Schultz - Failure : poems

Harcourt, Inc.
Orlando Austin New York San Diego London

Living in the Past

The Holy Worm of Praise

My Guardian Angel Stein

Deep Within the Ravine

Like Wings

Copyright 2007 by Philip Schultz

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Selection from "Leaving the Door Open" in New and Collected Poems,
1970-1985 by David Ignatow, and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan
University Press. Selection from "Cap Ferrat" in Area Code 212 by Frederick
Seidel, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schultz, Philip.
Failure: poems/Philip Schultz.1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3569.C5533F35 2007
811'.54dc22 2007009165
ISBN 978-0-15-101526-9

Text set in Minion
Designed by Cathy Riggs

Printed in the United States of America
First edition
A C E G I K J H F D B

For my son Augie,
a success story.

One madman laughs at another,

and they each give enjoyment to one another.

If you watch closely, you will see

that the maddest gets the biggest laugh.

E RASMUS

It's Sunday Morning in Early November 1

Talking to Ourselves 2

Specimen 3

The Summer People 5

The Magic Kingdom 7

Louse Point 9

The Idea of California 11

Kodak Park Athletic Association, 1954 14

Grief 15

The Absent 16

My Dog 17

The Garden 18

Exquisite with Agony 19

Bronze Crowd:

After Magdalena Abakanowicz 21

Why 23

My Wife 25

Husband 27

Uncle Sigmund 28

The Amount of Us 30

What I Like and Don't Like 31

Blunt 32

Shellac 34

The Adventures of 78 Charles Street 36

Isaac Babel Visits My Dreams 39

Dance Performance 41

The Traffic 43

The Truth 45

The One Truth 46

Failure 48

The Wandering Wingless 50

Acknowledgments 105

and there are a lot of leaves already.
I could rake and get a head start.
The boys' summer toys need to be put
in the basement. I could clean it out
or fix the broken storm window.
When Eli gets home from Sunday school,
I could take him fishing. I don't fish
but I could learn to. I could show him
how much fun it is. We don't do as much
as we used to do. And my wife, there's
so much I haven't told her lately,
about how quickly my soul is aging,
how it feels like a basement I keep filling
with everything I'm tired of surviving.
I could take a walk with my wife and try
to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to.
Or I could read all those books piling up
about the beginning of the end of understanding...
Meanwhile, it's such a beautiful morning,
the changing colors, the hypnotic light.
I could sit by the window watching the leaves,
which seem to know exactly how to fall
from one moment to the next. Or I could lose
everything and have to begin over again.

A woman in my doctor's office last week
couldn't stop talking about Niagara Falls,
the difference between dog and deer ticks,
how her oldest boy, killed in Iraq, would lie
with her at night in the summer grass, singing
Puccini. Her eyes looked at me but saw only
the saffron swirls of the quivering heavens.

Yesterday, Mr. Miller, our tidy neighbor,
stopped under our lopsided maple to explain
how his wife of sixty years died last month
of Alzheimer's. I stood there, listening to
his longing reach across the darkness with
each bruised breath of his eloquent singing.

This morning my five-year-old asked himself
why he'd come into the kitchen. I understood
he was thinking out loud, personifying himself,
but the intimacy of his small voice was surprising.

When my father's vending business was failing,
he'd talk to himself while driving, his lips
silently moving, his black eyes deliquescent.
He didn't care that I was there, listening,
what he was saying was too important.

"Too important," I hear myself saying
in the kitchen, putting the dishes away,
and my wife looks up from her reading
and asks, "What's that you said?"

I turned sixty in Paris last year.
We stayed at the Lutetia,
where the Gestapo headquartered
during the war, my wife, two boys, and me,
and several old Vietnamese ladies
carrying poodles with diamond collars.

Once my father caught a man
stealing cigarettes out of one
of his vending machines.
He didn't stop choking him
until the pool hall stunk of excrement
and the body dropped to the floor
like a judgment.

When I was last in Paris
I was dirt poor, hiding
from the Vietnam War.
One night, in an old church,
I considered taking my life.
I didn't know how to be so young
and not belong anywhere, stuck
among so many perplexing melodies.

I loved the low white buildings,
the ingratiating colors, the ancient light.
We couldn't afford such luxury.
It was a matter of pride.
My father died bankrupt one week
before his sixtieth birthday.
I didn't expect to have a family;
I didn't expect happiness.

At the Lutetia everyone
dressed themselves like specimens
they'd loved all their lives.
Everyone floated down
red velvet hallways
like scintillating music
you hear only once or twice.

Driving home, my father said,
"Let anyone steal from you
and you're not fit to live."
I sat there, sliced by traffic lights,
not belonging to what he said.
I belonged to a scintillating
and perplexing music
I didn't expect to hear.

Santos, a strong, friendly man,
who built my wife's sculpture studio,
fixed everything I couldn't,
looked angry in town last week.
Then he stopped coming. We wondered
if we paid him enough, if he envied us.
Once he came over late to help me catch a bat
with a newspaper and trash basket.
He liked that I laughed at how scared I got.

We're "year rounds," what the locals call
summer people who live here full time.
Always in a hurry, the summer people honk a lot,
own bigger cars and houses. Once I beat a guy
in a pickup to a parking space, our summer sport.
"Lousy New Yorker!" he cried.

Every day now men from Guatemala, Ecuador,
and Mexico line up at the railroad station.
They know that they're despised,
that no one likes having to share their rewards,
or being made to feel spiteful.

When my uncle Joe showed me the shotgun
he kept near the cash register
to scare the black migrants
who bought his overpriced beer and cold cuts
in his grocery outside of Rochester, N.Y.,
his eyes blazed like emerald suns.
It's impossible to forget his eyes.

At parties the summer people
who moved here after 9/11
talk about all the things they had to give up.
It's beautiful here, they say, but everything
is tentative and strange,
as if the beauty isn't theirs to enjoy.