Theater of Memory

New and Selected Poems

Mark Perlberg

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807145708
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award
Gifted with a unique and elemental style that goes to the heart of things, often with Zenlike simplicity, Mark Perlberg published four books of poetry over the course of his long and accomplished life. At the time of his death in 2008 he was in the process of putting together Theater of Memory, a collection of his best poems, both published and unpublished, which he saw as the summation of his life's work. His wife, Anna Nessy Perlberg, completed the manuscript and contributed an afterword to the collection.
Moving and unpretentious, the poems range from verses about the poet's childhood, including the early death of his father, to pieces in conversation with Chinese poet T'ao Ch'ien, to poignant poems about his grandson. A slowly deflating helium balloon becomes a meditation on aging and the urgency to teach his grandson "to remember in perilous / times to keep something of himself for himself."

FROM
The Feel of the Sun
(1981)

Baking Out

Peaks Island, Maine

Old fellow, taking your ease by the hour in the sun

at the side of the clapboard house that faced the sea—

“baking out,” you called it, and you sat still in the sun

half a day it seemed, head thrown back, eyes closed, smiling.

“My God, Harry, you’re turning purple.

How can he sit so long in such a sun? Did anybody ever

see the like?” Mother was annoyed.

Such sitzfleisch made her angry.

“Where’s Harry?”

“Where else? Baking out in the everlasting sun.”

And on he sat in the summers turning dark

as the sun blazed its way across the sky.

What did he think about in the high hot sun of noon

and afternoon? I never thought to wonder—arrowing

off on errands of my own. But I wonder now:

Did he dream in the pummeling sun?

Did he listen as I do now (eyes closed, head thrown back)

for the rustle of wind like water foaming

high in the trees across the road,

for the scrape of bayberry in a great green clump near his chair,

to the noise of kids calling, of gulls cackling, heckling, cawing?

Did this random mesh of sounds please him?

—far from the East Side streets he knew as a boy,

far from the pummeling gangs.

“—Irish and Italians they were. They’d clobber you

if you left your territory and crossed into theirs.

(He recounted the threat with zest.)

I was short but could run like sixty.

Did I tell you the time I won a medal in track?

I was a city kid in a camp in the mountains.

I ran the hundred without track shoes. Track shoes?

Who ever heard of track shoes?”

It was the one glory exploit of his youth

I knew about. And the time, in a boys’ club,

he sang in The Mikado.

“On a tree by a willow … ,” accompanying himself

with fluting whistlings.

Did the scent of weed on the beach,

the minty breath of the fields please him,

as he purpled in the sun?

What of the sight of boats puttering, sailing, passing

on the endless lilting sea,

of birds hunting, drifting on rivers of air?

Mostly, it was the feel of the sun, I think,

my stepfather loved,

oiling the skin of the long dead boy,

pouring some kind of honey.

Maybe he stored it up in his chair on the lawn

so it would glow in him all winter,

through the fights, the arguments, the long subway rides,

the gray afternoons in the courthouse in the Bronx.

Old Harry, I hope that baking out

was your time to dream

long waking dreams bright as sails

in the late afternoon of your life,

dreams you let no one enter,

as you sat on your rented lawn

by the sea and the Maine islands

in the light of the man-eating sun.

Early One Morning

Until my walk this morning I had forgotten

that wind can be freighted with the scent of raspberries,

that things like ropes or an old pot on a porch

will creak in wind.

—A gull’s shadow slides across the road,

ripples up the side of a house, and is gone.

There Are Afternoons in Summer

There are afternoons in summer that are so fine

they seem an interval of time’s first day that has never ended

and will never end.

I am sure it is the palpable force of the light,

of light so clear that one sees everything open to air:

the veins on the underside of leaves

the sharp serrations of the fern

the shadow cast by each small stone

the glass edge of the sea that is the horizon’s line

the sun flinging diamond fires from a patch of the bay,

the luminous wing-edge of a gull crossing.

The illusion dies as the day dies

when light lies down level in the weeds

and the sky in the west takes color like a bruise

and the evening walks in cold shadows like the morning.

Water and Light, Light and Water

1

At the lake’s edge in

an inch of water

minnows move above sand ridges

stroked by loops, by nets of light.

2

The late sun hangs over the lake’s rim.

Rings of light, shaken from the water,

climb the cedars.

Along the broken pier the clear light

sings in the thistles.

Bright Day on Lane Island

Small wind noises: puffs, hissings,

watery susurrations.

Tough plants erect in stony meadows:

raspberry, juniper, wildrose, goldenrod.

Old rock, gray-green, lichen-starred.

And pouring light everywhere flooding

this little island, the outer islands,

the great blue lyric sea.

In Praise of Lichen

It lives on m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• FROM The Burning Field (1970)
• FROM The Feel of the Sun (1981)
• FROM The Impossible Toystore (2000)
• FROM Waiting for the Alchemist (2009)
• NEW POEMS
• Afterword