Poem Friday.

Earlier this week, my oldest darling friend M. sent me a message, along with a link to the article in the New York Times which announced Matthew Zapruder as the Sunday Magazine's new poetry editor. My friend said she would like it if I would do as Matthew Z. will now do: post a poem once a week on my blog, prefaced by a few words. 

Nothing would please me more, especially since, in so doing, I can pretend just a little bit that I myself am Matthew Zapruder, and therefore that I am a poet that I myself much admire.

(Let me add parenthetically that I missed this delivery of the New York Times because my delivery situation is all fouled up, vis a vis the Sunday Times. It is the subject of much consternation and many emails, and still, still: I miss the paper the week that Matthew Z. debuts. Alas!)

Well, I think it's only fitting that for my first poem I pick a poem by Matthew Zapruder. So I did. This poem, which I found on the Poetry Foundation website. It was originally published in Poetry in September of 2010.

I like the flat sound of Zapruder's voice, although really, it just sounds like a person talking, a person with, perhaps, a mordant and dry wit, which is what I find attractive, really, in his poems. This poem,"The Prelude," makes reference to the Wordsworth epic, which I both did and did not read for my prelims, because although I love Wordsworth--a lot--The Prelude, like many epic poems, has its longueurs and dry parts. I love that the beginning of the poem has the poet invoking a refreshing beverage, a beverage which is, upon reflection, not quite so much refreshing in itself but rather redolent of sensations that lead nostalgically and synecdochically to other sensations. These take the poet back from a potentially rapturous walk in the world back to the city, where his ordinary temperament and self-doubts and his habit of verging on the dark await him. Just as our own natures, our own predilections always wait for us, no matter how many ways we try to transcend them:

Come to the edge
the edge beckoned softly. Take
this cup of darkness and stay as long 
as you want and maybe a little longer.

THE PRELUDE
Matthew Zapruder

Oh this Diet Coke is really good,

though come to think of it it tastes 

like nothing plus the idea of chocolate,

or an acquaintance of chocolate

speaking fondly of certain times

it and chocolate had spoken of nothing,

or nothing remembering a field

in which it once ate the most wondrous

sandwich of ham and rustic chambered cheese

yet still wished for a piece of chocolate

before the lone walk back through

the corn then the darkening forest

to the disappointing village and its super

creepy bed and breakfast. With secret despair

I returned to the city. Something 

seemed to be waiting for me. 

Maybe the “chosen guide” Wordsworth 

wrote he would even were it “nothing 

better than a wandering cloud”

have followed which of course to me

and everyone sounds amazing.

All I follow is my own desire, 

sometimes to feel, sometimes to be

at least a little more than intermittently

at ease with being loved. I am never

at ease. Not with hours I can read or walk

and look at the brightly colored

houses filled with lives, not with night

when I lie on my back and listen,

not with the hallway, definitely 

not with baseball, definitely 

not with time. Poor Coleridge, son

of a Vicar and a lake, he could not feel

the energy. No present joy, no cheerful

confidence, just love of friends and the wind

taking his arrow away. Come to the edge

the edge beckoned softly. Take

this cup full of darkness and stay as long

as you want and maybe a little longer.