The Discarded Life

Adam Kirsch

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781644450376
• eBook ISBN: 9781636280165
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

In these moving and meditative poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks—from Devo to Atari to the Challenger disaster—to tell a story of emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are.

1.

It used to be that everything that happened—

The things I did and that were done to me,

The faces and the places and the names—

Glowed with an almost infinite importance;

The texture of events was rough with meaning,

Helping the memory to cling to them.

Whether it is the endless pawing over

Of a few old mementoes of the mind

That makes them cool and slacken to the touch,

Or whether life begins to reveal itself,

As nothing but a choose-your-own-adventure

That leads us by a billion different paths

To the same landmarks and the same conclusion,

Eventually the past begins to leak

The meanings that I took such pains to store there.

I feel it happening, the way that HAL

Could feel the slow dismantling of his mind.

If now’s the time, before I age into

The wisdom or indifference of detachment,

To write down something of the way it happened,

It’s not because the circumstances matter,

But that the soul of meaning can’t survive

Outside the body of contingency.

2.

In the beginning, I am holding hands

With someone who has been erased completely,

Except that I believe it was a woman,

Whom inference has turned into a nurse;

In this way, probability fills in

The blanks the mind should not apologize

For leaving, since the details of her name,

Appearance, what she said and did, could not

Have mattered less to me at two years old,

Watching the closing elevator doors

That left me, for the first time in my life,

On the wrong side, the side without my parents.

What happened next has also been erased,

Until I seem to find myself supine

On a rolling table, being moved from one

Illuminated station to the next,

As a black mask is fitted on my face

And I inhale a sour metallic wind

That scatters me to nothingness again.

So memory begins with an incision;

So memory consists of an incision,

A scar upon oblivion, which gropes

Its own smooth length in unobstructed bliss

Until the sutures of experience

Disturb its touch, demanding explanation,

And consciousness emerges in the cut.

3.

Three Muppets, alternating in a rhyme—

Cat, sat, hat, perhaps, or ball, hall, wall—

Seemed as surprised as I was when a fourth

Darted between them and the camera lens,

Shouting the rhymes that he had taken over

As if they were a war-cry or a curse.

Whatever gentle souls at PBS

Designed the skit or held the Muppet-strings

Would have been shocked to see the way I tore

In sudden terror from the living room,

A categorical, instinctive fear

That had no remedy or explanation,

And wouldn’t be repeated till the night,

Years later, when the screen of my Atari,

Normally filled with blocky cars and spaceships,

Vomited up a solid wall of symbols—

Hashmarks, exclamations, ampersands—

My brain could not decode or tolerate.

If nothing’s been as terrifying since,

Perhaps I owe it to those early glitches

That taught me how to apprehend the form

Disaster takes, the sudden rushing-up

Of something that is not supposed to be.

4.

The death of Mr. Hooper doesn’t need

A footnote for the fleeting demographic

That came of age in 1983,

Crying or trying not to cry as Gordon

Initiated Big Bird in the meaning

Of never coming back. And if the name

Means nothing to our slightly older sisters,

Already jaded by The Facts of Life,

Or to the younger brothers who would make

A purple dinosaur their avatar,

Does that mean Mr. Hooper died in vain?

The half-life of a narrative has shrunk;

The jealousy that for millennia

Made ever...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
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• 2.
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• 39.
• 40.
• BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
• Back Cover