Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life

Poems x 5
by David Lehman

Maximism

What I propose is not
  Marxism, which
  is not dead yet in
  the English department,
Not maximalism, which was
  a still-born alternative
  to minimalism,
Nor Maxism, which rests on
  adulation of Max
  Beerbohm, parodist
  nonpareil,
But maximism, the love
  of adages,
Or Maximism, the advocacy of
  maximum gastronomic
  pleasure on the model
  of a meal at Maxim's
  in Paris in, say, 1950.
Is that clear?

Poem
(June 19)

What is it about the Abyss
that tempts the young poet to kiss
the air and head for the nearest cliff? This
unreasonable attachment to the bliss
of falling -- what accounts for it? Unlike the hiss
announcing a reptilian presence, the word Abyss
creates the object of our dread: it exists, it is,
widening like the gulf between whis-
key and wine, and we, drunk on neither, miss
the days when we, too, tumbled headlong out of heaven, pissed

To William Holden
(July 15)

We know who
the guards are
in those POW
movies with brutal
but easy to
fool fat Germans
or sadistic Japanese
who never smiled
they're the grown-ups
we're the kids
that's the secret

Examples
(August 27)

The last Campbell's tomato soup can
of the twentieth century is going to
the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh
That is an example of a sentence
Another is this from a CEO in Fortune
"You die in either case, but this way you get
to do it proactively," where the adverb
makes the sentence I'm walking amid
the tourists on Bleecker Street the riffraff
the students with backpacks the bums and
a good old-fashioned New York feeling
hits me from head to toe a misanthropic snarl
the urge to kick a stranger in the pants,
and if you don't smoke you feel as if you do

Our Friendship
(January 14)

We have a name for it
in the South:
asshole buddies.
It means we've known
each other so long
it doesn't matter
that he's an asshole
in my opinion
or I'm an asshole
in his opinion
or whatever
And I want you to know
I'm not from the South
and you're not my buddy
and it doesn't matter

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