them and waved your handkerchief 

bursting into tears that were impossible to read.  You loved

tragedies like Jude the Obscure

so years later I avoided you by refusing

the books you had buried yourself in. 

Another Niagara

I can tell you about Niagara though I’ve never been

Where waters

Which should be disappointing but isn’t

My honeymoon. I know what you want to say,

Light on the falls

But the rocks pulverized at the edges are still rocks

The imagination reveling in those places it feels

And everyone doing it and we didn’t want to be left out

With such fervor is a bright mineral green

At dawn, I find myself wandering the perimeter

At least based on recent calculations

Where I’ve never been

It ends up in my eyes

For one thing, it’s so big, and so famous and unnatural

And my hair a blond so platinum it looked white

They went over any way possible

I’ll tell you why I really care about Niagara: I went there

In an ecstatic nineteenth century engraving

I could feel a giant lens going off

Blinding was the adjective I was going for.  Lovebirds,

Old French fur settlements

But also into countries, of course

I’ve only imagined myself there like a figure

Like other canyons (grand) and valleys (Yosemite)

Give me a break! But is was the middle of the century

And I tell you about Niagara

The mist is too thick to be mist

Radiant with salt it leached from rocks far away

Amorous, though looking back now, I didn’t have a clue

None of those numbers like Niagara are precise

And you could buy postcards, magnets, toy bears

What love was all about.  Not until I met him and we made those plans

Daredevils

Or a Canadian or anyone with enough money to travel

And everything is in black and white even the rainbow

Wilderness lovers feared would become

Just outside the safety platform by the falls while making out

If you are an American you approach from the East

I hold my hand toward it and turn to my companion

It was already too late, the crowds were prolific

I’m not talking about my husband, but you probably guessed that

We’ve all been here before

Maybe even in my lungs

Fifty thousand years from now the falls will slide into Erie

And we were young and sex seemed to follow us like a hot cloud. 

But it isn’t History I want to tell you about

In which the falls look bucolic and even bigger than they are

New Niagaras, scarring the innate sublimity of the West.

The truth is, he’d gone kind of cuckoo, he said it was the war.

Maidens in the spray

One is meant to imagine emerging from all this collapsing wonder

Puffing out his presidential chest

Which is why we decided to go through with it.  I was sick

In terms of North and South

And perhaps here would be an appropriate place

All of America wanted to go to bed with me in a red dress.

Since, after all, this is a tourist destination and this, yes this

With whom I long to share nature’s glorious face

Inside a mirror.  But it didn’t matter because by now

I’d probably turn your stomach if you weren’t prepared

It’s easy to get there just don’t

But he has vanished into the foliage

Like a canoe, after all that erosion, with no tourists

For the kind of vision I had become.  But anyway, as you know

Five people and seven thousand people have died in the falls

And the sound of the falls makes me foolish and afraid

Emitting cheers like the sound the spray used to make

After being strangled while my husband is about to go over the falls

Greetings from Niagara Falls! The most Romantic Spot

To insert one of my favorite lines from a poem:

In a stolen boat and my lover lies bloated and smashed in the morgue 

And ten thousand years ago this land was ravaged by ice.

Gillian Osborne is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Berkeley. Her poems or criticism have appeared in the Believer, the Threepenny Review, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. She is one of three co-organizers of the Conference on Ecopoetics, which will be held at Berkeley this winter.