Adam has a sparkly new smart review up of “You Never Know” over at Stoning the Devil. Speaking of knowing, how did he come up with the concept of stoning the devil? Didn’t Jesus say something along the lines of he who is without sin should cast the first stone? And do these festivities exclude women? And if we stoned the devil and obliterated sin, wouldn’t there be a severe imbalance? And why does sinning often offer the most pleasure anyway?

And speaking of naming, I don’t know who Chicky Wang is (I adore the name though & will chant it for a good hour), but s/he is right on the money about my query directly below. Ashbery. David has always said so in interview after interview. Of course, Ashbery isn’t his only poet favorite. But he is the one Duchovny heralds.

And speaking of being an only one, is it possible that I find myself alas … sigh … alone on a Saturday night? No one to buy me a beer? No one to buy a beer for? I suppose I’ll wander the rainy Brooklyn streets, aimlessly.

In lieu of a beer and since there is only distance between us, and since there is no bedroom scene tonight, let me offer more poems as gleaned from Circumference:

Distance

Between love and don’t love is enough time
for a cigarette. What would happen to our lungs
without questions? If only two rooms
were enough, furniture as semantic
rescue, books sprouting on shelves,
frost that is surely outside the window.
This is not the whole world, the truth
is not ready just like an apartment
during a move. But. Oh yes, there are
such short words, useful
when a sentence develops too fast
like a fetus. We even picked the name.
What joy, the compliance of language one calls
one’s own that makes it hard to share with
the silent. A curtain moves behind which
someone watches someone eles’s happiness and misery.

Roman Kazmierski
(translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda)

A Bed Scene

Oh, bed,
oh, pillow,
how much will you remember
of the bedspreadramas?
Dialogues ground through
a sigh grinder,
not even a dry whisper left,
just rough stage directions:
Sexpeare is no more.
Now is the time of travels
from one side to the other,
the foot ventures to Siberia,
the ear to the silence overseas,
the eye to the vistas
at the honorable stain
on the ceiling.
While on the stage under the bed
a wild dance of dust–
a dirty plot?

Roman Kazmierski
(translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda)

p.s. I must include this story about twin babies who hugged to keep the weaker one alive. Cheesy? Heart warming? Yes and yes. But I’m not above learning from babies. Or listening to nurses with years on the job. Nope, it’s not an urban legend…

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 4th, 2006 at 10:37 pm

Responses to “Speaking of …”

1. Chicky Wang Says:
   February 17th, 2006 at 5:47 pm eOh, thanks Amy. I didn’t see this page and your nice comment. I think I saw the Ashbery quoted in a Vanity Fair article and then went around singing that pop song, “David Duchovny, why don’t you love me?” for a while. Hard not to.

Poetry