Poet's Sampler: Emily Fragos Emily Fragos is a thin-skinned, tough-minded poet of this world. Her sensual sensibility is unrestrained by conventional perceptual grids. Her poems take us by surprise. Sound counts in these poems--all of which come from her remarkable manuscript, Little Savage. Her verbal acts are informed by a music like a second language: with a player's skill at an instrument, a composer's concentrating election of notes and echoes, a listener's joy in attention. Sometimes, as in "Il Maestro," music is subject, object, and context, evoking the devastating minor voice of the poem's speaker. Sometimes, as in "The Path," a thread of melodic line unites a poem abounding in mental leaps. Always, matter and manner are one. Fragos's trust in language is fruitful, and justified. No word she writes is an advertisement for herself. The out-going empathy which moves her now and then even allows her moments in which persons, acts, things, and self are poised as if reconciled. We are enlarged by her resonant verbal imagination. --Marie Ponsot Poems by Poet Path Il Maestro del Violino Velocity The Art of Insane Path There is so little to go on: a pale trembling hand as I stand over you, my finger tracing the words on the page, a foreign language you are learning for a journey without me. You will do fine, I say. You will wrap your tongue around these sounds and be understood, be given what you desire: a loaf of bread, change for your money, an antique doll with violent eyes. Paintings are hanging on walls, behind glass, waiting for you to admire them. Their plaintive beauty will move through you and you will walk back to your hotel through the park I know well. I spent years there walking its bridle path, a gray cat in my arms, moving toward you, blind, in another life. first published in The ThreePenny Review Il Maestro del Violino Those afflicted with incurable diseases would go to the Incurabili, founded in Venice in 1522. There, hundreds of abandoned children were provided with music lessons and were taught to perform at Mass and at Vespers. Somewhere behind the huge thick doors deep within the bowels of the Incurabili on the Zattere a long paved street facing the Giudecca and named for the rafts that unload their wood there we live until we die and are taught our lessons by Maestro Matteo Puppi who plays violin by day and composes admirable sonatas by night of full harmonious music for us to play. Sweet-faced angels he calls us and once a lovely man he called friend with hair the color of carrots and eyes as green as Chiaretta's parrot came to hear us play his concerto and pronounced us marvels of great facility and expression. Signor Vivaldi patted me on the head and sparkled like a star so bright in the sky that he turned night to day. Those of us still pretty enough to leave give concerts in the open air and return to tell of shrieking gulls and large faces and the warm breeze that blows across our bare legs and arms as thin as reeds. Francesca conducted our chorus with sound flowing like water the light glinting off this voice and then off another. When she died, I played my instrument in a monotonous frenzy all high-pitched and piercing and made Him hold his ears in pain. My cat Gatto is fat with the rats he catches every day strolling about the dark halls with a skinny tail hanging from his mouth. One by one we pass away and are buried under signs in the garden behind. We can see the markers from our windows and speak to our friends who listen from above. We appear only as first names and the instruments we played: Francesca del coro, Luciana organista, Luciete dalla viola, Anna Maria and Silvia del cello. Me, I am Sofia del violino. Once I saw myself in a clear puddle of rain water. My teeth are very crooked, I know. We are none of us startled by the other. We are all the same. To Heaven. first published in The American Voice Velocity I once outran my own body like the sprinter accelerating down the track until the point reached within when he can no longer be contained by this world or be impeded by these limbs. And he must come to full stop pulled up and dissolved into pain on the track. I once wanted someone and no one else and yearned and turned my body inside out and still I could not have my desire. It grew and like a monster split in two and each half grew and strained and split in four and my body could not hold this gathering. I woke from wild-eyed dreams with tired legs incapable of flight. I woke with a delicate retina detached in the vanishing light. The Art of the Insane The good doctor Prinzhorn says it was the patent that snapped me in two like a twig, that shattered my lovely personality, so to speak. I nod my heavy head. Have you seen my machine, perpetually moving, whirring, breathing? Made it out of cloth and mud and dirt and spit and excrement. Dear Diary: Dubuffet and Klee came last week to copy my faces. Eager to meet me, touching my creatures with their long, skinny fingers. They smeared my orange chalk, calculating what they could steal . . . And if anyone asks, I am taking my pig Rafi for a walk. With her hooves of long curls like a little girl's mop, or Persian slippers, excellent for flying, we are wind gone. We are kingdom come.