Second Place Winner, May 2008 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

Filed In:

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, May 2008

WHAT APRIL IN NEW YORK IS *Guy Kettelhack* (About Poetry Forum) You take your bony awkwardness into the April day — too warm for May — and yet the nearly naked trees are barely March: well, that’s what April in New York is. Gold scrabbles here and there: forsythia: frail runty yellow feathers sprout from scanty soil — buttering a toss of corners in the side-walked town: you stumble down the pavement like a scarecrow with a tooth ache: pretty close to true. (Another poem snatches pain from you and turns it into point of view.) If you are to love this city you suppose it can’t be only when the two of you are pretty, which Lord knows, right now, my dear, you aren’t. Currents lurch: bipolar — hot/cold — devil-zephyrs from the river twiddle with the ordinariness of people — tourists: bodies are a weight and bother, something may be flourishing but it is not sweet human pulchritude. The sun’s too rude, and flesh too blank and pale and bulbous and mistaken to be taken seriously. Mysteriously, though, you’ve got to have a taste of it: you take your aches uptown to Central Park — decide to walk up to the Metropolitan Museum’s art. All the geologic outcrops! — rocks and runners! — gray and unused to the light: squiggly growing green shoots make it impolite to stare: they’d clearly rather not be there, all embryonic in the glare. Damn the chronic pain of everything! — and yet it paints a sort of wash of interest: splinters of a prickly sensibility that keep you walking and alert and almost happy with discomfort. Grandeur of the Met begets its usual surreal imperial effrontery: columns, steps and quandaries of what to look at first: but you are on a mission to do two things: see if your sore mouth can eat a sandwich in the cafeteria, then walk into the Pompeii bedroom painted gold and blue and red you caught a glimpse of on your television set that morning from your bed. The sandwich is a bust: leaves you scowling (the ghosts of both your wisdom teeth are howling): but oh! — the room. Roman glory turns the page and places you in habitable plot. Let the April day resume. Judge Patricia Smith’s comments: “Here we’ve got the just the opposite, a wildly ambitious, cluttered sensory celebration that deftly captures the rhythms of the world’s most complicated city. My favorite line, the one that gives the tale an intriguing twist, is ‘If you are to love this city you suppose it can’t be only when the two of you are pretty...’ From there, the momentum takes over, and—especially if you read this city setpiece aloud—it just gets better and better.”


About the InterBoard Poetry Competition Archive of IBPC Winners 3rd Place Winner, May 2008