"Aubade on East 12th Street" by August Kleinzahler - Norton Literature

August Kleinzahler was born on December 10, 1949, in Jersey City, New Jersey.  He grew up in the United States, but finished his English major at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.  He leads a very prolific writing life, having authored eleven books of poetry and several novels, and receiving several rewards for his works.




"Aubade on East 12th Street" by August Kleinzahler


The skylight silvers
and a faint shudder from the underground
travels up the building's steel.


Dawn breaks across this wilderness
of roofs with their old wooden storage tanks           5
and caps of louvered cowlings


moving in the wind. Your back,
raised hip and thigh
well-tooled as a rounded baluster


on a lathe of shadow and light.                               10
                                                                          [1996]

The setting and context of the poem is perhaps contrary to what one may expect.  When Kleinzahler describes “Dawn breaks across this wilderness,” one almost expects a tree line or a mountain range, but the only wood on this landscape is found in the “old wooden storage tanks” atop buildings, and the only mountain “caps” are “caps of louvered cowlings/moving in the wind.”  This setting breaks away from the more traditional and natural description of a sunset, though the way Kleinzahler writes, the buildings create an aesthetic to rival the grandeur of a mountain range.  After describing the morning sun breaking over the breath taking cityscape, he describes the woman to whom this aubade is addressed, spending an entire stanza on her “well-tooled” sensuous features and comparing her form to “a lathe of shadow and light,” breaking the morning light as the buildings did, if not better.  He relates the woman’s beauty to that of a city skyline; the parallelism between the two strongly hints at the parallel beauty of both, especially in the morning light.  Given the context that the poem is an aubade, a song to one’s love, similar to a serenade (only, while a serenade is done at night, an aubade is performed in the morning), these comparisons make sense: the poem is dedicated to the woman he loves, and to her beauty, which is enhanced by the beauty of the cityscape and exceeds it wholly.  In this poem, Kleinzahler attempts to utilize the beautiful setting to impress the woman with an aubade, dedicated to her sumptuous form, which breaks the morning sun like the city skyline.