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Night Street Repairs: Poems
Night Street Repairs contains elegiac meditations on time, modernity, and contemporary culture's unending flirtation with self-destruction. The many voices in these poems bear vigilant witness to humankind's urban wastes and wastefulness. Moritz's unmistakable cadences - magisterial, philosophical, and wry - mingle among the ancients, the Bible, Leopardi, Montale, and Rilke. These poems are mansions, at once derelict and opulent, inviting readers to wander with an open mind and hear through the poet's distinctive voice what the ages, humanity, and the myth of progress have wrought.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published March 20, 2004
9 people want to read
About the author
A.F. Moritz
42 books18 followersA.F. Moritz has published more than twenty collections of poetry as well as important works of literary history and numerous translations of Latin American verse. A leading figure in the literary life of Canada, he has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a major award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Two of his most recent works have reaffirmed his reputation: Night Street Repairs (2004) received the ReLit Award and The Sentinel (2008) won both the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Toronto.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 17, 2022
All of us know the chronicle
by heart - the list of our two thousand
dead kings and all the notable events
of their illustrious shameful reigns.
So this knowledge is safe. Except that
there are only ten of us left now and a wind
scrapes at our eyes, tears at
our lips and nostrils saying:
Forget. Or no: "Forget"
is what our singing Ukli says
when he impersonates the wind. The wind
merely drags infinitesimal scraps of stone
across our skin, dries out the moist
parts of our bodies, hardens
the soft and softens the hard
with a rasping that wants nothing
to be known. The wind simply
confuses except that when it is heard
and we always hear it we know
it is time to quit repeating things
and go.
* * *
The infinite erotic civilization we created
is declining now. Breast and penis wag in public
as in primitive times, when nothing was erotic but the gods,
and they wave placards and besiege the legislature,
demanding their right to go naked, unmolested,
unnoticed like anyone else through the public airwaves.
There are still heroes of eroticism,
those we call The Antediluvians, who appear in G-strings
behing aquarium glass, as if anyone were watching,
and there are still those who watch them
in the tried chrome and neon of the Erotomania Club
or on a last streetcorner of presenting she-males.
We still sometimes enjoy the very significant old bromide
whereby the decolleté is made to seem momentarily
the sacred cleft of the buttocks. Yet now
it all has the shuttered umbrella-folding sad
end-of-the-season feel that any religion will exude
as it survives stubbornly into the new age.
And the new age: how few steps are left to take
for the ever-developing machine of the body
before we get there. The distances are very big
but crossable, given merely a life that could be counted out
in simplest arithmetic, though it would have to last
longer than the universe, they say, is going to.
And it would be - will be - a boring journey,
like a bus trip across the Australian desert, sixty hours,
with the two drivers taking ten-hour shifts, each sleeping
while the other jounces and rots and the passengers look out
on the unvarying succession of pebbles, no two alike
and no two distinguishable: as if a mite should crawl
across one of those paintings of North African stone and sand
in which Jean Dubuffet submerged into the pure "thingness"
and dignity of earth's basic material. Yes,
though we bury our penises in the sand, we have to see
the erotic age is now dead and in the world coming to be
will be infinitely pitied by our sexless shadows.
For the time being, however, we remain: brittle
elders, almost insensible, almost impotent, yet alive
by the sufferance of our young, who could easily grab us
and wring our necks, if they ever should desire to.
But they don't desire. Who can understand them? They care
nothing at all for the mating song and dance
except that its necessary management provides some jobs.
They say right out loud that pleasure is a patina,
something to ease the bitter with the sweet,
and that the abyssal wealth of nature, custom,
and personality was all illusion, a mistake.
Nor can anything we do seduce or divert their resentment,
now that our most alluring female is only an old
half-bursting vacuum cleaner bag, whose penis envy
is about to vanish forever into white oblivion.
Still, we possess the last great strength of the erotic
era: intoxicated terror. Let them do as they please,
their advances can't help moving us to the passion
of agony and sorrow while we die. The final
penetration, the thrust home, is coming, and they will be
the deliverer, whatever they do or don't desire.
Around the last salons and saloons the human wave
mounts and howls willy-nilly with an electronic chuckling,
we can hear a click-click-click of commercial stiletto
heels: an undreamt body is stalking to be sold naked,
to be chained by the wrists to a white pillar
in the flap-snap-flop of the laundry of the future
strung out the windows of tropical highrise slums.
* * *
You are singing alone before the crowd, before
the many comes, first poet, your primitive
and repetitious epic. Canto follows canto
with scarcely a pause, each brief, identical, and simple
as simplest song: "Enjoy your desire." Enjoy, you too,
being lost as you are for this moment in this silence
of your dead of a season ago, and your yet unborn.
The armies of your kind have not awakened, no belovèd
exists yet to hear the music of your legs and come
to mate you with her body, so that soon when you die
eggs of your loneness will wait a further summer.
* * *
Riverbanks crumpled to the form
Of wrinkled silk filling a mirror,
Gravel beach where a boat stutters,
Pressed by the current and let go, let go,
Grasses forever being combed,
Grasses, grasses that have no respite,
What is becoming of your creature
Somewhere now
In the transparent storm
To which her heart has cast her out?
* * *
The stream embraces
its fate: the loveliest is very little
Transparency.
Down the clear stream runs eternal beauty.
No river nymphs:
here clarity is what unclothes its delights.
The water's clearness
offers the eyes the profound depths of fable.
And quick fishes,
lightning flashes, dream themselves and appear.
* * *
Will that day
the soul of days come rescue the two hands full
of words that are what we were
together? Me, I love so much
our longing life, its faith and faith desired,
that I hold hard to a drift
of words gone out and sifted in that never a
home's fireplace, our hearts.
by heart - the list of our two thousand
dead kings and all the notable events
of their illustrious shameful reigns.
So this knowledge is safe. Except that
there are only ten of us left now and a wind
scrapes at our eyes, tears at
our lips and nostrils saying:
Forget. Or no: "Forget"
is what our singing Ukli says
when he impersonates the wind. The wind
merely drags infinitesimal scraps of stone
across our skin, dries out the moist
parts of our bodies, hardens
the soft and softens the hard
with a rasping that wants nothing
to be known. The wind simply
confuses except that when it is heard
and we always hear it we know
it is time to quit repeating things
and go.
- Precariousness, pg. 24
* * *
The infinite erotic civilization we created
is declining now. Breast and penis wag in public
as in primitive times, when nothing was erotic but the gods,
and they wave placards and besiege the legislature,
demanding their right to go naked, unmolested,
unnoticed like anyone else through the public airwaves.
There are still heroes of eroticism,
those we call The Antediluvians, who appear in G-strings
behing aquarium glass, as if anyone were watching,
and there are still those who watch them
in the tried chrome and neon of the Erotomania Club
or on a last streetcorner of presenting she-males.
We still sometimes enjoy the very significant old bromide
whereby the decolleté is made to seem momentarily
the sacred cleft of the buttocks. Yet now
it all has the shuttered umbrella-folding sad
end-of-the-season feel that any religion will exude
as it survives stubbornly into the new age.
And the new age: how few steps are left to take
for the ever-developing machine of the body
before we get there. The distances are very big
but crossable, given merely a life that could be counted out
in simplest arithmetic, though it would have to last
longer than the universe, they say, is going to.
And it would be - will be - a boring journey,
like a bus trip across the Australian desert, sixty hours,
with the two drivers taking ten-hour shifts, each sleeping
while the other jounces and rots and the passengers look out
on the unvarying succession of pebbles, no two alike
and no two distinguishable: as if a mite should crawl
across one of those paintings of North African stone and sand
in which Jean Dubuffet submerged into the pure "thingness"
and dignity of earth's basic material. Yes,
though we bury our penises in the sand, we have to see
the erotic age is now dead and in the world coming to be
will be infinitely pitied by our sexless shadows.
For the time being, however, we remain: brittle
elders, almost insensible, almost impotent, yet alive
by the sufferance of our young, who could easily grab us
and wring our necks, if they ever should desire to.
But they don't desire. Who can understand them? They care
nothing at all for the mating song and dance
except that its necessary management provides some jobs.
They say right out loud that pleasure is a patina,
something to ease the bitter with the sweet,
and that the abyssal wealth of nature, custom,
and personality was all illusion, a mistake.
Nor can anything we do seduce or divert their resentment,
now that our most alluring female is only an old
half-bursting vacuum cleaner bag, whose penis envy
is about to vanish forever into white oblivion.
Still, we possess the last great strength of the erotic
era: intoxicated terror. Let them do as they please,
their advances can't help moving us to the passion
of agony and sorrow while we die. The final
penetration, the thrust home, is coming, and they will be
the deliverer, whatever they do or don't desire.
Around the last salons and saloons the human wave
mounts and howls willy-nilly with an electronic chuckling,
we can hear a click-click-click of commercial stiletto
heels: an undreamt body is stalking to be sold naked,
to be chained by the wrists to a white pillar
in the flap-snap-flop of the laundry of the future
strung out the windows of tropical highrise slums.
- The Erotic Civilization, pg. 33-35
* * *
You are singing alone before the crowd, before
the many comes, first poet, your primitive
and repetitious epic. Canto follows canto
with scarcely a pause, each brief, identical, and simple
as simplest song: "Enjoy your desire." Enjoy, you too,
being lost as you are for this moment in this silence
of your dead of a season ago, and your yet unborn.
The armies of your kind have not awakened, no belovèd
exists yet to hear the music of your legs and come
to mate you with her body, so that soon when you die
eggs of your loneness will wait a further summer.
- Night of the First Cricket, pg. 45
* * *
Riverbanks crumpled to the form
Of wrinkled silk filling a mirror,
Gravel beach where a boat stutters,
Pressed by the current and let go, let go,
Grasses forever being combed,
Grasses, grasses that have no respite,
What is becoming of your creature
Somewhere now
In the transparent storm
To which her heart has cast her out?
- The Trout, after René Char, pg. 57
* * *
The stream embraces
its fate: the loveliest is very little
Transparency.
Down the clear stream runs eternal beauty.
No river nymphs:
here clarity is what unclothes its delights.
The water's clearness
offers the eyes the profound depths of fable.
And quick fishes,
lightning flashes, dream themselves and appear.
- Clear Stream, after Jorge Guillén, pg. 58
* * *
Will that day
the soul of days come rescue the two hands full
of words that are what we were
together? Me, I love so much
our longing life, its faith and faith desired,
that I hold hard to a drift
of words gone out and sifted in that never a
home's fireplace, our hearts.
- Head Stone, after Yves Bonnefoy pg. 66
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