|
To
Kenneth Koch and Adolescence (After OSU reading, 5/3/00) |
Strategic pauses followed a question
in the sparse auditorium:
"Which 'address' poems never came to be?"
To which you finally replied, "To Adolescence. That one
just didn't work out."
And what a metaphor for adolescence, on a Wednesday night,
in a glass-encased mini-theatre with gray walls, much like the
waves
of circular distortion of your hair, of Van Gogh's "Starry
Night",
of anyplace you'd hear a doctor stammer, "We did everything
we could…
I'm sorry." What a succinct way to express adolescence,
anyone's in fact, who happened to be listening for a semblance
of symbolism
in the room at the time. You didn't smile when I photographed
you. So I
continued to wonder, ponder your discreet metaphor, as if you'd
coded it for me to find later while I traced wrist veins of memory
that used to bear razor trails. But that one just didn't work
out.
It was too trite to begin discussing. Over some boy, over some
argument with my mother, over the awkwardness of coming into
a language that straddled stockbroker dialect and the silence
of an inflatable woman, over my head. "So adolescence,"
you surely must have thought, "I won't address you.
Not in the memory of my first kiss or nocturnal emission,
not in the first time I slugged a beer, not in any of the times
I (surely must have) cried with my awkwardness into
the mother's apron of my pillowcase. Not to any portion
of the partitions of you, in your elusive way, treating
me as Prometheus and Odysseus simultaneously, not to
your secret decoder ring sentimentality, not that
you didn't prepare me for the discipline of men destroying
other men, or the women who defeated me just the same.
Oh, adolescence, you just wouldn't understand, just like
you never did and that is why I grew up to be a poet. Besides,
you would just go to your room and slam the door and crank up
your stereo, sneak out of your bedroom window, and go to
strip clubs anyway."
