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
