by David Lehman
He talked to himself in the middle of the room, the way he would talk to anyone who used hyperbole. He said: I tried suicide but it didn’t work. When he stuck out his hand I shook it.
I walked with him down 8th and we parted at 21st. I thought of all the times I’d dozed in my car near the river, how cops would come to my window and tap, telling me it wasn’t safe for a woman alone in the middle of the day in a car near the river in a world like this one. I’m sober, I’d say, pointlessly.
Now there’s snow in Chelsea and my soul leaps in something I’ve heard described as bliss. You’re never far, I realize, and here is the secret: If you’d lived you’d be asleep now beside me, bent around me like an aura, keeping me safer than I ever thought I had the right to be.
from Columbia Poetry Review
TIM SEIBLES
Sotto Voce: Othello, Unplugged
Iago, it was not Desdemona but myself
I loved too much. So many battles found me
unharmed, but the want of beauty struck
like a kind of death. My rank only served
to wound my head with bigger dreams.
Didn’t I deserve better than the tricks
every season brings? All my years
had stumbled into shadow: my own
dark face, harder and harder to find
in this cold kingdom. You knew my soul
ached for a woman who could conduct
my blood—that I might be in love alive
with the sharp sublime flinting
her eyes. All mine! My heart nearly
doubled until you made me doubt—
not so much Desdemona as my own
worthiness: if what I was couldn’t make love
faithful I thought better to be done with
her than to know myself a smaller man.
from Alaska Quarterly Review
VIJAY SESHADRI
Trailing Clouds of Glory
Even though I’m an immigrant,
the angel with the flaming sword seems fine with me.
He unhooks the velvet rope. He ushers me into the club.
Some activity in the mosh pit, a banquet here, a panhandler there,
a gray curtain drawn down over the infinitely curving lunette,
Jupiter in its crescent phase, huge,
a vista of a waterfall, with a rainbow in the spray,
a few desultory orgies, a billboard
of the snub-nosed electric car of the future—
the inside is exactly the same as the outside,
down to the m.c. in the yellow spats.
So why the angel with the flaming sword
bringing in the sheep and waving away the goats,
and the men with the binoculars,
elbows resting on the roll bars of jeeps,
peering into the desert? There is a border,
but it is not fixed, it wavers, it shimmies, it rises
and plunges into the unimaginable seventh dimension
before erupting in a field of Dakota corn. On the F train
to Manhattan yesterday, I sat across
from a family threesome Guatemalan by the look of them—
delicate and archaic and Mayan—
and obviously undocumented to the bone.
They didn’t seem anxious. The mother was
laughing and squabbling with the daughter
over a knockoff smart phone on which they were playing a
video game together. The boy, maybe three,
disdained their ruckus. I recognized the scowl on his face,
the retrospective, maskless rage of inception.
He looked just like my son when my son came out of his mother
after thirty hours of labor—the head squashed,
the lips swollen, the skin empurpled and hideous
with blood and afterbirth. Out of the inflamed tunnel
and into the cold room of harsh sounds.
He looked right at me with his bleared eyes.
He had a voice like Richard Burton’s.
He had an impressive command of the major English texts.
I will do such things, what they are yet I know not,
but they shall be the terrors of the earth, he said.
The child, he said, is father of the man.
from FIELD
PETER JAY SHIPPY
Western Civilization
Lucas took one of those trips
That Americans of a certain rage
Must take—to find themselves. In Utah
Lucas found himself marooned
In the wilderness, 50 miles
From society, covered in flop sweat
And Cheetos dust, perched on the roof
Of his teenaged Pinto as it neighed
A swan song. His cowed cell phone crowed:
Out of range, where seldom is heard
A word. Should he hike back to Moab?
Should he wait for his satellite
To synch or should he scream like Job
And curse the day he was born?
To keep awake he stared at the sun
And sneezed. After a week, he came to
Believe that snakelets were zagzigging
From his brain to his heart so that
He felt what he thought. That was enough
To move Lucas from hood to the earth.
He mimed building a fire and cooking
A can of beans. At dusk, Li Po
Came down from the foothills, looking
For Keith Moon. Lucas offered regrets
And faux joe. They discussed The Who.
“ ‘Substitute’ is their best song,” Lucas said.
The poet disagreed: “ ‘Magic Bus’—
The version on Live at Leeds.”
From the arroyo Steve-the-saguaro
Plucked his mesquite ukulele
As he sang, “Thank My Lucky Stars
I’m a Black Hole.” Lucas joined on
The chorus and Li Po shadow waltzed.
Later, over spirits, Li Po cupped
His ear and whispered, “Do you hear
The hoo-hah of hoof beats? The great herd
Is here to lead Old Paint to that
Better place ‘where the graceful whooper
Goes gliding along like a handmaid
In a blissful dream.’ Lo siento.”
Then Lucas submitted to gravity.
When the highway patrol found him
He looked like a dried peach. They emptied
Their canteens over his face until
His skin sprung back, like a Colt pistol,
To the lifelike. On the bus ride home
Lucas slapped himself silly, chanting:
I want it, I want it, I want it . . .
from The Common
MITCH SISSKIND
Joe Adamczyk
He was Joe Adamczyk and
Eve Grabuskawa was her name.
They owned a tavern called
Adamczyk & Eve’s and they
Called their sex life Grandma Fogarty.
Nights as closing time approached
Joe would say, “Eve, do you think
Grandma Fogarty could drop by?”
And Eve would often answer,
“I would not be a bit surprised.”
Years passed in just this way.
Blatz, Schlitz, Pabst Blue Ribbon,
Heileman’s Old Style Lager,
Old Milwaukee—ten thousand
Beer glasses filled and emptied.
When pizza pies, as they were then known,
Achieved popularity Joe and Eve offered
The pies to customers and called them
Polish pizzas for a laugh. Beer sales
Skyrocketed as pizza pies appeared.
Also available were White Owl cigars,
And Cubs’ home runs were called
White Owl Wallops by Jack Brickhouse
On the TV set above
the bar.
But the Cubs lost during the 1950s.
In those days some wrong ideas were held.
Around the time Kennedy was elected and
Eve Grabuskawa began her menopause,
Grandma Fogarty was told to take her leave.
Grandma Fogarty was sent on her way.
No more did Grandma Fogarty come calling
At all hours of the night like a will-o’-the-wisp
Fluttering, flickering, and then fully ablaze.
As Eve and Joe’s union passed twenty years,
Grandma Fogarty was nowhere to be found.
But is this not a familiar story as married
Couples age and passion’s flame sinks?
Let us turn to the much more novel story
Of how Joe Adamczyk, the Chicago bartender,
Transformed himself into a man of ideas.
No stale autodidact would he become,
But a thinker comfortable and at home
In a variety of disciplines, reading widely
In libraries, copying pages, memorizing
Long passages, and making diagrams.
He would hardly sleep. He ate little and,
As was true of Edmund Burke,
Anyone trapped under a tree with him
In a sudden rain would quickly see
That Joe Adamczyk was a first-rate mind.
With time his interests would encompass
Gottlob Frege and Whitehead and also
Alonzo Church and Church’s dissertation
Awarded at Princeton in 1927 entitled
Alternatives to Zermelo’s Assumption.
His transformation began inauspiciously,
Meandering for years like a stream.
Paint-by-numbers was his first awakening:
Sunsets, views of old windmills,
Solitary reapers, the heads of noble steeds.
In faux-impressionist style these emerged
From the confusing higgledy-piggledy
Of lines and numbers on canvas glued
To cardboard. Joe could execute a large
Paint-by-numbers landscape in one day.
Somehow from his paintings a hunger
For narrative gradually developed.
He imagined stories of people who
Lived in his paint-by-numbers cabins
With smoke curling from the chimneys.
Fascinated by the concept of man
As a story-telling animal, he began
Serious reading for the first time in his life.
He read The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
And Marjorie Morningstar, also by Wouk.
He followed Wouk with the historical novels
Of Irving Stone: Lust for Life, Men to Match
My Mountains, and The Agony and the Ecstasy.
He read the bestselling Magnificent Obsession
And The Big Fisherman, both by Lloyd C. Douglas.
He amused himself by considering life
As a stage play. Was it tragedy or farce?
He pondered the nature of storytelling,
Then took the short leap, intellectually,
To viewing the world itself as a narrative.
Turning his attention to nonfiction,
In Volume Two of Will and Ariel Durant’s
The Story of Civilization he discovered
The concept of telos in a discussion of
Greek philosophy and the work of Aristotle.
He gnawed the concept of telos like a dog
With a bone. He toyed with the caprice
That even mathematics might be teleological:
An unwinding tale with a start, a middle,
And perhaps an end returning to the beginning.
He grew careless of his tavern and
Heedless of Eve Grabuskawa, still his wife.
He felt drawn to the used bookstores
And hole-in-the-wall coffeehouses
Near the University of Chicago.
The day came when without a word
Joe left Eve Grabuskawa and rented
A room on South Harper Avenue.
He immersed himself in the collegiate
Ambience of the University of Chicago.
In a coffeehouse called the Pegasus
He saw a reproduction—displayed
With ironic intent—of the portrait
Entitled Arrangement in Grey and Black,
Also known as Whistler’s Mother.
He was shocked, was set back on his heels
By the subject’s strong resemblance
To Eve Grabuskawa. Had all those years
Of marriage to Eve Grabuskawa been
A dour arrangement in gray and black?
It was the last time he ever thought
Of Eve Grabuskawa, who evanesced
Like the Cheshire Cat, and even his
Attraction to women in general
Deliquesced like Frosty the Snowman.
Yet the Pegasus was known for pulchritude.
It was the era of girls in black turtlenecks
With love for jazz and folk music—
Educated young women who watched
Italian films at the all-night Clark Theater.
There in the Pegasus one of those women
Approached Joe, she stole up behind him,
And in a voice rich with a kind of sarcastic
Academese she asked, “Have you read
Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead?”
Joe’s look of baffled incomprehension
Must have moved or amused her,
For she pressed a dog-eared paperback
Into his hand: the 1956 Mentor Classics
Edition of Whitehead’s Dialogues.
“Here, take my extra copy,” she said,
Slinking out of the Pegasus as Joe
Glanced at the book’s cover illustration
Of Whitehead reading aloud from a
Volume held in his liver-spotted hands.
What a revelation Dialogues of
Alfred North Whitehead proved to be!
That very night, like a magic carpet,
The book whisked Joe from his bare room
To Whitehead’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
There, close by Harvard Yard, a journalist
Named Lucien Price drew the eminent
Mathematician into conversation ranging
Across history, theology, philosophy,
Politics, education, and of course mathematics.
A truly fascinating man was Whitehead,
In Joe’s opinion, and a man full of surprises.
He believed, for example, that mathematics
Beyond quadratic equations should remain
The province of specialists—and Joe agreed.
As a teenager Joe was tortured by algebra
At Archbishop Weber High School but
He never needed algebra to run the tavern.
His crank-operated adding machine lasted
Many years and did not even use electricity.
In fact—and here he imagined himself
Speaking to Alfred North Whitehead—
Joe would extend Whitehead’s thinking
And require no math instruction at all
Past basic fractions and decimals.
All through the night he read, pondering,
Considering and reconsidering, accepting
Many of Whitehead’s ideas, questioning
Others, rejecting nothing out of hand though
Some passages caused him to stamp his foot.
Finally, as dawn broke over the university,
Joe sighed and shut the Mentor paperback.
He then noticed a name—Karen Schmolke—
Lightly inscribed by some dying ballpoint
On the front cover of the Dialogues.
Schmolke, Schmolke. . . . Joe stroked his chin.
Not an uncommon name on the Nort
hwest Side
And here on the South Side more Schmolkes
Might be found. Should he return the book?
“Schmolke” would be in the phone directory.
But no, by God. He would keep the book.
It was a gift. It was now his prized possession.
Phrases like, “In the nimbus of religious awe,”
Which Whitehead used so gracefully,
Made one forget he was a mathematician.
Joe’s studies went on. Months passed and
He spoke to no one. He ate tuna fish.
He ordered pizza pies. Physically
He diminished. Like a breeze in the trees
His sixtieth birthday came and went.
Yet he felt strong and growing stronger.
The Dialogues whetted his appetite
For more Whitehead. With difficulty,
Sometimes pounding his head on the wall,
He read Treatise on Universal Algebra.
“The process of forming a synthesis between
A and B, and then to consider A and B united,
As a third thing, may be symbolized as AB.”
As Joe’s familiarity with Whitehead grew,
The significance of this proposition awed him.
How striking that even in the Treatise,
His earliest work, Whitehead referred to AB
As symbolic of process rather than product.
Yet the Treatise came thirty years before
Whitehead’s greatest book, Process and Reality.
On and on he read. The vigor with which he
Once devoured Sidney Sheldon’s Rage of Angels
Now energized his attack on Gottlob Frege’s
Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, which he read
Using Langensheidt’s German–English dictionary.
For Joe, October of 1962 was noteworthy
Not for the so-called Cuban missile crisis
But for his completion of Ernest Nagel’s
Problems in the Logic of Explanation.
He found Nagel’s easy style very appealing.
No sooner had he finished Nagel
Than a still greater dreadnought hove
Into view. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
By Thomas Samuel Kuhn made Nagel
Look like a Sunday school picnic.
One midnight—or was it noon? for night
And day were now indistinguishable—
Joe in his reading came upon a name
That, like no other, would inspire and
Instruct him for many months to come.
The name was Alonzo Church. Who was
Church? Well-known, but not well-known.
