Anne Carson's Glass, Irony and God (New Directions, 1995)

...Sokrates
opens his--

eyes stacked with the motions of roses in that other dawn
and a torn coolness--

reluctantly.


*

Pale dawn was filling up the lap of the room.

from "TV Men: Sokrates"

You dove once

into your privatest presentiment

and stayed, face down in your black overcoat.
To my wonder.
Endlessness runs in you like leaves on the tree of night.
To live here one must forget much.

the end of "TV Men: The Sleeper"

XXIV.

A stranger is poor, voracious and turbulent.

He comes

from nowhere in particular

and pushes prices up.

His method of knowing

is to eat it. 

*

XXX.

A stranger is master of nothing.

Who in a nightmare

can help himself?

*

XXXIII.

Rome collapsed when Alaric ran out the dawn side. 

from "The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide"

Lapping at Isaiah's ears black birdsong no it was anger.

*

The nation stirred in its husk and slept again. 

*

It was a cold winter evening, the cold bit like a wire. 

*

He slept, the asters in the garden unloaded their red thunder into the dark.

from "The Book of Isaiah"

Anne Carson's 'The Glass Essay' (1995)

Some favourite passages from Anne Carson's long poem, 'The Glass Essay,' from Glass, Irony and God (New Directions, 1995):


Spring opens like a blade there. 

*

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?

*

Each morning a vision came to me.
Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul.

I called them Nudes.

*

                               By now I was so cold
it felt like burning.

*

But by now the day is wide open and a strange young April light
is filling the moor with gold milk.
I have reached the middle

where the ground goes down into a depression and fills with swampy water.
It is frozen.
A solid black pane of moor life caught in its own night attitudes.

*

It is a two-way traffic,

the language of the unsaid.

*

The April light is clear as an alarm.

As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object
existing in space on its own shadow.
I wish I could carry this clarity with me

into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce.

*

His face cracks open it could be a grin or rage

and looking past me he issues a stream of vehemence at the air.

*

Sunlight flocks through the room.

*

He used to be a big man, over six feet tall and strong,

but since he came to hospital his body has shrunk to the merest bone house--
except the hands. The hands keep growing.

*

I stared at the back of her head waiting for what she would say.
Her answer would clear this up.

But she just laughed a strange laugh with ropes all over it.

*

Those nights lying alone
are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn.
This is who I am.