Visiting Hours at the Color Line

Poems

Ed Pavlic

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781571319012
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The acclaimed poet finds many-hued complexity within America's divided black-and-white society in this 2012 National Poetry Series–winning collection. American attitudes and perceptions—of tragedies, major events, each other—are often segregated into two camps by a politicized, racially divided "Color Line." But in this award-winning poetry collection, Ed Pavlic explores the nonlinear aspects of our cultural divide. Where, he asks, is the Color Line in the mind, in the body, between bodies, between human beings? In daring prose poems and powerful free verse, Pavlic tracks American characters through situations both mundane and momentous. He exposes the many textures of this social, historical world as it seeps into the private dimensions of our lives. The resulting poems are intense, intimate, and psychologically probing, making Visiting Hours at the Color Line a poetic tour de force.

Verbatim III

West Bengal. India. Have an ear-taste. Kolkata. What a word lens to objects? This is not a typo. I mean hold a word’s lens to things. Front seat of the cab. Let the meter run. Turn your face into the wind coming thru the window of the car. Take a deep visible breath. Count the inhaled parts. Ok, start over. Wreathed in flowers. Ganesh rides on the dash. He’s not saying. Up ahead is a flatbed truck. You’re certain there are physical pieces of it in your mouth. Upon acceleration, a slight grade, whole tires come out of the exhaust. Your lips taste like the green flaking off the rear bumper. The camera flails along, always too late, capturing things just after they become what they’re not. The endless pattern. Revolutions. An abandoned pair of thongs on the sidewalk, all movement in orbit about the empty space above them.

Was that bumper you said? And what are they used for in Kolkata? More for tasting than for bumping. And driving? More for the exercise in polyrhythm than for traveling. The driver’s thumbs Morse an endless code on the car’s horn. Left thumb holds down the key. The driver swerves right into oncoming traffic made mostly of bus grills, passes one car, merges back into an eighteen-inch space. Right thumb takes over the code. Someone’s thumb answers. Several answer it, several more them, etc. It’s an ocean. The horns are fluid, audible everywhere in the city. Your cab now occupies exactly an itself’s-worth of space thru which, a horn-thumb’s second ago, you couldn’t have passed your arm. The accordion that, well, accords the behavior of this space is invisible. It’s an inaudible double, a moving mirror to the sound of horns, the fundamental reality in Kolkata : motion inside motion and the motion inside that and so on until the horns orbit the all-horn point, a limitlessly small core of sound. And the mirror of that sound. A sound point containing all the horns you hear, all the horns that have ever blown, will blow. A point small enough that what orbits it moves not at all. A mirror of sound silent enough that you hear nothing else.

Motion. A scooter passes with an impeccably lime sari’d woman seated sidesaddle, the pillion made of either a burnt-orange rag or the glow from the blinkers. You taste the oil stain in the towel’s fringe and the blend of lime and orange moves like sunshine in an ice cube. The brushed steel bends your eye along a handlebar to the grip. The scooter pilot gecko-necks his wrist, his arm a capital P on its back, and the woman’s hair tied back into an elegant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Verbatim
• Verbatim II
• Verbatim III
• Verbatim IV
• Verbatim V : You Two Talk or In Flew Itity : Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author