The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

2010

Two poems from Matthew Thorburn's This Time Tomorrow followed by a note on the author   In Reykjavik – but wherever we are it's like this. Try to go one place, we wind up someplace else. Lily, how do we get back to Austurstræti? "Didn't we pass that church already?" Nothing feels familiar enough. Nothing nods back. In a misty drizzle we look for Ásmundur Sveinsson's studio-turned-museum and drive by Einar Jónsson's instead. "Did this happen when they were alive too?" A strange new world hides inside each stone – "I know I read it, but who gets the credit for that one, again?" We linger over his tools, chisels laid out largest to smallest like a xylophone. A few unfinished pieces – rough outline of a man, or is that a dog and that one's a man? – stand out back, fuzzed with moss. "Now they'll never be finished, which is just another kind of finished." Everything not it gets chipped away – that's how our work is done. And so we go. You splash along in your new rubber boots the color of an old hot water bottle. Umbrellas pop up like blue flowers. Seagulls – hundreds, hundreds of seagulls – hitchcock around Lake Tjörnin, white and light gray against the darker sky. Back in the car you unfold the map, look deep into its tangle of blue and red lines. Will it ever be this easy again? You tell me where to turn. We turn.     Pylsur — Reykjavik That's a hot dog with fried onions (the kind that come in a can) and stripes of brown mustard and mayo. We each ate one standing outside the metal shack down by the harbor. It'd become a tourist site – seriously, a green bus pulled up; and after all we were there, weren't we? – after Bill Clinton stopped by for a pyls and a Coke a few years back. They have his picture up over the register. He must have done what we did – turned around slowly till the wind blew at his back and watched the whale-watchers straggling back in off the boat, gray-faced in their yellow and blue slickers, glanced past them to the Esso station – odd how it's the best place to get your hands on cups of yogurty skyr, the ones with the smart folding spoons tucked under the lids – and wondered why are gas stations also often restaurants here, the only lights on in the smaller towns, and felt secretly happy about this country's love of burgers and dogs, pizza, fries dipped in remoulade, even if a hot dog sets you back seven bucks (he wouldn't have cared, or even known) because everything's shipped in and trucked around, until the wind turns around again so you do too, and wolf down your last two bites.     ©   Matthew Thorburn was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1973. He earned his BA from the University of Michigan, where he was a two-time Hopwood Award winner, and his MFA from The New School. He is the author of two books of poems, Subject to Change (New Issues, 2004) and Every Possible Blue (CW Books, forthcoming 2012), and a chapbook, the long poem Disappears in the Rain (Parlor City, 2009). Thorburn's poems have appeared in many journals, including the American Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and Ploughshares, and he has contributed essays and book reviews to Jacket, Pleiades, Rowboat: Poetry in Translation and other journals. He lives in New York City, where he works as a marketing manager for an international law firm. "In Reykjavik –" first appeared in Cave Wall, and "Pylsur" first appeared in the Paris Review.