“[Koethes] digressive, melancholy verse has been gathering steam and critical esteem since FALLING WATER” Publishers Weekly
Hackett Avenue
Leaves floating on the water
Like faces floating on the surface of a dream,
On the surface of a swimming pool
Once the holocaust was complete.
And then I passed through stages of belief
And unbelief, desire and restraint.
Ad interim, until they began to seem quaint
And I began to feel myself a victim of coincidence,
Inhabiting a film whose real title was my name --
Inhabiting a realm of fabulous constructions
Made entirely of words, all words
Until they meant whatever "I might mean.
But they're just fragments really,
No more than that.
A coast away,
And then across an ocean fifty years away,
-- Bewitchment of intelligence by leaves --
A body floating clothed, facedown,
A not-so-old philosopher dying in his bed
-- At least I "thought I felt those things.
But then the line went dead
And I was back here in the cave, another ghost
Inhabiting the fourth part of the soul
And waiting, and still waiting, for the sun to come up.
Tell them I've had a wonderful life.
Tell Mr. DeMille I'm ready for my close-up.
---In ItalyFor Henri Cole
1. Hotel Solferino
I was somewhere else, then here.
Somewhere else: call it an idea
Lingering in the air like the faint smell of a rose
Insensibly near;
Or call it a small hotel
Towards the end of Via Solferino,
With a window open to the sun
And the sounds of automobiles on the street below
And adistant bell.
Call it any time but now,
Only call it unreal. In time's small room
Whatever lies beyond its borders
Couldn't have been, like an imaginary perfume
Nobody knows how
To even dream of again.
In the extraordinary world where
Nothing ever happens, when in something like the way
A poem begins
I entered upon a street
I'd never imagined before, all the while
Concealed by that close sense of self
That seemed to repeat
My name, that tried to consume
My entire world, that brought me to the entry
Of a small hotel where an image
Of my own face stared at me from another country,
From another room.
2. Expulsion from the Garden
It's hard to remember one was ever there,
Or what was supposed to be so great about it.
Each morning a newly minted sun rose
In a new sky, and birdsong filled the air.
There were all these things to name, and no sex.
The children took what God had given them --
A world held in common, a form of life
Without sin or moral complexity,
A vernal paradise complete with snakes --
And sold it all for a song, for the glory
Of the knowledge contained in the fatal apple.
At any rate, that's the official story.
In Masaccio's fresco in the Brancacci Chapel
The figures are smaller than you'd expect
And lack context, and seem all the more tragic.
The Garden is implicit in their faces,
Depicted through the evasive magic
Of the unpresented. Eve's arm is slack
And hides her sex. There isn't much to see
Beyond that, for the important questions,
The questions to whichone constantly comes back,
Aren't about their lost, undepicted home,
But the ones framed by their distorted mouths:
What are we now? What will we become?
Think of it as whatever state preceded
The present moment, this prison of the self.
The idea of the Garden is the idea
Of something tangible which has receded
Into stories, into poetry.
As one ages, it becomes less a matter
Of great intervals than of minor moments
Much like today's, which time's strange geometry
Has rendered unreal. And yet the question,
Raised anew each day, is the same one,
Though the person raising it isn't the same:
What am I now? What have I become?
John Koethe is distinguished professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee. His collections include Falling Water, which won the Kingsley-Tufts Award, North Point North, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Ninety-fifth Street, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2011, he received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.