supercheesegirl

I really loved this book. Kirby has such an interesting style--he uses long long lines and a relaxed, conversational tone. Reading Kirby is like listening to someone who's had just enough to drink that he's got lots to say and eventually almost without noticing he gets around to saying something oddly profound. (Although obviously Kirby's profundity is much more intentional than your tipsy friend's.) I liked this book very much. Here's one poem that really struck me (long, but a quick and worthwhile read):

My Dead Dad

Our rue Albert apartment has this pre-Napoleonic water heater
that lurches to life with a horripilating bang
when, for example, Barbara is taking a bath, as she is now,
and every time she turns the handle for
more hot water, the heater hesitates a second, then ka-pow!

as though there's a little service technician sitting inside
working a crossword, his elbows on his knees,
and suddenly he gets the more-hot-water signal and jumps up
off his little dollhouse chair and runs down
the walkway and throws a shovelful of coal in the furnace

and then walks back, wiping his brow, only to have Barbara
crank that faucet again, and thwack! he's off
and running while I'm sitting in our French living room
reading Journey to the End of Night by Celine,
whose prose is sweaty and overheated in the first place,

and boom! there he goes once more, sprinting toward
the furnace, and in the other room
Barbara is giving these little cries of either pleasure
or surprise or both, as she often does
when bathing, and ba-boom! there he goes again.

I imagine him in neatly pressed khakis and a hat
with a patent-leather brim,
like the gas-station attendants of my youth,
and I wonder if he is not a relative of the equally little man
in the refrigerator whose job it was, according to my dad,

to turn the light on whenever anyone opened the
door and off when they closed it
and who, in my child's mind, bore a striking resemblance
to my dad not only in appearance
but also patience and love of word games and other nonsense,

And if there is such a little man in my French refrigerator
and water heater and one
in my refrigerator and water heater back home,
and if there are five billion of
us big people in the world, there must be twenty billion of them!

I think, like us, they'd have entertainments, such as
circuses, barbecues, and thes dansants,
but also wars and horrible acts of cruelty!
Though when peace returned, entire towns of
little people would finish the evening meal and then go on

the passeggiata the way the Italians do, the young flirting,
the old sighing as they admire and envy the young,
the children and dogs getting mixed up in everybody's legs
as they stroll and chat and ready themselves for
sleep as the clock in the little clock tower strikes eleven,

twelve, one, and the moon comes up--the moon! Which also
has its little men, according to my dad,
though these are green and, to our eyes, largely invisible,
since they live on the dark half,
though every once in a while they, too, become curious,

and a few will sneak over into the glary, sunlit side,
so that when the moon is full, he said,
we should stare at it with every optical instrument at our
disposal, because if we do, we just might see
one of those little fellows nibbling the piece of cheese

he holds in one hand as he shields his eyes with the other
and squints down at us. And I haven't even got
to the good little people who live inside each bad one
of us, according to pop psychologists,
though I don't think my dead dad would have bought that one;

yet since the few people left who knew us both often say
how much I remind them of him, then I think
if my dead dad lives anywhere at all, he lives inside me.
Well, and my brother, too, if not
our mother, though there's nothing unusual about that,

because the older I get, the more widows I know, and
none of them ever says anything about
her dead husband, suggesting perhaps these champions
weren't so fabulous after all, at least
to them. Sad thought, isn't it, that these men should live

only in the minds of their children. Or maybe my dead dad's
on the moon, since the alternate point
of view to my smug phenomenological one is that people
go to heaven when they die,
and heaven's in the sky, and so's the moon,

so who's to say that's not my dead dad up there, his mouth
full of Limburger or provolone,
shielding his eyes as he tries to find the house
where we used to live, but he can't,
because it's been torn down, though he'd have no way

of knowing that, so he looks for my mother, and she's there,
but she lives in a retirement community now,
and he can't believe how old she is, and he's shocked
that she's as beautiful as he always knew
her to be, only she can't walk now, can't hear, can't see.

And he looks for my brother in Ohio, and he's there,
and me in Florida, where he left me,
but I'm not in Florida anymore. Hey, Dad! Over here! It's France!
No, France! Great country! Great cheese.
I wish I could take you in my pocket with me everywhere I go.

Courtesy of The Southern Review, Autumn 1999.