Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy. Andrés Cerpa. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2019. 65 pages. $15.95.
“What interests me about poetry,” writes Jack Underwood in the May 2018 issue of Poetry, “is that rather than looking up for answers, it tends to lead us back indoors, to the mirror, as if seeing ourselves reflected in its frame . . . [and so] might reteach us a lesson: that meaning presents itself precisely as a question.” Poems operate this way even when the topic of exploration is not existential in nature, but also when it pertains to the intricacies of personal and particular experience.
This is the topography of the beautifully somber, wide-roaming poems in Andrés Cerpa’s debut collection, Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy. The city, yes, might refer to New York; Staten Island, where Cerpa is from, and the Bronx figure greatly throughout. These poems also take us to Europe, often Barcelona, and at other times to Rome, Berlin, and Amsterdam. But the titular ransacked city might be better identified as the memory of the poet, “I’m a petty thief in a world of forgetting,” he tells us in “Letter,” the first poem the collection. What is not forgotten, then, becomes the treasured always present of the book, each poem a fragment not carefully plucked, but fugue-ishly rising from a landscape in disarray. In one poem, “Freud Cycle–Untitled (Freud’s Desk and Chair, Study Room 1938),” the speaker says of his ailing father,
At breakfast I feed him my dreams as I arrange
his pills on the table. He is best in the morning,
when his wings lift from the labyrinth,
when he shaves, has an espresso.
In this way Cerpa gives us a glimpse in the window. We are allowed some logistical understanding of the speaker’s life: he eats breakfast with his ill father. His father shaves and drinks espresso. But taking up equal space is the subjective surreal contained within the concrete practical. This is not a person who is interested in delivering upon us an account of Truth. He reminds us in “Tracing a Sparrow,” in his signature long, loping line that “The old truths are not written, they are not poems or held in bookshelves which fall & are buried like cities.” Instead, he shows us the world of himself generously and in strange particularity.
The “elegy” in the book’s title is most clearly for the speaker’s terminally ill father, which we learn about in an astounding early abstract image in “Portrait & Shadow,” where “my father waits in the dark taking apart what is left of his former selves,” followed only lines later by the devastatingly concrete image, “another streak in his depends.” Despite the apparent severity of the illness, the father tells his son, the speaker as a child, in “At the Tree Line,” that “he would not die, but change.” This is the reason for the speaker’s conclusion earlier in the same poem that “More likely, my father dies surrounded by the sterile / beep of suicidal green.” We see here Cerpa’s resistance to allowing us to believe his omnipotence. He possesses these memories, but he is intent on pointing out that memory works neither consistently, nor in any pure sense, in time. Instead, memory puts itself squarely in the present. This is why Cerpa begins the same poem in prose, alluding to another period of time, a different memory entirely, saying, “That year I rented a room without mirrors & smoked dope with my friends, alone, / every chance I could get. The morning of my 22nd birthday, Bill pushed a bundle through the gap in my door & put two shots in our morning coffee.” The speaker tells us: in one moment he is 22 and smoking dope, while in the next he is sitting as a young boy in his father’s car asking “the simple questions of childhood.” Time folds in on itself through memory, pushing together these seemingly disparate events.
Spliffs, acid, butterfly knives, hollow-points, heroin, “Pabst in the morning”—if his father’s illnesses, and eventual death, are the occasions for the book, the speaker’s own embattled life is the terrain through which these poems must find their way. Structurally, Cerpa maps these separate but intrinsically entwined impulses by building in a series of eight signpost poems spread roughly evenly throughout the book, all titled “Notebook: Kairos in Chronos.” These poems are grounded in the present, allowing the speaker a vantage from which he is able to contrast his fugue-ish memories against his present clarity, thus making them integral for navigating the book. Here, the poet is most lucid, and least guarded. It is in the seventh section of “Notebook” that he can bring himself to ask, “Is it leaving this world clean / that matters?” the answer: “Admit it / yes.” This answer seems to bubble out of the speaker before he is prepared for it, and he pushes on, tripping over the syntax continuing from the seemingly definitive “yes,” directly to “you, he & me, Mr. Cerpa, that you & most of your friends are apathetic & joyfully sad.”
In another moment, in the subsequent section of “Notebook,” the speaker finds a way to say exactly what he means on the subject: “I stayed high for a decade and believed it was love.” The plain statements allowed in these sections rub the fog from the glass for a moment, and as they continue to accumulate, the fog dissipates incrementally in turn. The speaker learns ways to be even more lucid, letting us know, finally, in the last section of “Notebook,” the specific affliction from which his father suffers, something he has previously chosen not—or not been able—to do: “At the Guggenheim, on Sunday, early, my father & I are walking, / entering rooms as he begins to slow & fog. / The Parkinson’s like birth & death in each season. Each season in a day.”
However, it is with the poems between, in the moments where Cerpa shows us his particular sense of time, that we come to understand how the book’s movement, as the internal mechanism of a watch, functions.
Somewhere in summer my friends are burning through cane and cold beers in a ’twas heaven prayer card.
Between now and there I don’t say much more than, How’s the weather? to the rain.
It turns to snow.
Winter is the knife I carry but never use & we’re dying but dying slow & that’s life.
Those are the first few stanzas from “For Tim—Newark, DE,” where the idea that memory is our present comes to the fore. Notice that “somewhere in summer” sets the initial scene in immediate space, not in the distant past. “Between now and there” continues to affirm that the time of now is no more absent than that place: it may not be “summer” in the “now” but both are equally present. Winter can be carried like a knife in the middle of summer, it’s always right there. It is true that we will eventually die, but the distinction we make between our present and death is merely a construction. There is no true difference between dying and living, this poem says. The truth of these matters exist apart from other frameworks, religious, scientific, even others that are poetic, but Cerpa writes his way into a truth that can only be perceived in context; the poem itself, then, becoming both question and its answer, too.
