April 16, 2022

Arlene Ang

OF GEESE

and dear-john notes: the color is always
the same—off-white, with grime somewhere

between the left wing and Toronto. Rain
washed away wet paint from the park bench.

Up to the end, she blamed the weather.
The classical CDs left in her music box are

pirated copies, some titles smudged with
liquor. I taught her how to drink hard and fast;

we both had the same dance instructor
in school: a Brazilian named Dante

who dated us separately before the 9/11
disaster. There comes a time in everyone’s

life when solitude gapes from the molds
of cheeses in the fridge, sometimes

the shoelace that comes undone in the midst
of a rush-hour crowd. In theaters, Swan Lake

continues to draw lonely people: the costumes
are elaborate, the women entrancing, the water

and fog deliberately fake. She confessed
watching the prince die seventeen-and-a-half

times with another man while I slept in the nude.
The lights were switched off, and I thought

I knew every part of the house by then
without stepping on a loose floorboard.

from Rattle #24, Winter 2005

__________

Arlene Ang: “I haven’t yet gotten over my love affair with the word ‘bucket.’ This is the reason I write poetry about birds and wet paint signs.” (web)

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May 5, 2016

Arlene Ang

ROS AND GUILD, 1994

Hyacinthus opens sky for ICU bedders
with the sky bloodied a blue so blue.

We pledge in Latin our mutated love:
‘carinii pneumonia …
Kaposi’s sarcoma …
Mycobacterium avium …”

My arm vines your nape for a kiss;
you scratch a furtive glance at the IV pole.

We make love holding hands instead—
Latin is now our embrace.

And love—this bright, corpuscular love—
is the endless despair of never coming back.

—from Rattle #11, Summer 1999

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March 4, 2011

Arlene Ang

A DRIVING STUDENT ADJUSTS THE SEAT

When she enters
she has to adjust the seat to her size.
She thinks this is how it feels
to drive a stolen car.
She leans against the wheel to change
the recline angle and smells
what she’s learned to call
the starvation of damp-palmed girls.
The wipers go off. Like chemistry class,
that boy in the skeleton closet
rubbing vapor from his glasses.
For a whole year, he made room for her
in his homework, his tree house.
She is different now.
She is taller. She uses a sharper blade
to shave between the legs.
When her elbows push
against her breasts, she knows
she’s come too near.
She slides back. And forth.
Then back again. Her movements
are arrhythmic, spurred, ose.
The driving instructor predicts a good day
for doing curves. His hands
around the stress ball open. Close.

from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

__________

Arlene Ang: “I’m particularly fond of my small town just outside Venice, Italy. It’s not really mine in the same way as the left side of the bed is mine or a leg of lamb can be mine, but it’s near enough. When asked, I tell everyone I’m a housewife because it beats having to explain why I write when I should be mopping coffee spills instead. The fact that I’m a driving student on a faux suicide mission keeps the inspiration alive.”

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August 5, 2010

Review by Lynn LevinSeeing Birds in Church... by Arlene Ang

SEEING BIRDS IN CHURCH IS A KIND OF ADIEU
by Arlene Ang

Cinnamon Press
Meirion House, Glan yr afon, Tanygrisiau,
Blaenau Ffestiniog
Gwynedd, LL41 3SU
Wales
UK
ISBN 978-1-907090-06-6
2010, 80 pp., L7.99 UK, L8.99 outside UK
www.cinnamonpress.com

The poems in Arlene Ang’s new collection Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu bid farewell to mothers, fathers, spouses, children, comrades in arms, and others. My own parents are elderly, and I know that I will endure some of the losses that Ang describes in this new collection. I will return to her lyrics at that sad time because of the tenderness they offer, but I savor the poems now for their beauty. These poems of death and remembrance speak intimately of family ties. While a few poems might hint of regret, most reflect on relationships that are solid, tender, and loyal. Though unsentimental, the poems are steeped in love.

In her 2008 collection Bundles of Letters Including A, V, and Epsilon, a collaborative work with poet Valerie Fox, Ang was playful, experimental, and avant-garde. Her 2005 collection The Desecration of Doves delighted with stylish, and sometimes sexy, lyrics. In Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu, her fifth collection, Ang returns to the lyrical and richly descriptive style of The Desecration of Doves.

Arlene Ang’s metaphors startle and amaze. A house in August wears “heat like hosiery” (“The Day She Was Called to Identify the Body”). Parents contemplating their adult son’s death, stand outside his bedroom door “like phantom limbs” (“As we think”). In a house of mourning, time passes to no effect: “Like a mother, the clock wipes its face over and over/with its hands” (“A Sun That Isn’t a Source of Heat…”). Ang, who lives near Venice, sometimes brings glimpses of Italy into her poems. In “Col San Martino,” a wife drives to visit the remains of the car wreck that claimed her husband, and the landscape speaks: “From this hillside, the vineyards/sprawl like cemeteries, grape stalks crucified on white pales.”

In the title poem, “Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu,” the poet unfolds a painterly tableau in which a sparrow, a pigeon, and a blackbird alight upon a pew, a statue of Christ, and a bronze of a station of the Cross. The poem opens with these lines:

The silence never lasts long.
Wings in the air stroke and turn it upside-down.
Ears were made to capture chaos,
you said. A tree sparrow raps
its beak on the pew as if to remind the wood
that it was once a tree.

The birds seem to symbolize the spirit of a person – a father perhaps? – who had wanted a room overlooking the church.

Ang often memorializes the dead by describing the spaces in which they lived or the rooms in which they are dying. She shows us a sickroom with its crumpled sheets and pills, a studio, a kitchen. In “Leopold’s Room,” a mother seeks to hold on to the memory of her son who died of cancer by having his bedroom videotaped.

The curtains – craggy with nicotine – billow,
smudging a view of the lake.
The tape jams. You don’t slap
the video camera awake, but watch
the wind shut the door on Leopold’s secrets:
the x-rays, the synthetic wigs,
the unworn sweaters
with moth holes mouthing sarcomata.

Amid the tender moments, Ang faithfully observes the things that are not so neat and beautiful. Various poems speak of incontinence or food spoiling in the dying person’s fridge. And yet, one of the things that impress me about these poems is how kind the people in them are to each other, the sensitivity they show, and the dignity they accord those who are suffering the humiliations of illness. In “Surviving Grandfather,” a poem written from a child’s point-of-view, Ang writes:

In the end, his fingers cast spidery
shadows on the wallpaper, white sheets
became stained: this was coffee,
everyone said, and we shouldn’t stare.

The children are then sent outdoors to play, and there they encounter still other clues of the grandfather’s illness.

Ang includes a number of sonnenizios on lines from the poets Ros Barber, Merryn Williams, and Jean Cassou. Invented by the Kim Addonizio, the sonnenizio is a fourteen-line poem that springboards off a line from someone else’s sonnet and which incorporates a word from that first borrowed line in each of the successive thirteen lines. The poem ends with a couplet. I was delighted to discover the sonnenizio, and I see that it is catching on with other poets.

The poems in Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu throw their net over a world that is receding, fading, and therefore all the more dear. The poet says to us: “You are facing a loved one’s death, you are visiting his possessions and keepsakes. I’ve been there, too, and this is how it was for me.” These are poems that console. They are clear-minded, unsentimental, stoic even, and yet they radiate love.

____________

Lynn Levin’s newest poetry collection is Fair Creatures of an Hour (Loonfeather Press, 2009).

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December 6, 2009

Arlene Ang

TONSILLITIS

Like a man’s remains in the belly
of a whale, the throat cultures its own pain.

A cruelty—a secret love—that drinks
crushed glass from a glass. In dreams,

the body runs, twisting its ankles
in different places until the feet break off

and swell into barrel cacti from the sand.
A heartbeat cuts the torso apart,

fever that draws a birdbath from the groin.
To possess a head is to wear it inside-out

after the hair finishes licking the pillowcase.
On one wall, there’s a charcoal sketch

of Death digging up his mother.
On another, a mirror holds the moon

captive inside the room—deformed

and unborn—like a diaphanized turtle in a jar.

from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

___________

Arlene Ang: “There’s little difference between being ill in bed and being drunk on the floor. You get to stare at the ceiling a lot. I was sick when I wrote this poem. I didn’t want to see anyone or eat anything. When I got tired of wishing myself dead, writing became the best alternative. It still is.”

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