the words of kenneth koch and co.

from “Quick Question” (2012)

POEM AT THE NEW YEAR

Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight, you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs, that would be my wish for you, my darling, my angel. But other principles prevail in this glum haven, don’t they? If that’s what it is. Then the wind fell of its own accord. We went out and saw that it had actually happened. The season stood motionless, alert. How still the dropp was on the burr I know not. I come all packaged and serene, yet I keep losing things. I wonder about Australia. Is it anything about Canada? Do pigeons flutter? Is there a strangeness there, to complete the one in me? Or must I relearn my filing system? Can we trust others to indict us who see us only in the evening rush hour, and never stop to think? O, I was so bright about you, my songbird, once. Now, cattails immolated in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for. The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off center. At least that’s how it feels to me. I know it as well as the streets in the map of my imagined industrial city. But it has its own way of slipping past. There was never any fullness that was going to be; you waited in line for things, and the stained light was impenitent. ‘Spiky’ was one adjective that came to mind, yet for all its raised or lower levels I approach this canal. Its time was right in winter. There was pipe smoke in cafés, and outside the great ashen bird streamed from lettered display windows, and waited a little way off. Another chance. It never became a gesture.

It takes a lot of a person’s life To be French, or English, or American Or Italian. And to be at any age. To live at any certain time. The Polish-born resident of Manhattan is not merely a representative of   general humanity And neither is this Sicilian fisherman stringing his bait Or to be any gender, born where or when Betty holding a big plate Karen crossing her post-World War Two legs And smiling across the table These three Italian boys age about twenty gesturing and talking And laughing after they get off the train Seem fifty percent Italian and the rest percent just plain Human race. O mystery of growing up! O history of going to school! O lovers O enchantments! The subject is not over because the photograph is over. The photographer sits down. Murnau makes the movie. Everything is a little bit off, but has a nationality. The oysters won’t help the refugees off the boats, Only other human creatures will. The phone rings and the Albanian   nationalist sits down. When he gets up he hasn’t become a Russian émigré or a German circus   clown A woman is carrying a basket—a beautiful sight! She is in and of   Madagascar. The uniformed Malay policeman sniffs the beer barrel that the brothers of   Ludwig are bringing close to him. All humanity likes to get drunk! Are differences then all on the surface? But even every surface gets hot In the sun. It may be that the surface is where we are all alike! But man and woman show that this isn’t true. We will get by, though. The train is puffing at the station But the station isn’t puffing at the train. This difference allows for a sense   of community As when people feel really glad to have cats and dogs And some even a few mice in the chimney. We are not alone In the universe, and the diversity causes comfort as well as difficulty. To be Italian takes at least half the day. To be Chinese seven-eighths of it. Only at evening when Chang Ho, repast over, sits down to smoke Is he exclusively human, in the way the train is exclusively itself when it is   in motion But that’s to say it wrongly. His being human is also his being seven-eighths   Chinese. Falling in love one may get, say, twenty percent back Toward universality, though that is probably all. Then when love’s gone One’s Nigerianness increases, or one’s quality of being of Nepal. An American may start out wishing To be everybody or that everybody were the same Which makes him or her at least eighty percent American. Dixit Charles   Peguy, circa 1912, “The good Lord created the French so that certain aspects of His creation Wouldn’t go unnoticed.” Like the taste of wheat, sirrah! Or the Japanese. So that someplace on earth there would be people who were Writing haiku. But think of the human body with its arms Its nose, its eyes, its brain often subject to alarms Think how much energy, work, and time have gone into it, To give us such a variegated kind of humanity! It takes fifteen seconds this morning to be a man, Twenty to be an old one, four to be an American, Two to be a college graduate and four or five hours to write. And what’s more, I love you! half of every hour for weeks or months for   this; Nine hundred seconds to be an admirer of Italian Renaissance painting, Sixteen hours to be someone awake. One is recognizably American, male, and of a certain generation. Nothing   takes these markers away. Even if I live in Indonesia as a native in a hut, someone coming through   there Will certainly gasp and say Why you’re an American! My optimism, my openness, my lack of a sense of history, My distinctive facial muscles ready to look angry or sad or sympathetic In a moment and not quite know where to go from there; My assuming that anything is possible, my deep sense of superiority And inferiority at the same time; my lack of culture, Except for the bookish kind; my way of acting with the dog, come here   Spotty! God damn! All these and hundreds more declare me to be what I am. It’s burdensome but also inevitable. I think so. Expatriates have had some success with the plastic surgery Of absence and departure. But it is never absolute. And then they must bear   the new identity as well. Irish or Russian, the individuality in them is often mistaken for nationality. The Russian finding a soul in the army officer, the Irishman finding in him   someone with whom he can drink. Consider the Volga boatman? One can only guess But probably about ninety percent Russian, eighty percent man, and thirty   percent boatman, Russian, man, and boatman, A good person for the job, a Russian man of the river. This dog is two-fifths wolf and less than one-thousandth a husband or   father. Dogs resist nationality by being breeds. This one is simply Alsatian. Though he may father forth a puppy Who seems totally something else if for example he (the Alsatian) is attracted To a poodle with powerful DNA. The puppy runs up to the Italian boys   who smile Thinking it would be fun to take it to Taormina Where they work in the hotel and to teach it tricks. A Frenchwoman marvels at this scene. The woman bends down to the dog and speaks to it in French. This is hopeful and funny. To the dog all human languages are a perfumed   fog. He wags and rises on his back legs. One Italian boy praises him, “Bravo!   canino!” Underneath there is the rumble of the metro train. The boy looks at the   woman. Life offers them these entangling moments as—who?—on a bicycle goes   past. It is a Congolese with the savannah on his shoulders And the sky in his heart, but his words as he passes are in French— “Bonjour, m'sieu dames,” and goes speeding off with his identity, His Congolese, millennial selfhood unchanging and changing place.