Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club Poems: 1975-1990

by Kleinzahler, August

• ISBN13: 9780374527013
• ISBN10: 0374527016
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-05-15
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

The early poems of an American master "I have loved the air outside Shop-Rite Liquor on summer evenings better than the Marin hills at dusk lavender and gold stretching miles to the sea. At the junction, up from the synagogue a weeknight, necessarily and with my father-- a sale on German beer. Air full of living dust: bus exhaust, air-borne grains of pizza crust wounded crystals appearing, disappearing among streetlights and unsuccessful neon." --"Poetics" August Kleinzahler's first collections won him a cult following but have long been out of print and hard to find. Here Kleinzahler--acclaimed byThe Times(London) for the "vision and confident skill to make American poetry new"--has selected the best of the poems collected inStorm over Hackensack(1985) andEarthquake Weather(1989) and added an autobiographical Preface. August Kleinzahlerwas born in Jersey City in 1949. He is the author of ten books of poems and a memoir,Cutty, One Rock.His most recent book of poetry,The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize. He won the Lannan Literary Award in 2008. He lives in San Francisco. "I have loved the air outside Shop-Rite Liquor on summer evenings better than the Marin hills at dusk lavender and gold stretching miles to the sea. At the junction, up from the synagogue a weeknight, necessarily and with my father a sale on German beer. Air full of living dust: bus exhaust, air-borne grains of pizza crust wounded crystals appearing, disappearing among streetlights and unsuccessful neon." "Poetics" Though Kleinzahler's first collections earned him a cult following, they have long been out of print or hard to find. ForLive from the Hong Kong Nile Club, Kleinzahlercredited byThe Times(London) with the "vision and confident skill to make American poetry new"has chosen the best ofStorm over Hackensack,Earthquake Weather, and other volumes. Featuring a new autobiographical preface, this collection makes available the early work of a contemporary master. "[Kleinzahler's] world is one of inundating multiplicity, noise, hubbub, traffic, crowds--a federation of intense and disparate states unified in a single sensibility. . . . Kleinzahler's concern with getting it exactly right is also Pound's, and his best successes here are just as crisp and pungent as Pound's most startling images."DeSales Harrison,Boston Book Review "Kleinzahler's verse line is always precise, concrete, intelligent, and rarethat quality of 'chiseled' verse memorable in Basil Bunting's and Erza Pound's work. A loner, a genius."Allen Ginsberg "August Kleinzahler is surely one of the best lyric poets writing today . . . A typical piece is fleeting, unstable, almost improvisatory, entirely seductive in its aimlessness."Stephen Knight,Times Literary Supplement

Author Biography

August Kleinzahler's most recent collections are Green Sees Things in Waves (FSG, 1998) and Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow (FSG, 1995). He lives in San Francisco, where he writes a music column for The San Diego Weekly Reader.

Table of Contents

East
Where Souls Go	3	(1)
Show Business	4	(2)
Blue at 4 p.m.	6	(1)
From FDR Drive the Children of Whitman Gaze Up	7	(2)
Song	9	(1)
The Last Big Snow	10	(2)
Winter Branches	12	(1)
Evening, Out of Town	13	(1)
Ahasuerus	14	(2)
Canada Geese in New Jersey	16	(1)
16	17	(2)
Where Galluccio Lived	19	(1)
On the Way Home to Jersey One Night	20	(2)
Art & Youth	22	(1)
Vikings of the Air	23	(1)
Afternoon in the Middle Kingdom	24	(1)
Three Love Poems	25	(3)
I Valentine Out of Season	25	(1)
II Pinned	26	(1)
III Invitation	27	(1)
Boxing on Europe's Most Beautiful Beach	28	(2)
The Device	30	(1)
The Interior Decorator on Sunday	31	(1)
The Sausage Master of Minsk	32	(2)
Lightning Bugs	34	(1)
Storm over Hackensack	35	(1)
Meat	36	(1)
Sundown at Fletcher's Field	37	(1)
Ghosts	38	(2)
Poetics	40	(1)
Like Cities, Like Storms	41	(1)
Staying Home form Work	42	(3)
West
On Johnny's Time	45	(1)
Art & Life	46	(2)
Earthquake Weather	48	(2)
Sunday in November	50	(2)
The Lunatic of Lindley Meadow	52	(1)
What It Takes	53	(1)
Friday Morning in the Haight	54	(2)
Warm Night in February	56	(1)
Tenderloin: An Etymology	57	(1)
September, with Travelers	58	(2)
Old Movies	60	(1)
Disappointment	61	(1)
Lock Shop	62	(2)
Sunday in September	64	(1)
Ebenezer Californicus	65	(2)
An Autumnal Sketch	67	(1)
Ye Olden Barge	68	(1)
Hack	69	(1)
The Inland Passage	70	(1)
The Fourth of July	71	(3)
Poppies in the Wind	74	(1)
Indian Summer Night: The Haight	75	(1)
Before Winter	76	(2)
Bay Lullaby	78	(2)
Dispatch	80	(1)
Trolley	81	(2)
The Tree	83	(2)
Sunset in Chinatown	85

Excerpts

Chapter One

WHERE SOULS GO

No telling where: down the hill

and out of sight--

soapbox derby heroes in a new dimension.

Don't bother to resurrect them

unless some old newsreel clip

catches them shocked

with a butter knife in the toaster.

Countless snaps and episodes in space

once you hit the viewfinder that fits.

It's a lie anyway, all Hollywood--

the Mind is a too much thing

cleansing itself like a great salt sea.

Rather, imagine them in the eaves

among pigeons

or clustered round the D train's fan

as we cross the bridge to Brooklyn.

And make that a Friday night

July say. We are walking past

the liquor store to visit our love.

Two black boys are eating Corn Doodles

in the most flamboyant manner possible.

She waits, trying

to have the best song on as we arrive.

The moon is blurred.

Our helicopters are shooting at fieldworkers.

The Mets are down 3-1 in the 6th.

SHOW BUSINESS

                 That was a book I think you

were the Duchess

me the Stableboy

I remember now the horseapples

and itchy wool it was never that way

but God were you ever a Sireen

that I do remember and how the Townsfolk

flushed you'd have thought a gram

of niacin was in them instead of you

on your way out of the Butcher's

with half a roast and some mustard

under your arm turning suddenly

with that look of sexual malice I think

you were rich but I forget who

it was betrayed whom and were we

in love the Players most of them are

still in the Directory we could phone

and ask that is except your Sister

who perished poor thing the Actress

who took her part was gallant but missed

that delicacy of nature which killed

your Sister whom I do remember

but the rest what was between us

how the garden smelled the electric

storms were we or not I wonder

how we are punished for forgetting

or let go numb

somewhat more smooth charming and mean

BLUE AT 4 P.M.

The burnish of late afternoons

as winter ends--

this sadness coming on in waves is not round

and sweet

as the doleful cello

but jagged, intent

finding out places to get through the way wind

tries seams

and cracks of the old house, making

the furnace kick on

or the way his trumpet

sharks

through cloud and paradise shoal, nosing

out the dark fillet

to tear apart and drink his own

FROM FDR DRIVE THE CHILDREN

OF WHITMAN GAZE UP

Lavender smoke from the Con Ed stacks

assembles its tufts

into bubbles of thought (viz., the funnies) high

                    over the chilly river

and her bridges,

monuments of clunkish whimsy from an Age of Boom.

For the sky is synchronous this evening;

through the windshield its vistas

exactly right.

         Yes and speed too is sweet

at the golden hour,

dipping under viaducts and out

into heraldic light on the bounce

off Citicorp's roof,

the only pentahedron in sight,

up way up

          high for a street-rooted thing

but no kin of sky

as are those puffs wind

fails to scatter

but simply hang there like smudged zeppelins

one might be induced to

think scented

              while small craft higher yet

crisscross

aimlessly over the factories and luncheonettes

of Queens

          clearly beyond this spectacle

and thou,

dreamily seeking your exit.

SONG

No one said

jiggle stuck syllables till the sow

drops piglets

and we'll buy

you a cottage way back in the trees

with fat fat June bugs

that slap the screens

No one said

grub your noggin night

and day

and here's a stack of 78's

by the one the only

Memphis Minnie

Sing for your supper and look

what you get

potato eyes and a helium crepe

And for dessert, Monsieur?

Sincere best wishes

Put in another slug

and I'll tell you what else

No one said

Boo

THE LAST BIG SNOW

(Montreal, 1977)

I

She snowed

a night, a day

and another night, laying down deafness

as she went

and deafness again on top of

what she had let down

as she wound continually out of herself.

          And when she was done

she pulled

a wind onto the town, routing

snow into spindrift

off the mortar between bricks,

then blowing it back down.

         Cats

threw cats

     off each shed's sweetest angle.

II

The week that freighters slept in the ice

a day from port,

and the dove at our window

coo'd till first light,

my love gave herself over to making a broth.

With the fluid and pith of pale legumes

she came on a savor

         that visited our rooms

like a certain thought.

Those nights near the turning

when beacons on snowplows flashed until dawn,

and caravans of trucks

brought snow to the river as snow fell

on the river,

my love gave herself over to the making of broth

while I, in turn,

stirred until thick my greasy soup.

WINTER BRANCHES

A net of capillaries, veins, the full moon

beats through

     the sky late winter

between sunset and night

more clarifying to the spirit

than the ancient Chinese glazes, tea dust,

     plum shade,

the celadons from Hangchow

that take hold of the mind,

fastening it;

      and when a bird shoots through

between shadow and snow, branch and roof,

the heart tracks it

washed in a pleasure so distilled,

    so exquisite and sharp,

as to seem a kind of ecstasy

(for Ralph Mills, Jr.)

EVENING, OUT OF TOWN

Falling, falling

until breath wanders out of itself, transforms and is lost

and then there is simply a disembodied pulsing

a small dark bird

a nub

Boats

with a single lamp ride the water's lip, and the quiet

keeps vigil for a small intrusion: the shadows

presage so many things

but no intrusion, only some memory unhoused

AHASUERUS

There was no hazard so we left off

when night fell.

The wind spoke too slowly to fathom.

Voices, lights

drifted away from us like a cloud of gnats.

I can remember that first morning

when we woke athwart the world.

Even the light had its own strange scent.

Any sudden shadow of bird or branch

triggered a shock between our genitals and spine.

The worst, naturally, was the waiting.

Whiskey, chess and sentences

that broke off

only to reconnect past memory's gate.

The gardener scything out there was wild himself.

When the girls arrived we swam to the point, fucked

and walked back

along the gravel road to the highway.

The sun drew out the echoing in our blood

but by then we were already listening like tourists.

After a winter the villagers,

dull salacious eyes in tiny heads, warmed

to us, confided to us

their peculiar gossip and lore.

Their wives brought cookies.

We learned nothing.

The cookies tasted like rancid dust.

But when we looked in the mirror

we were both ourselves and otherwise.

Spirit and flesh played blithely in each other's yard.

CANADA GEESE IN NEW JERSEY

          Headed north

on the sodded-over trolley track

to Coytsville

            or until carbons blew free

of the brain stem, out

both ears, settling like soot on wet grass

I heard a honk and made to duck

but two geese slanted past--

getting the hell out of here,

honking all night up the Hudson Valley.

Just like that: honkhonk :

a honk about as straight as their necks.

Two big geese can scare up the dead.

Then they're gone,

          Azalea blossoms stir,

like so many tiny nightgowns.

16

The creases in the schoolboy's pegged wool slacks

blow flat against his ankles

as he puffs uphill in the Bronx. The day is

raw and new. He didn't do his Latin.

Below and to the east smoke braids

and drifts farther east. Levering and stoking

out there grown men in coveralls slog through

the dead hours, while in their lunch pails

bologna sweats. A bird is in the schoolboy's head:

Shelley's skylark. Ha, that prink

never lurched uptown on the El with squads

of plump domestics lost in romance comics

and down each night

past the Italian cookie factory, its sigh-fetching

smells. Life

is a tunnel the kid's soul spills out of--

blithe crystal missile

kissing down in a meadow, high

over the Bay of Naples.

Girls are there

in bright cotton dresses pulled just past

the knee. In gestures ritual,

tacit and wild,

they offer him glances, then sweet things to eat.

This is the place our friend shall run

the circuit of every glad thing, flare

and perish

     exquisitely.

WHERE GALLUCCIO LIVED

Get all of it, boys,

every brick,

so the next big storm blows out

any ghost left with the dust.

In that closet of air the river

wind gnaws at

was where the crucifix hung;

and over there

by the radio and nails,

that's where Galluccio kept

with his busted leg

in an old, soft chair

watching TV and the cars

go past.

     Whole floors,

broken up and carted off ...

Memory stinks,

like good marinara sauce.

You never get that garlic smell

out of the walls.

ON THE WAY HOME TO

JERSEY ONE NIGHT

The same old stories whip around

and around,

streaking the air between dark buildings,

breaking apart in the updraft.

A million tough chances

and Dina's bad back--

a nebula of complaint and spattered talk

flying apart in the wind:

the wind off the Hudson,

wrapping itself round the Hotel New Yorker,

riding the aluminum twigs

of a cyclone fence--

something about the wind,

how it roots around in the passageways and lots,

a kind of animal;

and in the night itself,

so dark,

as if everything had been washed out of it--

absence, an unearthly absence,

like space.

And who is it out there

in the shadows and doorways,

at every window and busted skylight?

Who is it I sense there out on his rounds,

keeping the ledger,

taking the last soiled scraps of it in?

Copyright © 2000 August Kleinzahler. All rights reserved.