Bicentennial
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That was the year I read Madness and Civilization under a heavy comforter at night and dated an anthropologist from California who wore a striped windbreaker to bed and considered sex an athletic activity.
Our country was having a birthday party and so a company dedicated to sweetness, patriotism and money baked the largest cake in the world and floated it through the Baltimore harbor, though it turned out to be disastrous when wind blew the frosting into the water . . .
Toni felt that love was a cultural construction and left me for a female tennis instructor, though by then I was smitten with a theorist who was writing about fairy tales and the excremental vision, and predicted the cake would be inedible.
My new lover said that sex enforces power, and the red, white and blue fire hydrants sprinkled around the city reminded her of the fullbacks and line- backers to whom she pledged allegiance every Saturday night behind the football stadium.
My friend Robert, who was studying folklore, had his mouth wired shut from a broken jaw, [End Page 117]
but that didn't stop him from muttering through clenched teeth that graduate school was a kind of purgatory and America was a layer cake of inauthenticities, which made everyone grimace with recognition
and still seems pretty clever because we were sitting in a faux Italian bakery and watching a cake that melted in the harbor under lights that flickered like candles in the fog.
Edward Hirsch, who taught poetry writing for many years at the University of Houston, is presently director of the Guggenheim Foundation. His new volume of poems, Special Orders, will be published in Spring 2008 by Knopf.
