Topeka, Kansas
BY JOSHUA BENNETT
Appropriate Times for Tasks (259-310)
for Gwendolyn Brooks
The Moon herself has set certain days as auspicious
such as the ones where Gwendolyn’s father,
David, builds a mahogany bookshelf
for his beloved. The day he brings it to her
as a wedding present. And the dark mornings
he pores over tomes his daughter would place in that sacred
frame: Harvard Classics, mostly, Homer & Aeschylus,
Plato, Seneca. Ancient names embossed in gold,
shimmering against worn hardback covers,
each as green as the grass on a grave.
The groves in her eyes, they are growing
now, beyond the bounds of the apartment,
outward and up into space. Out of the bloom,
a friend of a friend, Chrysanthemum, says,
omitting blueness, altering the phrase’s circuitry,
for reasons I can understand even at a distance.
As a teenager, Brooks translates the Aeneid,
whole passages from the original Latin,
eventually crafting her own parodic verse,
timeless in its effervescent rage:
Forgive me this small speech, wherein I rave
That thou didst ever live to harass me.
Oh, not that I do not appreciate
The mild, concordant beauty of your lines—
But I am puzzled by them; I translate,
And every word seems but a set of signs.
Out of the blue, we say sometimes
because we imagine the truth
careening through the atmosphere
like a winged beast, to interrupt
our boredom, or our fear. Or is it
because we were borne from the sea,
and call back to that origin even
still, the Unconscious orchestrating
our idioms as we sleep, pointing home.
She titles the poem
“To Publius Vergilius Maro,”
direct as the arrow
in an assassin’s dream: a missive
to the long-buried bard
who speaks with her now, only
through language we call dead as a matter
of specificity, though she summons
his audible sense of things in the act
of composition. Unearthing a voice that is both
hers & altogether new, fugitive,
like the name of the Almighty.
In those days, Gwendolyn turns toward endlessness
to call in a manner not of speaking
per se, but of perceiving the distance
between the words one etches onto the air
& the whirlwind, compelling that stillness within us to move.
