Descartes’ Nightmare
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Available March 2008
Susan McCabe
96 pp., 6 x 81/2
Paper $12.95
ISBN 978-0-87480-934-3
Winner of the 2007 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized writer and former professor at the University of Utah.
Descartes’ Nightmare is the 2007 prizewinning volume selected by this year’s judge, Cole Swenson, of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Descartes’ Nightmare
Robed in pink, snapping his picture-machine,
he took time with reflections, the kaleidoscopic
sheen
of blood cells, for in two centuries he’d become
Baudelaire
roaming the boulevard for his red-haired beggar.
If only he could feel her degraded silks upon his
breast
as he dictated: “Let me first address the Unreal.
Let me first
locate and adorn it.” What disturbed him, pleased
him,
was this corpuscular insect with its thousand eyes,
for at last, there was a mechanism for breaking
the world
into little mollusk-stained window panes.
He read those monoliths that stood on banks of
sand.
And now he was a monolith, for he had to be
sculpted
before he could exist. He might yet conceive the
curvature
of ether by taking photographs of ruined
photographs of churches:
each wavering color had its nerve nets (if one
fired,
others did, but none could be traced to an origin),
part of a larger paradigm and diagram and
window the size
of a camera hallucinating his heart,
waking in the middle of the night.
SUSAN McCABE is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her other books include Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film; Swirl; and Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss. Her poetry has been published in The Kenyon Review, GLQ, and American Poetry Review.
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