The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems
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About this ebook
Philip Schultz, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, has been celebrated for his singular vision of the American immigrant experience and Jewish identity, his alternately fierce and tender portrayal of family life, and his rich and riotous evocation of city streets. His poems have found enthusiastic audiences among readers of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Slate, The New Yorker, and other publications. His willingness to face down the demons of failure and loss, in his previous book particularly, make him a poet for our times, a poet who can write “If I have to believe in something / I believe in despair.” Yet he remains oddly undaunted: “sometimes, late at night / we, my happiness and I, reminisce / lifelong antagonists / enjoying each other’s company.”
The God of Loneliness, a major collection of Schultz’s work, includes poems from his five books (Like Wings, Deep Within the Ravine, The Holy Worm of Praise, Living in the Past, Failure) and fourteen new poems. It is a volume to cherish, from “one of the least affected of American poets, and one of the fiercest” (Tony Hoagland), and it will be an essential addition to the history of American poetry.
Philip Schultz
PHILIP SCHULTZ won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Failure. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Paris Review, among other magazines. In addition, he is the founder and director of the Writers Studio in New York.
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Failure: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Living In The Past Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5
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The God of Loneliness - Philip Schultz
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
From Like Wings 1978
For the Wandering Jews
The Artist & His Mother: After Arshile Gorky
The Stranger in Old Photos
Letter from Jake: August 1964
What I Don't Want
The Elevator
For the Moose
San Francisco Remembered
Onionskin: For the New Year
The Gift
Like Wings
For My Father
From Deep Within the Ravine 1984
Ode to Desire
The View
I'm Not Complaining
Mrs. Applebaum's Sunday Dance Class
My Smile
Pumpernickel
For My Mother
Balance
Guide to the Perplexed
Fifth Avenue in Early Spring
The Music
Lines to a Jewish Cossack: For Isaac Babel
My Guardian Angel Stein
In Exile
Ode
Personal History
The Quality
From The Holy Worm of Praise 2002
The Holy Worm of Praise
Courtship According to My Guardian Angel Stein
Flying Dogs
On First Hearing of Your Conception
The Monologue
Sick
The Inside and The Outside
The Answering Machine
Ars Poetica
Personally
Prison Doctor
The Dead
The Displaced
The Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem
I Remember
Apartment Sale
Nomads
Stories
Darwin, Sweeping
The Eight-Mile Bike Ride
The Silence
The Dalai Lama
To William Dickey
Stein, Good-bye
The dark between
Mr. Parsky
Souls Over Harlem
From Living in the Past 2004
2
3
4
5
6
7
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
18
20
21
23
24
27
32
33
35
36
37
38
44
50
51
53
54
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
73
79
From Failure 2007
It's Sunday Morning in Early November
Talking to Ourselves
Specimen
The Summer People
The Magic Kingdom
Grief
The Garden
Why
My Wife
What I Like and Don't Like
Blunt
The Adventures of 78 Charles Street
The Truth
The One Truth
Failure
New Poems
Things I Have to Do Today
The Reasonable Houses of Osborne Lane
Attention
The Opening
Aging Egoists
The Fourth of July
Free Mercy
Stein, in Produce
The Joke
Yom Kippur
The Sweet Undertaste
The God of Loneliness
Bleecker Street
The Big Sleep
Acknowledgments
Index of Titles and First Lines
Copyright © 2010 by Philip Schultz
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to Permissions,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schultz, Philip.
The God of loneliness : selected and new poems / Philip Schultz.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-547-24965-0
I. Title.
PS3569.C5533G63 2010
811'.54—dc22 2009041895
Book design by Melissa Lotfy
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my wife, Monica,
and my sons, Eli and Augie
Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance,
men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think
about such things.
—PASCAL
From Like Wings 1978
For the Wandering Jews
This room is reserved for wandering Jews.
Around me, in other rooms, suitcases whine
like animals shut up for the night.
My guardian angel, Stein, fears sleeping twice
in the same bed. Constancy brings Cossacks in the dark, he thinks.
You don't explain fear to fear. Despair has no ears, but teeth.
In the next room I hear a woman's laughter
& press my hand to the wall. Car lights burn
my flesh to a glass transparency.
My father was born in Novo-Nikolayevka, Ekaterinoslav Guberniya.
Like him, I wear my forehead high, have quick eyes, a belly laugh.
Miles unfold in the palm of my hand.
Across some thousand backyards his stone
roots him to the earth like a stake. Alone in bed,
I feel his blood wander through my veins.
As a boy I would spend whole nights at the fair
running up the fun house's spinning barrel toward its magical top,
where I believed I would be beyond harm, at last.
How I would break my body to be free of it,
night after night, all summer long, this boy climbing
the sky's turning side, against all odds,
as though to be one with time,
going always somewhere where no one had been before,
my arms banging at my sides like wings.
The Artist & His Mother: After Arshile Gorky
Such statuesque immobility; here we have it:
the world of form. Colors muted, a quality
of masks with fine high brows. Light & its absence.
Alchemy. The hands are unfinished. But what
could they hold? The transitory bliss
of enduring wonder? Mother, Mother & Son;
here we have it: consanguinity. The darkness
inside color. Space. In the beginning there was space.
It held nothing. What could it hold? Time?
The continuum? Mother & Son, forms suspended
in color. Silence. Her apron a cloud
of stillness swallowing her whole. Her eyes
roots of a darker dimension. Absence. Here we have it:
the world of absence. Light holds them in place.
The pulse of time is felt under the flesh,
the flesh of color. Continuum. You feel
such immensity. The anger of form. The woman
locked in the Mother; the man in the Son; the Son
in the Mother. Their hands do not touch. What
could they touch? Here we have it: the world
of gift. The gift too terrible to return. But
how could it be returned? In the beginning
there was anger. Mother & Son. The islands of time.
The passion to continue. Such statuesque immobility.
The hands, the hands cannot be finished.
The Stranger in Old Photos
You see him over my uncle Al's left shoulder
eating corn at a Sunday picnic & that's him
behind my parents on a boardwalk in Atlantic City
smiling out of focus like a rejected suitor
& he's the milkman slouched frozen crossing our old street
ten years before color & his is the face above mine in Times Square
blurring into the crowd like a movie extra's
& a darkness in his eyes as if he knew his face would outlast him
& he's tired of living on the periphery of our occasions.
These strangers at bus stops, sleepwalkers
caught forever turning a corner—I always wondered who they were
between photos when they weren't posing & if they mattered.
It's three this morning, a traffic light blinks yellow yellow
& in my window my face slips into the emptiness between glares.
We are strangers in our own photos. Our strangeness has no source.
Letter from Jake: August 1964
Never mind that uncle business my name is Jake.
In college they try every thing there is this girl
at Wegmans supermarket who is to busy to join
protests who is right takes more than me
to figure out. Cohen died last Monday. He owned
the deli on Joseph Ave. The democrat running
for supervisor is a Puerto Rican. Don't ask me why.
You are young and have to take things
as they come. Some day you will find your
real niche. I wrote poetry to but this July
I'm a stagehand 40 years. I've seen every movie
Paramount made believe me. Now theres a union
but I remember when you was happy just to work.
Meantime have a ball. Yrs truly now has kidney
trouble plus diabetic condition, heart murmur,
cataract in rt eye. Yr mother Lillian is well to.
Cohen was just 58. We went to school together. Loews
is closing in October. If you ask me the last
five rows was no good for cinemascope.
Yrs truly,
Jake
What I Don't Want
Die slouched & undecided in a girlie show
watching the lambs eat the wolves.
Sit talking Kafka this Kafka that
(that bugfaced sword-swallower!).
Play deaf & dumb in Chicago.
Chew the fat of the land while looking
up somebody's leg for the right word, ever again.
Cross the Golden Gate Bridge on a bus
listening to the guy ahead say: Doesn't it look
like a G-string all lit up, Fran!
Die in the house where I was born,
a happy man.
I want, Lord, to die with Neruda & Chaplin
naked & sinful
eating cheese so old it sings on my tongue.
The Elevator
This elevator lugged Teddy Roosevelt
when they both were new. Now I count stars
in the skylight as it jerks into the sudden light
down hallways & hug groceries like a thief his loot
when it stops in the dark between floors. Often
it howls climbing, sings falling. Someone
on the fifth floor loves chicken fat & Brahms;
the worst soprano in Cambridge lives on the third.
The man above me taps goodnight on his floor but
doesn't know me in the street. The girl down the hall
drops her head if I smile in the elevator; she knows
I watch her run to work each morning from my window.
After dinner I stand there with my hands folded behind
as I imagine Mr. Roosevelt stood, watching the lights
come on along the spine that is Massachusetts Avenue at night.
For the Moose
Tania must place her hands on my skull,
one above the other, to better hear the truth.
We are discussing the art of poetry. Eight
years old, she chews her lip & squints. Who's
my moose? she