Second Empire

Richie Hofmann

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781938584305
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"The delicate arc of these poems intimates—rather than tells—a love story: celebration, fear of loss, storm, abandonment, an opening forth. Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore, ' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna Warren

This debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary.

Antique Book

The sky was crazed with swallows.
We walked in the frozen grass
of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep.

Trees shook down their gaudy nests.
The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow.
I was jealous of the river,

how the light broke it, of the skein
of windows where we saw ourselves.
Where we walked, the ice cracked

like an antique book, opening
and closing. The leaves
beneath it were the marbled pages.

Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

BRIGHT WALLS

It was not penitence I sought, standing outside

the bedroom in the old apartment

where you had spent the night alone.

To bend, to kneel before some greater force—

that was no longer what I wished.

Clouds blew in from the coast, and I felt

the sun abandoning the window behind me,

making the bright walls suddenly colorless,

obscuring everything, for a moment,

that I wanted. When I finally entered,

I saw you still asleep—a wet strand

of hair tucked behind your ear, the husk

of your body—and lingered there for a minute,

before walking upstairs to shut the windows.

EROTIC ARCHIVE

We sleep in his bed

among his silent books.

Though I never knew him,

I’ve spent my life thinking it’s his ghost

I belong to.

We pass his books

between us. We read inscriptions

meant for him. We record them

dutifully. Remembering

the blue room of an evening,

I look past the window

the light changes through,

past the boats

with their tied-up sails and canvas covers.

The window shows

the sea as unattainable

and distant as art,

our lovers far away.

THE HARBOR

Afterwards everything whitened

like paper or breath—

The room was suddenly anchored to itself,

the chains stopped groaning.

I knew I could not leave with you.

The sea outside was like the sea

on the map. A sea-god was blowing

into a crosshatched arc of sails.

PURPLE

From the Phoenicians, they learned to extract

the color from shells.

When their dogs ate sea snails along the coast,

their dogteeth were dyed purple—that’s how the Phoenicians knew.

To darken it,

the Romans added black, which came from soot, from scorched wood,

which abounded, one imagines, in an empire.

THE SHIPS

from an inscription of Augustus

“All the Germans

of that territory

sought by envoys

my friendship

The far reaches

of what any Roman had ever seen

opened to me

the mouth

of the Rhine the water

swallowing the gold-

colored hulls

What gods

would I find in the forests

in the riverbanks

scattered

with precious stones

I sailed my ships

on the sea dark

and full of meaning

When

our sails first caught

the wind

of the Cimbri it was rough

as their language

I watched

their shirtless oarsmen

maneuvering

the oars

I watched the ships

running their fingers

through the water

of the Roman people”

BRAYING

Now is the time we hear them coming back,

when t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Sea Interlude: Dawn
• I
• Sea Interlude: Passacaglia
• II
• Sea Interlude: Storm
• III
• Sea Interlude: Moonlight
• IV
• Notes
• About the Author