“Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language as they swerve back and forth between the realms of the colloquial and the absurd. The result of these maneuvers is The Next Ancient World — a deconstructed soap-opera, a one-hundred-ring verbal circus, a gang of brazen, ingenious poems.”—Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate
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Description
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The Next Ancient World won the Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize in 2001 and has since won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the ForeWord Magazine Best Poetry Book of the Year (2001).
Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language as they swerve back and forth between the realms of the colloquial and the absurd. The result of these maneuvers is The Next Ancient World — a deconstructed soap-opera, a one-hundred-ring verbal circus, a gang of brazen, ingenious poems.”—Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate
Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-0-971031-00-5 -
About The Author
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Jennifer Michael Hecht earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Columbia University and is a Professor of History at Nassau Community College. Her works include the award-winning poetry book The Next Ancient World (2001), published by Tupelo Press, and the forthcoming history books, The End of the Soul (July, 2003) from Columbia University Press and The History of Doubt (Fall, 2003) from HarperCollins San Francisco.
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Critics' Reviews
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“Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language as they swerve back and forth between the realms of the colloquial and the absurd. The result of these maneuvers is The Next Ancient World — a deconstructed soap-opera, a one-hundred-ring verbal circus, a gang of brazen, ingenious poems.”—Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate
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Excerpts
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History Even Eve, the only soul in all of time to never have to wait for love, must have leaned some sleepless nights alone against the garden wall and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild and wished to trade-in all of Eden to have but been a child.
In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace, that she might have a story of herself to tell in some other place.
Waiting to Happen The bottom of the town might open up or influenza. Or everybody on the planet finds a lump. Some man might plan even now some foreign words to live in the future’s memory—as Kristallnacht takes up space in ours. Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Bubonic Plague. Consider now the length of good times we’ve indulged in, consider the bliss of sullen bus rides, the paradise of trouble on the job, the incommensurable dream of sexual frustration, the joy of being mad and unfulfilled, the glory of a night alone, lonely, watching sitcoms; left out of the world.
On the other hand, this may be remembered as the dawn of the golden age, wherein after six millennia of disaster followed on disaster, forever after no disaster comes. Then this loneliness will never be redeemed. If we never starve this bread will never seem in hindsight to have been a feast of pleasure is part of what I mean. But look at the books. Consider the odds. We will very likely starve.
Villanelle If You Want to Be a Bad-Ass You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same. You will, of course, be taunted if you ever try to change. When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.
Consistency is worse, it brings the wrong kind of fame. The orbit of right action has a freakin’ woolly range. You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same.
It, inertia, is a pity. It, stagnation, is a shame. Yet you yourself preach caution as you pace your unlocked cage: “When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not. Stay tame.”
Be a mountain if you want to, be the whole mountain range. Will you, in turn, be hostage to your hostage on the page? You will not. Be rewarded for remaining long the same?
You can say what you want when the angel makes you lame. You can wrestle against water, you can rape your own rage (when trainers wander off). Tigers, please do not stay tame.
As hard as bleeding a tree to death by cut and squeezing, change from out of the gut of the rut’s range will be insanely hard. But you will not be rewarded for remaining long the same, when trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.
Trotsky’s Hand I It’s like dreaming of someone too much while you’re away at war; then you come home to his fingered hat or her faltering hemline and it’s What the hell was I fighting for? Just another example of how biography works. Your character has got to have a narrative arc, some drawbacks, something irredeemably awful,
along with his or her strong points, to be believable. Yet we all recoil in disbelief when anything of the sort cuts a form into our real lives, the life of the author. Don’t
despair! It’s just the demands of narrative! Leda, after all, probably never even thought to fear anything like that.
Then one day, there it is, the century actually over
and most of its artifacts still entirely inexplicable. This is no walk in the park with spinach, Swee’pea,
I’ve got no idea where to go for extra strength.
I guess that’s what they’re selling. It’s an incidental that it cleans your laundry,
scrubs your teeth. What is of note is that it is a source of extra
strength. Extra strength! Thank God! That’s what we’re going to need in case they all switch back: the swan, the prince, the salt.
Even if you weren’t ever accosted by a feathery god,
you take some heavy losses early on, and that will leave feathers everywhere for the rest of your life; as if you were wearing an eiderdown coat;
you just walk around and molt. As for the man in the tiara,
that’s a transformation you never want to go through twice, but do, coaxing every so often your sad, damp, frog
back into his palace. Don’t you like your scepter? Won’t
you wear your robes? Lastly, salt. Well, who doesn’t turn towards the sepia for a second look; into the carousel music
and the tortured plaster horses of the past? But this sympathy
does not imply that I want Madame Lot back here knitting itchy sweaters. Let’s just try to calm down.
II When Stalin took power he had Trotsky erased from the photographs. Sometimes, you can still see
a floating hand. Left behind. So disembodied as to be
almost meaningless. We try to ignore it, floating there in history. We get to work. There is something to be said for that.
You can’t really expect me to roll around naked in a garden
letting Trotsky’s severed hand float around my body, knowing my body better than any lover, his soft,
soft-focused, probing hand. Yet, how can we do anything
serious with that thing hovering overhead? A woman working at a table in the park swats away the tickling hand
of Trotsky, and intones as if to all of history:
Not now. Trotsky’s hand, abashed, moves on to pick some flowers. So much is gone that
what is left is inexplicable without memory, and memory
is painful and very difficult to explain. Which isn’t to say I mind Trotsky’s hand
snapping its fingers and flapping itself like a bird
above my desk or would rather have him back, extant, yammering about world socialism and complaining about
the samovar: Is this thing cold again? So, is this more of a lament
than a complaint? Sure.
But it is always there. This burden of history is not a bird but a hand, its wrist a tiny cloud.
It’s very quiet. It fills the quiet sky.
Please Answer All Three Of The Following Essay Questions.
I What would it take to make you what you truly want to be and why will no one cooperate with you on these visions you have of yourself, when it would be so easy for them to finally acknowledge that you are the demon ruler of this island world and that all we eat here is pickled herring that we harvest from sycamore trees in the plenitude of summer and load into mason jars for the lean months of the cold? Do these men and women, your subjects, fear you more than they love you? And what is it that they fear? Use a logical proof; show your work.
II If someone wanted to make you slap them, hard, would it be better for him or her to say that your father didn’t like to hear you sing, or to say that your mother purposefully pricked her finger and bled into the coleslaw she brought to the physics-department picnics every year because, despite her smile and gala disposition, she had no taste for any of it, not for your father, nor for you, nor for the logic of time and space and so she made them drink her sorrow with their cabbage? Explain your answer. Are you aware you can not save anyone from dying?
III Why do you waste so much time considering the juxtaposition of the perceived endlessness of a moment and the micro-elapsement of a year? Clearly there is nothing you can do about it and yet, overcome with love for your friends and family you neither run to them constantly and weep for them, kissing their cast-off running shoes like a minor apostle, nor do you refuse to answer the question “how are you” ever again, certain that you don’t know what it means? By now you must recognize that rational truth is unbearable and impossible to live by and that everything possible and bearable is, of necessity, a logical mess incorporating lies as well as contradictory truths. And yet you just go along, making phone calls, hanging curtains, letting the slanting sun before twilight shift your thoughts, riding the subway, sweeping the hallway, and you watch TV, don’t you, and go to the bank, eat ice cream, call the cable guy, why do you do it when you are so keenly aware of the impossibility of your goals given the obdurate resistance of such material? Try to answer as completely as possible; time.
Swamp Thing
I Apparently you’ve got to be vulnerable if you want anything to happen, and on the other side of it you’ve got to be unfathomably strong in order to get by. In order to get through the attacks and rejections occasioned by vulnerability you’ve got to be almost invulnerably strong. It’s a difficult road map to fold, friends. The shifts in logic are very subtle, they have to do with generational time and we don’t have that kind of time lying around in the store-room, we’ve got to get it on special order, which means you’ve got to read about a thousand books.
II So, to review, the inner life is lousy with affection for the outer life which seems like a sweet, dumb child that has somehow survived a week alone, lost in intemperate circumstance, an actual swamp in the Bayou, and our inner life wonders, how did that stupid child I love so tenderly and with so little outward show of derision possibly survive out there where the possibility of being eaten by a crocodile is very real, grabbed by snakes, being bitten by endless mosquitoes, and drowned, let alone freezing, let alone starved.
III Survival experts opine that your idiot outer life survived in the Bayou because it never thought to panic, it never noticed that it was a time to give up. Our inner life wonders how this naïve assumption of existence is communicated to the crocodiles and the snakes but the survival expert is gone: wanted to be the first one out of the parking lot, just in case. I guess I understand.
IV How did it ever get construed that the child of us is inner? It’s the outer that always has to be told to take that out of your mouth. I’ve got something twice as inner that sits quietly writing her book. Perhaps our outer self ate algae. Bumble bumble, the deadline for the grant is long past, long past, but some part of you writes for guidelines. I realize that the deadline is past but I want to express my desire to have applied. This is not what the survival expert had in mind.
V Staring out the window towards First Avenue, the inner self lectures. Vulnerability, it explains to the outer self, is a difficult mess. Yes, apply for the grant but not when the deadline is so long past. As for asking your lover to move in, perhaps you remember your stay in the swamp? The yellow eyes of those who see when you are nightly blinded? The leg-less finesse of the serpents? The tug of vines? Well, who am I to caution your affections. By now the outer self is on the phone, making the arrangements, not particularly concerned; eager for all of it. Hoping to win grants for which it never applied and sliding down some secret handrail, open-armed, wide-eyed, into the din of life. Apparently, it is crazy in love, and reckless with the customs of survival. -
Weight
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.4 lbs
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Dimensions
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6 × .5 × 9 in
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Awards
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No Information
The Next Ancient World won the Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize in 2001 and has since won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the ForeWord Magazine Best Poetry Book of the Year (2001).
Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language as they swerve back and forth between the realms of the colloquial and the absurd. The result of these maneuvers is The Next Ancient World — a deconstructed soap-opera, a one-hundred-ring verbal circus, a gang of brazen, ingenious poems.”—Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate
Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-0-971031-00-5
Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language as they swerve back and forth between the realms of the colloquial and the absurd. The result of these maneuvers is The Next Ancient World — a deconstructed soap-opera, a one-hundred-ring verbal circus, a gang of brazen, ingenious poems.”—Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate
Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-0-971031-00-5
Jennifer Michael Hecht earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Columbia University and is a Professor of History at Nassau Community College. Her works include the award-winning poetry book The Next Ancient World (2001), published by Tupelo Press, and the forthcoming history books, The End of the Soul (July, 2003) from Columbia University Press and The History of Doubt (Fall, 2003) from HarperCollins San Francisco.
“Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language as they swerve back and forth between the realms of the colloquial and the absurd. The result of these maneuvers is The Next Ancient World — a deconstructed soap-opera, a one-hundred-ring verbal circus, a gang of brazen, ingenious poems.”—Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate
History
Even Eve, the only soul in all of time
to never have to wait for love,
must have leaned some sleepless nights
alone against the garden wall
and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild
and wished to trade-in all of Eden
to have but been a child.
In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace, that she might have a story of herself to tell in some other place.
Waiting to Happen The bottom of the town might open up or influenza. Or everybody on the planet finds a lump. Some man might plan even now some foreign words to live in the future’s memory—as Kristallnacht takes up space in ours. Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Bubonic Plague. Consider now the length of good times we’ve indulged in, consider the bliss of sullen bus rides, the paradise of trouble on the job, the incommensurable dream of sexual frustration, the joy of being mad and unfulfilled, the glory of a night alone, lonely, watching sitcoms; left out of the world.
On the other hand, this may be remembered as the dawn of the golden age, wherein after six millennia of disaster followed on disaster, forever after no disaster comes. Then this loneliness will never be redeemed. If we never starve this bread will never seem in hindsight to have been a feast of pleasure is part of what I mean. But look at the books. Consider the odds. We will very likely starve.
Villanelle If You Want to Be a Bad-Ass You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same. You will, of course, be taunted if you ever try to change. When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.
Consistency is worse, it brings the wrong kind of fame. The orbit of right action has a freakin’ woolly range. You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same.
It, inertia, is a pity. It, stagnation, is a shame. Yet you yourself preach caution as you pace your unlocked cage: “When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not. Stay tame.”
Be a mountain if you want to, be the whole mountain range. Will you, in turn, be hostage to your hostage on the page? You will not. Be rewarded for remaining long the same?
You can say what you want when the angel makes you lame. You can wrestle against water, you can rape your own rage (when trainers wander off). Tigers, please do not stay tame.
As hard as bleeding a tree to death by cut and squeezing, change from out of the gut of the rut’s range will be insanely hard. But you will not be rewarded for remaining long the same, when trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.
Trotsky’s Hand I It’s like dreaming of someone too much while you’re away at war; then you come home to his fingered hat or her faltering hemline and it’s What the hell was I fighting for? Just another example of how biography works. Your character has got to have a narrative arc, some drawbacks, something irredeemably awful,
along with his or her strong points, to be believable. Yet we all recoil in disbelief when anything of the sort cuts a form into our real lives, the life of the author. Don’t
despair! It’s just the demands of narrative! Leda, after all, probably never even thought to fear anything like that.
Then one day, there it is, the century actually over
and most of its artifacts still entirely inexplicable. This is no walk in the park with spinach, Swee’pea,
I’ve got no idea where to go for extra strength.
I guess that’s what they’re selling. It’s an incidental that it cleans your laundry,
scrubs your teeth. What is of note is that it is a source of extra
strength. Extra strength! Thank God! That’s what we’re going to need in case they all switch back: the swan, the prince, the salt.
Even if you weren’t ever accosted by a feathery god,
you take some heavy losses early on, and that will leave feathers everywhere for the rest of your life; as if you were wearing an eiderdown coat;
you just walk around and molt. As for the man in the tiara,
that’s a transformation you never want to go through twice, but do, coaxing every so often your sad, damp, frog
back into his palace. Don’t you like your scepter? Won’t
you wear your robes? Lastly, salt. Well, who doesn’t turn towards the sepia for a second look; into the carousel music
and the tortured plaster horses of the past? But this sympathy
does not imply that I want Madame Lot back here knitting itchy sweaters. Let’s just try to calm down.
II When Stalin took power he had Trotsky erased from the photographs. Sometimes, you can still see
a floating hand. Left behind. So disembodied as to be
almost meaningless. We try to ignore it, floating there in history. We get to work. There is something to be said for that.
You can’t really expect me to roll around naked in a garden
letting Trotsky’s severed hand float around my body, knowing my body better than any lover, his soft,
soft-focused, probing hand. Yet, how can we do anything
serious with that thing hovering overhead? A woman working at a table in the park swats away the tickling hand
of Trotsky, and intones as if to all of history:
Not now. Trotsky’s hand, abashed, moves on to pick some flowers. So much is gone that
what is left is inexplicable without memory, and memory
is painful and very difficult to explain. Which isn’t to say I mind Trotsky’s hand
snapping its fingers and flapping itself like a bird
above my desk or would rather have him back, extant, yammering about world socialism and complaining about
the samovar: Is this thing cold again? So, is this more of a lament
than a complaint? Sure.
But it is always there. This burden of history is not a bird but a hand, its wrist a tiny cloud.
It’s very quiet. It fills the quiet sky.
Please Answer All Three Of The Following Essay Questions.
I What would it take to make you what you truly want to be and why will no one cooperate with you on these visions you have of yourself, when it would be so easy for them to finally acknowledge that you are the demon ruler of this island world and that all we eat here is pickled herring that we harvest from sycamore trees in the plenitude of summer and load into mason jars for the lean months of the cold? Do these men and women, your subjects, fear you more than they love you? And what is it that they fear? Use a logical proof; show your work.
II If someone wanted to make you slap them, hard, would it be better for him or her to say that your father didn’t like to hear you sing, or to say that your mother purposefully pricked her finger and bled into the coleslaw she brought to the physics-department picnics every year because, despite her smile and gala disposition, she had no taste for any of it, not for your father, nor for you, nor for the logic of time and space and so she made them drink her sorrow with their cabbage? Explain your answer. Are you aware you can not save anyone from dying?
III Why do you waste so much time considering the juxtaposition of the perceived endlessness of a moment and the micro-elapsement of a year? Clearly there is nothing you can do about it and yet, overcome with love for your friends and family you neither run to them constantly and weep for them, kissing their cast-off running shoes like a minor apostle, nor do you refuse to answer the question “how are you” ever again, certain that you don’t know what it means? By now you must recognize that rational truth is unbearable and impossible to live by and that everything possible and bearable is, of necessity, a logical mess incorporating lies as well as contradictory truths. And yet you just go along, making phone calls, hanging curtains, letting the slanting sun before twilight shift your thoughts, riding the subway, sweeping the hallway, and you watch TV, don’t you, and go to the bank, eat ice cream, call the cable guy, why do you do it when you are so keenly aware of the impossibility of your goals given the obdurate resistance of such material? Try to answer as completely as possible; time.
Swamp Thing
I Apparently you’ve got to be vulnerable if you want anything to happen, and on the other side of it you’ve got to be unfathomably strong in order to get by. In order to get through the attacks and rejections occasioned by vulnerability you’ve got to be almost invulnerably strong. It’s a difficult road map to fold, friends. The shifts in logic are very subtle, they have to do with generational time and we don’t have that kind of time lying around in the store-room, we’ve got to get it on special order, which means you’ve got to read about a thousand books.
II So, to review, the inner life is lousy with affection for the outer life which seems like a sweet, dumb child that has somehow survived a week alone, lost in intemperate circumstance, an actual swamp in the Bayou, and our inner life wonders, how did that stupid child I love so tenderly and with so little outward show of derision possibly survive out there where the possibility of being eaten by a crocodile is very real, grabbed by snakes, being bitten by endless mosquitoes, and drowned, let alone freezing, let alone starved.
III Survival experts opine that your idiot outer life survived in the Bayou because it never thought to panic, it never noticed that it was a time to give up. Our inner life wonders how this naïve assumption of existence is communicated to the crocodiles and the snakes but the survival expert is gone: wanted to be the first one out of the parking lot, just in case. I guess I understand.
IV How did it ever get construed that the child of us is inner? It’s the outer that always has to be told to take that out of your mouth. I’ve got something twice as inner that sits quietly writing her book. Perhaps our outer self ate algae. Bumble bumble, the deadline for the grant is long past, long past, but some part of you writes for guidelines. I realize that the deadline is past but I want to express my desire to have applied. This is not what the survival expert had in mind.
V Staring out the window towards First Avenue, the inner self lectures. Vulnerability, it explains to the outer self, is a difficult mess. Yes, apply for the grant but not when the deadline is so long past. As for asking your lover to move in, perhaps you remember your stay in the swamp? The yellow eyes of those who see when you are nightly blinded? The leg-less finesse of the serpents? The tug of vines? Well, who am I to caution your affections. By now the outer self is on the phone, making the arrangements, not particularly concerned; eager for all of it. Hoping to win grants for which it never applied and sliding down some secret handrail, open-armed, wide-eyed, into the din of life. Apparently, it is crazy in love, and reckless with the customs of survival.
In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace, that she might have a story of herself to tell in some other place.
Waiting to Happen The bottom of the town might open up or influenza. Or everybody on the planet finds a lump. Some man might plan even now some foreign words to live in the future’s memory—as Kristallnacht takes up space in ours. Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Bubonic Plague. Consider now the length of good times we’ve indulged in, consider the bliss of sullen bus rides, the paradise of trouble on the job, the incommensurable dream of sexual frustration, the joy of being mad and unfulfilled, the glory of a night alone, lonely, watching sitcoms; left out of the world.
On the other hand, this may be remembered as the dawn of the golden age, wherein after six millennia of disaster followed on disaster, forever after no disaster comes. Then this loneliness will never be redeemed. If we never starve this bread will never seem in hindsight to have been a feast of pleasure is part of what I mean. But look at the books. Consider the odds. We will very likely starve.
Villanelle If You Want to Be a Bad-Ass You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same. You will, of course, be taunted if you ever try to change. When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.
Consistency is worse, it brings the wrong kind of fame. The orbit of right action has a freakin’ woolly range. You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same.
It, inertia, is a pity. It, stagnation, is a shame. Yet you yourself preach caution as you pace your unlocked cage: “When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not. Stay tame.”
Be a mountain if you want to, be the whole mountain range. Will you, in turn, be hostage to your hostage on the page? You will not. Be rewarded for remaining long the same?
You can say what you want when the angel makes you lame. You can wrestle against water, you can rape your own rage (when trainers wander off). Tigers, please do not stay tame.
As hard as bleeding a tree to death by cut and squeezing, change from out of the gut of the rut’s range will be insanely hard. But you will not be rewarded for remaining long the same, when trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.
Trotsky’s Hand I It’s like dreaming of someone too much while you’re away at war; then you come home to his fingered hat or her faltering hemline and it’s What the hell was I fighting for? Just another example of how biography works. Your character has got to have a narrative arc, some drawbacks, something irredeemably awful,
along with his or her strong points, to be believable. Yet we all recoil in disbelief when anything of the sort cuts a form into our real lives, the life of the author. Don’t
despair! It’s just the demands of narrative! Leda, after all, probably never even thought to fear anything like that.
Then one day, there it is, the century actually over
and most of its artifacts still entirely inexplicable. This is no walk in the park with spinach, Swee’pea,
I’ve got no idea where to go for extra strength.
I guess that’s what they’re selling. It’s an incidental that it cleans your laundry,
scrubs your teeth. What is of note is that it is a source of extra
strength. Extra strength! Thank God! That’s what we’re going to need in case they all switch back: the swan, the prince, the salt.
Even if you weren’t ever accosted by a feathery god,
you take some heavy losses early on, and that will leave feathers everywhere for the rest of your life; as if you were wearing an eiderdown coat;
you just walk around and molt. As for the man in the tiara,
that’s a transformation you never want to go through twice, but do, coaxing every so often your sad, damp, frog
back into his palace. Don’t you like your scepter? Won’t
you wear your robes? Lastly, salt. Well, who doesn’t turn towards the sepia for a second look; into the carousel music
and the tortured plaster horses of the past? But this sympathy
does not imply that I want Madame Lot back here knitting itchy sweaters. Let’s just try to calm down.
II When Stalin took power he had Trotsky erased from the photographs. Sometimes, you can still see
a floating hand. Left behind. So disembodied as to be
almost meaningless. We try to ignore it, floating there in history. We get to work. There is something to be said for that.
You can’t really expect me to roll around naked in a garden
letting Trotsky’s severed hand float around my body, knowing my body better than any lover, his soft,
soft-focused, probing hand. Yet, how can we do anything
serious with that thing hovering overhead? A woman working at a table in the park swats away the tickling hand
of Trotsky, and intones as if to all of history:
Not now. Trotsky’s hand, abashed, moves on to pick some flowers. So much is gone that
what is left is inexplicable without memory, and memory
is painful and very difficult to explain. Which isn’t to say I mind Trotsky’s hand
snapping its fingers and flapping itself like a bird
above my desk or would rather have him back, extant, yammering about world socialism and complaining about
the samovar: Is this thing cold again? So, is this more of a lament
than a complaint? Sure.
But it is always there. This burden of history is not a bird but a hand, its wrist a tiny cloud.
It’s very quiet. It fills the quiet sky.
Please Answer All Three Of The Following Essay Questions.
I What would it take to make you what you truly want to be and why will no one cooperate with you on these visions you have of yourself, when it would be so easy for them to finally acknowledge that you are the demon ruler of this island world and that all we eat here is pickled herring that we harvest from sycamore trees in the plenitude of summer and load into mason jars for the lean months of the cold? Do these men and women, your subjects, fear you more than they love you? And what is it that they fear? Use a logical proof; show your work.
II If someone wanted to make you slap them, hard, would it be better for him or her to say that your father didn’t like to hear you sing, or to say that your mother purposefully pricked her finger and bled into the coleslaw she brought to the physics-department picnics every year because, despite her smile and gala disposition, she had no taste for any of it, not for your father, nor for you, nor for the logic of time and space and so she made them drink her sorrow with their cabbage? Explain your answer. Are you aware you can not save anyone from dying?
III Why do you waste so much time considering the juxtaposition of the perceived endlessness of a moment and the micro-elapsement of a year? Clearly there is nothing you can do about it and yet, overcome with love for your friends and family you neither run to them constantly and weep for them, kissing their cast-off running shoes like a minor apostle, nor do you refuse to answer the question “how are you” ever again, certain that you don’t know what it means? By now you must recognize that rational truth is unbearable and impossible to live by and that everything possible and bearable is, of necessity, a logical mess incorporating lies as well as contradictory truths. And yet you just go along, making phone calls, hanging curtains, letting the slanting sun before twilight shift your thoughts, riding the subway, sweeping the hallway, and you watch TV, don’t you, and go to the bank, eat ice cream, call the cable guy, why do you do it when you are so keenly aware of the impossibility of your goals given the obdurate resistance of such material? Try to answer as completely as possible; time.
Swamp Thing
I Apparently you’ve got to be vulnerable if you want anything to happen, and on the other side of it you’ve got to be unfathomably strong in order to get by. In order to get through the attacks and rejections occasioned by vulnerability you’ve got to be almost invulnerably strong. It’s a difficult road map to fold, friends. The shifts in logic are very subtle, they have to do with generational time and we don’t have that kind of time lying around in the store-room, we’ve got to get it on special order, which means you’ve got to read about a thousand books.
II So, to review, the inner life is lousy with affection for the outer life which seems like a sweet, dumb child that has somehow survived a week alone, lost in intemperate circumstance, an actual swamp in the Bayou, and our inner life wonders, how did that stupid child I love so tenderly and with so little outward show of derision possibly survive out there where the possibility of being eaten by a crocodile is very real, grabbed by snakes, being bitten by endless mosquitoes, and drowned, let alone freezing, let alone starved.
III Survival experts opine that your idiot outer life survived in the Bayou because it never thought to panic, it never noticed that it was a time to give up. Our inner life wonders how this naïve assumption of existence is communicated to the crocodiles and the snakes but the survival expert is gone: wanted to be the first one out of the parking lot, just in case. I guess I understand.
IV How did it ever get construed that the child of us is inner? It’s the outer that always has to be told to take that out of your mouth. I’ve got something twice as inner that sits quietly writing her book. Perhaps our outer self ate algae. Bumble bumble, the deadline for the grant is long past, long past, but some part of you writes for guidelines. I realize that the deadline is past but I want to express my desire to have applied. This is not what the survival expert had in mind.
V Staring out the window towards First Avenue, the inner self lectures. Vulnerability, it explains to the outer self, is a difficult mess. Yes, apply for the grant but not when the deadline is so long past. As for asking your lover to move in, perhaps you remember your stay in the swamp? The yellow eyes of those who see when you are nightly blinded? The leg-less finesse of the serpents? The tug of vines? Well, who am I to caution your affections. By now the outer self is on the phone, making the arrangements, not particularly concerned; eager for all of it. Hoping to win grants for which it never applied and sliding down some secret handrail, open-armed, wide-eyed, into the din of life. Apparently, it is crazy in love, and reckless with the customs of survival.
.4 lbs
6 × .5 × 9 in
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