The Brooklyn Rail

The poet is concerned with making a thing of beauty. Just as Francisco Goya, Rembrandt, and John Singer Sargent put things in their paintings, this poet’s poems include paintings, statues, photographs, books, cups, air conditioners, and angels. “Maybe there’s a genetic desire,” he says, “to find a home in objects and / Memories,” of museums, canals, cafes, airports, alleys, a magnolia tree outside a window; and in memories of his parents, his grandparents, his great aunt, his son, and waiters in an outdoor café. Like Wallace Stevens, the Stevens of “Sunday Morning” and the early-twentieth century, George Franklin is the poet of imagination, memory, and transience for our times. His aesthetic is encapsulated in a passage from “Drinking Chai on a Mild Afternoon in January.” In Barcelona, buzzards hovered over “some unidentifiable roadkill.” Of this memory and others, he says, “Only in words can we pass them on to someone else.” In A Man Made of Stories, his poems about art, nature, and love are provocative and often profound.

Imagination is key to Franklin’s poems about art, including literature. In “What Brueghel Might Have Painted But Did Not,” he describes men “unloading wagons, and imagines their talk about lumber and weather.” He describes the artistic progress of painters: Giovanni Bellini in “The Presentation at the Temple,” and in “The Sulphur Match,” he contemplates differences between what Sargent, the painter, sees and what the man in Sargent’s painting sees. From another poem, the lines “we walked / Through a room of Rembrandt portraits” emphasize the two-fold aspect of museums: to safeguard and showcase: “in Paris, the Assyrian sculptures in the basement of the Louvre.” In other poems, Franklin writes about opera and theatre, their value in his life and in the lives of others. In poetry, Jorge Luis Borges is first and foremost. There’s also Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado, Charles Baudelaire, Joseph Brodsky, D.H. Lawrence, and Franklin’s companion and lover, the poet Ximena Gómez. What art is and what it can be is evoked powerfully in “Blue Ink,” which begins, “At the prison graduation, the poets stand up.” Franklin’s familiarity with this place for poetry is noted: 

Some of the men sit without saying anything, afraid of the guests but not showing it, just waiting for the poets, for ink
for Hialeah twenty years ago or a music festival on Miami Beach

And from “Absence:” Every week, / I bring in poems, which is their own kind of contraband. / But, I was talking about absence, which is more than grief / For a person you’ve loved or a place you can’t go back to— / The absence they know is a life that never happened, / One lived outside the gates and razor wire.

While numerous poems focus on the sensual beauty of trees, flowers, water, sky, birds, and four-legged creatures (most often dogs), the terror of the natural world is also ours. But not without humor. In one poem, the poet notes how foolish it would be to ignore the posted sign and feed the alligators. What would anyone feed them? The family pet. (This is funny in the way “a toilet plunger” in “Adam Zagajewski Enters Into Heaven” is funny.) Yet, in his catalogue of animals that Noah didn’t take on the ark in the Biblical story, the poet depicts them with nobility, these living creatures. Left behind, “Brown monkeys with large eyes and delicate fingers / Still picked lice from each other’s fur and / Stared at where the ark had been.” In “In the Afternoon at Las Dueñas,” the speaker includes “—a lost dog, it’s looking / for its owner, but no one has come to claim it. / The sun sinks lower than the rooftops, darkening / the leaves of the orange trees.” His two-fold image (rooftops and orange trees), simple, sensual, keenly observant, comes right after his comment on the dog. The speaker gives his impression of the dog, and “leaves it right there.” He goes from telling to showing, and likens himself to the dog in an exacting, original way; showing that canines, like humans, feel things. “In the Afternoon at Las Dueñas,” is an example of how to paint a picture in words and do it really well. Life is change, and art imitates life. The tone changes in “It’s Yom Kippur, and I’m Not Fasting,” and nature is part of that change. From the mild humor of 

I say I’m not observant, which sounds
Like I have poor eyesight but really
Means that when God and I have a chat
All I hear is a dial tone at
The other end of the line. I’m tired
Of imagining what doesn’t have
An image.

The last sentence signals a shift in tone. He thinks of atrocities, “the bodies of Jews in a / Ravine in Kyiv, now Ukrainians.” Out of anguish he asks:

When can we say atoning doesn’t
Work? The Earth is full of graves, mass and
Singular. Trees send out roots to thread
Ribcages that insects and worms have
Already hollowed. Each year, the ground
Sinks a little.

George Franklin picks up where Delmore Schwartz left off in his great lyric of the modern era; “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave,” concludes “History is unforgiven.” In Franklin’s plain-speaking tour de force of eloquence, “It’s Yom Kippur, and I’m Not Fasting,” in the midst of “graves, mass and / Singular, nature persists.

Two people can be in the same room and not be together, and in the same bed and not be together. George Franklin knows this, and writes about it. More importantly, he writes about its opposite: the nearness and intimacy of two individuals in love. For him, that love is shared in life and in poetry with Ximena Gómez. She is very much a part of his life and the poems in this book. The lovers are together as one, in Spain, in Ximena’s native Columbia, and in Miami, Florida. In his book Poetry & Pigeons, Franklin talks about the centrality of the image in poetry. He shows love in "Without a Soul.” It concludes:

I think
About all the nights we’ve held each other,
How I wake the next morning, my lips pressed
To your neck, shoulders, resting my hand on
Your thigh, listening to my own heartbeat,
Listening to your breath on the pillow.
On those mornings, our bodies are enough.

Love is strong, and fragile; in a heartbeat it could all be taken away. Yet, like nature, love persists. Love is transient: What happens never happens again, at least not the same way twice. Love is two bodies, two beings together in moments of time. And so much of it is a matter of luck: “the scent of your hair, your cheek flushed from the pillow.” Here’s a passage from “What Gamblers Know:”

They know we can only take what luck gives—
That when it’s good, it’s not because some virtue
rests on our shoulders like a soldier’s epaulets,
and that when it’s not, there’s no point to second-
guess or blame ourselves, sit morose in cafes
or on padded stools in diners, watching 
in the steam swirling above the cup the shapes of
lives we could have had and didn’t.

And toward the end:

A gambler would know you didn’t enter my life
because of anything I said or did. A gambler
would say it was luck, good luck, a perfect spin
of the wheel, the card I would never have
thought possible. 

What begins as a poem about gamblers ends as a love poem loaded with a passion that gains strength in understatement. The poem suggests “I am lucky to be alive, even luckier to be alive with you, mi amor.”

Back to Steven’s, the Stevens of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Where does George Franklin fit into that poem? Perhaps in the part VII: about the “thin men of Hasddam,” imagining “golden birds, while not noticing “the blackbird.”  George Franklin, while not lacking imagination, notices the blackbird. In imagination, in outlook, in facility with language, Franklin and Stevens “are one.” (Also, Stevens was a lawyer, Franklin is a lawyer.) But there’s “a world of difference.” Stevens is detached, Franklin is involved. Many of Franklin’s poems are biographical. He does not hesitate to talk about his life (none of that in Stevens). Like a good painter (Franklin in one poem alludes to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks) he knows what to put in and what to leave out. He is a poet of “impeccable taste.”  So, at the end of A Man Made of Stories, the astute read might say, no, that reader will say, “I’d like to sit across a table from this guy and hear more.”