Nothing by Design Read online

Whoever free-floats, it isn’t versatile Crusoe,

  who cast his dreams with people he hoped to find,

  and through years without lackeys, never slept alone

  given the draft at his foot, his Robinson Crusoe.

  LOST ORIGINALS

  All his life he spoke of “lost originals,” as if he were reaching beyond his own civilization to the simplicity and grandeur of a remote past…

  —PETER ACKROYD, Blake

  The window to the mortal world

  shows mountain islands in the sea.

  One of them rises at the same

  slope the soul floats from the body

  flat on the bed, in stony folds,

  the profiled head propped on a pillow.

  A second distant hill has curled

  into a corner of the window

  (more a mirror than a window)

  precisely in the size and shape

  of the other pillow at the foot

  of the bed from which, now flying up

  from feet of clay, utterly free,

  the female soul looks down on man,

  her weeping hair a kind of pity,

  her breasts as round as sun and moon.

  *

  For a pittance he would illustrate

  the poems of others, like The Grave

  by Robert Blair (forgotten now,

  of the graveyard school). He would engrave

  a scene like this to make ends meet,

  or sometimes furnish a first sketch

  for wretches like that Schiavonetti—

  who wrecked this one, and couldn’t etch—

  but beauty in the end was his,

  for right was left, and black was white,

  the world was flat and he went round

  his cottage blessed with second sight,

  like Catherine, his better half,

  and when the visions would forsake

  both of them, “What do we do then, Kate?”

  “We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.”

  *

  Soul peeled like a printer’s proof

  off the body’s copper plate.

  Hands black as a chimney sweep’s

  worked and with black hands he ate.

  Raging at injustices

  to all of humankind, yet placid,

  steady with needle, burin, paint,

  he brushed the pastel tones with acid.

  The worldly took their patronage

  elsewhere when he made them wait

  for pages queerly old and new,

  ahead of their time, and always late.

  Time was of such little note!

  Heaven came by the infernal

  method, corrosives, which in Hell

  are salutary and medicinal;

  birds sang their eternal song

  and angels lodged beneath his roof.

  Off the body’s copper plate

  soul peeled like a printer’s proof.

  *

  Illuminations like stained glass

  on paper, or like parasols

  that shaded with a pale translucence;

  enlightenment from Paracelsus

  himself, beloved sage, who said

  imagination is like the sun:

  its light, intangible, may set

  a house afire. O let light in

  from deities of every source—

  the New and the Old Testament,

  gods of the Greeks, the Romans, Norse,

  gods of wise heathens, gods that went

  so many eons back he had

  to invent them, so to mourn their loss.

  Saturated colors sang

  prophecies. In The Song of Los

  he burned the institutions, Churches:

  Hospitals: Castles: Palaces:

  (built, he wrote, like nets & gins

  & traps to catch the joys

  of Eternity) on a treated plate

  and turned it, coining true from false.

  “All his life,” the future wrote,

  “he spoke of ‘lost originals.’ ”

  *

  London turned meanwhile, cog-wheeled

  industry of speed; grinding

  people up in mills, it spilled

  William Blake on common ground.

  Rest in peace, white chalk and red,

  hammer and chisel, rest in peace,

  aqua fortis, vinegar,

  salad oil, and candle grease.

  No gravestone for the great engraver.

  Never mind. We’ll meet hereafter.

  Catherine, who’d lost her beauty

  to toil and hunger years before,

  had posed a last time (you have ever

  been an angel to me), and

  sold his works to stay alive.

  Let the future understand

  he sat with her for hours together

  daily following his death,

  and she followed his instructions

  from Jerusalem or Lambeth,

  Bunhill Fields, Soho or Felpham,

  Fountain Court, all was the same—

  and soul, its twisted sheets in tatters,

  rose up from its bed of letters.

  Acknowledgments

  A number of artists’ residencies helped me greatly in writing this book. I am grateful for a Bellagio fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and for several stays at the MacDowell Colony, one of which was supported by a Concordia Foundation fellowship. A period as a Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieri, as well as visits at The Whiteley Center, gave me time and peace to write.

  My thanks to the editor of this book, Deborah Garrison, and to the editors of the following magazines and anthologies, where these poems appeared for the first time, sometimes in slightly different form.

  The Atlantic: “Out of the Woods”; The Common: “The Gods”; The Cortland Review: “Instrumental Riddles”; Five Points: “Cities in the Sky” and “Our Friends the Enemy”; The Hopkins Review: “Common Room, 1970,” “Fractal,” “Our Ping-Pong Table,” “Over and Out,” “Pair of Bells”; Little Star: “French Haiku,” “Nora,” “Voice of America”; The New Yorker: “Complaint for Absolute Divorce”; The Plume Anthology of Poetry: “Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.”; Poetry Northwest: “From a Balcony, Lake Como,” “It’s Hard to Say,” “Lost Originals,” “Unbroken Music”; Sewanee Theological Review: “Dr. Syntax and Prosody”; Southwest Review: “The Afterlife”; Subtropics: “No Second Try”; 3QR: The Three Quarter Review: “Crusoe’s Footprint”; The Yale Review: “Constellations”; The Warwick Review: “Cardinal Numbers.” “The Seafarer” appeared first in The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, edited by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto (Norton, 2011).

  Dedications

  “Morning Mirror” is for Ann Hulbert; “Pair of Bells” is for my friends at Civitella Ranieri; “Common Room, 1970” is for David Brown; “Fractal” is for Daniel Hall, Pengyew Chin, and Kannan Jagannathan; “The Gods” is for Stephen Kampa; “From a Balcony, Lake Como” is for Jean McGarry; “Cardinal Numbers” is for Emily Leithauser; “Our Friends the Enemy” is for Albert and Janet Salter; “Nora” is in memory of Nora Kornblueh; “The Afterlife” is for Hilary Leithauser; “It’s Hard to Say” is in memory of Gladys Leithauser; “Cities in the Sky” is in memory of James Rossant; “Over and Out” is for John Irwin; “Unbroken Music” is for Karen Chase and Caolan Madden; “Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.” is for Joseph and Carla Harrison; “Dr. Syntax and Prosody” is for Greg Williamson; “French Haiku” is for James Magruder and Stephen Bolton; “Instrumental Riddles” is for Claudia Emerson; “Crusoe’s Footprint” is for Mark and Bryan Leithauser; “Lost Originals” is for Gjertrud Schnackenberg.

  A Note about the Author

  Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She was educated at Harvard and Cambridge and taught at Mount Holyoke College for many years. In addition to her six previous poetry collections, she is the author of a children’s book, The Moon Comes H
ome, and a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore.

  For more information visit www.aaknopf.com/poetry

  Also by Mary Jo Salter

  POEMS

  A Phone Call to the Future (2008)

  Open Shutters (2003)

  A Kiss in Space (1999)

  Sunday Skaters (1994)

  Unfinished Painting (1989)

  Henry Purcell in Japan (1985)

  FOR CHILDREN

  The Moon Comes Home (1989)