Clerk of Closed Files, Department of One

    What follows is an excerpt from the poet Philip Schultz’s new “novel in verse,” more than 10 years in the making and due out from W.W. Norton in February. In it, a young man hides from the Vietnam draft by changing his name ever so slightly and going to work in obscure drudgery in the basement office of a Bay Area social services agency. He keeps himself busy, in part, by translating his mother’s diaries having to do with a 1941 slaughter of Jews by their Polish neighbors.     

    Mr. Schultz, who runs the Writers Studio in New York and lives in East Hampton, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his collection of poems “Failure.”

‘The Wherewithal’

By Philip Schultz

1

    Upstairs,

It’s San Francisco 1968 April 17

and every day the world spins faster on its axis,

a little more off-kilter,

a little less in its right mind,

bursting at its seams with desire for variation,

while everyone everywhere around me

appears to be fornicating

in doorways and on rooftops,

in spiraling parks under transplanted palms

beside rhododendron beds,

marching and waving fists

in wheels of sweltering air,

hurrying in every direction

possessed of an overflowing innocence

and furious resolve

and revolutionary zeal — indeed —

hurling themselves

against barricades of forlorn ideals

and ancient decrees,

throwing off rusty shadows

and leafy inane inner beings,

singing unholy penitential psalms

full of righteous sorrow . . . yes,

forgiving nothing

while remembering everything . . .

while I, one

Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski,

Head Clerk of Closed Files,

a department of one,

work,

for the time being,

in a hole in the earth

hiding from the US Army,

from a vast personal history

of defeat and occupation,

of anger and despair,

among other things,

work,

in a forgotten well of ghostly sighs,

where, more often than not,

it’s Poland 1941 June 25

and in the town of Jedwabne

a great massacre is taking place

and the world has stopped in its tracks.

2

I wish I could say I possessed the wherewithal

(like Ludwig Wittgenstein) to regard

my thoughts as mere remarks

that can be condoned and trusted,

rather than footnotes,

or facsimiles of actual thoughts,

which when pushed

“against their own inclination”

become the scattered dependents

of an orphaned mind,

who, basically,

want nothing more to do with me.

In other words,

despite enjoying a mere half-life —

no wife, girlfriend, family or friends —

I remain (to myself at least)

somewhat “interesting,”

more than a quickly passing blur

blending lizard-like into the gray air

as I sneak down hallways,

hiding in the frayed inside pocket

of a nervous suit jacket,

my wallet and keys,

avoiding those whom only recently

I was counted among,

the odious odiferous crowding the halls,

offices and urine-stained lobbies

of this mercy depot,

this fortress of dolor,

whom I’m now employed to serve,

and who therefore see me

for what I am — guardian of nobody,

solicitor of nothing,

unnatural ferryman lugging a cargo

of dissolute souls

from one hostile shore to another

for no reason other than

to sustain myself to the next paycheck . . .

3

Leaning all the way back

in a swivel chair, cradling my aching head,

my recycled cowboy boots crossed

on a small mountain of files assigned

for further procrastination,

further dubiousness,

in a clearing wide enough for a desk,

two chairs, a rancid water cooler,

four phones, three battered filing cabinets,

a splintered two-fanged coatrack,

and a poorly framed etching

of the spectacular dungeon gloom

of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carcere,

with Arches and Pulleys

and a Smoking Fire in the Center,

nailed to a cinderblock wall,

all of which now is swaying

under the cracked illumination

of a dusty street window

that permits a paltry sliver view

of mostly fancy shoes heading west

along Bush Street in posh downtown San Francisco,

not to mention, ten hissing fluorescent lamps

clinging to angry ceiling shadows

like metallic arachnids casting

a sulfuric gloom over a forest

of 1,000 sq. miles of floor-to-ceiling

metal shelves stuffed to bursting

with 700,640 inactive files

recording every sort of grievance,

indignity and plea for sustenance

suffered in the Bay Area between

September 23, 1968 and July 15, 1959

when such documentation was first evaluated,

filed, and quickly forgotten

in this branch of

the California Department of Social Services,

in whose bomb shelter of a basement

I now sit snug as a bug,

my pulse a strong breeze,

a steady 15 knots

on the Beaufort Wind Scale.