Poems by Robert Polito ​

Cruelty

Young I professed to admire cruelty — 
even as I misconstrued my own.

Nancy’s lofty confession to her first husband — 
I have three lovers, and you’re not one of them…

Although (she smiled) that wasn’t exactly true.

After her second divorce the way she played off her next lovers — 
They don’t like it that I see other men, yet what can I do?

And then she abruptly married the most boring person any of us had ever met.

Go figure. Mark’s contempt for all things stupid,
even as he couldn’t stop the ten year suicide that was his life.

His adored Wittgenstein — a person caught in a philosophical confusion is
like a man in a room who wants to get out but doesn’t know how.

Nancy and Mark of course hated each other.
One loved me too much, the other far from enough — 

And, ultimately, didn’t I want to make both of them pay?


 
 
Deep Deuce

As phantoms direct life from the shadows,
 
                                                                              I feel
I leaned on something,
                                          and it broke.
 
My father on the porch with his crosswords said,
this must be what it feels like to be dead;
 
When I returned from the dead there was no one to greet me,
but still you are glad — 
 
I wander the ruins the way my tongue
wanders my missing teeth,
the bricks and mortar of Deep Deuce
rotted like molars in an ancient mouth;
 
Here Charlie Christian might have walked — 
 
The astrologer counseled patience
and creative imaging:
 
                                 Step One: Visualize
an object that symbolizes the accursed influence. Picture yourself throwing
it into a furnace.
 
                                 Step two: Visualize
the person who is responsible for the curse. Imagine one end of a rope
is tied around your waist and the other around that person. Picture yourself cutting
the rope with a chainsaw as you call out, “You have no power over me!”
 
                                 Step three: Repeat
twice a day for eleven days . . .
 
You visualize her green boots inside the furnace . . .
 
—No. You are in a crematorium and you see
her perfect and corruptible body on a tray sliding into fire;
 
Then you see yourself cutting the rope that ties you together with a saw;
 
And then at last your own imperfect and corruptible body—I mean, me—calls out
 
and I jump in after her.
 

In 2026 Robert Polito will publish After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace (Liveright/Norton); Jim Thompson Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 1960s (Library of America); and in collaboration with Sophie Brown and Robert Rubin, Barbara Loden’s WANDA (Film Desk Books). Previous books include Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, and Hollywood & God. He teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at the New School in New York City.https://ramongarciaphd.com/

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