U-Turn
a cento from the work of Max Jacob
In my head a bee is talking: a trickle of water: so many faces,
so many stations—
& in these scientific cities, crowded
with butchers: a beautiful road, waiting for the house
to be rebuilt again.
It happens, when you exhale,
that the material world wakes up the other one, between
the great, sad sky
& everything full
in the desert of art. Looking back, I see loose ends. The door
is still standing, a
port at dawn, under the sky
that’s everyone’s. And they are less beautiful, the stairs—
less beautiful, going down.
Note: This cento is drawn from Jacob’s Selected, as translated by William Kulik
Inventory
family ‘estate’ sale, Wharton, NJ
[X] brown glass bottles for medicinal elixirs; one glass boot-
flask (Italy-shaped) pre-
Mussolini maybe
“Porgie” Concetta’s, a Sandellini
on my mother’s side;
[X] “there are poisons that blind you, & poisons that open
your sight”— inscribed
inside a seminarian’s bible (my father’s)
misquoting Strindberg;
[X] a Reagan bust with eyes shut, or otherwise just
ambiguous-blank in this miniature casting
I once tried smashing;
[X] full-size Italian flag; full-size Irish flag; American
flags full- mast on cocktail toothpicks
for olives;
[X] $5.50 sells a horse- hair rope-ladder touched by children
who delivered The Bomb
or,
at any rate, helped to;
[X] 22 wine-blue volumes on the falling of the Germans
(price to-be-determined) my grandfather’s
of the bomber division w/ furloughs
in Glasgow (he never ate lamb
or pudding
skins again);
[X] “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”
embossed upon this replica pen Churchill’s pen
gold-tipped,
as though *power were its
secret; *(not power,
but what can be done
with power)
[X] I never make mistakes in black half-faded ink: a novelty
eraser (my great-grandpa Paddy’s
of the Picatinny Arsenal
& drink—of four weeks’ asylum time singing
his father’s Sligo rhyme for the dolmens
left behind);
[X] a cheap print (99 cents) in faraway perspective: a first
ferry trip on the Staten Island
boat of many faces;
[X] pearl-white Parisian beads a Notre-Dame tourist’s rosary
coiled in an ashtray (post-Vichy)
resembling a poppy;
[X] bird-bone necklace (bought in Poughkeepsie at a pigeon-
shoot trinket- booth) displayed for you
un-ironically on an eaten-through, sky- blue
linen;
[X] a crude map, vintage at that, 1900, lower Manhattan:
Ellis Island in a soft- lead circle;
Brian Tierney’s work has appeared in, or is forthcoming in New England Review, Kenyon Review, AGNI, Best New Poets, FIELD, Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, and others. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, and a graduate of the Bennington College Low-Res MFA Writing Seminars, he was named among Narrative Magazine’s “30 Below 30” emerging writers in 2013, and was most recently a finalist for PSA’s George Bogin Memorial Award. He currently lives in Oakland, Ca.