Pratik : PRATIK LA POETRY SPECIAL : AMERICAN POET FRANK X. GASPAR POEM -- "Black Notebook #9—Los Angeles In Bed with an Old Book of Chinese Poetry"

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

PRATIK LA POETRY SPECIAL : AMERICAN POET FRANK X. GASPAR POEM -- "Black Notebook #9—Los Angeles In Bed with an Old Book of Chinese Poetry"

FRANK X. GASPAR

Black Notebook #9—Los Angeles

In Bed with an Old Book of Chinese Poetry

photo credit: Alexis Rhone Fancher

Of course I’m sad. It’s night again, but all day long people have been

churning at their books, stuck in the same old tired dialectics and

categories. Their fraudulent poems come from fraudulent thinking.

They are a danger in the world. They make you bleed and toss on

your own sheets. Sometimes you feel so broken that you start to

believe that you cannot break any further, and then someone comes

and asks you for clarification, or another says, I’m confused—you seem

contradictory. I confess that I have always been a frayed glove filled

with shattered glass trying to pass myself off as a hand, and then I

smile in a certain way, and then they smile in certain way. It’s un-

bearable. You always feel that something terrible is going to happen.

You feel that nothing is true. Let’s stop all this. Let’s go down to that

river where the fisherman’s wife says she’s looking for a good dream.

She says they’re hard to find. Then she weeps while the rain falls and

drips all night from the eaves. You don’t find god there. You don’t find

the self and its deadly sins. It’s all about how you’d really be if you

turned off the lights and turned down the noise and stopped all that

goddamned smiling. The emperor gives a silk glove full of pearls to a

lovely woman. She is married. She gives two of them back with a letter.

These two are my tears, she says. How did she grieve so perfectly?

That’s what we want to know. Nothing else matters. By that river:

There’s a shack there. The wood is old and bleached. The water

swirls by it. Sometimes the wind blows the reeds in tiny circles.

Author of five poetry collections and three novels, Frank X. Gaspar’s work has appeared widely in magazines and literary journals, including The New Yorker, The Nation, The Harvard Review, The American Poetry Review, and others. He has held the Helio and Amelia Pedrosa/Luso-American Foundation Endowed Chair in Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and more recently was named the 2016 Ferrol A. Sams Distinguished Chair, Writer in Residence at Mercer University. He currently teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Pacific University, Oregon.

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