by Michael Blumenthal
I’ve never liked novels
with too many characters in them
just as I’ve never liked parties
with too many guests. What I prefer
are intimate engagements between me
and just one other person: Madame Bovary
over War and Peace, The Metamorphosis
over One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Too many people between the same covers
always confuses me-- I’m perpetually forgetting
who slept with whom, who has died
and who is still among the living.
Had I been an athlete, I would surely
have preferred golf to juggling:
one little ball moving through the air
at a time, just one thing to keep
your eyes on. In a crowded room,
I tend just to glom onto one person—
preferably a beautiful woman—
and hold my attention fixed there
for the entire evening, maybe even after
the party has ended. The older I get,
the stronger this conviction becomes,
until I find myself with nothing but books
like Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea
and Huysmans’ Against Nature (even
Phillip Roth’s Deception), on my shelves.
That way, I don’t always have to go back
to the cast of characters to remember
who’s who or who did what to whom.
Then it’s such a relief to be ordering
for just the two of us, much easier
simply to split the check, and then,
in the morning, to remember exactly
who you are, and what your name is,
and how to get you back home again.
Michael Blumenthal, formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard and Professor of Law at the West Virginia University College of Law, and has taught at universities throughout the world. In addition to ten books of poetry, most recently Correcting World: Poems Selected & New, 1980-2024, he has published a novel, a memoir, short stories, essays and translations from the German, French and Hungarian. He spends his time between Washington, D.C. and in the small Hungarian village of Hegymagas near Lake Balaton.
January House Literary Journal 
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