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Snapshots
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THE WOMAN I LEFT YOU FOR
FLASHES OF CONSCIOUSNESS On three hours' sleep the car has to run on autopilot, I have renounced any pretense of control. My hands know where the wheel needs to be turned, where one road becomes the next I am too tired for road rage. Depth perception is for discussions of Dutch and Flemish painting. At least they give the illusion, this morning I lack even that. In the car listen on the CD player to Carmen: Troyanos, Domingo. Beautifully sung, pedestrian, surprise me, please God, surprise. Kenneth Wolman USA, 8.48am, 7/16/03 IDENTITY THEFT So we read it: Uday and Qusay are dead, Iraq's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern minus the recorders or Hamlet's lame jokes. You can doctor a photograph. Identity theft is big business or a diversion depending on your mood. They've got the dental records? To hell with that--maybe they have Uday's dick too, the way urban legend says the FBI has John Dillinger's. If that's so, the Army should put it in the Museum, plant photos in the Baghdad Enquirer: "Here it is, proof that the biggest prick in Iraq is gone!" Uday and Qusay belong in the Freak Show of the Unspeakable next to two opera characters, Radames and Ramfis Trujillo. Anyone can fix anything: how do we know who is dead? Perhaps the dead Hussein Brothers are Photoshop fakes. Perhaps for that matter Joe Stalin is still alive. Who would have been his body double? Maybe that's why they shot Beria right after: dressed him up like his boss. Maybe they got Mandelstam's body out of 15 years in cold storage to be laid out in Joe's uniform and medals. Politicians, after all, have strange senses of humor and anything is possible in Washington, London, or Moscow when you are utterly amoral. Kenneth Wolman USA, 2.44pm, 7/23/03 NOTHING A day of not procrastination but of nothing, dryness, one of my frequent strolls into the Desert. So not to get grandiose: I was not tempted by the allure of Principalities and Powers, I was not shown women waved in my face as they've been before, I was not even overloaded by work. I was content. I slept for the first time in two weeks. Do I, I wonder, need irritation to write? A finger upraised by another driver, an argument with my S.O., having to clean up cat puke at 6:15 AM? None of this. How do people with nothing to bitch about lead creative lives? Do I lead a creative life even when I'm bitching about something? I want to solve...
The one I can't solve becomes the poetry, what someone called the argument with oneself. I think. Kenneth Wolman USA, 7/30/03 REMEMBRANCE DAY Public Radio at 7 AM while I'm in my car: "Today is August 6, 2003." I was 18 months old when it happened. Still, it is Remembrance Day. In a Chaim Potok novel a doomed rabbi prays at the Hiroshima shrine, recites the Mourners' Kaddish to remember the dead by magnifying and sanctifying the name of God. I have dreamed, this night past, of myself returned to that same faith, years renounced, living as I never did before among the frum, in a place that cooks New Jersey and the Bronx into a cholent, sweet with the scent of meat and fertility. Forgiveness, though unspoken, is possible. Reconciliation--the forgiven life--is asked and granted. I'm dreaming. There is nothing to it. It is another Bronx dream only now rabbis and women in sheytls have replaced my parents. I go back to the Bronx when the shrink has changed the meds and my head is still adjusting. There is nothing to it. And yet driving across the Rumson bridge, knowing what I think I know, I hear the Hiroshima date, and the taste of earth and ashes fills my mouth. Kenneth Wolman, USA Irondequoit Bay THE BOULDER DANCER (for John Berryman) Elbow my damned way past obnoxious pedestrians, Minneapolis Friday--to work, to class I will cut. This is my day off, unscheduled time. No sin then: forgiven though uncommitted. Too responsible. Never a deed like this on a day I'd teach Thucydides or the Letters of St. Paul. So cold here. And the warm apartment remembered, she quiet, still smarting. Oh Kate, shut the hell up, cut the silent whining: you knew what I was, what I am, I am Popeye, I yam what I yam, cannot stop being: Hazelden, AA, nobody, not even me, prince of my ego, could stop. This stops, quietus made with a bare boulder. Fear of heights, of everything, but not today, not now: my valediction Lenny Bruce, "Father Flotsky's Triumph," this wave--not at passers-by but at God Hisself, gwine to face Him get (Mr. Bones-to-be) Da Judgmen' fo' drunks, fo' cattin' 'round, & now dis: but let go, cry "Yatta-yatta, Father, yatta-yatta!" Kenneth Wolman, USA FOR STAN RICE I cannot even sit on a toilet seat without bad news of mortality. Read Poets & Writers, the intellectual's drekschrift in lieu of People magazine read about the task of editing Stan Rice's last book. Last book. Le Testament de La Morte, Psalms, prefigurations of 9/11, then its afterglow: not of love but of smoking bodies. Thrownback. Memories of "Some Lamb," the first poetry I read that left me quivering wanting, praying to God, to be sick to my stomach to purge the horror from inside me, wanting to kill Death because Rice told me that six years old or ninety-six I stood in line. Kenneth Wolman The Dance It has taken me years to come to my personal Center of Indifference. My ex-wife points her accusing finger, I feel like I am in the middle of Bruegel's "Triumph of Death," embraced by the bony arms of a shared past from which all flesh has fallen. Yet now I can throw my arms around it, the bony-raggy figure, dance with it, take away its power with a shrug, a slough. When my younger son comes to the car, about to be transported south to begin a life of his own, away from us, my ex and I look at each other in a moment of shared Something, perhaps merely the knowledge of history, the memory of fallen flesh: the marriage's, hers, mine. Kenneth Wolman Strangers on a Train There was a very appealing woman in her 40's who rode the Hoboken train with me each morning. She'd get on in Middletown, get off at Newark, presumably heading to lower Manhattan. She wore blue-tinted glasses and had long blond hair. I did not know her name. Our only conversations were "Excuse me" and "Of course" when she tried to sit down across from me now and then, sometimes rub my knee perhaps by accident. Then she disappeared. When I went back to work on Monday after that horrid Tuesday morning, she was not on the 6:51. Never again. I did not know her, I do not miss her, But at this moment I grieve her. There was a dour-looking man, tall and heavy-set, who always wore the same distressed leather shoes and carried a ratty briefcase. I disliked him because he looked like my girlfriend's ex-husband. Then he disappeared. When I went back to work on Monday after that horrid Tuesday morning, he was not on the 6:51. Three weeks after that morning when I stared up like a turkey at the rain of Hell, I missed my train and took a later one. There he was on the platform, the ex-husband lookalike, chainsmoking and seeming unpleasant. And I was filled with utter joy. Kenneth Wolman Daily Life Marianne Moore cut the line from her revision of "Poetry": "Beyond all this fiddle." I can intuit why: the lady, when she wasn't at Mets games or buying funny hats, must have shopped at Jersey malls. Monmouth County is all fiddle. We await with almost excitement the hurricane that probably will not come. Some will be disappointed if it's only rain, not the ewige vernichtung of a Cat5 killer storm. My car needs a brake job. The dentist botched my root canal and tomorrow I shall give her a chance to finish the job. These are things of no moment. Even now they are of no moment to me. I browse displays of hammered dulcimers and dream of the celestial sounds that drown out the click of failing brakes or the sickening whirr of the drill. Fiddle indeed. Kenneth Wolman Birthday, a Fragment Years ago I found a picture my mother kept of me at a birthday party, mine, and I was one year old. It was February 1945. The child that I know as Me is grinning, he seems truly happy and unafraid. I am still looking for where I lost him. Kenneth Wolman "You Stepped Out of a Dream...." Six years later, she will walk into a dream, interrupt it as she interrupted opera broadcasts, poem-writing, autoerotic fantasies. No "How've you been?" or pleasantries as courtesy dictates for life in real life, simply that jackhammer voice pounding through the concrete block of the husband's skull, affirming in dreams this marriage for eternity, beyond the last kiss and the final embrace, even beyond the stiff courtroom nod. The husband speaks but can't hear his own voice. The dream is all hers, the captious voice of failures, mockery and ice proclaiming ruination, every plan he has come to nothing, every dream doomed to contain her. On the other side of dreams one day they will meet-- or so he thinks--and then perhaps will come an end to the cold that visits in July at 3 AM, there will be a place for forgiveness. Or maybe not. Better to just wake up. Kenneth Wolman Princeton, NJ Star-Ledger, 10/1/03 (for Lynda Hull) Not another yawnful knock on an easy target, but a glimpse behind the stucco, a finding: the moldy guitar, worm-eaten beneath the shored-up porch, million dollar houses harbor the lives we'd love to think belong in trailer parks. A former investment bank executive has not worked since late 2000. After his death his former employer will not disclose the reason they separated. One may be married to his job but business divorce is a private horror. So he has, still, the high-priced house, a beautiful wife with a UN job, he spends his days keeping pace and losing ground, running up credit card debt, and caring for their young son. Perhaps he cannot ask. And if he can, what matter? Community dissolves: cancer is more easily handled than unemployment. Lose your job, you are a Death's Head, the fate awaiting others who cross the street when you walk toward them. So he floats adrift on the raft of the Medusa and sees at last her snaky hair, his heart turns not to rock but magma. He strangles his son, age seven, walks to the local railroad station, hears a train, kneels on the tracks before it as though in worship of this final God of his eternal deliverance. When his wife arrives home from New York she is met at the door by local police. "Ma'am, maybe you better sit down." Suburban brickface crumbles, porches rot, there is no music left. Kenneth Wolman. USA "Ora e per sempre addio, sante memorie!" Don't speak save your strength I do not need to hear your voice need to talk to you you amidst the hospital smells I married your daughter love you better than she no strings attached voluntary commitment her I loved not wisely not too well either Look at you not say goodbye as though to say so is a curse See you tomorrow instead her face silent animated yet twists putty gray then the smile audible "Only if you are prepared to follow me tonight!" Silence beneath not silence but the wounded-beast tenor the pain pounding tympanic. Kenneth Wolman. USA ERIC DOLPHY PLAYS “NIGHT MUSIC,” SYRACUSE, NY, 1962 A bass clarinet crawls up the patrons' legs, curls round them serpentine doomed man madman deathbound diabetic who lived on demand on a white bean diet tonight violently revives revolves draws a room to him playing the black constrictor no breath but his the constrictor squeezes the eyes shut the lungs closed the ears open. KTW Princeton/Sea Bright, NJ GRANDFATHER Not yet I'm not--but last night, suddenly, thought it might be fun, though both my sons seem disinclined to marry, understandable given family history, still, accidents happen, and I thought then how nice I'd have it, bouncing the (literal) little bastard on my knee, singing to him (even though everyone in the house would tell me to shut up, Verdi scares the kid) even volunteering to change his diaper, a skill I learned and mastered with the same sons who've grown to be the fathers of these mind-children. Later, because he's still a mental creature, I could take him for walks through my imagination-- or maybe not: I'd probably scare us both to death. KTW/11-5-03, Princeton, NJ Tedium. Drive time. Donne wrote of Good Friday heading westward. The march toward Death, not the recalled Passion leading to the Cross but the shared Passion, the fact of humanity the common ticket. This is mundane: westward each morning on Route 33, bad pavement, gravel trucks, talk show hosts, NPR, sometimes broken by music, a clarinetist playing Debussy-- barely a comfort, inappropriate as Bjoerling singing in a whorehouse. Westward not toward death but toward employment, what was so long craved turned to the morning small-p sexless passion. KTW/11-12-03 MY LIFE AS AN EXTENDED X-RAY Transparent for years--more now. The chiropractor points at my insides, turned to the question mark that is nothing new to my mind, but's moved now to my spine. Scoliosis. Disk degeneration. Not the first time I've been called a degenerate, either. But there are upsides: if my voice holds out perhaps I can sing Rigoletto or cast myself in the miniseries "The Voyeuristic Passions of Alexander Pope," made when Reagan became too controversial. In the meantime I need to buy myself The Comfy Chair. KTW/11-19-03 A DEATH IN ENGLISHTOWN A body on the roadside: someone has moved her to the shoulder, or the driver got a lucky hit that threw her back and sideways. The State is so overpopulated, what is one more or less on a cold November morning when people's minds are elsewhere? Death is a commonplace on Jersey roads so she goes unnoticed. In the next lane, a driver sits and shaves. Another has her cell-phone, yelling as though she matters. On the roadside, the doe is intact but her shapely head is bloodied. Sometimes a traveler comes who is amazed that we share--human and animal-- this sticky red commonality, both symbol and reality of our transience. In an hour the County will send a truck to fetch her. Perhaps, though unlikely, a workman will stroke her cold fur and whisper words of their shared fragility. KTW/11-26-03, 2 PM, Princeton, NJ Kenneth Wolman MADNESS ... the murderous couple, victims of an all consuming amour fou that drives their passions to extremes.--comment on The Postman Always Rings Twice with Lana Turner and John Garfield. Big deal. This is what love is: "Combats amoureux is amour fou" Read: fluidic carnage, kimchi for sure, nutritious and rank. How many hotel rooms have needed fumigation or been outright condemned? The stuff of Medieval theory, that passionate love is a disease, it sweeps through families, destroys them, is unavoidable like a plague or death or even love. KTW, 12/3/03, Princeton, NJ BRIDGE (after Sonny Rollins, 1959) Rollins grows his legend, sprawls tone across the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, into the black, healing up hero no longer heroin, drawing starpower, giving it back, making love to lights and velvet of City night. God bless this child he is is own he is God's child. In the building where he lives, a God's child, newborn, sleeps sound undisturbed by the weeping brass for Sonny has gone to the Bridge. Ken Wolman, 12/09/03-75, 12-10-03 (2:02 PM) The Structure of Imperial Whoids in a Cartoon Universe Whot is a whog? An orthographic reminder of Empire proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain: wog is a word, inspirational, WOG an acronym, almost forgotten, fallen into ill-repute, reminder so it's said the Victorian Brits, defined "Wog" as starting across the English Channel not just in Bangalore or Kashmir. Change a letter, advance to WCOG: Wiley Coyote Oriental Gentleman. A cartoon Wog, clever, ill-intentioned, ultimately doomed to repeat his weekly doom, anvil-fodder. So the bird he pursues becomes the face of Empire, grinning stupidity charging forward, thoughtless, in this version invulnerable. Ken (oh well, it's been a long day)br> MuttBoy: On the Eve of Christ's Nativity The only thing memorable in fifty-nine of them is that Christmas night many years ago was the first time I got laid. Some present: I should have stayed celibate. Have I said too much, spoken crassly? Deal with it. I barely remember it: except there wasn't no mistletoe to kiss her under first or after: she was Jewish too. I still think a monastery would have been a better choice: for I also got into Pandora's box. If you want to call that Sexual Nausea, knock yourself out, for every Christmas has that memory. When I turned Catholic I was denied even the cursed dignity of mourning mirrors draped, no one cared, I was alone, added Catholic sin to Jewish guilt and let myself go almost mad. Returned to my roots, formally forgiven (but by whom?), I contemplate the lack of caring I feel, how I missed the truth that God lives inside me, in the rain, even in that same love I sought years ago, seek still, that I have made myself a mutt of the Mansions of God, but that mutts prance and dance even in the rain. KTW/Christmas Eve, 2003 CLOSING TIME Someone invites me to write my way out of the year. I feel today as though nothing is of moment, there is a great sense of So Whatness. But. Not everything is picayune. Earlier, I received a note to look on a website, at photographs, taken before the fall of the city of Bam, the city in Iran earthquaked into ruin. I felt I was looking at Roman Vishniac's photographs of prewar Polish Jews, feeling not the superior knowledge of one who knows how the story ends, but the tears of God who cannot arrest the free will of man or Nature run psychotic brandishing a knife. There is another picture: a Bengal tiger, up close, its eyes staring out at me. He is in a zoo but he is not Rilke's panther: there is nothing restless in the gaze, his soul is calm and visible. He has no interest in me, in others, even in being let alone. He is content simply to observe himself being observed, confident in his self-knowledge via my act of anthropomorphism that, given the opportunity wrought by human stupidity, he will eat my throat. Tomorrow the memory of Bam will be in place. The tiger will continue to stare. The calendar will have changed. So Whatness is too important to be wasted. KTW/12-31-03 "Poet's Cat Detained as Illegal Combatant at GITMO" So that's where she went. Not to some Rainbow Bridge (sniffle, barf) but got snatched, stuffed into a carrier box on a flight from McGuire, sent someplace she didn't belong. She'd be happy enough. All she ever wanted, this dangerous terrorist masked as a 15-pound feline Mae West, was for a bunch of human-type guys to grope her. Muslims? Christians? Made no difference, not a bigoted bone in that body. Sometimes we'd call her Madonna Cat lacking only the stainless steel bra. Real life makes me resort to theft, my place to hide: For I will consider our cat Macy For she was the servant of the living God For I perceived God's light about her both wax and fire. For she died Monday, kidneys quit, heart seized. For she and the God she served knew better than we the best way to the egress, For she beat the vet's poisoned needle, For she eluded even our chance to say goodbye which this writing is, a theft to answer a theft, and imperfect as its maker. For she is departed someplace, we hope, even before her time, to where she really belongs. For if Theophile Gautier was right, a soul lived behind those eyes. For it is here now. KTW/1-14-04 Princeton, NJ, 11:15 AM (after Geoffrey Gatza and Christopher Smart) NPR's "Fresh Air" last night had an interview with Paul Auster. He said one of the things he would like to imagine is the first meeting of his parents. Delmore Schwartz did this in "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." My turn. This is a fast sketch, nothing nearly finished. First Meeting of My Parents, 1927 "Everyone knows what is in Room 101" Inelegant in felt hat and vested suit he looks her over in the furrier's office hey nice ass she knows he is looking cocks her head over her shoulder smiles maiden pre-Raphaelite pose furs pelts in place of water lilies and fallen leaves on a forest floor eventually there will be me much later too later too late Imagination fails I cannot do this the ultimate challenge picture your parents Doing It Almost 60 years old and I still can't He will take her to lunch perhaps dinner it will go as it went does he tell her he is married does she care it will explode legalistic acid spattering him them both what they do what he does is still a crime in New York State they marry in 1934 what is left by then but too much knowledge of the other they are pre-owned misery burned into them even at the vows by 1944 undercooked but finished Kenneth Wolman, USA Harp Seal Bark No poem, nothing will come, only our dog this week encountering a harp seal pup, beached, surely afraid, and the dog tries to get it to play, the harp seal barks too. A failure to communicate even though they speak something like the same language? Ken Wolman SANDBURG'S ALLEGED CAT Damned if the little beast didn't walk on little cat feet. What do you expect from a feline? Silence: questionable. Exile: only if Carl by mistake left the cat outside overnight. Cunning? Absolutely. That's what they're for. Maybe Carl had his cat declawed so you'd never hear him coming. Some people like surprises along the line of IRS audits, unexpected transmission jobs, or a dose ("Jesus, she said it was okay!"). So perhaps, being of milder nature, Carl liked the cat to spring up on him from behind, never hear it coming. Fog at the Jersey Shore rolls silently onto the peninsula. The dog, frightened, will not walk in it. The cats live indoors. Little cat feet in your dreams and mine-- they clatter and slide over the floors at 2 AM, running side by side, less the silence of Jersey fog than Turnpike traffic and the Ben Hur chariot race. Ken Wolman/2-11-04 (backdated like a bad check) Birthday Letter 1: Metropark Epitome of middle-aged beauty rotating down the platform before me red hair streams over her coat recall Botticelli but she turns face of Elizabeth I porcelain makeup O Jesus Christ can I pick them and the eye job her make-up case brushes colors screwdriver and sterling silver pliers removes an imperfect eye bright blue polishes it lose that last trace of a cataract reinserts it why am I still looking at this is everything else on her what I cannot see also an artifice are her hidden joys propelled by a wind-up clock is she really a Woodbridge cop? she examines the other eye in her mirror satisfied leaves it where it is thank God applies coats of eyeliner needs a palette knife coats of mascara purple is the color of my true loves eyes in the morning when we rise fantasy trashed watch her eat a Twix bar instead think that if the train had been on time I would have missed all this Kenneth Wolman FIND HOME, MAKE HOME Take things to heart about which no one cares. Who cares if you feel homeless when there is a roof over your head? Get over yourself. Dennis Leary glares at you, whiner, snaps "Shut the fuck up!" What are you? Not who, what. To say "The heavens are silent" scratches at it. Your spiritual self, assuming you have one on its own, the world as the beehive you envisioned 1967 during an acid trip: everyone in little cells of the comb, alone together. It has not changed: today a bunch of people in a church basement chanting the Our Father: wahoo whoopee, look at me, I am spiritual. We want conclusiveness. I do. There isn't any. If you are lucky one day leads to its successor a dynasty of individual lives that ends but you won't be here to see it. Be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be: That's all folks! Happy closure. Kenneth Wolman/Princeton, 3/3/04 The day job Someone once sent me a card an illustration like a 1930s horror film "The Job That Ate My Brain" People who think they are writers should not have routine day jobs I know Wallace Stevens managed insurance Charles Ives had the same job Dana Gioia was a Lever Brothers manager until he sold out They are exceptions if not exceptional in their ability to leap between two moving trains like Hoot Gibson in a serial Western Most days it's impossible I fake work fight on the phone with a cell phone provider leave exhausted halfway pleased only because I did not call the customer service person an officious asshole Small consolations that lead to now, freewriting that a Composition teacher would grade Nice Start Needs Work. Ken Wolman, sea bright, 9:50 pm Macho Man Carries His Cross Gibson is not the Jesus they taught me in RCIA: even in blue-collar America Jesus was forgiveness, unconditional love, Milton's One Greater Man who died for us so we could live for each other. It sounded great until I met some priests who I don't think forgave their mothers for birthing them. Go to the movie anyway. Mel gets a lot right: the Jesus-actor sweating blood in Gesthemane, the fear eating into him even before the nail-studded whips make him look like he'd been stuffed into a meatgrinder. "Febrile terror": this guy was me before I went to divorce court, before I entered a roomful of strangers, spoke my first name and proclaimed my condition. Gibson does radio interviews now, easy target on the senex Andy Rooney, comes on like Mad Max and says "If he had a pair he'd say it to my face," repeats "If he had a pair" over and over, macho mantra, a great feat calling out an 85-year-old man. What a guy. Maybe there's an answer, though: hand-to-hand combat, expand the principle of A Pair to politics, Kerry in gladatorial combat with Bush in a ballpark retiarius versus secutor, sangre y arena, supposedly George Patton challenged Erwin Rommel to a man-to-man tank duel in the desert. Nothing came of it: maybe though they could have killed each other. "You forgive and move on" says the good Christian Mel, but damned if Detective Riggs, that lethal weapon, still doesn't wanna take old Andy out into the parking lot and whip his ancient ass with those cats of nine tails. Ken Wolman/Princeton, NJ 12:03 PM, St. Patrick's Day Larry Adler Plays "My Funny Valentine" Adler, old commie exile scandal of his family for his life as Al Jolson, wanting not the life of a cantor but to blow the harmonica like a backporch schwartze, expelled by HUAC from Baltimore, stays instead in Britain, adopts British style and dress, but keeps the acid tongue until it falls upon the chromatica the sound the sound I hear by night in the darkness of my car, Rodgers' "My Funny Valentine," the opening melody line, key of C, crying, bending, sobbing, a violin, a human voice, a Bjoerling of the harp, and the dark indeed is light enough. (For Larry Adler, harmonicist 1914-2001) Kenneth Wolman Finally, spring. Two of us at work stand outside smoking, homing to the light like cats to a sunbeam laugh and stretch ourselves a day finally to purr. Kenneth Wolman/4-7-04 JIFFYLUBE Ogle the pretty girls faces fixed in blank stares or the not so pretty or young cashier but with a smile that could melt the concrete that is your heart and stomach when you hear the damage the $29.95 oil change has become something ridiculous. Hunting World magazine filled with ads for overpriced outdoor gear articles on survival rifles because you might be out camping and have to shoot a drug dealer or take down a charging grizzly bear and you won't get a choice. Another day without choices you cannot afford to have the transmission fail the engine seize the car is hateful it is the means to your livelihood a weapon of survival outside nothing but a downpour Route 1 night and fog at noon steer the weapon back into traffic Kenneth Wolman/Princeton & Sea Bright, NJ/4-14-04 A reaction to Deborah's poem...not a snap but written like a snap, fast enough so I could not think too hard about it. We are "condemned" to return to the same material over and over, or so I've heard. This is another take on something I described years ago. The Look For years I cannot say this because I also live with it the Fear my mother's eyes Passaic General Hospital in the Emergency Room to which I have been summoned the night of my 48th birthday looking into those eyes there is articulacy beyond the speech she has lost the acid tongue is gone sarcasm vanished removed finally stripped the eyes say everything knowledge that this is the end Fear burning outward into me who grew up afraid Fear of what is beyond the great Nullity of her belief but mercy that denies Nully even Fear removed coma for the last two days now the eyes shut only the ears open heeding me who tells her it is time for her to go. Ken Wolman/4-15-04 CLOSING TIME Eliot world, Hopper world, wind across the pavement at 4 AM some guy fights to sober up, too-hot black coffee sipped in the car he dares not try to drive. Woman in bare feet, filmy dress, standing, crying on the sidewalk someone has just finished with her flung her out. Everyone grieves as they grieve: a cast-off man walks the pavement, disprized where he placed his heart, flung aside, Turgenev's superfluous man love-lost. Who sees this: me, remembering something, but hearing it first. Ernie Kovacs, long-ago's doomed television master, the clown in an unfunny truth-moment, a street scene, Elmer Rice to the opening bars of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra tragedy in Prime Time, sadness charred from blood to black. Places at last to leave. Kenneth Wolman THE TUNNEL (not after Russell Edson) Berryman came to David Wojahn in a basement tunnel where he was a night watchman, UMinn undergraduate. Perfect timing--steam pipes along the walls, darkness broken by small bulbs probably in wired-in covers. How many metaphors for Hell do we need? One a day will suffice. This is mine, yours if you want it. Where better to read about Henry, pussycat with untrimmed claws pointed at his own throat? Kenneth Wolman FALLUJAH not the name the word itself suggests an act of oral sex two recipients one finds no relief the other only humiliation what if they changed places would it go differently would the stars explode in a cliched velvet sky or would the stars merely explode Ken Wolman/Cinco de Mayo 2004 *** no word not frustration not anger nothing this is a world where radio talkshow callers scream about how what they just did is worse than what we did good guess but nobody sees cause effect the chain fine copper wire first bound around a detainee's wrists but now conducts Hell's electricity and holds together the whole thing. Ken Wolman Princeton, NJ 1:50 PM *** A lovely tribute, and yes, sad. How sad to think that, like Messiaen, birds presage healing, that Francois d'Assise could hear in them angelic orders, when all there was that day was the Abysm. Ken Wolman in the distance stand of trees, there is the hum the same low roar you would hear it if you were on route 22 nearing newark airport still two miles away cicadas their mating call love me and die if thou love me take heed of loving me Ken/Princeton 5-27-04 *** OLD GIRLFRIENDS Old girlfriends sit aslant from you in the subway, behind the Times, visible only the angle of their jaw. Their hair draws light from the sun, empties the sky to perfect darkness, cat vision. Old girlfriends pass afar on midtown streets at noon, pursued by the phantoms they have bequeathed you. Old girlfriends sing the Miserere, brass and strings pound in the stomach like moonbursts of lust. -- Kenneth Wolman *** THE ROSE GARDEN (after R. W. Reagan, 1911-2004, in memory of the Rose Garden Martyrs) The Legend on an Icon "In the early morning hours of November 16, 1989, government troops forced their way into the Jesuit residence of the Central American University in San Salvador and brutally murdered six priests and two women. 75,000 others had already been killed in El Salvador's civil war and while each death was equally tragic, these eight murders immediately took on special symbolic importance. Shot in the head with M16s at close range, their brains had been blown out of their skulls. It was as if the army had wanted to wipe out the intellectual life of their country, trampling on all that the university and western civilization represented." Gesthemane There is a rose garden at Universidad Jose Simeon Caņas, San Salvador's Jesuit university. It is a place to rest the eyes, collect the spirit, perhaps--no, surely in this place--a space for prayer. Perhaps, after all these years, it is so again. Who Knelt in This Garden? Six priests, scholars, trained as the Jesuits have always done, to think critically, even when the result is danger, theological, or to ones life. Name Them Segundo Montes Two women, one (Celina) only 15, daughter of Elba the housekeeper. People can leer: "Housekeeper, yeah right." What matter? Does a hollow-point bullet care about chastity? It has its own chastening effect. When you are shot through the back of the head, when your brains are splattered among the roses, it is the ultimate absolution and the ultimate sin. Who Was Not There Jon Sobrino, priest and Jesuit, also on the Army's short list, but on that night away from the University: become Ishmael, escaped alone to tell thee, a bony pointing finger haunted to a fury by the murder of his friends, his community, finding perhaps the seed of forgiveness. Who Will Answer? The Army of El Salvador said it was the Communists. They probably said this when Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot at the altar in a hospital chapel while saying Mass: "The Communists got him, they're godless, but we are true Catholics." By now this joke is so tired that only the large portion of the American population that has a "Duh" balloon over its head is stupid enough to believe it. By the night of the slaughter Reagan is gone from office. But he built this nightmare country, he held power while the 75,000 Salvadorians preceded the eight. They ended up Disappeared in the city dump of El Playon, Salvador's Golgatha scented with Eau de Buchenwald. Reagan cannot escape: from his hands the money poured into Salvador to supply an army that did not buy its M16s from the back pages of Soldier of Fortune. Name It In a field of roses, six men, two women, shot in the back of the head at close range. The term is Sophiacide, the murder of Wisdom. Wisdom is telling the truth of what one sees. Wisdom is naming, wisdom is not letting these names be lost. Wisdom is pointing the bony finger at the smiling drawling orator cowboy hero (yee-ha) and seeing justice: that for these eight who lost their brains in an instant in the University's rose garden, who lost their brains to protect the reign of capitalism, pietism, shit in the streets, daughters whoring to feed their families, his own brain was forfeit, he owed 10 years losing it. Maybe at the end he could sense the quid pro quo exacted on him as he exacted it upon many. Maybe he heard the voice of his inner creature, maybe he saw at last that the thorns that sprang forth that night in the Caņas rose garden stuck in his heart, tore out his mind, but live in our memories. Ken Wolman THE CANONICAL BLOOMSDAY MADE FOR TV The Cialis must have worked: Blazes Boylan, priest manque, is into the 11th Station of the Cross, the nailing of Molly Bloom. Magical Blazes: it is also Transubstantiation, for Molly's insides by now are turned from flesh to grated cheese. People didn't realize DiCaprio could play such a scumbucket or that J. Lo could convince anyone she's an Irish earth mother-- Yet it's all about illusion: or call it Faith. If Charlize Theron can be made to look like she stepped out of a bath of used french fry oil, then the blind will have their sight, the dead be raised, and the location caterers will divide two fishes, five loaves, and feed the whole crew. Edward Asner, Poldy's editor, stands at his desk, shouts "Tell him to kiss my royal Irish arse!" and you don't even wonder what a nice Jewish boy is doing in a place like this-- for the power of faith probably could make us think that Ray Charles might have starred in the life of Dale Earnhardt. Poldy and Stephen hook up, travel about in the Dublin dark. The ghosts of Zero Mostel and Milo O'Shea haunt James Gandolfini, doing his best to carry the burden of Poldy Bloom, yet failing. Faith may move mountains but New Jersey, like Eboli, is the place where Christ stopped. Ken Wolman VIA RIPA A film memory: Monty Wooley, imperious impersonation of the critic Alex Woolcott, wheeled into a room of admiring rubes, looking about, stroking his beard, saying softly "I may vomit." Our house is on the corner. Chinese deliverymen are afraid of the dog. They don't know the dog is cross-species, a big pussy: but to mailmen and guys who bring Chinese food, illusion is all. Via Ripa was known for years in town as Calle de los Borachos, a collection of wino clammers and fishermen, fighters with truly vicious dogs that nevertheless read the papers and summonses to their humans. Our neighbors: the couple who spend days working on a home improvement project they'll never finish, one kid kicked out of the Navy in wartime, the other the proverbial whiteboy asshole with a turned around baseball cap on an empty head. I may vomit, indeed. People with no visible means of support amble about, drive Lexii, My Dog's Bigger Than Your Dog, My Cat Beat Up a Schoolbus, on summer days we will repeat what has happened every year since I arrived: a guy bashing in his buddy's skull with a 2x4, us watching where the dog steps on his morning walk because of broken bottles on the street and sidewalk... the exquisite beauty of young women in halter tops headed for the sea across the street. The incomparable vision of the sun over the ocean. Go figure. Kenneth Wolman/Sea Bright & Princeton, 6/24/04 Poetryetc is a listserv relating to poetry and poetics which provides a forum for poets to debate their critical and creative work. The list has over the years run a number of projects for its members, of which Snapshots has been the most enduring. Every Wednesday, Poetryetc members were invited to post short poems on any subject or in any form they chose. The idea was to make a poetic collage of instamatic “snaps” of that day that reflected the international membership of the list. The project has generated an astounding number of poems. The first two runs, of six weeks each, and the first ten weeks of the third run, are archived at Wild Honey Press www.wildhoneypress.com under Poetryetc Project. The rest - amounting in all to a run of a year - are archived here. Poetryetc, like its affiliate Salt Publishing (http://www.saltpublishing.com), was founded by Australian poet John Kinsella. Salt is managed by Christopher Hamilton-Emery (cemery@saltpublishing.com), while Poetryetc is owned by Alison Croggon (ajcroggon@bigpond.com). Poetryetc is now archived at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/poetryetc.html. and anyone interested can join from that url. To contact the listowner: Alison Croggon These pages are designed, maintained, and hosted by Rebecca Seiferle, the Editor of The Drunken Boat. To email. 
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