Category: Matthew Lippman

by Matthew Lippman

So what that Dave Letterman’s got a big white beard,

I’m the human snowblower.

That’s what my neighbor from Alabama said to me the other night.

He said, “You’re a goddamn human snowblower,”

and, seriously, it was the nicest thing anyone has said to me in decades.

It was five degrees outside and I said, “Roll Tide.”

He said, “I’m an Auburn fan.”

I said, “Sucks for you,” but really, I don’t know a damn thing

about the NC double A gridiron.

I just know that I don’t care about Dave Letterman’s new Netflix series.

Frankly, I think he looks goofy with that big, white beard.

I want to write his PR people and ask them if he’ll have me on his next

TV special,

the one where he has a stubble-free face;

have me on to talk about the poetry of Erika Meitner;

have me on to roll eggs stuffed with firecrackers down granite steps;

have me on to chat about what it’s like

to be a human snowblower

and I’ll say, “Bring me up to Connecticut the next time it blizzards

and I’ll whistle clean your driveway in no time.”

But then I realize all my fantasies are pathological.

I don’t want to be Dave’s entertainment flunky

like that guy Rupert the deli dude.

That was an exercise in:

Hey, let’s use the Indo-Asian guy to boost ratings.

Or not?

What do I know?

We are all good inside,

I’m sure of that.

My neighbor from Alabama knows that, too.

He’s done two tours in Afghanistan, shot some people in the face,

and the last time he got back from that part of the world asked me

if I’d let his rescue dog crap on my lawn

because we have some green space in the backyard and he doesn’t.

Swear to god, he said,

We’ll clean up after she poops.

I’m out here blowing snow for hours with my thirty-horsepower shovel

and all I want to do is go inside to my living room

and have my own talk show,

Ladies and Gentleman, David Letterman

and his goofy-ass beard.

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by Matthew Lippman

Today I looked at people.

It was like looking at the green and scratched earth.

I felt so sad and bored.

I sat at the counter of Dunkin Donuts

and waited for my broken car to be fixed

by the mechanic across the street.

People in big coats came in for coffee and chocolate-covered donuts.

All day long it was a donut-and-coffee fest.

I drank my tea and did not have any memories.

It was glorious and beautiful

and the people were glorious and beautiful.

From sunup to dinnertime everyone was so happy in their big furs and

rusty boots

at the Dunkin Donuts.

I did not know what to do with myself in the sadness and boredom.

I did not eat or talk on the phone or play the flute.

It’s hard to look at people these days.

We don’t pay enough attention to other people’s faces.

The way they contort into rivers.

The way they mutate into cities

and yearn for other faces that are rivers and volcanoes.

Look up. Look at me

so I can look at you.

That’s all anyone wants to say

but we are all too busy being glorious and bored.

I want to believe otherwise.

My car is still not ready

and I am at the orange counter.

I have been here my whole life.

My tea is cold.

I have been here all day.

It’s cold outside and the donuts are all gone.

I’m sure they were bad for everyone

but tasted so great.

I love your face.

It is a beautiful face.

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by Matthew Lippman

We buy all this food.

Thousands of acres of grapes and rolled oats before they are rolled.

We buy the banks of the Mississippi and the tundra between one Serengeti

and another Mojave.

Sometimes, on a whim,

I go out and get a shopping cart of bones and water.

The kids can’t get enough.

They eat and sing and fart and blow.

It’s endless.

That’s the one thing about being a parent

that no one every mentions. Massive consumption.

An endless loop of Western Civilization,

of American thievery and piggery.

Twelve acres of Ho-Hos.

Thirteen thousand bottles of Twitter tweets.

I am sure there are kids in other worlds

that could not conceive of the barrel of stuff, which lives in the front yard.

I want to go there. Wherever there is.

With my kids.

Sit them down inside a stone building and say look:

There’s one dinosaur in the corner. That’s it.

Her name is Françoise

and then there is the grass.

Hours and hours of grass, right outside.

Go to it.

Be in it.

Soft and quiet and wild.

Make boats and computers and oceans and blankets.

Then, when you come home hungry and tired

we will eat the same chicken and dates,

those and figs and moonbeams,

and that will be everything.

No joke.

It will be all you get.

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by Matthew Lippman

Someone will love you many times.

Many times over and over a red flame.

Over a million dollars and someone will love you a million dollars.

You will be loved from all over and from pockets and sandwiches

and someone will stick her hand through a plate-glass window to love you

and from between two sheets.

Over and over and many times love will come at you

from a rooftop with billowy sheets

and Miley Cyrus will love you

and so will Spiro Agnew. Many times

the Earth will love your stomach,

for many times and for the thousands of times you have answered the door

and no one was there.

For the many times you were down on your knees between the tile and

the toilet.

Someone will take your hair and hold it behind your head

many, many times over and over.

Someone will walk with you down the summer path,

all those pink and purple wildflowers getting wild for you,

getting wild for your love and for the stench of your absence.

You will send it back time and time again—

when the buildings shake, when the show is over,

when the shadows creep tall into your tall brain and mess it up.

It is a truth that can’t be untruthed—

that someone will love you many times no matter how tired they are,

the way a blade of grass takes itself not too seriously

and grinds out other blades of grass. Look at them out there,

all stupid and green

in the backyard,

count them all. I bet you can’t.

That’s how many times you will be loved, count them all,

I bet you can’t.

By someone who couldn’t be more serious about love.

And is.

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by Matthew Lippman

We save our children.

Some days we save them from the riptide and the masked gunman on

the bleachers,

the armed robber under the stairs,

we save them. We save them

from the spiders in their dreams

that breathe fire

and then we walk on that fire

to get them away from the burning buildings, raging.

We look at our children and we save them with meanness in our eyes

and the eventual moment when all patience is lost

and they tell us to go fuck ourselves,

we’d never understand what is in their hearts, anyway.

Sometimes, we think they save us, and they do,

from the lies we tell ourselves about how special our lives have been—

flying in the circus, the boardroom, at the operating table,

the gas pump.

But, really, it is we who save them

from the car smash-ups in snowstorms and their loneliness

when it backs up on their bodies like monster waves

smashing down without warning.

We save them.

Then, when all is said and done,

when we think all the saving has been used up,

when the Saving Shop has been closed down for the night,

we get a note from our old high school friend,

Sad news, my father passed peacefully in his sleep, service Monday,

so we go down to the kitchen and make herb-encrusted chicken, potatoes,

and garlic-infused broccoli

for the grieving.

It does not matter that we want some saving too,

that we want our beloved, our neighbor,

the bear in the woods,

to wrap woolly arms around us in the naked night

and hold us so close it hurts—

we are in the business of saving.

It’s an endless and priceless monotony

that does not ever finish—

the way we save,

the day-to-day saving,

the way we take our hands and put them out and say, Bleed, it’s alright,

I will catch you in your breaking.

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by Matthew Lippman

It’s enough to sit down in the middle of the street,

the garbage trucks picking up trash,

the school buses stopping and starting,

the dirty rain falling from the neon clouds;

it’s enough to make you collapse in the middle of a speech you are

giving on human rights

or animal rights

or the right of the Earth to be as clean as it was 10,000 years ago;

enough to make you put down the pen, the gavel, the scalpel,

the international phone call,

and get on a bike and bike, hard,

to your child’s school, walk into her classroom,

and hold her tight

without apologizing to the teacher for your interruption;

it’s enough to toss the phone into the river, the computer into the lava pit,

turn to the person next to you

and offer them your hand, eye, maybe even a lung.

I’m saying I’m tired. We are all tired.

All around everyone is doing the best that they can do.

He makes the best pot roast,

she crafts the tallest building,

the bagel people whip up the best bagels,

the lovers love,

the students write the smartest papers on governmental corruption

as humanly possible and still, still, still,

there is someone outside the room with a backhoe

filled with battered Clorox bottles,

steel-tipped bullets, and vice grips ready to tear apart hearts.

It’s enough to take your feelings and slide them onto a towel,

all of your feelings, all of your human and animal feelings,

jam them into a towel,

all of your decency and rage and joy and bullshit and horror and

excitement,

walk out into the street and into the mountain, the cave and the field,

and wrap up any live thing you can find in that soft cloth,

the whole world of live things,

to turn back that backhoe,

push it away into some place in the imagination

that won’t even let us imagine it anymore.

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by Matthew Lippman

Tony Hoagland wrote a poem called “Dickhead.”

I wonder how many poems will be written entitled “Shithole?”

How a word becomes more than a word

is a terrible thing sometimes.

Last night, watching the football game,

my friend’s daughter, Orly, came downstairs

and handed us The New Yorker.

She is ten.

There was a picture of the president in a onesie

sucking on a pacifier.

She said, Makes me gross.

Her father said, Shithole, really loud.

She smiled, and said Shithole back.

That’s what happens now.

Across the country

ten-year-old kids wear baseball caps

with the word Shithole on the rim

and if you imagine it long and hard enough

it becomes the country of your body

which is a terrible thing.

A terrible, horrible thing.

I miss Tony Hoagland.

I miss his poem.

His poem is about the high school locker room

and jock straps

and other boys saying nasty things

and owning words

and turning words into sunflowers

when they have been bricks of coal

hurled at other people’s heads.

It makes me sad and the sadness takes over

when my friends’ ten-year-old daughter goes up to bed

and takes that word with her

instead of a book on rare gems,

or a cassette player with a mixed tape

her mother made for her

of all the cool songs from 1976,

the first one “I Wish.”

I wish Stevie Wonder, Tony Hoagland, and Orly¸

could sit down for dinner one night

adorned in long Technicolor robes,

laughing so hard that the sound of their laughter

eradicated the word Shithead from the lexicon,

erased it so thoroughly that there would be no more cartoons of him

in his infant clothes,

sucking his thumb,

watching television clips of himself into oblivion.

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by Matthew Lippman

It doesn’t matter how much Van Morrison you listen to,

how many Museum of Fine Arts that you visit,

the shuttlecock of time comes down extraordinarily fast

and smashes you to pieces.

There was that time in Sag Harbor when we played badminton for hours

after a day at Windmill Beach.

The hot sweat, the cold Labatts.

That shuttlecock rifled its little plastic nub at us

but we had no idea that this would be the way of things.

Our children birthed, our parents on the way out.

Some days we’d put on Veedon Fleece to slow it down

but all of a sudden the kids were sixteen and kinda drunk.

We went to the Richter exhibit,

the Rothko retrospective—didn’t matter,

one mother slipped into dementia,

another father dead in the ground.

We ran to our record collections with our museum memberships

and threw Moondance at Monet,

Common One at Caravaggio.

Nothing helped.

The shuttlecock slammed into our faces saying, “Listen to us, listen up.”

And we did, the welts growing wider and faster, bumpier and pink.

Time just marched on.

The body began to sag in weird places—under the tongue,

between the ribs—

and then one day we woke and couldn’t drink beer anymore,

get those greasy fries from The Frye Shoppe.

Tonight, alone in our rocking chairs beneath a frozen moon,

we raided the radio for “Brown Eyed Girl,” for “Hyndford Street,”

and found both.

We turned up the dial to ten and walked outside.

But it was too late.

We had lost to the infinite joke of a freezing rain of shuttlecocks

that drove us back into our small rooms and stained white walls

littered with the posters of Picasso and Murray,

Hockney and Hopper,

and that one original Miro

hidden beneath the floorboards

so when the thieves came

there’d be something left.

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by Matthew Lippman

Roberto Clemente kicked my ass last night.

He came out of the darkness like a train whistle

with his 21 Pittsburgh jersey tucked in

and laid me out with a left hook.

I fell to the grass and screamed,

What’s your problem, Roberto?

Couldn’t sleep, he said.

Get a motel.

He said, My plane crashed. I am dead.

Go home.

He said, I come from Carolina, Puerto Rico.

So, what’s the problem?

He said, My name is Roberto.

I have three sons and three thousand base hits.

My name is Roberto Clemente.

And when his plane took off from San Juan,

overloaded with bananas and gauze

for the earthquake victims of Managua,

it was New Year’s Eve

and his eyes were bloodshot bullets

under the canopy of the Atlantic Ocean.

When the sharks got their teeth into him,

the turtles,

the manatees and sting rays,

the vapor trail of his gait around second base

brushed back the wind.

Ten hours later my father woke me to say, El Padré, Roberto,

no longer swings for the fences.

I was seven.

I have been seven ever since.

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by Matthew Lippman

This guy, Lev, at the dinner party said,

If you don’t want your kids to have sex, don’t finish the basement.

I don’t remember anything anymore, my fifty-two-year-old brain a

soggy piece of kale,

but I remembered what Lev said.

It’s because Lev is the heart in levov

where all the stories come from.

Here’s the story: we were eating the salmon and he was talking about

his kids,

all grown up,

and my kids were in the basement playing ping pong,

not yet thirteen.

There was beer and wine and gluten-free challah and gluten-free Tiramisu

and the walls were red and gluten-free.

That’s the whole story.

The other story is that when a guy says something like that

you have to remember where you were when you first had sex.

It could have been in a car, in an attic, between two trees, under the moon,

near the factory, inside the deep blue sea, in the onion patch.

Sex is an onion.

It’s translucent and sweet and will make you cry your face off.

It’s a swimming pool on fire and a gorilla who knows how to speak

seven languages.

If you are lucky enough to have sex in a finished basement,

this is a good thing.

If you have sex in an unfinished basement, not so good—all that dust,

those exposed water heaters, boilers, and rusted rakes.

So when Lev said,

If you don’t want your kids to have sex, don’t finish the basement,

I took a bite of my salmon and here’s the last part of the story.

My kids are going to grow up and have sex.

A sad and wide-eyed, ecstatic sex, if they’re lucky,

and so I left the table in the dark middle of winter to finish the basement—

buy some rugs, some cheap pillows, and a jukebox,

one of those old school Wurlitzers with the automatic eye.

Fill it up with all the songs that make your heart burst, I will tell them.

Play your music

till the needle runs those records bare bone beauty and glisten.

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