If we’re lucky, Adam Scheffler’s poetry–lucid, demotic, right-valued–is on the verge of becoming a national resource. Your editor thanks the poet for allowing us to reprint “”1WTC” and “Obama’s Oval Office” from his Jacar Press collection–A Dog’s Life. (The first poem was originally published in Rattle and the second appeared in Jacar Press’s online magazine One.) Scheffler is properly wary of “over-explaining” poems but he risked the following introduction to his own twofer. B.D.
As a poet, I am interested in the ways our most private, secret inner lives intersect with the grossly public world of politics and history. Most people remember what they were up to on 9/11, or (if they’re old enough) where they were when Kennedy was shot. Jorie Graham has a haunting poem about a showing of Kubrick’s Lolita being interrupted by the announcement of Kennedy’s death. And not only dire events, but also politicians and public figures often enter into our psyches. Presidents often occupy the same psychological space as parents; world leaders turn up in our dreams. The poem below that I wrote for Obama blindsided me – I knew he was a good President, but I didn’t know that I loved him until I wrote it. And conversely, we often feel intimate, personal disgust for public figures. Think, for instance, of how many of us are repelled by Trump’s body and hair; or of how Russian poet Osip Mandelstam once described Stalin’s moustache as a ‘hairy cockroach crawling along his grin’ (trans. Christian Wiman). History requires broad strokes, but it only ever happens to individuals who experience and make meaning from it in their own subjective ways. Sometimes these ways can be anti-factual or nutty, and we must then reject them wherever we can. But in an age of huge dire events, frantic up-to-the-minute public discourse, and cacophony, it can be crucial and rejuvenating to reclaim our subjective historical lives – the secret places where you or I exist in history without being crushed by it.
xxx
1WTC
Sometimes I lie in bed at night
with the shade pulled back,
and count all the lights still on.
This morning, in the distance, it hoists a scaffold
of shouting workers high in the air
who struggle to latch and graft its glittering
spire into place, the one needed
to reach its symbolic 1776 feet.
I hate the simplicity of its most American message:
we can do anything –
knock us down, we’ll rise up stronger –
and I think how little we’ve learned,
though it’s not unbeautiful, its bent
glass-sheen and shimmer. ‘At sunset
it takes on the color of the sky,’ says the doorman.
From my room at night it can seem delicate,
distant, even small, but running south
along the Hudson it grows
so quickly that I feel quickly helpless:
I see the simple myth of innocence
and perseverance writ large
in its monstrousness and I tilt my head back
until I see black in the corners of my vision.
I try to see in it those many who won’t
ride the elevators into the sky,
who won’t vacuum the floors, or barter for stocks,
or else to glimpse in it the families
who watch the new tower rise
up better and higher, like an elaborate
eulogy telling only a person’s best qualities,
one that in its very ethereal perfection teaches you
for the first time, that your beloved is dead.
xxx
Obama’s Oval Office
I stood at the Oval Office’s open entrance
and stared in at that cozy room, half-window
lit by blazing roses, tulips outside
against the paper-gray sky, thinking of the
man who is not here today, the great ghost
in DC’s machine, how he calls himself
“the bear” at times wandering out from
his vast one-animal zoo, past snipers
on the White House roof and the guards nervous
& glad to see him, and out to the streets
for a simple lunch – everywhere the people
surprised, alert, with the wild celebrity of his
sighting, the one living statue amidst all the
giant marbled dead ones. I stood there
at his place of work while he was not there
admiring his décor, the bust of MLK
opposite his desk, the bowl of fresh apples
on the coffee table, the two Hopper paintings
of farmhouses, as if to say
the country is large and not an oval,
as the beaming black secret service agent
joked saying I had to leave, then smiled,
telling me of arrows and olives and how
he ‘gets to see the man each day.’
I stood at the roped-off entrance feeling love
for the President, and a dim ache that he
would be leaving soon, who used such a
pleasant office, and did all his work there,
not in a closet hidden nearby as was rumored,
and looking in at his desk I thought
I would like to work there too it looked
so light and wholesome in the April
cloudy-sun, but I only smiled at the guard,
and leaned my neck into that room
as far as it would go, wishing for it to
grow even longer on the stem of my neck,
and breathed in deeply through my nose and
mouth, like a teenager who places to his lips
a girl’s discarded sweater, and since you’re
not allowed to take pictures wrote this poem