Snow Approaching on the Hudson: Poems

By August Kleinzahler

August Kleinzahler has earned admiration for his musical, precise, wise, and sometimes madcap poems that are grounded in the wide array of places, people, and most especially voices he has encountered in his real and imaginative worlds.

Snow Approaching on the Hudson is a collection that moves seamlessly through the often hypnogogic, porous realms of dreams, the past and present, inner and outer landscapes. His haunting, shifting atmospheres are peopled by characters, intimately portrayed, that are at one historical and invented.

The poet's signature rhythmic propulsion serves as the engine for his newest collection, and his always masterful free verse conveys a life thoroughly lived and brilliantly perceived.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780374722241

August Kleinzahler

August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. His collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. That same year he received a Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Francisco.

Book preview

30, RUE DULUTH

—Elvis is dead, the radio said,

where it sat behind a fresh-baked loaf of bread

and broken link of kolbasz

fetched only lately from Boucherie Hongroise:

Still Life Without Blue Pitcher.

I read that piece of meat as if I were Chaim Soutine,

with its capillaries and tiny kernels of fat,

bound up in its burnt-sienna casing.

There and then the motif came to me

that would anchor my early masterwork, Opus 113.

No? I’ll hum the first few bars.

The window was small,

and set low on the wall. Little out there to see,

only the legs of pedestrians below the knee.

Captive, a prisoner nearly, inside the ochre room,

as the radio poured forth this terrible news:

—KING ELVIS IS DEAD

his flesh empurpled, the giant gold medallion,

his lolling tongue bitten nearly in two.

I took note, the time was propitious for soup

even amidst the bulletins and updates, and then made ready

with the preliminary slo-mo casting about that attends

the act of creation,

a length of sausage readily at hand.

Soup-making always seemed to settle me back then.

Those with whom I lived considered me vain,

excepting the Lady M,

with whom I tirelessly played,

Parcheesi, Scrabble, less circumscribed games.

She would have bought for me a giant gold medallion

could she have managed the expense,

if only I would let her.

Presently the soup was the color of the room;

everything around me, the walls, the air,

varying shades of ochre,

but pebbled with paprika-colored nuggets.

They say he existed on Tuinal and cheddar,

his blood turned to sludge,

odds & ends from this snack or that buried deep inside him,

dating all the way back to Blue Hawaii,

the fat around his neck like a collar of boudin blanc.

Every so often he’d soil his white cape,

and only, it turns out, in Vegas and while on stage.

Now, that’s what I call a showman.

Both afternoon and summer were drawing to a close

while the soup thickened on the stove,

the unlit room darkening by degree.

The radio resumed its regular programming,

And, as always seemed the case that hour of the day,

Satie’s Gymnopédies.

TRAVELER’S TALES / A HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC: CHAPTER 74

Odd, unsettling somehow, visiting here again after so many years,

traveling through town at this hour,

the Baixa nearly deserted, then along the river, the lights of the bridge blurred by rain,

just me and the Consul’s driver:

customized Citroën C4 Aircross Picasso, outsized smoked-glass windows,

upholstered like the inside of a leather queen’s crypt, brown Bavarian bull hide.

Might as well be in a glass bathyscaphe or slow-motion pneumatic tube

forcing its passage through a tunnel of oil.

I mean, how different is this from the last time,

way back when, before our anthem hit the charts? It’s still in everyone’s