So I pretended to be sad. / Now I am old and have tasted every sorrow, /
And I am content to loaf /And enjoy the clear autumn. [Hsin Ch’i Chi] or Tu Fu’s
“Restless Night” or “Full Moon,” ever since you first read Pound’s Cathay at 19.
You’d always return to that well for refreshment, as have I, as have I.
But we sit there awhile longer until the loons take up their nocturnal chorus
as if on cue, almost directly on heels of night’s arrival, and a while after that.
This disc always tears me up whenever I play it, and I find it nearly unbearable
not to be sharing it, sitting beside you at sunset, autumn coming on.
SO
In memory of Michael O’Brien
So, my friend is gone,
whose counsel I depended on,
not in how I lived my life,
but in matters to do with language,
what words went where
or were best dispensed with entirely,
which, one might say, is less important
and more easily addressed.
So slender as to seem fragile,
he resembled an instrument
sensitive enough to register the slightest tremor
or shift in wind …
To whom do I turn for tuning now?
—Sew buttons, Mrs. Di Camillo, our neighbor next door
would reply when I’d turn up in her kitchen
and ask, as if on cue, “So?”
then give me a cookie,
for having played my part so well.
She must have sensed what was going on
across the rhododendrons. I loved her
and remember those cookies still.
She baked them herself, with colored sprinkles.
I remember her kindness
and the aroma of those cookies,
the most inviting haven of my young years.
Her kitchen was a place where I could go
should I ever have a need to sneak away.
Strange I should think of her now,
at this moment, 60 years later.
We would sing together, as well.
It only comes to me as I write this down,
and for the first time:
she must have had no children of her own.
“COMING ON THE HUDSON”: WEEHAWKEN
He seldom spoke, even when well, and when he did it was misterioso, brief,
a gnomic shorthand, often only a grunt,
but his musicians got it, Nellie, Boo-Boo, and Sphere III too.
Nowadays next to nothing comes out of his mouth, nothing at all.
—What’s with his head, Woo?
(He insisted on calling all his doctors “Ping Pock Woo,” can’t say why.)
—Dunno, says Woo.
A Steinway, marooned, in a corner of the living room.
Him mostly in the bedroom. Nica’s cats pad in and out,
licking themselves clean where they’ve collapsed in a puddle of sunshine.
Still, he carefully dresses every morning, spiffed up, suit and tie,
only to stay lying there in bed, glued to Bob Barker and The Price Is Right:
the dinette sets and double-door Amana refrigerators,
brought to you by 100% pure Dove soap and Imperial margarine.
Out the window of the old Von Sternberg house Nica’s brother bought,
three Bauhaus cubes midst the frame & brick extravaganzas on Kings Bluff,
tugs push garbage scows south to the harbor’s mouth and open sea.
He watches the river all day long. That’s what he does:
what the wind and light make of the water, for seasons on end,
the shimmer off the river at 9 a.m., the wakes the ferries and cruise ships make—
headed where? Barbados? The Antilles? France?—
slowly passing across his field of vision like giant, ocean-going wedding cakes.
What is there left to say, anyhow? Or play? They either got it or not.
His world, or what of it that’s stayed with him, lies directly across the way:
the tenements of the old San Juan Hill neighborhood, Minton’s, 52nd Street—
none of it what it was, everything something else …
He watches as the lights begin to switch on across the river come end of day,
the skyline and clouds above going electric with pinks and reds
as the sun goes down behind him over the Meadowlands in the west.
Sometimes at night, looking across, he feels a twinge, the throb and pull of it.
But it don’t pull all that hard, and it’s too damn much of a bother anyhow.
SHE
She was eating an onion as if it were an apple,
keeping her distance from the rest of us gathered there
on the shore of the vast and famous volcano lake.
It was an interlude for writers at some sort of literary affair.
We had just been served a dreadful local prosecco
the event’s organizers seemed unreasonably proud of,
hick culture functionaries in this distant corner of Oceania.
Stand-offish though she may have affected to be,
I walked directly over to where she was standing and said,
—Is the onion meant to discourage the plague of suitors
who will be drawn like moths to the radiance of your beauty?
She barely acknowledged that I was even there, turning
her head ever so slightly in my direction as if she had picked out
in the breeze the faintest strains of an unfamiliar folk melody,
even though we had been lovers once, long ago,
passionately, memorably, including even murmurs of marriage.
She then turned herself further toward me, almost imperceptibly,
and said, in the chilly, rather formal manner of a chargé d’affaires
or barrister—How deep do you suppose it is out there?
Naturally, I wanted to fuck her. So, by the way, would you.
We could have hardly been farther from home, mine or hers,
with its bauxite-colored condo developments, shopping carts,
rows of garden hose nozzles set out like AK-47s at a gun show,
the two boys nearly grown now, her husband, a signal twerp
if ever there was one. My own circumstances will be of no real interest.
Still, she retained her remote, almost aristocratic demeanor.
—600 feet or so, I told her.
Women, I find, can often behave quite strangely …
The black waters now filling the collapsed and empty magma chamber
stretched out before us. A great conflagration then suddenly lit up
a patch in the hills beyond, an explosion almost, a spectacle.
—Fancy a swim? I asked. The notion seemed to jar her insouciance,
if only slightly, but she turned to me now, fully, and drank me in,
wreck that I am, but with remnants … —Why not, she said,
and began to undress, only a few yards clear of the prosecco crew.
Her dainties, wet and clinging to her … Well, I had to catch my breath.
Likewise her skin and form, still both youthful and as I remembered.
A deep and most unusual sense of ease and delight welled up inside me
as she gracefully swam in tiny circles around me while I treaded water.
A magical zone, I could feel it, a holy place among the indigenous locals.
—Tell me, she said, swimming so close that now our bodies touched,
do you have an agent?
DRIVING BY BLUFF ROAD JUST AFTER DUSK IN LATE AUTUMN
The house remains there still, almost hidden in shadow at the foot of the block,
the oaks and maples stripped of their leaves, atop the cliff,
the river 300 feet below, black waters trembling
&nbs
p; as they recede from the rotted pilings at low tide, leaving behind a fetid wake.
The boy is in his room upstairs, second door on the right,
where he has always been, a bare Mazda bulb switched on in his head.
It’s always on, this light, with a nimbus around it,
illuminating the big atlas he keeps at hand, lying open in bed beside him.
He riffles through it ceaselessly, like a supplicant fingering prayer beads.
He zooms in on every inlet, meadow, and lacustrine plain,
summoning them up as if in answer to some inner demand, stirring their surfaces
with his gaze, phosphors pooling at the bottom of each page.
He calls up great cities: Montevideos and Maharashtras,
entering through their gates at will, visiting their alleyways and boulevards,
the apothecaries, joss houses, and mills, unnoticed, as if a phantom,
drinking in every particular. To what end?
Even the most remote hill station and crumbling redoubt do not escape
his feverish attention, their contours and signs of weathering held up to the light.
Nothing must go unexamined, turned over and over, re-examined.
It seems that you, even with all your outward journeying, now find yourself lost,
while here the boy remains, attending to the work you long ago abandoned.
THE BENCH
What passed through your mind, old man,
what passed through your mind back then,
staring out beyond the shingle and sea wrack,
the islets and rocks,
to the Olympics on the far shore,
snowy peaks poking through cloud?
I would spot you often on this bench,
smoking your unfiltered Player’s, gazing into the distance,
reading the grain of the sea,
the currents and wind,
as if parsing the whorls of Eadfrith’s Gospels.
What can a young man—a boy, really—
know of what runs through an old man’s mind?
But I wondered then, and wonder still,
no longer young, sitting here,
gazing as you once gazed at the patch of sea,
ever the same, ever changing,
the gulls and crows busily at work, hovering.
This sky would have been foreign to you,
the light, as well,
but not unpleasing, no, not at all—how could it be?—
swift-moving, full of drama,
weather and clouds rushing east overhead
until caught up in the coastal range,
and there unburdening themselves of their cargo.
It’s fine light, at its best days like this,
almost pearly, a light mist.
I remember now, after so many years away,
how well it suits the place and suited me then, as now.
I stayed on for years.
But you moved along, and took the long way back,
by ship. You enjoyed the water,
watching it from this vantage or under you at sea.
You were the sort accustomed to moving on.
I spotted that about you straightaway.
You traveled light, the one book,
Njal’s Saga, always in your left coat pocket.
Copper-wire moustache,
sea-reflecting eyes …
You’d long ago been a sailor yourself,
knowing what to take along, what leave behind.
There was more than a bit of the wanderer to you,
the exile, and in your carriage and gait:
no nonsense, erect, never inviting attention
but clearly not of this place.
I watched you carefully that year,
and listened.
It was good to be around a man like that.
One learns, takes in a great deal,
not even half-aware of it, not for many years later.
And not just how words join up,
made to fit properly together like the drystone walls
of a Yorkshire dale, sturdy, serviceable, lasting.
I watched you carefully that year.
That bungalow we’d meet at, the few of us,
rain pouring down outside,
listening to Scarlatti, Dowland, Byrd,
or you reading aloud to us, Wordsworth, Wyatt—
just back there across the road,
torn down, a gruesome condo complex now.
You poured those sounds into our heads.
Who knew what might come of it?
Surely, nothing bad.
I would walk past you many times that year,
sitting here, gazing out at the sea, the rocks.
Who can say what thoughts … ?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank the editors of the London Review of Books, where most of these poems first appeared, and also Hoboken Eddie’s Mean Green hot sauce for kick-starting these flights of fancy.
About the Author
August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. His collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep was awarded the 2004 International Griffin Poetry Prize, and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. That same year he received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.
By the Same Author
POETRY
Before Dawn on Bluff Road / Hollyhocks in the Fog
The Hotel Oneira
Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected
The Strange Hours Travelers Keep
Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems 1975–1990
Green Sees Things in Waves
Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow
Like Cities, Like Storms
Earthquake Weather
On Johnny’s Time
Storm over Hackensack
A Calendar of Airs
The Sausage Master of Minsk
PROSE
Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs:
Selected Prose, 2000–2016
Music: I–LXXIV
Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters
and Strange Places, Gently Explained
Copyright
First published in 2021
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
First published in the US in 2020
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
This ebook edition first published in 2021
All rights reserved
© August Kleinzahler, 2020, 2021
The right of August Kleinzahler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–36334–6
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