The Hundred Yard Dash Man

By Barry Goldensohn

In dedicating this volume of poetry to his father, who was a championship runner in his time, Goldensohn compares the lyric poem to the hundred yard dash. Fans of Goldensohn’s work will find poems chosen from previous published works, including St. Venus Eve, Uncarving the Block, The Marrano, Dance Music and East Long Pond, as well as a generous portion of new work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: Mar 25, 2020

Book preview

The Hundred Yard Dash Man

The Hundred Yard Dash Man

New And Selected Poems

Barry Goldensohn

Fomite

Contents

I

The Hundred Yard Dash Man

The Summer I Spent Screwing In The Back Seats Of Station Wagons

Marriage Vows, 1956

In Mexico

Back Roads

Losing Boundaries

Rediscovering Wonder: Santa Cruz Mts, California, 1989

Before Beethoven’s Creation Of Music As Personal Expression

April 26, 2006

War And Peace

Walking In Fog

The Coast

II

Thelonius Monk Dancing

Reading Faust When Young

A Night At The Theater

National Portrait Gallery, London

Aphrodites, The Louvre

To Hollis Frampton (1936-1984)

She, Tiresias

Mater Dolorosa

Richard II: the religion of art

Burmese Temple Bell

Dance

Lao Tzu Rebuked

Rest

Arch Of Titus

Machine For Bringing On The Second Coming

The Quilt Of Aphrodite

The Swan And Leda

A UNE PASSANTE, Fifth Avenue Variation

Bottoming Out

III

The Statue

A Wedding

Wooden Crucifix 15th Century

The Natural, Brooklyn, 1950

Haystack

My Gallery

The Forerunners

Remains

IV

Subway

Driving Westward To San Diego

Point Lobos

A Treatise On Ungovernment

Memorial

Managed Grief

Obit

Old Home Day

Sweet Town

The Gossips

Leaving The Body

Repeats

Fugitive’s Night Song

David And Saul

V

Pieces For The Suicide Of Paul Celan

At The Frick

The Execution Of Lady Jane Grey

Ignorance

Carmens, The Audition

From The Book Of Blessings

The Entitled

Toad Skin

Mountain Lion

Learning From Nature

Meditations On Violence

From Saint Venus Eve (1972)

The Listener Aspires To The Condition Of Music

Flaubert And Emma Bovary

Nomos, Logos

Padre Antonio Vivaldi

Secret Love Song

Speech On The Telephone

The Crow Down Comforter

Paolo And Francesca

The Judges

The Scribe

From Uncarving The Block (1978)

Uncarving the Block

Epithalamium

Antethalamium

Burying A Child (R.B. 1969-1974)

Famous Lovers

Last Act: Don Giovanni

Our Other Mind Problem

The Morning Of Execution

The Old Prince

The Revolution Decides Not To Occur

Three Ring Circus

Time And The String Quartet Domesticate Eros

Tired With The Hunt And Cold

What Is The Condition Of Music?

From The Marrano (1988)

The Kabalist

The Marrano

A Librarian Of Alexandria

A Short Season In Hell

After The Revolution

Coney Island Roller Coaster

Family Plot

Great Horned Owl

Margaret Roper

Emily Dickinson’s Room: Main Street, Amherst

Poem Beginning With A Line By Hollis Frampton

Puppet Theater

Tarzan & Co.

The Drawing Of Thomas Wyatt By Holbein

The Dybbuk

The Religion Of Art: 1 Feb 58

The String Quartet

The Toy

The Via Negativa, Ojai, California

For Hollis Frampton (d. 1984)

U.S. Signal Corps Footage

To All The Gods At Once: A Prayer For Mercy

Dance Music

Dance Music

from East Long Pond

Immersion

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by Barry Goldensohn

This book is dedicated to my father Joseph Benjamin Goldensohn, 1907-1993, who held records for the hundred yard dash in his time in the New York City high schools and at City College.

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I consider the hundred yard dash very like the lyric poem.

I

The Hundred Yard Dash Man

I carried him lightly,

eighty pounds, my height,

half my weight

with enough body sense—

the old track star—

to work in my arms to balance

his remaining mass

as easy live weight.

It became his last voyage,

from living room to bed—

this carrying was comfort to both.

Morphine had ended months

of pain—genial now,

euphoric, enjoying himself,

with his daughter, and me, his son.

You must have gotten stronger,

he said, dismissing the loss

of body with a joke.

He knew he was on his way

out the door, and was easy

though less clear for me

as I laid him down in bed

and laid myself in the twin

cold, rumpled, sour.

When hushed voices woke me

saying He died last night,

I couldn’t open my eyes

and lay there frozen

among the murmuring women.

He had slipped silently

through the black door

he left open for me.

The Summer I Spent Screwing In The Back Seats Of Station Wagons

was the last summer that lasted all summer.

This was not—do not misread the title—

screwing the seats in, but climbing in

the back and screwing as fast as I could.

It was always the same, open the back and fling

in the power driver and the big tool

box with the braces and screws as the tall Pole

pressed the window firmly into place,

as I would drill the holes, line up the clamps,

and screw them in. If the clamps sat too tight

the window cracked and then a flurry of work

as we swarmed ahead of our spot on the line,

the tall Pole and I at Fisher Bodies

in Euclid, Ohio, and rushed to return to our place.

I kept bashing my hands and my nights were crushed,

and in all that soul exhausting work

the cars were as rotten as we could make them.

There was nothing of ourselves we wanted to see

in what we did to Chevy Kingswood and Nomad

and Pontiac Safari with pubescent tailfins.

This was in Euclid, who looked on Beauty bare,

Ohio, whose three long syllables danced

in only four letters, pronounced ah-hah,

by my fellow workers who wrenched, torqued, and screwed

on the assembly line with me in Euclid, Ohio.

At the end of the day all we had was numbers,

corporate totals. It brought to mind

the boast of Wilt the Stilt that he had fucked

twenty thousand women in his time,

and never, never, the same woman twice.

And as we looked, wearied, at our line of cars

we wondered, how could he tell?

Marriage Vows, 1956

We were claimed by our time, elected

study over prayer, not invulnerable

to the charm of the sacred, of ritual,

even of ceremony when talk of god

was left out. We were married

by a rabbi I revered, who took our youth

and levity as serious, rightly.

After we spoke our dignified vows

and I smashed a glass under foot

the rabbi yoked us by the powers

granted to him by the Laws

of Moses (in Leviticus), of Israel

(meaning the mystical body of the Jewish people,

not the divided, embattled nation of the Middle East

that clamored for our faith with the Freud

-and-Marx dream of the kibbutz) and the State

of New York (meaning where we were born,

whose rich Diaspora culture we loved—

little theaters, coffee shops, and talk, talk, talk—

and where we lived with unforced loyalty.)

In Mexico

The priest, hands soaked by the milk swollen breasts

of the young mother,

grows dizzy with pleasure in his middle age,

reaching under

her embroidered linen blouse,

wide for nursing,

and knows her man could kill him for this

confusing tenderness—

not lust but the recollection of lust

mostly forgotten,

the boyish wonder of a virgin.

How harmonious

the love of his vocation with the love of this woman

but he won’t stagger

down the ladder of love and tumble

to his death.

The woman caressed is surprised, mostly

amused and flattered

and fortunately discreet. She likes this priest,

sees him retreat

as his hands fall back to his knees.

Back Roads

After a brief violent storm toppled trees,

deep rooted ones, splayed crowns

across the roads, root balls,

the buried double of the crowns

pulled up as walls of loam in air,

and young ones blown down too,

I drove out to meet my wife and found

most roads blocked, but I knew

the country threeway and fourway roads

like the veins on the back of my