ADVANCE PRAISE FOR FAILURE

"Philip Schultz's language reminds me of such modern masters as Isaac Rosenberg and Hart Crane. It's one thing I've always admired in his poetry; that and a heartbreaking tenderness that goes beyond mere pity and that is so present in Failure. It's as if he bears our pain." -Gerald Stern, winner of the National Book Award

"Philip Schultz's poems have long since earned their own place in American poetry. His stylistic trademarks are his great emotional directness and his intelligent haranguing--of God, the reader, and himself. He is one of the least affected of American poets, and one of the fiercest." -Tony Hoagland

"Call it a poetry of the multiple truths of the all-too-human, the American language profoundly shaped into inclusively, powerfully felt passion. Philip Schultz's Failure is a book of poems of the highest achievement by one of American poetry's longtime masters of the art."--Lawrence Joseph

PHILIP SCHULTZ won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Failure. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Paris Review, among other magazines. In addition, he is the founder and director of the Writers Studio in New York.

Failure

Poems

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Contents

It's Sunday Morning in Early November

and there are a lot of leaves already.
I could rake and get a head start.
The boys' summer toys need to be put
in the basement. I could clean it out
or fix the broken storm window.
When Eli gets home from Sunday school,
I could take him fishing. I don't fish
but I could learn to. I could show him
how much fun it is. We don't do as much
as we used to do. And my wife, there's
so much I haven't told her lately,
about how quickly my soul is aging,
how it feels like a basement I keep filling
with everything I'm tired of surviving.
I could take a walk with my wife and try
to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to.
Or I could read all those books piling up
about the beginning of the end of understanding ...
Meanwhile, it's such a beautiful morning,
the changing colors, the hypnotic light.
I could sit by the window watching the leaves,
which seem to know exactly how to fall
from one moment to the next. Or I could lose
everything and have to begin over again.


Talking to Ourselves

A woman in my doctor's office last week
couldn't stop talking about Niagara Falls,
the difference between dog and deer ticks,
how her oldest boy, killed in Iraq, would lie
with her at night in the summer grass, singing
Puccini. Her eyes looked at me but saw only
the saffron swirls of the quivering heavens.
Yesterday, Mr. Miller, our tidy neighbor,
stopped under our lopsided maple to explain
how his wife of sixty years died last month
of Alzheimer's. I stood there, listening to
his longing reach across the darkness with
each bruised breath of his eloquent singing.
This morning my five-year-old asked himself
why he'd come into the kitchen. I understood
he was thinking out loud, personifying himself,
but the intimacy of his small voice was surprising.
When my father's vending business was failing,
he'd talk to himself while driving, his lips
silently moving, his black eyes deliquescent.
He didn't care that I was there, listening,
what he was saying was too important.
"Too important," I hear myself saying
in the kitchen, putting the dishes away,
and my wife looks up from her reading
and asks, "What's that you said?"


Specimen

I turned sixty in Paris last year.
We stayed at the Lutetia,
where the Gestapo headquartered
during the war, my wife, two boys, and me,
and several old Vietnamese ladies
carrying poodles with diamond collars.
Once my father caught a man
stealing cigarettes out of one
of his vending machines.
He didn't stop choking him
until the pool hall stunk of excrement
and the body dropped to the floor
like a judgment.
When I was last in Paris
I was dirt poor, hiding
from the Vietnam War.
One night, in an old church,
I considered taking my life.
I didn't know how to be so young
and not belong anywhere, stuck
among so many perplexing melodies.
I loved the low white buildings,
the ingratiating colors, the ancient light.
We couldn't afford such luxury.
It was a matter of pride.
My father died bankrupt one week
before his sixtieth birthday.
I didn't expect to have a family;
I didn't expect happiness.
At the Lutetia everyone
dressed themselves like specimens
they'd loved all their lives.
Everyone floated down
red velvet hallways
like scintillating music
you hear only once or twice.
Driving home, my father said,
"Let anyone steal from you
and you're not fit to live."
I sat there, sliced by traffic lights,
not belonging to what he said.
I belonged to a scintillating
and perplexing music
I didn't expect to hear.


The Summer People

Santos, a strong, friendly man,
who built my wife's sculpture studio,
fixed everything I couldn't,
looked angry in town last week.
Then he stopped coming. We wondered
if we paid him enough, if he envied us.
Once he came over late to help me catch a bat
with a newspaper and trash basket.
He liked that I laughed at how scared I got.
We're "year rounds," what the locals call
summer people who live here full time.
Always in a hurry, the summer people honk a lot,
own bigger cars and houses. Once I beat a guy
in a pickup to a parking space, our summer sport.
"Lousy New Yorker!" he cried.
Every day now men from Guatemala, Ecuador,
and Mexico line up at the railroad station.
They know that they're despised,
that no one likes having to share their rewards,
or being made to feel spiteful.
When my uncle Joe showed me the shotgun
he kept near the cash register
to scare the black migrants
who bought his overpriced beer and cold cuts
in his grocery outside of Rochester, N.Y.,
his eyes blazed like emerald suns.
It's impossible to forget his eyes.
At parties the summer people
who moved here after 9/11
talk about all the things they had to give up.
It's beautiful here, they say, but everything
is tentative and strange,
as if the beauty isn't theirs to enjoy.
When I'm tired, my father's accent
scrapes my tongue like a scythe.
He never cut our grass or knew
what grade I was in. He worked days,
nights, and weekends, but failed anyway.
Late at night, when he was too tired to sleep,
he'd stare out the window so powerfully
the world inside and outside
our house would disappear.
In Guatemala, after working all day,
Santos studied to be an architect.
He suffered big dreams, his wife said.
My wife's studio is magnificent.
We'd hear him up there in the dark,
hammering and singing, as if
he were the happiest man alive.


The Magic Kingdom

It's a beautiful January Sunday morning,
the first morning of the new year,
and my old dogs limp behind me up the beach
as my sons scour the ocher sand like archivists
seeking the day's quota of mystery.
To them it's all a magical kingdom,
their minds tiny oceans of good and evil strategies,
the hard traffic of dreams
enclosed by a flourishing expectation.
We came here for the ripening light,
the silence of the enormous sky; to exult
in the shy jewels of sea glass
polished by the tides of the wind,
in the forlorn shrieks and chortling cries of gulls
rising and falling between their world and ours.
To be where it was lush,
lonely and secret enough.
At the edge of things,
in the shimmering spray
and flawless sparkle of seashells,
under the lonely momentum of clouds
lugging their mysterious cargoes all the way
to the horizon and back,
each a wish, a gift
that must be returned.
I never thought I'd have so much to give up;
that the view from this side of my life
would be so precious. Bless
these filaments of sea grass,
this chorus of piping plovers
and bickering wrens, each mile
these arthritic animals tag behind,
sniffing tire ruts, frothy craters of rotting driftwood,
lacy seaweed and scuttling crabs,
after something deliciously foul ...
Bless the plenitude of the suffering mind ...
its endless parade of disgrace
and spider's web of fear, the hunger
of the soul that expects to be despised
and cast out, the unforgiving ghosts
I visit late at night when only God is awake ...
Bless this ice-glazed garden of bleached stones
strewn like tiny pieces of moonlight
in sand puddles,
the wind's grievous sigh,
the singing light,
the salt, the salt!
Most of all bless these boys
shivering in the chill light,
their fragile smallness and strange intransigence,
so curious and shining. Bless
their believing happiness will make them happy;
that the ocean is magical, a kingdom
where we go to be human,
and grateful.


Louse Point

I've wanted to write my way into paradise,
leaving the door open for others ... Instead
I am scribbling, beneath its wall, with the door
shut.

— David Ignatow

This is where we came to swim
around grassy islands, past dories
and osprey nests hoisted high
under the muted blues, ravenous reds
and lush hospitable yellows
of the wide East Hampton sky —
a place, you said, where one
can almost forgive oneself.
Once you visited late to say
your wife, mistress, and daughter
all hated you, that love wasn't fate
or salvation, but a cold back room
of paradise. Neither of us asked why,
after a lifetime of writing about sorrow,
you lived in a back room of your house.
You loved me like a son, you whispered
on my fortieth birthday, ready
to rush off if I looked displeased.
Our favorite game was guessing
how much truth someone could tolerate.
For P, you wrote on your last book,
the passionate pilgrim through this sickness
called the world. The truth is, I think,
you wanted the world to father you,
to heal the sickness of your soul.
I saw you, weeks before you died,
in the A & P, straining to read
a soup can in the hard fluorescent haze.
I wanted to explain why I avoided you,
chose love, but you shrugged
and turned away when I tried
to introduce my wife. I didn't go
to your funeral, but, late at night, I
bathe in the beautiful ashes of your words.
I think of you today as my wife hovers
like a mother swan and my sons fish
for hermit crabs scurrying sideways
across the surf. You, too, wanted to shed
your life, renew yourself. Still the waves
are jubilant, slightly off-key, the wind
whispers its few small truths to the earth,
and the migrant clouds stretch forlorn wings
all the way to the open door of paradise.


The Idea of California

Yiddish is the language of children wandering
for a thousand years in a nightmare, assimilating
languages to no avail.

— Leonard Michaels

I liked the music of
his propulsive rage,
his crazy decapitated
metaphors that lived
one inside the other
like savage scroungers.
I liked his wild hunger
to smash the world
hidden inside each spat
out word. Most of all
I liked the rage, and
wrote him a fan letter
after I read his first book.
He invited me to lunch
in Berkeley, where he
taught Byron, of all people.
Why was he, someone
who spoke not one word
of English until he was six,
a nervous child of Yiddish
speaking immigrants, who
grew up in a tenement
on the Lower East Side,
teaching an English fancy pants?
"Dreams do divide our being ...
tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
they make us what we were not ..."
he sang. We had a lot in
common and therefore
little to say. Asked to read
together in a town south
of San Francisco seventeen
years later, we roared along
the ocean in his bloodred
Alfa Romeo, under foggy
mountains and a glinting sky,
yelling over the wind. "Byron
would've loved the idea
of California, not the place,"
he screamed. He was writing
movies, not fiction, he said.
Why? "Because writing fiction
makes me happy." Didn't he
want to be? "Sometimes it's
more tyranny than I can tolerate."
Was that the idea of California,
to be happy? Around us tiny
explosions of clouds, ebullient
sapphire light, wounded curves,
and the sunken emerald ocean.
"Byron would've thought so,"
he said. We read love stories,
our only subject, we agreed.
Later, in a bar, after margaritas
and all that opulent light, we
wrote a poem, he one line,
I the next. He was seventy
when he died in Rome,
ancient when we first met,
but not today as I sit looking
at his photo in the Times,
his black eyes daring me
to write a last line. Our poem,
I remember, was about the pain
and pleasure of being divided
by what we were not, of
wandering endlessly
in the language of children.


Kodak Park Athletic Association, 1954

Nobody wanted the Schwartz boys together
in one room. Arthur pinched while Moshe tore
your shirt off with his teeth. Hymie punched himself
for a nickel, knocked himself out for a dime.
They played first, third, and center. Danny Enright
pulled up on his red Schwinn and slapped your face,
twice. His older brother Liam dragged you by the hair
(which is why we all shaved our heads). Danny was
our second baseman, Liam our shortstop. Tommy
Hildebrand could knock you off the Hixon Street
Playground with a slider (aimed at the cowardly mole
between your eyes) from his roof across the street.
I won't say what his cousin Bim did with his thumbs,
but Tommy was our pitcher, Bim our motivator.
Tyrone Enrique Madison, our catcher, the fastest kid
in the Finger Lakes, didn't wear a mask or pads,
he carried a knife. None of our dads ever came to a game.
We swiped equipment, slid through mud and glass,
cajoled, cussed, and bullied our way through four seasons,
fleeing the darkness inside to the darkness outside,
until the park became a supermarket and all that yelling
a framed photo that said: "Outstanding Members of
the Community." We got Brownie Automatics and learned
a few things: winning hurts less, nothing about yourself
has to be loved; never want anything out loud, or end up
out in left field where everyone is the son of a failure.


Grief

My wife is happier this morning.
Valentine's Day, the kids and I went all out,
candy, cards, heart-shaped cookies.
Gus, our smooth Fox Terrier,
mopes around, tail down, grieving
for our black Lab mix, Benya,
who still sleeps in our boys' room.
Gary, my wife's younger brother,
no longer lives in his photos on her dresser.
He prefers to stand behind our maple,
hands in pockets, trying not to interfere.
My friend Yehuda still drops by without calling.
Right now, he's marching backwards
around my study, making the sound
of every instrument in the Israeli Philharmonic,
hoping to cheer me up. I used to think
the dead preferred their own company.
They don't. They prefer ours.


The Absent

They follow me up the beach,
carefully stepping over tire ruts,
glancing about, stepping into the surf,
sighing, whispering, lagging behind,
not wanting to impose, my lovely dead,
still distracted, surprised by eternal exile.


My Dog

His large black body lies on his bed across the room,
under the French doors, where he used to sleep, watching me.
The vet said to cover him with a blanket, but I can't.
Two hours ago he moaned loudly and let go of his life.
My wife dreamed of his death in Paris but didn't tell me.
I drove home from the airport imagining him at the door,
tail wagging. He introduced me to my wife in a dog run,
stood proudly beside me at our wedding, handsome
in a red bow tie. He faced wherever I was, sat staring out
the window if I was away. If you haven't loved a dog
you'll find it hard to believe he knew it was time to die
but wanted to wait two weeks for me to come home.
I'll spread his ashes at the beach where we walked nearly
every day for twelve years, this gentle creature following me
the mile and a half to the breakers and then back to our car.


The Garden

In Memory of Joel Dean

Years before I moved next door,
Joel gave Jack gardening books
and Jack made a garden out of
his passion for geometry, and chance.
He raked, clawed, and watered each
peculiar vision until the daylilies
were good company and the azaleas
were immaculate and dignified.
I used to stand on my side of the red cedars,
listening to Jack's endless scraping,
envying his devotion. I was alone then
but understood love was a gift,
a vast, unbroken conversation.
Yesterday, Jack scraped all morning,
on his hands and knees, weeding,
plucking musical vines. Ask and he'll say
their forty-six years was a garden of exquisite design.
It's best to remember the peonies,
the quaint delirium of lilacs, and Joel
at the back door enjoying the reunion
of cardinals, robins, and pesky blue jays
speaking the language of color and delight,
the language of chance and endless change.


Exquisite with Agony

Only the guilty ask why
they deserved such punishment,
only the stupid expect kindness.
Always it comes to this:
how much pain we can tolerate.
Yesterday, in our town,
a two-year-old girl drowned
in her grandmother's pool.
The woman, who had lived most
of her life on the good side
of this moment, left to get mail,
heard a door open and ran
to find everything once luminous
and unyielding smashed. A child
drowns quickly, silently,
without knowledge of what
is being sacrificed. This is
what we cannot accept,
the idea of blameless loss.
This is why we blame ourselves.
What if it was winter, the pool
door closed, one's need
to retrieve news, fend off debt,
escape the stress of constant
vigilance wasn't so irresistible ...
Three generations of womanhood
floated at the bottom of a moment
so crystalline, so immovable,
the mind, once regarded as divine,
the entrance to the soul, tries
to sever itself from the horror
and enterprising plenitude of
its suffering, to free its vanquished
chieftain soul and rise above
and no longer fear its own vengeful
nature, to live a more dignified,
less fearful existence, if only for
a few blessed moments ... like
the Efugaos of the Philippines,
who suck the brains of their foes
in order to acquire their audacity,
the mind swallows itself, falls into
a deep black sleep from which all
light is drained, exquisite with agony,
Lord!