Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry:  Names Above Houses (SIU Press, 2001), Furious Lullaby (SIU Press, 2007), and the forthcoming Requiem for the Orchard (U. of Akron Press, 2010).  He is the co-chair of the advisory board for Kundiman.org and is the recipient of grants from the Artist Trust of Washington and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  He teaches creative writing at Western Washington University.

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 Oliver de la Paz Interview, with Nickole Brown

I had been working on "Aubades," which are love poems that take place at the break of dawn.  I wanted to write their opposite, in a way, so I wrote a sequence of "nocturnes" as companions to the aubades from FURIOUS LULLABY.  They wound up being so tonally different that they ended up in a "save file." 
 

They are indeed part of a larger collection.  Right now, they work as framing poems for what seems to be a dystopian novella in verse and prose poetry.  Well, maybe dystopian is inaccurate . . . the work is more like an allegory on war and art.

Actually, I didn't do any research for any of the scenes.  The scenes are quite fictional.  One thing that I did do is imagine a particular character or point of view upon which to focus.  From there, the scenes became more about character than anything.  They're not quite dramatic monologues because, really no action is occurring in them that's a result of either the action or speech of the characters located in the pieces. 

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The sofa in the parlor is red, and in the foreground

a man rises to put a cord of wood in an iron stove.

 

A veil of music plays like grease, smeared across a window.

The roofs of old homes have been pulled down, leaving only

 

the dark crisis of memory. Vivid and heavy, the man

strolls through the dark brick kitchen with a servant’s candle.

 

His face is tawny in response to the light. The little worried breath

from his nose transfigures his shadow onto the sofa

 

so there are repetitions of his ghost, dancing. An inhuman cathedral

will grow from the pit of ruins. Mice have left

 

excrement in the grain pot and the man plucks them out

with his thumb and forefinger. The angels have come

 

looking for food and now they are becoming men whose boots

resound on the cobbles outside. It is the last year of the war

 

and the soldiers coming to the door do not know this. Nor

does the man, simmering hunks of animal fat in a pot

 

over the stove. From his hands, he lets the grains pour

into the simmering stew pot. Each glitters like mica. The odor

 

is an arrow fired from his window and the soldiers let themselves in.

It must be a clear night because the light of the moon

 

is a tourniquet for the small home full of displaced shadows.

The blue from the door twists the candlewick’s flame

 

outlining the shadows of the forms at the door into a checkering

of shades: blue, then red, then blue again. The dead

 

in their upended thatched houses must be full of moonlight

given the outcome of the soon to end war and given

 

the audacity of the redness of the scene. 

 

 

  

The porphyry bricks turn a deeper red and the smell

of lamb roasting over onions pulls the soldiers

 

into a tighter fist. The shellac from the table

mirrors their faces. Tongues of fire from the stove

 

spasms their shadows on the wall. The house is not theirs. 

The wounded wrap their limbs with dresses taken

 

from a child's nursery closet. A young soldier pulls the arms

off a doll he's found, and burns its hair with a lighter. Then

 

the smoke. The doll completely engulfed is thrown into the stove,

its body slowly rising into sitting position before it melts.

 

Off in the hills, the artillery-men are shelling tombstones

for the hell of it, waiting for relief. The old villagers

 

are besides themselves with grief. Cloistered at gunpoint,

they see the deep black smoke of impact and curse the devils

 

and their children. Hard packs of cigarettes between the soldiers

jump at each strike and just past the tree line, hunks of marble fly high

 

into the dark ozone of winter. The light from the village

wavers in and out upon impact. Parts of the dead are in the trees

 

and parts are mashed into the ground, disintegrating with the snow.

Soon the artillery-men will be relieved to write their letters

 

in the warmth of the house. They will lie in their cursives, about the food

and the enemy. They will tell stories about the horizon at sunset

 

and of the loved ones tucked in crisp blankets in their dreams of oleander

in the spring. They will speak in low tones to each other over the hungry fire,

 

saying nothing about the dead. Saying nothing but how tired they were,

and how, they thought, the winters were terrible and cold.

 

 

  

 Something has happened: the rain has nothing to say

            and the boat out on the waters carries its shoulders

up, parting breakers because breakers have nothing

 

to say either. And tonight, there is nothing to remember about

            them, those men on the boat, because this night the summons comes

as the keel tilts this way and that with the dispassion of

 

the afterlife. There is nothing to say because the sky invents

            this country where the nautical birds stay in the water, knowing

winds will tear them to shreds. The low-bellied cumulus

 

oozes its heaving body up and down the skyline and

            the birds, they stay where they are because this ocean is,

at once, not an ocean. Some men in that boat spill into

 

that dusky forgiveness that is the water, their bodies

            seal-sleek in thermal suits, and the seated gulls are far off,

their cries pitched just so that the men in the water feel

 

their hearts swell against their ribs, and it's tedious, swimming,

            so tedious that the men in the water want to be carried, to be

buoyant like remembered light--to be carried with the rising

 

waters, lifted up, to be visible and then to descend at a constant

            amplitude. To have nothing to say with each descent, except

your name and the names with you in the water. Something

 

has happened and the fatal quiet of the lost gulls or

            the lost motor's drone finally has nothing to say.

The ocean moves the boat up and down in the darkness

 

like a child's hand practicing scales, and the world is

            preoccupied.   There are fish, shining like phosphor

beneath, and above, there are stars, endlessly repetitious. 

 

  

Seated on ammunition creates, the captain withdraws

into the stones of his quarters and draws in a long drag

 

from a cigarette. The gem of the tip, slowly moving

closer to his lips. From the window he can see

 

in two directions--to the lit taper on the sill of the infirmary

but also out to the rhododendrons, heavy with rain.

 

Early summer and the intolerant wasps had been burned

from their vespiary by one of the soldiers with a newspaper torch. 

 

How they curled in lazy pirouettes, drunk on the smoke

and on their grief for their queen. Now the rows of pines

 

move over the roofs with the dusk while behind a green curtain,

a young private loses consciousness from a swollen wind-pipe--

 

the edema from a single sting very much like the heavy bulb

of a rhododendron, near vibrant in bloom.