Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder was born in 1967 in Washington, D.C. He holds a BA in Russian Literature from Amherst College, an MA in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His poems have appeared in such journals as BOMB, Boston Review, Conduit, Fence, Harvard Review, jubilat, McSweeney’s, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Zapruder is the author of American Linden (Tupelo, 2002) and The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006), and the co-translator of Secret Weapon, the final collection by the late Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu. He works as an editor with Wave Books, teaches creative writing at The New School in New York City, and is the co-curator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series. Zapruder is also a member of the permanent faculty of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and was recently a Visiting Professor at the California Institute of the Arts. He lives in New York City.

Canada

By Canada I have always been fascinated.

All that snow and acquiescing.

All that emptiness, all those butterflies

marshalled into an army of peace.

Moving north away from me

Canada has no border, away

like the state its northern border

withers into the skydome. In a world

full of mistrust and self-medication

I have always hated Canada.

It makes me feel like I’m shouting

at a child for letting a handful

of pine needles run through his fist.

Canada gets along with everyone

while I hang, a dark cloud

above the schoolyard. I know

we need war, all the skirmishes

to keep our borders where

we have placed them, all

the migration, all the difference.

Just like Canada the Dalai Lama

is now in Canada, and everyone

is fascinated. When they come

to visit me, no one ever leaves me

saying, the most touching thing

about him is he’s so human.

Or, I was really glad to hear

so many positive ideas regardless

of the consequences expressed.

Or I could drink a case of you.

No one has ever pedaled

every inch of thousands of roads

through me to raise awareness

for my struggle for autonomy.

I have pity but no respect for others,

which according to certain religious leaders

is not compassion, just ordinary

love based on attitudes toward myself.

I wonder how long I can endure.

In Canada the leaves are falling.

When they do each one rustles

maybe to the white-tailed deer

of sadness, and it’s clear

that whole country does not exist

to make me feel crappy

like a candelabra hanging

above the prison world,

condemned to freely glow.

School Street

My house is so small

I bang my head

just thinking about it.

The house is old,

and “structurally unsound.”

If you smoke inside

all the paint peels off

and the walls

fall down.

I sleep

in the refrigerator

with my feet sticking out,

I’m not sure why.

Somehow

the entire house

manages to face north.

A mad dog paces the attic

and howls

until I give him my dinner.

The backyard

is full of vipers.

The front yard

is an interstate.

To walk out that door

is suicide.

I’m plagued

by the demons of loneliness.

They mix my metaphors,

then brew me

a hellish soup.

The demons of loneliness

sit on my chest

and play with my navel,

leaving me

bruised and out of breath.

They are being punished too.

One of them even said,

“Like you

we are affected

by the cold the noise

and the wretched ceilings,

but the worst

is your endless complaining.”

A man came to read the meter,

but he died

of a heart attack.

So they sent another man,

but he died

of one too.

Finally they sent

an archangel.

He lives next door.

All day he practices

sign language

into a mirror,

flexing his wings.

I know

he is there,

staring into his world,

keeping me

awake

with his silent

folktales.

Whoever You Are

As the wayward satellite believes its rescuers

will come with white and weightless hands,

and the rescuers turning and floating believe

in their tethers and all those uninspected latches,

as madness believes in the organizing principle,

and allows it to strap her down on the gurney,

and the tiny island believes the sound

of a harp will arrive on the wings of a gull,

as the olive believes it is filled with light,

and its oil will someday grace a god’s tongue,

as my arms flail outward and strike my forehead

in belief of a vestigial prayer process,

and I believe to allow them such historical pleasure

is hardly harmless from time to time,

as the transistor radio hears the woman

muttering and believes she requests

she be buried in the front yard with only her knitting

far from her husband the master of stratagems,

and weeping daughters once believed

their father had coated each grassblade with poison

and woke one morning to some twigs on the lawn

to believe they were dead starlings,

as the mountain believed it could stay hollow

long enough to return the tunnellers home,

and their wives believed in trying to believe

that rumble through clear skies was thunder,

I believe that is not what you wanted,

for you are only a guardian

geared to one particular moment

conjectured in no saintly book of apocrypha

when slowly at last the trucks will pull

into a warehouse shot through with shadows

and wherever I am I will see candles floating

on the ritual arms of two dark canals

and you will allow me to step I believe

into the mechanism

and tear off your wings