Carl Phillips

 

Through An Opening

It was as if they'd stepped into the head
of a wind god,and gotten trapped there and,
within captivity, made a space they could

sometimes recognize. Soon it looked
like home: chicken hawk; first stars;
a golden steeple. . . Almost, they could believe
each word of it,

the wordless parts also,
the particular riot—and beauty, for they did
admit as much—of a field on fire, the wind
tumbling through the god's hair, here and

there lifting it—so a kind of life, still—
They would make
a music of it. Singing
Hush now—why not hush? You're mine, coyote.

Michael Cunningham

from Larry and Bobby Kissing

Were they glad about it? Was Larry glad the night he kissed me back to life? Was I? I’d been among the dead for so long. Sleep, gym, hustle, dinner, hustle, sleep, repeat.

I never kissed any of them. That was the line I drew. That was what kept me in my body, kept me from getting sucked into their vortexes.

Until Larry kissed me. It hadn’t been my idea.

I thought, at first, I wanted to be dead again, to go back to that endless smoky undream, but he kept kissing me, and I kept kissing him, and by now, I don’t think he’d let me go back to being dead, even if I asked him to. By now, I don’t think I’d want to go back.

That’s why I’m in love with him. That’s why I’m gladdened. That’s why I seem to wish, every now and then, when love gets into me like a fishhook and pulls me, gasping, out of myself — when I start to fear everything that might happen if I abandon me and enter him — that he’d disappear, so I could be dead again. 

Paul Durcan

 

POEMS FOR PAINTINGS.  

For several decades now the Irish poet Paul Durcan has been one of the heroes of the international poetry-reading scene. In the mid-eighties at one of the Newbury Street bookshops in Boston I saw him give one of the most electric and startling readings I can ever remember: he came into the polite little shop where people were drinking tea and tied them to their chairs, rifled their pockets, blasphemed their idols and had his way with their daughters. (“Are you really that intense?” the shop owner asked him, in awe. Durcan gave him an amused shrug.) I’d first discovered his work in the seventies, when the great Galway bookseller Maureen Kenny pressed Jesus, Break His Fall on me, which ends with the stark and moving piece “The Death by Heroin of Sid Vicious”. His work is prolific and highly uneven; he can fall into fantasy and garrulity, those persistent Irish failings, but in 1991, working with the National Gallery in Ireland, and in 1994, with the National Gallery in London, he produced two tours de force: Crazy About Women and Give Me Your Hand, in which he has written poems about paintings in those collections. Poems on paintings are a standard exercise for poets, but I’d say Durcan’s extended success in this form is probably unique. He uses language, not to evoke colors or textures, or to describe the paintings or place them historically, but to imagine scenarios and voices that manage to belong both to Durcan and to the paintings. There are the strange transformations and the obsession with Irish and English place names common to all of Durcan’s work; the twelve apostles become a communal gay group who take to following Christ “After living together for so many years in County Mayo / In the Delphi Valley between Leenane and Westport / In what was once a shooting lodge of Lord Sligo’s.” There are his constant bits of sly mischief and wry malice, withering with baby talk: “He is sulking because he wants his din-dins.” There are also moments of simply inspired observation: what other viewer could’ve read so sharply the expressions of the subjects of Moroni’s “Man With Two Daughters” or Rubens’ “Susanna Lunden” and spoken for them? What other poet, on the inspiration of Riminaldi’s “Cain and Abel” or Van der Werff’s “Flight into Egypt,” has so powerfully restored the brutality and heartbreak of the Biblical stories? Mischief, surrealism and all, gravity, a more than earthly serious weight, is Durcan’s natural atmosphere, whether leaping from Rousseau’s “Tiger in a Tropical Storm” to capture the flustering fear of a woman in an old age home, or honoring and restating the gravity of Cezanne’s “Old Woman with a Rosary.” Startlement and gravity: these are the words that strike me time and again, trying to describe Durcan and his work. At the London National Gallery exhibit when Give Me Your Hand was published, I observed a woman who was looking at Joshua Reynolds’ “Banastre Tarleton,” who then read Durcan’s poem—about a man remembering his rugby-champ son who has died of AIDS—and then gasped, fell backwards into a chair, and began sobbing openly. Jesus, break our fall.

Glenn Shea (Book Barn) Niantic, Connecticut

Daniel Borzutsky

  

Lake Michigan, Scene 0

There are 7 of us in front of the mayor’s house asking questions about the boy they shot  22 times  

There are 7 of us in front of the mayor’s house screaming about how the videotape of  the shooting was covered up so the mayor could get reelected 

And a police officer says down there where they live there was a shooting you should  be protesting that shooting a 9-year-old boy was shot by a gangbanger why aren’t  you protesting that shooting why are you only protesting this shooting 

Another police officer wants to know why we are protesting this shooting when just  yesterday there was a drive-by shooting in Rogers Park and two innocent bystanders  were shot and one of them died 

We don’t answer instead we do a die-in in front of the mayor’s house and the camera  crews from the nightly news stand above us as we lay stiff and motionless on the cold  wet pavement  

They shot the boy 22 times  

They kept the video secret for a year and a few days after the video was released we took  to the streets and didn’t let anyone into the Disney Store 

We blocked the doors to Brooks Brothers 

Franz Wright

Association

Dawns when I can’t sleep I walk

In thought, all the way

Around Walden.

My father loved Thoreau, I wish

He could have walked there

With me once

My hangover Virgil. Lying in bed

With a big ax

Lodged in my head, I still hear him

As if from the next room

Bumping ino things and cursing, 

Give us this day. He mutters,

Our daily stone. Nice.

Can’t blame him though. This morning

Can’t sleep for missing him.

David Foster Wallace

  

from The Pale King

§2

From Midway Claude Sylvanshine then flew on something called Consolidated Thrust Regional Lines down to Peoria, a terrifying thirty-seater whose pilot had pimples at the back of his neck and

reached back to pull a dingy fabric curtain over the cockpit and the beverage service consisted of a staggering girl underhanding you nuts while you chugged a Pepsi. Sylvanshine’s window seat was in

8-something, an emergency row, beside an older lady with a sacklike chin who could not seem despite strenuous efforts to open her nuts. The core accounting equation A = L + E can be dissolved and reshuffled into everything from E = A – L to beyond. The craft rode the updrafts and downdrafts like a dinghy in a gale. The only service into Peoria was regional out of either St. Louis or the two Chicagos. Sylvanshine had an inner ear thing and couldn’t read on planes but did read the emergency laminated card thing, twice. It was mostly illustrations; for legal reasons, the airline had to presume illiteracy. Without being aware that he was doing so, Sylvanshine mentally repeated the word illiterate several dozen times until the word ceased to mean anything and became just a rhythmic sound, not unlovely but out of sync with the propellors’ flux’s pulse. It was something he did when he was under stress and did not want an incursion. His point of departure was Dulles after a Service shuttle from Shepherdstown/Martinsburg. The three major codifications of US tax law being of course ’16, ’39, and ’54, with ’81 and ’82’s indexing and anti-abuse provisions also relevant. The fact that another major recodification was on the horizon would not, obviously, be on the CPA exam.

David Foster Wallace

from Infinite Jest

‘My application’s not bought,’ I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. ‘I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I’m complex.’I read,’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,’ I say. ‘I’m not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’

I open my eyes. ‘Please don’t think I don’t care.’

On how to present well in an Alcoholics Anonymous session:

The thing is it has to be the truth to really go over, here. It can’t be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone. Same with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity. Sincerity with an ulterior motive is something these tough ravaged people know and fear, all of them trained to remember the coyly sincere, ironic, self-presenting fortifications they’d had to construct in order to carry on Out There, under the ceaseless neon bottle.

On what it’s like to be and feel depressed:

It’s the mornings after the spider-and-heights dreams that are the most painful, that it takes sometimes three coffees and two showers and sometimes a run to loosen the grip on his soul’s throat; and these post-dream mornings are even worse if he wakes unalone, if the previous night’s Subject is still there, wanting to twitter, or to cuddle and, like, spoon, asking what exactly is the story with the foggy inverted tumblers on the bathroom floor, commenting on his night-sweats, clattering around in the kitchen, making kippers or bacon or something more hideous and unhoneyed he’s supposed to eat with post-coital male gusto, the ones who have this thing about they call it Feeding My Man, wanting a man who can barely keep down A.M. honey-toast to east with male gusto, elbows out and sovelling, making little noises. Even when alone, unable to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wing out the sheet and go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can’t even bring himself for hours to think about how he’ll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light — the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

David Foster Wallace

 

from Infinite Jest

 That the chilling Hispanic term for whatever interior disorder drives the addict back again and again to the enslaving Substance is tecato gusano, which apparently connotes some kind of interior psychic worm that cannot be sated or killed.

That it is possible, in sleep, for some roommates to secure a cigarette from their bedside pack, light it, smoke it down to the quick, and then extinguish it in their bedside ashtray—without once waking up, and without setting anything on fire. You will be informed that this skill is usually acquired in penal institutions, which will lower your inclination to complain about the practice. Or that even Flent’s industrial-strength expandable-foam earplugs do not solve the problem of a snoring roommate if the roommate in question is so huge and so adenoidal that the snores in question also produce subsonic vibrations that arpeggio up and down your body and make your bunk jiggle like a motel bed you’ve put a quarter in.

That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males. That over 60% of all persons arrested for drug and alcohol-related offenses report being sexually abused as children, with two-thirds of the remaining 40% reporting that they cannot remember their childhoods in sufficient enough detail to report one way or the other on abuse. That you can weave hypnotic Madame Psychosis-like harmonies around the minor-D scream of a cheap vacuum cleaner, humming to yourself as you vacuum, if that’s your Chore. That some people really do look like rodents. That some drug-addicted prostitutes have a harder time giving up prostitution that they have giving up drugs, with their explanation involving the two habits’ very different directions of currency-flow. That there are just as many idioms for the female sex-organ as there are for the male sex-organ.

That the little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for the required AM and PM prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed to literally lose your mind, to be able to wrap up your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.

That in metro Boston the idiom of choice for the male sex-organ is: Unit, which is why Ennet House residents are wryly amused by E.M.P.H. Hospital’s designations of its campus’s buildings.

That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most non addicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.

That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.

That AA and NA and CA’s ‘God’ does not apparently require that you believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you.(59) That, pace macho bullshit, public male weeping is not only plenty masculine but can actually feel good(reportedly). That sharing means talking, and taking somebody’s inventory means criticizing that person, plus many additional pieces of Recoveryspeak. That an important part of the halfway-house Human Immuno-Virus prevention is not leaving your razor or toothbrush in communal bathrooms. That apparently a seasoned prostitute can (reportedly) apply a condom to a customer’s Unit so deftly he doesn’t even know it’s on until he’s history, so to speak.