In 1988

By DAVID LEHMAN

In 1988, I went into the unisex bathroom and read the graffiti. A
graffito from 1980 had been erased: “Support your local philosopher.
Buy a jockstrap.”

In Miami, on a visit to my mother, I got to spend a little time with
Isaac Bashevis Singer. He made great claims for the sexual organs.
“An eye will not stop seeing if it doesn’t like what it sees, but the
penis will stop functioning if he doesn’t like what he sees. I would
say that the sexual organs express the human soul more than any
other limb of the body. They are not diplomats. They tell the truth
ruthlessly.”

Sitting at my mother’s desk, writing a few lines, signing a few
checks, I opened the drawer and there were forty-year-old paper
clips. There was pleasure in using a pencil that was new in 1948.

I discovered a story I had written in college. It began with a
sweeping authoritative observation: “People duplicate the same liv-
ing room in all the apartments of their lives.” Nineteen years and
twelve apartments later, it was still true.

In November 1988, I asked Larry Rivers how he differs from
Andy Warhol. Larry showed me one of his “smudge” paintings in-
spired by a Dutch Masters cigar box. Then he showed me a box
of Dutch Masters. “What Warhol does is more like what the cigar
manufacturer did.”

We were on the way to New Jersey in a hired car. John Ashbery
told me he was reading a paperback bio of Vanna White (St. Mar-
tin’s) on the toilet. There was a quiet moment. Then he looked out
the window and said: “Look at the lovely older homes here.”

David Lehman’s most recent book of poems is New and Selected Poems (2013). His latest nonfiction book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World (HarperCollins, 2015). He is editor of The Best American Poetry series and teaches at The New School in New York. 

[Purchase your copy of Issue 10 here.]

In 1988

Related Posts

"kochanie, today i bought bread" Book Cover

September 2023 Poetry Feature: Uljana Wolf

ULJANA WOLF
legnica your direction is uttered: night halfnight / legnica your sirens rise in the gate-keeper's lodge / and keep the flag on all clear: /            yellow yellow the direction’s right / a crooked wave the gate the cross / legnica in singsong of tracks land trickles away / legnica your sky

Poetry Feature: Poems from the Immigrant Farmworker Community

MIGUEL M. MORALES
Days into the promise of a new year, resolutions plentiful, blossoming, / seven farmworkers were shot and killed harvesting mushrooms in Half Moon Bay. / Those of us who sprouted from families, whose hands and backs worked the land, / waited for news of our farmworker siblings.

A White House against a blue sky, with a watertower on top.

Two Poems by Liza Katz Duncan

LIZA KATZ DUNCAN
First the marsh grass came, then the motherwort, / then bitterberry and honeysuckle. Blackbirds, / gulls and grackles built their nests. / Mourning doves call from the eaves / of the old factory, closed during the Depression.