I could tell him, writing him (to tell him
of the stunning brilliance of his manuscript,
called A Place Where Things Are), that I saw
my self in it, saw myself everywhere, and
tell him this as an aside, and then say, so
to tell it yet more slantly, hinting of my
deep consort with irony, that I could see,
especially in the beautiful poem titled “Violets,
Time, and Motherhood,” all eleven letters
of my name packed together in a cross like
a message in The Bible Code, but then say
“that has nothing to do with my saying this,”
or could say some knowing off-handedness like
that, which like any ‘ol clever e-mail on
a poetry listserve would become lost forever,
in the same exact way (note to self: you’re
drowning, cut the crap and get the poem moving),
no ontological difference whatsoever, as a
pretty girl named Francy, so popular at the
Savannah Finishing School for Coming Ladies,
whose (Francy’s) 15th birthday party on the
grounds of her parents’ plantation in 1857
was a smashing success, full of practiced
girlish gossiping and giggling, many significant
deals being made there by thickly side-burned
fathers, deals of finance and marriage, including
one that transferred seventeen slaves “from
the property of William Pickett, Esq., to
the property of Jonathan Hackentham III, Esq.,
in return of forty acres bordring [sic] Coby’s
Creek, between Concord Road and Queen Anne’s
Lace Abutmente” (note to self: revise names
of road and abutment), along with William
Pickett’s notarized promise that his daughter,
“soon within her eighteenth year, should receive
with feminine grace and kind will the courtship”
of the latter’s son, Jonathan Hackentham IV,
a legal document I imagine being struck over
fat Virginia cigars and fine French brandy,
while in the second loft of the cotton shed,
secreted away in a fluffy cloud, oblivious
now to the giggling, gossiping swirl, Francy,
in ancient and dark position, her billowing
white hoop skirt pulled up in a bundle, her
frilly bloomers at her knees, a yellow sash
tied over her eyes, was getting her sweet
little vagina furiously licked by her school-chum,
Chastity, in whose pink rectum the dainty
middle finger of Francy [note to self: revise
to make less pornographic] was jammed up to
the last knuckle, but I digress, for this
is a poem about Aaron Belz, and this is, after
all, the twenty first century, wherein flying
telescopes take pictures of how things appeared
three billion years ago, and Frank, Jimmy,
Kenneth, Joseph, Edwin, and Ted, to name just
a few, are all dead, and Aaron, their heir,
is on his confident way to meet them there,
where they are, they transparent, yet liquidly
so, a teasing hint of the walled Renaissance
city through their opalescent winged bodies,
drinking champagne and smoking Gitanes, in
the bar of the Hyatt, invisible to normal
mortals, and Aaron walking industriously in
their general direction, with neutral visage,
his hair slicked back with lots of gel, dressed
in a cream-colored suit, with thin silk cream
tie, a get up you’d imagine a high-ranking
member of Enver Hoxha’s Albanian Communist
Party wearing, powdered and rouged in his
coffin, a fifteen-mile long line of wailing
workers and farmers filing by, some of them
fainting in grief, feigned or otherwise, by
the massed scarlet flowers, but no, he’s on
his way to a job interview at the MLA, a finalist,
one of seven, for a position at Penn, the
Tirana, now, of the classic denouement of
Language poetry, yes, look at him, bouncy
with that young John Travolta gait, striding
past the fifteen-mile long line of grad students
and part-timers, some of them fainting in
grief by the massed books in the Exhibit Hall,
oh, I just hope the letter of recommendation
from me to the Language poets helps, and that
he lives in a nice house on the outskirts
of the walled city, and can take his wife
out to decent restaurants a couple times a
month, the fancy ones preferred by experimental
apparatchiks, who whisper in husky Jacobin
tones over empty oyster shells, and that he
publishes wonderful books with the more recent
avant-garde poetry presses, like Harvard,
Princeton, Chicago, and Wesleyan, dedicating
in each prestigious volume a poem to me….
oh, and I hope he’s not distracted and confused
by Bob Perelman’s cracked glass eye, or Charles
Bernstein’s huge, oozing neck boil, or Al
Fielreiss’s perfect Chia-Pet beard, for he
is a nice boy (note to self: revise to turn
the coordinate clauses of last sections into
subordinate structures to keep the flow going)
and deserves a break from the high school
teaching that is slowly choking off the oxygen
from his many-hived mind; and I hope his coffin
goes at a great speed to match what his slicked-back
hair premonishes so, and that his skeleton,
two hundred years from now, turns a deep greenish
blue, the same color as the skeletons of all
the slaves of pretty Franny’s childhood plantation,
the ones who picked the cotton in which she
deliriously came, which is to say the color
of a lost, mysterious, and magnificent sea,
whose fathomless taste, Athena, I pray, in
this sappy and tacked-on ending, Aaron Belz
will know at the moment of his dying, will
know that he always knew there was no knowing,
and that his turquoise soul, then, shaped
like a wooden ladle from the poorest home
of the poorest slum of Lima, Peru, will rise,
slowly turning, like a tiny propeller, toward
the frescoes of all the martyred saints of
Poesy above.
Check out Kent's Flash Poem, Poem
Upon a Typo Found in an Interview of Kenneth
Koch, Conducted by David Shapiro
