“Piss expressively.”
The onomatopoeic first line of Adam Scheffler’s poem, “Advice From a Dog,” hints at his virtuosity and his modesty. This guy ain’t too proud to pet and be petted. Another one of his openers make you wonder if he’s about to give himself too much credit: “She said my butt was a piece of art…” Not to worry:
…my greatest asset, if
you will, although come to think of
it she didn’t say it was good art
only a “piece” of it, as if it’s
not complete without her hands
on it…
Scheffler is careful about intimacies. I doubt he’ll ever go Lowell. There won’t be lines from a begging (or pegging) partner’s correspondence in his poems. Nor does this nice Jewish boy suffer from Maileria. He’s no wannabe macho.
But that doesn’t mean he lacks ardor. The sight of a used condom in the mouth of his dog sparks a creamy ode to “all loves flawed and sketchy.” Scheffler is youngish but he stretches himself to take in elders’ interrupted sex lives (“After forty years of marriage, they haven’t touched/ one another in years except for few fond forgetful pats/or back rubs after a work day…”). Then he embodies what it takes to dive in again…
…remembering how as a girl
at the start of summer, after dancing
gingerly over the hot concrete, she’d
climb the high diving board one rung at
a time, stepping up on the cool white
plastic lips of the rungs, shielding her from the
hot metal, then she would step out onto the
aquamarine board with people
coughing behind her, feeling the
quavering under her feet and in her stomach
at the long look down, her bathing cap’s
elastic suddenly screwed on too tight—
but then she’s doing it, whispering into
his ear, taking his hand, leading him into
the cool prepared bower of dark bedroom,
bed made, air-conditioner on in the heat
of August, droning, remembering the
wind whistling as she fell, the cool gentle
touch of the water that envelops you
quickly and instantly, taking that plunge
Scheffler goes wide as well as deep. He teaches at Harvard but he doesn’t come on like a son of Boston. Scheffler’s Heartworm is ready for the Heartland. He’s not an alien in Kentucky, Nebraska, or Indiana. Down in Florida he puts his bent shoulder to wheel like Ginsberg.
Your masculinity is a problem, Florida, we need to talk about it.
I’m not sure all your Cubans and ancient New Yorkers can save you
How long will you kiss Ponce de Leon’s golden ass?
When will you be worthy of your millions of armadillos?
Florida, is your heart a concealed carry?
Florida, they tell me you’ll be underwater soon: Imagine a
..clear sea instead of you, the Disney spires shooting up
Humor is our American Adam’s super-power but he’s not playing around about the state of our union. We published his “Union” here last month. And there’s another poem right at the top of Heartworm where Scheffler turns to (on?) his reader like Philip Levine forcing “you” to imagine what work is for American underdogs:
A poem can’t tell you what it’s like
to be 83 and seven hours deep
into a Christmas Eve shift
at Walmart…
Bless Scheffler for trying to place “this curse upon the Waltons.” In poems like “School Shooting” and “Breaking News” (where he has Wolf Blitzer “standing over me with a whip”) he aims to be more livingly responsive than CNN to history’s screams. Scheffler has mused in the past on “the ways our most private, secret inner lives intersect with the grossly public world of politics and history.”[1] You can feel Trump hovering over Scheffler’s poetics. The grossest of us can’t be unseen—”and here his big clown face comes/again head-butting through the page” or unheard—“his itchy/sarcastic voice spreading like orange/cloud wings from inescapable airport tvs.” Scheffler knows we’ve been Trumped: “the bomb has already gone off”—yet he senses his charge is to resist despair.
and I think of the ice I waded out
on as a kid, of how often the world
seems like it’s going to shatter,
but then, miraculously,
mercilessly, does not.
“Mercilessly” here becomes – amazingly – something like a synonym for gracefully. Taking solace from the natural world’s obliviousness to human need, Scheffler glides on. Or runs to watch horses gambol and graze. There are a couple horsey poems in Heartworm that are worthy of Philip Larkin’s “At Grass.” I wish I could enjoy them with my gone equestrian pop (though, who am I kidding, it’s the evening of the day and the groom’s coming for me too). Larkin underscored how “At Grass’s” almanacked ex-racehorses, famous long ago, had “slipped their names.” An easeful prospect to him and he was writing long before celeb-culture had taken hold, when nobody could’ve foreseen the mania to be seen/heard that defines our own time. (“The bomb has already gone off”?) At Heartworm’s core are poems where Scheffler squirms through our context of no context…
I hate the voice Facebook makes
me adopt: cheery, thoughtful, pleased
and false as an actor’s cutout
gracing a cheap marquee
Scheffler grasps the…decline of the Human Social? Nah, lose the big idea; his poems aren’t pitches. Scheffler’s stuff resists our concept world. Let him have the last words…
Googling Myself
I like googling myself
finding all the other Adam Schefflers
besmirching my good name with their
local news articles about mosquitoes,
their deaths in the nineteenth century of tuberculosis
and slam poetry events, think of it,
another me, a slam poet in Lincoln, Nebraska.
I’ve been there five times, and we never met–
or maybe we did and I didn’t even know it,
didn’t even get to buy him a beer and say,
hey we have the same name now convince
me slam poetry is more than yelling your
political beliefs. For once I’m listening.
Or perhaps over a whiskey
and soda, or three Blue Moons,
we could discuss the Adam Scheffler who
wrote a treacle-filled poem so terrible
and posted it online
that it could have been me in high school
sending a poem into the future,
so terrible I wanted to change my name,
I wanted to tell everybody I met,
That’s not me!, which felt great
being superior to myself,
and I’m sure the Nebraskan slam poet me
would agree. Together we could shout It’s not us
from the no-mountaintops of Nebraska,
from the meager artificial hill of this poem,
or the detective spotlit stage on which he
presumably performs. Maybe Adam Schefter
the sportscaster would hear us. Adam Schefter
whose famousness vs. name similarity ratio is
high enough that when I look for myself
I find his handsome tap-water face,
and what a relief that is, to look
into the mirror of the internet after a haggard
sleepless night, or on an ordinary afternoon
of having no good ideas about life,
and to see him instead, his badgery look,
his vacuous confidence and expensive purple tie,
and to think what a precious, lovely
thing it is to have nobody know your name.
xxx
Note
1 Public Events & Private Truths: Two Poems from “A Dog’s Life” – First of the Month
Heartworm is available here: Heartworm | University of Arkansas Press (uapress.com).