Poems

Find and share the perfect poems.

Costumes Exchanging Glances

1946 –

             The rhinestone lights blink off and on.
Pretend stars. 
I’m sick of explanations. A life is like Russell said 
of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave. 
A science of motion toward some flat surface, 
some heat, some cold. Some light
can leave some after-image but it doesn’t last. 
Isn’t that what they say? That and that
historical events exchange glances with nothingness.

Mary Jo Bang was born on October 22, 1946, in Waynesville, Missouri, and grew up in Ferguson, which is now a suburb of St. Louis. She received a BA and an MA in sociology from Northwestern University, a BA in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London, and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University.

About Mary Jo Bang

Themes

Clothing

About this Poem

“Bertrand Russell said, ‘Electricity is not a thing like St. Paul's Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave.’ And it's not ‘they’ who say, but Walter Benjamin who said, ‘Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness, with the base and the banal.’ In September, 1940, Benjamin died under ambiguous circumstances in the French-Spanish border town of Portbou, while attempting to flee the Nazis.”
—Mary Jo Bang

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

More by this poet

Speaking of the future, Hamlet

is saying, someday this day will be over.
A moon will presumably still be above:
a bone quiet, an inflatable in the scene

—the cool blue swimming pool
it finds itself in. And I will want to be.
My mother, the Queen, will want only

Mary Jo Bang

2020

How will it feel months from now

when the pink sliver of sky swims in
through the window and you hear
the high notes from the opera singer
one story below. Angel of wishing,

angel of fortune, the cart overturned,
the small animals from the back
of the truck flooding the highway.

Mary Jo Bang

2020

A Miniature

In my numb mind, a little leather jacket,
the sleeve no bigger than a thumb drive.
In that diminished instance,
I light a cigarette. I put on lipstick.

I’m a version of a self. I speak the truth.
As if speaking French. Haltingly.
Fast forward and it’s me asking air
to save me from the synaptic patterns

that dictate who I am alongside what I do

Mary Jo Bang

2020

Poems

Page submenu block

Costumes Exchanging Glances

More by this poet

Speaking of the future, Hamlet

How will it feel months from now

A Miniature

Newsletter Sign Up