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JANUARY 23 *
ODE TO MODERN ART
Come on in and stay a while
I'll photograph you emerging from the revolving door
like Frank O'Hara dating the muse of modern art
Talking about the big Pollock show is better
than going to it on a dismal Saturday afternoon
when my luncheon partner is either the author or the subject
of The Education of Henry Adams at a hard-to-get-
a-table-at restaurant on Cornelia Street
just what is chaos theory anyway
I'm not sure but it helps explain "Autumn Rhythm"
the closest thing to chaos without crossing the border
I think you should write that book on Eakins and also the one
on nineteenth-century hats the higher the hat the sweller the toff
and together we will come up with Mondrian in the grid of Manhattan
Gerald Murphy's "Still Life with Wasp" and the best Caravaggio in the country
in Kansas City well it's been swell, see you in Cleveland April 23
The reason time goes faster as you grow older is that each day
is a tinier proportion of the totality of days in your life
(appeared in the online magazine Jacket)
Copyright © 2002 by David Lehman
MARCH 19 *
They were wrong
for whom success
was sweetest. It's
failure that interests
me. It's why
I like movies
that look like
they were filmed
down under the
Manhattan Bridge overpass
a raw March
Sunday, warehouses empty,
black and white
and always 1953,
and the hero
believes in nothing
like the waiter
in Hemingway who
prays to nada
our nada who
art nada nada
be thy name
(appeared in the Boston Review)
Copyright © 2002 by David Lehman
MAY 26 *
In Rotterdam I'm
going to speak about
the state of poetry
on a panel with a Pole
and a Turk. It's worth
being alive to utter
that sentence. A
German from Fürth,
my father's hometown
and Henry Kissinger's,
will preside. His name
is Joachim Sartorius,
which sounds like a
pseudonym Kierkegaard
might use to condemn
the habits of his age
and ours when nothing
ever happens but the
publicity is immediate
and the town meeting
ends with the people
convinced they have
rebelled so now they
can go home quietly
having spent a most
pleasant evening
(appeared in Antioch Review)
Copyright © 2002 by David Lehman
AUGUST 25 *
COMMENCEMENT
They're calling old people seniors
short for senior citizens but it's as though
they're still in college and can look forward
to graduate school at Purgatory State
or the University of the Damned and
I can see this poem is intent on being Catholic
though it started out agnostic
Maybe that's because I was talking
to Ed Webster on the phone tonight
and he described himself as an agnostic
who got a job teaching at a Catholic school
in the South Bronx or maybe because I was reading
the classifieds in the Daily News today
and several greeted dead ones in heaven
in any case I like seniors maybe the rest of us
are juniors and sophomores and we still have
the junior prom and all that romantic angst
to go through before we reach the holy land
(appeared in The Paris Review)
Copyright © 2002 by David Lehman
NOVEMBER 30 *
What a night what a light what a moon
white with patches of blue snow & here I am
striding longlegged to the bar on East 4th Street
Never was a Martini more deserved
The hot water pipe in my apartment sprang a leak
soaking a couple dozen books, magazines, files
There is renewed evidence of mice
My left eye has begun to twitch
after two and a half hours on the Taconic
and then to play War & Chicken on New York streets
but I had Mingus and "Fables of Faubus"
to keep me awake while you slept
and now the city, which suspended its activity
in my absence, has come back to me
with exciting new crises a haystack of mail
and thee O silver moon
(appeared in Five Points)
Copyright © 2002 by David Lehman
