Pictures from the Bowery Poetry Club Reading
by Ernie on 17/09/08 at 10:05 am
Ernest Hilbert reads from poems that will appear in his book Sixty Sonnets. Note his beer in the foreground, a pint of Brooklyn Lager.
From Ernest Hilbert’s forthcoming book Sixty Sonnets:
A Sad Last Number for the Gentlemen at the Tavern
Ernest Hilbert
This one is for all the aging fuck-ups,
The guys who can’t get their shit in one bag,
Can’t find a job much less get there on time.
They struggle to grind tires out of deep ruts,
But they slide back in. They will always lag
In the long race, skid down while others climb.
There are, as a rule, women, kids, and pets
Who learn not to depend on them so much,
Who go on with their lives, nurse their grudges.
What keeps these men from growing up? What gets
Dropped behind them? Something must make them flinch
From life’s harsh contours, its many judges:
As if they prefer to remain children,
More loved, and more easily forgiven.
Michael Quadland reads from his novel That Was Then.
From Michael Quadland‘s novel That Was Then:
I sleep hunched on my stomach, fists to my chest like I’m about to be hit. Gina sleeps looking up at the world, facing it. Incompatibility or a perfect match, it’s hard to say.
We met the year our fathers—both confirmed Democrats—became partners in a Ford dealership in western Massachusetts. It was also the year John Kennedy was shot. You could say that our relationship was born in that mix of real optimism and enormous disappointment, as if we’d been branded by the events around us, imprinted with feelings we could never quite shed, or even understand. We went to movies and dances that fall of 1963, pals with nothing better to do. Then, one thing led to another, as it can for teenagers, though no one would ever have accused Gina of lacking direction. Her attraction to me was more likely part of a general instinct for rebellion. Tall, determined, attractive, she could have had any number of boys at Williston High School. We grabbed onto one another, two marooned tourists in the land of early adolescence, until, three years later, Gina suddenly let go.
Deserted, I grew my hair and went off to become a geek at Yale, where hiding in a library carrel was acceptable if not admired behavior. After that, I made my way to New York University to study psychology. Books and papers were always right there where you left them the day before.
Twenty years later, remarkably, Gina and I run into one another just four blocks north of Washington Square Park, where elegant, 1920’s apartment buildings line Fifth Avenue and uniformed doormen stand like sentries outside their marble entrances. New York’s First Presbyterian Church, smaller in scale and surrounded by flowering shrubs, graces the corner of Eleventh Street, where Gina stands, waiting to cross. Her impatient, splayed-leg stance is utterly familiar from ninth grade, as if the rush of traffic down Fifth Avenue were a challenge set deliberately and specifically for her.
Or maybe it isn’t so remarkable, our meeting this afternoon. We both live south of Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, which is not as big a place as people think. In fact, I have imagined just such an encounter plenty of times, having heard regular updates about Gina from my parents—her successful acting career, her marriage and divorce, twice. Still, actually seeing her sends a fearful tingle up my spine, and I start to turn away. But that feels silly, and cowardly, and so I continue down Fifth Avenue, smack into the distressing yet exhilarating pull she’s always had on me.
A passing taxi douses the sidewalk between us. Strands of hair cling to Gina’s rain-soaked cheeks; her eyes betray a fleeting moment of insecurity, I think, or maybe hope. I have an umbrella, she doesn’t, which says a lot, I suppose. She smiles and steps next to me, and we begin talking as if we can just pick up where we left off so long ago. I walk her to her apartment at Ninth Street and First Avenue, while she tells me how she’s been attempting to steer her career toward directing and is currently assisting in an Off-Broadway production of Our Town. She’s still poised and confident, but seasoned now, the attractive woman she’d been destined to become.
Neither of us mentions what drove us apart twenty years ago.
“Would you like to see the play this evening?“ she asks me in front of her building, a walk-up with a beveled glass door and an array of drenched Chinese take-out menus strewn across the stoop.
Being with her feels like slipping into a favorite old jacket. Her ambition, her courage and colossal resilience, her slightly breathless demeanor, are dollar bills unearthed in the frayed lining of a pocket. She says she’s intrigued by my choice of psychology as a career, wondering, I suppose, if I took up the profession in order to figure myself out. A lot of people think that about psychologists. There are worse motivations.
Her hand feels small and cool. “Tonight, then,” I say.
We spend most evenings together after that. She invites me into her world of rehearsals, opening nights and after-theater parties, and mine, being relatively empty, I go. Four months later we get married at City Hall, the way a body in interrupted motion tends to regain its initial momentum. That sounds flippant, and my decision to marry Gina is anything but that. I’m thirty-four years old, a loner lured a second time by feelings I’ve never been able to decipher. I label them love, though more than anything, what I feel, marrying Gina, is gratitude.
But why does she want to marry me? Her life is filled with the passion that has ruled her since childhood—the theater. Even now, she doesn’t seem to need people, much less a mate. But that’s only the part of Gina that shows. Underneath lie the fears and longings only I know about, from when we were thirteen. This quirky Gina isn’t as confident as she appears. She has a conventional side, not unlike those of the women she disdains. She is forever questioning whether she should have kids, though outwardly, she scorns parenthood as selfish and wasteful of the world’s resources. Her blithe spirit belies a penchant to worry about money, about how people see her, about whether her mark on the world will be indelible or guaranteed-to-bleed.
Though she would never admit it, marriage for Gina is a hedge, in case the road less traveled leads nowhere. I’m the insurance policy not offered by Actor’s Equity. Do I mind? Not really. At thirty-four, I am beyond illusions, or so I like to think.
We move into a larger apartment on West Sixteenth Street in Chelsea, advance professionally over the next three years, buy a Volvo and visit friends in the Hamptons. Sex is good, as it was when we were teenagers. Couples who can’t quite reach one another verbally find other ways. What I never realized was how fragile sex is; how it can’t carry the weight of a relationship. It’s like asking a two-by-four to do the work of a joist. It buckles. Maybe not right away, but eventually. The frequency of our love-making begins to dwindle after a while, and I can feel myself slowly steeling against Gina. I dread the smug partnerships of convenience and habit that I observe in some of our friends, cogs in a wheel that, fast as it might spin, isn’t really going anywhere.
Three years into our marriage, I get the idea to buy a house. It’s ironic that I want to work on something physical when it’s my bewildering feelings that need attention. So much for psychologists figuring themselves out!
The Bowery Poetry Club has a well-stocked bar, now equipped with E-Verse Radio shot glasses!
Adam Kirsch reads from his new book of poems, Invasions.
From Adam Kirsch’s collection Invasions:
Calmly, the papers calculate the chance
That in ten years the planet and a shard
Of rock will consummate the long romance
We’ve led with ruin. This will be ignored:
Not for the long but lotto-beating odds,
But from the madman’s counterfactual ease
That fissions us as always into gods
Who count in aeons and eternities,
And beasts who scavenge for the daily kill,
Gobbling down the meat that will not keep.
Does the beast suspect that nuclear winter will
Be secretly welcome as untroubled sleep,
And does the god observe the sky in peace
Since his life neither starts nor ends in weather?
Both let what will come come; for the decrees
Of the asteroid are righteous altogether.
