Read an Excerpt
Disposable Camera
By JANET FOXMAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Janet Foxman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-92411-3
Chapter One
NEW HOUSE
Dad who thinks life is a paper bag
Gets heavier and heavier
You hold until the bottom drops out
Says make me a poem that starts sad
And ends happy
Nobody's ever done that before
He's never read the one about the dead people
Shining in paradise and the light reaching them
Out of colanders almost
Today he says his new house is like being
On vacation every day
That he sleeps like a baby
That the boxwood under his window
Is so pretty you want to pee in your pants
That he is happy all the time
THE ORCHESTRA
For my father
A violinist should always be happy when he is playing.
If he is playing well, he should be happy that he is playing well.
If he is not playing well, he should be happy because it will soon be over.
—Jascha Heifetz
1
The orchestra is a place for perverts—
also for a pimp (the personnel manager),
a Peeping Tom, two bigamists, a pusher
who deals Ecstasy after practice.
The people in the orchestra like
to fuck each other:
in a corner in the pit
a cot for the piccolo and third clarinet,
herpes from the bassoonist to the cellists
then to the tympanist and some violinists, &c.
Complaints from the audience
a bassist is looking down, during concerts,
women's shirts.
2
At the rehearsal for Ravel's Bolero—
Berrruuummp berrruuump berrruuump bump bump—
Toscanini, who'd with his stick
poke his concertmaster in the eye, says:
It was magnificent but could you
make a small change.
The snare drummer
tries, wants to
please his conductor.
Toscanini stops him again—
the guy's hands shake so much,
his tempo starts
to fall apart.
Toscanini rages,
wants five minutes
later, to fire the guy.
The thing is, it was almost perfect
the first time.
3
A Musician on Conducting
(Mozart Symphony #40 in G Minor) move the stick, move the stick, show something—
move the stick, move the stick, show nothing—
4
A musician calls the orchestra office asks for the conductor
and is told that he is dead
The musician calls back twenty-five times and gets the same message
I just like to hear you say it he says
5
In the bathroom door
a trick lock:
Heifetz wanted to put them
in their place
early: sent them
to wash their hands
before the first lesson.
6
The Concertmaster Decides to Play the Violin In the crib trying to compose
The Best Song: his first
memory.
Carries it to the alley and smashes it: his first
violin.
7
People always buy an instrument that's got
the sound they started out with, like a mother.
Start with a crappy instrument, end
with a crappy instrument.
A lady in the orchestra had a cello
with a dark and thuddy sound.
A luthier remade it masterfully,
gave it the tone of the Italian
golden period—
a miracle.
But a wasted miracle:
to restore the thud right away
the lady restrung it.
8
The look, in the hallway mirror,
of the violin under your ear!
The animals your hand resembled there!
The spiders! The delicate birds!
9
The audience should sit quietly & listen.
It is common courtesy for all concerned to sit quietly.
Audience members should not leave during a performance.
Audience members should bring cough drops
if they have a cough so as to avoid coughing during a performance.
Cough drops should be unwrapped discreetly; rustling paper will disturb
the performers.
Audience members should not clap between movements.
They should wait until the entire piece is completed before clapping.
10
A conductor and a violist are standing in the middle of the road:
which one do you run over first and why?
The conductor-business before pleasure.
11
The Concertmaster Decides to Leave the Orchestra They are playing
Carmina Burana,
so earthy, so infectious,
things in it to put anybody in paradise.
He looks into the audience:
only four people smiling.
12
Nothing much happened but sometimes
people fell out of their chairs playing,
dropped their instruments on stage.
Or strings unwound during concerti.
Once during the
Pathétique somebody in the audience died.
When we played beautifully
sometimes they got quiet.
Remember how I played sometimes—
when I had them in my hand:
no coughing.
13
When the music is
beautiful,
the walls, the hall itself hardly holds together.
You're not sure the roof
won't come off.
The light that turns buildings gold
is pouring in.
14
Why are they clapping?
They thought it was
sad and beautiful?
15
The old Wurlitzer was removed to a roller rink. Every Thursday night an
organist plays wartime music there. Like magnificent birds, chains of men
in velour holding each other at the waist and three women, who were young
when the songs were new, and came here separately, appear untroubled as
they fly, and innocent.
SMORZANDO
Sight reading music a dead man marked—
How itty-bitty the two of us make Mozart!
How Schubert shrinks when we play!
Get it away from me. Get it away.
DECIDING BETWEEN FAR - OR NEAR - SIGHTEDNESS
BEFORE EYE SURGERY
He wonders if the sequoia and tea roses
if the mounds the moles have cast
between them, are worth seeing clearly.
He knows he wants to see what could
trip him. He doesn't want to trip.
He wants to know if in the end
it's better to see into the distance.
But whether to see spiders well, the cracks in the wall.
To see, without glasses, the music on the stand.
Or in the middle of the night to not have to ask
what the clock says.
PAGES FROM MY FATHER'S DREAM JOURNAL
Something about a cut on a pocket of a shirt.
Pop is living under the ocean.
He comes to earth.
There is a box with three glasses—dirty.
I don't want him to drink from them.
They might grow the hump on his back.
* * *
I'm in a closet.
I don't understand what I did wrong.
They have glued wallpaper around the edges.
It's pretty but it's not on tight.
I say: I think this could be fixed up a little.
* * *
I'm kissing and hugging Osama bin Laden.
There's a cut halfway under his eye.
I'm thanking him for not destroying all the carpet
when he robbed my mother's house.
She loves him for stealing just part of it so neatly.
I'm waiting to get packages of food out of the car.
My mother is there.
She's holding an old thank you card (for flowers).
I tear it up.
One package is empty.
The other I put on the backseat where Whoopie is tied up.
We drive past the house on Pico where God lived.
* * *
I'm sitting at a restaurant.
They're serving unfinished portions of people's food.
Fish pancakes? I don't want to eat here.
There is oil on the table.
One of my daughters puts her sleeve in the oil.
(I don't think she notices.)
She has on the sweater I gave her.
* * *
I'm standing in line to buy meatballs in a butcher shop.
I'm buying the cheapest.
The best is made of goat.
Whoopie is in the other room.
There is a contest on TV.
I want her to come to me.
But the flies on my face are keeping me company.
* * *
Something about me playing a bow.
The Metropole Orchestra outside before a performance.
Two or three young men and a female concertmaster.
One of the young men has thinning hair.
I have played my bow for Susan.
She has heard another,
but she says mine is full of subtlety
and the other just overwhelms her with sound.
* * *
I'm in a city I don't know,
a long time ago.
We're walking along and Susan says I have something
in the crease of my nose.
I pull at it. It's like clay-loose.
I put it in my pocket and think This is what death is made of.
* * *
A story about three men—
one who's going to die.
One is going to be caught and die by an insect.
There is no way of stopping the story or the death.
* * *
I'm explaining to Darlene that the last notes of the Chausson
Poème were so
difficult that even if I could play it, it wouldn't do any good.
* * *
His little dog comes back to a place
where other dogs are waiting, mostly in pairs.
One of them looks like him so he kicks it twice.
* * *
Susan and I are discussing what to do during an earthquake.
We are living at an old folks' home.
There's a window to the left and a stair to the right,
an extra support to the right of her bed.
There's a bull hanging from the ceiling
whistling a requiem to God.
* * *
Twenty-eight wedges of cake on a shelf,
each representing seven or fifteen hours of happiness.
* * *
Many cars going downhill. Passing me narrowly,
narrowly missing accidents.
Finally somebody is hit.
I'm with people.
I meet Myra Kestenbaum. She looks beautiful.
She gives me opuses of Grieg, Beethoven.
I am willing to learn everything.
SOUVENIR
And those stars trembling under the Coliseum's dome
during the ice show?
Light sabers, fiber-optic wands—
children contented at the souvenir stands in the lobby.
How did they come to light
so numerously, and so suddenly?
A man's voice, or Mickey Mouse's,
cooed an order over the loudspeaker.
Or somebody in the control room dimmed the lights.
And those hasty nebulas emitting stars whenever they stopped?
Vendors climbing the stairs along the bleachers.
In the box seats-the Pleiades?
That globular cluster?
A girl's birthday party;
an only child.
The black matter between?
Funded this heaven—but afraid.
Afraid its hold on any of the constituent stars
is as loose as its hold on those impersonal ones
that pass over the houses they share with these.
What happened?
The melodrama began on the ice under us.
The maid figure-eighted out of a florescent forest,
mimed an apostrophe to a mirror, or a wishing well made of cardboard.
All along, the prerecorded bleating of monarchs and dogs.
THREE PICTURES
PUBLIC GARDEN
Birds. Hey birds! birds!
They don't even know me, the birds. Then crying.
CEMETERY
Aldan! All din!—
Baby's first word.
All done, all done—the name
of her brother roller skating
down a path too far from her.
FAIR
The youngest one lifted onto
a pony for the first time—
a wail impossible
for our alphabet to imitate—
being monosyllabic, like a body bag.
FERRYBOAT
A woman is telling her husband the sun
looks like diamonds where it
touches the water.
Like thousands of diamonds—
and she begins to count them—
One of those days, in other words,
when looking at water feels peaceful.
* * *
This
is peaceful.
This is
peaceful.
* * *
Cupolas. Empty porches and gazebos.
Shuttered windows toward the sea; or in the arched
windows of houses near the tabernacle—NO TRESPASSING.
Beauty nobody gets to have when they're
not here, but that is theirs.
* * *
Above the sea
a bird heaves itself
toward the dark.
* * *
Crossing the sound,
such envy of birds
from my bench on the boat.
POSTCARD FROM MY HOMETOWN IN SUMMER
The people are so happy here!
They walk barefoot alongside big American dogs.
They smile without embarrassment when they hand off restroom keys at
open-air cafés.
Were they always this happy?
Every year, a parade down Broadway, a fair on the waterfront—
Remind me. Was that an ostrich or a prostrate lion we rode?
All I remember is the merry-go-round,
the itinerant rides blinking like a street of jewelry shops.
DISPOSABLE CAMERA
For Karen
To a disposable camera I have confined the paradise
where my sister lives—
palisades, sycamores. Sunbathers mistaken for statuary.
People with shears, shrubbery cut into sea creatures.
Lemon trees bloom in front of houses.
Trophy wives escort children through mazes of palm trees.
In the shadows of palms the children paw their toys delicately
while the youngest one rides his plastic motorcycle toward his mother
with a confidence so absolute, so heartbreakingly
beautiful, everybody at the pier
hopes nothing will ever humiliate it, that it will persist
after the camera runs out of film.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Disposable Camera by JANET FOXMAN Copyright © 2012 by Janet Foxman. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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