Samuel Washington Allen Prize Honorable Mention, selected by Enzo Silon Surin
Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, forthcoming 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry), and three chapbooks. Her poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, Consequence, Southern Indiana Review, At Length, Plume, and elsewhere. She is a past recipient of the NEPC’s E. E. Cummings award, and her first two chapbooks, Mirror Factory and Dearling, also received honorable mentions for the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. A 2023-2024 Artist in Residence at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Carolyn lives with her family in Worcester. Her website is carolynoliver.net.
Phantasia on Dvořák’s Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 85
I
An ending, a dance: a train glides
up and over a mountain’s crest. Rain slips
over spring, alighting in a frenzy
on surfaces like stone.
{Lullaby. Glissando.}
Deliberate liquid swirls in a glass bottle,
a whirlwind defanged and declawed.
Tugging on one’s gloves is a frantic attempt
to make oneself understood.
{Turn indicator.}
Concerns that remain outstanding:
Someone rushes into the night, forgetting;
horses, trains, descend into valleys;
on blue-ink streets, cobblestones glisten;
stairways, rather grand, do not suffice;
umbrellas, umbrellas, umbrellas.
II
Fingers gallop up a child’s arm.
Two process
down an aisle, toward the interior,
playacting communion
and other weddings.
A rollicking boil calls for seasoning.
Someone lays a matelassé blanket
across a rarely used bed
or blows out the candles
on a table set for empty places.
Against the ebony wall
the vases stand full of amber and honey.
In a cross-sectioned house
the silent (silenced) tenor hides
from the searching contralto
and from the bass trying to keep up
[But we can see him, we in the audience,
we who are on his side, who support his just cause.]
(Try to keep up, you who are slightly old.)
Peppery taste, like watercress lingering
on the edges of the tongue.
Return to solemnity, an insinuation of—
too late.
III
{drinking song}
A dance between two people
is not the same as a dance
for two people or a dance of two people.
[When does misunderstanding take on betrayal’s edge?]
Except in thin places, the river is frozen.
Ice skating is over for the night.
A chair waits in a cellar room
lit only by winter
moonlight tilting through a window
chalky with street grime.
A cabaret, emptied?
A black leather shoe, worn but well
made, is a psalm
requiring a response.
Her sleeve swishes,
drips water on waxed wood.
A predictable phrase
canted at an angle
may satisfy one’s craving
for return: How have you been
living?
{That little trill,} like a cuckoo clock
not quite—definitely not—placed
with care in a garden maze.
[The old centuries will intrude.]
In this room built
for slow motion purposes
white-gloved hands and formal forearms
unsettle dust covers.
Stately ascension memorialized
as {a music box tune.}
IV
EXT. DAY.
A country lane. Unspecific birds laze
from tree to tree, crossing a dirt road.
[Would you, too, feel disconcerted
to realize your perception has been functioning
as a film camera, images appearing
at twenty-four frames per second
without your conscious direction?]
Soon the opening credits will appear
for this film set
in the spring countryside
regarding a dinner party
or a momentous Sunday lunch.
The last clumps of snow balance
on grey smooth branches, list
and with the barest gasp,
drop.
No silences may be permitted.
A dog scampers back and forth
chasing a ball or a stick or a squirrel
[the disappointment of these banal images!
I have only myself to blame]
until—
You come upon a carousel
propelled by fear, you are sure of this, yes
by an undercurrent of fear
even as your attention is called
briefly, elsewhere:
(Go ahead.
Build a nest,
gallants.
Sway.)
{Hedge of sound}: breathless, as if
you can’t prevent this fear
(your secret fear) from coming to pass
unless you can block the noise of its progress
this hissing thing twisted
and set in motion like a wind-up doll.
V
Jolly, easy prancing:
a child tells a story to a mother’s voice.
[All change perceived as intrusion.]
Grandiose and yet necessary
for the world’s proper functioning,
a self-important robin promenades
about the yard, surveying
chickadees, squirrel courtship,
petals drifting down from the west.
Abruptly you are called in to supper.
[Did you think you were a spectator?]
That friend of yours,
the clown who’s always performing,
is just off the six o’clock train.
VI
Tentative tentacle tango:
hermit crab scuttles, approach and retreat.
Timid is the breath.
[Forget the sea.]
Cloth strips flutter in early autumn reeds,
pennants against a cool sky.
[The camera is angled up and to the left.
Once again I am accidentally film-making.]
What could they be marking? Who tied the knots?
An inscrutable woman in a pale blue skirt
looks out over fields
(absently? waiting? satisfied?)
[How can I not know?]
as she pins the last of the laundry to a line.
[I can’t remember the source.
I’m afraid of losing my memory,
like the old woman who held onto the composer’s name
much longer than she held onto mine.]
{Fuzzy edges surround the sound.}
There’s cream for after supper,
and berries.
That will bring him back.
[This terrible desire for narrative.]
She remembers
turning back to the house at day’s end,
her satisfaction with
the view of the house:
green doorway, white clapboards,
afternoon shade from an unfelled oak
blue flax in the field left behind.
VII
Have you prepared yourself?
Throw the best porcelain down the stairs.
Dance your way through empty halls.
Tumble down the stairs yourself.
CUT TO:
A precise cooking montage
with rolling pin and maybe
some cheerful slaughter:
plucked feathers [fathers?], disjointed limbs.
Now send the entire meal down the stairs.
CUT TO:
Candlelight, old-money voices
. . . antique gold, but bronze if
it can’t be helped . . .
Haze dims the ivory lace
at every throat.
Flash back and flash forward.
Refrain:
Dishes sail gaily down the stairs.
VIII
{bells tinkling}
Tilt-a-whirl, a while.
Cheerful repetition.
A little conversation. A child’s patter
claims attention.
A romantic balletic swoop,
and the imitation pond is floating
right out of frame.
On the riverbank, under an easy sun
the hero of the silent film weaves
a daisy chain for his longing.
{again these saccharine bells}
Little dance,
whom do you hope to convince?
IX
{Doorbell. Phone rings.}
A simple swing, a jump rope in the grass.
A film by Merchant and Ivory
about delicacy and withheld
professions of adoration.
[I want to tap out these notes;
they feel inevitable.]
A smell at once crisp and soft, stately,
a glass of quiet wine.
You remember
who granted you forgiveness
when you were young,
how much you loved a certain walk.
[Fragility: the composer is aware of yours.]
Do you hide your nostalgia
from your own children,
almost wiping your face clean?
Perhaps you have lived slightly
content but not self-satisfied;
to your name belongs a series of small,
nearly unremarked accomplishments.
And then {that trill} and the unlooked-for
triumphant
flourish—
an unexpected gift?
No.
That’s not quite it.
A homecoming,
but not yours.
X
A cartoon villain pirouettes up marble stairs,
minces down a silver hall.
A door opens on a celebratory session
of piratical planning.
A toast! Some small argument deferred.
Slightly off camera, people must be running
in the off-kilter framerate of silent film.
Small mouselike plans are afoot in the larder.
Meanwhile
(reads the title card)
good folk go about their marketing,
unaware, truncated.
How much fish
—The river’s low
How much for these leeks
or your fine cabbages
Your new hat suits
Oh the villain is watching, recalling
when she loved too,
and sprinkled flour on the board
beside her comely friend,
the tower of pies rising and rising and rising
like a grand folly.
In the plotting room the villain sighs.
What does victory offer?
Only diminishment of purpose.
But then a stranger approaches at a gallop—
winsome, and quite alone.
XI
Two taking tea
give and take.
The afternoon is overcast.
Too early yet in spring
for posies on the table.
From pleasantries a turn:
Did you hear?
Come in out of the rain,
duck under the eaves.
Rain unravels the finework surface
of the town pond.
Pick up the thread again.
Darn the conversation.
Every pastel macaron tastes the same.
You begin to say something true,
and still the exchange reverts
to its usual grooves, a carriage jolting
over a rude rut.
Brass it out? Brave the open
questions?
In the one-room schoolhouse,
the pupils recite in turns.
A door closes on voices from another room.
XII
[{The cold tapping of fingernail on keys}
makes me hunch inward, how awful
it is to be trapped.]
An speech, solemn and practiced
is delivered from a dais.
A listener follows the tangent in her mind,
weaving in and out of the present moment
and memory, picking up a word,
tossing it back into a spring.
A soldier, motionless.
Pools of navy and greenly bioluminescent water.
There was another way?
The river grew cold in autumn.
She grew surer of her own voice.
Their love was serious, deep.
A train steams over a high bridge.
In the {glissando,} confirmation:
the speech is a toast
to someone else’s triumphant imagining.
Pressed among the others
she recalls stone steps, a declaration.
The dream is back, the dream of the other life.
She rejects the ecstasy of violent gesture.
Water trickles down a hillside.
The camera pans back up to her face.
[You know what you will find in her face.]
XIII
Sunlight cascades over a careful landscape.
This is twilight. Punctuation.
[The {birdsong} is perfectly timed to suggest
the end of the film.]
Simplicity and sincerity
of a fairytale’s painted countryside
where the rain ceases even as it falls
Alone, a weary figure absorbs the vista.
Silence. The exhaustion of the image.