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    Beautiful False Things: Poems
    Beautiful False Things: Poems
    Beautiful False Things: Poems
    Ebook140 pages53 minutes

    Beautiful False Things: Poems

    By Irving Feldman

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    About this ebook

    This volume from the two-time National Book Award-finalist offers “splashes of beauty, yes–but also a fountain of shameless knowing and inspired telling” (Cynthia Ozick).
     
    This tenth collection of Irving Feldman’s poems extends what readers and critics have long recognized to be a body of work singular in its extravagant wit, powerful storytelling, variety of voices and range of feeling—playful, tender, ardent, biting, enthralled. Here, among the major poems of Beautiful False Things: the stand-up comic Larry Sunrise of “Funny Bones’ duels with death in Florida; in “Oedipus Host,” Oedipus arrives from his millennia-long trek to host a TV talk show; and the plucky, feminist heroine of “Heavenly Muse” visits yet another barely worthy male poet. In the tragicomic title poem, “translation” comes to stand for the dilemmas of expression in a culture that sucks up language and spews it back.
     
    The renowned poet J. D. McClatchy called Feldman “our best fabulist, Franz Kafka’s imagination combined with S. J. Perelman’s ear, and everywhere his own buoyant, driving line.” The poems collected here demonstrate why the Guggenheim Fellow and National Book Critics Circle Award-finalist is deserving of such high praise.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9780802196545
    Beautiful False Things: Poems

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      Book preview

      Beautiful False Things - Irving Feldman

      BEAUTIFUL FALSE THINGS

      THE RECOGNITIONS

      Not the god, though it might have been,

      savoring some notion of me

      and exciting the cloud where he was hidden

      with impetuous thunderstrokes of summoning

      —it was merely you who recognized me,

      speaking my name in such a tone

      I knew you had been thinking it

      a long, long time, and now revealed yourself

      in this way. Because of this, suddenly

      who I was was precious to me.

      VOLUPTAS

      Strange to be remembering how

      —was it twenty-odd years ago?—

      you drew back from one of our kisses,

      your head turning half away so that

      I saw in our bedroom’s half-light

      your lovely profile and eye staring

      out toward and into a passing thought.

      Then all of half your smile was for me,

      and you put your mouth to mine again

      with overwhelmed gentleness.

      We both were overwhelmed and pulled under.

      Strange suddenly to remember this

      after so many, many kisses,

      after such years of rupturing.

      Caught in our archaic caresses

      (you know, that same old, old thing):

      a space of five seconds of fresh time,

      when nothing was happening

      and nothing was happening yet.

      And I now its voluptuary.

      SONO UN POETA.…SCRIVO

      At eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old,

      my Bohème was a walk-up on Willett Street.

      And I bolted up—two, three steps at a time

      to my garret under the stars … where Mimi

      came at me in the dark hallway, eyes burning.

      I thought she’d strike me with her cold little hand.

      Or darted back with angry mutters, and stood

      in her apartment door, pronouncing my death

      in hoarse, undecipherable arias.

      She had lost the key—to everything.

      Dark, small, white-haired, darting, a Fury

      derided by minuter, madder furies.

      Or was Catastrophe, the idiot Fate,

      gibbering a million strands together.

      Then swipe of the shears cuts a city short.

      And all night just beyond my bedroom wall

      something, newspapers, rustled into my sleep.

      What is she doing? my sleep asked me.

      Go to sleep, she’s burning the building down,

      looking by firelight for the key in the fire,

      lost homeless wind groping among our embers.

      *

      Garret? Star-infested? On the Lower East Side?

      Near the middle of the twentieth century?

      Charming had it been, oh, say, something like

      a set for the real thing—the opera, I mean

      —with underwear filling in for window glass,

      and nesting icicles in the potbellied stove,

      and tarpaper shreds festooned overhead,

      letting starlight fall through with the snow.

      And yet, whatever scenery was shifted on

      or off, the thrill was in the being there

      and singing out, Who am I? I am a poet!

      The air we sang was city soil, tenement musk:

      cooking grease, coal dust, mildew, piss, sweat, rot.

      Ages of human habitation, failure, loss

      —birth-cries crowding on death-coughs in the walls—

      authenticated our art and love and talk.

      Come January, hallway johns froze over.

      And under my kitchen sink, lath bared its bones

      —one tough rat had knocked a chunk of plaster out,

      and perched in the hole for a good long look around;

      then, slumming god before my trite offerings,

      turned up its nose, and faded into the wall,

      as if to say, Keep it, kid—you need it all.

      (Worse critics than the rat have condescended since.)

      Picturesque? Of course—life imitates bad art.

      Poor? Of course not—I was, we all were, young.

      *

      Kid poets, painters, actors, our collected works

      you could have flushed down the hole of a pin,

      but youth poured out of the holes in our clothes,

      youth poured down from the openings in the heavens

      —and poured on everything its shining possible.

      We knew we were the whole show and theater:

      authors, players, and the audience that counted.

      And if we preened and played to one another,

      we were the world’s own preening to the universe,

      admired in the bright, galactic galleries

      —Because, we sang, we have the key, the key is

      ourselves belovèd by and beyond everything.

      And all the while, Mimi, like the faux-phénix

      —cloud of ash and dust dying as it rises,—

      Mimi, raving, scattered down on our heads

      the starless, futureless snows of tomorrow.

      *

      Josie hemorrhaging her bank account

      —she wants to give it away, set it free,

      transfuse the whole world’s neediness.

      "Yesterday I went back there.

      I brought these presents for my friends.

      I have to rescue them—they have beautiful souls.

      Bad things go on there. They hit people.

      They wouldn’t let an ex-patient in.

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