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Judith Fitzgerald
Coda
Here, cowering on the cusp of obliteration,
these shards, these shreds, those rags of grace
sloughed in the balance, that Mona Lisa landscape
where Dali scrapes a corner of the sky
and Hopper hangs a garish string of Romeo lights
and you shrink and huddle and dream Cézanne?
Then turn, turn here,
where the mass
will always haunt you. Consider that haven so fragile its squalls wrap their strands
of filigreed death encircling postcard sailboats tethered
to bones of light. There, heaved and scattered artefacts
roil upon a sea of catastrophe glittering with greed.
Solitude by the numbers bound by the driven score
palpable and blunt and breathe goddamn it breathe
(and you know the limits of these lines erupting
in that ruinous avalanche of crimson departure).
And, yes, it reveals a meticulous edge achingly familar
with the brutal carnage pooling in the inexpressibly blue contours
of arteries or tributaries leading to your own personal Iphigenia,
ravished in such white fate: The temple of attrition;
the arresting smear of blood spilled for nothing special.
Those memories, the sky a subtle prison, a vague promise
recalling a spectral figure wholly absorbed in the stunning
exactitude of silence when grief yields to the siren of horror.
Now, late in the day, hesitating in that wild longing,
the one you know intimately, its altar indelible passage,
its attenuated austerity shrieking through your veins —
paralysed and anaesthetic, desensitised and consumed —
with the debris of a life grimly random. Parvum parva decent,
plunging headlong into a future fraught with standstill,
cut deep — good girl — now.
Glory, glory.
That's the story.And you?
You're banished from it.
© 2008-2009 Judith Fitzgerald. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
"Coda" appears in the first of four books comprising the Adagios Quartet.
From reviews to be found on http://www.judithfitzgerald.ca/biography.html
Adagios Quartet is the first successful epic penned by a woman in the history of the English-language literary tradition.
The Adagios Quartet includes:
Adagios: Iphigenia’s Song
Judith Fitzgerald
Iphigenia was the daughter of Agamemnon and she was offered as a sacrifice to appease Artemis, who had becalmed Agamemnon’s fleet as he was setting out for Troy. Judith Fitzgerald uses this classic myth as a metaphor for her own life, of the abuses she suffered as a child, of the pain that all children must endure. “Pain,” she says, “is the truth at the centre of everything. It’s a story that needs to be told.” She has made this story uniquely her own, and told it with grace and passion.
http://www.oberonpress.ca/titles/?v=2003#adagios_iphigenias_song
Adagios: Orestes’ Lament
Judith Fitzgerald
The second in a four-part epic, this book is a lament, set in the framework of the Homeric story of the Oresteia, for the horrors of the twentieth century. As Judith Fitzgerald puts it, the Adagios, when complete, will articulate, through the voices of the four speakers, the wreckage and ruin of modern civilization. On the strength of Iphigenia’s Song, the first part, Judith Fitzgerald was awarded one of the prestigious Chalmers Arts Fellowships.
http://www.oberonpress.ca/titles/?v=2004#adagios_orestes_lament
Adagios: Electra’s Benison
Judith Fitzgerald
Electra’s Benison is the third part of a four-part epic series. The four sections of the Adagios encompass the several facets of the myth of Agamemnon, treating it as a commentary on contemporary political and personal realities. In the wonderful poem before us, Judith Fitzgerald portrays the grief and the passion of loss—not only the grief of one woman but also the loss to be endured by civilization itself, speaking of a truth as real today as it was for ancient Greece two thousand years ago.
http://www.oberonpress.ca/titles/?v=2006#adagios_electras_benison
Adagios: O, Clytaemnestra!
Judith Fitzgerald
This is the fourth and final part of the four-part epic that Judith Fitzgerald calls Adagios. One of her characters remarks, “explore what’s real and what isn’t. Then, you’ll know what to do.” “What to do,” writes David Staines, “is to read and reread her poetry, where she captures an entire world and its visions.” Thomas Dilworth agrees: “This is poetry of personal and cultural pain and a rich linguistic play that bristles with intelligence.” Finally, Leonard Cohen has this to say about Judith Fitzgerald: “Her work is incredible—entirely original, deeply moving and universally attractive.”
http://www.oberonpress.ca/titles/?v=new#adagios_o_clytaemnestra
* * *
The following new (unpublished) poems are from Points Elsewhere (Oberon, 2010)
QUE BESA SUS PIES, QUE BESA SUS MANOS
To Edward Strickland
The delicate gorgeosity of your vital words,
each shimmering with irresistible possibility,
barely containing the truth catching in one's throat,
such exquisite intensity, the blackness each repudiates,
porous with damage and longing, indelibly sorrow-
streaked in one transparent universe where knives
of knowledge carve wide swaths through history,
luminous among moon's slow-dawning curves, now
arcing to pull you towards the radiance of darkness
serrated, swallowing pain, gasping for air
in those shadowed chambers of the heart yielding
to the contours of thinking skin in the perfect syntax
of stone and aether, grasping the universal finality
language's liquid purity salvages almost anything
but that, solves all conundra but that, that which
you cannot overcome, that cacophony of time wound up,
ground down, astounding in its irrefutable injury;
the circus of our love, its amusement-park attentions
spanning a millennium of, ultimately, swift midnights
(where the hands on the doomsway clock stand still
an instant, stand at attention, stand ready to embrace
whatever remains of a human face gone missing
without a trace). Hear that? It is cold; it is lethal;
and, it is threatening to break into itself in the name
of answers materialising on the horizon when the sun
rises to reveal dysphoria in all its splendorous glory.
That? Think crux. Think matter. Think father,
son, and wholly ghost-trace host. Think shatter.
© 2008-2009 Judith Fitzgerald. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
POINTS ELSEWHERE
To Virginia, Gwendolyn, and Sylvia
He inclines his head towards midnight's guttering clashes,
acutely intuits his role in this tiny tableau —
her pitched darkness, restively keyed to the art of damage
(or drama, tires screaming, the spectral careening glazing
her panic dread — automatic — smudge of violet swells
marrying vague horizons — her personal hell exposed —
his hand held just so, hers shielding face from lips to lashes).
Oh, God, he loves her. He's sorry. He's a fucking monster.
She reaches out to someone who cannot hear nor help her
because the roar of the ocean swallows voices and cries
with astonishing swiftness, with supreme disinterest
in all-too-familiar reenactments of primeval
brutalities beyond comprehension — Chrysanthemums?
Jesus, recall all those wild Irish roses brambling hair
and skin, their bloodless petals sharply crimson and brilliant
in their absolute faith beauty's future remains secure?
It gathers ice-rough raindrops pooling beneath blankened sky
in its arms, its articulated layers unfolding dusk-deep colour
fastening stem to starblight, first yellow gangrene, now,
indigo-mauve broken. The ocean a ghost mirror in denial roaring
its growling stamina — its inexorably seductive pull embattling
the only way out — out of the question — the only way
back to healing leaving love alone to fend for itself
in the bruised rainbow of bituminous rage-blasted eye.
© 2008-2009 Judith Fitzgerald. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
* * *
Poetry is Judith Fitzgerald's vocation; literary journalism/cultural criticism (including sports, philosophy, and music) is her avocation. A partner in one of the cyberworld's best-loved literary blogs, Books, Inq. — The Epilogue, she lives in Northern Ontario's Almaguin Highlands.
More can be found here:
http://www.judithfitzgerald.ca/criticalprose.html
http://www.judithfitzgerald.ca/biography.html
Other sites of interest:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/....-e.htm?param=68
http://www.brocku.ca/canadianwomenpoets/Fitzgerald.htm
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