Thank YOU Kasper. I don't know what happened with the multiple postings. One of them came through with gobbledegook as the receiving address. Which makes me wonder if the account weren't hijacked. Why would someone try to snatch a poetry list??
Ken
On Sep 13, 2012, at 8:30 PM, Kasper Salonen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Ken, that was a privilege and a treat to read. Very clear on a subject that
> many opt to leave untouched or -analyzed, very nonchalant while being
> intensely heartfelt. The details empower this with authenticity too. Thank
> you.
>
> KS
>
> On 14 September 2012 02:51, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> I tried to post this and nothing happened.
>>
>> AT THE CEDAR TAVERN, FEBRUARY 1997
>>
>> After the Saturday winter readings
>> we'd cross West 3rd Street through the Square
>> and quick-march to the Cedar Tavern,
>> then drink some more, eat the tolerable food,
>> and usually four conversations
>> at once produced laughter
>> even if no one knew quite why.
>>
>> That winter of 1997 my marriage was in ruins,
>> but I still dwelt in that airless Between
>> where my sole action was waiting for
>> a tenant to abandon an apartment
>> into which I'd move; so I crept
>> below (I hoped) the radar
>> through the end-days in the house
>> that was now a house of strangers.
>> Marital ghosts roamed the rooms and halls,
>> fangs dripping like the Queen Alien,
>> while we pretended we were civilized
>> that hatred was too far buried for us to touch.
>>
>> The proof? my wife still cooked for herself and our son,
>> but since I'd paid for the food, even then for me,
>> and I wondered Why back then and still I wonder Why,
>> for dinnertime was a silent torment I could face
>> only if I got plastered first. So
>> I tried not to go to whatever I called home,
>> performed elaborate psychological contortions
>> to keep myself out as late as possible, and laughed
>> or tried that I'd call the place Home at all
>> --my local habitation with a name that was lost.
>>
>> There were ghosts in the Cedar too, adrift
>> on Saturday nights, but they were not my ghosts,
>> nothing to take to heart or care about,
>> because in those moments the dream of beauty
>> stank like shit, and poetry had died in me.
>> It clanged around in the steel ventricles
>> of a Tin Man clone: something detached, heartless,
>> anchored only to the fear that it
>> might never reattach, that words were dead,
>> and I'd be left only to read the crap I'd written years before.
>> Nobody would know or really care.
>> deception did not end at home,
>> it was everywhere and I wrapped myself in it.
>>
>> I did not know the Cedar Tavern's history.
>> Nobody told me that this was the House of Fame,
>> the artist's paradise between the used bookstores
>> and dry cleaners on University Place,
>> a home for the blessed spirits even if they
>> were only the blessed-in-training, in other words
>> just a pack of chain-smoking drunks
>> swinging like bipolar pendulums in a clock shop--
>> manic-sad, sad-manic, graced at least
>> with communal misery.
>>
>> Ghosts of the blessed spirits, benign
>> and without anything like evil intent,
>> and I would come to love them.
>>
>> Frank O'Hara bought me a drink but
>> did not sit on my lap.
>>
>> Rothko sat in clear stolid pain
>> but did not open his veins,
>>
>> LeRoi Jones was not glaring
>> while awaiting a name change.
>>
>> Dylan came through and Dylan was gone,
>> the Joker and the Thief together.
>>
>> Contrary to mystical beliefs,
>> I did not absorb some secret charm from
>> the seats and benches, only
>> was what I came in with: sadness
>> that the subway ran uptown
>> to the Port Authority bus station,
>> and that sooner I would have to go
>> and later, too, I would have to go,
>> even beyond the darkness of the inner cold,
>> beyond even where those cold nights drove me.
>>
>> I would never see the Cedar again.
>> The last I heard it's gone, out of business,
>> presumably taking its ghosts along for the ride.
>> The ghosts in any case were displaced by mine:
>> not famous or gifted, but weighted
>> with a tragic raging presence
>> that drove even the gifted from the room.
>>
>> KTW/1-25-09
>>
|