A House
I am thirty-two, thirty-two times have I passed before the day and hour of my death, as one passes by the door of a house that one will someday live in, without even a thought of glancing at it.
—JULIAN GREEN, DIARY, 1928–1957
It’s just a house. And standing on the sagging porch,
peering from the screen door through cramped, unlit rooms
to the sun-struck kitchen in back, I can finally make out
odd hunks of darkness drifting up—a dining table,
four chairs that weirdly look at first like monks at prayer,
flecks of some reflected distant glow or fire
scattered from a couch’s plastic cover, the white keys
of an upright piano in its thick Victorian silence.
A small house, postwar, working people surely,
their lives of work buried in the vague odor of oil and sweat
rising from the carpet, whose green swirls twist into view.
A strange light begins to fill the front room’s lace curtains,
falls like a fine dust, like mortality itself,
upon the Blue Willow dishware and the family photos
arranged around the Motorola’s wire antenna.
And now so faintly, so terribly, voices float
from the kitchen, women’s voices flute-like and sudden,
then little bursts of laughter, a flurry of whispers,
a sharp No!, and there he is, there he is, a small boy
standing in the kitchen door, surprised and smiling
the purest form of happiness, then walking quickly
toward me in his white T-shirt, jeans and blue
Brooklyn Dodgers cap, those bright hazel eyes looking up
and hands spread wide and raised against the screen
of the door, pushing, pushing hard until it opens,
its rusted spring creaking in that long cry that sounds
like a question without words, and I walk through.
Poem
(from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest)
(2003)
Poem
The name of the bow is life, but its work is death.
—FRAGMENTS
How in Heraclitus
ideas of things, quality, and event
coalesce—sun/warmth/dawn—
the perceiver/perceived, too,
not yet parsed, not yet,
and then the great Forgetting,
knower and known, love and beloved,
world and God-in-the-world.
But then it comes upon us: that brightness,
that bright tension in animals, for instance,
that focus, that compass
of the mammalian mind finding
its own true North,
saintly in its dark-eyed,
arrow-eared devotion.
A kind of calling, a via negativa,
a surrender, still and silent, to the heart’s desire.
So in the cathedral of the world
we hold communion,
the bread of language
placed delicately upon our tongues
as we breathe the bitter air,
drinking the wine of reason
while lost, still, in the mysterium of Being.
NOTES
The Arrival of the Future
“Flight”: This poem is a dramatic monologue inspired by a passage, used as an epigraph here, from George Steiner’s essay, “Humane Literacy,” in Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1977, p. 11) in which Steiner is paraphrasing Dostoyevsky.
“Groceries”: The lines quoted are from Louise Glück’s poem, “The School Children,” in The House on Marshland (New York: Ecco Press, 1975, p. 19).
The Art of the Lathe
“The Dumka”: Dumka is the name of the second movement of the piano quintet, Op. 81 in A Major, mentioned in the poem.
“A Model of Downtown Los Angeles, 1940”: Although the story of the Owens Valley/Los Angeles aqueduct is generally well known (and debated) in California, it may be less known elsewhere other than through the film Chinatown, which is not, obviously, a documentary but a drama loosely based on the incidents leading to the construction of the aqueduct. In 1905, encouraged by repeated headlines in the Los Angeles Times declaring a state of drought, citizens of Los Angeles voted for a bond issue to finance the building of an aqueduct from the Owens Valley 230 miles northeast of the city, a project of astonishing proportions successfully carried out by the brilliant, self-taught engineer, William Mulholland. But the aqueduct was brought not to Los Angeles but rather to the San Fernando Valley a few miles northwest of L.A., where a group known as the San Fernando Valley land syndicate—including the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Henry Huntington, Moses Sherman (a member of the L.A. water board), and other fabulously wealthy men—had purchased thousands of acres of cheap land that would now be worth tens of millions of dollars. Two years after construction was completed, the San Fernando Valley was annexed to Los Angeles (thus, Noah Cross’s famous line in Chinatown, “Either you bring the water to L.A., or you bring L.A. to the water”). Over the years, the effect upon farmers in the Owens Valley was disastrous, but the economic benefit to L.A. was beyond measure; it would be fair to speculate that without the aqueduct L.A. today would be a small city about the size of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In my poem, the story is told from the point of view of a former resident (and victim) of the Owens Valley. Other references: Gunga Din (1939) was filmed in the Owens Valley. Franz Werfel, author of Song of Bernadette and friend of Kafka, was a part of the European émigré community in L.A. during the late thirties and forties, along with Mann and the others named here. Manzanar was a prison camp for Japanese U.S. citizens during World War II; the Rodney King beating, widely televised, culminated in the L.A. riots of 1992.
“The Art of the Lathe”: Ramsden, Vauconson, and the others named here were major contributors to the development of the lathe and other machine tools. See W. Steeds, A History of Machine Tools 1700–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
“Moses Yellowhorse Is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt”: Moses Yellowhorse played one and a half seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, 1921–1922, always listed on the roster as Chief Yellowhorse. The famous game in which he struck out Gehrig, Ruth, and Lazzeri in succession occurred during spring training.
“The Blue Buick”: The Cendrars epigraph is my translation from the Folio reprint of the 1949 Denoël edition of Le Lotissement du ciel (The Subdividing of the Sky), edited and annotated by Claude Leroy, pp. 406–407:
. . . je lisais les Classiques dans une édition anglaise; mais il m’arrivait aussi, toujours pour me distraire, de dérouler une carte du ciel sur la grande table et de recouvrir chaque constellation avec des pierres précieuses que j’allais quérir dans la réserve des coffres, marquant les étoiles de premiere grandeur avec les plus beaux diamants, complétant les figures avec les plus vivantes pierres de couleur remplissant les intervalles entre les dessins avec une coulee des plus belles perles de la collection de Léouba, . . . Elles étaient toutes belles! Et je me récitais la page immortelle et pour moi inoubliable de Marbode sur la symbolique des pierres précieuses que je venais de découvrir dans Le Latin mystique de Rémy de Gourmont, ce livre gemmé, une compilation, une traduction, un anthologie, qui a bouleversé my conscience et m’a, en somme, baptisé ou, tout au moins, coverti à la Poésie, initié au Verbe, catéchisé.
In his notes, Leroy quotes Cendrars in Bourlinguer: “Le Latin mystique a été pour moi une date, une date de naissance intellectuelle.” In his journal, Roy’s first quote from the section of Sky entitled Le ravissement d’amour is his translation of “Le saint aussi a ses migraines et ses dégoûts de lassitude. . . . Il se méfie de l’illusion, du somnambulisme comme dans les rêves, des acrobaties comme chez certains intoxiques et des attaques du haut mal, et des crises de nerfs com
me chez certains épileptiques et névropathes” (p. 247). Roy’s second quotation is also from that section: “L’oraison mentale est la volière de Dieu” (p. 244).
Roy’s critique of Los Angeles refers to the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which, through “false droughts and artful title transactions” and the passing of a bond issue in 1905, diverted Owens River water from the Owens Valley and its farms and small towns and brought it 235 miles southwest to the San Fernando Valley, where Chandler and other members of two land syndicates had recently “bought or optioned virtually the entire valley.” As Joan Didion further notes in After Henry (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 222–23:
The extent to which Los Angeles was literally invented by the Los Angeles Times and by its owners, Harrison Gray Otis and his descendants in the Chandler family, remains hard for people in less recent parts of the country to fully comprehend. At the time Harrison Gray Otis bought his paper there were only five thousand people living in Los Angeles. There was no navigable river. . . . Los Angeles has water today because Harrison Gray Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler wanted it, and fought a series of outright water wars to get it.
“A Wall Map of Paris”: The epigraph is from Sonnet XXVI in the Second Part of The Sonnets to Orpheus (New York: Modern Library, 1995), translated by Stephen Mitchell, pp. 512, 513. Mitchell’s translation of the entire passage is “—Oh compose the criers, / harmonious god! let them wake resounding, / let their clear stream carry the head and the lyre.”
Usher
“Usher”: Known as the “master builder,” Robert Moses, Arterial Coordinator of New York City, enjoyed unprecedented power as an urban designer, radically altering the landscape and urban sociology of the city through his mammoth freeway projects, including the Cross Bronx Expressway, the construction of which (from 1948 to 1963) destroyed hundreds of blue-collar and middle-class neighborhoods, many of them predominantly Jewish. Arguably two of the four or five most important Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr taught at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan during the 1950s. Tillich’s most widely read works for a popular audience were The Courage to Be and Dynamics of Faith. “The Heraclitean way” refers to the statement in the fragments of Heraclitus that “the path up and down is one and the same.” In his reference to the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, France, at the Musée d’Unterlinden, Nathan is thinking of the right side panel depicting Christ risen from the tomb.
“The Cottonwood Lounge”: George Cantor, German mathematician (1845–1918), created set theory as well as the very controversial theory of transfinite numbers. He died in a mental institution.
“Wittsgenstein, Dying”: “Trakl” refers, of course, to Georg Trakl, the Austrian poet, whom Wittgenstein admired and to whom he gave a small portion of his inheritance though he confessed himself unable fully to understand Trakl’s poems. Although World War One was “the nightmare of the earth” for all involved (and through a long line of historical connections continues to be), it was especially so for Trakl, who died from a cocaine overdose in 1914. Wittgenstein’s On Certainty was written partially in response to G. E. Moore’s argument against skepticism, which begins with Moore holding up one hand, pointing to it with the other, and saying, “This is one hand.” “Paul” is Paul Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s brother, a concert pianist who lost his right arm in World War One but continued performing, commissioning works for the left hand from such composers as Ravel, Strauss, and Britten.
“Gödel”: Kurt Gödel, Czech-born American mathematician and philosopher, who worked with Einstein at the Princeton Institute for Advance Study, was best known for his incompleteness theorems. Nowhere did Gödel say that “no life contains its own clear validation”; that is solely Ira Campbell’s inference. “Lansky” refers to Meyer Lansky, the legendary American mobster known especially for his financial shrewdness.
“The Beauty of Abandoned Towns”: My loose, colloquial translation of the Latin epigraph is, “Work defeated everything, back-breaking work, and the grinding need of hard times.”
“Nathan Gold”: The American Objectivist poet, Charles Reznikoff, published his long poem, Holocaust, in 1975. Material for the poem was based upon transcriptions of court proceedings of the Nuremburg trial and the Eichmann trial. Eichmann’s “use” of Kant is discussed at length in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Malach HaMavet is the Hebrew angel of death.
Hart Crane’s lines quoted here are from the final two stanzas of “To Brooklyn Bridge”:
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the Curveship lend a myth to God.
“Maria”: Maria Rasputin, oldest daughter of the infamous Grigori Rasputin. “The mansion of the Railroad King” refers to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, a center for research on the poet William Blake. Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) was a French philosopher born in Russia who exerted an immense influence on both European and American intellectuals, including the political philosopher, Leo Strauss; Alan Bloom (Strauss’s student who later studied with Kojève); Bloom’s student, Francis Fukuyama; and many others in both academic and political life. Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man, incorporated ideas and themes from Kojève.
“Poem”: Formerly entitled “The Problem” and owing much to Professor Richard McKirahan’s classes on Heraclitus at Pomona College and to Philip Wheelwright’s commentary on the Fragments in Heraclitus (Oxford University Press, 1959), in particular this comment on Fragment Six: “. . . there is at least an overtone of suggestion that we come to know reality not by merely knowing about it . . . but by becoming of its nature.” I am also indebted to comments on Parmenides and on Stephen MacKenna’s famous translation of Plotinus which were given in a lecture by Donald Sheehan at the Frost Place, Franconia, New Hampshire, in August 2001.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made for poems in “New Poems” which originally appeared (although, in some cases, in different form or under different title) in the following publications:
Christianity and Literature: “The Death of a Gerbil”
The Cortland Review: “The Left Fielder’s Sestina.”
Green Mountains Review: “The End of Art”
Gulf Stream: “The Student Assistant”
Image: “Rothko”
Luvina (Mexico): “The Language of the Future”
Mississippi Review: “The Attaché Case”
New Letters: “Alzheimer’s,” “Dust Storm, No Man’s Land, 1952,” “Shakespeare in the Park, 9/11/2011”
Outerbridge: “Swan Lake”
Ploughshares: “The Game,” “A House”
Provincetown Arts: “Abandoned Grain Elevator”
REAL: “Getting Fired,” “Obed Theodore Swearingen, 1883–1967”
River Styx: “Language”
Salt Hill Journal: “Leaving”
Southern Poetry Review: “Betty”
The Virginia Quarterly Review: “Economics,” “Three Girls Tossing Rings”
The Warwick Review (England): “The Men on Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, 1975,” “Pale from the Hand of the Child That Holds It”
Yale Review: “Red Snow,” “The Story.”
“The Story” also appeared in the 2014 PushcartPrize anthology.
“The Student Assistant” was included in Best of the Net 2010.
This is my fourth book with W. W. Norton since Jill Bialosky invited me to submit the manuscript of Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. She has been a consistently supportive, efficient, and gracious editor, for which I am deeply appreciative. Many thanks, too, to Rebecca Schultz for h
er expertise and hard work on this project.
Praise for the Work of B. H. Fairchild
“Lush with cottonwoods, Kansas autumns, Ford tractors, dust devils, oil rigs, family and the pull of history, B. H. Fairchild’s poems resonate with loneliness, like the wide-open plains and small towns where he sets so many of them. . . . Fairchild speaks for anyone who has yearned to escape over the horizon [capturing] the unnamable longing that creeps into ordinary lives and slowly snuffs out youthful dreams. It is history, writ large and small, that beats strong through Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. . . . This is the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic.”
—Michael Hainey, New York Times
“B. H. Fairchild is one of those poets prose readers love: Meaty, maximalist, driven by narrative, he stakes out an American mythos in which the personal and the collective blur. . . . [A] lack of sentimentality infuses Usher, an insistence on seeing things as they really are. That’s a vivid and compelling strategy, for at the heart of these poems is the issue of longing, of what we want and yet can never have.”
—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“[The poems in Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest] are an ecstatic celebration of language—long, lavish lines sprawling across the page as the speaker’s consciousness roams the Kansas countryside. Fairchild is a spinner of tales who writes unforgettably of loneliness and the tenderness of the Midwest.”
—Elise Paschen, Chicago Tribune
“I daresay [Fairchild] has arrived with some of the future of American poetry in his hands. It satisfies this reader to know that someone so steady is running the machine.”
—Christopher Bakken, Contemporary Poetry Review
“Fairchild’s ability not only to choose a story but to pace it and to reveal its meaning through the unfolding of the narrative is probably unmatched in contemporary American poetry. The incisive psychology, the vividly descriptive diction, the large repertoire of vocabulary, the weightiness of his settings and plots: all these contribute to the delightful sensation that one is reading, simultaneously, the best poetry and best prose. I cannot think of another living poet capable of delivering such pleasure. . . . Not since James Wright has there been a poet so skilled at representing the minds and imaginations of ordinary American working people.”
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