manwalksintobar

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Funeral Blues // W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good.

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On This Very Street in Belgrade // Charles Simic

Your mother carried you Out of the smoking ruins of a building And set you down on this sidewalk Like a doll bundled in burnt rags, Where you now stood years later Talking to a homeless dog, Half-hidden behind a parked car, His eyes brimming with hope As he inched forward, ready for the worst.

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Crow Jane In High Society. // Amiri Baraka

                                                   Wipes her nose on the draperies. Spills drinks fondles another man's life. She is looking for alternatives. Openings where she can lay all this greasy talk on somebody. Me, once. Now I am her teller.                                   And I tell her symbols, as the grey movement of clouds. Leave grey movements of clouds. Leave, always, more.

Where is she? That she moves without light. Even in our halls. Even with our laughter, lies, dead drunk in a slouch hat famous king.                                                      Where?

To come on so.

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In This Galaxy // Diane Wakoski

I looked for a man who knew the temperatures of stars;    one who could draw rings around Saturn with a fine pen and would sleep with me as if a shower of meteors was a common occurrence around the bed each night. But love and science — they are both gambles; and if you try to win the sun’s light,                      you must be prepared also to lose every                    day.

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December 10 // Yannis Ritsos

I ask, I ask, tell me, but first put down that knife I'm not a sheep, I kick at the wind.

(From Diaries of Exile; translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich & Edmund Keeley)

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College Avenue, Halloween, 2002 // Hanif Abdurraqib

Earlier, on the floor of my dorm room, Brittany told me

I mean, dude, I know you’re Buddy Holly but only because YOU’RE telling me you’re Buddy Holly. Everyone at the party may just think you’re a black guy in an old suit.

And I told her that she had no idea what she was talking about because this was the 2000s, and we are only 19 and not yet saddled with the burdens of our parents except for in the middle of some nights, when the loneliness slides itself along our necks like a crucifix and we gasp for anything familiar, but I told her that time is not now, not when this tweed striped jacket was 49.99, and I spent all morning shining these shoes, so clean I could see my face in them, if that face were white which it kind of will be in a way later, I told her, if only in the confidence it will have in itself.

But, right now tonight, everyone at this party thinks I am dressed as Sammy Davis Jr., and the decades old couch I am pushing my fingers in between is wrapped in torn cloth covered like a grandmother’s bible the girl next to me curves her spine around the 90s pop song swinging its legs over the air and asks me where Frank Sinatra is and I want to ask her what she knows of the Apollo, the Mecca, bowing to four white kids from Lubbock Texas in 1957 if she knows how hard it might be for her to squeeze a standing ovation outta all of those black hands but I smile instead and just say Frank’s buried in California so she will give me her phone number and I can pretend to have lost it on the hardwood floor of this house which has the consistency and activity of a beehive, all at once sticky and buzzing

so I go outside to escape the coat of dried beer throwing itself over the bare and cracking walls. Outside, my white friend Andy, who sits in the back during documentary film class and wears his pants and fitted cap so low we think he’s sleeping, tells me I make a good Sammy Davis Jr. and I tell him I am supposed to be Buddy Holly, so he laughs and says what’s the difference, and I say a burning plane in an empty field, and a burning cross in front of a house and then he stops laughing and asks if I saw the girl dressed as Pocahontas and I said no at the time but then she was stumbling out of the previously locked bathroom when I went back inside and she was followed by Tupac, or at least someone who was once close to resembling Tupac before this moment when the brown and black makeup sweats from his previously white skin and he pulls a feather once belonging to a headdress from his tongue, and stares at the girl whose taste was still splitting his throat wide open, and without looking at me he says Man, there are some things that stay with you your whole life, there are some things it is impossible to sleep off.

I promise the girl on the couch I will call her and maybe I will after all because I am becoming more and more like my father every day, the way we both swing into the darkness like it is our birthright, the way we both crave the moon and the breeze dancing in for the gossip after we walk out of the party, which I do to get back to the dorm, so I can tell Brittany she was right

up until the corner of College and Ruhl, where back in ’75, before the houses were worth millions, I hear the dealers would kill you right where you stood for fuckin’ with their corner and the police sirens knew these streets like a second language and still do though for different reasons, or so they say as the red and blue glow devours the blackest parts of the night, and the officers press arms into my back and yell questions which don’t desire answers, the kind of questions that have nothing to do with what I’m doing out at this hour.

On the other end of the sidewalk Andy from documentary film class and his friends finish their cans of beer and throw them on someone’s lawn before running into the alley, but none of the officers move, except for when my student ID falls out of my pocket, and only then, when a flashlight shines on it just long enough for one of them to get a glimpse,

and when our legs are all once again planted to the pavement, though only mine trembling, and when my jacket is wearing a fresh tear, one officer looks me up and down.

Says,

Sorry. We thought you were someone else.

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Town Of My Farewell To You

Look what a thousand blue thousand white. Thousand blue thousand white thousand. Blue thousand white thousand blue thousand. White thousand blue wind today and two arms. Blowing down the road.

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New York Address // Linda Gregg

The sun had just gone out and I was walking three miles to get home. I wanted to die. I couldn’t think of words and I had no future and I was coming down hard on everything. My walk was terrible. I didn’t seem to have a heart at all and my whole past seemed filled up. So I started answering all the questions regardless of consequence: Yes I hate dark. No I love light. Yes I won’t speak. No I will write. Yes I will breed. No I won’t love. Yes I will bless. No I won’t close. Yes I won’t give. Love is on the other side of the lake. It is painful because the dark makes you hear the water more. I accept all that. And that we are not allowed romance but only its distance. Having finished with it all, now I am not listening. I wait for the silence to resume.

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Great, Glowing Vault // Paul Celan

Great, glowing vault with the outward- and away- burrowing black-constellation swarm:

into the silicified forehead of a ram I burn this image, between the horns, therein, in the singing of the coils, the marrow of the curdled heartseas swells.

What doesn't he butt against?

The world is gone, I have to carry you.

(translated from the German by Pierre Joris)

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The Meaning of Simplicity // Yannis Ritsos

I hide behind simple things so you’ll find me; if you don’t find me, you’ll find the things, you’ll touch what my hand has touched, Our hand-prints will merge. The August moon glitters in the kitchen like a tin-plated pot (it gets that way because of what I’m saying to you), it lights up the empty house and the house’s kneeling silence­ always the silence remains kneeling. Every word is a doorway to a meeting, one often cancelled, and that’s when a word is true: when it insists on the meeting.

(translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley)

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Last Letter to his Wife  // René Daumal

I am dead because I lack desire, I lack desire because I think I possess. I think I possess because I do not try to give. In trying to give, you see that you have nothing; Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself; Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing: Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become; In desiring to become, you begin to live.

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The Art of War // Mikko Harvey

In the department store, there is an area for kids to play. Most of them are swimming in a ball pit, but one is off to the side. I notice he is reading The Art of War. When he sees me seeing him, he starts to cry. What's wrong? I ask. Ugh, he says, the masses. It's been a while since I let the masses get me down, but here in the play area I give myself permission. I know, I know, I say, and we sit there bitterly watching bargain hunters come and go. Don't you hate cats, too? he asks. Personally, I like cats, but I don't want to spoil the mood. Sure. Hate them, I say. The kid grins. Then you're going love this. He pulls the skinned corpse of a cat out of his knapsack. The eyes have been pulled out and stuffed in the mouth.

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More Like Wings // Nicole Callihan

It wasn't an illness as much as it was a grouping of blackbirds on a telephone wire, or at least that's what the doctor said. She asked me to stick my tongue out farther. She said, this is a pale tongue, indicating your poor diet. She asked me what I had been feeding myself, if I ate crows, etc. I told her about the handful of almonds, the coffee. She asked me to lift up my arms. Like this? I asked. No, she said. More like wings. I made my arms into wings. Also, I scratched at my scalp. She explained this was a consequence of being around children too much and too often. They are dirty, she said. But I love my children, I told her. I am not here to talk about love, she said. While my arms were out it occurred to me that I missed the physical world, that if I were to rid myself of anything, I did not want to drag it and drop it into some "pretend" trash can, I wanted to burn it, or shred it, or fashion it into huge paper wings, hurl it off a very high building, and see if it could fly. You can put your arms down, the doctor said. But I couldn't. I could only lower them a tiny bit, then lift, then lower, and lift and lower. In this way, I experienced flight for the first time. I found my kin along the telephone wire. From my throat, I released one final call, but the doctor, having perhaps been distracted by her own longings, had already dismissed herself from our virtual appointment.

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Broken Spoke // Mary Ruefle

You grow old. You love everybody. You forgive everyone. You think: we are all leaves dragged along by the wind. Then comes a splendid spotted yellow one—ah, distinction! And in that moment you are dragged under.

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The Parable of the Old Man and the Young // Wilfred Owen

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went, And took the fire with him, and a knife. And as they sojourned both of them together, Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father, Behold the preparations, fire and iron, But where the lamb for this burnt-offering? Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, and builded parapets and trenches there, And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son. When lo! an angel called him out of heaven, Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him. Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

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An Inconvenience // John Raven

Mama, papa, and us 10 kids lived in a single room. Once, when I got sick, and like to die, I heard a cry slice through the gloom "Hotdog! We gon have mo room!"

06/16/69

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Anatomy of Melancholy // Robert Wrigley

Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee and informed the seven of us in his charge his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man he never knew, had been possessed, as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother, born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said, along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair, we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember.

As we should also always remember to call him only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive, and never, he warned, by his given nor surname, least of all with the title “Mister” attached, which would remind him of that same most hated father and plunge him therefore into a mood he could not promise he would, he said, “behave appropriately within.” Fortunately, our job, unlike the social difficulties attached thereto, was simple: collect the trash from the county’s back roads.

Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness, this meant not only beer cans and bottles, all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but also the occasional condom too, as well as the festering roadkill fresh and ridden with maggotry, or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed into the bed of the township flatbed truck we ourselves rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette.

Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloaded our tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston, sexton of the dump and the dump’s constant resident, in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailer we marveled at and strangely envied, since every inch of wall we could see through the open door was plastered with fold-outs and pages from every Stump-salvaged Playboy and nudie magazine he had ever found among the wreckage there. Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth.

Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known, by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yards of his hovel, that he never bathed. And once, while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22 from the rack beside his door and popped with amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us, then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out, and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rack to dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hide coat we could see, come the fall, except for school.

As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathom and Lucy had no use for, on the truck’s dash all that summer Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a tome he said he’d read already eleven times, this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way, it might have had to do with something like the gallery Stump’s trailer contained, the first word of its title meaning something to us, the last nothing at all. There were things about men we might be unable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky. And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat, fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shade with Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats. The town we came from was sinking into the emptiness of a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it, and rats were more common than hares and universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed, as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity— the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenance of rats the very earth offered up like a plague, the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump, whose name, as it was scrawled on his mailbox, seemed to be Stumplin Reilly McCarriston, Esquire. Of the seven of us, one would die in Vietnam, one, after medical school, would hang himself from a beam in his parents’ basement, the others merely gone, vanished in actuality if not in memory. Leaving me, alone, to tell this story. How Stump would spend his last twenty years in prison, having shot Lucy—one slender, flattening .22 slug

through the forehead—as he stood fifty feet away, balanced atop the tub of an ancient wringer washer, arms extended, like Jesus Christ, said Stump, whose trailer was bulldozed into the dump itself even before the trial, and who, no doubt, by some court-appointed lawyer if not the appalled sheriff himself, was forced to bathe and shave, to step into the unknown country of a scentless white shirt and black businessman’s trousers, in order to offer his only yet most sincere defense, that Lucifer—Mr. Doolin, as the court insisted—had told him to.