New Years, 1948 (Boston: Washington and Dover Streets), from Hello, Darkness, by L. E. Sissman (1978)

Three Stanzas from “New Years, 1948

TWO
‘“Well, happy birthday,” Sally Sayward says,
Endowing me invisibly with bays,
Each leaf to mark a year. “Now, go away,”
She tells me, twenty, but, near-man, I stay
To press my case with passive rhetoric
Where deeds are needed. Nonetheless, her quick
Rejection is retracted. By degrees,
I talk my way down to my bony knees
And kneel and squat and sit beside her, where
My drinkless hand can infiltrate her hair
And fathom her resistance. Soon her square
Mouth may traverse to meet my mouth, and then,
Our crossed stars nodding, we’ll be off again.

FOUR
I’m taking Sally Sayward out to lunch.
Inside the Union — say, this place has changed
Since I last ate here; look at all those wild
Magenta murals on the walls — all eyes
Lock onto us, the hunter and his prey
Brought back alive, if only for a day,
A date, a lunch, a showing-up of all
The bucks and stags stuffed in that musty hall.
We march abreast, my hand dressed on her arm.
My eyes right on her onionskin disdain,
Toward the serving line, where old colleens
Stand and deliver soup, slaw, salad greens,
Lamb patties, peas, beets, coffee, brick ice cream.
This round room has changed, too; it’s lavender.
Sashed with long draperies in jungle green.
Look — there’s a blood-red change booth with a brass
Wicket enclosing money and a man.
We step up to get nickels. The change man
Becomes my father. Recognition. Up
Goes the gold wicket, bang!, and out he shouts —
Face lit with flame, no doubt a trick of the
Sensational decor — “No, no, no, no!”
Dream ends. Escapement of small hours resumes.

FIVE
Doze, wake, and entertain those sawed-off dreams
That spring on you at morning, when all things
Distort and shiver; men on stilted legs
Mutate into short blobs, and blots explode
Into thin alphabets of wiry stars;
Simples turn double, petals form whole heads
Of leaves like cabbages, perspectives go
Back to beginnings like a Chirico,
And you fall down the fun-house chute of sleep,
And land, awake, in trouble, on the street
Of dreams, where every door turns you away
To face the undeclared but actual day.

Louis Edward Sissman was born in Detroit 91 years ago today. When he was 37, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he spent the next ten years anticipating death. After the first three years, he was well enough acquainted with it to title his first collection of poems Dying: An Introduction. In the title poem from that collection, he recalls walking out of the clinic after first receiving the news:

Outside, although November by the clock.
Has a thick smell of spring,
And everything —
The low clouds lit
Fluorescent green by city lights;
The molten, hissing stream
Of white car lights, cooling
To red and vanishing;
The leaves.
Still running from last summer, chattering
Across the pocked concrete;
The wind in trees;
The ones and twos.
The twos and threes
Of college girls.
Each shining in the dark.
Each carrying
A book or books.
Each laughing to her friend
At such a night in fall;
The two-and-twos
Of boys and girls who lean
Together in an A and softly walk
Slowly from lamp to lamp,
Alternatively lit
And nighted; Autumn Street,
Astonishingly named, a rivulet
Of asphalt twisting up and back
To some spring out of sight — and everything
Recalls one fall
Twenty-one years ago, when I,
A freshman, opening
A green door just across the river.
Found the source
Of spring in that warm night.
Surprised the force
That sent me on my way
And set me down
Today. Tonight. Through my
Invisible new veil
Of finity, I see
November’s world —
Low scud, slick street, three giggling girls —
As, oddly, not as sombre
As December,
But as green
As anything:
As spring.

In a scene in Mad Men, Don Draper is shown in his den reading Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency. If we’d seen the same scene shot ten years later, Draper would have been reading Dying: An Introduction. Sissman was a copywriter himself, though most of his time was spent in Boston rather than New York. But he is perhaps the ultimate bard of the Mad Men generation, who wrote of dinners at Luchow’s, beautiful young socialites, and men in Dacron-and-worsted suits who found themselves up late at night wondering, “Is that all it is?”:

Men past 40
Get up nights
And look out at
City lights.
Wondering where they
Made the wrong
Turn, and why life
Is so long.

And Draper would appreciate Sissman’s sense of humor, which is summed up by the poem he included in his second collection, Scattered Returns (1969): “Upon Finding Dying: An Introduction, by L. E. Sissman, Remaindered at 1s.”

Happy New Year, everyone.

Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L. E. Sissman, edited by Peter Davison
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978