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
>
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