bohemian, though he detested the brutal word
gracehoper, see James Joyce, and when two ants
ran around the corner when it was dinner
and how the gracehoper wept and it was cold
on top of the cold stone wall though dinner cost
at most say twenty cents, and how the ants
reasoned, and how the gracehoper, and what the stakes
were, and what the dream was, see Aesop.
Sugar
How when I cut the giant Norway maple down
the first warm day the stump was covered in sap
and I ended up stuffing Russian sage
into my Polish nose and waving medicine
down and around the stump which in this case
was more like grass than it was a bush I picked
the other side of the bridge so I could consider
the other side of beauty for a while,
though when I saw the maggots all I could think of
was dead flesh and maggot therapy
and how the maggots stink and struggling bees
swimming in the syrup came up for air from
time to time but it was murder there
and there was murder everywhere and stumps
galore and broken this and that and smashed
everything I was supposed to venerate.
Sinai
No one thought of naming his dog Sinai
for fear of offending the mountain, given how dogs
whimpered and growled outside the tents, their ribs
glistening in the fire, their tongues dripping
oh centuries before we clothed them and let them sleep
on our mattresses and named them Miriam and even
in one case I know Moses, more for his croupy
bark than anything else, for he was the one
that had the problem—though there were other mountains
and one was named Chicora after the poem
I wrote in 1944 though there was
never a dog by that name and that was a mountain
you ran up, it was so perfect, and at the top
above the chained-down cabin the stunted trees
bowed and groveled for they were dogs, and Sinai,
since she was not Misty and not Lucille, just whistled.
Domestic
It was as if his gills were going in and out
and there was a croaking noise he made that scared her
almost to death he imitated while lying
under her heavy salty blanket she pulled
up to his neck and tucked in at his sides
for she was going to read a little afterwards
and put her glasses on that perched on the edge
of her English nose and held her head in her hand
while he took in, for a second only, the streaks
of lightning mixed with the moonlight as if one brightness
was not enough, two gods he thought, and how the
river would smell tomorrow as he swam over
the greasy rocks and she would take him again
in her brackish arms that more than reading and more than
music it was she overcame her sorrow,
and that is why her elbows were sore and the rotten
underwater steps gave way and love
rushed into her mouth and mercy broke over her head.
Frogs
The part that we avoided was not the heart
but what we called the pouch, for it still swelled
or seemed to and there was plenty of horror cutting
into what made the music or at least
the agency you might call it, and more than one of us
retched and as you know, that can become
contagious—think of a roomful of pouches exploding
think of the music on a summer night
with no one conducting and think of how warm it might be
and how love songs may have gotten started there.
In Beauty Bright
In beauty bright and such it was like Blake’s
lily and though an angel he looked absurd
dragging a lily out of a beauty bright store
wrapped in tissue with a petal drooping,
nor was it useless—you who know it know
how useful it is—and how he would be dead
in a minute if he were to lose it though
how do you lose a lily? His lily was white
and he had a foolish smile there holding it up like
a candelabrum in his right hand facing the
mirror in the hall nor had the endless
centuries started yet nor was there one thorn
between his small house and the beauty bright store.
Journey
How dumb he was to wipe the blood from his eye
where he was sucker punched and stagger out
onto the plaza blind. He had been waiting
all night for the acorn moon and eating pineapple
topping over his ice cream and arguing
either physics or philosophy. He thinks,
at this late date, it was the cave again
throwing a shadow, although it may have been
only some way of reconciling the two
oblivious worlds, which was his mission anyhow—
if only there was a second moon. He had a
kind of beard and though he could practically lift
the front end of a car and was already
reading Blake, he had never yet tasted honey.
Died in the Mills
Then, fifty dollars for a Hungarian
say a black dress to go to the funeral
and shoes with soles for the three oldest, that leaves
a dollar fifty for the feast but I’d say
what a dollar was worth then you could have
a necktie if you wanted and paprikash
for twenty or thirty and strudel with apples and nuts
and violins—he favored the violin—
and it is not just poets who love meadows
and take their sneakers off and their socks to walk
on the warm rocks and dip their tender white feet
in the burning freezing water and then bend down
precariously to pick up a froglet and sight
the farthest lonely tree and note the wind
moving quickly through the grasses their last summer.
Rosenblatt
The most revolting thing of all was carrying
a suitcase through the gate for that was mixing
your journeys, even wearing an overcoat
or socks—with clocks—inside your shoes was stupid,
but nothing compared to a suitcase, amazing compartments
for matching neckties and handkerchiefs, and one
for underwear and one for toilet articles
which when it was forced open—for who had such
a tiny key—there was your name burned in
the leather, nor did the scalloped bottles spill,
dear Rosepetal, son of the Hamburg kosher fishmonger.
Iberia
I have been here so long I remember Salazar
and how he tortured my four main poets in Portugal
with his “moral truth and patriotic principles,”
and fatherless Coughlin and all the old bastards
that stretched in one great daisy chain from the coast
of California east and east to New York and
London and thence across Eurasia to God knows
what small moral and patriotic islands
so listen to me for once and hate for good
all moral islands, and if you haven’t done so
already add my Pessoa to your Lorca.
Independence Day
There were packs of dogs to deal with and broomsticks
whacking rubber balls and everyone stopping for
aeroplanes and chasing fire engines
and standing around where sidewalks on hills turned almost
level, and horses and horseshit, and ice in the cellars;
and Saturday I wore a dark suit and leaned
against my pillar and Sunday I put on a necktie
and stood in front of a drugstore eating a Clark bar.
The 4th of July I stayed in my attic resting in
filthy cardboard and played with my bats, I stretched
their bony wings, and put a burning match
to the bundle of papers, especially to the ropes
that held them together and read the yellow news
as it went up in smoke and spoke for the fly and raged
against the spider, say what you will, and started
my drive to Camden to look at the house on Mickle Street
and walked—with him—down to the river to skip
some stones, since Ty Cobb did it and Jim Thorpe did it
though it was nothing compared to George Washington
throwing silver dollars, and for our fireworks
we found some brown beer bottles and ran down Third Street
screaming, but he had to go back home and sit
in his rocking chair for there was a crowd of Lithuanians
coming and he was a big hit in Vilnius
the way he sat in his mound of papers and gripped
the arms, though I was tired of Lithuanians
who didn’t know shit, not to mention Romanians,
to pick a country out of a hat—or I was
just tired and Anne Marie was right, I shouldn’t
be driving at night, I should be dead, I don’t
even know how to give instructions, I don’t even know
my rabbi’s name—she and her motorcycle—
imagine them speaking Babylonian over
my shoe box—imagine them throwing flowers—fleabane,
black-eyed Susans, daisies—along with the dirt.
The Name
Having outlived Allen I am the one who
has to suffer New York all by myself and
eat my soup alone in Poland although
sometimes I sit with Linda he met in Berkeley
or San Francisco when he met Jack, the bread
just coarse enough, the noodles soft but not
thin and wasted, and not too salty the way the
Chinese farther down sometimes make them, the
name still on my mind whatever the reason for
mystery, or avoidance, though rat Netanyahu
and pig that swings from a needle or lives in some
huge incubator, they do darkness where there
was light, the name hates them, the name
in hiding, the name with a beard, and Linda she
loves the name though she invokes her Christ
as Jack her lover and tormentor did and
taught her to do though it is too easy, that,
it troubles me but what can I say, what should I
say while we walk north on the right-hand side,
past the pork store and the hardware store, me lecturing
on Logos (my God) and whatnot Hebrews and Greeks
where Allen and I once kissed, Jack in the sun now.
Broken Glass
Broken bottles brought him to Mickle Street
and pieces of glass embedded in the mud
to Whitman’s wooden house across the street from
the Church of the Most Unhappy Redeemer for when
it was too quiet he broke another bottle
and he collected his glass in a paper bag
and when he was verloren he cut himself
though just as like he cut himself on a wall
while doing an exercise to stretch the tendons
so he could get rid of the numb and burning feeling,
or sometimes he sat on a hydrant and once on a bench
with drooping slats so when the slats gave his back
also gave and feeling came back to his foot
as it came back to Whitman when he sat
on the orange rush seats or rocked in his chair between
the visits and loved the hollyhocks that grew
in the cracks and for a nickel the whole republic
would turn to broken glass as Oscar insisted.
Soll Ihr Gornisht Helfen
Nothing Will Help
Some Austrian Jew or other who dipped his head
in Christian Water so he could get a job
in Wien or some such place, whose cousins galore
never dipped, never stripped,
for they were Jewish through and through
and carried their suitcases into the blue
whatever the gossamer gowns they wore
though it didn’t help a bit,
all that shit
for he had a leather suitcase too,
Austrian Jew.
Voltage
I don’t know one thing from another but I
think the one on the left is a television wire
and the one on which the blue jay jumps is electric
though how they plan the flow to go up the bricks
or right across the yard it’s one of the secrets
and I am learning something about high voltage
and insulation and the different kinds of
poles and I do like the small and crooked ones;
and when the wires were put in conduits I even
grieved for I like torture to be in the open
and cruelty, or indifference, not to be buried
like oral agreements in some small living room,
and I am beginning even to like Verizon and
Sprint, loose and hanging multiple wires
every which way, for in a decade from now
I could grow nostalgic for the metal
footrests and the signs we nailed on poles
for parties and sales or the uphill walk
in Nebraska underneath the endless rows
and what remained of the messages, a cry
from Red Eugene or Red Emma, Mumford
swallowing his sword, never a word
from Stockholm, though a little later the rodents
made their speeches and got their millions, and those
were masters of the underground pipes and conduits
and loved their secrecy and spoke with accents
here and there and were invited to castles
and added fees to their prizes lovingly
and watched their backs of course because you never
know when the hot blue murderous currents will get you.
For D.
Let not a grocery bag of bloody napkins come between us.
Or a floor covered with cigarette butts and dirty underwear
or an alcoholic son or a paper with your
instructions regarding the upper and lower keyholes.
. . .
Let me not be a part of yet another creative narrative.
. . .
Come now the love.
. . .
Come now the two-inch predator wasp dragging a huge insect
over the rocky sidewalk into his dark hole under the porch.
. . .
Come the bees now clinging to flowered curtains.
Rage
I lost my rage while helping a beetle recover
and stood there with precision, balancing
grass with stone and lifted my stick to show
how dirt holds us up and what is indifferent and what
their music could be and what the whistling train,
according to childhood and ecstatic age.
Love
I loved your sweet neck but I loved your shoulder blades more
and wondered whether I should kiss your cheek first
or your hair for I was watching carefully, and
sitting on t
he edge of the tub I thought of
the three great places, namely the three gardens
of Eve, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Mrs. Bloom
lately of Auschwitz, though there are others, oh
there are others, but show me the two hands concealing
love and you have the whole history of the human race there.
Nostalgia
Stalin comes to mind who tried to destroy
everything they remembered, including the tree
they ate from, green delicious, including the store
they stole from after school, including the water
they leaned their foreheads on the moss for and even
the blue stone that once diverted the river
and by so doing came loose and was for the two
long months a dangerous step, but not the bulldozer.
Sleeping with Birds
I have slept with a Crow and a Robin and it’s
not easy, birds, nor going to the airport without
a passport nor singing for security
something out of Noël Coward and thus
proving you’re English and telling them you’re on the way
to catch a bird; but you had to take your shoes off
anyhow and they put a stick up your groin
and one down your throat and you made walrus noises
to show your suffering.
And it was Crete
you traveled in and she had a withered wing
from being crushed by a horse when she was thirteen;
and what you remember is how she sobbed after
climbing into the bus and putting her suitcase
into the overhead bin, but I am conflating
trips and even conflating birds though this one
was named Mavis and she wrote long letters
for she was English, and her last name was Sparrow.
My Libby
I hung onto her likeness and centered it
but as far as the samovar
they threw it into the river
when they took a raft somewhere
or just they bought someone else’s keepsakes,
and as far as the chest
of hand-sewn sheets and pillowcases
Blessed as We Were Page 9
