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Letter from Brooklyn

Page 4

by Jacob Scheier

who in peering back into the wreckage, found

  us, the people. For looking forward

  was his true gift. He always saw what we

  might be capable of. And so we are left

  now to struggle without his recognition,

  which while sometimes inaccurate, was

  often faithful. He taught us what we knew

  and wished to forget: our independence

  was for those who could afford it, and the slaves

  were freed to be serfs, and the good war

  was like every war, a war on children.

  One could say he was unkind to the nation,

  or it was the kind of tough love given to

  a friend, who suffers from one of Jung’s

  shady types. Where there’s hope for this patient,

  he found it by integrating the country’s

  repressed selves, who are bare and as incomplete

  as his research. If status, at times,

  had made him blind, to us he is no more

  a person now than an entire movement

  of people. The patriotic remain proud

  but a little less, while the scholars

  accuse him of bias, and, of course, they

  are right. He was not a historian, but

  the narrator of a collective memoir,

  where proving what happened exactly

  was less important than why it mattered.

  THE ILLUSION THEORIST OF COLOUR DESCRIBES A LANDSCAPE

  “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”

  — Wordsworth

  The top soft of the hills, shadow dappled. On these summer evenings cold seeming as mint ice cream,

  whose green appearance functions to distinguish it, say, from butterscotch.

  I haven’t had mint ice cream since those birthday dinners at the Old Spaghetti Factory.

  The hills are the colour of a banana or raspberry represented

  as green as a sign that it is unripe.

  My mother always returned, from the bathroom,

  minutes before the waiters came and sang

  “happy birthday” to me.

  Hills green as a signifier to keep going.

  I thought then that the waiters sang because they wanted to, not because they could be fired if they didn’t.

  That the stars are white can be stated as x is white = x has some feature by virtue of which x appears white.

  The stars are trick candles.

  The colour of the stars can be explained by interpreting their appearance as indicators of other physical features, where those features have causal powers on our perception of colour.

  The stars are like a toy camera’s flash, capturing nothing.

  It is sufficient to say “It is as if the stars were white.”

  I followed my mother around with it like I was the

  paparazzi —

  White is a property the stars do not have but might have had:

  in some possible world but not in this one.

  For who is a bigger celebrity, to a child, than one’s

  mother?

  Virtual colours are as good as real colours.

  Sometimes I expect her, any minute now, and after all

  these years, to return from the bathroom.

  In the case of colour, unlike other cases, false consciousness should be a cause for celebration.

  The stars are singing to me, because someone left

  the table to tell them it’s my special day. And

  though they’re far, if I listen close, I can nearly

  hear them.

  FOR DAVE IN ISTANBUL

  We couldn’t hear the evening call to prayer

  sheltered by the pub’s basement walls.

  We could almost think we were

  in one of our locals, except the names of everything,

  especially the women, reminded us we are foreigners,

  the yabancılar referred to in the menu

  whose drinks cost double the price.

  We were Adams in reverse, arriving

  last on the scene, the animals named long ago,

  the earth fully decorated and Eve already fallen

  and fallen and fallen. We drank our way

  to the bottom of the Bosphorus, searching for the nails

  our mothers took from the cross, before yours left,

  you told me, to play guitar for other people’s children. And mine,

  whose body thinned till it seemed to be hiding within itself

  like prayer beads in the palms of old men

  or down the blouses of the curious girls in Taksim Square.

  Each night, after last call, we ascended

  the pub steps into the softening sky, the streets barren

  as our pasts. We stumbled across the half toothless grin

  of shoddy cobblestone roads, and the skeletal remains of a cart:

  birdcage, sack of cashews, some piece of crap

  with a picture of Atatürk. We arrived where we started from,

  though had forgotten it again: the kokoreç vendor

  like a mythic tree, waiting for us at the place where the roads part.

  And we ate lamb guts, obeying the only law

  binding our lives now —

  not to look inside the bun. Then, the muezzin called

  the faithful, and I felt pious, once again,

  for being awake at this hour.

  JASPER AVENUE

  You spoke of Edmonton as a river god,

  turning your amateur boxer father

  into a fucking vegetable. A religion

  of one punch. Your faith

  only in metamorphoses

  for the worst. How all it takes

  sometimes is one good blow

  to the head. But at least it got him off

  Jasper Avenue. A joke I didn’t get

  till now, arriving

  for the first time in your hometown

  and seeing the faces

  you once described

  as rain-damaged suede

  stumble by the dust caked

  and curtained 25 cent

  peep shows. You told me how

  you would fuck anyone

  with a car, keys to get you

  out of town. I should have

  seen your little indiscretions

  and thefts coming for miles —

  and perhaps I did. Deserved it,

  in a way, as you wrote

  in your Coffee Time napkin scripture:

  what’s fair is what happens to you

  and we do what we can

  and whatever that is —

  is what’s right. And now

  you’re married, and, well,

  not poor, and I’m

  walking down Jasper Avenue

  to where I’ll read some poems.

  Yes, they pay me for this.

  Though not very much.

  But people listen to me

  talk about all the things I had,

  maybe we all had, coming.

  And I always wanted that, I guess.

  It makes a lot of things forgivable,

  or proves, at least, they were necessary.

  A SORT OF LOVE POEM

  I know how I change in Kafka-esque ways,

  when I get what I long for. So, I am pretty alright

  with keeping our romance as is,

  the exchange of letters and poems, a coffee once a year —

  the subtle flirtations that may all be in my head,

  or that you weave, like a web, in the night,
<
br />   in the minds of nearly every man you talk to.

  I am okay with that, since I am in love,

  most of all, with the way we fall in love.

  The burial ceremony of old skins

  and sound judgement. Glorious —

  how un-Plantonist I feel at the thought of you

  drying your hair. And I do not write this

  with a belief that it will make you see something

  you cannot already. Poetry can’t

  substitute for the absurd currency of attraction,

  the way someone winces when they sneeze

  or stirs their coffee.

  I write now from the place of good love poems,

  the ones that have no intent,

  seek to change nothing,

  and live alongside the prayers of atheists,

  formed simply and only,

  because there is nothing else left to do.

  1989

  When I was a boy you were old

  and have stayed that way for twenty years.

  I remember you best as the world’s one sad man

  when The Wall fell. Your glum face

  reflected in people dancing

  atop televised rubble. I didn’t know

  what ideology was, but understood

  you were against joy on principle. That Christmas

  you bummed a du Maurier off a stranger

  in the Golden Griddle on Front Street, and we sat

  in your old Chevy, wrinkled

  with dents, windows rolled up

  so smoke curled against the glass

  like a caged ghost. I predicted all of this,

  you said, and if I had known

  who Cassandra was, I’d think

  she was a Trotskyite or “Trot”

  as I heard you called once. Though I didn’t know

  what that was either, and spent

  my childhood waiting for you

  to strut like a proud thoroughbred.

  You exhaled forecasts all night, told me

  Yugoslavia will resemble an uprooted tree

  and so will Iraq. You told me

  peace wouldn’t last

  in the place of your birth

  and about the intifada to come

  which sounded like “ta da” —

  what I imagined you would say

  one day — your leaving

  turning out to be sleight of hand. You told me

  about the economic collapses to come, but not

  tumours will grow in my mother’s body.

  You didn’t tell me

  they will fill her brain

  till she believes I am a spy

  and then she’ll be dead. She is dead.

  But not right now, where it is 1989,

  the future unfolding along predictable and unknown lines

  through the frosted windshield. You tell me

  you are scared of snow and miss the desert.

  You are thinking of moving back soon.

  You are already gone.

  It will be years before you appear again,

  looking remarkably the same, as though

  there are no disappointments left

  to take the years from you. You won’t

  see the revolution in your lifetime.

  You admit it, freely now, shrugging

  like Rand’s Atlas. You want now,

  more than anything, to know me,

  for the first time, as though

  historical materialism didn’t apply

  to our lives. I try to tell you who I am

  these days. I list off some beliefs,

  if this is what makes us who we are. I tell you

  I believe there is a god,

  sometimes, and that Marx was right

  about a lot of things, but was, probably,

  an asshole. I tell you

  art matters, and so does love and that’s the extent

  of what I know

  with any certainty. But I can’t

  talk about the past. The word pain comes to mind

  and for a moment pain and past sound like they are the same

  word, that we invented pain so we could have

  a word for the irrevocable that falls soft

  on the ear. I want to tell you I once believed

  snow made men vanish in the night, into history.

  POST-OCCUPY

  Tourists posing for the shot by the balls

  of the Bowling Green bull. Deli. Starbucks.

  The stones of Trinity Church. Opening bell. Strip club.

  Reuters showing the news of the day. Black birds

  in Battery Park. Scaffold. Spring. Someone

  talking about the Dutch colony. Blue bank.

  Lenapehoking. The ant march up Lady

  Liberty’s crown. Pigeons. Another Starbucks.

  Ellis Island. The search for namesakes. Red bank.

  Freedom Tower. Fences. Never Forgetting.

  Poplars. This is an important announcement . . .

  The Q train is running via the R.

  Going Out of Business Sale. Grand Opening Sale.

  Closing bell. Hudson River on a clear day.

  NOTES

  The opening of “Raising the Pentagon” is a slight variation on Norman Mailer’s description of a cell mate in The Armies of the Night.

  All the lines in “Re: Grandpa’s Village” are from an email my uncle, Michael, sent me in 2007.

  The italicized lines in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” are directly quoted from the character Paul Varjak, or “Fred,” in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  The lines “We were blindsided . . . /We never saw it coming” in “Occupy” are Pat Buchanan’s paraphrase of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s testimony to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2009. (“Is a U.S. Default Inevitable?” Human Affairs, January 15, 2010.)

  “Ode to the Double Rainbow Guy” refers to Paul Vasquez whose excitement over seeing a double rainbow became an internet meme in 2010. The Gregory Brothers soon after turned it into a YouTube music video.

  “For My Beard” is influenced by the poems “Nearing Winter” by Sachiko Murakami and “Cockroach Elegy” by Jeff Latosik.

  The poem “In Memory of Howard Zinn” could not have been written without the aid of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and a talk he gave at Boston College in 2010, entitled “Holy Wars,” which I watched on democracynow.org.

  The non-italicized lines in “The Illusion Theorist of Colour Describes a Landscape” are variations of text taken from the article “Color” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

  The line “. . . to play guitar for other people’s children” in “For Dave in Istanbul” was inspired by a line in an unpublished poem my father seems to have written decades ago.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council for their generous financial support in the writing of this book.

  Thank you to Michael Holmes for his careful and caring eye in editing these poems. Thank you to Jack David and David Caron for believing this work is worthy of their wonderful press. Thank you to Rob Winger for his careful copyedit and helpful suggestions. Thank you to Natalie Olsen for her beautiful cover art. Thank you to everyone at ECW Press who put their time, energy, and care into this book: Crissy Boylan, Erin Creasey, Troy Cunningham, Jenna Illies, and Rachel Ironstone.

  Thank you to the editors of Arc, Big City Lit (U.S.), Prism International, Rampike, Rattle (U.S.), and Guernica’s Editions Poet to Poet anthology.

  Thank you to th
ose who read earlier drafts of some of these poems and offered generous and helpful feedback: Di Brandt, Nashira Dernesch, Daniel Marrone, Sarah Pinder, and Phoebe Tsang.

  Thank you to Sage Hill Writing Experience where some of these poems were completed. The feedback from Ken Babstock and my fellow workshop participants there was invaluable.

  To Rachel Bonner, Rocco de Giacomo, Chris Matthews, and Rowan McNamara, who, in one way or another, helped these poems make it through (or helped me get through). Thank you.

  Jacob Scheier is a poet and journalist from Toronto. He has also lived in Istanbul, New York City, and Brandon, Manitoba. His debut collection, More to Keep Us Warm, won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2008. His poems have been published in literary journals and magazines across North America, including Descant, Geist, and Rattle, and have been aired on CBC Radio. He is the co-winner of a 2009 New York Community Media Alliance Award for Best Feature and is a regular contributor to Toronto’s NOW Magazine.

  Copyright © Jacob Scheier, 2013

  Published by ECW Press

  2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2

  416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Scheier, Jacob

  Letter from Brooklyn / Jacob Scheier.

  Poems.

  ISBN 978-1-77041-134-0

  Also issued as: 978-1-77090-387-6 (PDF); 978-1-77090-388-3 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8637.C432L47 2013 C811’.6 C2012-907514-0

  Editor for the press: Michael Holmes

  Cover and text design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

  Cover image © particula / photocase.com

  Author photo: Chris Matthews

  The publication of Letter from Brooklyn has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, and by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit. The marketing of this book was made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

 

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