Poems by Carl Landauer   ​

The Shop Creaked with the Weight of Other People’s Sorrows
 
                                     Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964) after
                               Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker (1961)
 
Flash.
several frames of—what is it?—legs and dog
more frames—yes, gray legs and German shepherd
more frames, Nazi running with German shepherd
longer takes, a man struggling against a fence,
all interspliced with Rod Steiger’s face,
those close-ups of
a pained and anaesthetized canvas.
The film’s flash cuts reveal,
            no, tap
the pawnbroker’s pain,
without long, italicized blocks
of nightmare and memory.
 
The pawnbroker’s teeming shop,
its
            stolen typewriters and gold-plated crucifixes
            and half-paid-for cameras
and its desperate faces,
set in a world both stolid and hopeless
with
            the gum-and-spittle steps of the subway
and the desperation in Ortiz’s eyes,
all swirling around
            the gray, expressionless face.
We’re given no access to the rooms
            odorous with the decaying life
nor sense
            cheaply perfumed bodies,
but we feel the weather, the
humid streets, in black and white,
and have no need for so many
utterances of blue,
so many references to the ink
of Wallant’s
            man with blue, cryptic numbers on his arm.

 


​
And Watch the Radiance on His Face
 
              Vijay Anand, Guide (1965) after
              R.K. Narayan, The Guide (1958)
 
How could I not
dash to 2338 Telegraph Avenue,
the one-time Carlton Hotel
or was it the Hotel Carlton?
no sign remains
Countless times I’ve walked by
the red-brick building with its four storeys,
never knowing the count of its floors,
just the bustle of Blondies
with thick pizzas and bins on the street,
but on one of those floors
I’m told
Narayan wrote his Guide.
 
How could this visitor to Berkeley
not toy with Western views of an East,
irrational, brimming with mystics,
            If he looks at you, you are changed
and enveloped by spirituality?
His one-time
shopkeeper-guide-dance impresario
forger-convict
growing long hair and beard
to embody sainthood
even if his fast too is accidental
            He is like Mahatma.
At last, we don’t know whether he brings the rain
and leaves this world.
 
And how could Anand not
please his audience with ten songs
and leave no ambiguity about his guide,
showing us the glittering
apotheosis of St. Raju?
 
And yet how could Anand
have his temple dancer
not consult the ancient texts,
read the Natya Shastra
with its teachings
            a thousand years old
though she startles her husband,
her ankle bells thundering
through his beloved caves
and his anxious eyes turn
to the ghungroo on the ankles
of stone figures
on the wall?

Carl Landauer taught history at Yale, Stanford, and McGill and is a visiting scholar with UC Berkeley’s Institute for South Asia Studies and a contributing editor for Poetry Flash. His poems—including his “refracted ekphrasis” poems on film adaptations of literature—have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Exacting Clam, Poetry Flash, and the Mary McCarthy Society website. His writings on cultural history and on Indian international legal history have appeared in Beat Scene, Salmagundi, The American Scholar, the Indian Journal of International Law, and Renaissance Quarterly.

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