Dan Beachy-Quick & Matthew Gregory
October 2011
DB-Q
A Star Knot
the very veery it veers it varies in flight
and in song there is no law I can discover
the world escapes the word but not the tune:
a day veers a day veers veers veers
MG
Slides from Tolstoy
I. Under Oaks
When she tore off a leaf to give to him he held it up like a note from her. They laughed, and he let her go lightly ahead under the oak's green print. They walked, for interminable passages in the Summer Garden that June.
In her silhouettes he saw her elbows fly out before her, her bonnet loose over her live hair, in her silhouettes he saw her plural all around. Count Levin looked at the leaf in his hand—forgive me, but I am happy.
Kitty stopped and posed by one trunk that'd surged up the centuries. She was tiny under its cambers. Well, what do you think? ‘The Tsarina' by Makovsky? Levin nodded but was a muzhik when it came to art. He stood back and saw only his Kitty by the high tree, pressing in his palm its warm, strange leaf, a fold from the realm.
DB-Q
“admire me I am a violet!”
This ravished bride, genius— she holds out her purple hands and she will not say how they were stained—
Father? Pack all your secrets in the berry and still the button will bloom, and still the thin red lines
seem to describe a map that cannot be described in any other way—
these thin lines that sting and do not sing, these lines in the tender arm's
skin—her tender arms, yes— these sundry harms— the air vibrates with such harms some call bees—
where deep down in the clover— never clever— love in the grass lounges his purple-stained feet—
MG
Slides from Tolstoy
II. The Pause
With his bag of snipe he came home through bulrushes gone to gold. His hands were stained with birds he'd taken in Pokrovskoye. Wet peat on his boots, sarafan, visor and his pointer trailing voices with her nose over the morass. He must make it back in time for Agafea's supper, and his servants' night address— but reaching a thicket another wave of birds occurred in triplets, one, then one, then one. He raised his fire. And slowly put it down again at the trees containing them
The Count paused, and sat down quiet to hear their overhead passage like that pianist who stopped his hand over his white parlour grand one evening and simply listened to his own haunted composition ring out the limits of the room.
DB-Q
A Beauty Obliterated Consideration
Mind-governed strife, ask her there in that unoccupied corner where thought desists
exactly where the wound hurts? Or ask the snipe, Is it true? The lyric must be simple to be
understood? Mother? Ask the worm- bitten, worm- ravaged leaf in tatters
What is the sun? That green circle almost glowing on the dusky underwing of
the dusty moth, or is it that circle is the moon?— I don't care about being so
stupid. I don't mean these answers to all be so mean. Like the dumb brute lacking a mouth
I must find other means: shrug shoulders, or use a stick to point straight at my eye.