Jeffrey Schultz

IX. Poem Written Eighteen Years after Having First Met the Poet Joshua Robbins on September 11, 2001

Faith is mute
      with a muteness
All faith’s own.
It is nothing so resounding
As the muteness of god,
Structured though it is
By this same.

We had supposed
Poetry might be made still
            to speak
And worked out the details
In patinaed college-town light,
The cigarette and whiskey-mucked
Cuffs of our blazers
Perfuming our ever-more-precise
Gesticulations, as if such precision
Might lead precisely anywhere.
We know by now both of us
What vain and clamorous silence
Comes of all that.
        On the day we met
The world ushered in
The world it had prepared for itself
And became what it already was.
Our horror has reached its adulthood
And no longer finds any interest in itself.
It wakes disappointed each day from the dream
Of its falling from the height it had climbed.

I have said nothing, my friend,
This whole time and have ushered in
Thereby the world in which
I am committed to stay the course.
What the muteness speaks of
Is the air behind the air,
The sky behind the sky.
These also have nothing to say,
But their muteness
Is just the usual old one,
Same one one might hear any morning,
Any half-sober mid-life afternoon,
And not at all their own.

Jeffrey Schultz’s artist statement:

Title of series: Fifteen Variations on Themes from Levis.
In a series of fifteen brief variations, Schultz will meditate on a number of themes–some of them poorly recalled from memory, some of them badly obscured or poorly understood–from Levis’s work.

Jeffrey Schultz

VIII. Papers Please

I hear nothing
In language
But what’s lost
Beyond the border
Of a frontier
So far forgotten
It cannot be mourned
And whatever
It is its name was
Doesn’t even
Bother to taste
Of ash and never
Gets caught
Anyway in anyone’s
Teeth. I mean,
The 60s for Christ’s sake…
Or to think of one’s youth
As anything at all
And then go on
To make a whole thing of it…
In the 90s
I read about the 60s
What did I feel or do?
What did I see?
Who knows? I tell
The same stories
Over and over
Every year. I embellish
Freely to keep
Myself from becoming
Too much over-bored.
I don’t remember
People’s names
Nor what was
Or wasn’t real
And am concerned
Little if at all.

Jeffrey Schultz’s artist statement:

Title of series: Fifteen Variations on Themes from Levis.
In a series of fifteen brief variations, Schultz will meditate on a number of themes–some of them poorly recalled from memory, some of them badly obscured or poorly understood–from Levis’s work.