The sky was breaking, and I felt a little less numb

than the alcoholic devotedly spooning

pate from a tub; than the divorcee’s station wagon

with its dog-haired sheepskin dogseat;

or the birds barking in the trees to greet the day . . .

“Up in the Air”  — Michael Hofmann

i’m not in the habit of giving poems to people, but yesterday i passed along the same Michael Hofmann poem for the second time in a year. i read an okay amount of poetry–i think i can comfortably say i read more of it than most Americans, (i’m guessing that anyone who’s actually read a whole poem this year can say the same), and his are the ones i carry around.  i’d been up and down Manhattan Avenue twice already. Once to buy water balloons, once for coffee, and now for coffee again as i walked my friend back to the train. We’ve known each other for almost 20 years as adults. We had just left a Memorial Day barbeque. We met working in a restaurant. We were were both ex-cheerleaders and current English majors in the process of “turning” weird. Jonas was soaked in exploded water balloons and basically asleep in my arms and we–both of us (ex?) Floridians–stepped slowly, comfortably warmed by the kind of heat that seems impossible to remember until you’re back trying to move through it, while talking quickly, down Manhattan. She is looking for poems for a project she is in the middle of, and i made a few suggestions before i got to Michael Hofmann.

There is a kind of queerness that doesn’t always wear itself obviously. i am starting to understand that it has something to do with having had a queer childhood. i mean queer both in its current and in its antiquated sense. Children of single parents, of jailbirds, of foreigners, of teenagers, of iconoclastic parents, of families that moved around incessantly, of queers. Of being poor, of being an easy crier, of having had to act like it’s okay to have everything fall apart when you’ve already had a bad day because that same dick at your lunch table made fun of you for being flat. Again. It’s been going on for so long that anyone else would have grown boobs by now. And the absurdity of being bullied for physically looking like a child when you aren’t supposed to anymore while you have had to perform emotional adulthood since long before this jerk had pubic hair is just too difficult to explain. Of being allowed to be quiet and just sit around and read whatever you want, and watch whatever you want, and eat whatever you can find, and listen to what you like over and over, because no one is home. Of having to act like the past-life regression happening upstairs is interesting. Of having had parents switch gender roles, or both perform the same one, or of never having normative models for either. For pretending so hard to be normal that no one would ever guess what your world was “really” like–whatever that means. Some people who are raised loosely fill in those holes as adults, because they finally can. Because they have to know what they missed. Others find being broken-in more familiar, and can’t ever quite adjust to the story of what we are supposed to do at different points along the line–but continue to try. i suppose there are endless variations here, but i am immensely curious about what other people find  comfortable. For some of us comfort actually seems like perversion–picking at the strings is sometimes the only relief.  For others of us regularity feels like a welcome challenge.

i don’t know much about Michael Hofmann’s childhood, other than what is suggested by his Dad’s book, Luck, but i have spent some time with his poems, many of which are either about his father or about fucking. There is a queerness to them that seems to me apiece of what i am describing here. The willful risk for the erotic. The unwillingness to designate the poems as a place where any juxtaposition might be too much. A way of existing i find attractive even though i was raised to understand it as repulsive. The complications of nature and the inescapable weather. Mexico. Men. Music. Dad. Drugs. Kids. Cheating. Hart Crane. Starting again. Lynyrd Skynyrd.  Drinking. Class. The biting observations of a stranger as he becomes a familiar. Silencing word choice. The South. Europe. Gainesville. London.

Beer drunk, sitting across from him one night at the Salty Dog Saloon in Gainesville, i said something about not being able to fathom having had a famous novelist as a father, (as he had), or of being the child of someone who did similar work to my own, when my own father is an electrician who spent most of his working life climbing poles. Your job as an academic is not so different, he said. Plugging things into holes.

This is the poem i recommended to my friend, who is interested in hotel rooms.  It is from Corona, Corona (1993):

“Schonlaternengasse”

Better never than late like the modern concrete
firetrap firegaps spacing the Austrian baroque, risi pisi;
like the morgenstern lamp’s flex leaking plastic links of gold,
leaving the cutglass nightlight good enough to drink;
like the same tulip reproduction twice in our hapless room,
where the twelve lines of a spider plant die without offshoot:
your period, which we both half-hoped wouldn’t come.

Here is another, from Poetry (June 2008):

“For Adam”