The Nepotist

"Do not think all ecstasies the same!" writes Marc McKee, gentle soul that he is.  The following three poems owe their genesis to a business card the poet found by chance in a copy of a Kenneth Koch book. In these poems, Marc imagines a corporation (what a perfect word in this context) of bereavement professionals.  Of course, such things exist. But these poems aren't meant to function as a critique of the funeral industry. As I read them, they come closest to being poems in praise of grief itself. In fact, how Marc writes of grief and the conclusions he draws regarding its virtues are revolutionary, wildly provocative, and they excite me both as a poet and as a person who's lost his own fair share of people to wretched death. "We will wake if we wake / singing or sobbing into the threshold / where our business becomes the world."  I wonder if in the end, the only business any of us should busy ourselves with is readying our hearts and souls not to meet our maker, but to accept the charism bereavement naturally brings: that we, awkward lilies, become fully open to the mystery of The Possible. Even if one possibility is death.

Thanks, Marc.

***

Bereavement Company Picnic

And then shall the wolved much serenade,

and then shall the other thing much happen too,

no?  As a specialist in grief recovery,

I am qualified to make such qualms.

Do not think all ecstasies the same!

says the thundercloud pelting the alleys

with ridiculous dictionaries, nor boiling water

all the same! though at times

it has/will have been, and oft

does its sameness seem mighty.

You may ask what a Bereavement Company is. 

You may ask, cocking your head, Why for?  

But such a company may ask of you:  no one knew

we needed a mechanical washer of dishes nor a robot

to fetch our prescriptions, right? and now look. 

I recover grief, the hole out of which oceans

and wars &c.  I serve the humans, now one

who sucks the blood from the new divot in his thumb

where he got into a physical reality disagreement

with the cheese grater and, turning, finds no one

beside him in the kitchen.  The cheese

seems tougher tonight, but it is your heart.

I list with a pewter tankard through such blues

but that’s the job.  There’s a metal taste,

a stillness in the foyer rudely golded

by relentless days into which less and less

and more and more of us will wake. 

Those cries in your heels, the plucked keys

of your despair which is always becoming

another version of itself

or bugling into an altogether

althogether else.  I list with a tankard growing lighter

until I can see the big tent lose

its crutches, the slow plunge that looks like

it wouldn’t hurt a noncombatant hemophiliac

but is so different beneath

than seen from afar.  Saying tent is just my way

of talking about it, my safe image. 

We think these sounds will act like wolves

I mean shields I mean

oxygen masks with scabbards holding sharp swords

to cut the failing tent away

but it is really just beginning.

***

Bereavement Company Christmas Party

We plunge into wreaths of sparks here

but shortly the photographs

taken out of some pathological need

will be as veils to what we see:

two empty champagne bottles, tiny lungs

teetering on an upside down broken jaw,

two coworkers kiss with furious, cutting tears

beneath a copper sprig wet with blood. 

This part of the song is sawed in half

by the shark, the punch in the bowl

strained through rags retired

from swabbing wounds. 

The toy Doberman does not care for us,

the dowdy executrix wags her gilded pipe

at our loosened ties like scarecrow legs

trembling from windmills, the ordnance

arrives shortly after the tiny bathtubs

brimming with whiskey and voices

through the ventilator shafts twine

minor chords so that we are sure

someone is being mourned,

someone is always being mourned.

And then of course we realize Jesus,

then we realize God, no, gods

with many heads, no, devils blown out

of the faces of mountains, our representatives,

then the necklaces made from teeth

of those we survive and rhapsodize over,

humming in elevators.  We are dizzy

with the gone, the broken branches,

our outsides worn smooth. The first drops of rain

seem startling then having to walk

the long parking lot, the cloudburst is so there

it nearly isn’t.  All the boxes beneath the tree are open

and before we go to our efficient conveyors

we will detour first to a place for stowing

such gifts deep, deep below the ground,

where our eyes will no longer be touched.

This is a real party.  Every ventilator shaft

breathes sadder.  We will wake if we wake

singing or sobbing into the threshold

where our business becomes the world.

***

Bereavement Company (0):  At the Grief Recovery Academy

Here we indulge our full grief

and take notes, we gauge the flex of sorrow,

the way it lives in muscle, the way it licks

briar-tongued upside your softness, how

it makes of the lung a sandbag

barbed by an impossible lure.  We tabulate,

we make charts, there is lunch.

We skate in the afternoon

in the period of suspended weeping,

wrinkling awhile in the suggestive air.

Once you step through the turnstile

and achieve the metal detector,

you must answer to all you can carry

from the darkest rooms.

They ask you and ask you

like you swallowed a shovel

they are taking back, until nothing

belongs to you, until you ask yourself

in the practiced manner of an assassin

or nurse and even then

it’s only possible to tell

that where now there’s a stale taste

there was once a grief

preening like an awkward lily. 

***

About the Poet:

Marc McKee received his MFA from the University of Houston, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray.  His recent work appears in The Journal, Barrelhouse, Subtropics, absent, and Handsome, and is forthcoming from Copper Nickel and The Minnesota Review.   He is the author of a chapbook, What Apocalypse?, from New Michigan Press, and a full-length collection, Fuse, which is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2011.  

On the identity of The Nepotist:

As far as speculation on who The Nepotist may be, I couldn’t really venture a guess.  Anytime I think it might be someone, someone else who has been contacted refutes my idea.  This is fun, though, I will say that.  It puts me in mind of one of my pet daydreams, one that I’ve been curating for years in my interior: Friend City.  Though my friend Jess Piazza claims authorship of the particular title, I have longed for such a place since experiencing the initial soft diaspora that happens with moving away from college, and then graduate school, and soon, graduate school again.  Lately, I’d like to come up with a way to have a kind of monstrous MFA program that employs all my friends.  And eventually starts its own city. 

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When Ann Hudson sent me these poems, I emailed her back immediately thanking her for them, and rushed to tell her that, in particular, the last few lines of "Guiding Light" were words that, this particular day in question, I sorely needed to hear.  But the truth is there are wise words for sore times in each of these poems.  It's a marvelous tightwire to navigate, writing poems that are lyric and narrative at the same time.  The tendency is, of course, for poets to favor one over the other.  I find no such favoritism in Ann Hudson's work.  Her lyricism coaxes you through the narrative like, if I may, a Guiding Light and desposits you on the other side of the story, somewhere where you hadn't even expected to travel.

Thanks, Ann.

***

Guiding Light

One afternoon I perched beside Grandma

on the hard, ivory sofa to watch

the residents of Springfield, Middle America

mix it up.  Frankly, it was boring,

until just before the credits rolled when a nurse

walked into a young boy’s hospital room

with water and his evening meds

and he didn’t turn his head when she called his name

over and over.  The light, sliced by metal blinds,

fell across his too-still face.  It was a cliffhanger

for a Friday afternoon, and it stuck

in my head for years, how Grandma stood

and crossed the cream-carpeted room

to click off the set, and returned without a word

to dinner on the stove.  I busied myself

with a deck of cards, but couldn’t get

it out of my head, how I was watching the nurse

and her neat tray, and only then the boy,

about my age.  I wish I’d known how effortlessly

and habitually characters might spring back to life,

stepping out of the wreckage of a ruined plane,

or appearing cheerfully in the doorway

one Thanksgiving afternoon as if

they hadn’t been presumed dead a dozen years. 

I didn’t know I could hope that boy

would climb up out of his hospital bed

to hold the hand of the nurse who’d wept for him,

the nurse whose uniform was a deeper blue

than my Grandmother’s housedress, though not

as carefully ironed.  Truth is, I didn’t know

the first thing about miracles,

about whatever it is that makes the body

click on and off and on again.

***

***

Mercy

She hoists her shopping caddy

up over the curb.  Looks like she’s gotten

some sun, her hair is neatly combed,

and I think I spot a streak of gloss on her lips.

Her eyes might even be said to sparkle

as she approaches us.  And I must say we are

a sight for Norman Rockwell, the grownups

beaming at children too busy

burying their mouths in ice cream

to speak or smile.  I know she’s crazy,

but still it takes my breath away

when she makes eye contact

with the youngest child who gazes

up over a giant chocolate cone,

ice cream dripping over his wrists,

his belly, his bright green shoes,

and she mutters, Asshole.  I know

it makes no sense to react. But it rankles,

it will rile me up in some slow way for hours,

how I stand there staring at her shrinking figure,

the tilt of her hair, and then turn back

to the children, smiling, and ask

how they like it.  Like it!  It still burns me

how in sixth grade, the whole math class

silent over workbooks, I crossed

the room to the pencil sharpener

and the boy sitting nearest to it stood

and deftly put me in a headlock. 

I'd said maybe ten words to him all year,                                        

and was too stunned to struggle

or even call out.  In my surprise

all resistance drained from my body,

and I stared into the battered metal trashcan,

my hot breath beating back on my reddening cheeks,

a few stray pencil shavings

blowing up and grazing my lip.

***

About the Poet:

Ann Hudson’s first book, The Armillary Sphere, was published by Ohio University Press in 2006.  Yes, she knows it’s a Magic: The Gathering card, too.  She lives in Chicago.

On the identity of The Nepotist:

Hi, Nepotist. I like how I immediately started thumbing through my mental Rolodex of people you might be.  I like that you’re asking me to have courage, despite my suspicious nature. I like, frankly, that you like me ? that never hurts.  I like that your email came out of the blue, amongst some very, very dull emails which I am ignoring.  I like that you seem to be working hard at this,and that helps me trust you.

When I was a girl, my friend Claire had a book about a rabbit.  The illustrations were intricate and mesmerizing, and they held clues to where treasure was buried.  Real, honest-to-god treasure.  We stared at the pages for hours, not even sure what it was we were supposed to look for.  A man in England solved the puzzle, but it hasn’t stopped me from thinking about that book, all these years later.

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Today's Steven Schroeder poem pulls against, in thirteen taut lines, many of the tensions I like to see in poems. It's conversant and yet it doesn't spill all of its secrets by employing too chatty a tone. As well, it's a mysterious poem that, at the same time, manages an odd friendliness. The title comes from the sixth of Satchel Paige's rules for staying young: And don't look back—something might be gaining on you.

Something gaining, indeed. Dementia? Death? Does it matter? It's the poem's 'friendly' touches (the casually nomenclated 'Daschie,' itself cheerily Happy, the concern of the neighbors, and the ease by which the speaker enters into his own nostalgia for purposes good, bad and indifferent) that propel it through its plot. This is not a maudlin poem. And yet, from the reader's wistful distance, we're seized with a deeply felt ache for the man who is not named Crazy Lee. This is wise craft.

Thanks, Steve.

***

Something Might Be Gaining on You

That's not my name, I told the neighbors

When I fell and they found me calling

Happy, that's my Dachsie mix,

Gone up sixteen years this Sunday.

Are you my son? If so, which one?

No, I named mine James and Jacob

And James, the oldest, who stole my mail

Except the bills, so we're not speaking.

Though Doctor Blake made me promise

To take those pills, I flushed them because

He's a black. I looked back but couldn't see

The voice who whispered Hello, Crazy Lee.

Anyway, that's not my name.

***

About the Poet:

Steven D. Schroeder's first book of poetry, Torched Verse Ends, appeared in 2009 from BlazeVOX [books]. He edits the online poetry journal Anti-, serves as a contributing editor for River Styx, and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer. He has a few friends.

On the identity of The Nepotist:

I have my ideas, but I don't want to spoil the fun if I'm right or be wrong if I'm wrong, so I'll guess that you're Walt Whitman.

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What The Nepotist likes about Jill Alexander Essbaum's poems is that they are difficult to pigeonhole.  While many contain elements of form, most aren't technically metrical ("Equivocations" might be the exception that proves the rule).  And while some of her poems are explicitly religious, an equal number are irreligious, carnal, and (let's be blunt) kind of raunchy.  So what is she?  A traditionalist?  An experimentalist?  A born-again libertine?  Let the lady be all of the above.  Her poems are better for it.  So are we.

Thanks, Jill.

***

Equivocations

The map is not the landscape.

The recipe isn’t the dinner.

The polygraph isn’t the falsehood. 

The confession isn’t the sinner.

The diagram isn’t the sentence. 

The blueprint isn’t the house.

The jacket blurb isn’t the novel. 

The groom is not the spouse.

The outline isn’t the essay.

The evidence isn’t the crime.

The seismogram isn’t the earthquake. 

The tears are not the crying. 

***

Appall Bearer

I will wear a glass mask 

And foxhide gloves.

I will wear the black dress 

Of an exiled lover.

I will hover at the rim 

Of a crush of far relations.

They’ll speak of me through 

Prissed lips or mistakenly. 

I will block print my name

In the ledger of your guess-book.

None of it will register. 

I’ll teeter at the banister,

I’ll loiter in the narthex

(Better to hear the vespers).

I’ll add thistle to the vases.

I will paint for you a vanitas, 

But leave it on the easel.  

I will not be a vessel.  I will 

Knot your vest with tassels.  

I will hostess in your honor 

A wake for forty nights.

I’ll serve sheet-cake to the mourners

On plates with floral patterns.

I will tincture each tea

With honey and with Thallium.

What would I do without them.

What could I do without?

Without a doubt, I will be asked.  

Such a rich trick, this.

Oh enemy, my arch. 

I will hoist you through the parlor.

It will be my gravest honor.

***

À Mon Seul Désir

In a black or bleaker mirror.

With broken, oblique tremors.

In the hollyhock and under hay-bales.

By the success of every failure.  

When Hittites pray to moon gods. 

When empires fall prey to Mongols. 

From the eighth of every erring height.

When it is hot.  When it is night.  

Bruxed in the jaws of you, my Leviathan. 

Pierced by the tongs of the iceman. 

When you move across my water. 

When my wetness isn't water.

When I pay the Great Pearl's price. 

When only death suffices.

***

About the Poet:

Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently, the single-poem chapbook The Devastation (Cooper Dillon Books, 2009).  She lives in Austin, TX, and teaches in the UCR Palm Desert Low Residency MFA program.

On the identity of The Nepotist:

It's gotta be either Oprah or Jesus.  

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In a world where much is uncertain, unfair and ugly, I am grateful for poets like H.L Hix.  He's a charming soul and an enchanting poet. I choose the word 'enchanting' with intent; his poems have a magic that many poems try to conjure, but simply don't.  The Nepotist has been a fan of his since he stumbled upon Hix's first collection, Perfect Hell (if you find a copy, snatch it up; they're rare). Hix writes, "Anything can be mythologized. / The truth most needed will least suffice. / All my loves that spring were impossible." Do you see what he's doing here?  It's really subtle, it's really keen, and it's really, really, really good.  Nearly every line of the two poems here is quotable.  

If I say much more, I'll be gushing. 

Thanks, Harvey.

***

Record of a Certain Spring

             (After Yi Chinmyông)

In that house, one season might have been any other.

The house stood at the end of a short road

that started at the end of a long road.

The long road ended, the short road began,

at the base of a hill, a ridge really, oblong and awkward,

the gangly kid embarrassed above her smaller classmates,

rises hardly more than mounds.

The short road ended at the ridge’s crest.

Beyond, to the west, only trees, trees that together

defined the horizon, though no one tree touched it.

Every morning I drove the long road.

Every evening I walked the short one.

Every night wind shook the house until it felt it might fall.

In that house, inside that house, just the one season.

But around it, in the garden, along these roads,

a million little transitions nudged

each last season out, each next one in.

That one spring, I surprised a field mouse

nursing her blind hungers under a canna leaf

that all winter had softened under snow,

dyeing itself a black-soaked umber to match the mud.

Thus spring visited there: though hesitant at first,

later it insisted, threw its fits,

storms that boasted in the west, threats

issued in thunder and realized as hail.

That house that spring was inhabited, though I was not.

That house that spring was not haunted, but I was.

The creek tendered cattails and turtles.

The cattails issued redwings and also lent

their raspy voice to the very breeze

the blackbirds animated with their short flights.

That house was surrounded by water

but I never knelt to it and cupped my hands,

never once waded in.

Goldfinches gloried by, glinting.

Anything can be mythologized.

The truth most needed will least suffice.

All my loves that spring were impossible.

I needed a jacket on those walks,

but the sun and the breeze conspired

to keep my cheeks pink.  My cheeks, and the bridge of my nose.

***

Man Unloading Angle Iron

            (After Kang Ûngyo)

On a day when sunlight settles like silt, a man is unloading angle iron, with each piece adjusting his awkward stance atop the unstable stack, one of three on the flat-bed, the man’s sweatshirt hood secured on his head by his hard hat, and from here it looks like he may be bantering with the man to whom he hands each piece, the way their hard hats tilt and bob a little out of time with their rhythmic movements, the way a third man turns to them and pauses a moment before adding a translucent trash bag to the dumpster full of lumber scraps and broken-down boxes.

Fifteen floors up, a line of men on a long scaffold with metal railings and orange netting along its length glue four-foot squares of styrofoam to the building’s side.  On the ground near the truck, five men stand, each in an orange vest, one holding a styrofoam cup from which, once in a while, he sips.  Above, above the line of shadows cast by other buildings, the sun makes the sheath of white insulation shine.

***

About the Poet:

Though widely regarded as a boring homebody, even a tedious drudge, H. L. Hix has chosen this picture of himself with friends in order to convey to readers of The Nepotist (hoping that they are not alert to the logical fallacy called simply “small sample”) the impression that he spends a lot of time with a drink in his hand, surrounded by beautiful women half his age. 

On the identity of The Nepotist:

I suspect that the Nepotist him- or herself has a recurring nightmare that involves a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem.

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