This book, My Alexandria, does not have a title poem, per se,
but I want to read you the poem in which
the title phrase arises.
It's a love poem to the city of Boston
and, by extension, I think, to cities in general.
It refers to several different artists.
One of them is the American impressionist painter,
Maurice Prendergast, who did extraordinary monotypes
of the Public Garden in Boston.
And these pictures look at first like drips and drabs of paint.
And as you look at them, they resolve into images of people
enjoying themselves in the park on summer afternoons.
Very beautiful.
The poem also refers to the great Greek poet,
Constantine Cavafy, the patron saint of memory and longing.
Cavafy's city was Alexandria, in northern Asia,
and he saw that city as a kind of a vast repository of memory
and desire.
He was an extraordinary character.
E. M. Forster once described him as "a short Greek man in a straw
hat standing at a slight angle to the rest of the universe."
He didn't care if his mother knew he was gay,
but he didn't want her to know he was a poet.
[LAUGHTER]
It's really quite remarkable.
And there's a quotation from one of his poems in Edmund Keeley
and Philip Sherrard's translation in this poem.
And finally, Rodgers and Hart get in here a little bit, too.
Poem's called "Chanteuse."
"Prendergast painted the Public Garden.
Remembered, even at a little distance,
the city takes on his ravishing tones.
Jots of color resolve, massed parasols
above a glimmering pond, the transit
of almost translucent swans.
Brilliant bits.
Jewels?
Slices of sugared fruit?
Bloom into a clutch of skirts on the bridge
above the summer boaters.
His city's essence, all the hues of chintzes or makeup
or Italian ices, all the sheen artifice is capable of,
our city's lavish paint box.
Name the colors.
Light turning to rose, a suspended glow, late afternoons
in the air above the avenues.
As if the houses themselves were remembering,
their brick-tinted memory a warm haze above the taxis
and the homebound cars.
Almost the color of the glow, evenings, at the end of April,
when one lamppost positioned exactly right on Marlborough
Street would shine to the unfurled petals
of a blossoming magnolia, marbling
a corner mailbox, an iron gate, a tract of sidewalk.
Light, stained by the skin of flowers, the shadows of bloom.
I loved that city.
The two of us, traversing that light.
Name the colors, the frothing pink evidence of tulips beheaded
in the garden, patinated rainstreaked green
of Dover Station's backstreet pagoda rusting
over the moon windows of the Premier Diner,
the surplus clothing store of Harry the Greek--
the Geek, everyone called him-- his windows painted over
with the prices of socks and trousers.
What was our city but wonderful detail?
A scaffolding's wrought iron tiara, the evening's violent
smolder over the avenue's noise and happy taxis.
Lit windows, possible futures with their parchment glow,
intimate interiors.
And then the brilliant red snow of firecracker wrappings,
Chinese New Year's scatter of bright applause, hammered
copper carp rising in a tank.
Bean cakes in the baker's window glazed in sugar water.
A tangle of crated squid.
Flares, sparks shaking the avenue awake,
the tumbling, fiery bolts of blazing silk.
Name the color, the one you've been saving.
Memories, glimmering, spotlight and sequin.
Once, upstairs, in a nearly empty room
over a crowded bar, a beautiful Black drag queen
perched on the edge of the piano.
Under a blue spot, her legs crossed in front of her
so that the straps of her sparkling ankle shoes
glimmered, sang only to us.
The song was Rodgers and Hart.
'My romance doesn't have to have a moon in the sky,' and she was
perfect.
The piano's slow unfolding, her smoke-burnished, entirely
believable voice, the sequins on her silver bolero
shimmering ice blue.
Cavafy ends a poem of regret and desire--
he had no other theme than memory's erotics, his ashen
atmosphere--
by going out onto a balcony.
'To change my thoughts at least, by seeing something of this city
I love, a little movement in the streets, the shops.'
That was all it took to console him,
some token of Alexandria's anarchic life.
How did it go on without him, the city
he'd transformed into feeling?
Hadn't he made it entirely into himself?
High windy blue, I wrote, in one of those old notebooks one
never really reads again, burning over the balconies.
Whose city was it?
Prendergast's?
Cavafy's?
Ours?
The rapt singer who caught us in the glory of her artifice?
One Christmas, when the day broke every record for warmth,
we pried open our long-shut windows above Beacon Street,
and the wind pouring into that high-ceilinged room
swept every flake of paper snow from the tree.
We were awash in a studio-sized blizzard.
Snow on your sleeves and hair, and anything
that divided us then was bridged by the sudden graceful shock
of being inside the warmest storm.
That is how I would describe her voice, her lyric, that
becomes, now, my city.
Torch, invitation, accomplishment.
'My romance doesn't need a blue lagoon standing by.'
As she invented herself, memory revises and restores her,
and the moment she sang.
I think we were perfected when we became her audience,
and maybe from that moment on, it
didn't matter so much exactly what would become of us.
I would say, she was memory.
And we were restored by the radiance
of her illusion, her consummate attention to detail.
Name the colors, her song, my Alexandria, my romance,
my magnolia, distilling lamp light,
my backlit glory of the wig shops, my haze and glow,
my torch, my skyrocket, my city, my false,
my splendid chanteuse."
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.