Marilyn Kallet is the author of 16 books, including Packing Light: New andSelected Poems; The Big Game, translated from Benjamin Péret’s Le grandjeu; and Last Love Poems of Paul Eluard, all from Black Widow Press. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Tennessee, where she is Nancy Moore Goslee Professor of English. She also teaches poetry workshops for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in Auvillar, France. She has won the Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Fellowship in Poetry, and was inducted into the East Tennessee Literary Hall of Fame in 2005. Kallet has performed her poetry on campuses and in theaters across the United States, as well as in France and in Warsaw and Krakow, as a guest of the United States Embassy’s “America Presents” program.---------
Losing it
“The universe is absent from all your plans”
(Gérard de Nerval)
Somewhere at the Atlanta airport
I dropped Diabetes with Owls––my signed
Sedaris––tucked inside, a fat
missive from Marge Piercy about traffic
wrecks, the Boston bombing, cozy
sleeping cars, her slope of daffodils.
I believed her letter would save me
from falling out of air. Reread it
a hundred times. Good thing,
now it’s only in my brain.
As my friend Alice said about losing love,
“It’s like swallowing a couch.”
Or swallowing a hardback
with a voucher for paradise inside.
Quickly I bought another Sedaris, the way
we Americans shop double
when we feel like Job,
told my woes
to the young African-American
bookstore clerk with the tee-shirt logo:
My Story’s Worse!
“Oh no! A signed copy!” she groaned.
“But think of it this way—
now someone else has found treasure!”
Then I boarded Air France and
eight hours and one disgusting
supposedly salmaun parmentier later,
at Charles DeGaulle, my loss
seemed lighter.
A bubble with a feather on it.
Those missing pages sailed in front of me,
out of sight, along with my early dead.
My father in his private’s uniform
did not look up. The top of his handsome
dark head gleamed with Bryl Cream, in lines
his little black comb had moved through.
In Atlanta I had sworn to write more, to patch
rips in the fabric of in my existence
with poetry, never again to lose mindlessly.
Not to bargain with God.
When I woke two days later in Auvillar with
strips of duck breast in the frying pan,
a bowl of yogurt flavored with violet figs
on my table, I was calm.
My belly pooched out
Buddha-like,
and I felt less stricken
by what a bubble-head I am.
Lost and found seemed pareil, equal,
as if I had caught some
particulate in my net
worth more than the Piercy letter
which will perhaps
pop up on e-bay
along with the Chanukah book
I once signed––L’Chayim!––to John Updike.
From The Book of Excess
If I loved you more they’d have to lock me up
I’d have to leave my body
all that triage
I still
can’t get rid
Catullus, me too—
auch and
ouch if
I’d need an extra body
I is someone else
whirling, not pretty
not “like”
I’d melt like tiger butter
everything pancakes boys
If I loved you more I’d careen off the edge
of the known word––
you croon and croon to them
and they’re not babies, not even close.
Lucky River
Lucky Seine!
It has no worries
and no memory.
Me? Bodies
turn up at the edge
of forgetting, another
man down, gasping,
looks like Dante, a.k.a
Orpheus the Heartless,
Seine water in
his veins and ice for his
you know.
Someone knows.