The Dead of the Day

Happy Dia de Los Muertos, everybody! It was about this time 10 years ago that I first heard Scott Cairns read some of his poems. A group of my lit-geek friends and I took a road trip a few hours from the college to Memphis and did the whole shebang. Some of us went to Graceland, we saw the parading of the ducks at the renowned Peabody Hotel, and in the evening walked down Beale Street listening to street musicians. Unbeknownst to us at the time, when afterwards we stopped at the foot of the Tennessee River to take group pictures, we were not a stone's throw from the spot where Jeff Buckley's body was retrieved from the water three years before.

We had a few hours to kill before the reading at some church, so we parked there, rolled down the windows of the car and listened to Chopin's "Nocturnes" as we all lounged, drowsy and content.  Then it was showtime and we changed into our finest pretentious poet wannabe costumes: lots of black, my friend Ian had purple shades and under my dress shirt I drew a red lightning bolt on my chest with lipstick a lá my early hero Newanda. (More on him later.)

We were definitely the youngest people there: mostly gray hairs and polite muted applause. It was lame and awesome, to imagine ourselves a new generation, people to whom literature and poetry actually mattered and who were assuredly new artistic voices waiting in the wings to take our rightful places on the stage!

It didn't quite work out.

But one of the first poems Cairns read in his calm, measured voice was this, perhaps an homage to Wallace Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice Cream."

Necropolitan

Scott Cairns

Not your ordinary ice cream, though the glaze   

of these skeletal figures affects

the disposition of those grinning candies

one finds in Mexico, say, at the start of November,   

though here, each face is troublingly familiar,   

exhibits the style adopted just as one declines   

any further style—nectar one sips just as he   

draws his last, dispassionate breath, becomes   

citizen of a less earnest electorate. One learns   

in that city finally how to enjoy a confection,   

even if a genuine taste for this circumstance   

has yet to be acquired, even if it is oneself   

whose sugars and oils now avail a composure   

which promises never to end, nor to alter.