then, we were still living
then, we were still living poems by
Michael Klein
Michael Klein, Then, We Were Still Living Š 2010 Michael Klein First edition, October 2010 ISBN: 9780982359419 Printed and bound in the USA Library of Congress Control Number: 2010929552 Cover photo: Ewa Nogiec For information regarding GenPop Books distribution, personal orders, and catalogue requests, please visit our website at www.genpopbooks.com. Reproduction of selections from this book, for non-commercial personal or educational purposes, is permitted and encouraged, provided the Author and Publisher are acknowledged in the reproduction. Reproduction for sale, rent, or other use involving financial transaction is prohibited except by permission of the Author and Publisher.
for Adrienne Rich
Contents i Bread In the underground mall under the World Trade Center, the thief wasn’t taking The massage The playwright 2001 Living We can’t live with the dead Vaudeville The twin You What we see The movies
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 13 14 15
ii The ranges Happiness The pact Looking for the body music My brother’s suitcase The mirror I was always in love A saver
17 19 21 23 24 25 26 27 28
iii Five Places for Sex The churches
31 36
The technologies The series The world is the same What it is like for you Her death, later, and his Day and paper The nineties The hundreds
37 38 39 40 41 42 43 45
iv Was America ever the world What war? The fall of Kabul What we look for Anyone’s child What you say The world then The only bomb is the apple suddenly hitting the hill Not light’s version More light
49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58
Acknowledgments About the Author
61 63
i
Bread As real as, as real as, as real as N.Y.C. this is law: The beggars ask for food. You can keep your shining money – worthless, hidden, unreachable. Dear Lord, unlit, we’re made of bread.
|3|
In the underground mall under the World Trade Center, the thief wasn’t taking anything valuable anymore. He took what he remembered about the world so he could give it back to the world.
|4|
The massage for Peter Harris When you went into the neck, a tunnel happened and I was crawling back to Uncle Ted and his prayer to the butterflies – killed, framed, his. Collection: what you borrow, in the order you took it, from the world. The prayer I am hearing in your hand: lake, chimera, glow. The prayer I am telling you: I feel the world as love
without the object.
|5|
The playwright
for Maria Irene Fornes
She was talking about the mystery happening to the artist as necessary light. The subjects for her plays: the poor, people who want to learn something they didn’t think they could have. Not what an American audience expects. An American audience expects fame. She covers her mouth when she has nothing to say. Then she was talking about how she made people. She said, you don’t know, but people know – people know what you’re like. She didn’t know the character was homosexual until she finished writing him, and how he would thrive in the world. Then, he thrived.
|6|
2001 But wasn’t it always a scene in a movie to delay it in the world? The always movie? In America, we make movies before anything really happens. It wasn’t like the movies and it wasn’t real. It was our entirety emptying into the fully realized emptiness.
Then, we were still dead,
Then, we were still lost on our own soil.
Then, we were still living.
|7|
Living Some of the living have unpopular thoughts. One of the living says: it isn’t all dangerous life inside the mind of the terrorist. Thought’s policy can still register a light called childhood. Oh! childhood, where each little king
sings to the off-key world before joining.
|8|
We can’t live with the dead We live without them until we are like them. The way we feel the dead is to walk into a space we forgot something in. We think is still my life
this
when really it is you emptying
into a sublime coda for the dead
a falling
made in the statement of their rising with the sparrows – that are birds and the key to sorrow.
|9|
What war? Some people look into the television into Afghanistan and say they can’t see anything. Or that they’ve missed that landscape, in their own life – the moon, horses on the moon. Men have nothing but what they have in front of them and have nothing. Some people are in love with those men and the enemy.
| 50 |
The fall of Kabul Captured music set free back on the radio, back in the air, through two speakers hanging like two amazed heads
on a pole
at the marketplace. What kind of music is this? that makes a curtain rise
on these two radicals: a man’s close shave,
a woman’s face? Such an old and beautiful world on top of such an old and modern world – light mixed up with rubble. Almost free? Almost enough horses? Peace passeth not their understanding, but ours.
| 51 |
What we look for Images now: weather: changes in weather. Cycles. There was a woman dropped out of a cyclone stoning the already dead Taliban soldiers on the side of the road. The death of them includes her once life, and the dream life of being children, and the dream life of having children.
| 52 |
Anyone’s child In the future, to anyone’s child you say: we are not giving in to the terrorists then, you say: that was our greatest fear – not the unknown –
but the same day lived again.
It would always be like this now –
what had never been like this until now.
| 53 |
What you say To a child, you say: one day, fame settled on people next to fame – famous doctor, famous surgeon, famous fireman, famous policeman.
Famous child – the sweet oxymoron.
Famous terrorist, blank without the terror. The dead terrorist –
martyr radar on/off the paradise screen.
And when he had life?
Just its fury end – seeing the world through the crack in the world.
| 54 |
The world then After he joined the world, he left the world and came back with the terror light. A man who wasn’t there: a dead man, taller than all the other men the ladders leaning up against a century of stones. Taller than the horses. In the cave, the man who wasn’t there was part of an eroded network, which is why they couldn’t find him. He stopped the message. They wanted the network to disengage from the idea behind the terrible wave and potential wave in the West –
terror,
complicitness,
terror
In Tora Bora, the enemy and other enemy got mixed up with each other. Someone is always surrendering. Someone is always running away. | 55 |
The only bomb is the apple suddenly hitting the hill all the energy it took to turn its stem grassward. Leaves, fruit, some other kind of fruit – triumph over the plenty of it.
Then the common blast of sunlight:
too much of it.
| 56 |
Not light’s version A child from the past: we always knew the world would crack open like this, in our lifetime. The walls, the fences, the resembling governments looking past faces into the fire of maps on the long table. Forest sounds. A gun. A chemical. A bomb. Something leaking light. Then, not light. Then, not light’s version of everything. Then, that after it touches something.
| 57 |
More light Saturday: spring begins my lover’s saw cutting cleaner then deeper. He is remodeling the kitchen. He is relying on an old green floor to be level. Watching him sign for a delivery of plywood I am thinking how indiscriminate joy finds us and enters us how it however briefly releases our whole pasts as a swimmer
| 58 |
will handily surface from a summer full of water mild astonishment around the eyes ready to take the dark as breath, as if to say he’d seen the other world less terrifying and with more light than this one.
| 59 |
Acknowledgments Some of these poems appeared in a different form in the following periodicals and electronic media: Kenyon Review, nerve.com, Fence, CutBank, The Literary Review, Bloom, Barrow Street, Massachusetts Review, Global City Review and Provincetown Arts. “Looking for the body music� first appeared in A Memory, A Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer, edited by Eve Ensler and Mollie Doyle.
| 61 |
About the Author Michael Klein’s books are: Track Conditions, a memoir, The End of Being Known, a memoir, and 1990, a book of poems which tied with James Schuyler to win a Lambda Literary Award in 1993. He teaches in the MFA Program at Goddard College and is on the summer faculty at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is currently working on a book version of his blog to be called States of Independence. He divides his time between Provincetown and New York City.
| 63 |
GenPop Books current and forthcoming titles
The Kangaroo Girl Judith Baumel Then, We Were Still Living Michael Klein No Evidence, No Jury, No Justice: The True Story of Jeremy Barney, CT Prisoner #318764 Christian Peet In the Architecture of Bone Alan Semerdjian The State of Kansas Julianna Spallholz
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