John Herschel

June 6, 2023

“Waiting” by John HerschelPosted by

John Herschel

WAITING

Things don’t happen, they appear.
When I ask for a spoon,
they bring me a fork;
waiting has turned my spoon
into a fork.
 
The phone rings,
a huge distance between your head
and your other head.
 
There’s a place in the desert
where people go and shoot their cars,
discovered by De Anza on his perfumed horse.
 
My step-father in an orange vest
is still directing traffic in my head.
 
You can drown on the staircase,
you can wait for the desert to arrive.
 
The sky is a hat that neither covers nor hides.
 
I have a long conversation with the wall,
the longest lunar eclipse
in 123 years,
an Abyssinian moon that shatters windows.
 
My sleeve has a long memory.
I change my point of view
from one napkin to another.
 
My neighbor says
people are polite to the degree
they’re repressing an impulse
to kill you.
 
Mules are carrying the load
for no reason at all.
The rain in the gutter turns north,
a dog shakes himself in the rain.
It is a world ruled by the god of armored cars
and men in yellow shorts
taking pictures of the sunset.
 
My other neighbor says
it’s almost as if life were meant to be wasted,
as if you hadn’t lived enough
until you’d wasted your life.
 
I hear the little voice inside my head:
Hurry up and die, hurry up and die.
 
But the little voice inside my head
is like that guy in the Midwest
who writes everything down:
5:47 PM, earwax on the phone;
there’s an ant on my wrist.
 
His life is about three seconds
ahead of his diary.
 
And it’s beautiful tonight.
Every chance I get
I wish I didn’t have to die.
 
The plucky dog is still scratching his ear,
the asparagus fern is coming back.
 
A skunk came into the kitchen
and ate the cat food.
My two cats and I looked at him,
and then we looked at each other.
 
Now only little thoughts
are running after me,
wanting to be watered
and wanting to be fed,
like a quick tide
that raises and lowers
the level of the glass.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
Tribute to the Best of Rattle

__________

John Herschel: “If you write poems, even your best friends won’t care. Your enemies might notice, but their attention will inevitably wander. Freedom of speech is also the freedom not to listen. People who think writing poetry is therapeutic are not writing poetry. Maybe more poets have been driven mad by trying to get a line right, than the mad have been driven well by writing a good line. In America we don’t like useless things. Ours is a culture of uplift and good intentions. The pathologically optimistic are suspicious of a poem’s reluctance to sing along. But maybe useless is useful in a world blind to its own impermanence. Anger is probably the only reliable substitute for inspiration, and given what’s happening to this country, everyone should be sublimely inspired.”

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July 7, 2015

“KGB Orchestra at the High School Prom” by John HerschelPosted by

John Herschel

KGB ORCHESTRA AT THE HIGH SCHOOL PROM

for Terry

1.

I’m beginning to write anonymous letters with my left hand.
The conclusion of such a letter should not conclude.
Why are people always getting in the way of a good sentence?

Like a line of shopping carts telescoped into each other,
you never know who is using your voice
or who is occupying this foggy parenthesis.

When I close my eyes for a second,
it’s as if I were being interrogated
by the secret police of a very small country.

 

2.

I remember most of 1957 as a string between two radios
and high school girls in tight shorts washing cars for some demented cause
in the Safeway parking lot.

The ocean was always on the verge of doing something,
and you knew Richard Nixon would end up like a saguaro cactus
struck by lightning, burning for hours in the rain.

 

3.

The unthinkable always happens;
the unthinkable is never thinkable until it happens.

My friend Ork said, “Nothing is beneath you,
wriggling for a healing gaze.”

But whatever happened to the future?
Why is the present so embarrassing?
Why is the past always turning us into pillars of salt?

It’s as if the things that happen
are a dopey substitute for the things that don’t,
or the things that don’t are being held in reserve for some other time,
like a box of kitchen matches,
with their little red heads tucked together in the same direction.

 

4.

Everybody’s always trying to get in or out of institutions
and hoarding piles and piles of used books
they’re planning to read in eternity.

How many people go crazy without being Delmore Schwartz?
It takes a lifetime to ruin a happy childhood.

After standing for 2,000 years, my Platonic leg is asleep.
Everyone who ever confided in me said they peaked in 1975.

And money is always a disappointment.
It breaks your heart how many things it can’t buy,
and how many things it can buy that should be free.

 

5.

Newspapers say onlooker, but nobody says onlooker anymore.

In 5,000 million years the sun will expand to the orbit of Mars,
putting an end to all talk about sunsets.

Yes, the dead outnumber the living, but they’re counted differently.
In this country, if you’re not selling something, you barely exist.

In the meantime, my cranium is spreading its cracks into the sidewalk,
my pants are on the point of leaving me for another man.

The tide goes out and never comes back.
But all the waiting around we do is not wasted; it’s just time subtracted
from the necessity of always seeming to be doing something.

—from Rattle #47, Spring 2015

__________

John Herschel: “In the final days of the Soviet Union, a rumor in Moscow was claiming that anyone with a hundred rubles could hire the KGB orchestra. An official KGB orchestra? It didn’t seem likely. And it sounded like an insult. Maybe the KGB had made up the rumor to see who would actually show up with the hundred rubles. But what if it was true? And would they go anywhere? Eventually, I put the story out of mind. But a trace remained, and after a couple of decades, it became this poem.”

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