This page last updated: January 13th, 2004 |
About The Poet Richard Lehnert lives with his wife in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he works as a freelance editor. The Last Restaurant Somewhere in Tuscany, Provence, Oaxaca, a restaurant you've never seen calls you all your life, its menu unrequited-- a restaurant so good no one knows it. It opens for one dinner only; the officious maître d' leads you through the dining room's underwater light to a good table by a window. The sounds of metal on china are small, precise, from the kitchen a mysterious clank and hiss, an unparsable syntax of smells. The waitress is young, tall, forgetful; her red wine tastes like old books. She drifts off, and the room slowly fills: two former lovers gaze in each other's eyes as you once looked, separately, in theirs; your parents, who don't recognize you; an African woman and man in crisp white, fresh from their mass grave's blank dignity; your brother, the wounds that killed him almost healed, sits with your dead wife, her hair grown back, parted in a new place. The room is small, but soon the familiar heads of everyone you've hurt, lost, cared nothing for bow over menus, look up to ask about specials, ponder the great dualities: animal or vegetable, wine or water; later or now. You eavesdrop and never hear your name, but then someone's eye meets yours and he smiles; your mother asks your father if you're someone they know; he squints at you, turns to her and shrugs, complains about the prices. This is as far as you ever get. But someday the waitress will remember and return with her plate of bread and oil to ask one of three riddles: Do you know what you want? Would you like more time? Are you ready? The Men's Movement Your outposts shut down, break camp, pack up and head back, it's been a long recon but you'll never take that hill, valley, bridge, what would you do with it, who did you think you were so one by one your patrols lurch home and you can't believe how beat they are, how old, they went out boys and come back ghosts, you can see the moon rise through them they come back but they don't come back, all they want is to sit, close their eyes, not be on guard, not have to watch anybody die, they can't believe there's a life after this and they're right, this tired you don't get up again, you think for a while, remember till that's too much work, then sleep and don't wake up and that was your life, you don't want it anymore, go home okay go home so long as you don't have to live there, live anywhere, you'd kill yourself but you're too dead tired and what you're most tired of is being wrong about everything or is it right, working it so hard that when you hear At ease soldier you don't know where to begin and Sir Yes Sir you say Sir what should I fuck up now Sir and from the long list of all you want all you want is permission, someone to tell you it's over, you don't have to do this anymore, enough, stop, and so you stop the one way you know and enter the dream of death, the one you don't wake from so you never say It was all a dream and Oh I see, Oh I get it all that's changed is you don't question anything, nothing to learn or choose or understand, like a cow or weed or slug you just keep happening to yourself |
A Short History of The Usual is a winner of the 2003 Backwaters Press Reader's Choice Award |
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