Don’t Cancel Kafka
Did Kafka write his letters on an Olivetti?
They would’ve been so much sexier that way,
more mainstream in the modernist tradition,
and maybe he’d’ve been less clumsy in his seductions,
but then he wanted to keep his loves at a distance
because it was so much safer that way
and he could stay himself on paper
instead of biological life,
which is so much messier.
You have been disillusioned to discover
his terrible imperfections, like those of Hamsun,
who was a Nazi, almost as disgraceful
as being a lousy lover,
but nobody’s perfect. What tries to be
perfect is the work, but even the work
is incomplete, everyone leaving what they couldn’t finish
and were afraid to publish, so they ordered
their executor to burn everything
because of course that guaranteed it would be saved,
and the executors always spill the beans
and the widows are a headache to the biographers.
Poor Franz K. was pre-widowered, an orphan
of his own imagination, and his dad haunted him
worse than an editor, and so all he could do was write,
terrified of love as he was.
But if you read the fictions not just the confessions
in the diaries and correspondences, his being
a jerk doesn’t matter any more than most
self-obsessed artists are,
even the likes of you
or I or me, each of us so unique
we can hardly stand ourselves
because we are other
than we expected when we started out with no idea
what we were doing, and maybe are still doing
now, composing our way, one stroke at a time,
a story we hope to be able to bear to read
when all that’s left of us is what we left on paper.
Blues Bath
The Steinway shines
and sounds bigger than our baby grand
I almost learned to play when I was little
before baseball got hold of me,
and now I’m bigger too and have hung up my glove
for a horn, I mean a pen, which tries to approximate
a sound just swinging enough, or
syncopated, to imitate a song heard long ago
on a radio, or in a cool club where I sipped a drink
and transcribed notes of no known origin
except what I heard in my head. Now
that music I can almost breathe
like the fresh air of intermission
in autumn when it’s still mild
enough at night to hear yourself think
or not think as there’s too much
to think about and all you want to do
is immerse yourself in a bath
of blues to soak all the suffering
you feel from a seemingly safe distance
but can’t escape.
One Day Downtown
I’d rather be on the street sipping a smoothie
than home in my living room listening to the news
even if the breeze is cooler than I prefer
and the Pomegranate Paradise was premature
before I saw the placard for the Pumpkin Smash
and after the homeless woman with the pained
and weather-stressed expression broke my soul
as she strode past me with her bag as I walked
downtown to mail my packages the afternoon
after the funeral of an old friend
who killed himself last week much to my shock
and eruption of our boyhood comradeship
and rivalry on the early ball fields before
he became a lawyer and a father and musician
and leader of bands and teams into geezerhood
because what else can we do before the buzzer sounds
the bell tolls the clock runs out and we’re up
for the last out in the bottom of the end
except give it our best and hope we can
shake off the heebie jeebies with some boogie woogie
while we seem to be doing nothing but sitting somewhere
listening to gulls over one shoulder and crows
over the other and girls with bare arms and tattoos
walking past and gossiping to stay warm
and an unlikely end of summer chills me
with its blend of wind and why not
Saturday Night at Holy Cross Church
The bigger-than-life-but-twice-as-dead
pornographic 3-D Jesus behind the singers
is distracting and I’m glad the words
of the Bach are unintelligible as they too
are about a Savior I don’t believe in,
but if you listen to the sounds as birdsong
they sound large and melodious
tonight in May with a full moon
and all I had to do was walk
across a bridge to be here.
The traffic thickens as the virus recedes
but circles in fresh surges
so we are wearing masks,
which itch, and that’s why the violinists
are scratching their strings
and the woodwinds breathing maskless
even as the singers’ faces,
except for the soloists, are shrouded,
because microscopic droplets of spit
expelled from musical mouths can spread microbes,
so even as we are still plagued we are entertained.
Bach trades licks with Schubert
as if to compete for holy honors in perpetuity,
in eternity or infinity or wherever the notes go
once sung and remembered through the centuries.
After all the debaucheries and wrong sex and tragic
marriage, I am in church on a Saturday night
with no dance floor or jazz band in sight,
lone soloist with notebook and nothing to say
trying to find a way to say what can’t be said
any more than it ever could and you all
but sang it anyway in a language you never learned.
I’m far enough apart that I could ditch the mask
and no one would know the difference,
not even the prayer books in rows
in the racks at the back of the pews,
which are sparsely sat in, the audience
almost outnumbered by the orchestra and chorus—
at least it’s not poetry keeping the crowds away,
even though these few would be a great turnout
for some non-brand-name bard.
And look who’s talking,
with no identity to speak of
and hardly enough trauma to brag on,
just enough air left in what’s left of my lungs
to make a not-too-classical sound
with accidental repetitions
and reverse rhythms,
crossouts and incorrections enough
to make less sense than a man muttering to himself on the street.
It’s only music, dude,
don’t worry about it, says the inner
surfer carried on waves of sound too dangerous
to question. When someone’s chasing you with a knife,
you just run, as someone said ages ago in a statement,
actually a manifesto demanding a person be face to face
with the words or they won’t count.
Then why do the soloist
keep on doo-wopping all night long without witnesses
let alone a Thou to relate to, just a half-empty church
echoing with the sacred, since everything could be
full of God if you have faith.
And if you have nothing
that’s even better as you have everything
to discover, everything to be possessed by.
And that’s why I write,
to exorcise such possession, so as to possess
nothing and to elude the pursuers
and be left alone.
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Stephen Kessler‘s most recent book of poems is Last Call. His translations of the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda have received a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Center USA Translation Award, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award (Academy of American Poets). His essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Flash, Translation Review, and other periodicals. He lives in Santa Cruz, California, and his op-ed column appears on Saturdays in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
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Tim Fitts is a short story writer and photographer. His work has been published in the New England Review, Granta, Shenandoah, Boulevard, fugue, and the Baltimore Review, among others. His photographs have been shown in South Korea and the United States, most notably the Thomas Deans Gallery in Atlanta. His photographic works often combine color transparencies, as well as transparencies with black and white film.
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