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The Discarded Life
Adam Kirsch
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eBook - ePub
The Discarded Life
Adam Kirsch
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About This Book
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 landmarksâfrom Devo to Atari to the Challenger disasterâto tell a story of emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are.
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1.
It used to be that everything that happenedâ
The things I did and that were done to me,
The faces and the places and the namesâ
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 nowâs the time, before I age into
The wisdom or indifference of detachment,
To write down something of the way it happened,
Itâs not because the circumstances matter,
But that the soul of meaning canât 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 rhymeâ
Cat, sat, hat, perhaps, or ball, hall, wallâ
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 wouldnât 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 symbolsâ
Hashmarks, exclamations, ampersandsâ
My brain could not decode or tolerate.
If nothingâs 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 doesnât 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...