Today is the pub date for Elizabeth Powell's excellent new book Atomizer by Elizabeth Powell (Louisiana State University Press). Here is "Letter from American Airspace," a poem from the book:
The end of romance was what the teenage girl
was telling you about on a bench in the Jardin
in San Miguel de Allende, giving you T.M.I.,
but you realized she might need a Father who is not in heaven.
She gasps: Tinder is even sleazier in Mexico, how could it be
nostalgic? You listened the way your poems do when you write
them down in the cafes of Kerouac’s time here. You are Angelico
Americano with Instagram-troubled children of your own back home.
You are the only man I know who seriously loves his wife. Dios mio.
Right now this makes you the best Volta in any sonnet. Yearning
is a kind of loss, a desire that’s never filled. It is the drunk to his drink.
Never enough. Victim or victorious? Chasing yearning, I have discerned,
is like chasing a kind of poison. The Popol Vuh says in the beginning
there were corn people here and love was a YES at every turn against
death. The end of romance knows this, no love letters, no mysteries,
holding out for another swipe, like a pull at the casino. The sun texts
its setting over the city. Back home children shoot other children
Screens in every face. Savagery in the invisible, the Holy Ghost
weeping over new desires. My young female friend told me how nuclear
her hook ups are, how they like to choke and shag. Isn’t it not romantic.
My hairdresser confirms the same story. I think I am lonelier
than lonely, for which there is no word or Proustian reference. I drown
and swoon in Mariachi music with no relief. May tenderness deliver
us. Maybe the only recall I have is this, my other friend home safely
from Afghanistan, telling me of the surgical tents where the world is
like triage and you order the grunts to lay it down, those who are
the chorus screaming: unfuck it, unfuck this.
Tough row to hoe.Seems like someone put the curse of ultra-loneliness on you. Keep on fighting it.
Posted by: burak. C. D. | September 12, 2020 at 07:08 PM