Credit: Ebru Yildiz
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These two poems are excerpts from Wayne Koestenbaum‘s forthcoming book, Camp Marmalade, to be published in February 2018 by Nightboat Books. Camp Marmalade is the sequel to The Pink Trance Notebooks, which Nightboat published in 2015. Both The Pink Trance Notebooks and Camp Marmalade consist of notebooks — chains of aphorisms, linguistic tidbits, aleatory ruminations, lyric or narrative fragments…
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#20 [thick book on mother-shelf pinnacled me o’er Tums]
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……………………..good morning,
punctuated self—
_________
Lee Krasner proves it—stay
awake to the redemptive glyph
_________
………….scrutinized first chapter
and thought every statement dead wrong
except chartreuse and neon orange
________
……………………..cough
hurts right lung—even when I don’t
cough, the right lung has a lumpy
vanilla crunch feeling—in my arteries too
_________
………….M said Faerie
Queene is boring but thick book of it
on mother-shelf pinnacled me o’er
Tums—
_________
………….Hans Bellmer
receives hate mail USPS
grab bag of slain doll parts
_________
………….irenic
or oneiric gabbing
like 4-H club for gay hoofers
and Oona O’Neill
will be there and Nicole Kidman
good Nicole not bad Nicole
like moon Nicole versus Apollo Nicole—
but moon isn’t versus Apollo
_________
………….what is the
Harlequin Romance equivalent of
“friends, Romans, countrymen”?
_________
………….obtuse
is an ob word like obscene or
oblate or obsequy—
_________
……………………..to stretch
one’s loins across the public domain—
_________
……………………..why
do shrinks even when off-duty
refuse warmth and ebullience?
or do I specialize
in non-ebullient shrinks?
_________
use her talky head to block
the blinding sun
_________
tidbit was dead woman’s word, we
shared tidbit and also transcendent
and now she’s dead and I never told
her we shared tidbit and transcendent
_________
………….seeing I Never
Sang for My Father with my mother
long ago in a movie theater—
_________
be glad you never sang
for your father
_________
………….trying to prove that I
was Jewish despite ignorance
of the covenant—
_________
……………………..I saw a disgruntled
bride in flipflops lift her wedding dress
and walk at rush hour past Penn Station—
_________
stretched out like her dead
nurse mother whose
malted milk taste I still can’t fathom
_________
………….mother whose car
we wrecked in stop-and-go traffic
en route to Richard III or The Oresteia
_________
……………………..reaching
toward narrative but not necessarily
approving of the reach
_________
which Kafka was I glad to meet
in Mykonos dream?
_________
or a Massenet opera that might
not exist like La Bouillabaisse—
a long river cutting through Manon—
a good river advocating conversion
to frivolity—
_________
reunion cakewalk for retiring
kindergarten teacher who
expresses recognition when seeing me—
_________
……………………..rose glow
reflected on dull warehouse, blue
sky shined flat and pink by emigration
of rival color—
_________
sped up from pink extrojection,
wanting to subdue him in a scenario
of erotic torture based on my thinness
and his fatness—
_________
woman who ran a French
restaurant in St. Croix—
I envied her boozy
leathery ease—motorcycle—finality—
_________
writing on a paper napkin
a few un-causal enlightenment
nouns, like junk, hazard,
dumbness, Dillinger,
sexpot, dysfunction—
_________
………….two hours of giddy
threshold consciousness—
_________
a few stunned lyrics
to signalize my stupor
_________
again the hilly outline’s Pompeii
lump as the Jew hears it—
“the Jew” means not a
generality but a specific listener
who actually likes sex
and told me so
_________
………….unless I’m this Jew, too,
doublecrossing the earlier,
spread-out, novel Jew—
_________
………….stiff box for requested pearl
granted but lost, a pearl I didn’t
understand though I craved it
as girl-sign under night-cover
of boy-dawn
_________
everyone has a nadir, a
Nadja—even Nadja has a Nadja
_________
………….I spoke about
the solidity of nouns,
a U in the regarded
eggy or jizzy corner
_________
………….my throat
is not my own, it has become
a colony of national interests
_________
………….green soot posing
as lake cover
_________
………….cream of spinach
soup, my mother’s body when she suspected
food poisoning or experienced its greeny
symptoms—
_________
………….indiscreet
revelation about her ex—
I love triangulating
via unwise confessions
_________
……………………..my lips
logical except when I teach
my baby sister the art of shoplifting—
_________
Miltonic or Latinate relation to sideburn
length and thickness, George
Burns and Robert Burns and
Raymond Burr and Burl Ives—
___________
…………………………………leave Burl
off the list of treasured burns
_________
Blythe Danner isn’t burly
_________
……………………..Morton Feldman
was once my mother’s friend—
is that fact her property?
_________
………….we have in common
a predilection for killing plants—
no ability to keep a plant
alive—that’s an exaggeration—
three roses in her sideyard, maybe more
_________
………….Carlotta my unmet
unphotographed step-grandmother,
to designate her with regal sobriquet
_________
another green succulent
covering a pond
surface with scum
_________
………….skim the nitwit
coating off my tongue
_________
………….Thoreau died at 44,
killed by Apollo
_________
………….you have to be killed
by someone, might as well
be killed by Apollo
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§
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#15 [imprisoned within Busby Berkeley or the ethereal phlox]
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………….I draw butt
well because butt is elementary
_________
we say nautical because
we want to avoid naughty
_________
imprecise speech stovepipes
our position and we come
to love the stove
and its scarred pedigree
_________
immoral penis is the obvious
place to juxtapose somno-
fascist and dewlap?
figuration and abstract bagel?
_________
is Tachisme a movement
celebrating rough clumsy
texture—why sigh again like
Ophelia or her supporters?
_________
dipping into Frigidaire
we praise the book and
know its contours are
orderly, governed by proxy
and whim in lower region
_________
the sick mental wife drops
glove, and law helps,
law is recourse
when stents bloom, if bloom
squeezes his daffodils
or the ethereal phlox
_______
he pretends to know my sex
and photos it—
_________
………….1940 is she ten and
reading Black Beauty
watching Waterloo Bridge
Vivien Leigh?
_________
………….1958 I’m reading
Marjorie Morningstar, sending
emails to Leigh’s agent
_________
………….because syntax
has credibility and purse-like
we see syntax and can predict
its maneuvers and love
and forgive them in advance
_________
………….stones receive
sunlight, small
like teen friend dick-bush still
remembered
_________
lichen too has an unconscious—
_________
………….but his face
is so improbably handsome I
could die, his hair so phenomenal
I might need to do something radical—
_________
putting on lipstick
I wrote about fashion
classics in the Catskills
_________
………….he holds
himself like a hamburger,
hep to the hemisphere, an ass
presented to the camera
unconventionally
_________
………….Lauren Bacall
was Jewish and she died and I
really hope she doesn’t
show up because that would hold
a certain amount of bliss
in its pocket
_________
………….seersucker
yellow dream mother was
coherent, and the coherence fell
away like the difference
between ages 83 and 89—
_________
he treats me suddenly
with knife voice
edge shattering
Brünnhilde upon me
_________
………….the leaf of
when she thought I was her
favorite son and I leaned
upon her knee or its in-
dentation like A Star Is Born
oceanic suicide
_________
like a handsome guy in
basement doing laundry
and refusing to recognize me—
_________
my mother’s draught
of raw egg, raw beef blood
and onion—to ease
the ache of being
a girl in that household
_________
men were attracted to me
because of my big hips
she said
_________
cup with Sudek facets—
specialize in simple
forms and render them clearly—
_________
syntax contains only a few
available slots, capitalize
on each
_________
………….I called
my mother and she resorted,
bless her, to polite formula
_________
the recourse was mah-jongg,
the caregivers were three
_________
he sees me as evil but has
no prosecutor with whom
to share his verdict—
_________
………….it boils down to
a strange narcoleptic
cult of seriousness, to
be considered evil
by a quorum
_________
a consciousness defined by
the status (washed, unwashed)
of a coffee pot or a
cock (cut, uncut)—
_________
carving out a piece of
my Nachtigall stomach
_________
………….an eye imprisoned
within Busby Berkeley
corollas
_________
………….find
eros in blankness,
then behold his blotches—
don’t cry, he survives his
blotches and neither splices
nor censors them—
—Wayne Koestenbaum
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Wayne Koestenbaum has published eighteen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, including Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). He has had solo exhibitions of his paintings at White Columns (New York), 356 Mission (L.A.), and the University of Kentucky Art Museum. His first piano/vocal record, Lounge Act, was issued by Ugly Duckling Presse Records this year. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and French at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.