@ 1st Reading Max Ritvo

@chesterwood
summer studio
daniel chester french
stockbridge

@ 1st Reading Max Ritvo: 1990-

                                                    2016

At life's close, you're like the child whose

    parents

step out for a drive---

                "The Big Loser"

                   Max Ritvo

Doing the math I'm sad it's what I wanted

first off to know and how 

but resisting that

I'll start

reading Boy

Goes to War and The Big

Loser and listen from the lip

of the proscenium grateful

I'm saying to myself at last I'm glad I'm not

the only one

who thought my wings were

ghosts that the foam and soap

on my shoulders after my father gave me

a bath and the ends of the sudsy wash

cloth slapped at my knees stoked

the lonely hollows I couldn't 

reach.  I have to take my hat off

to you.  It's cashmere.  Red.  I have to wear it

in this room filled with books and a dead

fireplace and four 200+ year old

windows, their mostly still intact

20 panes of glass.  Cold and already the 1st

snow.  The near close of October.  A blue

moon is going

slow as moons go over 

and then     then below

so it seems or

through the neighbor's old enough oak growth.

Though I know if I were able

to stand farther and farther off and only

if I could

bilocate it would

be as if this blue moon were going

through me and through this room

where some of me comes up for air

after tunneling under

the river and after being de

                                    -compressed

and after letting the children's stringed 

and hung in the trees mobiles

get furious at the wind

and then stilled it's as if 

when one looks up one can touch

palm out palm out the calming

like it's a nymph wind

like it has been

waiting  

all along.

And then apropos of the moment I'm told

Akhmatova wrote

after visiting Mandelstam (1891-1938) returning

from his first exile:

                ...the town stands locked in ice:

                A paperweight of trees, walls, snow.

                Gingerly I tread on glass;

I'm guessing you'd know somehow by dying

so young that sometimes

voices like yours are omitted bars

of music still trying to settle

the score.  They are omitted fountains 

from that Icarus painting, you know

the one, Auden wrote about it, the one

where Bruegel allowed the only splash to be

a mere drop or two and sunk the others

under the mountains.  It's the sorriest

painting I've ever seen.  It made me

take it as matter

of fact that someone's out

    to fuck with you somehow even if that

    someone is ultimately (and let's be

    in agreement here we're right, each of us) 

yourself.  And so in closing could I give you some 

used litany, let's call it for God's sake, a quatrain eulogy, still

in the vein of Anna, (1889-1966) even if 

she too is long, but not that long, dead:

    ...in the room of the banished poet

    Fear and the Muse stand watch by turn,

    And the night falls,

    without the hope of dawn.

I'm sorry you're gone.  I'm sorry I didn't know you

when you weren't.