9 Big Haul
10 C
14 Let’s Talk about Banalities
16 To C
17 January 8
18 Listening, Speaking, and Breathing
20 Happiest Moments (Autocaliban)
21 Last List
22 Tages
EDITOR’S NOTE
Max Ritvo was a prodigiously gifted poet; toward the end of his life, he was also volcanically productive. Nothing he wrote was without flashes of brilliance, but many of these late poems would surely have been revised or jettisoned; it was slow work to sift out the very best. This he asked me to do—it seemed to me an essential labor lest the weaker poems dilute the stronger. What follows, obviously, reflects my judgment. Nothing has been revised; Elizabeth Metzger, Max’s designated literary executor, suggested one minute cut.
I have chosen to include with these late poems a slightly abbreviated version of Mammals, Max’s extraordinary undergraduate thesis. Some of these poems were imported to enlarge Aeons and Four Reincarnations; they are included here in their original forms, partly because they shape Mammals and partly because the small adjustments seem to me interesting. These poems also serve as a general reminder to readers, and to poets, that the work of twenty-year-olds is not necessarily practice work.
Cancer was Max’s tragedy; it was also, as he was canny enough to see, his opportunity. Poets who die at twenty-five do not commonly leave bodies of work so urgent, so daring, so supple, so desperately alive.
This book has no dedication. Had he lived, I feel certain Max would have wished to honor his wife, Victoria, who gave his last years rare intensity and joy. He would have wished to thank his closest peer, Elizabeth Metzger. And always and ultimately his remarkable mother, Riva Ariella Ritvo, whose resourcefulness and passion bought him more time than he might otherwise have had. His teachers he thanked repeatedly in his magical work.
LOUISE GLÜCK
Clear, the doctor says to your heart
before bolting it.
She’s saying this to clear away
everything else in the room.
Clear! I say, Your heart is clear! Clear as a fishbowl!
I.
THE FINAL VOICEMAILS (2016)
THE FINAL VOICEMAILS
1
I was told my proximity
to the toxin would promote
changes to my thinking, speech, and behavior.
My first thought was, of course,
for the child, the little girl,
but graceful, silent figures
in white suits flitted to her
and led her away by the shoulders, like two friends
taking a turtle from a pond.
My second thought was about pain,
the last thing visible
without our manners—
Or could there be an invisible peace
once the peace of the senses departs?
2
I’m glad she’s gone, and not just for her sake:
without her I feel somehow better equipped
to be what I am becoming—
which is, I suppose, preoccupied.
Nobody ever tells you how busy loneliness is—
Every night I cover the windows in soap,
and through the night I dart
soap over any lick of light
that makes its way to my desk
or bed or the floor.
At first it was fear—an understanding that the light
was death, was the toxin,
though really the toxin was invisible,
they said, and came from the water.
But work blesses fear
like a holy man blessing a burlapped sinner,
saying It is for you and Because of you,
and in time the working mind
knows only itself, which is loneliness.
3
Dim sight now,
and each twitch flows
into a deep, old choreography.
Maybe a week ago, my arm banged the faucet,
and I danced
in the middle of the bathroom—
the entire final dance
from the tango class we took
at the gym in New Haven,
with the air as you.
I wasn’t picturing you,
I didn’t smell your damp hair—
don’t imagine that I’m living
in memory.
Whatever I am, it is good at cutting meat.
The trick is: That’s blood.