who in peering back into the wreckage, found
us, the people. For looking forward
was his true gift. He always saw what we
might be capable of. And so we are left
now to struggle without his recognition,
which while sometimes inaccurate, was
often faithful. He taught us what we knew
and wished to forget: our independence
was for those who could afford it, and the slaves
were freed to be serfs, and the good war
was like every war, a war on children.
One could say he was unkind to the nation,
or it was the kind of tough love given to
a friend, who suffers from one of Jung’s
shady types. Where there’s hope for this patient,
he found it by integrating the country’s
repressed selves, who are bare and as incomplete
as his research. If status, at times,
had made him blind, to us he is no more
a person now than an entire movement
of people. The patriotic remain proud
but a little less, while the scholars
accuse him of bias, and, of course, they
are right. He was not a historian, but
the narrator of a collective memoir,
where proving what happened exactly
was less important than why it mattered.
THE ILLUSION THEORIST OF COLOUR DESCRIBES A LANDSCAPE
“Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”
— Wordsworth
The top soft of the hills, shadow dappled. On these summer evenings cold seeming as mint ice cream,
whose green appearance functions to distinguish it, say, from butterscotch.
I haven’t had mint ice cream since those birthday dinners at the Old Spaghetti Factory.
The hills are the colour of a banana or raspberry represented
as green as a sign that it is unripe.
My mother always returned, from the bathroom,
minutes before the waiters came and sang
“happy birthday” to me.
Hills green as a signifier to keep going.
I thought then that the waiters sang because they wanted to, not because they could be fired if they didn’t.
That the stars are white can be stated as x is white = x has some feature by virtue of which x appears white.
The stars are trick candles.
The colour of the stars can be explained by interpreting their appearance as indicators of other physical features, where those features have causal powers on our perception of colour.
The stars are like a toy camera’s flash, capturing nothing.
It is sufficient to say “It is as if the stars were white.”
I followed my mother around with it like I was the
paparazzi —
White is a property the stars do not have but might have had:
in some possible world but not in this one.
For who is a bigger celebrity, to a child, than one’s
mother?
Virtual colours are as good as real colours.
Sometimes I expect her, any minute now, and after all
these years, to return from the bathroom.
In the case of colour, unlike other cases, false consciousness should be a cause for celebration.
The stars are singing to me, because someone left
the table to tell them it’s my special day. And
though they’re far, if I listen close, I can nearly
hear them.
FOR DAVE IN ISTANBUL
We couldn’t hear the evening call to prayer
sheltered by the pub’s basement walls.
We could almost think we were
in one of our locals, except the names of everything,
especially the women, reminded us we are foreigners,
the yabancılar referred to in the menu
whose drinks cost double the price.
We were Adams in reverse, arriving
last on the scene, the animals named long ago,
the earth fully decorated and Eve already fallen
and fallen and fallen. We drank our way
to the bottom of the Bosphorus, searching for the nails
our mothers took from the cross, before yours left,
you told me, to play guitar for other people’s children. And mine,
whose body thinned till it seemed to be hiding within itself
like prayer beads in the palms of old men
or down the blouses of the curious girls in Taksim Square.
Each night, after last call, we ascended
the pub steps into the softening sky, the streets barren
as our pasts. We stumbled across the half toothless grin
of shoddy cobblestone roads, and the skeletal remains of a cart:
birdcage, sack of cashews, some piece of crap
with a picture of Atatürk. We arrived where we started from,
though had forgotten it again: the kokoreç vendor
like a mythic tree, waiting for us at the place where the roads part.
And we ate lamb guts, obeying the only law
binding our lives now —
not to look inside the bun. Then, the muezzin called
the faithful, and I felt pious, once again,
for being awake at this hour.
JASPER AVENUE
You spoke of Edmonton as a river god,
turning your amateur boxer father
into a fucking vegetable. A religion
of one punch. Your faith
only in metamorphoses
for the worst. How all it takes
sometimes is one good blow
to the head. But at least it got him off
Jasper Avenue. A joke I didn’t get
till now, arriving
for the first time in your hometown
and seeing the faces
you once described
as rain-damaged suede
stumble by the dust caked
and curtained 25 cent
peep shows. You told me how
you would fuck anyone
with a car, keys to get you
out of town. I should have
seen your little indiscretions
and thefts coming for miles —
and perhaps I did. Deserved it,
in a way, as you wrote
in your Coffee Time napkin scripture:
what’s fair is what happens to you
and we do what we can
and whatever that is —
is what’s right. And now
you’re married, and, well,
not poor, and I’m
walking down Jasper Avenue
to where I’ll read some poems.
Yes, they pay me for this.
Though not very much.
But people listen to me
talk about all the things I had,
maybe we all had, coming.
And I always wanted that, I guess.
It makes a lot of things forgivable,
or proves, at least, they were necessary.
A SORT OF LOVE POEM
I know how I change in Kafka-esque ways,
when I get what I long for. So, I am pretty alright
with keeping our romance as is,
the exchange of letters and poems, a coffee once a year —
the subtle flirtations that may all be in my head,
or that you weave, like a web, in the night,
in the minds of nearly every man you talk to.
most of all, with the way we fall in love.
The burial ceremony of old skins
and sound judgement. Glorious —
how un-Plantonist I feel at the thought of you
drying your hair. And I do not write this
with a belief that it will make you see something
you cannot already. Poetry can’t
substitute for the absurd currency of attraction,
the way someone winces when they sneeze
or stirs their coffee.
I write now from the place of good love poems,
the ones that have no intent,
seek to change nothing,
and live alongside the prayers of atheists,
formed simply and only,
because there is nothing else left to do.
1989
When I was a boy you were old
and have stayed that way for twenty years.
I remember you best as the world’s one sad man
when The Wall fell. Your glum face
reflected in people dancing
atop televised rubble. I didn’t know
what ideology was, but understood
you were against joy on principle. That Christmas
you bummed a du Maurier off a stranger
in the Golden Griddle on Front Street, and we sat
in your old Chevy, wrinkled
with dents, windows rolled up
so smoke curled against the glass
like a caged ghost. I predicted all of this,
you said, and if I had known
who Cassandra was, I’d think
she was a Trotskyite or “Trot”
as I heard you called once. Though I didn’t know
what that was either, and spent
my childhood waiting for you
to strut like a proud thoroughbred.
You exhaled forecasts all night, told me
Yugoslavia will resemble an uprooted tree
and so will Iraq. You told me
peace wouldn’t last
in the place of your birth
and about the intifada to come
which sounded like “ta da” —
what I imagined you would say
one day — your leaving
turning out to be sleight of hand. You told me
about the economic collapses to come, but not
tumours will grow in my mother’s body.
You didn’t tell me
they will fill her brain
till she believes I am a spy
and then she’ll be dead. She is dead.
But not right now, where it is 1989,
the future unfolding along predictable and unknown lines
through the frosted windshield. You tell me
you are scared of snow and miss the desert.
You are thinking of moving back soon.
You are already gone.
It will be years before you appear again,
looking remarkably the same, as though
there are no disappointments left
to take the years from you. You won’t
see the revolution in your lifetime.
You admit it, freely now, shrugging
like Rand’s Atlas. You want now,
more than anything, to know me,
for the first time, as though
to our lives. I try to tell you who I am
these days. I list off some beliefs,
if this is what makes us who we are. I tell you
I believe there is a god,
sometimes, and that Marx was right
about a lot of things, but was, probably,
an asshole. I tell you
art matters, and so does love and that’s the extent
of what I know
with any certainty. But I can’t
talk about the past. The word pain comes to mind
and for a moment pain and past sound like they are the same
word, that we invented pain so we could have
a word for the irrevocable that falls soft
on the ear. I want to tell you I once believed
snow made men vanish in the night, into history.
POST-OCCUPY
Tourists posing for the shot by the balls
of the Bowling Green bull. Deli. Starbucks.
The stones of Trinity Church. Opening bell. Strip club.
Reuters showing the news of the day. Black birds
in Battery Park. Scaffold. Spring. Someone
talking about the Dutch colony. Blue bank.
Lenapehoking. The ant march up Lady
Liberty’s crown. Pigeons. Another Starbucks.
Ellis Island. The search for namesakes. Red bank.
Freedom Tower. Fences. Never Forgetting.
Poplars. This is an important announcement . . .
The Q train is running via the R.
Going Out of Business Sale. Grand Opening Sale.
Closing bell. Hudson River on a clear day.
NOTES
The opening of “Raising the Pentagon” is a slight variation on Norman Mailer’s description of a cell mate in The Armies of the Night.
All the lines in “Re: Grandpa’s Village” are from an email my uncle, Michael, sent me in 2007.
The italicized lines in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” are directly quoted from the character Paul Varjak, or “Fred,” in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
The lines “We were blindsided . . . /We never saw it coming” in “Occupy” are Pat Buchanan’s paraphrase of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s testimony to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2009. (“Is a U.S. Default Inevitable?” Human Affairs, January 15, 2010.)
“Ode to the Double Rainbow Guy” refers to Paul Vasquez whose excitement over seeing a double rainbow became an internet meme in 2010. The Gregory Brothers soon after turned it into a YouTube music video.
“For My Beard” is influenced by the poems “Nearing Winter” by Sachiko Murakami and “Cockroach Elegy” by Jeff Latosik.
The poem “In Memory of Howard Zinn” could not have been written without the aid of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and a talk he gave at Boston College in 2010, entitled “Holy Wars,” which I watched on democracynow.org.
The non-italicized lines in “The Illusion Theorist of Colour Describes a Landscape” are variations of text taken from the article “Color” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The line “. . . to play guitar for other people’s children” in “For Dave in Istanbul” was inspired by a line in an unpublished poem my father seems to have written decades ago.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council for their generous financial support in the writing of this book.
Thank you to Michael Holmes for his careful and caring eye in editing these poems. Thank you to Jack David and David Caron for believing this work is worthy of their wonderful press. Thank you to Rob Winger for his careful copyedit and helpful suggestions. Thank you to Natalie Olsen for her beautiful cover art. Thank you to everyone at ECW Press who put their time, energy, and care into this book: Crissy Boylan, Erin Creasey, Troy Cunningham, Jenna Illies, and Rachel Ironstone.
Thank you to the editors of Arc, Big City Lit (U.S.), Prism International, Rampike, Rattle (U.S.), and Guernica’s Editions Poet to Poet anthology.
Thank you to th
ose who read earlier drafts of some of these poems and offered generous and helpful feedback: Di Brandt, Nashira Dernesch, Daniel Marrone, Sarah Pinder, and Phoebe Tsang.
Thank you to Sage Hill Writing Experience where some of these poems were completed. The feedback from Ken Babstock and my fellow workshop participants there was invaluable.
To Rachel Bonner, Rocco de Giacomo, Chris Matthews, and Rowan McNamara, who, in one way or another, helped these poems make it through (or helped me get through). Thank you.
Jacob Scheier is a poet and journalist from Toronto. He has also lived in Istanbul, New York City, and Brandon, Manitoba. His debut collection, More to Keep Us Warm, won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2008. His poems have been published in literary journals and magazines across North America, including Descant, Geist, and Rattle, and have been aired on CBC Radio. He is the co-winner of a 2009 New York Community Media Alliance Award for Best Feature and is a regular contributor to Toronto’s NOW Magazine.
Copyright © Jacob Scheier, 2013
Published by ECW Press
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2
416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Scheier, Jacob
Letter from Brooklyn / Jacob Scheier.
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-77041-134-0
Also issued as: 978-1-77090-387-6 (PDF); 978-1-77090-388-3 (EPUB)
I. Title.
PS8637.C432L47 2013 C811’.6 C2012-907514-0
Editor for the press: Michael Holmes
Cover and text design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design
Cover image © particula / photocase.com
Author photo: Chris Matthews
The publication of Letter from Brooklyn has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, and by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit. The marketing of this book was made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation.