they set it on fire
and floated it into West Virginia
but I who came for the light
I learned to sing and put my back out of place
by reading on the floor
for I was either the first or second generation
depending on how you counted
and I could have once become a Quaker
and now I have to confess
that it was I who hung them up to dry
and folded them in the dark
for here you have to fight for life.
86th Birthday at MacDowell
Why do you always climb an extra pair of stairs
to get to a good light and why does all your pain—
speaking only of backaches—always show in your neck,
and do you think it only shows there or also under the pouch
of your left eye, and can’t you just cut your neck off?
And what is the age of your fellow artists shrieking from
their crowded table and shouldn’t I be working all day
with Alessandra changing words from thirty years ago
to make myself more musical and when will she be
done with Einstein’s bastardly life and ready to give herself
to my fine animal, vegetable and human love songs?
Plaster Pig
It didn’t work that the bores I grew up with
smeared my door with lard
for I was enlightened and walked with the rest
in the mountains of Italy on Easter morning
and went to St. John’s on Christmas Eve;
and neither does anyone I know
keep a plaster pig in his living room
for it is not what goes into the snout,
and you will forgive me
whether you like it or not
for wasn’t it being afraid of the pig
that drove us there in the first place
and wasn’t it God in the second,
and it had bristles in the third,
and the lungs were too small
and it was as smart as a fox terrier
and lived in shit.
And it turns wild in a second like nothing else
and someone once told me the male
has a cock that twists around like a corkscrew
and for those reasons I won’t eat it.
Apt. 5 FW I
We return to the blood pudding
every chance we get
that every poet in Kraków
knows just as he knows the cabbage,
so fok the five flights
and the door to the roof
and the plaster ceiling since
my left arm hung down and scribbled
on the gray and green and yellow painted floor;
and there was a wind in the airshaft
and a red and blue beacon I said of Empire
that Schechter called the Divine Light
so give me back my Chinese landlady and my orange bathtub.
Counting
You remind me always it’s thirteen years
though when I sit with my calendar or after
with just my fingers I can’t remember or just
confuse myself by trying to put my things
in order but I am almost always wrong
and I have to empty the room and pull the blinds down
and fold up the rug and sweep the floor
and put a wooden chair under the window
so I can think by squeezing the rungs until
the veins in my hands turn blue, for in the beginning
I climbed into your car and two weeks later
though neither of us gave it a thought we walked
across the street for breakfast where there was an ocean
nearby and that’s the morning we started counting.
Day of Grief
I was forcing a wasp to the top of a window
where there was some sky and there were tiger lilies
outside just to love him or maybe only
simply a kiss for he was hurrying home
to fight a broom and I was trying to open
a door with one hand while the other was swinging
tomatoes, and you could even smell the corn
for corn travels by wind and there was the first
hint of cold and dark though it was nothing
compared to what would come, and someone should mark
the day, I think it was August 20th, and
that should be the day of grief for grief
begins then and the corn man starts to shiver
and crows too and dogs who hate the wind
though grief would come later and it was a relief
to know I wasn’t alone, but be as it may,
since it was cold and dark I found myself singing
the brilliant love songs of my other religion.
Droit de Faim
Once I was a postwar doctoral student
eating a sandwich on the sly in one of the
nethermost aisles of an empty superette
on Broadway near 100th in the days of
unchecked books and I could cut my bread
and put on mayonnaise in a tenth of a second
and eat while walking in the direction of
the glass door, and though it’s hard to explain
except in terms of hunger, or you might say
“droit de faim,” though I would have said I was
St. John and I was in an El Greco painting
creating a world and I would have stuck to my story
even if I was slapped on the back of the neck
on the way to number this or that for I was
stubborn as the rind that covered the meat
or as the hardened skin of calf tongue stuck
in my throat I reached my fingers down to
carefully pull away from the windpipe it must have
wrapped itself around so I could breathe
again after almost a minute and thus continue
forty-six more years, or let’s say forty-
five and counting, in a world I adored
on a crowded hillside on the Delaware
inside a converted 1840s schoolhouse,
and there were other brutal happenings.
1946
One hand was holding the rail and one hand
was pushed up to the middle of his back
as if it were growing there, and he was disastrous
from looking too much backwards and from loving
slums too much, including the beans he ate
and the ketchup he spiced them with; and there were musicians
busting violins and bashing trombones
who also loved the slums and they had hands
too growing on their backs nor was there a suit
to fit them or a sweater and even their heads
were turned backwards, mostly because of the rivers
they once swam in and mostly because they tossed
their girlfriends over their heads or under their legs
in someone’s small enlightened living room
or at Tom’s Bar where beer was still a nickel,
before they raised everything to a dime,
including doughnuts and coffee and subway fares,
ruining our lives—the bastards—it almost killed us.
Bio III
I will go down in history without a hotel
for I have been dispersed, though what I wanted
was nothing, a box for my mail, a key,
an easy chair and a floor lamp with tufted string,
a coffee shop with access inside and outside
next to the lobby with a redheaded waitress.
I was waylaid, given what I was, by
two thousand books and a Plymouth station wagon
thirty feet long and easily twelve years old
that I co
uld carry a piano in and park
anywhere I wanted, given the year then.
And I had a bench where I could think it through
when there were two seconds of silence in between
the delivery trucks, before my coffee got cold
and the crumbs on my lip were gobbled up by sparrows
catty-corner from St. Andrew’s Episcopal
where there is opera music four times a year
and you put clothes on the porch to give to the poor
—if I could compare one life to another—
though what I loved always got in the way.
from Divine Nothingness
Bio IV
I created an unassailable Utopia amidst Max Factor the powder
and sang such that I entertained a small living room
full mostly of berouged women in the days of Bobby Breen,
and played for money nine-ball instead of reading Kant
offering my substance to suffer by inattention and suffer
again by the final wiping out of the cosmic mirror.
And I fought Figgy Dutch the toughest when I was only ten
and then again when I was twenty but never once
though I had a gift did I pluck his red eye out,
which brought me to my kitchen window in the autumn of many a year
and many a cat hiding behind the orange and purple chrysanthemums
and one time blue not far from the birdbath his blue Santiago.
I stood there thinking not of Kant but of Paul Goodman though more of Delmore Schwartz and even more of John Berryman have you heard the terrible news?
Though ten years earlier I sat on a heated glass floor in stack after stack
for the government loved me and gave me more time than you can imagine,
which I used wisely not ever sleeping not ever joining the
Communist Party eating supper for a maximum of sixty cents a plate.
Crossroads I had but it meant nothing and though I went
left and right I only followed a thumbtack, and it’s
amazing how I didn’t die, three times, and where I woke up
and what the dogs said and how I thought Immanuel Kant
would clear the air for me for I heard it somewhere
and followed that thumbtack wherever I thought it would
take me by holding his book under my armpit
through the tunnels and up the evil hills,
beloved hills, and read in bars and restaurants,
and once in the North Side bibliothèque oh Scotchman oh beard
of ages nor was I ever deprived—I couldn’t be deprived—
and if I dropped my Air Corps khakis down the incinerator
I never dropped my thumbtack into whose steel or tin
but shining I primped or at least I stared while waiting
for a light or waiting for a drink or looking through
my set of keys (I have eight) in the act of opening
one of my doors (I have three) which is
one of my numbers as eight is the other since I am
occult, though you’d never know it, and willing
to imitate the believer the lover, which isn’t
mockery but putting on the dead clothes and giving them life by
climbing or just by breathing as we breathe into a paper bag
or into what we call rubber since our lungs are pumps
and we do the motion of arms and legs as with a threadbare
tire the left hand fitting it into place the right hand
holding the bumper jack a shoulder even
keeping the car upright the smell of birds
escaping from the woods my good luck to find
two bricks to keep the car from rolling, birdfoot
violets for luxury a gust of wind for love.
Ruth
There was a way I could find out if Ruth
were still alive but it said nothing about
her ’46 Mercury nor how the gearshift ruined
our making love nor how her brother found her
compromised and what the contempt was
he registered, though I wanted to remember
the two hundred steps I climbed and the first
kisses in the empty kitchen a lifetime
before she died of emphysema and all
her credits were spread out on a page
in what they called an “almanac” for which
I chose to walk uphill for a half hour
until I reached a house with a blue boat
in the front yard, then walk back down for downhill
you are relieved since you have a whole city
below you and you have the wind at your back
for consolation and a small porcupine
at home in the empty street and hunched over
eating a rotten cabbage since grief is your subject.
Dolly
It’s true that in spite of the sign that said
No Dogs or Else
I was offered a room under the weather vane
where the arrow’s shadow came and went and
there was a mattress against the wall
and boxes of records and cartons of lightbulbs
and Dolly whom I hid in a shopping bag
only allowed herself to whimper
for dogs know when it’s time to hide
and, for all I know, can read our miserable signs
and what you do with a dog in a shopping bag
you can gently hold her mouth shut
for she wants to bark
and that would ruin your nap on the filthy mattress
and later your swim
and most of all near the ivy and the beach plum
the race to restore knowledge with a stick.
D.
My Deborah was a judge too
only I am pulling names out of a hat
the way you did rabbits
and though she stood with her toes pointed in
as if she were in the docks
she was still the judge and would remain one.
There is only one other person who understands this,
the rest will have to go by language alone.
Think of a meadowlark you held in the cup of your hands
and how you reached down to kiss her wet feathers
and she bit you twice, on the lip and the left cheek.
Limping
Space again for a predatory wasp
to sing you to sleep and good cracks in the sidewalk
where the trees spread year by year creating broken
steps either up or down and two garages
from 1929, I know it as sure as
I know the hollow blocks though I’d have to
get into urban archaeology from
Pittsburgh east as well as the decades and that’s
not my job, though I don’t know what my job is,
mourning, finding a word, finding
a number—8—showing what’s despicable,
clearing the air, remembering, though not official,
I’m not official, I just ingest,
devour, I said once “reconciling
two oblivious worlds,” I said “getting ready,”
naming names, maybe it’s
hiding behind a tree, maybe
getting inside the tree, maybe
learning to love the one or two breeds of dogs
I didn’t love before—say boxers, say stiff-haired
small brown crossbreeds, say it’s
walking again as far as the Flea, say it’s
limping, even if I don’t have to.
Love
A wet towel so many times you’d think
I’d finally get it, say the day
I reached into my pocket for two hundred fifty
with nothing in writing and forty more for the paint
though it was more for Jack Daniel’s
and Jim Beam;
or say the day I made the mortgage payment
to save a house and made an agreement for working
against the money, involving receipts and deadlines,
but both were ignored, and who paid the next month’s mortgage
there’s no way of knowing;
but money is only water,
isn’t it, and everything rises and falls and
somehow it’s only smoke but the poorer poor
reach down on the sidewalk for a penny, bohemians
too, they know exactly what’s in their pockets
down to the dollar, for they are provident,
unlike the bastards who don’t need pockets since
the tailors cut their pants without to give a
smooth ferocious look like the czarist police,
or the corporate piggery eating and vomiting;
and one time I picked up a soul near Easton, PA,
and drove him down to my house and cooked
an omelette you can’t imagine—with Big Boy tomatoes
out of our garden and new potatoes and drove him
downstream to catch a bus to Philadelphia
and probably gave him twenty bucks besides—
the day of hopeless amour on the Delaware.
Top of a Mountain
You could mistake the wind itself for a voice
though no one ever said it was a tenor
or not or even male or female although
without even blinking you knew, and it was mostly
unequivocal though I wanted the words,
even if it was the wind, for which, well,
a pine tree took me in her arms the way they
do and we did Fred Allen and Arthur Godfrey
and other voices back of the bus and such,
the pine tree too before we both got serious
and put our hats on, me with a Lindy, both ears
covered in flaps, she with a rag, a kind of
bandage, and referenced Job and Jeremiah
and I said “Perish the day” but didn’t mean it
for I was lucky, I said so once, and I did
swaying, the pine tree too, though maybe
she swayed first, stunted as she was,
but don’t worry, I won’t be struck dead
for my poetry, I’m too old for that,
Blessed as We Were Page 10
