the bases, used to be a schmooze artist, ladies’ man, seducer, used to be husband to three women and father to three daughters, promising author of two books of poetry, published by a major press, major, not minor (verses in minor key but not of the minor leagues), with tributes from luminaries plastered on back covers with that significant word he had relished, chewed over, sucked on long and hard: Whitmanian ? The kid’s work is “Whitmanian,” and there were no less than three exclamation marks that ended sentences inside those blurbs by notables of international reputation, emphatic punctuation for emphatically bright boy who raked in grant money on strength of looming hill yonder, young, handsome poet whippersnapper who begins epic poem, poem for the ages, the poem to end all American poems.
And he writes, and he writes, and he writes, and then he writes it again, and he cannot get it just the way he wants it. And as he writes it, the years pass; he marries and divorces, and he marries and divorces again and then again; children are born, and he is still writing the poem, and he cannot get it the way he wants it. Sometimes he can’t see it anymore. He is under the poem, and it is threatening to crush him. He wants the bullshit out of it; don’t you see? B.K. hopes to purify MS. of all B.S. and climb said hill, and he cannot get over it. There are days when he feels he is pushing the poem toward the top, and he can almost see the other side, but then, like Sisyphus, he cannot get it to roll over the summit.
And so one morning in October, the false Kleinfeld is gently easing a turd from his aged ass into poorly functioning toilet bowl in aforementioned rat hole with the window shade slightly raised for viewing traffic below and large warehouse building across the street, where renovations have been underfoot for quite some time, and he sees her again, the woman he has seen often, nearly every day for many months, and has heard tell about, the tall, striding woman with a pair of tits that make his heart stop. There she is again in another coat, a fern-green number with wide sleeves and some kind of built-in scarf that sweeps over her shoulder. Kleinfeld has an idea that the woman has a closet with nothing but coats in it and another for boots, since those changed, too. She is wrapped up daily, he thinks, in the magic of money, which means simply this: You can tell she isn’t thinking about the coat or the boots; they just are. The poor wear their prizes—the gleaming new leather shoes, the just-off-the-rack sweater, the expensive gloves—with a stiff self-conscious air that gives them away. No, her mind is on greater things, he says to himself. You can tell by the little V between her eyebrows, a philosophical wrinkle, he believes, not a run-of-the-mill V carved in deep by sick worry about rent money and groceries. Hadn’t he spied her once, quite by accident, on the remote F train reading Schelling? God help us, the woman was reading Friedrich von Schelling on the F as calmly as if she were gliding through the Daily News . The old Bruno, the speed demon, had looked into Schelling once as an undergraduate and had taken a bad fright, equaled only by his opening up the Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who also scared the boy witless. This was not some regular dame. No, this was a doll with high tastes, with ideas dancing in her head like fireflies. The lady’s hair was a jumble of curls and her eyes were big and wide and dark, and she had a long neck and wide, square shoulders, and that day, that October morning, as she crossed the street below him, just as she had crossed it many times before, he saw something vulnerable and hurt cross her face that came like a breeze and, as it blew, she suddenly looked very young. Her mouth, her brows, her eyes all contributed to the expression, which didn’t last long, but it seemed to Kleinfeld’s double, sitting there on the pot, boxers around his
And he writes, and he writes, and he writes, and then he writes it again, and he cannot get it just the way he wants it. And as he writes it, the years pass; he marries and divorces, and he marries and divorces again and then again; children are born, and he is still writing the poem, and he cannot get it the way he wants it. Sometimes he can’t see it anymore. He is under the poem, and it is threatening to crush him. He wants the bullshit out of it; don’t you see? B.K. hopes to purify MS. of all B.S. and climb said hill, and he cannot get over it. There are days when he feels he is pushing the poem toward the top, and he can almost see the other side, but then, like Sisyphus, he cannot get it to roll over the summit.
And so one morning in October, the false Kleinfeld is gently easing a turd from his aged ass into poorly functioning toilet bowl in aforementioned rat hole with the window shade slightly raised for viewing traffic below and large warehouse building across the street, where renovations have been underfoot for quite some time, and he sees her again, the woman he has seen often, nearly every day for many months, and has heard tell about, the tall, striding woman with a pair of tits that make his heart stop. There she is again in another coat, a fern-green number with wide sleeves and some kind of built-in scarf that sweeps over her shoulder. Kleinfeld has an idea that the woman has a closet with nothing but coats in it and another for boots, since those changed, too. She is wrapped up daily, he thinks, in the magic of money, which means simply this: You can tell she isn’t thinking about the coat or the boots; they just are. The poor wear their prizes—the gleaming new leather shoes, the just-off-the-rack sweater, the expensive gloves—with a stiff self-conscious air that gives them away. No, her mind is on greater things, he says to himself. You can tell by the little V between her eyebrows, a philosophical wrinkle, he believes, not a run-of-the-mill V carved in deep by sick worry about rent money and groceries. Hadn’t he spied her once, quite by accident, on the remote F train reading Schelling? God help us, the woman was reading Friedrich von Schelling on the F as calmly as if she were gliding through the Daily News . The old Bruno, the speed demon, had looked into Schelling once as an undergraduate and had taken a bad fright, equaled only by his opening up the Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who also scared the boy witless. This was not some regular dame. No, this was a doll with high tastes, with ideas dancing in her head like fireflies. The lady’s hair was a jumble of curls and her eyes were big and wide and dark, and she had a long neck and wide, square shoulders, and that day, that October morning, as she crossed the street below him, just as she had crossed it many times before, he saw something vulnerable and hurt cross her face that came like a breeze and, as it blew, she suddenly looked very young. Her mouth, her brows, her eyes all contributed to the expression, which didn’t last long, but it seemed to Kleinfeld’s double, sitting there on the pot, boxers around his
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