Famous by Kathleen Flenniken

From the Publisher

She “became famous, finally, to herself,” Kathleen Flenniken writes. This is the kind of fame at the heart of most lives and at the center of Flenniken’s first collection, the winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Here “a little voice sings / from the back of the auditorium / of my throat. Aren’t all of us / waiting to be discovered?”
 
The poet’s answer is sometimes grave, sometimes comic, but always tuned to the incidental music of daily life.

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Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

Famous

University of Nebraska Press

All right reserved.

ISBN: 0-8032-6924-2

Chapter One

the breakdown we've felt coming since chapter five.
When his doctor calls with test results, most of us
decide to remain minor characters

like the quixotic neighbor growing
bonsai sequoias, or the waitress with thick
glasses and a passion for chess,

because the main character, in the thrall
of a relentless plot, can't help hurtling toward
the crumbling cliff edge. And who needs that?

Some inherit genes from generations
of minor players, some must learn to guard
those sunny Sundays with the paper

full of heroes in distant gunfire. And some of us
who've gotten smug over the years turn another page,
turn on the football game, until one day

the doorbell rings. We close our books,
adjust our eyes, and the protagonist
sweeps in insisting himself into our lives

with his entourage of lust and language,
sorrow, brio. Hero, anti-hero, it hardly matters
with the lights this bright. The music crests

and it's time to speak.

It's Not You, It's Me

Nature abhors a vacuum
but God loves a good vacuuming.

The garden was strewn with petals
and those whimsical helicopter seeds
so God created woman and watched
as Eve unwound the cord, plugged it
into the slot between good and evil
and tidied the footpaths
while all the animals sat there, dumb,
and when she was done

somebody got out the apple juice and spilled
somebody opened a box of crackers
somebody trimmed his nails without a thought
for collecting them in his palm

and after however many days of consecutive Eden
Eve said I gotta get outta here and she did
and the cord snaked after her.

The International House of Pancakes

Under that blue plastic fake chalet roof
there are people eating waffles
at ten o'clock on a cloudless Monday morning.

Everyone with a destination
has eaten breakfast and gotten on with life,
so they must be uncertain tourists

bent over plates of butter and sweetness,
ducking a sky so bright and blank
it could point anywhere, mean anything.

I've got a reservation at the hospital next door
which I'm pretending is a Ramada,
that I'm just another jittery traveler

with overnight case and toothbrush.
I could pull in, add to this lump
in my stomach. It's a good place to go

if you're a stranger, alone, almost forty
and late to see the world. The menu unfolds
like a map and for a moment your trip

feels intentional. But if you look, the diners
are not travelers at all but castaways,
their islands shrinking with every forkful

until they drift out the door
on this brilliant day, no place else
they want to go, no place far enough away.

LOST COAT, PLS CALL

Even in Sporting Goods, even as my son
grinned at it in the three-way mirror,
that coat started disappearing,

slipping in and out of the material plane.
Even as I wrote his name
on the inside tag below Men's Small,

as if that would fend off loss, it started
to look missing. We try to be optimists here,
we send him out each morning in a coat

and he comes back with it sometimes.
Even after a Samaritan came upon it in a field,
read the name and tracked him down,

he didn't really own the coat, he'd only
borrowed it until he could return it
to the universe, the way at two he cast

his first hooded fleece from his stroller.
That one had drawstrings with wooden toggles
and I dreamed of it once, hanging

on a scarecrow. In my dreams I revisit
them all-the red Gore-Tex, the green slicker
with cargo pockets, the beige fleece

and the blue fleece and the rust jacket with
yellow sleeves. They hang on fence posts,
in magic closets extending into parallel worlds,

on air currents like sea gulls-coats soaring
on uplifts in the cold and rain as my son
lopes along below, in my arms one moment,

the next out the door, insufficiently warm.

The Nuns' Remains

On the eighth day of rain,
the nuns-
stacked in twos
in their Calvary graves-
washed down the hill
to our own back garden,
where each found
a bed of her own.
Mostly they favored
golden rays of early daffodils
or the pheasant eye narcissus
with its delicate crown.
But one chose
the tender white blossoms
of a freesia
which we brought inside.
It smelled like black pepper
and illumined the dark.


Map of the Marriage Bed

Some nights he wants directions
and she tells him which crossroads,
where to idle, where to drive fast and hard.

It's instinct, and the route into those mountains
wanders-on the back of an elephant,
on the lip of a milk jug, jangling, jangling.

Some nights only half-way there he pulls
into a motel hidden in a grove of Douglas firs
because they're lost-they're always lost,

but some nights on those unlit highways
it hits him hard-and he takes charge,
produces a key, a chair, a lamp, and the Puritans

who live inside them nod at the trim hospital
corners, the porcelain ewer and basin. They
take their places, grip and grimace in the dark.

And a few times one has hauled off
and clapped the other fl at on the head,
hijacked their moving vehicle and driven overland

until the nettles and tumbleweeds put a stop
to this craziness. They crawl out the passenger
window, they weep, they say a little prayer

and cling to each other in the grass and dirt.
Once she found a knife in the field where they lay.
And once she found a ruby ring.


How to Read This Story
to Your Children

When you woof for the dog,
imagine him gray at the muzzle,
profound and gentle, but
with a taste for tasseled loafers.
The clock in the hall tick tocks
with an Eastern European accent;
the scissors snip crisply
as a nurse in starched cap.

The child in this story never ain'ts
or slams doors or speaks insincerely,
and he's suspiciously good natured.
You'll need to intimate with your pauses
the sticky striped candy hidden in his fist,
and in the spaces between words
those midnight walks
when he sneaks into a field
of sunflowers and stars.

When Father speaks,
put a slight yawn in his voice,
as though he's only just
wakened into his life,
the delicacy of his son's bones,
his wife's cotton dress,
the morning home free from
the mysteries of work. Where
have I been? he seems to ask
behind his newspaper.
How do I enter the story?

And the smiling mother,
who speaks of nothing
but blueberries and making jam-
let her voice have an edge to say
she hates the hot work of canning,
the too-small house.
The sweeter and more patient her words,
the more impatient she sounds,
hinting she might shout with dismay
if her child asks one more question,
or run out and cut off all her hair.

When you're narrating, be the voice
of kindness, your very best self,
but a little removed
as if watching from the top banister.
You read in warm blue tones suggesting
dog and boy, father and mother
retrace their steps
over countless readings,
that no matter how they never learn,
you forgive them everything.

Elisabeth Reads Poetry

Elisabeth is two and reads
a book of poetry off my shelf,
opens with Yah yah sumpin to eat.
I try to read my own book
but she sings Dibbah dah ze Rosie.
She's changed her clothes
six times today
from blue dress to swimsuit
to Tom's size 7 green jeans.
That was all before 10:00.
She's been naked ever since,
now reciting A B D B's,
while I read over her shoulder
to check for genius,
like my friend who found
her two-year-old breaking
the alphabet code,
reading real words
as if he'd climbed
into the high cupboards,
eating sugar and poison
willy nilly-a horrifying miracle.
But no. Atsa batta sorry,
Elisabeth intones
and tosses the book in favor
of a red crayon, then
on to her dolly's baby blanket,
folding it like soft origami.
I thumb her dropped book of poems.
I can't help it, she's a genius
of prolonged babyhood,
of its light, its wild uncoded rhythms,
playing late into the open afternoon.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Famous
by Kathleen Flenniken
Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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