April 23, 2010: from Jenny, Genya Turovskaya
from Jenny
Genya Turovskaya
Dear Jenny, I feel I am growing older, and the girls,
the girls are so pretty, and I am no closer to being the boy that I was than I am
to the man I thought I would be. I’m a cross country skier, Jenny, I cross
from the livingroom into the bedroom, from the kitchen into the hall.
I turn on the television, I watch it snow, I turn off the television, and the snow
presses on.
Please Jenny, I need your attention
for the pleasure inside me to buck up like the colt
whinnying in the meadow of my slightest recollection of that day,
the one to which I am forever returning, my hand in the air, waving
down the taxis that stream past like a school of yellow fish.
And all I can think is: Jenny, we’re getting this wrong!
Just look around you i? the marionettes
are tangled in their strings, the lovers are putting on their clothes,
the blondes have taken their blondeness away, the brunettes
have taken their dark, wet eyes, and where are the troubadours,
those torchlight crooners, where have they taken
their quivering lutes?
When I close my eyes, Jenny, I see everything
and everyone I have ever known falling at once, and I see the wind
which is made of fine blue wires
and clouds marching like animal armies across the sky: they are elephants
linked tail to trunk, and they fall too. If I could
have back but one small part of my diminishing mind, but one of the two
halves of my engorged heart I know I could fall asleep
in one place and wake up in another and it wouldn’t matter how I got there,
but Jenny, the trees
are green as dollars, and still there is doubt. The boys race their scooters
down the sidewalks and still there is doubt.
The girls are so pretty, and still there is doubt. There is a woman
holding a child, and still there is doubt.
I mean nothing
more than this: we move
from one into another into a third room,
and only there do we live casually in false etcetera.
==
[This is the second of three parts. Read the full poem here.]
On this day in…
2009: A Step Away From Them, Frank O’Hara
2008: Entry, Lisa Sewell
2007: Meanwhile, Richard Siken
2006: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Amiri Baraka
2005: Holy Sonnet XIV, John Donne
