Gerald Fleming: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Brocade Dress

 

On the way back from the dance in the days of cars with bench seats, she slid over to you, put her hand on your thigh, said Shall we park? & she was dark & beautiful & now these many years later you see she was desperate for you & you for her & what did you say, Catholic boy? Oh, I’d better get home & fact was you could have said I’d love to, but I wouldn’t know what to do—and now you know that would have been OK, that she would have said I’ll teach you, then—she was kind that way—for she’d been taught & perhaps had taught others & for her this was not new, and what a lesson it would have been.

            Twenty years later you’re alone on an elevator in a department store, you’re going down & the door opens at a floor before the one you want & you see in the distance a gold brocade dress draped across an ornate chair & from hard right she steps into the elevator & you look at each other & you hear her quick intake of breath as she must have heard yours & she turns to face the door & at the ground floor the door opens & each of you walks away.

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Gerald Fleming’s most recent book is The Bastard and the Bishop, a collection of prose poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2021). Other titles include One (also HL), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press), Night of Pure Breathing (HL), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers). Fleming taught for thirty-seven years in San Francisco’s public schools and has written various books for teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed (a title taken from the great Turner painting), which details an innovative process of intensive writing with adolescents—writing accompanied by outrageously loud, carefully curated instrumental music. He lives most of the year in the Far West and, when there’s no plague occurring, part of the year in Paris. Fleming’s poetry and prose poems have appeared widely in magazines over the past forty years.

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Comments

[Anne Harding Woodworth]

I don't see a necker's knob on the steering wheel, but I recognize the shoes. What a delightful prose poem. Thank you, Gerald Fleming, for bringing it all back.

[Don Berger]

Wonderful poem whose speed is the greatest highlight, the way the sentences run, not to mention the striking contrast of the two scenes covered in the paragraphs. I didn't know Gerald Fleming's work before this morning and now I'm glad I do. Reading this poem makes me want to stop everything and try something similar of my own. Bravo, Gerald, and thanks Terence for throwing light on this for us.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, mon ami, for the comment.

[Eileen]

Great poem and photograph.

[Jiwon Choi]

Prose that flows and grows in your heart, that's Jerry's art.

[gracecavalieri]

heartbreaking in its own poetic way

[David Lehman]

Kudos. An excellent justaposition of paragraphs to create a unified whole. And speaking of juxtaposition, Terence attaches just the right picture. A sometimes overlooked virtue of his pick of the week columns is the inspired use of art.

[Howard Bass]

Wonderful choice, Terence. My teenage self, which still resides within, can relate. In fact, my current self can relate as well.

[Denis Fama]

As always, Gerald captures a memory and packages it into a moment that I can relive with fondness. Thank you my friend.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Howard.

[Katherine Hastings]

Just one of so many gems in his latest collection. Fleming’s poems always make you “feel.” In this way, and many others, they are always successful. Thanks so much for posting his work. Great choice!

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, David.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

Fumbled signals and punted opportunities in matters of the heart—-or sexual heat--are part of our “what ifs?” (Today it’s codified in a stinging dictum: “If you snooze, you lose.”) It’s the precious gene gone astray in the “Catholic boy” DNA that gets filled in long afterward--or doesn’t. Gerald Fleming re-creates two such scenes with breathtaking precision and aching passion: the botched bench-seat beckoning and, two decades later, the evanescent elevator encounter. They echo each other as blunted opportunity. The “gold brocade dress draped across an ornate chair” and espied “in the distance” through open elevator doors may be a wedding gown just tried on by the “dark & beautiful” woman of twenty years ago. Perhaps the dress additionally serves as a quest symbol for a golden fleece of fully reciprocal and enactive ardor. In either case, the form of the poem expertly serves its content, creating an onrush of feelings and thoughts through the use of ampersands, dashes, and italics; limited capitalization; and just one period in each stanza. “Brocade Dress” demonstrates the power of accomplished verse to probe our own sunless secrets and self-inflicted mysteries, and in the process reveal, as Carson McCullers put it, “the heart is a lonely hunter.”

[J Serin]

Hooray, a great piece!

[lally]

nicely done, gerald, and terence, A delightful treat for my sunday

[Peter Kearney]

The poem expresses movingly the long-term effect of an earlier missed opportunity, but is the appellative "Catholic boy" appropriate? I think such a boy would have demurred because "it might be a sin."

[Julia B Levine]

Love this piece and all it even evokes. Longing and sadness and somehow a bit funny too. What a great writer!!!

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Michael. Glad you liked it.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Earle, for another insightful analysis.

[Mo Silverstein]

Love this one....and, coincidentally, I'm right in the middle of Jerrys' book now, and it's fantastic. Deep, alive, playful...he has made the case for the prose poem as well as any writer I know. Elegant is the word. Check it out, The Bastard and the Bishop. May he keep going up and down in that wonderful elevator of his imagination for a good many books to come. & I'll bet he runs into her again.

[Eamonn Wall]

Thanks. This is a wonderfully poignant look-over-the-shoulder into the past prose poem.

[Eliot Schain]

"What a lesson it would have been." What a lesson life is, especially when infused with such restrained emotion, wit, and wisdom. Thanks, Jerry, my friend. Thanks for keeping the gently loping American line alive.

[Celine Keating]

Wonderful - brings back the bittersweet agonies of youth!

[Joseph Zaccardi]

Gerald Fleming’s self-proclaimed prose poems in The Bastard and the Bishop are in the tradition of Anton Chekhov. What I mean by this is that they give a remarkable attention to the environment that surrounds his words. They contain continuous music as they sing from justified margin to justified margin. Some people feel that prose poems are not real poems, but I think if they read these poems they will hear the crescendos and decrescendos of Fleming’s poetic voice. Perhaps a way to characterize his poems is by their wildness and kindness; he pushes the limits of understanding to understand. This poet challenges his and the reader’s sense of memory; such counterpointing allows for a fresh understanding of life, love, and loss, to wit: “…jokes are just a way of talking to each other about death, don’t you think?” For Fleming, poetry is a spiritual necessity; he writes because he must write.

[Camille Norton]

What a delight to find this poem waiting for me today. Jerry Fleming is one of the best poets writing today.