Norman Dubie

The Pit

Each green leaf on the gingko tree
is caked like a tongue
with the flash milks of magnesium.

There are many of these trees.

So the cavity of sky above them,
speaks, when it does,
with a thousand tongues.

Not la-la-la,

but not sad, either.

A heavy sewn ball from the cooling gymnasium
flies past helmeted firemen
who are cleaning the tongues of the gingko,
first of all allegory,
and then of tedium. It was an academic exhaustion
that left filth on the tongue of the gingko. It is
always like this--

for instance, in a moment of early photography,
the nude Parisian woman
tosses a leather ball above her head,
lengths of hair cascading
over the breast with its quarter-moon scar
and three lesser moons
that are its companions.

The photographer under his black cloth
is asking himself
if the street walker's toppling auburn hair
somehow increases the importance of his composition.

She giggles, he thinks, unreasonably,
like a gingko tree--all of its tongues
touching all of its teeth.

The yellow salts of the darkroom baths,
he suspects, have made him mad.

The Ottoman Empire has collapsed.

His widowed mother becomes a refugee to France.
Their September picnics are always situated here,
precariously, under the gingko trees--

ash from furnaces, ashes
from the twin stacks of a nearby iron foundry
color the gingko

the broad violets of a reflected evening light
that rises off the silent river
while their napkins are gathered up
with red lengths of river water
into the straw basket of a dead grandmother.

These conflagrations of skyline
announce the night
like a pit beside a river
from which Professor Tropielle excavated
a stone weapon and the hairless newborn mammoth

from the very last of the great mass extinctions.

---

Norman Dubie's new collection of lyrics, Ordinary Mornings at a Coliseum, will be published by Copper Canyon Press, along with the paperback of his collected poems, The Mercy Seat, in September of this year. His 400-page futurist poem, The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake, is to be found online at Blackbird (The New Virginia Review). contents | next