On the Poem Not Read by Stephen Gyllenhaal

Naomi's stepmother Sharon, her father Sam, her husband Steve.

A year ago today was Good Friday, the day of the fire in the Hollywood Hills (no one killed thank goodness, fire set by careless teenagers on vacation), and the day Stephen gave a reading in Huntington Beach, Orange County for a poetry organization so filthily compromised I’m not even going to mention its name. Attendant were Steve’s in-laws, while Michael’s and my companion in this adventure was a friend who works near Cedars Sinai and, who, by an astonishing coincidence, turned out to work in the same building—on the same floor—as Stephen’s stepmother-in-law. Here’s Stephen with 89-year-old Sam Achs (Naomi’s maiden name is Achs, not Foner) and his very pleasant wife, Sharon, who is about Naomi’s age.

This was the reading where Stephen finally admitted that his poem, “While Cutting Carrots for Dinner”, was actually his fantasy about stabbing Naomi to death with a kitchen knife. “But I’m not going to read it tonight,” he announced to the bemused group, “as Naomi’s father happens to be in the audience.” Atta boy, Steve.

By the way, I hadn’t realized that it was a poem about stabbing Naomi to death with a kitchen knife until Michael, Stephen’s editor, told me. “Isn’t it obvious?” he said to me rather testily. Well, it wasn’t obvious, because when Stephen first submitted this poem it was about being inspired by the suicide of poet Anne Sexton to stab himself to death. He called with drastic changes in early May, mere days before we were to send the manuscript to the printer. One can only wonder what transpired in the family conclaves (Stephen’s term) during the golden springtime of 2006. The “Carrots” poem can be found in Claptrap.

Below is another poem, “True Love” which, ironically, was the clincher for me personally when Michael and I were deciding whether or not to publish Stephen’s collection. A fine confessional poem, but even at his triumphant poetry debut in New York at Housing Works Steve still wouldn’t cop to who it was about. Said it was about his mother. Naomi was in the audience, standing far in the back with her old school chums from Barnard. Their recent estrangement (Steve moved out of their place on Mulholland two months ago) makes the last lines particularly resonant.

True Love

I catch it again: the reflection of you
(so much more stunning and true
than all the Marilyn Monroe diamond snow
sweet sewn seeds of success,
sucked so clean boned from the glory fish
of breast and beast and queen blood flow
to kingdom combed clean toothbrush fresh
my dream come through more red, white and blue
than my first view of Playboy magazine

that it undoes me completely).

Your strategies succeed so mercilessly well
below the hard-wrought structures of civilization
(architecture, zoology, French, mathematics, etc)

that your ligaments are attached to mine.

And, even though I’m 3000 miles away,
I fall to any knee I can find every time
your stone hard commandments are invoked
(far more potently I might add than
any golden calf Sinai ant hill version they sold to us
for worship)

because you and me are playing for keeps, babe

(womb powered, moon gathered

peace entreaties not withstanding).
We cannot risk the earth spinning
off her candy axis, can we?

Or can we,

even though my half thoughts stutter
at any view of myself
(mirror, photo, video
camera or mind’s eye snap shot),
because, of course, it’s

you

I see,

you

I carry

(baby inside me
that will never come out,
never cry, suck, piss or whimper
as I did,

this one will stay inside
what ever there was I was supposed to be
so you, my mist of all the silver cinemas,
can eat her way motherly to lunch in bed
and nap on the wine red blanket to heaven)

unless I do something

now.