Schultz - The God of loneliness: selected and new poems

Copyright 2010 by Philip Schultz

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to Permissions,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schultz, Philip.
The God of loneliness : selected and new poems / Philip Schultz.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-547-24965-0
I. Title.
PS 3569. C 5533 G 63 2010
811'.54dc22 2009041895

Book design by Melissa Lotfy

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my wife, Monica,
and my sons, Eli and Augie

Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance,
men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think
about such things.

PASCAL

This room is reserved for wandering Jews.
Around me, in other rooms, suitcases whine
like animals shut up for the night.

My guardian angel, Stein, fears sleeping twice
in the same bed. Constancy brings Cossacks in the dark, he thinks.
You don't explain fear to fear. Despair has no ears, but teeth.

In the next room I hear a woman's laughter
& press my hand to the wall. Car lights burn
my flesh to a glass transparency.

My father was born in Novo-Nikolayevka, Ekaterinoslav Guberniya.
Like him, I wear my forehead high, have quick eyes, a belly laugh.
Miles unfold in the palm of my hand.

Across some thousand backyards his stone
roots him to the earth like a stake. Alone in bed,
I feel his blood wander through my veins.

As a boy I would spend whole nights at the fair
running up the fun house's spinning barrel toward its magical top,
where I believed I would be beyond harm, at last.

How I would break my body to be free of it,
night after night, all summer long, this boy climbing
the sky's turning side, against all odds,

as though to be one with time,
going always somewhere where no one had been before,
my arms banging at my sides like wings.

Such statuesque immobility; here we have it:
the world of form. Colors muted, a quality
of masks with fine high brows. Light & its absence.
Alchemy. The hands are unfinished. But what
could they hold? The transitory bliss
of enduring wonder? Mother, Mother & Son;
here we have it: consanguinity. The darkness
inside color. Space. In the beginning there was space.
It held nothing. What could it hold? Time?
The continuum? Mother & Son, forms suspended
in color. Silence. Her apron a cloud
of stillness swallowing her whole. Her eyes
roots of a darker dimension. Absence. Here we have it:
the world of absence. Light holds them in place.
The pulse of time is felt under the flesh,
the flesh of color. Continuum. You feel
such immensity. The anger of form. The woman
locked in the Mother; the man in the Son; the Son
in the Mother. Their hands do not touch. What
could they touch? Here we have it: the world
of gift. The gift too terrible to return. But
how could it be returned? In the beginning
there was anger. Mother & Son. The islands of time.
The passion to continue. Such statuesque immobility.
The hands, the hands cannot be finished.

You see him over my uncle Al's left shoulder
eating corn at a Sunday picnic & that's him
behind my parents on a boardwalk in Atlantic City

smiling out of focus like a rejected suitor
& he's the milkman slouched frozen crossing our old street
ten years before color & his is the face above mine in Times Square

blurring into the crowd like a movie extra's
& a darkness in his eyes as if he knew his face would outlast him
& he's tired of living on the periphery of our occasions.

These strangers at bus stops, sleepwalkers
caught forever turning a cornerI always wondered who they were
between photos when they weren't posing & if they mattered.

It's three this morning, a traffic light blinks yellow yellow
& in my window my face slips into the emptiness between glares.
We are strangers in our own photos. Our strangeness has no source.

Never mind that uncle business my name is Jake.
In college they try every thing there is this girl
at Wegmans supermarket who is to busy to join
protests who is right takes more than me
to figure out. Cohen died last Monday. He owned
the deli on Joseph Ave. The democrat running
for supervisor is a Puerto Rican. Don't ask me why.

You are young and have to take things
as they come. Some day you will find your
real niche. I wrote poetry to but this July
I'm a stagehand 40 years. I've seen every movie
Paramount made believe me. Now theres a union
but I remember when you was happy just to work.
Meantime have a ball. Yrs truly now has kidney
trouble plus diabetic condition, heart murmur,
cataract in rt eye. Yr mother Lillian is well to.
Cohen was just 58. We went to school together. Loews
is closing in October. If you ask me the last
five rows was no good for cinemascope.
Yrs truly,
Jake

Die slouched & undecided in a girlie show
watching the lambs eat the wolves.
Sit talking Kafka this Kafka that
(that bugfaced sword-swallower!).
Play deaf & dumb in Chicago.
Chew the fat of the land while looking
up somebody's leg for the right word, ever again.
Cross the Golden Gate Bridge on a bus
listening to the guy ahead say: Doesn't it look
like a G-string all lit up, Fran!
Die in the house where I was born,
a happy man.

I want, Lord, to die with Neruda & Chaplin
naked & sinful
eating cheese so old it sings on my tongue.

This elevator lugged Teddy Roosevelt
when they both were new. Now I count stars
in the skylight as it jerks into the sudden light
down hallways & hug groceries like a thief his loot
when it stops in the dark between floors. Often
it howls climbing, sings falling. Someone
on the fifth floor loves chicken fat & Brahms;
the worst soprano in Cambridge lives on the third.
The man above me taps goodnight on his floor but
doesn't know me in the street. The girl down the hall
drops her head if I smile in the elevator; she knows
I watch her run to work each morning from my window.
After dinner I stand there with my hands folded behind
as I imagine Mr. Roosevelt stood, watching the lights
come on along the spine that is Massachusetts Avenue at night.

Tania must place her hands on my skull,
one above the other, to better hear the truth.
We are discussing the art of poetry. Eight
years old, she chews her lip & squints. Who's
my moose? she wants to know. Does she just
hand one over or what? Last night she dreamed
her bed was full of frogs, then her ship sank.
Do poems give nightmares? Funny, I say, but
I had the same dream. This breaks her up.
Well how about God; do you always have to put
Him in? No more than three-legged horses, I say.
They get equal time. Which brings the big one:
Will she be rich & famous before she's fifteen?
Will they hang her picture in the A&P?
Will she have to fall in love every day &
come down with some fatal disease? Her father
said poets led sad lives. I put my arms around
her & think: Stick to new math & somersaults
& if you must write, write historical novels
about gorgeous queens who give up whole kingdoms
for love. But say: Tania, your hair's on fire,