Peter Balakian: Some Flowers

Click the link to hear Peter Balakian's Some Flowers read by Lola Koundakjian.


Poppies

I.
Bright orange in the morning
cupping the fragrant air
of the upstate summer.

All my aunt remembered of Armenia.

In the hot sun,
I look them dead center --
papery petals streaked black
around the anther sacs;

pollen gets into my nose,
I should brush it from my face,

but when I look in
the flower's dark pit
the base of the pistil's missing.

II.
When the buttery
light of the moon
falls on them

I see into their eyes.

Men and women who bore my name
have gone from face to bone

with the quickness that night
has made my poppies
into nothing.

III.
Not only for Armenia
do these poppies give up their petals.

My eyes grow tight as a calyx.

IV.
Off long stems
black eyes sway
in the morning wind.

The anther sacs are busted --
filaments rise past my window
into nothing.


This poem has appeared in the volume "Reply from Wilderness Island", Sheep Meadow Press, 1988, and is used here by kind permission.

Peter Balakian: To Arshile Gorky

Click here to hear the clip To Arshile Gorky read by Lola Koundakjian.

1. Landscape

The sun hangs all day in sight.
Highsummer is on me. I watch
the fantailed leaves of the chestnut
spread in the air. Hemlock and rose
bring back the purple earth.
Before my eyes this very noon
three cardinals rising from fuschia
became a plume thinning in the air.

In my boyhood garden
my father's vines were weighty
with the honey-scent of hanging things -
eggplant, color of the blood-in-vein.
The sun falling through our giant oak
lit the grass, moss, ivy;
in silver light they eddied as a tide
and all the fence dissolved around his hands.


2. Anatomy

In the shade where suckle falls
like gentle water over our side fence,
the eyes see eggs. Rabbits nest
in the wild carrot. When I walk out
to the empty summer garden my father
used to tend, my tendons are drawn
out like zither strings. A raccoon hides
in the tissues of the stomach.

The blood that drives my thighs
a thousand times by night rises
in each milky spike of weed
and by morning spills into the lavender
you call the day.

Here, your heart's an apricot
lost on a tree; columbine, a flock
of doves, rises in my mouth.


3. History

Cousin, uncle, brother, fellow
townsman, I come to you this day
deported with berry soil on my hands.
Somewhere between your lake in Armenia
and this place there is a trail
of ash -- almost chalk -- to bring
the limbs back to fullness.
Your mother's stomach is a dried fig

on your palette. Though swallows
glide and turn through the rope
still hanging in your barn,
in this ghostly light you are a shadow:
off-white, then gray, then a wisp
of flame rising in the dust.


This poem has appeared in the volume "Reply from Wilderness Island", Sheep Meadow Press, 1988, and is used here by kind permission.

Peter Balakian

Peter Balakian is the author of five books of poems, most recently June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000 (Harper Collins, 2001). His other books include Father Fisheye (1979), Sad Days of Light (1983), Reply From Wilderness Island (1988), Dyer's Thistle (1996), and several fine limited editions. His work has appeared widely in American magazines and journals such as The Nation, Antaeus, Partisan Review, Poetry, and The Kenyon Review; and in numerous anthologies.

Selected Publications: The Burning Tigris; The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (HarperCollins, 2003), June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974-2000 (HarperCollins, 2001), Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir (Basic Books, 1997), Dyer's Thistle (poems, Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 1996), Bloody News From My Friend by Siamanto (translation, Wayne State Univ. Press, 1996), Theodore Roethke's Far Fields (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989), Reply From Wilderness Island (poems, 1988), Sad Days of Light (poems, 1983), Father Fisheye (poems, 1979); chapter in America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004); editor, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Wayne State Univ. Press, 2003); poetry and essays in The Nation, Art in America, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, etc.

Distinctions: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship 2004-05; Guggenheim fellowship 1999-2000; PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Memoir, 1998; New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize, 1998; Anahit Literary Prize, Columbia University, 1990; Daniel Varoujan Prize, New England Poetry Club 1987; Academy of American Poets Prize 1975; New York Times and Publishers Weekly notable books of 2003 (The Burning Tigris); New York Times and Los Angeles Times notable books of 1997 (Black Dog of Fate); NEA editing grants, Graham House Review

Peter Balakian teaches at Colgate University and serves on the editorial board of Ararat Quarterly.