Three Poems by Nathaniel Rosenthalis
Nathaniel Rosenthalis is the author of The Leniad (Broken Sleep Books, August 2023). His debut book of poems, I Won’t Begin Again, won the 2021 Burnside Review Press Book Award, and his third book, Father Figures, will be out in 2024 (Broken Sleep Books). His poems have appeared in Granta, The Chicago Review, New American Writing, Lana Turner, The Harvard Advocate, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. Based in New York City, he occasionally teaches writing at NYU, Baruch College, and Columbia University. He also works as an actor and singer.
Virgil
Just like a snake a bronze wheel crushes on the road
an offshoot or overgrowth of them, I see
or one smashed by a traveler’s cruel stone:
that bush, so the overgrowth becomes a home that any
mangled and half-dead, it’s desperate
one with wings can use, claim, customize, occupy, add
to, glad, glide away but can’t. It keeps coiling
bits to make it on your own. Not sure why
its long body, fiercely rearing up, its neck
the goal. Even a haircut has to converge
hissing, eyes like fire; but the maimed part drags
with something else we’ve seen before,
down, and the snake weaves knots and falls back,
so loneliness doesn’t seem to apply. The lone
on itself: so the ship limped under oars.
Twig doesn’t raise an eyebrow. My eyebrow
still, it spread full sails and reached the port.
“Virgil” includes an excerpt of The Aeneid translated by Shadi Bartsch, lines 273-281 in Book 5, where Aeneas and his crew have just left for the sea, leaving Dido behind.
Sappho
When many a guy seeks out
the first-person I, the moment becomes Aphrodite, who
if you stayed here five years and kept on asking
how many things the fighters suffered there
to get off, period, they see a
Sappho to Sappho herself, who has now
you, would get bored and go back home, again
attractive, guy they want to fuck, him
become the second-person you
when they watch
from The Leniad
If we boil down the story, we’re left with a few bare bones. Leni eats at a restaurant with an
ex. Travels on a bus between cities. Has a hotel hookup, or three. Importantly, for our
purposes, he keeps a journal.
A scant metaphysics
is scatterable. A man put his hand
on Leni’s ankle.
“I’ll yes myself,” Leni thinks. As per usual.
“As a man, it’s not that I struggle to think about magic or blood”
says the Latest X.
The two of them are munching at a restaurant table.
Cold night.
He zooms inward.
“Again is one gift
of fewer sexual partners.”
He looks in the bathroom mirror.
Availability
makes him often gathering.
Blowback.
Leni passes a center
for conventions, side-eyeing
the suits in and out.
A long line. “It’s as if a lone
line has a static
I absorb, and I need it.”
Convention subject: porn. Porn can’t be separated from art. Great art
is always flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography (says a pull-out
quote).
“Desire’s eventual.”
He thinks this, in this city.
“How much is rent?”
“A man is a force, but feeling defeated, his eyes will burn like fire, bright, not dim, as
he comes upon pretty local girls, who are like cows or sheep in sturdy pens, because
he is a mountain lion.” “A man is the in-taking of a breath by a god; when the god
gives him mouth to mouth, the man gets good at words.” “A man is a giant who
supersedes comparison with the usual types that live on bread; compare him to the
wooden peak in airy mountains.” “A man is a lion at home on a mountain when he
eats.” “A man looks like fish when speared.” “A man is a pig in a landlord’s feast
when he’s one of many murdered.” “A man is a prince who tends to be young, with
the soft skin.” “A man is a young boy who grew up like a tree to match limb for limb
that dropped seed.” “A man is material to begin.” “A man is a boy who glows like
embers.” “A man is a goose when he’s one of many, gathering to waste wealth.” “A
man is trash when he puts his feet up to get nasty.” “A man who talks too much is an
old woman at work on an old oven.” “A man who takes up space in the minds of
many, that’s a hero.” “A man is a god when more than one honors him.” “A man is
non-existence if you can’t prove him.”
Doing love well is will.
He looks outside his apartment building.
It’s cold.
He mis-sings, We ain’t ever getting older with our roommates back in Boulder.
“For why shouldn’t I roll.
My eyes do me.
To do as done and still to do.
Change no wet blue jeans, take no
hat off in the wind, for an answer.”
He hears a ringing alarm of a car
and calls it violation.
No such thing as noticing no small thing.
He’s getting out of jeans.
This opens his mouth.
He’s aware
inhaling faster thru the nose
when you suspect a bad smell
is rude.
“I’d laugh.
His musk is like the gasoline
Dad used to power his boat.
He died when I was nine. Death happens then spring’s back.” He writes this down.
“I crave danger
sometimes. Then I go back to the selfsame green.
The green iPod I wrap the
flat headphone cords around.”
Into the huge day he rides, on a train.
Hears the highway is blue in a blur. “I listen.”
“He’s not mine. Nor are his hands
mine now
which he had folded me up
with.”
“If not, one attends,” Leni thinks.
He is looking up
at loud clouds, in a group of buds.
Compare this impression to “She maintained this contradiction.”
“I’ve heard it said ‘Who are your parents?’
is one of the most important questions.
You can ask.”
Knocking around with them
he looks up at the sky.
No eagle.
The prose blocks in “The Leniad” catalog each appearance of the eyes, the heart, grief, men, the mind, night, sleep, wind, and words as metaphors in Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Leni: “I paraphrased them radically.”