Poetry | June 01, 2004

Featuring the poems:

• The Telemarketer Basically Enjoys Talking With Goldbarth, Though It Ends Too Soon for Her Preference
• Is the man of the house at home? 

        I can't believe you just said that, your throwback euphemism

        drags up a past to lament and praise, supernova twice, bigness

        a narcoleptic paradox running down the lice-ridden rungs of time-

   

  -so you’re the man, er, the head of the household.

        You could say that.

   

  Excellent. I have some questions?

   

  Is it excellent? Do you know what you’re saying? Or are you like

         the loquacious cockatiel, your exuberance a feathered haste,

         chit-chat scattershot like rejected millet flecking a shag carpet.

         We discuss you, you know, over dinner, over grilled fish or

         a burger flame-plump and greasy, while the moon, at once pale

         and thick, opaque as sperm, like turned milk, looks nailed

         to a frail horizon, and we complain, bitch about the everyday

         invasions, grudge and shrug to admit some utility in the cubicled

         greeting mills ...

   

  [This is easily the best call I’ve had all day.]

               put up with coy asides and pomegranate

         scatters of salesmanship, of salespersonship, of the multiple

         mutations of commerce, while some of us raise the specter

         of a forgotten conquistador whose arrival on palm-sotted shores

         in 1570, rifle-pricked and steel-cowled, cowed the first native

         he saw with a plea for water, for anything other than salt,

         anything other than the lexicon of distance and its flat

         horizons, and in effect exercised the great prerogative

         of free markets, or free enterprise anyway, sans the lovely

         parting gifts of affected tele-purchasing by simply getting

         to the fucking point and asking, right out there, crackerjack

         simple, for exactly the thing he wanted and nothing more.

   

  Okay. We’re running a special on appliances.

        Don't need any. See ya.

        [click]

• The Telemarketer Calls a Poet She’s Actually Heard Once on NPR to Talk to Him About Relief From the Burden of High-Interest Credit Cards

• Mr. Collins, I am calling today about an important opportunity for you to start paying down those

  high- interest credit cards and get on the road to good credit.

            I don't have credit card debt. Thank you.

     Now wait. I've read your poems,

     of your affinity for wine

     and bread's pleasures, for candlesticks

     and clutches of freesias, your taste for brocade,

     your love of solid furniture, your likely

     lingerie purchases.

               You know, don't you, not to take poems

               as biography, right? You can't just

               strap them down and beat from them

               the details of a poet's life. You know

               that, right?

     So they say. But you also write

     what you know, right? Clean out

     your attic, describe and collect

     what you find there?

               That's part of it.

     Then isn't it reasonable market

     research to have a look at your work

     and deduce you've had contact

     with lots of stuff at one point?

               Fair enough. You can assume my valise,

               too, is tooled leather, my books gilt-edged

               and leather as well, my dinners tidy opulences,

               but if I told you, in a slight stutter, sotto

               voce, that I now had just finished a Big Mac

               and was preparing to watch Hannity and

               Colmes, to ignore the trifling sky

               and the corduroy hours of evening, would you

               frown, want to tousle my hair, tell me I'm

               being silly, ship me to bed? Or, are you

               the moth drawn to this flame, the spoon

               yearning to lie with the knife, the bureau

               drawer yawning to be filled with folds

               of colored socks and accidental change?

     You have a point, there.

               I usually do. I don't care how many

               condescending titters I hear.

     Not from me you don't.

               No. True. Never from you

• The Telemarketer Means to Call Baker About Erectile Dysfunction but, in a Misdial, Winds Up With Simic
• The Telemarketer Calls Bashō About a Cure for the Winter Blues
• After Calling Too Many Poets, The Telemarketer Gives Up
• The Telemarketer’s Husband, Unemployed, Kills Time in a Café, Waiting to Pick Her Up