The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

These sundry interruptions and redactions, all the skirmishes and misdirection. Like a dog finally catching its tail and chewing it down to the gristle.

It would have been easier for these poets to say that sometimes you lied and sometimes you were mistaken and sometimes the truth changed on you in the course of telling. That sometimes trauma reconfigured your relationship both to the truth and to the very apparatus of telling. But no, they went on signifying. Tethering their bad ideas to recognized names and hoping someone would call them smart, call them sharp, call them radical and right, call them a poet and a thinker and a mind, even if they were just children.

It had the vibe of a detail you might find in a good poem. As if out of O’Hara by way of Kooser.

What kind of person, what kind of poetic organizing intelligence, upon seeing menstrual blood on a bedsheet after not-great sex, thought of Medusa’s decapitation? Too funny. Not the blood itself, but the pretentious linkage.

This variety of poem often surfaced in seminar: personal history transmuted into a system of vague gestures toward greater works that failed to register genuine understanding of or real feeling for those works. Self-deceptions disguised as confession.

This too was a performance, but he considered it morally acceptable because he knew it was a performance. He didn’t pretend it was poetry.

She was the kind of poet whose work was chiefly about herself, as if all that had transpired in the existence of humankind was no more consequential than the slightly nervy account of her first use of a tampon. He thought her poems craven and beautiful and utterly dishonest.

Witness and legacy of violence and valid: such terms made poetry seminar feel less like a rigorous intellectual and creative exercise and more like a tribunal for war crimes. Seamus hated it very much—not because he believed that trauma was fake, but because he didn’t think it necessarily had anything to do with poetry.

But then again, they were fags for belief. They were poets, after all.

There was a hostility to public life now. Or maybe that hostility had always existed, and what was new was simply the directing of it toward people who had long been exempt. Seamus thought that the whole thing had the absurd drama of a great play. All the Shakespearean misunderstanding and misspeaking, everything doubling in its extremity and consequences until it ruptured into something truly cathartic. Except that there was no catharsis. Just people hardening into the caricatures of their roles.

It was the height of foolishness, academia. You sank down and down in debt, in desperation, in hunger, so that you could feel a little special, a little brilliant in your small, dark corner of the universe, knowing something that no one else knew. Art was worth many things, but was it worth putting your whole family on the brink of extinction? Seamus didn’t understand Gerard’s calculus. He loved poetry, but he couldn’t always square it with the essentials of life.

if he could think of a set of circumstances that could justify turning away from poetry, then why bother at all?

He loved that first bite of the knife through the material wet of the ingredients. He could read, in that very first moment, the final taste of the dish. It was just an onion, but in bisecting it, he felt a little closer to himself.

His mother loved his father more than she loved him.

Perhaps it was this that he resented in the work of his peers. It wasn’t that their lives were worse than his or that his life was better than theirs—it was that they all had the same pain, the same hurt, and he didn’t think anyone should go around pretending it was something more than it was: the routine operation of the universe. Small, common things—hurt feelings, cruel parents, strange and wearisome troubles.

The skin was so hot with shame it shocked him.

Though he did laugh remembering how he’d used the word cooter, which he hadn’t used in years. It had come on him so suddenly: cooter. That was the closest he’d come to a poem in what felt like a lifetime.

He despised the suggestion that he should make his poems say something new, since that posited a progressive view of literature, located the importance of a piece in its being contemporary.

Seamus liked to be used this way. Sometimes he thought the only things he really needed in life were poetry and to be occasionally held down and fucked like dogmeat.

The man pulled Seamus close and kissed him. There was no love in it. There never was. But in the kissing, Seamus felt if not close to the man, then at least some acknowledgment that they were together in something, whatever that was.

The stars, he thought, had been watching him his whole life. They’d seen the whole thing go on and on. Him and the rest of all the people who had ever lived and ever would.

There was something mean and mocking in his voice. It was how certain of their mutual friends spoke to Fyodor when they felt he had done something out of character. When he offered to julienne the vegetables for stews, or when he delicately and with great tenderness lifted their quivering pets into his arms and spoke in soothing, quiet tones into their ears and they stopped shivering, or when his eyes grew teary at the conclusion of movies, as the music became soft and optimistic, like fine rain or mist on hopeful faces. In these moments he often saw himself through their eyes, and understood that they thought of him as something else entirely—as hard and stupid.

He wanted—though perhaps want was not the correct word for it, because want implied something conscious, something of awareness, which was not present, and so it was maybe better to say that Fyodor felt, somewhere, deep and central to his body, a compulsion—to touch Timo.

The rupture that had come about because of silence could only be fixed with silence, except that silence was no good for fixing anything. But silence and time were all they had.

But he did know that she loved him. This was one of the fundamental truths of his life, although her love was at times inscrutable, indistinguishable from the routine rhythm and course of life itself. Love had been in the tension of his freshly made bedsheets, in the astringent cleaner she used on their bathroom and kitchen. Love was everywhere in their life. But then he had moved away.

But now his mother was saying that one of those boys was dead, and Fyodor didn’t know what to make of it, except that all his life he’d gone around with a soft piece of hurt just below his ribs, where he stored whatever disappointment or sadness he felt at his father and his brothers not trying to know him. It was not sharp. It was not hard. But it was a persistent, soft ache, like a sore gum through which a tooth threatened to rupture.

Timo still had the beard, and his body had changed. His chest looked broader, his shoulders wider somehow. He seemed more precisely himself.

The wet heat of Timo’s mouth felt like kindness.

Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.

Sculptures were easier for him because he could understand the manual nature of the work. But paintings, no matter how conventional, always felt cold and inert. Not that he couldn’t appreciate their beauty. It’s just that he was without a context.

Goran turned to face him directly. It was alarming. It felt as if it had been years since they had looked at each other this way. Goran’s thick eyelashes. His eyes. The playful, annoyed curve of his mouth. The tension in his brows. Unremarkable human face, but familiar to Ivan.

The whole city seeming to perform a radical opening of itself to expel heat.

But then he’d been young in New York. Well, younger. When you were that young, nothing mattered except your body and what you could do with it. He’d lived wholly by that body. Until it turned on him. But for a while, fuck.

He hadn’t had it in him to make Fyodor feel secure. It was so tiresome having to make a grown man feel like he had something to offer.

didn’t love it enough,” Timo said blandly. He shrugged in indifference. But his heart caught as he said it, and the indifferent cool he wanted to project collapsed in on itself, so that he felt exposed and quivering. Like a child trying to act out profundity.