A gray plate of steaming musselsand a draught saucerof butter with floating slivers of garlic—Van Gogh coughs an affirmationat his brother who putshis brown cigarette on the edge of the table—he walks downthe long street. He enteredthe rain, leaving the green awning.Each passing second they aresomewhat more distant. They’reboth infected with syphilis.Theo is visiting his new girlfriend. She isnot suffering with his infection.He gives her a dripping wetbouquet of stolen calamus.In fact, Theo thinksshe is still a virgin. She isn’t.In less than a decade they all aredead and buried. The two brothersbelieve in the superstitionof posterity. Her syphilis actuallywas congenital. As of last Aprilall of them were entirely virginal.They do remain my best and onlyimaginary friends. I likea feint of mustard with my mussels.I like the rain.
Romance
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- September 19, 2020
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Excerpted from Robert Schumann Is Mad Again: Poems by Norman Dubie.
Published by Copper Canyon Press, 2019.
Copyright © 2019 by Norman Dubie.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Laura Johnson
Norman Dubie is the author of thirty books of poetry, most recently Robert Schumann Is Mad Again. His previous volume, The Quotations of Bone, won the 2016 Griffin International Poetry Prize. His other books of poetry include The Volcano, Insomniac Liar of Topo, Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum, and The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems, 1967–2001, all from Copper Canyon Press. His poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Narrative, Blackbird, Lake Effect, Bombay Gin, The Paris Review, and Fiddlehead. He is the recipient of many fellowships from granting institutions including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; he was also awarded the Bess Hokin Prize from the Poetry Foundation. Mr. Dubie received the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry in 2002. He has lived these last forty years in the alkali desert of Arizona. He lives and teaches in Tempe, Arizona.
Port Townsend, Washington
“Dubie’s uncontested mastery of the lyric poem has... broken into strange and revelatory territory.”
—International Griffin Poetry Prize, Judge’s Citation
“The reader new to Mr. Dubie’s work is likely to be struck first by the vigor of his forms and the bravery of his language.”
—The New York Times
“In Dubie’s sphere, anything can happen, and when it does, he brings it to the reader in excruciating and exquisite detail.”
—Library Journal
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