Category: poetics

Forgetting Someone

Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light
in the backyard so it stays lit all the next day

But then it is the light that makes you remember.

-Yehuda Amichai (translated by Chana Bloch)

I sent this to a friend but then read it again and felt that it isn’t enough to share it with just one person. (I must miss New York.)

Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye
by Gerald Stern

Every city in America is approached
through a work of art, usually a bridge
but sometimes a road that curves underneath
or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel—

you don’t know it—that takes you through the rivers
and under the burning hills. I went there to cry
in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle
through fire and flood. Some have little parks—

San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque
is beautiful from a distance; it is purple
at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian,
especially from the little rise on the hill

at 14-C; it has twelve entrances
like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived,
has two small floating bridges in front of it
that brought me in and out. I said good-bye

to them both when I was 57. I’m reading
Joseph Wood Krutch again—the second time.
I love how he lived in the desert. I’m looking at the skull
of Georgia O’Keeffe. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye.

He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city
in every sense of the word; he wore a library
across his chest; he had a church on his knees.
I’m kissing him good-bye; he was, for me,

the last true city; after him there were
only overpasses and shopping centers,
little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper
with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf

where whores couldn’t even walk, where nobody sits,
where nobody either lies or runs; either that
or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum,
a flower sucking the water out of a rock.

What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores
lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick
turning the bricks up, numbering the shards,
dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left

with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial.
I put it in my leather pockets next
to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys,
my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there

beside his famous number; there is smoke
and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter
is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting
is taking down his words. I’m kissing Stieglitz

goodbye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos
are making me cry; we’re walking down Fifth Avenue;
we’re looking for a pencil; there is a girl
standing against the wall—I’m shaking now

when I think of her; there are two buildings, one
is in blackness, there is a dying poplar;
there is a light on the meadow; there is a man
on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.

Katie

She loves three things:
moving a stamp from adhesive
to envelope, luggage
with a loud silver clasp,
and an old jar as goblet. She hates
to think of her mother
in her separate bed;
she hates the phrase yes-or-no
and the pert requirements
of morning.

And I live without her.

Now you walk through New York frigid in your layers
Flumes of farsighted taxis tunnel by alongside you
The agony of love tightens in your neck
As if you would never see those loved again
As if you were living in another nation where the gestures are unfamiliar
You are unsure of your consonants & use them delicately
You unfurl your tongue in slowmotion as you whistle
The threads of your throat coat
Three slips of wind
It is a song on its way to lovely
And it will be neither taken nor given away freely

Last Wednesday I received a letter addressed to me in my own handwriting. This never fails to utterly disturb and confuse me for three seconds, until I remember that it must be from a journal that required a SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope) in order to deliver me a rejection letter. But–MIRACLE OF MIRACLES–this one was not a rejection. The Connecticut River Review wants to publish my poem “It Hurts Your Eyes (To Look)” and this bit of unfathomable good luck will be appropriately celebrated as soon as I finish my literary theory paper and Spring Break 2010 officially begins.

(I’d post the poem here, but then I might get in trouble because maybe it’d count as being previously published, and that’s not allowed, and oh the rules of the internet are very confusing when it comes to issues such as these. So I guess if you really want to see the poem, you’ll just have to email me [taylormkatz@gmail.com] and go, Taylor Frickin’ Katz. Congratulations and gimme gimme. And I’ll happily give it give it.)

The poem that was Connor Donohue’s life has ended abruptly and the world will not be the same.

but how to collect a human?

Collective nouns.

(Yes, these are real. My favorites are bolded.)

• A shrewdness of apes.
• A flange of baboons.
• A cete of badgers.
• A parcel of birds. A pod of birds (small flock). A volary of birds (in an aviary).
• A dissimulation of birds.
• An obstinancy of buffalo.
• A rabble of butterflies.
• A clowder of cats. A clutter. A comfort. A chowder.
• A coalition of cheetahs.
• A quiver of cobras.
• A muster of crows. A hover. A parcel. A murder. A horde. A parliament.
• A pitying of turtle doves.
• A seething of eels.
• A charm of finches.
• A stand of flamingoes. A flamboyance of flamingoes.
• A skulk of foxes.
• A kindergarten of giraffes. A journey. A kaleidoscope.
• A troubling of goldfish.
• A remuda of horses.
• A cackle of hyenas.
• A husk of jackrabbits.
• A brood, smuck, or smack of jellyfish.
• A troop of kangaroos.
• A kendle of kittens.
• A loveliness of ladybirds.
• A leap of leopards.
• A steam of minnows.
• A business of mongooses.
• A pandemonium of parrots.
• A covey of partridges.

Barscene

space
There’s no need to buy me
a drink. I’m mad about neighbors
but the thought of you
relocating to the barstool on my right
makes me long to plug up
every hole I own
with chewing gum.

But here you are & so
I gab to fill the pinkspace
of the conversation.
Midnight catches me mid-
yawn and tra la la it’s time
for a visit to the bathroom:
that timeworn pretense

granted to women
from the plucky goddesses
of fuck-that-dude.
I feel you watching
what my bluejeans cover
as I tootle towards
the toilet’s gumstained walls.

The sass detained
in half my ass
could crash your hard drive, boy.
Don’t waste
your hard-earned dollars
on goods I won’t imbibe.
When it comes to chitchat,

love & beverages,
the truth stings: we diverge.

katzenjammer (noun)

a. A hangover, or a symptom of one.

b. transf. and fig. An unpleasant aftermath or reaction; depression, ‘blues’; clamour, uproar.

c. Katzenjammer Kids (or Children), mischievous, naughty children; enfants terribles. So called from the title of a comic strip, first drawn by Rudolph Dirks in 1897 for the New York Journal, featuring Hans and Fritz, two incorrigible children. Also attrib.

**Watch our for us Katzes. We come with aftermath.

(definition culled from the wide & glorious Oxford English Dictionary)

Brooklyn Heat

Thinking back to that June afternoon,
the medals of coolness rise

to the top of memory like cream:
the park’s recipe of shade & breeze,

the surprise of watermelon,
& the celestial spray of the fountain

we stood close to.
I kept stretching my arms wide,

pushing my belly, hot as everything else,
into the mist. Underneath the separate

sprays was Poseidon, his beard
like twelve ropes conversing.

Looking at my companions,
I could not say with conviction

whom I loved most.
The library stood nearby & lampooned

me with a gleaming
of columned creatures in gold

that bared a deep and stately knowledge
unknowable to any of us

sweaty, splattering humans.
Therefore I, neither Greek nor godlike,

exhaled as my dream self jumped
into the arctic spume of the fountain

and there, unbodied & wild,
I showered down beside Poseidon, a rainbow of cool.