HANNAH SULLIVAN
Three Poems
Contents
TITLE PAGE
YOU, VERY YOUNG IN NEW YORK
REPEAT UNTIL TIME
THE SANDPIT AFTER RAIN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
YOU, VERY YOUNG IN NEW YORK
Rosy used to say that New York was a fairground.
‘You will know when it’s time, when the fair is over.’
But nothing seems to happen. You stand around
On the same street corners, smoking, thin-elbowed,
Looking down avenues in a lime-green dress
With one arm raised, waiting to get older.
Nothing happens. You try without success
The usual prescriptions, the usual assays on innocence:
I love you to the wrong person, I feel depressed,
Kissing a girl, a sharpener, sea urchin, juice cleanses.
But the senses, laxly fed, are self-replenishing,
Fresh as the first time, so even the eventual
Sameness has a savour for you. Even the sting
When someone flinches at I love you
Is not unwelcome, like the ulcer on your tongue
Whetted on the ridges of a tooth.
And when he slams you hard against the frame,
The pore-ticked sallow bruise seems truer
Than the speed, the spasm, with which you came.
So nothing happens. No matter what you try,
The huge lost innocence at which you aimed
Recedes like long perspectives, like the sky
Square at the end of Fifth whitening at dawn
Unseen, as you watch the unlit cabs go by.
The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the tile floor.
All summer the Park smelled of cloves and it was dying.
Now it is Labor Day and you have been sleeping through a rainstorm,
Half aware of the sewage and frying peanut oil and the ozone
Rising in the morning heat, and the sound of your roommate hooking the chain,
Flipping ice cubes into a brandy balloon, pouring juice over them,
Ruby Sanguinello, till they giggle, popping their skins. The freezer throbs.
He has been beating a man he met on Craigslist, he has been dreaming:
Old New York, a James novel, a Greenwich Village Christmas,
A certain kind of frost in the Meatpacking District, and the smell of the carcasses
Dull with the tang of freezing blood beside the skip of the Hudson wind.
You have been thinking of the building opposite at night, the lights
Going off one by one, a diminished Mondrian, one ochre square
Where a woman undresses for the city, stroking her puffy thighs.
You hear him talking on the phone about you, his ‘petite innocente’.
All summer you have been eating peaches from the greenmarket.
Overripe in September they need to rest in the icebox, sitting with their bruises.
All summer you have been dreaming of Fall and its brittle confection of branches.
Lying awake in the fat pulse of November rain, as the bond market falls
And the art market gets nervous, starts to freeze up, and hipsters
Keep on trying to sell huckleberry jam from Brooklyn and novelists
Keep on going to Starbucks to craft their sagas, adjusting their schemas,
Picking like pigeons at the tail of the morning croissant,
As the bartenders figure out the winter cocktail lists, telling each other
That Cynar, grapefruit bitters, and a small-batch Mezcal will
Be trending in the new year, even though guests are still going to be wanting
Negronis at weddings, gin and tonics on first dates, Manhattans before
Moving upstairs, away from the camera phones, on illicit business …
Schramsberg ’98 is working well for Caitlin in the nouveau Bellini.
Jed crafts a drink from porter, coffee rum, and Brachetto d’Acqui,
It can only be written in Chinese but is ordered as ‘the vice grip’,
Its taste is whipped cream and kidneys, beer bitter and honeyed.
He makes it for the girl in leathers with a face like the Virgin Mary.
You are listening to Bowie in bed, thinking about the hollows
Of his eyes, his lunatic little hand jigs, longing for Berlin in the seventies.
You are thinking of masturbating but the vibrator’s batteries are low
And the plasticine-pink stick rotates leisurely in your palm,
Casting its space-age glow into the winter shadows.
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.
Moving in the bathroom at Christmas, plucking your eyebrows, shaving,
(On Friday Trinh will be back and you will take two Advil and lie
On a table in Chelsea holding yourself open, ‘stretch it’ she says,
Irritably sometimes, and ‘stretch’ as lavender wax wells
Voluptuously in hidden places, and ‘turn’ as you kneel on all fours
So she can clean you up behind and, still parting you open, her fingers
Spend one moment too long tissuing off the dead wax with almond oil and
‘All done’ she pats, producing hot towels); then moving lightly
Over the floor, taking medicines with last night’s overnight-out
Brackish water in a coffee mug; taking a levothyroxine, half a Lexapro,
Some vitamins to ward off colds, one to reduce PMS, some other crap
You bought in a basement discount store with a cold, last Monday,
From a man who thought you might be low in magnesium, he said this
While eating vegan candy from a ripped-out pack snatched
From his own counter. Then the weighing, the exhalation on the scales,
A finger callipering for fatness, a finger slipping in to check the cervix –
And walking out of the house into a world overwhelmed with rain and light snow,
At more than capacity, so the taxi drivers are only in the middle lane
And the rose sellers have stayed home.
The consciousness of the finite, the menaced, the essentially invented state twinkles ever, to my perception, in the thousand glassy eyes of these giants of the mere market.
Evening comes without seeing light again. Between you and a window:
The beige Lego-maze of offices, people whose names you don’t know.
You should be addressing inefficiencies in online processes,
Mastering multichannel, getting serious about small business,
You have created a spreadsheet with thirteen tabs,
The manager is giving you hell, ordering sushi, cancelling cabs.
The senior partner calls from Newark, ‘Thanks team,’ (his thin
Voice purrs, he is sipping something), ‘let’s make it a win–win.’
But in the morning, brushing his new teeth, looking out into the snow’s
Huge act of world-effacement, its lethargy, he knows:
Things are illiquid, freezing up. Light is abortive
On the greyscale Park. It’s time to short the fucking market.
In Chennai, meanwhile, a man is waiting for your analysis,
Eating his breakfast of microwaved dal and mini-idlis,
Checking the cricket scores on his computer, reading Thoreau,
Wondering what New York looks like at night, in snow.
He is
applying to Columbia, NYU Stern, and Stanford GSB.
He thinks of going abroad as an attempt to live deliberately,
Imagining the well-stacked fires in iron-fenced Victorians,
The senior partner’s grace under pressure, his Emersonian
Turn of phrase, the summers spent sailing, the long reaches
Of sand loosely threaded with grass on Cape Cod beaches.
Evening comes without eating anything except a whoopee-pie
You find leftover in the kitchen from someone’s birthday surprise.
The malted cream of the filling is so rich it clumps like shit.
You lick it off your fingernails and google the bakery’s website.
On Yelp someone has written, ‘This case of cakes smells so good
If I ever have to go on a respirator (*knock on wood*)
I hope they use this cake case as my respirator.’ Smiling at the screen,
A flicker of dry tongue now, a dopamine prick, as the Ritalin kicks in.
It has something about it of the narrow room silk-lined
With Flemish tapestries you once dreamt about being locked in.
Your psychiatrist said it would help your productivity,
But it feels like drawn-out sex on coke, like something dirty.
The bakery is in Astoria, on Broadway and 28th.
On Street View you look at strangers’ faces, at the averted gaze
Of men in sportswear smoking in front of F*MOUS BRANDS,
At takeout bikes, nail salons, Turkish ice-cream stands,
And a grocery store with an unlit sign, ‘Hot Coffee’,
The slow passing of a cortège in March sleet, the poverty.
Last week New York magazine said Queens was getting hip:
At Club 19, ‘Manhattan transplants chill and sip
Cold hoppy Krušovice, whisky sours, and Staropramen.’
On Fridays, a pop-up serves tonkotsu miso ramen.
You wonder what it means to define Astoria’s ‘epicenter’,
Or press panini with ‘finesse’, what the median two-bed rent is.
Once a year you go in a cab to the Bohemian Beer Garden
And eat pink, flayed kielbasa, penile and artery-hardening,
While elderly men dance to a band in blue embroidered hose,
Holding their elbows rigidly, like waxed Pinocchios.
Your friends wear flannel and McDonald’s name badges,
They talk about Ben Bernanke and Isabel Marant wedges.
You are slightly disappointed in Obama’s domestic policy,
You think the great American novelist is David Foster Wallace.
The epigraph to The Pale King is from Frank Bidart,
It is about pre-existing forms and formal questions in art.
CTRL + N is jammed in the spreadsheet of your mind,
Nothing seems real or right, so you just press send.
Then a smear of olive lipstick, and you walk out into the night,
Into the breeze, the smell of roasting, the rich quarters of delight,
And as you are dancing in a suit skirt to the Killers’ ‘Mr Brightside’,
Feeling the anthem soar and rise, he makes the PowerPoint slides;
You will present them in the morning to the client, while he
Sleeps in a fruit and urine breeze beneath a linen sheet.
Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside.
Now you are meeting them for Pisco sours at the Peruvian dive bar,
Now plans have changed, it is April, and the first hot day of the year
Has exploded from nowhere. Skin is as profuse and white as funeral flowers.
You are heading downtown, and the cabs are angrier than ever, wasps
Darting between thin panes of glass, and the shape of the traffic
Bulges and breaks in waves while the slam and the slam-hold of horns
Sings a scale of human frustration, of the boredom of boxes, as the radio
Dribbles on and off ‘Crazy in Love’ and you check Facebook on your iPhone:
Kate is photographing durians in Shanghai, Zena was born this morning,
Claire is drying homemade pasta, Elina wishes she could play guitar,
Arlo is flying LHR–SFO, upgraded out of H to J, and your mother asks
To be your friend again, but the request just hangs in the sidebar.
The wind is blowing road-dirt through the window. It catches in your lens.
You are still reading as you move the plastic on the cornea, blinking.
It is still there as you type a happy birthday, pulling your tights down,
And ‘The splinter in your eye …’ thinking, for some reason, about Paris
And the street market on the Rue Mouffetard, wanting to be in Europe,
Remembering your breasts at seventeen and the smell of frying fish
In a cheap hotel, lying while he showered, legs splayed up the wall.
Now he is ‘happy Friday!’ in Los Feliz drinking gin and you like it.
Three people comment on your update and the driver keeps staring
Dolefully at you in the mirror, long-nosed, surgically examining
Your crotch, a poet of the quick cab change, watching even as you cross
Fifth and the long perspectives open out, into white light, into the infinite.
Here is infinity obscured by a bus, an advert for night classes.
There was infinity and the cab window was gravel-pocked.
Here is infinity again but the driver is outstaring you, unsmilingly
Bent on your feet, the curve of your thighs, still slamming and slam-
Holding the horn as the cab veers east and you see Rosy on the street
Smoking with an older man, the man she is trying to seduce, frail
Despite the biker boots, loosely touching his arm, taking his wrist, waving.
Now you step out of the cab bare-legged into the salty evening,
And a boy model calls out ‘ciao bella’, and W. H. Auden’s house
Is still La Palapa, and you tip him heavily because it is almost summer.
The thing about being very young, as you are, is the permeability
Of one person to another, so when the guys buying sangria say
You should come to Williamsburg you say yes, eat the last orange slice
Skin and all, and do the sideways dive on their laps so the cab takes five.
Rosy strokes your hair absent-mindedly, ignoring the bankers.
Her fingers smell of Camel Lights and lavender, and she is laughing.
‘You know his wife left him for a woman.’ Her knees are bony.
‘We even smoke the same cigarettes.’ What do they talk about?
Derrida’s late work on gifts, the modalities of power. Last week
In the Bobst stacks they were looking for the same book on Beckett.
‘I bent down and I asked him,’ she is leaning forwards, whispering
With wine breath in your ear, ‘I said I want you to do these things,’
Occluded, a list – the things he might do – you think about her spidery
Cut-out dress, backless, ‘but he walked off’. Maybe his hearing is failing.
Maybe he just isn’t into her. ‘It’s not like I want to marry him or anything.’
No one is sure what to say hours later, whipped by the return of winter
Wind on a rooftop in Brooklyn, as she tells the story again,
Lavishly drunk, buoyant, ‘Rosy is a beautiful girl and she wants you inside her’.
No one is sure what to say, but it gives one of the bankers an in,
And she is gone, lacing his fingers, leaving her yellow duffel coat.
She is gone so you photograph the view and upload it to Twitter.
She is gone, leaving you alone on a rooftop with a German sculptor,
‘Ic
h arbeite aber lieber mit Holz’, I prefer to work with wood.
Sometimes the smaller figures are cast in yellow bronze.
Each time she says the word aesthetic you suppress laughter.
And then you see him, the man you are hiding from, coming up the stairs,
Alone, in all his specificity: the darting glance fastened elsewhere.
The conceptual installation is in a disused church in Mitte
Not so far from the Hackesche Höfe, ‘if you know it?’
He has seen you now and he is here and, as he says your name,
You nod keenly at her, ‘the figures are made from locust wood,
With olive wood I was less satisfied’, they are painted in mineral colours,
Jade, ‘Lapislazuli, is it?’ You ask about the sanding tools she uses.
And then to avoid him looking at you, you say all the words for wood
And minerals you know: beryl, emerald, aquamarine, garnet,
Cypress and chestnut, ficus wood, spreading planes, Kastanie …
When he says ‘you’ve lost weight, you look great’ which is true
(He dumped you) you think of elderberry and magnolia, quietly pulling
At the silver-starred skirt, pulling it over the ripple of your thighs.
But when he says one more, for old time’s sake, you say why not
And sit rigidly in a cab, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge beside him.
You take your clothes off when he puts his hands over your nipples.
No murmured approbation. His fingers run along the fat, supple
Above the pubic bone, the white flesh below your hips,
Three Poems Page 1