Recalculating

by Charles Bernstein

  The water is painfully frigid on one of the hottest days of the summer. The bathers do not know if they should wade or swim. “Do as the geese do,” says the Jew. “Glide on top.”

  Too much pepper has been added to the stew. “Use this stew as a spice for a new stew,” says the Jew. “In this way a moment of discomfort will give way to a dozen aftershocks.”

  The homeowner is disturbed that he owes the bank more on his house than the house is worth. “A bad investment,” the Jew tells him, “is like a spoiled puppy that requires even more attention than a baby. You learn to love it all the more.”

  The Jew tries a new bread knife. “The bread was never easier cut. But even this knife will not work for a good bagel.”

  The poet complains that the most recent book did not sell many copies nor receive any reviews. “Even if your book sold and was reviewed,” the Jew says, “it would not have been able to compete with Schwartz or Goldberg. So at least you have avoided that disappointment.”

  The Jew sees a crab. It is an ordinary crab.

  A hard worker has been summarily fired from a job, replaced by a person with less experience and less ability. “The person who did this,” says the Jew, “will never understand the wrong that has been done and so will not be able to make amends. The only thing worse than what has happened to you has already befallen this person.”

  A man buys a suit on sale that is too tight at the waist and long in the sleeves. “Yes,” says the Jew. “Things often turn out like this.”

  The lifeboat capsizes and the passengers are close to drowning. “I always wanted to be buried at sea,” says the Jew. “But I had hoped to die on land first.”

  A tear graces Jesus’s cheeks as he suffers on the cross. “That tear is not for his own pain,” says the Jew, “but his pity for those who condemn any man to death, regardless of what he has done.”

  The waves wash over the child’s magnificent sandcastle. The Jew consoles the heartbroken builder: “The castle will always be more beautiful in your memory than it could have ever been in the harsh light of the day. Tomorrow, the waves of your mind will erase even the memory of your castle. Making is its own best reward.”

  The patient does not know whether the treatment is more injurious to life than the disease. “Whatever you do, it is bound to be a giant, annoying, and irrevocable mistake,” counsels the Jew. “So you might as well make the best mistake you can.”

  The young scholar cannot decide the best color for a new couch. “Pick not the color you want to see,” says the Jew, “but the color you want to sit on.”

  Little hope is given that the cake will be ready for the wedding. The party planners are beside themselves. “An unfinished cake,” says the Jew “is like a marriage in progress: tomorrow is always in the offing.”

  A business deal goes sour when the main investor runs off with the owner’s spouse. “A fly in the ointment is the proof in the pudding,” says the Jew.

  A reader complains about the obscurity of a line of verse and seeks a Jew’s counsel. “Obscurity is like the yeast in a cake. It is long acting to ensure the dough rises on time.”

  Vandals steal the pump’s handles. “You think this is bad,” says the Jew. “You should have seen the neighborhood before the vandals moved in.”

  A miller notices that the grain is too coarse to sell and is advised to consult a Jew. “Cohen still owes me 14 dollars.”

  A Jew writes a book in which he bears false witness against his friend, also a Jew. How could my friend turn against me? A Jew is asked for advice: “When Jew does this to Jew it creates a problem: it’s harder to ascribe it to anti-Semitism. But not impossible.”

  A high-handed literary critic dismisses the irony in a work. The writer turns to a Jew. “The absence of irony in a work,” says the Jew, “is like a window pane without a window: impossible to justify.”

  Two parents both claim a child is theirs. A Jew is brought in to arbitrate. “Don’t try that ruse where you propose cutting the child in half,” says one parent. “We weren’t born yesterday,” the other adds scornfully. “Yesterday’s ruse is like a jackhammer drilling in sand,” says the Jew. “The end result is still a hole in the ground.”

  The scholar cannot understand an unusual diacritical mark over a word in the text he is studying and ponders on it for several days before asking a Jew. “It means nothing,” says the Jew, blowing a speck of dust off the page.

  MANIFEST AVERSIONS, CONCEPTUAL CONUNDRUMS, & IMPLAUSIBLY DENIABLE LINKS

  I love originality so much I keep copying it.

  Immature poets borrow. Mature poets invest.

  POETRY WANTS TO BE FREE. (Or, if not, available for long-term loan.)

  I’m the derivative product of an originality that spawns me as it spurns me.

  The work of art “itself” does not exist, only incommensurable social contexts through which it emerges and into which it vanishes.

  The author dies. The author’s work is born.

  Poetry is a secret society hiding in plain sight, open to ear and mind’s eye.

  The shock of the new for some, the invigorating tonic of the contemporary for others.

  A work of art is the overlay of a set of incommensurable possibilities, linked together around an anoriginal vanishing point.

  CONCEPTUAL POETRY IS POETRY PREGNANT WITH THOUGHT.

  (The absence of conception had itself to be conceived.)

  THE POET IS A LIAR.

  THE POET IS A LYRE.

  THE POET’S TIRED.

  (Poetry abhors a narrative.)

  “I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like.”— J. M. W. Turner (1842)

  L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y: a loose affiliation of unlike individuals.

  Which reminds me of the story of the man who reports a wife-beating to a neighbor. “Then stop beating her,” the neighbor replies. “But it’s not my wife!,” replies the good Samaritan, becoming agitated. “That’s even worse!” says his neighbor.

  No parodist goes unpunished because in these times the parodist is pilloried for the views he or she parodies. In a world of moral discourse absent ethical engagement, only the self-righteous go unrebuked.

  I was born yesterday . . . and’ll die tomorrow.

  SO WHAT

  This is so & so is this

  But neither is important.

  That is theirs

  & near’s not here

  But neither is important.

  Never twill, never twine

  Nor peep nor bleat nor pipe.

  Neither’s important.

  CARPE DIEM: CARP AND DIE.

  I am not the man I was much less the one I will be nor imagine myself as, just the person I almost am.

  A bird calls but I hear only its song.

  My skin is burning but inside I am as cold as the North Pole. My shivering is metaphysical, a kind of involuntary davening.

  Religion is giving religion a bad name.

  Nor am I an atheist. I believe in the fallible gods of thought and in my resistance to these gods. I have faith in my aversion of faith.

  Take care not to define yourself against others’ belief systems. Their God does not define the domain of my profane, their Devil does not wash away my sins.

  The water colors in watercolors.

  I’m an observant Jew. I look closely at the things around me, as if they were foreign.

  Sandy as a sugar donut, salty as a red rose . . .

  You’re either awake or asleep or will be.

  I am not a secular man, but in moments of crisis I turn to agnosticism for the comfort it gives in freeing me from superstition. Once, when gravely ill and sure I would die at any minute, I embraced agnosticism, and, with Nietzsche in hand, swore I would remain an agnostic even if I recovered. But once I did recover, I lapsed again into religious belief, feeling the danger was over and it was safe to return to my old ways. Still, the fear of dying under the veil of dogma still grips my soul late
in the night, and I yearn for the courage to embrace reality without prophylactics.

  My mind is a labyrinth with well-lit exit signs; as much as I try, I can’t ignore them. When I take leave of my mind I put myself in the care of my brain. In this way, I become again the animal to which my mind is blind.

  There’s no depth to the depth.

  In the world of the imagination, impossible just means the next opportunity to get real.

  The ceremony of sorrow is performed with a measured, defiant acknowledgement that makes words charms, talismans of the fallen world. Poetry is a holding space, a folded grace, in which objects held most dear disappear, returning as radiant moments of memory’s forgiving home.

  [for Akilah Oliver]

  Turner’s sheerness.

  Existence needs essence the way a walking tour needs local color.

  But a hole in an argument is not the same as a point of light.

  Rather than an expression of love, justice is a protection against our inability to love.

  We are most familiar with our estrangement; it is our home ground.

  The absence of an accent is also an accent.

  Yet the Dark, untouched by light, injures it all the same.

  AND AENIGMA WAS HIS NAME, O!

  Gather ye rosebuds while you can

  Old times are locked in an armored van

  Story’s told, hope’s shot

  Chill out for the ultimate not

  ARMED STASIS

  I will make a fact with you Robert Frost.

  Me on the one side, you on the one side.

  No learned astrologer will ever

  Separate us, crouching in the proverb-

  Ial darkness even when it sounds like

  Light.—Gosh I gotta go soon, even now

  The Jersey shore beckons, my cabana

  For your cheddar, my bootstraps for your boot.

  UNREADY, UNWILLING, UNABLE

  Peerlessly literal,

  We’re a little nearer than we were.

  There is nothing I would rather see

  than an angel dancing on a rhyme

  or a unicorn playing Phaedra.

  I love humanity; it’s people I can’t bear.

  I am a Jewish man trapped

  in the body of a Jewish man.

  I love people;

  humanity scares me.

  If nothing is translatable, then

  everything is.

  Scars me.

  Sob rule.

  Boss is serrated.

  Slush life. (The slope of the sloop is

  spooked.

  The revolutionary spectacle of a baby tearing off her diaper or a crippled young boy casting aside his crutches cannot help to move all those who yearn for liberation, a liberation that is blocked by the cruel forces of fate and biological inequality.

  Poetry doesn’t exist to be understood or to solicit accolades or dismissals.

  It does what it does, what it can do.

  When it comes it

  comes, when it

  goes it

  goes.

  This is the secret of rhythm.

  For what leaves one person high and dry is for another as necessary as water. And can you have that necessity for one without at the same time sacrificing the availability to another? (And those two points of accessibility / inaccessibility may also occur for the same person at different times or even different parts of any one of us, odd as that may sound.) Poetry’s power (some poetry’s power) may be that its appeal is not universal but specific (not popular but partisan); we don’t all agree.

  If everything is translatable, nothing is.

  )

  Then I came to a pork in the road.

  Mediocre politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Great politicians campaign in prose and govern in poetry.

  Camp is a drag.

  Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep I take down one of the volumes of my vast Yellow Pages collection. Too much light. So I go to “Draperies, shutters, and blinds.” But which one? Draperies, shutters, or blinds?

  I write to forget (or just

  not think

  about it

  too much

  ).

  There ain’t nothing like a metaphor

  nothing in this world.

  There ain’t nothing you can name

  that is anything like a metaphor.

  —Hold it. I gotta take this call. It might be from someone more important than you. (I don’t even know you.)

  Infinite joy in finite time; finite pain in infinite time.

  My little blurb must think it queer

  To stop without a poem book near.

  But I have proverbs still to write

  To shore me ’gainst frightening night.

  Grenier: “Green in green shines.”

  nowhere now here [[now here no where]]

  [Ronald Johnson]

  Time’s loopy as a pretzel, salty as belly lox.

  A gift horse looks

  nobody in the mouth.

  The more one turns away from a thing

  the greater the force with which it returns

  in the

  unconscious.

  Tea Party: I love America so much I want to lock her in mybasement to have her all to myself.

  We’ve come to take

  your country back. (OUR

  AMERICA NOT

  Y

  OURS)

  (oars, pours, lores, ore, ors)

  Nothing is done forever or everything

  is done forever. Poetry often operates

  in the spaces

  between intention &

  serendipity. Or it reframes / displaces /

  replaces where the intentionality

  lies.

  But how readers interpret the result of randomization is not

  random; we

  project meaning, associate freely, symbolize the process / structure.

  Who decides what poetry ought to be? Historically,

  poetry’s history suggests many radical swerves from

  such oughts and of course much

  compliance as well. What some reject as empty

  others embrace as visceral. And what some

  embrace as rational / sensible poetry others reject as

  empty, lifeless.

  Poetry’s not about what it says but what it does.

  “For where one finds commensurability with paraphrase, there the sheets have not been rumpled; there poetry has not, so to speak, spent the night.”

  [Mandelstam, tr. Brown]

  So in the end what is comes down to is

  Can the truth handle truth?

  Wake up and smell the plasticine.

  RECIPE FOR DISASTER

  1 brown pillowcase

  2 cans 20W20 motor oil

  1 DVD William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

  2 pony tails

  1 1854 edition of Leaves of Grass

  6 matching leatherette banquettes (beige)

  3 sarcastic innuendos

  13 nightingales

  4 oil paint sticks (ochre)

  ∞ resignation

  1 tube tanning oil

  Play DVD chapter 3 in loop while grinding Leaves of Grass with the innuendos. Soak pony tails in motor oil and shake gently over banquettes. Let motor oil sink in then apply tanning oil by hand. Garnish with pillowcase and paint sticks. Release nightingales.

  AFTER LEMINSKI

  My cut-off head

  Thrown in your window

  Moon-lit night

  Window open

  Hits the wall

  Loses some teeth

  Falls to the bed

  Heavy with thought

  Maybe it’s scary

  Maybe you’ll blink

  Seeing by moon

  The color of my eyes

  Maybe you’ll think

  It’s just your alarm clock

  On the nightstand

  Not to s
care you

  Only to ask kindlier treatment

  For my sudden head

  Departed

  CATULLUS 85

  Hate and love. Why’s that?, you’d ask

  Don’t know, I feel it and it’s torture.

  PSYCHOLOGY OF COMPOSITION (VII)

  It’s mineral the paper

  on which to write

  verse; verse

  that is possible not to make.

  Mineral are

  flowers and plants,

  fruits, animals

  when in a state of words.

  Mineral

  the horizon line,

  our names, those things

  made of words.

  Mineral, at last,

  any book:

  ’cause the written

  word is mineral, the cold nature

  of the written word.

  João Cabral de Melo Neto (1950)

  translated with Horacio Costa and Régis Bonvicino,

  after Djelal Kadir

  VENEREAL MUSE

  O Heart’s Muse, you palace lover—

  When January winds hover

  Over dark despair of snowy night

  Will you have heat to make blue feet white?

  Will you bring life to marbled shoulders

  With moonlight-pierced shutters?

  Knowing money’s spent and throat’s dry

  Will you harvest gold from azure sky?

  Every eve you got to earn your bread

  Like a boy in choir giving head

  Blowing smoke to a God nearly dead

  Hungry for tricks, you strut like a queen

  Till your laugh, soaking in tears unseen

  Jogs joy from a vulgar spleen

  Baudelaire, “La Muse Vénale” (1857)

  POEMS FOR REHAB

  hang in

  turn up

  attune

  · · · · ·

  silence

  is

  unnerving

  · · · · ·

  God hurts those hurt themselves.

  · · · · ·

  Vengeance is mine sayeth the ideological state apparatus.

  · · · · ·

  just give me one more choice

  · · · · ·

  be here then

  be then there

  be there now

  · · · · ·

  hope is the thing

  feathered with loss