Mark and I are getting ready for Denise's tribute reading in a few hours. If you're in Manhattan, or close by, it would be lovely to see you. Full details below, and beneath that, the briefest passage from Trespasses, Denise's third novel, which both Mark and I are reading from tonight.
Denise Gess Tribute Reading, featuring J.T. Barbarese, Ron Block, DyAnne DiSalvo, Mark Doty, David Groff, Paul Lisicky, Bill Lutz, Victoria Redel
City College, Tuesday, November 10, 7:30 PM
NAC 6/316 (Sixth floor North Academic Center, between 137th and 138th on Amsterdam Avenue.)
Take 1 Train, get off at 137th and Broadway, and walk a block east to Amsterdam.
*****
from Trespasses
Denise Gess
Because the night was so incredibly still and dark--the street lamps burned out like matches--because there was nothing to illuminate Lenny's belt buckle or the shiny chrome of the fender, Rosalie thought she imagined the resigned voice that floated up from the driveway. She jangled her keys once, a signal, and heard Lenny sneeze. Sure enough, when she followed the direction of the sound she found him lying on the ground, in line with the heavy black tires. He was on his side, his knees drawn up as if he had a stomach cramp or a charley horse, some expected run-of-the-mill pain people made no effort to conceal, not even from strangers. A cricket trilled.
"What are you waiting for?" he asked.
She couldn't believe her eyes or ears, couldn't believe that this absurd day could get any more absurd. "Lenny, get up from down there."
"I don't think so," he said in a voice thick with effort. Rosalie squeezed the keys till they dug into her hands. She'd had just about enough thwarting for one day.
"I'm going to buy make-up. The make-up I wanted this afternoon, the make-up I couldn't buy because of you and your crazy idea that you're some kind of Jimmy the Greek. I need mascara--not a fur coat, not an emerald ring--and I need it now."
He didn't budge, nor did he say anything more.
"Do you want me to run you over?"
"Like an ant," he said. "What the hell."
She surprised herself when after a short pause she said, "Fine."
*****
Click here for a podcast of the Rowan University tribute to Denise last month. Scroll down to the link marked Writer's Roundtable.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Stupefied, Astonished
From today's New York Times: nine poets on the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, including Mark and Marie. Click here to read the entire set.
***
The Iron Curtain
Marie Howe
And the nun asked us-- were we seven?--what we would do if the
Communists
stormed our houses and bound our parents and threatened to kill
them. Would you
renounce Jesus in order to save your mother from being murdered?
We knew what the true answer was--
and what was the right one.
My mother stood, cooking a dozen pork chops in the two big frying
pans, when I told her
that I'd said that I'd let her die before
I turned my back on Jesus.
And my mother said that that was all right; she understood.
When the wall came down I was distracted. By what? A man I loved
and longed for?
A self integrating so slowly most days I hardly knew who I was?
Brick by brick. Some men pushed it with what looked like
long pillars.
Some kids sat on top, waving.
We'd been told families had been divided--crossing the city to work or
shop--
caught on the wrong side when the wall went up. And that was that.
People
lived and died, and married.
How strange to see them walking, on TV, through the empty air--
what had been solid--stupefied, astonished...
How they touched the faces of their loved ones
and ran their hands over their heads and hair.
***
The Lesson
Mark Doty
Some workers put up a wall on 25th Street,
plywood sheathing a frame of 2 x 4s, to seal the building
they’d gut and remake. Then they added layers:
stacks of metal pipe bound with black webbing,
a layer of permits, photocopied signatures far removed
from whatever hand inscribed them.
Then a blue expanding ladder, hydraulic,
squatting on its haunches. My friend John took pictures
of the whole unlikely and elaborate composition,
barrier and palimpsest, warning and advertisement.
How could you not look at it, with its tears and concealments?
And though such photos might aestheticize,
allowing us to stand at an annealing distance
from the wreck of things, I think his do something else;
in this way I begin to look at walls.
Decaled plexi between my face and the back of the cab driver’s head.
Blue shroud on 16th like the robe of Venus rippling over the entry
of Pottery Barn, and inside it some burr-grinder
scouring away at the stone. The insidious barrier –
who could put their hands on it? – dividing me and the dark young men
under the scaffolding near my corner, smoking by the door
of the technical school. All going back somehow to the story
one of my teachers told, voice slipping to a register we’d never heard
in our room’s calm rows: how a lover,
desperate to reach the beloved on the other side,
strapped himself beneath a car, face pressed up
into the undercarriage, the back of his head
inches above the pavement; how he’d tried to refuse,
with his own body at least, the sundering of his city.
Did he live, did he ever arrive? I remember only
my teacher beginning to weep, and we children
in our low-slung new school building in Tucson,
the desert freshly scraped to make way for us,
we didn’t understand, what was the lesson?
John’s pictures brought that back -- and how,
decades later, the night they first scaled the wall,
the people at the top reached down to pull up
the others, and shouted Come on, come on!
When the guards turned the water cannons on them,
they sprayed back from open bottles of champagne.
Then the broken chunks appeared, in the hands of those
who had loosened them, fragments of concrete
glazed with spray paint inscriptions, scarred
with sledgehammer and chisel: instruments of union.
A demanding beauty about them,
whatever was scrawled perhaps capable
of realigning, as words in what language?
Something barely spoken yet.
***
The Iron Curtain
Marie Howe
And the nun asked us-- were we seven?--what we would do if the
Communists
stormed our houses and bound our parents and threatened to kill
them. Would you
renounce Jesus in order to save your mother from being murdered?
We knew what the true answer was--
and what was the right one.
My mother stood, cooking a dozen pork chops in the two big frying
pans, when I told her
that I'd said that I'd let her die before
I turned my back on Jesus.
And my mother said that that was all right; she understood.
When the wall came down I was distracted. By what? A man I loved
and longed for?
A self integrating so slowly most days I hardly knew who I was?
Brick by brick. Some men pushed it with what looked like
long pillars.
Some kids sat on top, waving.
We'd been told families had been divided--crossing the city to work or
shop--
caught on the wrong side when the wall went up. And that was that.
People
lived and died, and married.
How strange to see them walking, on TV, through the empty air--
what had been solid--stupefied, astonished...
How they touched the faces of their loved ones
and ran their hands over their heads and hair.
***
The Lesson
Mark Doty
Some workers put up a wall on 25th Street,
plywood sheathing a frame of 2 x 4s, to seal the building
they’d gut and remake. Then they added layers:
stacks of metal pipe bound with black webbing,
a layer of permits, photocopied signatures far removed
from whatever hand inscribed them.
Then a blue expanding ladder, hydraulic,
squatting on its haunches. My friend John took pictures
of the whole unlikely and elaborate composition,
barrier and palimpsest, warning and advertisement.
How could you not look at it, with its tears and concealments?
And though such photos might aestheticize,
allowing us to stand at an annealing distance
from the wreck of things, I think his do something else;
in this way I begin to look at walls.
Decaled plexi between my face and the back of the cab driver’s head.
Blue shroud on 16th like the robe of Venus rippling over the entry
of Pottery Barn, and inside it some burr-grinder
scouring away at the stone. The insidious barrier –
who could put their hands on it? – dividing me and the dark young men
under the scaffolding near my corner, smoking by the door
of the technical school. All going back somehow to the story
one of my teachers told, voice slipping to a register we’d never heard
in our room’s calm rows: how a lover,
desperate to reach the beloved on the other side,
strapped himself beneath a car, face pressed up
into the undercarriage, the back of his head
inches above the pavement; how he’d tried to refuse,
with his own body at least, the sundering of his city.
Did he live, did he ever arrive? I remember only
my teacher beginning to weep, and we children
in our low-slung new school building in Tucson,
the desert freshly scraped to make way for us,
we didn’t understand, what was the lesson?
John’s pictures brought that back -- and how,
decades later, the night they first scaled the wall,
the people at the top reached down to pull up
the others, and shouted Come on, come on!
When the guards turned the water cannons on them,
they sprayed back from open bottles of champagne.
Then the broken chunks appeared, in the hands of those
who had loosened them, fragments of concrete
glazed with spray paint inscriptions, scarred
with sledgehammer and chisel: instruments of union.
A demanding beauty about them,
whatever was scrawled perhaps capable
of realigning, as words in what language?
Something barely spoken yet.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
I've Been Thinking A Lot About Heaven Lately
Heaven
from The End of Youth
Rebecca Brown
I've been thinking a lot about heaven lately. I've been trying to imagine it. In one version heaven is a garden, not Eden, but a great, big vegetable garden with patches of zucchini and crookneck and summer squash and lots of heavy tomato vines with beefsteak and cherry and yellow tomatoes getting perfectly, perfectly ripe, and zinnias and cosmos and lots of other flowers. There's an old lady in the garden. It's sunny out and she's wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. She's healthy and tan and stooping down over one of these plants. Lying half asleep in the sun on the path behind her is a cat and they are happy.
In the other version, heaven is a big field near a lake. It's early in the day, before the sun has risen, and the air is brisk and cool and ducks are flying overhead. There's a guy in the field, a tall, strong guy with the healthy clean-smelling sweat of someone walking. He's wearing his duck hunting gear, his waders and corduroy hat and pocketed vest. He's moving toward the water's edge where he'll shoot a couple of birds to bring home to his family.
The lady in the first heaven is my mother, brown-skinned and plump, with a full head of hair, the way she was before she turned into the bald, gray-skinned sack of bones she was the month she died. The guy in the second version is my father, clear-eyed and strong and confident, not the sad and volatile, cloudy-eyed drunk he was for his last forty years. I've been thinking about heaven because ever since my parents died I've wished I believed in some place I could imagine them. I wish I could see the way I did when I was young.
from The End of Youth
Rebecca Brown
I've been thinking a lot about heaven lately. I've been trying to imagine it. In one version heaven is a garden, not Eden, but a great, big vegetable garden with patches of zucchini and crookneck and summer squash and lots of heavy tomato vines with beefsteak and cherry and yellow tomatoes getting perfectly, perfectly ripe, and zinnias and cosmos and lots of other flowers. There's an old lady in the garden. It's sunny out and she's wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. She's healthy and tan and stooping down over one of these plants. Lying half asleep in the sun on the path behind her is a cat and they are happy.
In the other version, heaven is a big field near a lake. It's early in the day, before the sun has risen, and the air is brisk and cool and ducks are flying overhead. There's a guy in the field, a tall, strong guy with the healthy clean-smelling sweat of someone walking. He's wearing his duck hunting gear, his waders and corduroy hat and pocketed vest. He's moving toward the water's edge where he'll shoot a couple of birds to bring home to his family.
The lady in the first heaven is my mother, brown-skinned and plump, with a full head of hair, the way she was before she turned into the bald, gray-skinned sack of bones she was the month she died. The guy in the second version is my father, clear-eyed and strong and confident, not the sad and volatile, cloudy-eyed drunk he was for his last forty years. I've been thinking about heaven because ever since my parents died I've wished I believed in some place I could imagine them. I wish I could see the way I did when I was young.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
She Also Kissed Dogs on the Mouth
from "I Am the Lion Now"
Edan Lepucki
Margaret took a bath. The tub, like all tubs in apartments worth living in, was grimy. She had scrubbed it many times, but the porcelain remained gray and streaked with rust around the drain. She didn’t mind. She also kissed dogs on the mouth, didn’t wash her fruit. Let the squeamish suffer their fear, let them live without really living. Margaret was safe in her risk taking.
In the kitchen, Toby baked a cake, his second: the first one had burned. Margaret had assumed he’d forgotten to turn on the timer, but this was deliberate. He’d wanted to have sex, more than he wanted to eat cake, and he knew that if the timer went off in the middle, they would stop to handle it. They were married, and passion was not greater than cake.
Click here to read the full version in Narrative Magazine.
Edan Lepucki
Margaret took a bath. The tub, like all tubs in apartments worth living in, was grimy. She had scrubbed it many times, but the porcelain remained gray and streaked with rust around the drain. She didn’t mind. She also kissed dogs on the mouth, didn’t wash her fruit. Let the squeamish suffer their fear, let them live without really living. Margaret was safe in her risk taking.
In the kitchen, Toby baked a cake, his second: the first one had burned. Margaret had assumed he’d forgotten to turn on the timer, but this was deliberate. He’d wanted to have sex, more than he wanted to eat cake, and he knew that if the timer went off in the middle, they would stop to handle it. They were married, and passion was not greater than cake.
Click here to read the full version in Narrative Magazine.
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