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Peacock Island

From the island
he saw the castle
 
and from the castle
he saw the island.
 
Some people live
this way—wife/
 
mistress/wife/mistress.
But this story isn’t
 
the one I’m telling.
From the island
 
he saw the castle
and that made him
 
distant from power
and from the castle
 
he saw the island
and that made him distant
 
from imagining
what power can do.
 
The story I’m telling is
the war coming.
 
How can you go from
island to castle to island
 
to castle and not give
birth to a war? No.
 
I still can’t explain it.

Jennifer Kronovet was born and raised in New York City. She received an MFA in creative writing from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA in applied linguistics from Columbia University Teachers College. She is the author of The Wug Test (Ecco, 2016), which was selected by Eliza Griswold for the National Poetry Series, and Awayward (BOA Editions, 2007), which was selected by Jean Valentine as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize.

About Jennifer Kronovet

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About this Poem

“Peacock Island is a real place: sixty-seven hectares in the middle of the Havel River, just off the western edge of Berlin—after a thirty-second ferry ride you’re there and can hear the peacocks screaming to each other. The island was once given to an alchemist who discovered how to make ruby glass but was shipped off when his lab burned down, and one hundred years later, the island was given to the king’s mistress for her pleasure, and she was shipped off when the king died. The castle, the fountain, and the temple were all designed to look like ruins—the fantasy of ruin—and yet were untouched when World War II's bombs fell. When I first went to Peacock Island I thought, if I can understand this place, I can understand all of the real and imagined history of Western civilization. This place of artifice and hubris snagged me, and since then all my poems have been about Peacock Island.”
—Jennifer Kronovet

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With the Boy, in the Dark

The boy is interested in black holes
because he doesn’t know how to say
death death death. Just, infinite dark.
Event horizon. Singularity. The boy
teaches me how to mouth the absence
I won’t imagine—the dark keeps going
without time so it can’t hold words.

Jennifer Kronovet

2016

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941)

Whorf worked in insurance, studied the causes of fires in the files: faulty wiring, lack of air spaces, a problem of materials. 

Additional patterns emerged: Workers took great care around gasoline drums, but not around empty gas drums. 

Empty: put your hand in there. Can you feel anything? When the night sky is empty there are still. When the mind is empty there are still. When drums are empty there are still vapors more flammable than gasoline. They are English empty—waiting for the spark.

Jennifer Kronovet

2016

On Translation: Celia Dropkin’s “My Hands” (Yiddish)

She had emigrated to New York when she wrote my hands, and I was in New York again again looking at my hands when I typed my hands. She wrote two little bits of my body on the next line. She had children at this point. I typed the words in English on the next line and didn’t have the boy and then did and brought two little bits up to the first line with my hands. In her time, ideas sat on different lines, but in mine—living against being shown where to rest. Is that me now or now? I decided now.

Jennifer Kronovet

2016

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Peacock Island

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