Matthew Dickman is a poet in rare company. He has actually been published in The New Yorker. But today Matthew is most excited to start a new job as a prep cook. A job that includes health insurance!
ROMA
Last night my neighbor was looking a little enlightened,
you know, the way bodies do
after spending the afternoon having sex
on an old couch while responsible people are suffering
with their clothes on in cubicles and libraries.
He had that look vegetables get
in really nice grocery stores where the tomatoes aren’t just red
they’re goddamn red!
He was like that. Like a glowing, off-the-vine-Roma
sitting in his living room picking pineapple off a Hawaiian pizza
and telling me about his father who was a real mother
fucker. I ask him if he still loved his dad, or if he loved him more
now that he is dead. Sure, he says, I love anything that’s dead.
Someone’s hand floats up onto the beach
while the body is still lost below the current, a vase of lilacs
turned brown, the black archipelago of mourners marching
up the hill. My neighbor is there to greet each of them
with a box of chocolates and a barbershop quartet in the background.
When my father died, he says opening a beer, he was no longer
my father. He was no longer a man. It’s easy to love things
when they’re powerless, like children and goldfish.
This is the way with enlightened people. They say things
that are so infuriatingly simple when the world is not.
So I put down my Pepsi and pull out the big card.
What about Hitler? I ask. You can’t love Hitler!
My neighbor puts a piece of pineapple on his tongue like a sacrament,
sucks the juice out of it, chews it up, then turns
his head slow like a cloud and says I can love anybody I feel like loving.
And I say that’s ridiculous.
And he says what’s ridiculous is that you don’t. And there he is again,
shining in the grocery store, pulling the bow off
the heart-shaped candies and putting one softly into his father’s mouth.
More of Matthew's most excellent poems inside!
SLOW DANCE
More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dinning room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home, to knock it out of the park. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about how all the stars in the sky
are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-cord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a shear white dress
covered in a million beads
comes toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out.
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutang slow dance.
PUBLIC PARKS
This one is named after a suffragist and it’s also the first place,
at night near a pond where families of ducks
float by like paper boats, I felt
the warm legs of covered-in-shadow romance and had no idea what
to do with my hands.
I remember how her tights were smooth
but scratchy and midnight blue, she had
dark curly hair and a name like Ramon. Or maybe
it was Simone and her tongue was perfect like her knees
and the weeping willow wept hard for us
because we were rough and rough with each other as much as we were kind.
There was a bridge over part of the pond
and I crossed it when it rained and Simone
wore a shirt that looked like water
when you looked into it and saw a sky that was not
a sky and your face which was not really a face. The park was open
all night with patrol cars moving in and out, their bodies
like heavy benevolent animals .
There we were with our clothes half torn and soaked. This is my favorite
memory of rain and parks and ducks and nylon stockings.
I like parks with statues
and parks with fountains.
I have sat below a few signatories
of several important American papers while pigeons
sat above them, on their shoulders, swords, and wrists.
Lincoln stands, among other places, in the park near a famous bookstore
where he is turning green, facing Alder Street
and Rich’s Cigar Shop where you can get a really nice Romeo y Juliette
and smoke it on a park bench near the YMCA.
Some parks are celebrated for the bushes that men hide behind,
touching each other in the dangerous hour
before returning home
to their wives and boyfriends, setting a table and pulling a roast from the oven.
Some parks are noted for their baseball fields and some for their swing sets.
Some for their willows
and some for a body that’s found by hikers, left in the wet
brown leaves for the worms and twelve o’clock news,
the reporter combing his hair
between takes. I have performed Shakespeare
in the parks. I played a wall and fell in love
with a girl who played a nymph,
she wore a green dress made out of vinyl leaves that shimmered and shook
above her hips. She had a lazy eye and listened to Patti Smith.
There’s a park I visit whenever I’m in Chicago
and one in NYC where I smoke German cigarettes and watch students pass
between classes, all the lamps covered
by decorative, giant lampshades. The students
with their Norton anthologies
writing papers about George Herbert and Henry James,
some in love with professors and some
with little burns on their ankles
because a lover tied them too tight between the bed posts
and some with no one at all and no bed at all
but a blow-up mattress they pump full of air
each night before reading a section of the Iliad,
fighting themselves to sleep.
I like the secret life of students almost as much as I like parks
like the one in Texas where garbage cans are hidden behind a mosaic
of multi-colored tile so you’re not even thinking of garbage
but Adobe Flats, Mesas, and in particular a collage by Ray Johnson
and a table top by my neighbor who also cuts words
out of the daily cross word puzzle
and pastes them onto a separate page, making poems
that are often sad and terrifying. Can you believe it,
he says, these words were just lying there in twenty-four down and eight across.
He and I used to walk to a park that was five feet
by six feet, one live oak to sit beneath and one large stone to set a book
or a baby on. You could eat lunch there if it was a small lunch
and you were alone.
I dropped acid and walked through a park where I met myself over and over
until I was afraid that I wasn’t anyone at all.
I drank Australian beer with Carl in a park known for its roses, high
above the city, and we talked about his brother who was dying
of cancer and the girl he was seeing
who wiped his brow and left him at the same time.
Carl read a poem about Prospero that Jack Gilbert wrote when Jack Gilbert
was living in Greece. This park is surrounded
by barbed wire like a nasty halo, filled with kids in rain boots
who know the pleasures of mud and kings.
I knelt down in this park, below
a redwood tree and pretended
I was Saint Francis of Assisi though the birds were afraid of me.
I like this park because it’s like a small car
clowns pile out of, one after the other, and you think there’s a trap door
underneath, but there isn’t. This park
is where everyone goes on the fourth
of July to eat watermelon and watch the sky explode.
This park is the smallest park in the world, named after the poet
Hazel Hall who no one reads anymore and maybe never did.
This park is so big it should be National but it isn’t, its Public like the library
and all of us can go there with frisbees and water bottles.
You could be standing inside it
near the sandbox, your shirt unbuttoned at the top, a little
sand brushed away from your neck, some small
sparkling grains of which have fallen
beneath the wire and fabric of your push-up bra and later after we’ve taken
our walk and had our picnic, after the dog is tired
of catching the ball and we drive home, the sand turning into salt, the park closing
behind us, I am going to take you into the bedroom
and lick it off.
THE SMALL CLASP
Your breasts were two drunken parents
coaching little league practice
but smaller, I remember, than the disappointment
parents wrap around children
and now they have been replaced by others.
Some were like exposed negatives,
two copies of a Maria Callas biography,
a pair of Dutch clogs,
two pieces of chocolate cake
that left me thirsty for two glasses of milk,
pierced, tattooed, each different,
even from each other;
one always seeming a little brighter,
a little larger or smaller
at midday or midnight, while it rained
or began to snow, sticking to the sidewalk.
I remember my friend’s wife
the night I lifted her shirt
over her shoulders
in the tiny upstairs bathroom
while he argued about Eliot
and the Jews on the front porch
with the woman I would eventually drive home.
Honor will only carry you so far
before it drops you on your ass.
You can’t run from it
but you can get close, standing out in the cold,
lighting your little cigar, talking
a woman’s ear off.
I have learned to conquer loneliness
the way television conquers loneliness.
The woman in the car commercial, bending
over the hood, her breasts telling me
this is the car for you, handsome.
You have to believe in it
if you want to survive. You have to
let the old lies into bed and make them sing for you.
And it’s the same thing when I dream
about your breasts and a floating riding crop.
I have to remember how wonderful it feels, pulling
my hands out of my pockets, moving
them slowly between someone’s spine
and yellow t-shirt, happy to unhook the small clasp
without the fingerprints of love,
without the familiar sound of our neighbors fighting
and all the effortless moaning that went with you.
Matthew Dickman lives and works in Portland, Oregon. His first book, All-American Poem, received the 2008 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and will be published through Copper Canyon Press this Fall.
Roma was first published by The American Poetry Review. Slow Dance, Public Parks, and The Small Clasp were first published by The Missouri Review.
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Last update : 08-06-2008 06:23
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