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Postcard to Henry James
Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here this April day you'd probably dub "lugubrious," Mr. James, you who primly wished to be the ascotted adjective, a clause's strawberries and whipped cream, tweed you cleaned with a horsehair brush while dictating to an amanuensis sentences as endless as this Illinois horizon, prairie punctuated here-there by a silo and that blackbird net tossed upon just-tilled dirt as darkly glistening as they, so one disappears, poof, like that, into the other's black magic.
"Like that," I nod to the boy in red cap snapping his fastball We're talking but not. "Playing catch writes a good, long sentence," itself a sentence I'm thinking as the ball pops my mitt, thinking of thinking, thinking then this pop conjoins us toss to toss, son to father to father's father, both the lineage and my thinking of it Jamesian in theory if not practice, the whole of it Midwestern and not a miscreant's manor in sight.
Of this, Mr. James, you'd ask me to write down "how blackbirds halo the little orchard, angels in mind hot body, how the shadow of wings drops morning's ancient history onto our shoulders, how these seraphs in dark disguise will not halt their flight nor hang high garlands when we die, each of us alone on the petaled sheet" — yours a death sentence longer though less swaying than the high hard one my son has flung into the arms of a young plum redolent with bloom. Dear Henry, this poem's for American youth. See, its blossoms cascade white magic onto your hair. See, abracadabra, just like that, your bald spot's gone.
-- Kevin Stein
Postcard to Henry James
Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here this April day you'd probably dub "lugubrious," Mr. James, you who primly wished to be the ascotted adjective, a clause's strawberries and whipped cream, tweed you cleaned with a horsehair brush while dictating to an amanuensis sentences as endless as this Illinois horizon, prairie punctuated here-there by a silo and that blackbird net tossed upon just-tilled dirt as darkly glistening as they, so one disappears, poof, like that, into the other's black magic.
"Like that," I nod to the boy in red cap snapping his fastball We're talking but not. "Playing catch writes a good, long sentence," itself a sentence I'm thinking as the ball pops my mitt, thinking of thinking, thinking then this pop conjoins us toss to toss, son to father to father's father, both the lineage and my thinking of it Jamesian in theory if not practice, the whole of it Midwestern and not a miscreant's manor in sight.
Of this, Mr. James, you'd ask me to write down "how blackbirds halo the little orchard, angels in mind hot body, how the shadow of wings drops morning's ancient history onto our shoulders, how these seraphs in dark disguise will not halt their flight nor hang high garlands when we die, each of us alone on the petaled sheet" — yours a death sentence longer though less swaying than the high hard one my son has flung into the arms of a young plum redolent with bloom. Dear Henry, this poem's for American youth. See, its blossoms cascade white magic onto your hair. See, abracadabra, just like that, your bald spot's gone.
-- Kevin Stein
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