PATRICK RYAN FRANK [18.049]

Patrick Ryan Frank

Patrick Ryan Frank nació y se crió en Michigan. Estudió poesía y dramaturgia en la Universidad de Northwestern, la Universidad de Boston, y el James A. Michener Centro de Escritores de la Universidad de Texas. Es el beneficiario de becas del Consejo de Massachusetts Cultural, el Vermont Studio Center, el Nelson Centro Kimmel Harding para las Artes, el Woodstock Byrdcliffe Gremio, y el Centro de Trabajo de Bellas Artes en Provincetown, Massachusetts. Fue recientemente un Fulbright Fellow en Islandia, donde escribió poemas sobre derretimiento de los glaciares, dioses nórdicos, y el fin del mundo.

EL LECTOR AMATEUR

Y el mar

Alguna vez, quise ser Hemingway.

Pero lo mismo hacía Hemingway. Es un acto difícil –

Simples hechos revestidos de arte, y en cualquier caso,

¿quién obtiene lo que desea? ¿Y luego a quién le importa?

¿Qué cosa puede importar si el agua a tus pies

se está escapando sin ti? Hice crecer mi barba

y compré un pequeño bote a crédito, lo llamé

como yo y lo pinté todo de azul,

y luego nos pusimos a la mar. Y cuando hay calma

y cuando ha salido el sol, desaparecemos.

Nos hemos ido. ¿Qué otra cosa podía hacer?

Traducido por Roberto Zeballos

The Opposite of People

“Makeover”, from The Opposite of People:

  I'm only this, and this is not enough.

 Because each body is an accident.

 Because my body is the opposite

 of mystery, and yet I cannot solve

 myself.  I will not know until I'm shown. 

 Because I want to step into a life

 as a wealthy woman steps into a store.

 Because the fountain's full of coins already,

 and the escalator doesn't pause its glide

upward into grace. I will be more 

than what I seem. My heels on the marble floor 

will sound like every door in hell thrown wide.

How The Losers Love What's Lost

“Ghosts”, from How The Losers Love What's Lost :

  Each of them missed his moment, felt it pass

 like a body moving through an unlit room.

 The grandfather clock clicks through the minutes, bangs

 the hours, and they, in their old-fashioned hats

 and dull black jackets, pace the upstairs halls,

 practicing the words they should have said:

 another Stop , another I'll sober up .

 And in their murky heads, they run through all

 the cues they missed, the marks they didn't hit.

 Some times—on certain weeknights when it's rained—

 they gather in attics, unused nurseries,

 and they rehearse like actors.  Together, they sit

 and thumb their scripts, dog-eared and yellow.  The play

 is titled Living , and it starts in the dark

 with a knock on a heavy door.  Then, a voice:

 :   Darling, darling, I have something to say. 

LANDSCAPE WITH QUESTIONS

Another minivan abandoned off

the off-ramp. Someone said I’ve had enough

and left, just left, and left the radio on

and singing baby, baby, you’re the one.

And who is that when there is no one there?

God, like everybody else, is scared

of everybody else, and trying to hide.

So smoke. So black-winged drones. So so much light

at such strange angles that make the empty hand

look full, look like a fist. Look out at the land.

It isn’t barren, so why does it feel so bare?

The churches are full of people, so are the bars—

the life’s work of the dead. So which lives matter?

Ask the glass and blacktop; you’ll get no answer.

Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote Dance

—El Morocco, New York, 1955

Darling, let’s forget the details, dull

as they always are: who’s here and not, the room

as hot as breath and the orchestra lisping through

another number about love and harmless fun.

Let’s someday remember it better, romantically vague.

Let’s say I wanted to dance and so did you,

not pressed by the others together, no picture taken

of us spun drunken out from what’s behind

our looks and jokes and what is said, the sum

of all this goddamn work. Just a dance—

just sweet, like everybody sweetly else,

a man and woman sweetly moved. I know

no one forgets the ugly things they’ve known,

and yes, I know that love, for us, is sweat

and panic and some cameras, but it’s still love,

and we’ve done nothing wrong. So let them laugh

and then forget it all: those drinks and pills,

hands wet, that man who, grinning, made us dance

so here we are, we’re dancing. Let’s just pretend

that one of us—who would remember who?—

slipped through the grand and glittered dark and said,

Hello, fella. Hello and take my hand. 

Patrick Ryan Frank’s first collection of poetry, How the Losers Love What’s Lost, won the Four Way Books Intro Prize for Poetry.  This fall, he is traveling to Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.

Projectionist

There is nothing that I cannot show you,

no face nor body, hour of any day,

no place too far or strange for me to reveal

among the permutations of my light,

penumbras, focus and the turning reel.

Though we will never meet, I will know you

when you settle in your seat and the fugitives hide

and a green car idles in an alleyway;

while always I in my Plutonic dark—

unknown, unknowingly beloved—work

lavishly my magic with my lamp

and lens and spool. Look, the lovers linger

on a hushed side street. Look, the enemy camp.

And here you are, rushing between my fingers.

[From Confrontation 115]

Virginitiphobia

— The fear of rape.

They took her out to the field in a new black truck 

that smelled like apples and the denim 

of a young man’s thigh. They turned the engine off 

but left the radio on, the headlights lighting 

the woods to the west, toward the mountains, then 

to California. They laid her down 

and tied her hands over her head with field-grass. 

She could have pulled them free, no problem, 

ripped the roots right out of that soft dark dirt. 

They told her she was beautiful. 

They took off their shirts. She saw the black of their arms 

backlit in gold by the truck’s headlights. 

One of them started to crack a joke, but stopped 

halfway in. They took off her shoes 

and touched her ankles, but only barely. She waited 

for them to lift the hem of her skirt 

but they were scared and it was cold out there. 

She arched her back and held her breath, 

eyes closed, but they kept saying they were sorry. 

She told them to shut the fuck up, and if 

they started to cry, she’d kill them and take the truck 

and no one in town would ever know. 

While they were kicking off their jeans, so slowly, 

she listened to the radio 

and the cicadas whirring like the circular saws 

in the highschool shop, and a distant hum 

that might have been a train if any trains 

still ran anywhere nearby. 

It must have been a plane somewhere way up 

overhead, though she couldn’t tell 

because it was cloudy and dark, which bothered her; 

she’d wanted them to see her face 

moonlit and cold, staring up as they did it, 

impossible to ever forget.