Maryann Corbett
An Aisle of Japanese Tree Lilacs
North lawn, State Office Building, Saint Paul
We amble from the train
or from our cars, far off, resigned to lesser lots.
The great, with the bespoke, ramp-covered parking spots,
who enter from low-ceilinged, dank concrete
miss this last sweet: white-petalled, fragrant rain.
Floret and bract and spray
above the formal walk's procession to the entryway
toss celebration like a ticker-tape parade
hailing all comers—
the stony-faced in pinstripes, staid,
equally with the fashion-backward slummers,
the rumpled and the sleek,
clandestine poet, closet rocker, gambler on a winning streak,
the garrulous, the oddly blessèd meek.
Arched by a triumph cheered in flowering trees,
like generals in old Rome,
we're conquerors by a bald truth: here we come
out of our war-zone mornings and our muddled histories
into these ordered, honorific spaces.
We swipe our keycards, breathe once, step inside,
and set our working faces,
labeled and sorted, filed and classified.
Responsorial Psalm for the Beneficiary of My Mother's Will
℣ O Lord, You are my inheritance
℟ unearthed from murky records,
set down at tables where too little was said
by kinfolk who hedged their memories
℣ Yea, I have in you a goodly heritage
℟ in a will laid out like an Edwardian banquet,
its places set by gloved hands,
precision ready to shatter
℣ in you who are my portion and cup,
℟ my place at a feast set by death,
a dinner announced by unnerving letters from courts
full of strange demands, like the dreams of prophets
℣ my cup of blessing.
℟ delivered in the fullness of time
by UPS, in a corrugated carton
whose breached sides leak bubble wrap
and unpacked at last: gold-rimmed, daintily painted,
bone-white shimmer of longing
for an ease there was never enough of
℣ O Lord, You uphold my lot
℟ which I hoard now at the back of a cupboard
accreting a fuzz of dust and kitchen grease,
a richness, O Lord,
too breakable for the living.
Back Story
There is a category of Northern European art in which a panoramic view, often a landscape, is the principal subject, while a classical or biblical scene appears as a distant detail.
The foregrounds are ablaze with the mundane—
a Renaissance reality, but real,
though magicked with the North's painterly light.
Take Breughel's. (Auden did, although we question,
these days, if it was Breughel.) Or one might
ponder Teniers. Up front: the world and the flesh.
So solid you think of stepping into the canvas
to the plowed ground, or hefting the armor's weight.
Yet in the distance, a few brushstrokes of fable—
the boy with wings, the prisoner freed by the angel,
mere specks you have to hunt for, with attention—
yank the scene by its ears and flip it over,
as if to ask, What strange spell are you under
that you go dazzled by life's pure distraction
and daylight's daze? Do not fall prey to the demon
who soothes you with the steadiness of fact.
Look here. The whole scene's leavened with this lightness.
Step back and stare at the mist beyond this frame,
these layers of ground earth and mineral spirit.
It's there, if you look past mere vision's weakness.
The question, always haunted by its answer:
What if the world you learned in flame and darkness
can only be apprehended through these fancies?
What if the whole of it is heavenly?
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| AUTHOR BIO |
| Maryann Corbett spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes at the Minnesota Legislature. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely in journals like 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Ecotone, Rattle, River Styx, Southwest Review, and Subtropics and in anthologies like Imago Dei and Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters. Her third book, Mid Evil, won the 2014 Richard Wilbur Award; she
is also a past winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and a past
finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. New work appears
or is forthcoming in Able Muse, Crab Orchard Review, Tampa Review, and others. A fourth book, Street View, was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Prize and is forthcoming from Able Muse Press.
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| POETRY CONTRIBUTORS |
 Jane Blanchard
Lesley Clinton
Maryann Corbett
Barbara Lydecker Crane
Barbara Crooker
Midge Goldberg (Featured Poet)
Grace Marie Grafton
Jaimee Hills
Kathryn Hinds
Kathryn Jacobs
Jean L. Kreiling
Charlotte Mandel
Jennifer Davis Michael
Angela Alaimo O'Donnell
Leslie Schultz
Elizabeth Spencer Spragins
Marilyn Taylor
Cara Valle
Doris Watts
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The most recent addition to The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline is Etel Adnan by Joyce Wilson.
Save the date: A Celebration of the Timeline reaching 75 essays. Lincoln Center, Fordham University (Sponsored by Fordham's Curran Center) Friday, October 20th, 7 p.m.
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