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    By the Numbers
    By the Numbers
    By the Numbers
    Ebook142 pages1 hour

    By the Numbers

    By James Richardson

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    About this ebook

    National Book Award Finalist

    Book of the Year honors from Publishers Weekly

    "As if hurled from a pitching mound, James Richardson's aphorisms and images approach the reader like fastballs, only to curve at the last second, painting the corners of the reader's mind with wisdom and delight. In By the Numbers Richardson dips into an expansive repertoire of approaches and shows excellent command, as he illuminates the commute between the ordinary and the mystical." National Book Award finalist, Judges' Citation

    [O]ne of America’s most distinctive contemporary poets a powerful and moving body of work that in its intimacy and philosophical naturalism is unique in contemporary American poetry.” Boston Review

    James Richardson’s Interglacial, a poetry finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is like a beautiful river, under the thin surface of which rushes an intensely felt life and a never quite lost yearning to belong.” NewPages

    James Richardson’s poetry is unusual, quirky, personal, and profound.” The Threepenny Review

    James Richardson is a poet who earned his reputation as a master of imagery and concision.” The Christian Science Monitor

    James Richardson is the author of six books of poetry and two critical studies. His poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, Slate, and Paris Review. He is a professor of English and creative writing at Princeton University.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateAug 22, 2016
    ISBN9781619321427
    By the Numbers
    Author

    James Richardson

    James Richardson is a former senior writer for The Sacramento Bee who has covered Willie Brown and the California Legislature for the past decade. Currently he is Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley.

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      Book preview

      By the Numbers - James Richardson

      I. Bit Parts

      Northwest Passage

      That faint line in the dark

      might be the shore

      of some heretofore unknown

      small hour.

      This fir-scent on the wind

      must be the forests

      of the unheardof month

      between July and August.

      In Shakespeare

      In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass

      as you would expect. Others confuse

      their consciences with ghosts and witches.

      Old men throw everything away

      when they panic and can’t feel their lives.

      They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,

      cliffs, lightning, to die—yes, finally—in glad pain.

      You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,

      a woman you thought was a boy.

      Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows

      once, twice. Your children are lost,

      they come back, you don’t remember how.

      A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue

      comes back to life. O god, it’s all so realistic

      I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.

      Such a relief to burst from the theater

      into our cool, imaginary streets

      where we know who’s who and what’s what,

      and command with MetroCards our destinations.

      Where no one with a story struggling in him

      convulses as it eats its way out,

      and no one in an antiseptic corridor

      or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains

      staggers through an Act that just will not end,

      eyes burning with the burning of the dead.

      Special Victims Unit

      Actually Persephone loved his loving her,

      dark-browed, so serious: it proved something about her.

      And for him, gloomy, overwhelmed with himself,

      her brightness was more beautiful than beauty

      and he basked in it. But when his turn came to shine back

      it seemed her feelings were a storm of flowers

      he could not gather, and the story gets ordinary:

      he is angry at his heart and hurts her.

      Demeter gets confused. Did a god steal her daughter,

      or has she been living all this time in Manhattan

      with her difficult husband, difficult job, difficult cat

      and visiting once a year? Her love for what is lost

      spreads so thinly over the planet

      it’s not love anymore but weather. She goes to the police:

      Benson and Stabler find her story dubious.

      More so when they learn she never had a daughter,

      though she was one, and that her vaunted power over harvests

      apparently doesn’t extend to her wilting houseplants.

      As for those Hellish threats on her machine?

      Phone records show that dark voice was her own.

      Actually she has bipolar Multiple Personality Disorder,

      solution to all plot dilemmas. Fair enough,

      since cop shows can’t say what we’d say: Life is a dream,

      and we are everyone we dream.

      When they come to get her,

      her hands are clawed in the chainlink of the playground.

      Hades, Demeter, Persephone form in her face of cloud.

      She’s watching, of course, two girls on swings,

      one going up while the other goes down.

      Subject, Verb, Object

      I is not ego, not the sum

      of your unique experiences,

      just, democratically,

      whoever’s talking,

      a kind of motel room,

      yours till the end—

      that is, of the sentence.

      The language, actually,

      doesn’t think I’s important,

      stressing, even in

      grandiose utterance—

      e.g., I came

      I saw I conquered—

      the other syllables.

      Oh, it’s a technical problem,

      sure, the rhyme

      on oh-so-open

      lie, cry, I,

      harder to stitch tight

      than the ozone

      hole in the sky.

      But worst is its plodding insistence—

      I, I, I—

      somebody huffing uphill,

      face red as a Stop sign,

      scared by a doctor

      or some He She It

      surprised in the mirror.

      Emergency Measures

      I take Saturday’s unpopulated trains,

      sitting at uncontagious distances,

      change at junctions of low body count, in off-hours,

      and on national holidays especially, shun stadia

      and other zones of efficient kill ratio,

      since there is no safety anymore in numbers.

      I wear the dull colors of nesting birds,

      invest modestly in diverse futures,

      views and moods undiscovered by tourists,

      buy nothing I can’t carry or would need to sell,

      and since I must rest, maintain at several addresses

      hardened electronics and three months of water.

      And it is thus I favor this unspecific café,

      choose the bitterest roast, and only the first sip

      of your story, sweet but so long, and poignantly limited

      by appointments neither can be late for, and why now

      I will swim through the crowd to the place it is flowing away from,

      my concerned look and Excuse me excuse me suggesting

      I am hurrying back for my umbrella or glasses

      or some thrilling truth they have all completely missed.

      Metallurgy for Dummies

      Faint bronze of the air,

      a bell I can’t quite hear.

      The sky they call gunmetal

      over gunmetal reservoir,

      the launch, aluminum,

      cutting to the center,

      waters bittered with the whisk

      of aluminum propellers

      (your gold drink stirred

      with a gold forefinger).

      *

      Faint tinnitus,

      where is it?

      Air silver with a trillion

      wireless calls,

      stop-quick stop-quick

      of sweep hands,

      crickets and downed lines,

      their sing of tension,

      that out-of-earshot

      too-bright CD sun,

      the heads of presidents

      sleet sleet in your jacket.

      *

      They were right,

      those alchemists.

      Anything—

      tin-cold

      eye of salamander,

      a fly’s

      green shield and

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