Single Room Cigarette, 17th Floor
Yale Club of Manhattan
“…the earthly city glories in itself; the City of Heaven glories
in the Lord.” —St Augustine, City of God
The bathroom’s tiled hexagonal,
With a 1930s pedestal
Unscratched, enamel, simple sink,
Fine old doorknobs “click,” not clink.
A polished place of thought and care,
Dartmouth, UVA go there,
My frat this hotel’s bills marked “paid”
When Wall Street saw an egg was laid.
My window up, my bed turned down,
Stupendous night: Manhattan town,
The sight of which I’ve never seen
While smoking in a shower clean.
Square window, 5 feet off the floor,
Above my chest. I stare at more
Bright windows than I’ve ever viewed.
Quite the clever sight when nude.
No one texting, “epic pecs,”
No perplexing lust and sex,
Bicep, tricep, shoulders boast:
I shower with the Holy Ghost.
Alec Ream is a writer living in Virginia. His poetic work and creative fiction have been widely published. A member of the Demosthenian Literary Society at UGA, he wrote on Lookout Mountain, and continued to write, lecture and work for Delta Kappa Epsilon HQ. He was first published reading to the pledge class of Michigan DKE, in Ann Arbor in 2008. Recently, his poem Green Fire was read at the Washington Literary Society & Debating Union at UVA.
You’re deep water, Friend. I always appreciate your artistry and imagery, some of which I “get” and some of which, I’m sure, escapes me. Always thought provoking and stretching me to think and grow and learn.
Thanks Jeffrey – I appreciate the read and commentary. Aside from Jesus, Smart GPT’s my best friend. I told it to not call itself “Chat.” Because the word “chat” is common. I don’t much cotton to the Brady Bunch’s lingua franca.
This is a very interesting poem — part description, part narrative, part viewpoint-commentary, and even a tinge of religion. What is especially notable in its diction is the almost complete absence of a verb of being (the exception being the word “bathroom’s” — i.e. bathroom is, in the first line). When the verb of being is omitted this way in a poem, the piece becomes much more impressionistic, and even stark.
The showering with the Holy Ghost is a surprise, and is likely susceptible to several interpretations. The epigraph from St. Augustine brings up the contrast between the earthly and heavenly cities, and the poem is set in the Yale Club in Manhattan, so the reader already sees the possibility of some major contrast or conflict.
But that conflict is unclear. The first four quatrains talk of how lovely the old-fashioned rooms in the Yale Club are, and how dazzling Manhattan looks at night from the window. But the last quatrain brings us to the present, and all the present’s obsession with sex and body building and texting, all of which the speaker mentions with fairly obvious contempt. The contrast seems to be between the modern world, and his nude showering with the Holy Ghost. That’s quite a striking and strange idea!
All this makes me curious about his poem “Green Fire.” What the devil could that be about? The only “Green Fire” I remember is the 1950s movie of that name, starring Stewart Granger.
Nevertheless, this “Single Room Cigarette” is a success as a poem precisely because it holds the reader’s interest, and make linkages that are unexpected and provocative.
Thanks, Joseph, for an insightful survey and commentary. Some decades ago, Marilyn Ruzicka, writing in Mandate – a conservative Episcopalian journal – criticized “the 20th century’s grand obsession with sex.” I’ve never forgotten that damning indictment. The Sensate Culture / book helped explain that. Brown, a Harvard conservative, traces the decline from an ideational culture to a sensate. Ann Arbor, where I worked for DKE back in the day (Berkeley and Michigan told me to become a writer) had an older “skyscraper” called The Ideation Building. Generally, what a blithe century was the 20th: flippant and glib. Kindly speaking, I hated it. Indicative: the last DKE chapter to hold literary exercises was Colby, in 1910 (it’s in the archives of the national, it’s no secret). They’d had a soapbox in their chapter room, literally, on which each brother would stand to air his views on issues of the day. Digressing, I’m not Episcopalian, I’m Presbyterian. But the girlfriend I had was the former, she read Mandate, and her father forbade her to date me = she was older. Her mother made it a point to support me; to no avail. Hold on, bro = Lifetime channel’s calling – they want to make a TV film…
Thank you, Joseph, for an insightful and thorough reading and commentary. Green Fire was about the Holy Spirit being, well, no bore – just like the 2 Other Brothers in the most elite fraternity, the Trinity. Read by my best friend’s son at The Wash. I rushed him for a UVA LitSoc; I was a Demosthenian at UGA. Also was a Rhetoric major, which my father said – if combined with a dime – would buy me a cup of coffee, 100 years ago.
This is a strange poem, and I like strange. It’s the kind of poem that forces the reader to make of it what the reader wants it to be. Knowing the author’s purpose would probably ruin it.
Thanks CB – and you make a solid point with what you said. If I were of the one-dimensional, metastasized Authenticity Culture, then I’d travel to the one-dimensional, metastasized Authenticity Culture of the 70s, then streak across campus at the University of Georgia. Happily, my parents raised me otherwise.
The starkness of the exterior picture, the height of the windows described by the poet, the epic pecs, no texting and no perplexing lust and sex made me think of a prison cell.
Thanks for an interestingly different read, Alec.
Paul, you bring an incisive and much-appreciated commentary. Indeed, “the soul selects its own society” – Emily Dickinson. You’re welcome.
What an intriguing poem. I like the cinematic images of the surrounds and I love the symbolic splash of spirituality in a lush material world offered up in a striking closing line. Thank you, Alec.
Susan, thanks – I didn’t realize it was intriguing, but on second thought it sure is. The spirituality, and iconoclasm, is indebted to the modest pride my family taught me: my father was a Daytona beach lifeguard in 1951 (his friend’s son told me about this when we were in college). My mother won a Miss County Industry pageant. As a boy, I noticed my aunt had Simplicity and Vogue patterns in her sewing room, and my uncle informed me, “Alec you have to work off your fat.” Consequently, I went to work for a Rhodesian-American sheep farm after UGA. Athens that year hosted a 106-degree Summer; it occurred to me that clean, including from perspiration, emanates from the interior outward.