Disappointment

By August Kleinzahler b. 1949 August Kleinzahler

A faint smell of urine

embroidering that bouquet of mold the big cushions

give off days the fog won’t lift,

and a shelf of bone

growing out over the eyelids like evening’s shadow

across a field of corn—

The whole parade

leaking out from your shoulders, bequeathing

to the groin a pang of distance;

then that metallic taste in the mouth

and a voice you had let yourself believe

was dead

close now by your ear, intimate and sweet:

Well, well, well,

look what we have here.

August Kleinzahler, “Disappointment” from Live from the Hong Kong Club: Poems, 1975-1990. Copyright © 2000 by August Kleinzahler. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Source: Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000)

Biography

Often described a “pugnacious” and a “pugilist poet,” August Kleinzahler’s reputation rests on his jazzy, formally inventive and energetic poetry, though he has also garnered notice as something of a bad-boy literary outsider prone to picking fights with the establishment. Hailing originally from Fort Lee, New Jersey, and a long-time resident of San Francisco, Kleinzahler’s fame as a colloquial poet of “dive bars, greasy soup, . . .

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