Not Another Memory Poem
Jokes aside, poemy-nostalgia aside,
the girl literally led me by the hand
and in no time let me literally slide
something of me into something of her.
Like stepping off a plane into a new country,
a warmer one, that had been secret.
But fuck all that, we’ve all been there by now,
it’s like eulogizing the first time
you ate an olive, right?, and I’m not
going there either (food metaphors, Christ),
I will say this: the Reagan presidency
continued unabated, things began to change
in Nicaragua, London Calling
was already on our jukebox in Oakdale,
Zooey Deschanel was just born.
Let’s not evoke it, let’s measure it –
by footcandles, given
that ten footcandles of memory = a quart
of blood and a pint of sweat, plus
the liquid weight of the things you forget
that once seemed unforgettable.
Give me a minute, and some scrap paper,
OK, here it is: about
two hundred thousand footcandles
of hot memory, now that what I once knew
about my tenth year has vanished entirely,
and the market has all but dried up
for books not written about grandfathers
who by the time of my first
erection were already no better
than ghosts.
A Lost Astronaut Love Story
There are no lost astronauts, remarkably.
If it had been up to me, there’d be domed helmets
wandering the Mariner Valley and writhing
in orbit, like car keys under the radiator
and wallets left on rooves while gassing up,
there’d be support groups for the wives
and husbands, and petitions to indict me
for absentmindedness or incompetence,
neither illegal thank God,
and you’d bump into one every now and again,
like dogs not sure they should approach you
because you may be friendly or you
may be lost, too, a divorced man fleeing debts,
deciding to drink that forty bucks
instead of sleeping in a bed.
If you agree to go up in a rocket, anything can happen.
Your song becomes the astronaut’s song,
as dumb as any anthem, “We
wayfarers of the vast black empty /
Pointsmen of the new unknown,”
like that. We pee in our suits.
But astronauts come in all sizes and shapes,
colors and measures of capableness,
foolish giants and brusque dwarves and sleepwalking escapists,
littering the night sky with their headlights
and the dark regions between,
and when you look up, on your lawn,
it’s hard to say which are lost, or if they aren’t all,
scattered, wishing love could find them,
but knowing it’s only up to the chance passing
of a satellite, at best, as it bounces
the business-trip phone calls from Sydney
to New York, and back again.
Is a Line and a Circle Both
I, in effect, drove around the block and
pulled back in before Rocket Man was half over,
starting again in a moment,
give me a moment,
not unlike, I want to say,
astronauts whose orbits
are only exercises in orbital glory,
requiring no further rationale or justification,
so don’t ask, I have my reasons,
like the dog walking in circles around
the spot on the rug he’ll eventually lie on,
ten, twenty, thirty circuits
without a pause, counting them
down as the astronauts do
gliding in suits of foil and chrome miles
above us and the rain. Rain recirculates, too,
and that’s where I am in the driveway,
wanting every road to be a court,
every day to be a skipping record,
look how memories of old records
come around, it used to be you’d see
the machine of it turn like stars turn
in the sky but only when sped up on TV.
The dog may circle, sniffing, why?, but
of course his dog years, zipping by like taxicabs,
go from there to somewhere ahead,
in a line as straight as a latitude,
which of course also circles the world,
suggesting, alright, that I’ll come around to
a decent poem someday, I’ll so concretely
act upon this or that sushi-grade abstraction,
and the round of applause will be detectable
above the scratchings of the LP left
to itself, beyond the end of the song
and into the black hole of neverending
revolutions, until you start it over.
Michael Atkinson’s debut volume, One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (Word Works), won the Washington Prize in 2001. I have had poems in Crazyhorse, The Threepenny Review, Ontario Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Graham House Review, The Laurel Review, Mudfish, and many other journals.
Jokes aside, poemy-nostalgia aside,
the girl literally led me by the hand
and in no time let me literally slide
something of me into something of her.
Like stepping off a plane into a new country,
a warmer one, that had been secret.
But fuck all that, we’ve all been there by now,
it’s like eulogizing the first time
you ate an olive, right?, and I’m not
going there either (food metaphors, Christ),
I will say this: the Reagan presidency
continued unabated, things began to change
in Nicaragua, London Calling
was already on our jukebox in Oakdale,
Zooey Deschanel was just born.
Let’s not evoke it, let’s measure it –
by footcandles, given
that ten footcandles of memory = a quart
of blood and a pint of sweat, plus
the liquid weight of the things you forget
that once seemed unforgettable.
Give me a minute, and some scrap paper,
OK, here it is: about
two hundred thousand footcandles
of hot memory, now that what I once knew
about my tenth year has vanished entirely,
and the market has all but dried up
for books not written about grandfathers
who by the time of my first
erection were already no better
than ghosts.
A Lost Astronaut Love Story
There are no lost astronauts, remarkably.
If it had been up to me, there’d be domed helmets
wandering the Mariner Valley and writhing
in orbit, like car keys under the radiator
and wallets left on rooves while gassing up,
there’d be support groups for the wives
and husbands, and petitions to indict me
for absentmindedness or incompetence,
neither illegal thank God,
and you’d bump into one every now and again,
like dogs not sure they should approach you
because you may be friendly or you
may be lost, too, a divorced man fleeing debts,
deciding to drink that forty bucks
instead of sleeping in a bed.
If you agree to go up in a rocket, anything can happen.
Your song becomes the astronaut’s song,
as dumb as any anthem, “We
wayfarers of the vast black empty /
Pointsmen of the new unknown,”
like that. We pee in our suits.
But astronauts come in all sizes and shapes,
colors and measures of capableness,
foolish giants and brusque dwarves and sleepwalking escapists,
littering the night sky with their headlights
and the dark regions between,
and when you look up, on your lawn,
it’s hard to say which are lost, or if they aren’t all,
scattered, wishing love could find them,
but knowing it’s only up to the chance passing
of a satellite, at best, as it bounces
the business-trip phone calls from Sydney
to New York, and back again.
Is a Line and a Circle Both
I, in effect, drove around the block and
pulled back in before Rocket Man was half over,
starting again in a moment,
give me a moment,
not unlike, I want to say,
astronauts whose orbits
are only exercises in orbital glory,
requiring no further rationale or justification,
so don’t ask, I have my reasons,
like the dog walking in circles around
the spot on the rug he’ll eventually lie on,
ten, twenty, thirty circuits
without a pause, counting them
down as the astronauts do
gliding in suits of foil and chrome miles
above us and the rain. Rain recirculates, too,
and that’s where I am in the driveway,
wanting every road to be a court,
every day to be a skipping record,
look how memories of old records
come around, it used to be you’d see
the machine of it turn like stars turn
in the sky but only when sped up on TV.
The dog may circle, sniffing, why?, but
of course his dog years, zipping by like taxicabs,
go from there to somewhere ahead,
in a line as straight as a latitude,
which of course also circles the world,
suggesting, alright, that I’ll come around to
a decent poem someday, I’ll so concretely
act upon this or that sushi-grade abstraction,
and the round of applause will be detectable
above the scratchings of the LP left
to itself, beyond the end of the song
and into the black hole of neverending
revolutions, until you start it over.
Michael Atkinson’s debut volume, One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (Word Works), won the Washington Prize in 2001. I have had poems in Crazyhorse, The Threepenny Review, Ontario Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Graham House Review, The Laurel Review, Mudfish, and many other journals.