By THIRSTY
David
Lehman is internationally recognized as a poet, an anthologist, an editor, a
literary critic and a New Yorker. He founded of The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and has been its editor
ever since. He has also edited, among others, The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the
Present (2003). As a literary critic, he has published works ranging
from The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of
the New York School of Poets (1998) to A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (2009).
As a
poet, he has authored numerous collections of poetry that include Yeshiva Boys (2009), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005);
and The Evening Sun (2002)
and The Daily Mirror: A Journal in
Poetry (1998).
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| David Lehman |
Lehman’s
most recent publications include Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the
Man and His World (2015); The State
of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014 (2015); and, New and
Selected Poems (2013).
He
has written for Newsweek, People, The Washington Post, The New
York Times, The Wall Street Journal,
The American Scholar, and American Heritage. His poems have
appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Poetry,
The New Republic, The Paris Review and now Stay Thirsty
Magazine.
Lehman
earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University and was a Kellet Fellow at the
University of Cambridge. He has been awarded a Fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill
Foundation and he has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. He is currently
Associate Professor of Writing and Poetry Coordinator – Creative Writing
Program at The New School in Manhattan.
Stay Thirsty Magazine is
honored to have been chosen by David Lehman to publish five of his original
poems.
______________________________
Poem in the Manner of Walt Whitman
Last night I walked among the gray-faced
onanists and the women who love unrequited.
I saw the blind, heard the deaf, smelled the
stink of alcohol on their breath, tasted the
sweat
on the neck of a wounded man, and O I walked all the night long and I
knew.
Each one sleeps, some faster than others, some
more skillfully navigating in the dark,
others
snoring in the ears of their patient wives, some in noun clusters, others in
sentences
that daybreak will disperse.
Each one dreams, the woman who paints her face,
the loiterer, the shoplifter, the
trombonist
on his way to the cellar bar, the prisoner who knows he is guiltless.
They may sleep wearing clothes, pajamas or
perhaps a cotton t-shirt, but they dream in
the
nakedness of the night.
I have watched the father watching his son
outgrow him and I have seen the daughter
take
her mother’s place.
The boy who stutters, I watch him sleep, I hear
him dream, and I see him become a man
of
means and distinction.
The shopkeeper, the beggar, the young policeman
affecting nonchalance, the drunkard
asleep,
the woman with the painted face walking under the overpass,
I see them fade in the night, into the same
darkness that receives me, and the endless
yammering
of philosophers I hear,
Each one contradicting the other, each quoting
some sage of antiquity,
And if I could make them understand that I
rejoice in their right to exist
Yet would not, were they to knock on my door,
welcome them inside,
Nor grieve to learn that they have moved to
Montana,
I would sleep contented in the dreamless zone
before dawn.
______________________________
Highway 61 (Revisited)
In
the name of Abe – biblical predecessor
of
honest Abe, who freed the slaves,
and
also Bobby’s dad -- I stand at your gate
with
faith equal to doubt, and I say,
look
out kid, no matter what you did,
and
incredulity gives way to unconditional surrender.
Abe
say “Where
do you want this killing done?”
God
say “Out
on Highway 61.”
God
directs traffic,
and
young Isaac say it’s all right Ma I’m only bleeding.
And
Ma say it’s all right boy I’m only breathing.
And
Dad unpack his heart with words like a whore.
Young
Isaac ain’t gonna work for Maggie's brother no more.
Ike
no like the white man boss,
and
when stuck inside of Mobile to even the score
he
looks at the stream he needs to cross
despite
schemes of grinning oilpot oligarch arschloch
who
wanna be on the side that’s winning.
So he
climbs up to the captain’s tower and does his sinning
and
has read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books.
He no
get where he got because of his looks.
He’s
on the pavement talking about the government,
and
he knows something’s happening but he don’t know what it is.
A
strange man, Mr. Jones. Isaac Jones that is.
______________________________
Poem in the Manner of Emily Dickinson
Paradise
–
(c. 1886)
______________________________
Poem in the Manner of Basho
Pond.
Frog.
Splash.
______________________________
Poem in the Manner of William Butler Yeats
Now
as at all times I wear his ancient mask
and
walk alone in the lofty way of one
who,
with the cold courtesy of fishermen
in
trout-besotted streams, meets the dawn.
And
now they are gone, never to return;
and
now who will sing of their innocence,
swing
the censer, light a fire, and burn
with
deep passion for poetry and dance?
From
the ruby throat of a hummingbird
I
hear the question you left unasked.
Who
would rejoice in the power of ignorance
and
walk with his maker and an unnamed third?
Who
but a paltry man wearing a public mask,