Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books. His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, he is currently completing his doctorate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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I thought I’d find you here, that I’d finish these poems

and you would stand out as clear as the day. As bright

as the moon. I hate those poets who tell you that

they love, but never make clear who they love. 

My mother’s eyes are nothing like the sun. How do I

miss my mother? Let me count the ways. So where

are you? I couldn’t believe you let yourself

be filmed for the video they showed at your tribute,

and I wanted to tell everyone, that’s only her voice

when she’s nervous, that’s only her face when she

has to be on display and she doesn’t like it. But at least

you were there. Everyone knows you can’t write

your way out of grief. Everyone knows that grief

never turns into anything but grief, and OK, I can grieve

you forever. But I wanted you here, in the middle

of my book. Not a complaint about what I lost

or what it feels like to lose it. But you. Your smile. 

Your denim dress.

 

 

  

After the younger writer had refused the older writer,
it seemed to the younger writer that both the proposition
and the refusal were rather embarrassing events
that ought not be retold, and the younger writer, with
all good intentions, decided to tell no one, particularly
because the younger writer had a rather low opinion
of the older writer for having found the younger writer
appealing in the first place, and secretly, the younger writer
feared that having refused the older writer was actually
a sign of prudery, bourgeois morality, and overall
non-bohemian-boringness-and-boorishness. One night,
many years later, the younger writer became very drunk
and told some other same-age-writers about the advance
of the older writer and the resulting refusal. The younger
writer, discreet in indiscretion, swore the other writers
to secrecy, but on hearing the confession, they laughed,
as almost all of them had also been propositioned
by the older writer in question, and while some had
said yes and some had said no, none of them felt
that the story had anything close to the gravity that
the younger writer felt it did. Realizing that the great secret
was in fact of no weight, the distraught younger writer
began to cry. When the same-age-writers asked about the tears,
the younger writer revealed how terrible it was to have
a secret of no importance, to which his same-age-writer
friends said, Don't cry, Young Writer, This story
makes us love you more than ever.