Two Poems
The Hard-Charging Businessman
Like us, the hard-charging businessman is having dinner
on the terrace of the hotel at Mycenae, only he is taking
phone calls as well, and while the rest of us are marveling
over the untouched nature of the tombs at the nearby
archeological site or puzzling with our dinner companions
over the whys and wherefores of Bronze Age
technology, the hard-charging businessman is shouting at the person
on the other end of the line about the units that went here,
the ones that went there, the ones that were supposed to go
someplace else but didn’t. Greece, how beautiful you are.
Your temples, your streams and lakes, your willows and oleanders
and olive groves, your wild orchids, cyclamens,
and gladiolas. Why didn’t you tell me earlier, cries
the hard-charging businessman? Someone’s going to pay
for this, I’m not made of money, I’ll make a fool of myself
if I feel like it, tell Sammy I’m going to kill him.
Kick ass, hard-charging businessman! The rest of us
are tucking into our grilled fish and sneaking tidbits
to Omar, the hotel cat, and even though we can’t decide
which are prettier, the olive trees or the cypress
trees, we all agree that water the color of sapphires
is the prettiest of all. There’s going to be hell to pay
when I get back from Belgium, says the hard-charging
businessman, heads will roll, no bonuses this year,
I want everybody in my office Tuesday morning
at ten. Sweet is the night air here on the terrace
of the hotel at Mycenae, only, from the long line
of spray where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
you can hear the hard-charging businessman as he kicks
more and more ass. Oh, oh—bad Omar! When
the hard-charging businessman steps away from
his table to take an especially complicated call,
Omar jumps up on his table and helps himself
to the hard-charging businessman’s fish! Everyone
has a good laugh—well, not the hard-charging
businessman. Yet does not the hard-charging businessman
kick ass so the rest of us don’t have to? Is your fish
as fresh as though it just leapt from the sapphire-blue
water that morning? Are the sheets on your bed
at the hotel here in Mycenae soft and clean?
Will your car start, will your bank card work
when you visit the ATM, will there be olives
and cheese and bread and apples at the little store
you go to for your picnic supplies? Will there even be
an ATM? And when you stop your car for the picnic,
will it start again? If the answers to these questions
are yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes, chances are
someone had to kick someone else’s ass to make
all that happen. And therefore let not you, reader,
who are as much of a toffee-nosed aesthete as I am,
look down that excellent organ of olfactory perception
at the hard-charging businessman, no matter how
much ass he kicks or how hard he kicks it. As for you,
Omar, if you have been spayed, that is because
the hard-charging businessman either paid taxes
to support a spay and neuter clinic or made a charitable
donation to one or both, neither one of which he could have
have done had he not kicked a certain amount of ass. So you
needn’t stick your leg over your head and lick yourself
and then wander off as though nothing happened.
Fuck you, Omar! Just kidding. This world needs
the hard-charging businessman and you.
And the fish. And if you’re not spayed, you should be.
What If the Germans Had Won?
Would it have been so bad? Probably they would
have gotten tired of our candy-ass ways
and gone back to Germany—the Mongolians asked
the Bolsheviks for help in 1921, but after the Reds
sent troops to beat back the Chinese, they oppressed
their hosts until they got tired of it and left, meaning
that everybody in Mongolian today is Mongolian again,
not Russian and certainly not Chinese. We’d have
had to speak German for a couple of years, but then
we’d all be bilingual, wouldn’t we? We’d be fully
globalized and ready to do business with our new
friends, the Germans. Okay, you’d have to put Hitler
to one side, but isn’t that what poetry’s for? Kokoschka
was admitted into the same art school the future
Führer applied to, but “unfortunately Hitler failed
the exam. If I had failed in his place, the world would
have been spared a good deal of misery,” said the artist;
“Hitler would have become a bad painter, and I should
have become a reasonable, understanding politician.”
Hitler would have ended up giving lessons to schoolkids,
muttering about foreigners in cafés, and showing in
a friend’s gallery every few years, if he’d had a friend.
Oh, poetry, why can’t you make all this happen?
You’re part words, part music; can’t you draw a crowd
with your pipes and timbrels and then talk sense
into them? Don’t tell Music I said so, but you’re better
than it. Hitler’s goons listened to Beethoven as they built
their death camps and marched the people into them.
They should have listened to Rossini: when you listen
to Beethoven, says a character in Gravity’s Rainbow,
all you want to do is invade Poland, but with Rossini,
the lovers unite, isolation is overcome, walls are breached,
balconies scaled—listen! “The Italian girl is in Algiers,”
he says, “the Barber’s in the crockery, the magpie’s
stealing everything in sight!” In the midst of greed,
pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs;
shit is turned into gold, and the whole world
rushes together. Poetry does that, too, only not in big concert halls.
Poetry, you’re a woman reading in a chair by firelight;
you’re reading Yeats, how Love paces the mountains
and hides his face amid the stars, and you pause
to put another log on the fire and go back
to your book. Or you’re a man in Paris waiting for
the waiter to bring his coffee, or you’re two lovers
in a meadow—you’re certainly not an auditorium bursting with thugs
in their death’s-head uniforms and their brittle
wives. Oh, you remember war: the Iliad is more or less
a training manual for that pastime. But a better poem is the Odyssey
with its wily hero, at once wise and arrogant,
like, well, pretty much everybody. Or the way most of us
think of ourselves, at least. Serb poet Vasko Popa says poetry
is not written by lovesick teenagers but by sly old tricksters.
You go from house to house in every neighborhood, poetry,
from table to table, field to field. You don’t say, “Stop killing!”
to the people. You don’t say anything, really. When I read
you, I don’t want to kill anyone, though I guess someone
could kill me as I weep and chuckle, totally engrossed.
Okay, anonymous assassin, cut it out! Go kill
somebody else! Wait, don’t kill anybody. Here, read this poem,
it’s by Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Rilke, some little girl
who doesn’t even know she’s a poet yet. Okay, Astrid
or Gretchen or Dagmar or whatever your name is, let’s see
what you’ve written. Hey, not bad for a kid! Keep it up.
David Kirby’s collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” His most recent poetry collection is A Wilderness of Monkeys. For more information, see www.davidkirby.com.