[New-Poetry] Nat'l Book Award 2007 nominees, Poetry

[AlMaginnes at aol.com]

Here is a poem of Phil Terman's from his new book Rabbis of the Air. It's a  
bit long but pays off. 
 
 


My Kafka   
 



A  cage went in search of a bird.       
1.  The Heron 
The commotion of sunlight,  rattling  
of clouds, the impossible crash 
of daybreak, how loud the grass, how noisy 
the gossamer wavering in the dust, how terrible 
the explosion of the human heart.  The silence 
you need cannot be found on this earth, 
the circular saw grinding across the road, 
the chattering teeth of mice in the floorboards. 
At least from food you can escape into air, 
like your hunger artist, you can dissolve 
into skin and bone, into straw in a cage, 
you can disappear into your own obscurity. 
Zaru, Schelesten, Meran,  Molinary— 
you tried sanitarium after sanitarium, 
Ottla’s retreat into the countryside, 
but sound materializes even in empty air. 
If only a composing hut like Mahler’s, deep 
in the woods, before dawn, after bathing 
for purity, breakfast prepared, trees surrounding 
in their host, where you can be unnoticed 
like an indistinct insect, protecting 
the writing from every disturbance, if only 
a burrow big enough for your thin frame, 
and a desk that keeps madness at bay, 
like the one I’m writing on now, old oak, 
in a cabin the other end of a hay field, 
facing a pond where I saw a blue heron, 
thin neck curving into a pencil-pointed beak, 
on the edge of the water, its image 
doubled back to the surface as the sun 
poured beyond the trees.  It paused, 
all attention, waiting, eyes fixed skyward, 
standing stock-still in a concentrated silence, 
waiting for something, a quality of light 
to emerge or a cry inaudible to human ears, 
and it happened, its wings outspread, 
gone.  I traced it long  as I could into its next life. 
2.  Jewish Middle-Class  Fathers 
Impossible to  take them seriously, these fathers of ours, 
these Jewish  middle-class fathers: in the synagogue, 
rising with the congregation, mumbling their  prayers, 
distracted, bored, half-asleep, asleep, snoring. 
On Sabbath and High Holy Days we could have loved  them. 
They might have taught us Torah and the Talmud, 
instructed us, as it is written, in the sacred  scriptures— 
they could have passed on the wisdom of their  ancestors, 
demonstrated how to remove the t’fillin from the velvet  cases 
and weave them around our arms, securing the small  black 
boxes, commandments scrolled inside, to our  foreheads, 
instructed us in the proper way to don a scull cap, with a pin, to  our hair, 
how to wrap around our shoulders the tallism, not stiff 
like a scarf, but tossed back like a cape, given us  lessons 
in the precise intonations of the chanting—not a  mumble, 
but in cadences that carry centuries, the sufferings, the  exhalations. 
And they should have modeled—rather than stumble and  stand 
in silence—the davin dance:  to sway, with one’s  whole body, 
to prostrate, not to meaningless words memorized 
through repetition, but to the poetry of the  prophets, 
the complaints of the kings, the assertions of the  righteous, 
the story of a people exiled, like us—what we had to  learn 
by ourselves, had to find our own way back to—beggars,  prodigals. 
Our fathers!  We were  nothing beside their enormous bulk, 
their mammoth frames covered head to foot with fur. 
They inhabited our entire houses.  As children scaling 
their chests we reached the highest summit,  standing 
beside them they were towering as skyscrapers— 
we couldn’t see the horizon beyond them, they stood between  us 
and the world.  We  couldn’t keep step or stand their silences. 
These Jewish middle-class fathers, full of conquest,  enterprise, 
these small business owners—work was their god, their  religion, 
their mantra, work was who they married, who they slept  with, 
the secret name they wanted us to inherit.  But we were putzes, 
meshuginahs, shmegegies,  shlemiels, shlemazels. 
We didn’t know what it meant to live what they lived  through, 
how they had to sleep all in one room, eating potatoes and  herring, 
how they had to work as young boys—always the  Depression, 
always the War, how with nothing they made their own  way. 
We had no business sense, distracted, reading  Dostoyevsky. 
And the dinner table!  Their chamber, the Holy of Holies— 
sucking their meat, slurping the gravy, cracking the  bones, 
cleaning their ears with toothpicks, filling the air with  crude 
humor at our expense:  Son, the best part of you went on the  ceiling. 
Oh, these fathers.  But  on Sundays they didn’t shave and pranced 
in underwear, sometimes nothing at all.  They burped and  farted, 
read the newspaper on the toilet till noon, their cigar  smoke 
circling through the house.  They’d play us a hand of cards, 
wanting to win, yes:  still, those moments, a soft word, some laughter. 
And our writings.  To our  fathers—nothing, they’d get us nowhere. 
But it was all about them, we dedicated it all to  them. 
They were offended, they bristled, they took it much too  personally. 
They wanted us to be lawyers or accountants.  They wanted us 
to take over the business, they wanted us to be what they  understood, 
wanted us to be themselves, perhaps a little better, but not too  much. 
These fathers.  These  Jewish middle-class fathers. 
3.  Son of K. 
“Few persons left behind so slender a trail as this child of  Kafka’s.” 
Max Brod 
Mazel tov.  I learned the news  from the chronology 
in the back of Schocken’s Complete Stories.  A son! 
Kayn  anyhora, may you avoid the evil  eye. 
My own child’s sleeping now, long day, the  playground, 
the sandbox, coloring, chasing me around the house— 
me, a father!  Not much  writing today, but when I toss her 
into the air, her hair splayed wild, her eyes wide, 
skin flushed, arms flapping like a bird’s, the air stills,  
it seems for those few moments time stops  completely. 
Too bad you weren’t informed.  Let me fill you in: 
born 1914 or 1915.  In  Munich.  His name? 
Characteristics?  How he  died?  Was he  frail? 
A little awkward?  Large-eared?  Lanky? 
Did he keep to his room? 
Did he have difficult eating habits? 
Obsessed with the slightest noises?  Give 
mama a hard time?  Harbor  resentments 
and imagine little ridiculous things about his  father? 
That would be you, of course, don’t feel guilty, 
it wasn’t your fault, you had no idea, nobody did, 
until twenty-five years later, except, of course, 
the Mutter who, on April  21, 1940, identified you 
in a letter—not, it’s true, by name, but what other 
famous man whose “greatness is held to this day” 
died in Prague in 1924?  What about the  mother? 
Can you guess?  You were  delighted that she shares 
a name with your insect’s sister, yes:  Grete, 
your fiancée Felice’s friend, her go-between 
when there was a pause in your correspondence, 
the one she trusted, an intermediary, the messenger you fell  for. 
Don’t deny it.  Re-read your letter dated May 2, 1914, 
the time, according to calculations, when little Franz  Jr. 
would have been born:  you cannot be fully aware, you  pined 
of what you mean to  me.  And  this from a writer whose reputation 
doesn’t rest on his superfluity:  Everything you do,  especially 
your gaze,  has its effect, Fraulein Grete, it has its effect. 
Canetti says that if one reads your letters to  Felice 
and to Grete, often written on the same day, side by  side, 
“One can have no doubt as to whom he loves.” 
And didn’t you want G to move in with you and F. 
after the wedding?  Can engaged couples do  that? 
And didn’t you tell G. that your relationship with  her 
holds  delightful and altogether indispensable possibilities? 
And didn’t you want G. to join you and F at Grund? 
And didn’t you write G. about your unmistakable longing? 
Max thinks the impact on you would have been  enormous, 
there was “nothing he desired more fervently” than  children, 
you “longed to be a father,” you “would have taken loving  charge.” 
Perhaps, Max thought, it might even have “saved” your  life. 
And didn’t you tell your own father, in that famous  letter, 
that To get married, to found  a family, to accept 
all the  children that arrive, to maintain them in this 
uncertain  world, even to lead them a little on their way 
is the  most a man may succeed in doing? 
Max again:  “He longed to  sit beside a cradle of his own.” 
I’ve laid my pen down and sat beside a cradle 
of a child of my own and stared into all that mystery and  wondered 
what she was imagining on the other side of  language, 
shapes of water and the dark, patterns of the sky, 
what she made of this enormous shadow I cast over  her. 
She curled her tiny hand around my writing finger 
and held it tightly gripped all the way into her  sleep, 
like holding fast to a rope fastened to this world, 
floating in that great enigma that is her life, 
what I will never know, the way two people, no  matter 
how close, are lost to each other, the way nobody 
really knew you, not even Max, how you write 
to Felice:  I would never expose myself to the  risk 
of being a  father, because what you had to do 
was to become clear about the  ultimate things. 
So how could you be a father?  Arranging your life 
completely around your writing with a child in the  house 
when you could never be alone enough, there could  never 
be silence enough, sitting in your innermost room 
of the locked cellar, notebook on a table and a  lamp, 
someone placing food outside the entrance?  Last night, 
my daughter came into my study and yelled:  Papa! 
I turned from this page and lifted her on my  lap, 
I swirled away from my desk and twirled her around, 
she climbed onto my back and I crouched down like a  horse, 
she laughed hysterically, I stretched my back up and  neighed. 
No:  even the noise in  the next apartment congealed your blood. 
Better off you never knew about him, this Franz Jr. 
And besides, maybe you’ll be relieved, the whole shtick 
about the son, I discover, despite Schocken’s  chronology, 
despite Max’s certainty, is now in dispute. 
Scholars are saying the fellow didn’t even exit. 
Other than the woman’s claim, there’s no proof, 
none of her friends thought it possible, the  researchers 
don’t think anything intimate took place at all. 
In early spring, 1914, Grete showed no signs in the  stomach 
and, though in 1916, she complained of  “sufferings,” 
the dates don’t work out.  The story, says the biographer 
Frederich Karl, falls too closely into the realm of a  fantasy 
of a woman spurned.  The  editors of the Letters to  Felice 
concur:  “doubtful.”  “Unlikely.”  On the other side,  Karl 
speculates there might have been a “consummation, 
even without proof.”  Let’s allow Canetti the final word: 
“Whatever occurred between G. and K. remains  secret.” 
Such are the ambiguities of history.  Was there a son? 
Would you have wanted there to be?  How…Kafkaesque! 
Brod, we know, thought a son would have confirmed 
your worth from the “highest court of appeals,” the  verdict 
pronounced:  not guilty,  the message finally arriving 
from the Castle.  But of  course nothing arrives from the Castle, 
nothing definite, what we can be sure of, lay our hands  on, 
all agree with, you taught us that, that was your  burden, 
oh great father of Modernism.  Was that spoken like a true son? 
That’s all from Gerte, no more words, only the  letter, 
April 21, 1940.  According to the Red Cross, 
She was arrested in Italy after Hitler’s  occupation. 
Max received reports that a soldier “beat her 
to death with the butt of his gun.”  And so this son 
trails off, slender as you are, almost an airy  nothing, 
a small passage in an obscure letter, another soul 
who may or may not have existed, whose legacy 
is otherwise annihilated, one more mystery, a  perfection 
that you would have chosen for yourself. 
Every day you wished yourself off this earth, 
preferring, you told your father, the absolute  nothing 
over the alternatives:  marriage and fatherhood. 
You said you would mature from childhood into old  age 
and bypass manhood completely, another statement 
we’re forced to agree with:  at forty, near death, a wisp 
of gray in your hair, your expression almost  Chinese, 
a comparison the great Chinese scholar Arthur  Whaley 
wouldn’t argue against, he said you’re the “only  writer 
in the western world who is essentially Chinese,” 
and you yourself wrote to Felice:  Indeed, I am Chinese. 
What a coincidence!  So’s  my daughter!  Adopted, 
there’s the wisdom of 5000 years in her expression, 
her ancestors surely worked on the Great Wall, 
her eyes remind me of Tu Fu’s, but that’s kvelling, 
everything she does is astonishing, she’s opening those eyes  now, 
she’s leaping across the room, she’s waving her arms:  Papa! 


4. Last  Jottings or Flowers for Franz  
On the  treatment of cut flowers.  
Aslant, so  they can drink more.  
Strip  their leaves.  
The peonies,  
they are  so fragile.  
Move the lilacs  
into the  sun.  
Do you  have a moment?  
Then  please lightly spray the peonies  
and please  see that they don’t touch  
the bottom  of the vase.  
That’s why  
they’re  kept in bowls.  
A bird was  in the room.  
I’ll hold  out for another week.  
Careful I  don’t cough in your face.  
How trying  I am.  
The  craving itself is some sort of satisfaction.  
See the  lilacs, fresher than morning.  
I am  already so poisoned that the body  
can hardly  understand the pure fruit.  
Cut  flowers should be treated differently.  
Show me  the columbine,  
too bright  to stand with the others.  
Scarlet  hawthorn is too hidden,  
too much  in the dark.  
Where is  the eternal spring?  
Greenish  translucent bowls.  
A late bee  drank the white lilac dry.  
Cut a deep  slant; then they can touch the floor.  
How  wonderful, the lilac, dying,  
it drinks,  goes on swilling.  
Every limb  as tired as a person.  
It was all  so boundless.  





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