Second try
Self-Portrait at 33: Peachtree St.
1.
Big Dad is dead.
Papa T is dead. Grandma is dead.
Buster, my father “is dead is dead.” [FN1]
[FN1] some Jack Kerouac poem whose title I cannot remember and now cannot seem to locate.
I have done everything I settled for doing
and now there is nothing that I want to do.
Ridiculous man. Ridiculous condition.
A flaw that dare not speak its name,
because good people have no right name for it:
this is a poem about the names of things.
2.
Fine.
Fine.
July in Georgia, out in the stewing lawns of the suburbs for
that absurd party, with the frogs screaming in the steam.
Then evening, back to the city, and such a relief:
such an evening:
crystalline, and porous, with a dark breeze cut
through it as from the mouth of a cave:
reassuring and dual.
Drinking and eating outdoors with
a new friend and an old friend. [FN 2]
[FN 2] The old friend is Arthur. With whom I was once so in love that the love burnt itself up and burnt the feeling out of me and when I try to remember it I cannot feel that feeling again. So we were able to begin from scratch. The new friend is Patrick.
3.
This new friend is a poet
and so we begin discussing what we like:
he likes complicated poems that I do not understand,
not complicated like Pound or T.S. Elliot, whose complexities
can be unwound through deduction, multiple readings and
a consideration of the work in situ, but
a level of complexity that demands the poet to leave no breadcrumbs
for the reader, a level of complexity I find antagonistic. [FN 3]
[FN 3] Further reading: “Language Poetry.”
I, on the other hand, like things
simple and solid. Athletic. Brutal. Moral and amoral. [FN 4]
[FN 4] Further reading: Auden and Bly and Kerouac, Merrill and Mary Oliver.
Patrick indulges me in a discussion of James Wright:
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies. [FN5]
[FN 5] “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” (1963)
4.
And
We discuss another of Wright’s Poems. In case you have not read it, this is a poem that I cannot discuss without giving you the entire thing.
For all its power is in the whole of it, and once you have read it, you have read it, and it cannot be undone:
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
by James Wright
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
(1963)
5.
[FN 6]
[FN 6] I understand the mistake I am making by setting a masterpiece in the middle of my amateur hour, but now that we are post-post-everything, what does it matter?
6.
I do not remember reading “Lying in an Hammock”
for the first time.
But it has become the great beast
and governor of my life.
The way some people say a prayer,
I say: “I have wasted my life.” [FN 7]
[FN 7] Where are the long and numbered days of my life already used up in a thousand marvelous and mundane ways that I already cannot, and even then never could, remember? Gone. And pressed into a diamond under the thousand layers of nonsense, singing to me in those frozen moments when the universe is still for a nanosecond. The universe is never still.
“I have wasted my life.”
7.
Around thirteen years ago, I wrote a poem that read, in part:
I want to be a musician like my father,
but when I say musician,
I really mean writer,
and when I say father,
I really mean somebody else entire.
I want to be a musician, but my Kung Fu is bullshit,
but when I say Kung Fu,
I really mean poems . . . .
This was the first poem I had published in a real little journal. [FN 8]
[FN 8] The Blue Sofa Review, 1998.
Having it published meant so much to me, but the poem
itself is not very good: written by a twenty-one year old,
it was, and is, a work too saturated:
a burst of desire at the beginning of adulthood: garish.
But I am certainly not sorry for it. I would write it all over again if I had it in me.
8.
And at the running edge of the wave of
these merging days it turns out
I am too selfish to have much regret.
For my regret is instant, and burns itself out within the context of its creation:
only just lately I have realized, after all this time, when I find myself reciting:
“I have wasted my life,”
what I really mean is:
“I am wasting my life.”
9.
[FN 9]
[FN9] I worried that last bit might hurt Jason, but in the end I have left it, because he already knows what I am and without it there is no poem: If you want to know what to write about, if you want to know what is your own truth, consider what your dear husband would not want to hear:
See there. Spun sugar. Go find the sugar, my sweet. Dark days. Dark days of process. Get the honey. Bring the honey. Drink the honey and remember, if we can, what it was the needles of our hearts ever pointed out toward.
For,
never does the sun shine on my face and light me up into stones across the sky, throwing me out like black birds across the sky: spreading my most secret self out thin across the sky like translucent winter clouds high above the avenue, and
never do the walls peel back and let in muons from the beginning of time to flow through me and give me nothing and take me nothing away on their way to the end of time.
10.
I have wasted my life. “I have wasted my life.”
I am wasting my life:
My self-portrait at thirty-three,
the only thing I have done this long year.
So here is not just Adulthood in some abstract way,
but here is my adulthood:
home, office, Jason and our de facto marriage, Peachtree Street, the train, and paper and paper and paper, and screens and screens and screens, night, whisky, strangers, acquaintances, and Saturday afternoons calcified and standardized by hangovers and the internet, crystallized and run through with webs and webs of tiny fractures in the vacillating silence and sirens of two rooms that could be any rooms anywhere at all.
There is no right word for it.
Summer, 2010 - Summer, 2011. Atlanta.
1.
Big Dad is dead.
Papa T is dead. Grandma is dead.
Buster, my father “is dead is dead.” [FN1]
[FN1] some Jack Kerouac poem whose title I cannot remember and now cannot seem to locate.
I have done everything I settled for doing
and now there is nothing that I want to do.
Ridiculous man. Ridiculous condition.
A flaw that dare not speak its name,
because good people have no right name for it:
this is a poem about the names of things.
2.
Fine.
Fine.
July in Georgia, out in the stewing lawns of the suburbs for
that absurd party, with the frogs screaming in the steam.
Then evening, back to the city, and such a relief:
such an evening:
crystalline, and porous, with a dark breeze cut
through it as from the mouth of a cave:
reassuring and dual.
Drinking and eating outdoors with
a new friend and an old friend. [FN 2]
[FN 2] The old friend is Arthur. With whom I was once so in love that the love burnt itself up and burnt the feeling out of me and when I try to remember it I cannot feel that feeling again. So we were able to begin from scratch. The new friend is Patrick.
3.
This new friend is a poet
and so we begin discussing what we like:
he likes complicated poems that I do not understand,
not complicated like Pound or T.S. Elliot, whose complexities
can be unwound through deduction, multiple readings and
a consideration of the work in situ, but
a level of complexity that demands the poet to leave no breadcrumbs
for the reader, a level of complexity I find antagonistic. [FN 3]
[FN 3] Further reading: “Language Poetry.”
I, on the other hand, like things
simple and solid. Athletic. Brutal. Moral and amoral. [FN 4]
[FN 4] Further reading: Auden and Bly and Kerouac, Merrill and Mary Oliver.
Patrick indulges me in a discussion of James Wright:
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies. [FN5]
[FN 5] “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” (1963)
4.
And
We discuss another of Wright’s Poems. In case you have not read it, this is a poem that I cannot discuss without giving you the entire thing.
For all its power is in the whole of it, and once you have read it, you have read it, and it cannot be undone:
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
by James Wright
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
(1963)
5.
[FN 6]
[FN 6] I understand the mistake I am making by setting a masterpiece in the middle of my amateur hour, but now that we are post-post-everything, what does it matter?
6.
I do not remember reading “Lying in an Hammock”
for the first time.
But it has become the great beast
and governor of my life.
The way some people say a prayer,
I say: “I have wasted my life.” [FN 7]
[FN 7] Where are the long and numbered days of my life already used up in a thousand marvelous and mundane ways that I already cannot, and even then never could, remember? Gone. And pressed into a diamond under the thousand layers of nonsense, singing to me in those frozen moments when the universe is still for a nanosecond. The universe is never still.
“I have wasted my life.”
7.
Around thirteen years ago, I wrote a poem that read, in part:
I want to be a musician like my father,
but when I say musician,
I really mean writer,
and when I say father,
I really mean somebody else entire.
I want to be a musician, but my Kung Fu is bullshit,
but when I say Kung Fu,
I really mean poems . . . .
This was the first poem I had published in a real little journal. [FN 8]
[FN 8] The Blue Sofa Review, 1998.
Having it published meant so much to me, but the poem
itself is not very good: written by a twenty-one year old,
it was, and is, a work too saturated:
a burst of desire at the beginning of adulthood: garish.
But I am certainly not sorry for it. I would write it all over again if I had it in me.
8.
And at the running edge of the wave of
these merging days it turns out
I am too selfish to have much regret.
For my regret is instant, and burns itself out within the context of its creation:
only just lately I have realized, after all this time, when I find myself reciting:
“I have wasted my life,”
what I really mean is:
“I am wasting my life.”
9.
[FN 9]
[FN9] I worried that last bit might hurt Jason, but in the end I have left it, because he already knows what I am and without it there is no poem: If you want to know what to write about, if you want to know what is your own truth, consider what your dear husband would not want to hear:
See there. Spun sugar. Go find the sugar, my sweet. Dark days. Dark days of process. Get the honey. Bring the honey. Drink the honey and remember, if we can, what it was the needles of our hearts ever pointed out toward.
For,
never does the sun shine on my face and light me up into stones across the sky, throwing me out like black birds across the sky: spreading my most secret self out thin across the sky like translucent winter clouds high above the avenue, and
never do the walls peel back and let in muons from the beginning of time to flow through me and give me nothing and take me nothing away on their way to the end of time.
10.
I have wasted my life. “I have wasted my life.”
I am wasting my life:
My self-portrait at thirty-three,
the only thing I have done this long year.
So here is not just Adulthood in some abstract way,
but here is my adulthood:
home, office, Jason and our de facto marriage, Peachtree Street, the train, and paper and paper and paper, and screens and screens and screens, night, whisky, strangers, acquaintances, and Saturday afternoons calcified and standardized by hangovers and the internet, crystallized and run through with webs and webs of tiny fractures in the vacillating silence and sirens of two rooms that could be any rooms anywhere at all.
There is no right word for it.
Summer, 2010 - Summer, 2011. Atlanta.