Mickey Cesar
Vanishing Point
Mickey Cesar
I hadn’t been back on campus in years. As I made my way across the concrete tundra known as Wescoe Beach, I heard someone call my name. It is always disconcerting to be called out when you think you are cocooned in anonymity. Stranger yet, to be recognized while revisiting a place peopled by the shades of some twenty years past.
Turning, I scanned the preternaturally young faces. The Beach is where I used to come to smoke, to catch up with friends, and while away the in-between hours before class. And yes, I must confess, it offered the occasional venue to perform a little poetry.
On this sunny morning, I noted Mickey Cesar trundling up the stairs. A twiggy figure in camouflage pants, a slept-in T-shirt, and scraggly hair, he waves. His hand clutches his signature cigarette. We had last spoken nearly two years earlier just before he shipped out for Iraq. The bard’s words played over in my brain, “Breathes there a man with a soul so dead…”
I first met Mickey several years ago at an informal––by informal, I mean not affiliated with an institution of higher learning––poetry group. The get-togethers included some of the brighter names in the regional poetry firmament: Jason Ryberg, Ed Tato, Mark Hennessy, Sarah Ruhlen, Chris Citro, and yes, Mickey Cesar. At that time, he was using the group to help him work over the collection of poems that would become his first book, Vanishing Point, for 219 Press (2005).
Cesar is always wry in tone and can, on occasion, be just a touch too smart for his own good. His poems are rife with the fundamental curiosity of a man unwilling to call it a day just because things are different than he first thought. Cesar’s clear fondness for words, and their capacity to see with a sight different from one’s eyes, is occluded beneath a culture no longer valuing the kind of introspection and critical thinking required by a literary mindset.
Today, Cesar lives in Lawrence, riding out a low-key summer in preparation to beginning classes this fall in the maiden voyage of Kansas University’s new Master of Fine Arts program. He is working on a new manuscript and waking early to work in a bagel shop. In his spare hours, he is trying his hand as poetry editor for I-70 Review.
As we sit on the front stoop at the Free State Brewery and, later, rearrange chairs in our scramble for shade in Mark Hennessy’s back yard, we talk about his new poems. There is a new leanness to the words and images. Much of Vanishing Point found its genesis in the nasty breakup of Cesar’s first marriage and the awkward and often confusing effort to reintegrate back into singleness. In the new work, beauty remains slightly twisted and metaphorical, ala the poignant film, American Beauty. One particularly evocative scene unfolds in "Theory" as a solitary dog barks unheard warnings at a chain link fence that stretches between neglected back-ally garages. The sexual tension in Cesar’s poetry is tactile and all but palpable. I cannot but wonder how much of his new dialectic was birthed in the arid, low-grade fever of combat support in the Udairi Desert.
Will Leathem
Poetry Editor
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