Poems: 1996-1999
Jay Michaelson
contents:
1.
On the Merritt Parkway in Early Fall
Not unlike a bourgeois Giles Corey
Reverie near White Rock, New York
2.
An alternative to vanilla after Rocky Road is done
Advice to a talented kid (Get Lucky)
The least sentimental poem so far written about a girl and the Western Wall
Spoken by an old woman in a Nursing Home, Yom Kippur, 5757
In a K-Mart outside Wilmington, Delaware, just before July 4, 1998
3.
Seven images suggested by empty air
4.
What it's like in the Berkshires
Memory and Recapitulation in Six Parts
all of these here pomes are copyright 1999 metatronics
some are previously published - email for prior publication history or permission to reprint.
thank u kindly.
No way Dante Alighieri was a friend of the Jews.
He was always telling us about his pasta,
how delicious it was with shrimps,
as if he didn't know, the liar.
He would drive on the left side of the street,
and say,
"This is the way cultured people live,"
but they don't even drive on the left side in Italy.
Dante Alighieri never played canasta in a social setting.
He said he reserved it for special occasions.
You always say "special" when you mean "retarded" these days.
Like a Cadillac post-Ralph Nader,
tailfins emasculated with lipstick:
riding high on a tank in the ivy league.
Me without the engagement of your body,
like William Burroughs without a ruddy boy,
a sapiens without a homo,
trapped in a Tangiers alleyway by a man saying,
"This is not Israel, This is not the Shrine of the Book."
Or, sort of like, a place with no way to get there,
stretching out like low, flat mesas,
rocked-over moonscapes not unlike the Aran islands,
or the pancake waste-lands of Southern towns,
saved from Cinema by sheer inaccessibility,
only that.
Appetite without hunger, like a yearned-over popular song,
Harrison without Starr. Kneeling without a rug.
Text without something beneath it, like the same missing carpet,
which, torn away, reveals not an expected cement floor
but, as in the Hassan Deux Mosque,
just the cold hard ocean waving under glass,
"Hello, weasel, hello!"
"Hello! Hello!"
I wanted to tell a story of the infinite and the finite,
of building a home for one in the other.
You wanted a soup that eats like a meal.
I wanted to throttle the world by its neck,
and shake it, and say, my god, what are you doing.
You wanted rice you can boil in a bag.
I wanted, most of all, the closest intimacy of finitude,
the point beyond which only the limitless remains.
You said you wanted a loving to last you through the night.
On the Merritt Parkway in Early Fall
The ordinary sight of leaves turning in Connecticut
mysteriously teleports me into the life of someone else --
of a comfortable, turtlenecked limousine liberal,
enjoying specific pleasures:
sitting by a wonderfully peaceful fire with the New York Times book review,
and close friends, red wine, and crisp blue air outside.
I become this person, driving past reddening trees on the Merritt Parkway.
I remember this person's comforts, forgotten in the wide summer --
despised even, as too distant from the roar of arteries of life,
too insulated from what matters to be felt.
Now, a simple car ride brings it all back,
especially with bold classical music on the radio,
the kind that makes you forget poverty and loneliness.
You become, in being alone with this other self,
rather suddenly elated.
You are surrounded by the company of invisible friends,
in new blue jeans, on comfortable couches
and hardwood floors,
taking for granted the foliage.
Not unlike a bourgeois Giles Corey
1.
Another quiet air-conditioned indecision,
a slight grinding of my teeth as I ponder the alternatives,
with no particular preference, or value, one way or the other.
My life is not Sophie's Choice, let's say.
2.
A glass of water, evaporating. Drunk on a straw-lined field
where a golf course once ran,
but where now, ticks carry lyme disease.
Or another occasion of -- loneliness;
Another repetition, as if forty-five times a minute,
the same idea recurs,
with only a skipping of a needle to make it clear.
There's some reality here, and so much remains,
that I wonder if I can describe a mountain's view again.
3.
A viewfinder centered from below the waist,
time passing without sleep,
time spent fasting instead of eating,
hardly time spent at all, really.
But one ever recurring indecision: cold, and artificially ventilated,
cycling like a flourescent lamp
lighting and relighting a thousand times per moment.
Reverie near White Rock, New York
1.
A small column of smoke rises from a broken chimney,
inappropriate for summer,
in a backwater town near bridges over ditches.
The town is wearing prefabricated homes
like so much costume jewelry.
These used to be the places they called "quaint,"
when places were called quaint--
by people seeking them at arm's length.
This was a pasture that once would be called "innocent."
2.
Four miles north of the chimney on a rock on a stagnant lake:
There I am. I can't get my mind away from it, and you, and there.
I can't wrap my mind around it,
write the essay that is waiting,
make phone calls that need phoning,
or, plan ahead.
It's all biology, a smile--
there must be something to it.
A small boat is set off on the lake,
as a sky imperfect watches.
An alternative to vanilla after Rocky Road is done
The proposition I would present to you is this:
There is space for a wide-open skylight
letting the cross-beams of light
fill in the architecture of after-disappointment.
And in that space of floating, smoke-like air,
whose substance is like the felt tip of a black pen,
I am reclining with my feet on an ottoman,
my socks affronting the casual visitor,
although I do not spoke a pipe,
and never really have.
Let me argue for more space--
my model is the one out of seven orphans
crammed Dickens-like into a long, wide bed: "Roll Over."
Just as there's a critical mass of dreams and stops
that motivates different people from their chairs,
there's an unknown ceiling on cards you can hold,
as if, shuffling, some will inevitably drop
in accord with a hidden principle of entropy.
Sometimes a choice is a choice is a choice is a choice--
sometimes the cake is spoiling.
Advice to a talented kid (Get Lucky)
Get lucky,
make something that others have made,
but make it new,
and make everyone want it. And you.
I can't explain what to do, I can't do it.
So you give me an argument, you take this chance,
and get lucky with it,
toss it like a frisbee you've just grabbed and relayed,
because you know how to do that without rushing.
Honestly, your good luck --
it isn't a pleasant thing to watch.
It's as if the laws of the universe
are out on an operating table, all red and intestinal, and suddenly
they seem so very apparent. It's like making sausage and legislation.
So get yourself lucky, but maybe privately.
Take this out to the world like a man in slippers takes the trash.
It has to be done. Everyone not rich does it.
The ones who tried don't have it.
You have it. Get lucky.
Whatever drives a person to breathe in every autumn, touch the leaves,
hold them, press every one into volumes --
can't just be simple sentiment, can it?
-- the will to grab pretty ochre souvenirs and watch them grow brown in album leaves
-- or, worse, to freeze their orange unnaturally forever
It can, I suppose, but it ought not be.
I would capture autumn in this way not to save it
-- it will be back next year, whether I am or not --
but to save the last Spring and its green looking forward,
Summer, with all its musings and days,
so many unremembered,
and winter.
The each of each and every,
the quality of now,
all that which turns colors and drops in the cycle of always anew.
The least sentimental poem so far written about a girl and the Western Wall
This is a place for fools,
people flinging away the accomplishments of luxury
like so much bouncing fabric softener.
Fools who then surround themselves by people who think they are fools.
It is a place for people who love to dream --
dream inchoate, vague fantasies that only fit well in rhyming trifles,
and can't quite be captured in any way but triteness.
My own case in point, e.g.:
Waiting for something to happen, I guess,
sitting next to the transcendent pile of rocks
at the center of a large political dispute,
appreciating the carefree play of a little girl --
a little girl, for chrissakes??
Koch told me that was a cliche years ago.
But there she is, dancing around,
in a plaza conquered by brigades,
and sanctified by a shrill blast,
witness to a hundred thousant acts--
and she seems to make the death worth life.
So what can you do? You just gotta shut up about it, I guess.
Spoken by an old woman in a Nursing Home,
Yom Kippur, 5757
Why, you ask, do I look forward to the resurrection of the dead?
I have lived too many years already, you are right.
I look forward to the resurrection because it is not two days away --
I will almost surely die before it comes.
And then,
when, as prophesied, we are all born anew,
I will be as I was when I was young.
My grandchildren will see me as I have wanted to be seen:
young, alive, beautiful.
And I will never watch my loved one grow old again.
And everyone who sees me now, and thinks,
was she ever young? what did she look like then?
will see me,
and I will smile at them,
as if suggesting a lost seduction.
Just before July 4, 1998
(not for Carl Solomon)
In a K-mart outside Wilmington, Delaware,
on a trip from Washington, the capital of the nation,
to New York, the capital of Sodom -
detoured by teeming fourth of july vacationers clogging 95 Northbound
and the Delaware Bridge,
I saw fourteen varieties of tanktops in salmon and pea green,
and old woman rasping through an oxygen tank in the unreformed, yellow restaurant,
underneath the Marlboro cowboy,
a vast column of Coca-Cola, discounted to 99 cents for two liters,
only slightly more expensive than gasoline,
and it made me think of home.
I saw large expanses of sporting goods with meandering hunters,
while I searched for a map and asked:
"How did I get here? What have I done?"
There were no Chinese firecracker-stands gearing up for independence,
no inner city, no beltways or coffee stands
or used book outlets or Jews.
There were no street-hawkers, power-walkers, or cosmopolitan chycks.
There were no alibis or counter-arguments, no offerings or suitcase bombs. No
red-dress hooker, or box office deserted,
no shining revelation, just aisles.
In a K-mart outside Wilmington, Delaware,
I bought a map and a coke and a Snickers,
I thought of where I wanted to be: "I want to go home!"
"I want to go home!" "I want to go home!"
Wired with hours to go before I slept, with a half-digested lunch of carrot soup,
and out of place with round-framed glasses,
frustrated at my rejection of mass transportation, not writing or working,
not fucking anyone for the moment,
I zigzagged through the departments like a speed freak on Special K --
In the face of the K-mart checkout clerk, not the slightest wizened by experience,
I saw God.
In the rows of prewritten greeting cards, I saw epiphany.
In the flattened asphalt parking lot, I saw the wilderness.
In the racist boy dangling legs on the dashboard of his father's car,
I saw redemption.
There are no Beats now at checkout counters, there are only
bean-counting consultants outsourcing efficiency.
Ladies and Gentlemen, The poet has left the building, the icicles have
turned to sand, nothing beside remains.
The visions of Gautama that inhabited this country have been left for hippies
and stranglers.
The holy motorcycles are in the hands of corporations,
The untreated wastelands of the Delaware-Pennsylvania border are
an anomaly.
The traffic clogs the roads and the music America sings is muzak, while it shops among the pastel underwear for the right negligee.
Nothing or next to nothing happened as the place spread itself
over the spaces allotted it,
while quietly, almost like a small hair curling in the humidity,
an undry silence happened to creep up--
not just on you, or me, or this land with mosquitos in it,
or even on the human race struggling towards oblivion,
because that's not what the human race is struggling towards.
Instead, the silence and the thickness in the air arrives like a
heavy and unkempt duffel,
its weights shifting uncomfortably,
like a wallflower's well-tied hiking boots at a teenage dance.
It made its appearance not like some dramatic stranger's shadow
on the welcome mat or elsewhere,
but just gradually presented itself, and, you know, there it was,
another part of our geography, a widening space, bordering on oblivion,
finally not caring whether it was past the horizon or not.
I remember quite a lot of course,
you know, it's not as if the quiet is amnesia.
But now, instead of the color of things being the base upon which
their shadows are drawn,
it is reduced to blotches across the white,
as if the sky would be were it reduced to the shapes of clouds
and the grey-white of clouds the wholeness of the--
not of the heavens,
just of a place that's another word for sky.
3
a wheel carrying wood traveling slowly across "the west"
with a pilgrim on top of it. the grooves somehow from the mormons
are still in the rock on the side of the mountain, up and down
to some arbitrary eden with saline deposits, and I admire them.
I wonder if there is a set of toys made entirely out of glued match-sticks.
save yourself with a round foam hoop, spun around your hips deliciously,
hair flying off straight in each of three hundred and sixty directions,
connected with coil rope to the love boat, stubing supervising again,
railroads running across the caribbean to bring gold to the "east."
another caspar friendly haunting another broken down mansion
near a divinity school -- another list of orange juice and paper --
and another map here folded into a pillowcase for you to rest your head on,
a reassurance that there is a mercator projection to the world,
a place to rest your head on, filled with arbitrary edens of your own.
1.
John Cage has come and gone,
but people still disturb the music with small, quibbling sounds.
2.
A fictional monk once said:
Great wisdom comes from realizing that cars, viewed from above,
are not in fact "like ants."
They are like cars viewed from high up above in an airplane.
3.
I hiked halfway up a mountain that looked like the Mountain at the End of the World.
As you'd expect, I saw another mountain range beyond.
Maybe I went there to destroy the Mountain and replace it with the landscape.
I don't have much luck with places at the End of the World.
At the Cliffs of Moher, I thought "Out there is America."
Never been to the Siwa Oasis.
But I'm not making this stuff up about the mountain
Seven images suggested by empty air
The wide tan car hood of a Buick LeSabre
Like the expanse of the unconquered west.
A dry winter without snow or shine,
the oyster-overcast ice,
as imagined by ancient primeval gods.
The reduction of all breath
to a hair parted this way.
And yet also the expansion out of windows
from cracks in the weather
to expanses of amber waves
to include everything but the everything outside,
and to imagine that.
An old resolving note.
A scrap of mail
delivered across the globe
in rain
precisely to its destination,
indicated in the arrangement of ink
somehow stable on the paper of the envelope.
The open point of air, as in a sigh,
that precludes exhalation.
What is this life you've given us?
It seems to land in many places at once,
a backwards cat.
Nothing seems to come out of the pattern of the spill,
I do not want to see it cohere.
And yet...
You still feel, and I do, that you can be lifted up somehow,
a carpet or a gull,
into the Yves Klein sky,
Dangling feet over the edge like a thrilled four year old,
dancing them in the clouds,
a pirouhette in the stratosphere.
"What's the point in eating,
simply to bloat this body as it carries itself
through a series of peregrinations."
--Up, up, William, away from your tree-stump.
"When my darling love
has left her apocalypses behind her,
and engaged herself in commerce,
what illusions can remind her of yester-year?"
--In every quaking blot of earth.
"How else would you describe
a thousand yellow lights,
swaying silent at a needless intersection,
a cross of streets invented only by imagination
and a few timid bereavements?"
--A self-invented harness whose shape and bit
becomes accustomed-to, a mistake too late to be inverted,
or so it seems.
"Would you be interested in taking a blue swim,
knowing full well as you dive,
that in fact the water is as shallow as the last?"
--Yes.
Call in the chip-laden, backwards fool with words,
who writes upside-down in curved mangled verse,
Touch the shoulder of the minstrelly boy
awaiting on his master in Athenian mode.
This is a question for the concupescent sans-souci
This is the trill on the fermata,
the lengthening out of the cross-eyed black notes
in the lingering phrase of legato.
Delay and obscure while you perilously dangle,
held by a string over fire.
Confuse and collude and make mangled, spent trees burn,
roasting marshmallow smores in their firelight.
4
What it's like in the Berkshires
There, a rusted wheel sits cracked by rainwater,
beside the coward twelve-year-old kid,
trying to struggle through a book he's been assigned to read.
It is summertime, it is summer camp.
He rests his right ankle on his left thigh,
perches the book in between. It is required reading for history.
His friends--he does not know the word acquaintance--
are playing basketball, in the summer.
There are tall trees overhead, straining the sunlight.
It hurts your eyes to look at them,
because the sun pours through their gaps.
Better to keep your eyes facing front, at eye level, by the see-saws.
No one will let him get any work done.
They bother him, not saying hello,
and instantly Frederick Douglass is gone,
already forgotten.
So the book is folded, and he looks out over eye-level space,
here under the trees, the pine needle carpet dotted with light,
the smell in the air the smell of summertime,
which he will still remember, several years on.
Last time, there were fewer lines.
Now, a hundred telephones, wrinkles, waits for change, pomes.
There are moments of grey, warm, infinite place --
and these sustain a hundred "I'd rather be"s.
My advice?
Return as often as possible newness.
The problem?
Sadness, like an envelope, turns into itself.
Today, a wondrous span of a valley after miscellany left --
Just a vast traverse!
And more advice: Don't disturb cows.
'Seems' is usually more profound than 'is.'
And the less of that, the better.
Hard to know when "Can I have some more" is
the vital human thirst, so beautiful to see or
vice, greed, false striving after wind.
Guess you got to guess a lot.
I suppose I wouldn't give anything to be with him, because I haven't.
But it seems like I ought to, since even this astonishing line of connection
Is, like a disappointed transatlantic cable,
Somewhat disconnected.
Sometimes "Is" has it.
Those are the times
that inspire lines
that generally fail
to connect "this" with "is" anew.
Memory and recapitulation in six parts
1.
Balance your elbow against the side of my ribs as you run down the icy sidewalk in the middle of the meatpacking industry, so that you don't fall onto the pavement.
And when we return to my half-sister's apartment, I want you to select your favorite warm music, and rest your head on that same section of my torso.
-- I want you to simply sit and stare at the same section of the ceiling
-- I want you to justify all the self-exhibitions
2.
In the shower, when the window shade is open, and all my neighbors can indecently stare at circlets of hair coated by running water,
the sunlight comes in between eleven and noon, and each of the streams of the water is as exposed as I am, revealed to be a thousand separate, chained tear-like water drops flying in lines.
3.
Climbed to the top of the cliff--
tourists and faggots there,
all looking around corners --
We carved out a niche by climbing past the fences and No-Walking signs.
We set up camp and smoked pot.
The sun broke the horizon as it threatened to set:
you said, "cool."
I said, "that was profound."
4.
And then another evening that ended early in the quick-darkening 5pms of December, we had already been sitting inside on a sofa chosen by my mother as a gift.
Without noticing we realized an hour or two later that it had been as if we each had been talking to ourselves, but we had both listened as well.
I don't have many words in which to report this. It is one of the sorts of things that appears mundane but which, when you try to think of the times that it has happened, has almost never happened.
5.
In the dead of our last night spent together,
on a godforsaken dune filled with holy darkness --
the memory of this is almost occluded by the next day's hell --
the beach was perfect, and empty.
The moon was perfect, and full.
After rushing and uncertain failings,
we had set ourselves right and the cathedral in time descended.
And the stars emerged from the receding light.
And after touching the fabric of air,
we had a festive meal of instant soups --
there are no mistakes in life, some people say,
and it's true sometimes, you can see it that way --
and walked along the shore past all indiscretion.
6.
There are times given to wonder, and times to wandering back,
and most of the time there is time for not one or the other.
It seems simple consolation to order the misconstrued,
as if to give it a lie is to render it so.
Thinking it into a drama lets Act V fall uneventfully,
and properly. My teacher would say, it turns narcissism into schadenfreude.
I would answer, it does this, it does that, what else are explanations but higher orders of coherence
-- which is to say, higher order of consolation.
At the same time, it seems there was no place left to go, and we were at the eastern extremity of the island. It seems there was no place left to go by design.
(... but somewhere,
after another few new months of
before-unknown ways of looking,
will be an improbable moment
as a star rises or falls in a reminding way,
and when for the first and last time,
the regret of not-said will lose its vice
on the wonder of was.
... and that will be wonderful.)
Hundreds of small lines,
painted on the smooth sides of thick glass,
each one measuring a slow evaporation,
every graduation a different measure-mark of condensing time --
a line attempting to tint the glass and preserve its moment,
a line seeing itself sideways,
a measure-mark of a rainy season in the widening of a tree.
And now, this.
The world doesn't care about you,
the anticlimax announces --
as if there were by journeying the property of making-care,
or in the tangles of presence some more permanent conversation.
One might add:
"if there were a you, a care, a world," and the rest.
You are a civilian now, not protected, not a-part-of,
you are not a soldier in a plain man's clothes.
"as if there were a soldier, a man..."
The quiet rests a half-note's time,
a rectangle floating quietly above its index line --
and now this, a measure of marked time,
becomes itself an occasion of moment --
with some of the same problems of the punctuation it brackets,
and some of its character,
as though it holds something more than mirror-looking within.
Or as if there were one point in driving
where you turned around and your hair pressed against the back of your
head as you looked at a grazing animal,
who doesn't care where you are heading,
"as if there were a caring animal..."
as you sped toward a destination you have long forgotten.
It is still there, now, and you have some of the same accoutrements,
the backpack on your floor traveled with you to Montana,
your socks have all been to Jordan,
and you yet maintain change.
As I said, the animal is still grazing, "the same as it ever was."
Cows almost certainly possess the banality of permanence.
There remains, at this time, an orientation towards,
possibly... amending the record?
As if a fast-spoken word, even sincere, might be somehow retrieved,
like a dropped earring in a bin filled with cans and bottles,
and as if the scroll might be better written for the omission.
Another dishonesty, this possibility --
but a thoughtful one still,
like this drive to say "ad kan," until here, thus far, this much, no more,
this line-drawing on a wide range.
It's as natural as you might want to dare to say,
and the evening now, pregnant, quiet,
seems full of our natures,
staring at split-leaf red maples against a sky drawn in two by an
airliner carrying men to their destinations.
The late day hours between six and nine invite their own reflection --
they almost ask to refract three o'clock's light in their red,
they are comfortable with park-bench sitting, and watching.
These hours seem to have invented the need for "melancholy."
They weigh of a permanence which dusk undermines.
"As if there were melancholy, and permanence..."
I know today's words are not new to you,
and yet the power of reference is another false measure,
suggesting maturity by comparison to your big brother,
or cousin, who you hardly know --
and it is not even as thoughtful as amending the record.
Strangest of the human conditions in these times of measuring out,
is the tactile need for immediate presence,
as if the side of the neck could be the stable compass-point,
past all the insidious folks along for the credentials
and the connivance of a hundred sleazy accumulators,
beyond the false-stated pretension of greater complexity --
as if more dense speech is by its nimbler avoidance of obviousness
not merely eloquent but somehow a greater defense --
"as if there was that to be defended, that to be defended against, etc."
as if, that is to say, these lines had to have at their points of index,
some proximity to the substance of their subject,
and that they might invent that substance if it's gone, or dead,
or never was from the first.
There are so many simple human names describing solitude
that, like the absence of melancholy when dusk flies, miss most of the marks,
etched in white paint on cylindrical glass.
These names we know are not divinations,
they conjure nothing but our own half-perceptions,
and though they go part of the way,
there are all the familiar problems of a flower facing a river,
a tree falling here and there, and the various other projections
of a few things not fulfilled.
The names we have for the things we lack,
these however may be closest to accurate,
since they only describe the circumference of what is not,
and do not try to fill its contents and measure its volume,
sample the closeness of touching and the unusual foreign accent
of separation.
Leave taking, it is to be sent away.
It seems not final, and is probably no more so
than any of the diffused moments of "in between,"
from the dead mannequin awkward firsts
to whatever remains.
But there is nonetheless a passage through harbors
like a ship slowly grinding noiselessly away,
measuring the rising and falling waves by the lines on its hull,
moving towards some destination in a place whose borders are not drawn,
but for us visible only as this giant portage,
an unwieldy object whose scope is hard to see,
but through which it measures the gradually receding lines of our shore.
Self-described auburn leaves ringing in a late meadow,
standing back from the weight of sky,
Staring at the revolving blue
and air cut thin by a distant white plane,
both the he biography gave him,
and the himselves he dares imagine,
myselves, yours, All.
I learned depression from a rock and roll song,
which has played out of fashion for years.
There is no such thing as new pornography.