In memory of Nanora Sweet, here is one of her poems from the chapbook, Rotogravure.

Allegheny

            for my parents, poet and engineer

 

1

She was weak with death, not with dying.

This death was a somber excitement to us.

The dream, then, was retrograde, was

A previous part of itself. I stay

With the past, with the arrangements of the past,

Their beauty, like any beauty, taking time,

 

That circular road, it swings always a little

Wider, climbs into a new valley, from which

You suddenly see the old. You’ve been

Waiting all that time. It is a beautiful vista,

And the only one you will ever know, both

Far and near. The only stars we know

 

Are old ones, only our knowledge is new,

And perception is an arrangement of

The present: its depth must be enhanced

When sound and our excitement travel in

More slowly even than light – these human lives

Are piled in a kind of mute redundancy.

 

2

There is, I recognize, such a thing as

The aesthetics of science. It governs discovery

And use. It is one of those things unspoken

And played upon, whose governors are

Unconscious. And every human life is severely limited.

It is as though these human lives, overlapping,

 

Are really rather congruent, for the most part.

I suppose they would say “concentric,” none of us

With any sure way of expressing this. We are

Nonetheless together in this infinitely disappearing

Excitement, at one point in the depth

Of space. Ah, but the congruency of

 

Hotcakes, pocket change, spread by some other

Impresario, and swinging always a little wider,

Taking time to be discerned if not painted,

And no doubt felt after the effects

Of some distance. Or was it a previous part

Of the city, its grime and a tangle of bridges?

 

3         

The dream, as then, was retrograde,

The children younger, even the staircase

A backward facing affair. Actually,

Already she was dead, the bleach

Of her affectations was gold. She turned,

And I had been waiting all that time.

 

And she showed me a vista, gold, orange,

The countryside uneven, perhaps, but

Unbroken, deep as the heart’s desire. I

Looked, as certain elements of a town broke

The distance, gently, held still in the haze,

The aesthetic of the land itself. The expanse

 

Increasing, and on the left, a dome,

White capitol of the trees. The unconscious

Governors ruin words, “urban infrastructure”

The intuitive circuitry of civil form,

But now I see her city: its timbers

The large white spaces in a harmless heaven.

 

Nanora Sweet