The Best American Poetry

Tom Clark: Try to look upon death as a friend (Terence Winch)

No one who knew Tom Clark would ever deny that he was irascible, brilliant, generous, difficult, funny, erudite.  He was also immensely prolific—even in old age, he published his blog, Beyond the Pale, on a daily basis. BTP was a relentless illustrated catalogue—with scores of photos spanning the globe—usually revealing world’s woes and conflicts, often complemented with various texts he admired. He also wrote and published dozens of books of poetry and prose. His illustrious literary career is outlined here.

I felt really shaken by the news of his death yesterday: he was hit by a car near his house in Berkeley and died several hours later in the hospital.

We had met in person only once, back in April of 1978, when he came to DC to read in Doug Lang’s Folio Bookstore reading series. I have a distinct memory of taking him somewhere on the DC Metro.

We got to know each much better in recent years, mostly through emails. He liked my work and posted poems of mine from time to time in Beyond the Pale.  We had many exchanges about poetry, music, our shared Irish heritage, etc.  I am haunted today by his occasional references to the perilous streets of his neighborhood, where pedestrians had to risk their lives to take a walk. Indeed, he had been injured in an earlier accident some years ago. 

Here is what he wrote me in June on this very subject:

“Admire your getaroundability. Could never ride on any airplanes nevermore no!! Cannot lift right leg off ground. Get on bus impossible. Cross street a prayer every time, plus plenty straight out hate speech outa me, unheard by robo drivers on software cruise control. They never talk back. I set up in shooter stance w metal cane pointed like assault weapon, they smile and laugh and roar past w/o stopping @alleged pedestrian crosswalk!

Little known fact you probably won't believe or care why should you, but the stop lights here are "smart" - that is, have sensors to detect approaching vehicle, stay green for same, but green goes to yellow in 2 seconds (literally), if you're a ped, and if there is a more unliveable country on earth, defining living as having a soul, I want to go there, just to comparison shop - but I've never owned a credit card or a cell phone, have no i.d. and indeed no idea how to shop, so there might be a problem there, but no worries.”                    email from Tom Clark, June 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom will be missed and mourned by his many friends and colleagues. My deepest condolences to Angelica Clark, his wife of 50 years.

Here are two recent poems of Tom’s that I especially like:

Nocturnal Resolutions

Be opaque

Have no memory

Make no attempt to be understood

Stop suffering fools

Be kind to animals no matter what

Listen to the angel

Try to look upon death as a friend

Accept pain as the condition

Be more patient

Don’t turn on the light

 

The Edge of the Forest

Poems ought to have memories.

They should remember other poems.

At this moment the noisy city

has fallen quiet, and the edge

of the forest is abuzz with voices,

the voices of poems beneath the old trees

talking quietly about the poems that were

once here but are not here any longer,

remembering each other.

 

both poems from Truth Game (BlazeVOX, 2013)

 

Yehuda Amichai, From an interview with Lawrence Joseph (1992) and a Poem ("Memorial Day for the War Dead")

Lawrence Joseph interviewed the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai for The Paris Review, Spring 1992. Amichai was born in Germany in 1924. With his family he fled from Hitler  in 1936, emigrating to Palestine with his orthodox Jewish family. He fought form the British in World War II, for the Haganah uderground in 1948, and for the Iarseli army in 1956 and 1973.

"I really have the feeling that I am the result and very contents of the twentieth century," he tells Larry Joseph.

<<< 

I was [raaised a Zionist], but my family’s Zionism wasn’t ideological in any intellectual sense. It was the Zionism of religious orthodoxy, a practical Zionism—going to Palestine. For my parents, going to Palestine was typically romantic, motivated in part by their sense of Orthodoxy and in part by the longing to be in their own country. I had cousins who may have seen Zionism in utopian socialist terms, though my parents did not. There was, of course, zealous anti-Semitism before Hitler, which also had something to do with my family’s going to Palestine. Some people think that anti-Semitism didn’t really exist in Germany until 1933. I certainly don’t want to take anything away from Hitler’s guilt, but the anti-Semitism I grew up with predated Hitler. We were called names. We had stones thrown at us. And, yes, this created real sorrow. We defended ourselves as well as we could. Funny thing, the common name we were called was Isaac—the way Muslims are called Ali or Mohammed. They’d call out, Isaac, go back to Palestine, leave our home, go to your place. They threw stones at us and shouted, Go to Palestine. Then in Palestine we were told to leave Palestine—history juxtaposed can be very ironic. But I do remember in 1933 when the Nazis came into power the anti-Semitism had been religiously based. Then it became political and economic. Before that the two hadn’t merged—there was a kind of horrible limbo—but you could feel what was happening. I remember my parents telling me to keep away from the military parades, not to become mesmerized by the music and marching. I was also told—Würzburg was a very Catholic town—to keep away from the Catholic processions on certain feast days. All Saints’ Day, I remember in particular. The processions were very somber, very German in a way, with students, priests and nuns carrying banners and holy icons and figures. Once—I was nine or ten—I was watching a Catholic procession because I liked its colorfulness and pageantry. Since I was Orthodox I was wearing a yarmulke. Suddenly, someone hit me in the face and shouted, 'You dirty little Jew, take your skullcap off!' >>>

Memorial Day for the War Dead

Yehuda Amichai  (1924-2000)

Memorial day for the war dead.  Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you.  Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.

Memorial day.  Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.

The flautist's mouth will stay like that for many days.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great and royal animal is dying
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”

From Amen by Yehuda Amichai, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1977 Yehuda Amichai.

"Lesbian Corn" [by Elaine Equi]

Lesbian Corn

In summer
I strip away
your pale kimono.
Your tousled hair too,
comes off in my hands
leaving you
completely naked.
All ears and
tiny yellow teeth.

-- Elaine Equi

from the archive; first posted October 1, 2008

"The Publisher of Heaven" [by Ron Padgett]

The Publisher of Heaven

I looked at my leg and became a publisher. The day was bright with my leg. The trees laughed quietly, the wind shifting their leaves this way and that, in unison, each one a good example of a leaf.

There is a halo in search of each of us, but we are trees who lift our wooden limbs and moan like Scandinavians who have taken life far too seriously. The publisher has a book on this subject, printed in 1929. In it we see color pictures of slender pines in a bright blue day before the Crash.

Then the r left that word, which spelled panic. But we have a book on that subject, too. Sometimes I curl up in front of the fireplace and read it—not the words, just the white space around them. I published it that way.

—Ron Padgett

"That Ship Has Sailed" by Terence Winch [by Stacey Harwood Lehman]

Terence Winch's That Ship Has Sailed (University of Pittsburgh Press) arrived last week, and reading it has given me many pleasurable hours. Here is "Father," a favorite poem that in a few brief lines conjures an entire life:

Father

I have your cuff links and tie clips.
I have a box with your IDs in them.
Your steamfitters union card from
the middle of the war. I have the toolbox
you and I made together when I was a kid.

I have the bookcase you brought home
when the Monsignor bought new furniture
for the rectory and threw it out. It's right
upstairs in my living room. I have your banjo,
which still sounds great. All I'm missing is you.

        by Terence Winch from That Ship Has Sailed 

You can read Anne Harding Woodworth's fine review in the Innisfree Poetry Journal, along with new poems by Terence Winch here.

"Coming Soon to a Screen Near You" [by Tom Disch]

 

The soul has its own entertainment industry
as complex as Hollywood's, with premieres
scheduled every night of the week.
The papparazzi have been popping their flashbulbs
since before your first erection. Rival producers
vie to cast Ingrid Bergman as the nun
who proved her love for you by teaching you
arithmetic. But ah! it is the cinematographers
who are our secret masters. How can they trick
a string of neurons into a set
so persuasively resembling cities
we have flitted through heedlessly
before there was even VistaVision?
before we could tie our own ties?
And just as with the movies we've seen
we forget all these wonderful dramas
almost as fast as we can dream them up!
New names appear in the magazines,
teen idols kill themselves, but the glamor
never dies, the glamor goes on eternally.

February 19, 2008

"River" [by Stephanie Paterik]

River

The river never threatens to
dry itself up, or cast itself into itself.
The river holds the plank
but never walks it. River,
you must be my summer friend.
I will explore every blade
of your manmade banks until I know
you properly, and I will write you
these stories about myself, not as an act
of ego but an effort to expose myself
to you, so you might know me
and call me friend, too.

from the archive; first posted June 19, 2012

River

The river never threatens to
dry itself up, or cast itself into itself.
The river holds the plank
but never walks it. River,
you must be my summer friend.
I will explore every blade
of your manmade banks until I know
you properly, and I will write you
these stories about myself, not as an act
of ego but an effort to expose myself
to you, so you might know me
and call me friend, too.

from the archive; first posted June 19, 2012

"Ultimately Justice Directs Them" [by Craig Morgan Teicher]

Ultimately Justice Directs Them

1.

The soldiers are coming.

The soldiers

   are coming to break America.

The soldiers are dispatched

from America

   and they are landing

their boats on American shores.

2

Why are the soldiers coming?

Not because they believe

in what

they were told

but because they believe

that ultimately justice directs them,

that ultimately

the right thing will happen.

3

We say they are

the soldiers, but they are not:

they have chains and

moustaches

and hairstyles and daughters

and expressions on their faces

that their mothers remember on the faces

of the infants they were.

4

They are coming to break

everything down

to basics: America

has become too frumpy

for its pants.

Its health

care system cares not

for health.

5

Its laws are more paper.

6

Its schools are more paper.

7

Its schools are brick and paper.

8

The soldiers are yellow ribbon.

9

America looks at itself

and sees

itself, not America.

10

Itself looks at itself

and calls

what it sees America.

11

America has begun

calling everything

America no matter what.

12

Now more than ever.

13

Operation America.

Operation With Extra Cheese.

Operation With Fries With That.

Operation No Child Left Behind.

Operation Enduring Cheeseburger.

Operation Regurgitated Eagle.

Operation Prince of Freedom.

Operation All Night Long.

Operation Perhaps.

Operation No Really.

14

——

15

The soldiers are here.

16

Operation Big Time Pause.

17

Operation Please

And Thank You.

18

Operation Paper.

Operation No More Stars.

19

The Solders are wearing

yellow ribbons

in support

of the return

of the regular guy.

20

The soldiers are on TV

right outside

the door.

21

They are knocking——change

the channel.

22

Operation America Go!

Operation Yes!

Operation OK, OK.

Operation Every Man

for himself

and best of luck

to the women and kids.

23

——

24

By part 24 it is

already done.

– from No Tell Motel and The Best American Poetry 2009 [ed. David Wagoner]

2AM, and the Rabbinical Students Stand in Their Bathrobes [by Yehoshua November]

2AM, and the Rabbinical Students Stand in Their Bathrobes

2AM, and the rabbinical students stand in their bathrobes
at the edge of the yeshiva parking lot, watching
the practiced motions of muscular firemen disembarking
from their engine. Soon, it will be determined
the youngest student in the building
pulled the basement alarm
after learning, over the dormitory pay phone,
his parents, back in Baltimore, intend to end
their nineteen year marriage before Passover.
The only one the rabbis have not accounted for
crouches in his closet behind a row of black sports coats.
And because the yeshiva caters to souls
but also bodies,
the early morning mysticism class
on why the Divine Presence cannot dwell
amongst those plagued by sadness
has been cancelled.

-- Yehoshua November

first posted on Verse Daily

Devil #2 [by Miranda Beeson]

   
      #2 Devil

Manolo me Mammon      

                You gold-encrusted god of plenty

Park me on Park Avenue

                Gild my walls. Chandelier my halls

 Jet my days. Jaguar my bluestone nights

                Pool me in my private Mediterranean

Yacht me & unstopper me

                Margaux & Coach me

Cover me in coin. Booty & Botox me

                Multiply my capacity for rapacity

Artichoke roast & spit me

                Braise & flambé me

Let me live in your insatiable need

"Yonder, a Rental" [by Anna Maria Hong]

Time to howl at the celestial sphere,
that full frontal silver dollar, the very
paintball of pallor and elemental other.
It’s all or nada as noonnight’s empanada

discloses her pretty quarter, the priest’s collar
hung high on the hook of evening’s fluent
wall. Hung like a juror bent on acquittal
who can’t stall any longer, you’re a cobbler

hawking copper coins in an Oriental
bazaar. The Sultan’s power went horizontal
long, long ago. It’s fine to be sentimental,

though there’s no need to bother. Grab a handful
of shine like a disc of doll hair, a dollop of Neufchâtel,
                                                           valor and force, vital—

from Ecotone

"Let's Make a List" [by Tom Disch]

It's always a delight to stumble upon a new, previously uncollected poem by a master. Here is a poem Tom Disch wrote in December 2007.

Let's Make a List

The letter L
has cast her spell
on the whole English language.
The other letters willingly
anneal with her to form
all the words and things
we love the most: flowers
opening to the morning light,
the little birds fluttering
about the feeder, the swallows
along the river, ripplings,
dapplings, even loss.
L dies -- then lifts her head
and lives again. She smiles
in that special way she has
and it all becomes clear.
Look! there she is again

12/23/07

— Tom Disch

 Reprinted by the Estate of Thomas M. Disch c/o Writers' Representatives LLC, New York, NY 10011. All rights reserved.

Kenneth Koch: The Poem Writes Itself [by David M. Katz]

from David M. Katz's blog, we lift this tribute to Kenneth Koch:

<<<
Below I offer to readers of this blog a pre-New Year’s gift in the form of “You Want a Social Life, with Friends,” a delightfully funny poem by Kenneth Koch (1925–2002).  

“Kenneth Koch” by Alex Katz. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA at Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Perhaps the poem, which first appeared in the May 18, 1998 issue of The New Yorker, may spur your thinking about the parameters for hatching resolutions for 2022. A poet of great and often giddy ebullience, Koch, I imagine, would have appreciated how its rhetorical structure seems almost to have enabled the poem to write itself. It’s a player piano of a poem.

In the first three lines, we discover the terms governing the situation, and their whimsical arbitrariness is part of the fun: You can have two out of three particular satisfactions of life—a robust circle of friends, a “passionate love life,” and fulfilling work—but only two out of three. Once the rules of the game have been established, it remains for this poet to work out the implications of each set of choices for the reader.

For an example of someone afforded the advantages of love and work, but not of a decent social life, the poet offers Michelangelo, who achieved the awesome task of painting the Sistine Chapel and whose passions were said to have been stirred by Vittoria Colonna. But no parties for you, Buonarotti.

Proceeding with seeming logic to the instance of another immortal artist, Koch envisions Homer as a party animal with enough staying power to write the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Homeric Hymns. Rhyming, with a witty preciousness, “banquets” and “lockets,” Koch portrays the great blind poet as lovelorn. And it’s hilarious to think of “Poor Old Homer,” as Ezra Pound referred to him, as shedding tears over the absence of a “Girl” in his life.

The two examples of artists whose labors spawned masterpieces set up the pleasure of a contrast with that of a bon vivant who has a great time at parties and in bed but achieves very little in life. While the poem ends just where we might have expected it to—at the point where Koch’s two-out-of-three formula is fully worked out—the shift in the tone of the poem in the last line to a colloquial, off-hand putdown has the subtle economy of a perfectly turned joke. “It must give pleasure,” wrote Wallace Stevens, in proposing the indispensable requirements of a poem. I hereby attest that Stevens’s poetic descendent, Kenneth Koch, has done so in “You Want a Social Life, with Friends,” and you can hear him read it here as you read along :

You Want a Social Life, with Friends
By Kenneth Koch

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn’t time enough, my friends—
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends—
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

https://davidmkatzpoet.com/blog/kenneth-koch-the-poem-writes-itself

In Absence—This Unknowing [by Bianca Stone]

When you leave, faceless
old lover, element
that I have tried for so long
to explain—I will be
suspended between
two large stones
for a moment
thinking you were good
before I am revived.
I will be laundry
that has gotten loose
from the line. Pantyhose
flying into traffic.
So long, handsome.
When you go, I will be
the moth, the butterfly,
turned to broth in the cocoon.
Reassembled, I will climb out
and you will be subsumed
into a majesty of vapor
gone as an orchid.
I plan it, little switchblade.
I will it, strand of sweet spittle,
endearing idiot I made
out of mud and loss—
you, whose shelf life is zero,
you, who keep me from totality
and the small sum of what
is otherwise infinite.

from Brooklyn Rail

"New Year's Day" [by Billy Collins]

New Year’s Day

Everyone has two birthdays
according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
the day you were born and New Year’s Day—

a droll observation to mull over
as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen,

which is being transformed by the morning light
into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.
“No one ever regarded the First of January
with indifference,” writes Lamb,

for unlike Groundhog Day
or the feast of the Annunciation,
this one marks nothing but the passage of time,
I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell
of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.

I admit to regarding my own birthday
as the joyous anniversary of my existence
probably because I was, and remain
to this cold day in late December, an only child.

And as an only child--
a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child
in a colorful room this morning--
I would welcome an extra birthday,
one more opportunity to stop what we are doing
for a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.

And one more birthday might be a consolation
to us all for having to face a death-day, too,
an X in a square
in some kitchen calendar of the future,

the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
by a burly, heartless conductor
as it roars through the months and years,

party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.

frirst published in Ballistics

"A Message on the Machine" [by Tom Disch]

 

Hello Tom.  The day has come round at last
   the day appointed for our meeting,
   the day you are to die
      and I decreed to be your executioner.
So you must look your best.
If you do not I will be dishonored
   before all my rivals and companions,
      a regular heavenly host they are
      and quite particular in the protocols of death.

You should not seem to be expecting me, you know.
   No candle in the window.
   No Mahler on the record player.
      (But they're not called that any more,
      are they?  The word has obsolesced, yes?
      In any case, Mahler is forever
      Mahler. Ewig!)
   And for dinner something plain
      and not to filling.
      If there is to be a dinner.

   Hello?  Are you still there?
   I'll have to cancel.
   Yes, again.
   Such a nuisance, yes I know.
   Yes I see: everything's in such good order.
   Even the bathroom floor.
   But something has come up, it can't be helped.
   I'll be getting back to you
      but I can't say when.

April 8, 2008

Merry Christmas! "Little Tree" [poem by e.e. cummings]

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"Disappearance—My Euridyce" [by Lynn Emanuel]

Disappearance—My Euridyce                                                            

                                                1967, New York City, East River

From Jackson Pollock, I had learned to hate
Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”--                 

Those white, white sheets--
thrown back covers

of the breakers’ unmade bed, and Venus
uncombed, unkempt, always just

decanted from sleep, that hair--
a serpentine peignoir tossed across her shoulders—

I scrubbed my palette down to nothing
but the colors of wash water and zinc bucket.

And embraced the iron light
between Broadway and the Bowery,

and, beneath the streetlights,
the junkies, fellow bees in a hive of misery.

I loved my oppression,
walked Cherry Street to the docks and--

--there--washed out,
dreamy,  creepy,

drowned in her last experiment,
was a rat—

The dry clove of her eye glaring up.
If I bent down I would see

into the broken
hive of bones—

I did not look at her
staring at me from the window of her underworld.

About death
I didn’t give a damn.

I believed my hand
could open any lock.

And even if not,
as I forged ahead,

I did not once look back.

from The New York Review of Books

"Shanked on the Red Bed" [by Susan Wheeler]

Shanked on the Red Bed

The perch was on the roof, and the puck was in the air.
The diffident were driving, and the daunted didn't care.
When I came out to search for you the lauded hit the breeze
On detonated packages the bard had built to please.

The century was breaking and the blame was on default,
The smallest mammal redolent of what was in the vault,
The screeches shrill, the ink-lines full of interbred regret ––
When I walked out to look for you the toad had left his net.

The discourse flamed, the jurors sang, the lapdog strained its leash –– 
When I went forth to have you found the tenured took the beach
With dolloped hair and jangled nerves, without a jacking clue,
While all around the clacking sound of polished woodblocks blew.

When I went out to look for you the reductions had begun.
A demento took a shopgirl to a raisin dance for fun,
And for you, for me, for our quests ridiculous and chaste
The lead sky leered in every cloud its consummate distaste.

The mayors queued for mug shots while the banner rolled in wind
That beat at bolted windows and bore down upon the thin,
And everywhere warped deliverers got bellicose and brave,
When I walked out to find you in the reconstructed rave.

The envelopes were in the slots and paperweights were flung.
When I came down to seek you out the torrents had begun
To rip the pan from handle and horizons from their shore,
To rip around your heady heart looking there for more.

-- Susan Wheeler

from The Best American Poetry 1998  (ed. John Hollander)

From the archive, first posted March 13, 2009.

"Midston House" [by David Schubert, 1913-1946]

      What is needed is a technique
Of conversation, I think, as I put on the
Electric light. But not the limited
Vocabulary of our experience, the
Surface irritations which pile up,
Accumulate a city, – but the expression,
Metamorphosed, of what they are the
Metaphor of; – and their conversion into light.

      On the bus toward Midston House
I survey the people in their actions. Placid
And relaxed are they; this is the humdrum
Claptrap costume of girls and food, men
And work and house. The insurance
Of habit is circular, as
Democracy has interlocking duties,
Circular obediences.

      Yet how to transform
The continual failing clouds of
Energy, into light? The vital
Intelligence of the man whom I am
Going to visit – does he know? I
Think how the sharp severing of
My life's task – severed associations,
Produced in me almost a
Lypothymia of grief and a hiatus of
Days, which grew fangs of anger, my
Lycanthropy – thank god, it's over!

      I am fired from my job by flames, big
As angry consciences; I can do
Nothing; I have not one ability! This man
Whom I am waiting to see in the lobby – 
All my life I am waiting for something that
Does not eventuate – will he
Exist?

      The law of life, like an abstract
Rigorous lawyer, passes a terrifying judg-
Ment on poor little me, in a strange foreign
Syllogism. He is cheating me! He will not
Keep the appointment!

                                    His probity
Rebukes my suspicion. What can I say, that
I love him; that I am un-
Worthy? My doubt makes me feel,
– Even as we discuss another's dishonesty –
Ugly, irate, and damned avid, a cunning
Rascal, like that ugly bird of the White
Nile.

      But the poem is just this
Speaking of what cannot be said
To the person I want to say it.
I am sleepy with subtlety; the room strikes me as
Dark, so cold, so lonely. There is
No one in it. I will put on all the lights.
I wish I could go
On a long, on a long long journey
To a place where life is simple and decent, not
Too demanding.

No! On the vehicle, Tomorrow, I will see
That man, whose handshake was happiness.

Click here for Ron Horning's essay on David Schubert.

How Much? [poem by Jerome Sala]

Jerome Sala

(Ed note: Ever since we posted the conversation between poets Jerome Sala and Jack Skelley we've been fielding requests for their poems. Here is How Much? by Jerome Sala, from his book How Much? New and Selected Poems. Watch this space for a poem by Jack Skelley)

How Much?

        -- by Jerome Sala

How much is it worth —
the actual copy of
Poems by Pierre Reverdy
Frank O’Hara had in his pocket
when he wrote, “My heart is
in my pocket, it is
Poems by Pierre Reverdy
                                Probably not
as much as Duchamp’s chess set
or urinal: that’s because O’Hara
was not a painter but a poet,
and you know what that means:
while the other arts add value
to their objects, conspiring
with the world of commodities
to nurture the enrichment economy,
verse makes its objects worse
relieving them of their worth
casting them out into the world
beyond the cave of moneymaking
into another place that we do not
yet understand and cannot name.
                       How much is it worth,
the actual heart of Frank O’Hara,
the one stripped of its metaphors?
Can his heart actually be divested
of such accoutrements,
or must we be forever lost
in the moist mist, on the brink
of the heart in itself,
an irretrievable object?
                        When Shelley was
cremated, his heart refused to burn.
Mary Shelley carried it with her
for years wrapped in a silk shroud
inside a jar.
          When revered Tibetan Buddhist
teachers die, their hearts become relics
and are said to bestow blessings—
the greatest of which
is the knowledge of emptiness.

[Originally appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Dec. 18—Jan. 19, 2019 issue.] Now available in How Much? New and Selected Poems by Jerome Sala (NYQ books).