Louis Edward Sissman Biography

1

Nowhere is all around us, pressureless,
A vacuum waiting for a rupture in
The tegument, a puncture in the skin,
To pass inside without a password and
Implode us into Erewhon. This room
Is dangerously unguarded: in one wall
An empty elevator clangs its doors,
Imperiously, for fodder; in the hall,
Bare stretchers gape for commerce; in the air
Outside, a trembling, empty brightness falls
In hunger on those whom it would devour
Like any sparrow hawk as darkness falls
And rises silently up the steel stairs
To the eleventh and last floor, where I
Reside on sufferance of authorities
Until my visas wither, and I die.


2

Where is my friend, Rodonda Morton Schiff,
Whose hulk breasts, cygnet-like, the Totensee,
Shrilling her bosun's whistles, piping Death—
The Almirante of the Doldrums in
His black cocked hat and braided cape—aboard
Her scuttling vessel with such poems as just
Escape confounding his gaunt rape with lust?
She should be singing my song at this hour.


3

It is a simple matter to be brave
In facing a black screen with a white FIN—
The final title—fading out as all
Credits have faded in the final crawl,
To which the audience has turned its back
And mumbled, shuffled, struggled into coats
On its way out to face a different night;
It is far harder, in the light of day,
Surrounded by striped student nurses, to
Endure a slight procedure in which you
Are the anatomy lesson in pink paint
Splashed by some master on the tinctured air,
Complete, in gross detail, to the grimace
Denoted by a squiggle on your face
As the bone-marrow needle sinks its fang
Through atomies of drugged and dullard skin
And subcutaneum to pierce the thin,
Tough eggshell of the pelvic arch, wherein—
After steam-hammer pressure—it will suck
Up sips of specimen tissue with a pain
Akin to an extraction under gas,
All gravity against all hollowness.
Affronted and affrighted, I can't pass
This episode in silent dignity
Or bloodless banter; I must sweat and grunt
And moan in corporal fear of corporal pain
Too venial to be mortal, making a fool
Of my lay figure in its textbook pose
(Fig. 1) before these starched and giggling girls
Too young to be let out of simpering school
To meet live terror face to face and lose.


4

Why must the young male nurse who preps the plain
Of my knife-thrower's-target abdomen
With his conversant razor, talking snicks
Of scything into my sedated ears,
Talk also in his flat and friendly voice,
So far from showdowns, on a blasé note
Of reassurance, learnt by classroom rote?
It is that he must make his living, too.


5

If Hell abides on earth this must be it:
This too-bright-lit-at-all-hours-of-the-day-
And-night recovery room, where nurses flit
In stroboscopic steps between the beds
All cheek by jowl that hold recoverers
Suspended in the grog of half-damped pain
And tubularities of light-blue light.
For condiment in this mulled mix, there are
Assorted groans and screams; and, lest repose
Outstrip the sufferer, there is his own
Throat-filling Gobi, mucous membrane gone
Dry as Arabia, as barren of
Hydropsy as a sunburnt cage of bone
Perched on parched rocks where game Parcheesian
(A devil figure, this) went, wended his
Bent way to harvest, for a shekel, rugs,
And pack them back by camel over sands
Of nightmare to transship to richer lands
Where millions of small rills plash into streams
That give rise to great rivers—such wet dreams
Afflict the desiccate on their interminable way
Up through the layers of half-light to day.


6

The riddle of the Sphinx. Man walks on three
Legs at the last. I walk on three, one of
Which is a wheeled I.V. pole, when I rise
From bed the first time to make my aged way
Into the toilet, where, while my legs sway
And the pole sways, swinging its censer high,
I wait to urinate, and cannot make
My mortal coils distill a drop, as time
Stumps past and leaves me swaying there. Defeat:
I roll and hobble back to bed, to the
Refrain of cheeping wheels. Soon the young man
With his snake-handler's fist of catheters
Will come to see me and supply the lack
Of my drugged muscles with the gravity
Of his solution, and I'll void into
A beige bag clipped to the bedside, one of
The bottles, bags, and tubes I'm tethered to
As a condition of continuance.
The body swells until it duns the mind
With importunities in this refined,
White-sheeted torture, practiced by a kind,
Withdrawn white face trained in the arts of love.


7

Home, and the lees of autumn scuttle up
To my halt feet: fat, sportive maple leaves
Struck into ochre by the frost and stripped
From their umbilic cords to skate across
The blacktop drive and fetch up on my shoes
As if including me in their great fall,
Windy with rumors of the coming ice.
Though fallen, frostbit, yellowed also, I
Cannot participate in their late game
But must leave them to hide and seek a place
To decompose in, while I clamber up
Long enneads of stairs to the room where
I'll recompose myself to durance in
A world of voices and surprises, for
As long as Clotho draws my filament—
To my now flagging wonder and applause—
From indefatigable spinnerets,
Until her sister widows, having set
The norms for length and texture of each strand
And sharpened their gross shears, come cut it off
And send me to befriend the winter leaves.
...

I. Riverside Drive, 1929

" ‘Good-by, Ralph. It should end some other way.
Not this,' Corinna said. ‘Now go away.'
No. Rhymes. It's ludicrous. Try ‘Dear, good-by.'
No. Repetitious. Maybe ‘Dear, farewell.'
No. Stagy. Out of character. Oh, hell.
Time for a drink." The Smith-Corona heaves
As he retracts his knickerbockered knees
To rise. Outside, a southbound tug receives
The sun broadside, and the bold Linit sign
Pales on the Jersey shore. Fresh gin, tk-tk-
Tk-tk-tk-tk, quite clearly fills his glass
Half full from the unlabelled bottle. Now
His boyish fingers grip the siphon's worn
Wire basketweave and press the trigger down
To utter soda water. One long sip
Subtracts a third of it for carrying.
On the way back, he pauses at the door
Beside his football picture, where a snore
Attests that all is well and promises
Him time to work. To work: before the tall,
Black, idle typewriter, before the small
Black type elitely inching on the blank
White sea of bond, he quails and takes a drink.
First, demolitions: the slant shilling mark
Defaces half a hundred characters
With killing strike-overs. Now, a new start:
" ‘Good-by, Ralph. I don't know why it should end
Like tihs,' Corinna said. ‘But be my friend.' ''


II. Hotel Shawmut, Boston, 1946

(From a commercial travellers' hotel,
Professor S. jumped straight down into hell,
While—jug-o'-rum-rum—engines made their way
Beneath him, one so cold December day).

While he prepares his body, cold gears mate
And chuckle in the long draught of the street.
He shaves; his silver spectacles peruse
An issue of The North American Muse.
He uses Mum; outside him in the hall,
Maids talk their language; snow begins to fall.
He puts on his old clothes. The narrow room
Has nothing, nothing to discuss with him
Except what time you should send out your suit
And shoes for cleaning. Now he stamps his foot:
Outside the window, not saying anything,
Appears a seagull, standing on one wing;
A long-awaited colleague. With glad cry,
Professor S. embraces the white sky.

While S. demolishes a taxicab,
His spectacles review the life of Crabbe.

(From a commercial travellers' hotel,
Profesor S. descended into hell.
But once in April in New Haven he
Kissed a friend's sister in the gloom of trees.)


III. Deus Ex Machina, Flushing, 1966

La Guardia. Knee-deep in storyboards,
I line up for the shuttle, which arrives
Outside the gate and off-loads shuffling streams
Of transferees—each in his uniform
Of sober stuff and nonsense, with a case
Of talents at his side—who pass our line
Of somber-suited shuttlers carrying
Our cases on. Then one appears, a rare
Bird in migration to New York, a bare-
Crowned singer of the stony coast of Maine,
And of Third Avenue in rain; a bard.
The way of the almost-extinct is hard.
He peers through tortoise-shelly glasses at
The crowd, the place, the year. He is not here
And is. In his check jacket, he describes
An arc of back and arms as he proceeds
Between two city starlings, carrying
His store of songs in a beat leather grip
And a dried drop of his brown lamb's blood on
His wilted collar. A Time-reader in
Glenurquhart plaid identifies his bird—
"Godwit, the poet"—to a flannel friend.
The bard stalks on on his two legs, aware
He has been spotted; in, I'd say, some pain
At an existence which anticipates
Its end and in the meantime tolerates
Intolerance of the wing, the whim, the one
Unanswerable voice which sings alone.


IV. Lament of the Makers, Including Me: 1967

New-minted coin, my poet's mask
(A small denomination in
Demotic nickel, brass, or tin)
Passes from hand to hand to hand
Beyond my six acres of land.
Did I desire such currency
Among the meritocracy
Of tri-named ladies who preserve
The flame of art in mackled hands,
Of universitarians
And decimal librarians
Who shore and store up textual
Addenda, of asexual
Old arbiters and referees
Who startle letters with a sneeze,
Of critics whose incautious cough
Halts a new wave or sends it off
To break on uninhabited shores,
Of publishers, insensual bores
Procuring art—"A maidenhead!"—
To Jack the Reader, of well-read
Young underfaced admirers who
Impinge on undefended you
At readings in all colleges?
No, I did not; but knowledge is
All-powerless to seek redress
From injuries to innocence.
I think continually of
Abjurers, who, fed on self-love,
Housed in an incommodious cave,
Clothed in three-button sackcloth, crave
Indulgence of no audience
But their own laudatory ears.
Alack, this anchoritic few
Dwindles; these ticking times are too
Struck with celebrity's arrears,
And heap past-due advances on
The embryonic artisan;
All hours from dawn to night are lauds,
All auditors are all applause
(However electronic), all
Tempters conspire in Adam's fall.

The world turned upside-down, without
A beast in view, without a doubt,
Recalls its exiles and bestows
On them the palm, the bays, the rose
(Art sick?), the Laurel Wormser Prize,
Whose debased dollar only buys
More nods, more goods, more fame, more praise:
Not art, as in the rude old days.

Now worldward poets turn and say,
Timor vitae conturbat me.
...

(To Saul Touster)
I. January 22, 1932

Could a four-year-old look out of a square sedan
(A Studebaker Six in currency green
With wooden artillery wheels) and see a scene
Of snow, light lavender, landing on deepening blue
Buildings built out of red-violet bricks, and black
Passersby passing by over the widening white
Streets darkening blue, under a thickening white
Sky suddenly undergoing sheer twilight,
And the yellow but whitening streetlights coming on,
And remember it now, though the likelihood is gone
That it ever happened at all, and the Village is gone
That it ever could happen in? Memory, guttering out,
Apparently, finally flares up and banishes doubt.


II. May 29, 1941

Tring. Bells
On grocers' boys' bicycles ring,
Followed, on cue,
By the jaunty one-note of prayers at two
Near churches; taxi horns, a-hunt,
Come in for treble; next, the tickety bass
Of chain-driven Diamond T's, gone elephantine
And stove-enamelled conifer green
Down Greenwich Avenue.
Out of the Earle
I issue at half-past thirteen,
Struck, like a floral clock,
By seasonal
Manifestations: unreasonable
N.Y.U. girls out in their bobby socks
And rayon blouses; meek boys with their books
Who have already moulted mackinaws;
Desarrolimiento of
New chrome-green leaves; a rose,
Got, blooming, out of bed; and Mrs. Roos-
Evelt and Sarah Delano
Descending the front stoop of a Jamesian
House facing south against the Square, the sun—
Who, curveting, his half course not yet run,
Infects the earth with crescence;
And the presence
Of process, seen in un-top-hatted,
Un-frock-coated burghers and their sons
And daughters, taking over
All title, right, and interest soever
In this, now their
Property, Washington Square.


III. December 29, 1949

The Hotel Storia ascends
Above me and my new wife; ends
Eight stories of decline, despair,
Iron beds and hand-washed underwear
Above us and our leatherette
Chattels, still grounded on the wet
Grey tessellated lobby floor.
Soon, through a dingy, numbered door,
We'll enter into our new home,
Provincials in Imperial Rome
To seek their fortune, or, at least,
To find a job. The wedding feast,
Digested and metabolized,
Diminishes in idealized
Group photographs, and hard today
Shunts us together and at bay.
Outside the soot-webbed window, sleet
Scourges the vista of Eighth Street;
Inside, the radiators clack
And talk and tell us to go back
Where we came from. A lone pecan
Falls from our lunch, a sticky bun,
And bounces on the trampoline
Of the torn bedspread. In the mean
Distance of winter, a man sighs,
A bedstead creaks, a woman cries.


IV. July 14, 1951

A summer lull arrives in the West Village,
Transmuting houses into silent salvage
Of the last century, streets into wreckage
Uncalled-for by do-gooders who police
The moderniqueness of our ways, patrol
The sanitation of the urban soul.
What I mean is, devoid of people, all
Our dwellings freeze and rust in desuetude,
Fur over with untenancy, glaze grey
With summer's dust and incivility,
With lack of language and engagement, while
Their occupants sport, mutate, and transform
Themselves, play at dissembling the god Norm
From forward bases at Fire Island. But—
Exception proving rules, dissolving doubt—
Young Gordon Walker, fledgling editor,
My daylong colleague in the corridors
Of Power & Leicht, the trade-book publishers,
Is at home to the residue in his
Acute apartment in an angle of
Abingdon Square. And they're all there, the rear-
Guard of the garrison of Fort New York:
The skeleton defense of skinny girls
Who tap the typewriters of summertime;
The pale male workers who know no time off
Because too recently employed; the old
Manhattan hands, in patched and gin-stained tweeds;
The writers (Walker's one), who see in their
City as desert an oasis of
Silence and time to execute their plots
Against the state of things, but fall a prey
To day succeeding day alone, and call
A party to restore themselves to all
The inside jokes of winter, in whose caul
People click, kiss like billiard balls, and fall,
Insensible, into odd pockets. Dense
As gander-feather winter snow, intense
As inextinguishable summer sun
At five o'clock (which it now is), the noise
Of Walker's congeries of girls and boys
Foregathered in their gabbling gratitude
Strikes down the stairwell from the altitude
Of his wide-open walk-up, beckoning
Me, solo, wife gone north, to sickening
Top-story heat and talk jackhammering
Upon the anvils of all ears. "Christ, Lou, you're here,"
Whoops Walker, topping up a jelly jar
("Crabapple," says the label, still stuck on)
With gin and tonic, a blue liquid smoke
That seeks its level in my unexplored
Interior, and sends back a sonar ping
To echo in my head. Two more blue gins.
The sweat that mists my glasses interdicts
My sizing up my interlocutor,
Who is, I think, the girl who lives next door,
A long-necked, fiddleheaded, celliform
Girl cellist propped on an improbably
Slim leg. Gin pings are now continuous.
The room swings in its gimbals. In the bath
Is silence, blessed, relative, untorn
By the cool drizzle of the bathtub tap,
A clear and present invitation. Like
A climber conquering K.28,
I clamber over the white porcelain
Rock face, through whitish veils of rubberized
Shower curtain, and at length, full-dressed, recline
In the encaustic crater, where a fine
Thread of cold water irrigates my feet,
To sleep, perchance to dream of winter in
The Village, fat with its full complement
Of refugees returned to their own turf—
Unspringy as it is—in a strong surf
Of retrogressing lemmings, faces fixed
On the unlovely birthplace of their mixed
Emotions, marriages, media, and met-
Aphors. Lord God of hosts, be with them yet.
...