Archive
Meditation at the Metering Lights on the Bay Bridge
after Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas“
All the new hesitation is about traffic.
In this it resembles the old hesitation.
The sense, for example, that each green light flickering
then fading out is a sign of universal progress. That the idiot
driver ahead of me switching lanes and cutting off others
is getting any farther than the rest of the pack idling
loudly as their engines race to keep pace with inertia.
Or the other idea that bearing a FastTrack pass
will somehow negate the infinity of this fractal coastline
and bear one home safely ahead of the SUVs.
We were talking about their gluttony for gas
the other night, my friend and I, and we agreed
we would never own one. At least, not in Berkeley,
where the Prius predominates. After a while I realized
that our cars were ourselves, as they’ve said all along:
Cougar, Mustang, Impala, male, female, you and I. There
was a time I thought a Thunderbird would impress
the ladies until I realized I had usurped a Native American
icon for my own purposes. I took a vow of celibacy
that night but rose in the morning to the realization
that it had nothing to do with car makes or models,
their metaphorical nuances. It was really about
the girl I wanted to make violent love to in the backseat
of my old Rambler. Maybe it was the same for her
but she was vacationing with relatives in Cedar Rapids.
Distance, we say, is full of endless longing. There are
moments when longing and distance become
one in the same. Moments as on a bridge in rush hour
backed up to the maze with the metering lights on
and all you can think is why the hell didn’t I enroll
in FastTrack, FastTrack, FastTrack.
Susan Gubernat’s first book of poems, Flesh, won the Marianne Moore Prize and was published by Helicon Nine Press. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Cortland Review, Michigan Quarterly and Pleiades, among others. Her second book manuscript, Shaggy Parasol, has been a runner-up or finalist in such contests as the National Poetry Series, the Dorset Prize, the FIELD prize, the New Issues Green Rose Prize, and the Philip Levine Prize. She has held artist residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Arts, and the Millay Colony. Gubernat is an opera librettist (Korczak’s Orphans; composer Adam Silverman) and an Associate Professor at California State University, East Bay, where she and her students have launched a new national literary magazine, Arroyo Literary Review, focusing on, but not limited to, writers of the Bay Area.
A Philippic
after Phil Levine
Kids, you don’t know what sweat is.
You with your trust fund BMWs.
I never bought a car Detroit didn’t make.
So there, you whiners. And what
did you come out to the desert to see?
A man, like other men. I can’t baptize
you into poetry. You have to put in
your time: the Coke factory, a chicken farm.
Your sleep has to be dreamless
and earned. Even then, you’ll still
have your pedicures, your French
fountain pens. But where do you think
this hard callous of mine came from?
Not from a writing instrument,
I can assure you. It was years on the line
when I came home wasted yet teeming
with verses. I sat up all night, my No. 2
lead pencil (made in America)
filling the blue lines of a cheap notebook
with priceless stuff. Everyone
in my family was an artist manqué.
And it was left to me to ventriloquize
a whole silent generation’s voices.
The 50’s, yeah, they pretty much stank.
If you didn’t land on a list of some kind
you were a coward. Or worse. Maybe
you spent too much time in Montmartre
instead of sweating it out here, baking in a heartless heartland,
cooling in the shadows cast by the abandoned
steel plants and metal silos, empty, impotent
chambers of the post-industrial US of A.
Susan Gubernat’s first book of poems, Flesh, won the Marianne Moore Prize and was published by Helicon Nine Press. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Cortland Review, Michigan Quarterly and Pleiades, among others. Her second book manuscript, Shaggy Parasol, has been a runner-up or finalist in such contests as the National Poetry Series, the Dorset Prize, the FIELD prize, the New Issues Green Rose Prize, and the Philip Levine Prize. She has held artist residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Arts, and the Millay Colony. Gubernat is an opera librettist (Korczak’s Orphans; composer Adam Silverman) and an Associate Professor at California State University, East Bay, where she and her students have launched a new national literary magazine, Arroyo Literary Review, focusing on, but not limited to, writers of the Bay Area.
qarrtsiluni 