Mary Jo Bang

Professor Bang is the author of six books of poems. Her first book, Apology for Want (University Press of New England, 1997), was awarded the 1996 Bakeless Prize and the 1998 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Her second book, Louise in Love (Grove Press, 2001), won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress. The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans (University Press of Georgia, 2001) was chosen by Mark Strand for the University of Georgia's Contemporary Poetry Series. The Eye Like a Strange Balloon was published by Grove Press in 2004. Elegy, published in October 2007 by Graywolf Press, received both the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book is The Bride of E (Graywolf, 2009). Individual poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, Best American Poetry (2001,2004, & 2007) and elsewhere. She was the poetry co-editor at Boston Review from 1995 to 2005. She has received a "Discovery"/The Nation award, a Pushcart Prize, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. She has a B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from Northwestern University, a B.A. in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University. She is currently at work on a translation of the Inferno.

Night and Nail

That small feathered fiend, the needle that goes through you.
The beak threading through pity, the thread threading pity
to the porcelain cheek, a line where it lay on the bedsheet
all morning. Love forlorn and belled, a cat clattering
as far as China, and as near as here. The dim reaches
of a watchdog's yawn, enter there if you dare.
A foot trips at the incisor's edge. O going
down a tunnel. Any dream merchant worth her salt will tell you
to follow each bead until you come to
and there a spooned portion:

a portion not really bitter but bland,
baited with a bit of sel gris. She wasn't having any,
if you know what I mean. No mused rhyme could buy back
what had been bought or sold, bagged or borrowed. Sentiment
no bigger than a bauble. Disillusionment in the back of a cab.
Music from somewhere, an all-night Bird song - sweet, sweet
The murmurous flaunt of heavenly high notes. Perplexing breezes
bleeding through the casement. The fled anthem fading. O baby O!
Coming back to the thread now wrapping the wrist.
Passion to snare a hope.

From a single nail on the blank wall hung many of several
images - Bird, notes, Heaven, tender
tomorrow's green-leached leaves, specter-thin. The Moon embalmed
in Egypt, gloating above the sphinx. The thread was a path-
as-well, down which one could travel, hand to a handle
descending into ceaseful Death. But one would take nothing with.
No book in which the dotted sand glowed relentlessly
behind the inky type. No sorry folded note that said.
No consoling tinnitus against the empty sound. No perfume
of great magnitude and marble. Does she wake? Or will we weep?

From Mary Jo Bang, Louise In Love, (Grove/Atlantic Press, 2001).
This poem first appeared in Yale Review.