Jeffrey McDaniel: Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back

I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row

has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.

The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.

Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,

which certainly was one of a kind.

A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,

I surrendered my identity in your eyes.

Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny,

the way monogamy is funny, the way

someone falling down in the street is funny.

I entered a revolving door and emerged

as a human being. When you think of me

is my face electronically blurred?

I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest

satellite dish in the universe, your smile

as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.

Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.

I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash,

how I once held the soft audience of your hand.

I've been ignored by prettier women than you,

but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence

so far, without spilling a drop.

Jeffrey McDaniel: Grace

Glance at a woman on a train platform.
Suddenly we've been married for years.

I know all the delicate nuances
in her nine dialects of silence.

Can pick her from a thousand others
just with a sniff of her neck.

We sit next to each other, as we always have.

Our elbows touch, like the tips of matches.
Exactly the way I remember.

When she says excuse me, this is my stop,
There is nothing awkward about it.

Jeffrey McDaniel: A csendes világ

Annak érdekében, hogy az emberek
többet nézzenek egymás szemébe,
és kedvezzenek a némáknak,
a kormány úgy döntött,
minden embernek kioszt pontosan
százhatvanhét szót naponta.

Amikor a telefon csörög, a fülemhez teszem
anélkül, hogy beleszólnék. Az étteremben
rámutatok a húslevesre metélttésztával.
Jól alkalmazkodtam az új rendszerhez.
Késő este felhívom a távoli szerelmemet, büszkén
újságolva, csak ötvenkilenc szót használtam ma.
A többit meghagytam neked.

Amikor nem válaszol,
tudom, hogy elhasználta az összes szavát,
így lassan azt suttogom, szeretlek,
harminckét és egyharmad alkalommal.
Utána csak ülünk,
és hallgatjuk egymás lélegzetvételét.

--Fordította: Ferencz Mónika

Jeffrey McDaniel: The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice
the ring that's landed on your finger, a massive
insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end

of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt
in your voice under a blanket and said there's two kinds
of women—those you write poems about

and those you don't. It's true. I never brought you
a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.
My idea of courtship was tapping Jane's Addiction

lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M.,
whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked
within the confines of my character, cast

as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan
of your dark side. We don't have a past so much
as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power

never put to good use. What we had together
makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught
one another like colds, and desire was merely

a symptom that could be treated with soup
and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now,
I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy,

as if I invented it, but I'm still not immune
to your waterfall scent, still haven't developed
antibodies for your smile. I don't know how long

regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don't know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light

of a candle being blown out travels faster
than the luminescence of one that's just been lit,
but I do know that all our huffing and puffing

into each other's ears—as if the brain was a trick
birthday candle—didn't make the silence
any easier to navigate. I'm sorry all the kisses

I scrawled on your neck were written
in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you
so hard one of your legs would pop out

of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you'd press
your face against the porthole of my submarine.
I'm sorry this poem has taken thirteen years

to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding
off the shoulder blade's precipice and joyriding
over flesh, we'd put our hands away like chocolate

to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy
of each other's eyelashes, translated a paragraph
from the volumes of what couldn't be said.

Jeffrey McDaniel: Absence

On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more
than someone else’s presence, so I say no thanks
to the woman who throws her girdle at my feet,
as I drop a postcard in the mailbox and watch it
throb like a blue heart in the dark. Your eyes
are so green – one of your parents must be
part traffic light. We’re both self-centered,
but the world revolves around us at the same speed.
Last night I tossed and turned inside a thundercloud.
This morning my sheets were covered in pollen.
I remember the long division of Saturday’s
pomegranate, a thousand nebulae in your hair,
as soldiers marched by, dragging big army bags
filled with water balloons, and we passed a lit match,
back and forth, between our lips, under an oak tree
I had absolutely nothing to do with.

Jeffrey McDaniel: Where Babies Come From

For my eighth birthday
I got a toy train set
my father helped assemble.

My job was to hand him
pieces of track and re-light
the cigarettes that went out

in his mouth. Halfway
through, I asked him
where babies come from.

He told me that eight years
ago today I showed up
on the front stoop

in a cardboard box, how
he spent the whole afternoon
putting me together,

just like this train set,
that I was probably lucky
the box arrived on a Saturday.

Jeffrey McDaniel: The Archipelago of Kisses

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t grow
on trees like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy – like being
unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn’t
be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so g

ood kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The I wish you’d quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get older,
kisses become scarce. You’ll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. Now if you
were younger, you’d pull over, slide open the mouth’s ruby door
just to see how it fits. Oh where
does one find love? If you rub two glances together, you get
a smile; rub two smiles, you get
a spark; rub two sparks together and you have a kiss. Now
what? Don’t invite the kiss
to your house and answer the door in your underwear. It’ll get
suspicious and stare at your toes.
Don’t water the kiss with whiskey. It’ll turn bright pink and explode
into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it’ll be ashamed and sneak out of your body
without saying goodbye,
and you’ll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Dim the lights, notice how it illuminates
the room. Clutch it to your chest,
wonder if the sand inside every hourglass comes from a special
beach. Place it on the tongue’s pillow,
then look up the first recorded French kiss in history: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1300 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection
of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when
I’m dead, I’ll swim through the earth
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.