and if I’m too loud it’s all about the things
I’m trying to find the word for—murder, greed—
a single word, contamination, scandal,
moaning—though that’s personal—even swaying, even
if I’m surrounded by others, even if I
caress the suffering branches, for I have permission.
Hell
JONES & LAUGHLIN
It was easy to call it that because of the
smoke pouring through the bricks or just the
bricks themselves burning and we kept picking up red-hot
chunks and where we could we reinforced
the outer walls above and below our heads,
and who and what we were we couldn’t exactly
tell for we were covered in soot and hopped
away from the heat like hot dancers
for we were creating flames for those on the mountain
who drove up the steep sides to see the view
and took their visitors with them so they could express
their gratitude, though no one up there knew
that we wore thick white Tom Mix gloves with the word
“diamond” imprinted on the cuff and a large
red star as if on the knuckles and we were juggling
the burning bricks and our hands were blistered
and after a while our thick black shoes were steaming,
talk about inner and outer circles, talk about
Virgil whose name was something from Eastern
Europe near the Carpathians, soup out of cabbage,
meat out of fat, garlic from dog-star roses.
Mule
What good did it do him to sit in the white tub
and soap his back with a curved brush? He was
a mule who circled around the monstrous stone
from right to left, dragging and grinding and wearing
the blinders, and one time he tossed the hay
over his head and turned his teeth to one side
to catch it the way a mule does, bending to eat
the sweet and tasty grasses, and that’s when a stick
of sorts was used to guide him; you should have seen him
weighing tomatoes, in spite of the welts,
you should have seen him unloading bituminous coal
with a long shovel, pushing it down the chute
the way he and his kind did every winter
for twenty-five cents a load, give or take some.
Wilderness
Given how deer are pests now
you’d think it was no big thing watching one
run up Union Street at six in the morning
in the middle of town looking for a woods
though he may have smelled the river, which only confused him—
at least that’s what I think—and he turned right
on Jefferson toward the hills, if you consider
the corner where an impatient woman was running
in place and we went softly in different directions
for we were too ashamed to look at each other.
Not Me
It wasn’t me but someone else in his eighties
sitting against a wall and it had to be
his mother sitting beside him well over a hundred
and maybe blind—I couldn’t tell—and feeding her
from a tin plate or maybe it was foil
of some kind—I don’t remember and when
a small girl maybe three or four came by
in tan stockings with horizontal blue stripes
and new blue shoes—and sunglasses I remember—
it could have been Crete—Heraklion, I’m sure of it
he stared in disbelief, maybe in envy,
maybe even in joy, and turned to his mother
to whisper something and folded his stiff fingers
over his belly and broke out into a smile
and half closed his eyes and almost nodded,
there were so many decades between them—
he could have slapped the ground with gratitude.
After Ritsos
One man stood apart and announced to the others
it was a form of hysteria and explained
to them the roots and connections to a woman’s body.
But it was only when they brought the donkey over
to comfort her that she stopped her screaming
and gradually turned to sobbing in response to
which a dozen handkerchiefs appeared,
and everyone explained things to his neighbor
but the donkey loved her more than the man did,
he who was looking for a tree to rub against.
And there was an unearthly sound he made
as he backed up against a wooden post
to ease the sores on his haunches,
and I was remembering my own donkeys
and the kindness of Anne Marie.
After the Church Reading Against the War
It was Galway kept talking about the sidewalk
and how it was made of stone and not cement
and what a great wonder it was to him,
but there was old snow piled up and I had to
walk in the street against the cars mostly
speeding cabs and I would have stood my ground
if someone there didn’t pull me away although
what I remember I jumped over a barrier—
I sort of flew—and my pride knew no
bounds but at the restaurant I was too quiet
and maybe they thought I hurt my back or I was
thinking of death but I had probably
zeroed in on nothing, which no one can stand;
and it was such a pleasure driving home
with the window open and the smell of
winter on Route 78 and thinking
again of Galway and his stone sidewalk
and how I flew and how a bird ascends
at the last minute just to tease you, especially
crows, especially pigeons—and sparrows—so hungry
they stay for the bread and only when you reach down
do they go for the blue, and though it wasn’t blue that night
but black, with snowflakes falling on your eyelids,
and though you did the bread later you flew
first over a red plastic fence, then over a wooden
and if there was only a starter wind to lift you
you might have never stopped flying, you might have risen.
112th Street (1980)
Where there used to be a telephone booth here
that’s where she stood banging on the glass
wearing only a raincoat over her slip
accusing him of calling another woman
when he was only halfway out the door
and he was embarrassed when he recovered from
the shock and he tried to protect her from the shame
and couldn’t believe her rage and how her eyes
flashed as if in a drugstore novel and he
embraced her while she covered her face with her hands
and he remembered it thirty years later with something
like shame himself—though they both laughed later—
but something was lost, especially when he walked
by the building where the phone booth used to be,
and she would suffer bouts of sickness and death,
quick and unexpected and obdurate—
what they never dreamed about—fighting
each other two hundred feet over the river.
Free Lunch
I don’t give a damn who gets a free lunch
in the first Methodist church on Union Street,
I just wish they’d fix their roof and let us
alone for a while, though you can tell a schnorrer
because he looks around and then puts
t
wo quarters in the jar instead of say
a sawbuck and looks so happy leaving
as if he’d just put one over on the canary
or the wild volunteer in the orange apron, but your
heart would go out to the large-headed woman
who picked up her doll from a wooden high chair
and carried it out September 11, 2012.
And for God’s sake, someone bring up Isaiah
who had his faults amen but
refused to budge and he was sawn in half
at the end and someone bring up Debs
who ran for president five times
on the Socialist ticket and the last time
got a million write-in votes while serving
time because he hated war and said that
while there’s a lower class, he was in it,
and while there’s a soul in prison, he was not free,
and so on, so where’s his stamp, post office?
Maryanne
Everyone gets her day, Maryanne whom I
talked to exactly thirteen months ago
it seems was more at peace than anyone else
and though she had twenty-three cats and lived in rural
Arkansas I remember her curled up
as we say and reading old Cambodian novels
on the sixth floor—I think it was—while Howard
raged here and there and I am grateful we got
back in touch after fifty-five years and I am
amazed they lived together again, he with his
castle in Burgundy and his young French wife,
she with her puffed-up eyes and her black dresses
though both of their phones are dead now.
What Brings Me Here?
Here I am again and what brings me here
to the same wooden bench
preaching to the city of Lambertville
surrounded by mayapples?
For who in the hell is going to lie down with whom in the hell,
either inside or outside? And you know it’s amazing
to watch flies lie down with feces
or mosquitoes lie down with blue bloods
and over there is a double house you call a twin
and when the one on the right burned down in under a minute
the one on the left refused to budge, not even an inch.
I’m not saying a French horn with a trombone
or a fleabane with a fleabane
or in one case
wood as fuel with wood as a god.
And I’m not saying it doesn’t matter,
grinding the faces of the poor,
or whether it’s a song or not.
Even if someone got carried away
and swam across the East River to Little Poland;
even if someone called himself a remnant
and lay there for sale cheap in the cheapo bin
whose grandfather had a trumpet for an ear
and raged against the heartless
then lost his polished head lying down with the sycamores.
Durante
How could I ever lie down like that
listening to Jimmy Durante singing “Try a Little Tenderness”?
Wasn’t there a war on and weren’t legs being sawn off
by second lieutenants right out of medical schools
in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, home of Montefiore (in one case)
and Albert Einstein North and Albert Einstein South (in the other)?
and wasn’t my back getting tired carrying so much in
and out including celery and Raisin Bran and Eight O’Clock
and once a sofa and twice an upright piano and
wallboard out of my open trunk my body bent
forward a little and my elbows taking the weight, my
neck itself the telltale repository
of a hundred different pains, each one
enough to slow a gorilla down; and I should
love the mattress itself, which I have been sleeping on
for thirty-three years and I should have fixed the record player
and I shouldn’t have put the box of records on the curb
and lose the voices that way, and I should have paid
a sixteen-year-old to lift my end of the piano
and I shouldn’t have been so arrogant carrying
all alone a 4-by-8¾-inch wallboard
and I should have played patty-cake with the gorilla
and I should have let Louise carry her own sofa
or I could have carried the two cushions
and put them back in place on the open porch
waiting for the truck to park in the flower bed.
The World We Should Have Stayed In
The clothes, the food, the nickel-coated iron
flower tables, the glass-and-wood-fluted doorknob
but most of all the baby girls holding
chicks in one arm and grapes in the other
just before the murder of the Gypsies
under Tiso the priest, Slovak, Roman Catholic,
no cousin to Andy, he Carpatho-Russian
or most of all Peter Oresick, he of Ford City,
he of Highland Park and East Liberty
Carpatho-Russian too, or just Ruthenian,
me staring at a coconut tree, I swear it,
listening late on a Saturday afternoon
a few weeks before my 88th to
airplane after airplane and reading the trailers
by the underwater lights of yon organ-shaped
squid-squirming blue and land-lost swimming pool
the noise a kind of roar when they got close
I’m watching from the fifth floor up, Warholian
here and there oh mostly on the elevator but
certainly by the pool, his European relatives
basking under his long serrated leaves
coconuts near the top—ripe and dangerous—
like Peter, coming from one of the villages inside
Pittsburgh, like me, half eastern Poland, half southern
Ukraine, born in the Hill, on Wylie Avenue,
the first village east of downtown Pittsburgh,
Logan Street, the steepest street in the Hill,
two blocks—at least—a string of small stores and
Jewish restaurants, Caplan’s, Weinstein’s, I was
born at the end of an era, I hung on with
my fingers then with my nails, Judith Vollmer’s
family was Polish but they were twelve miles away from
Peter’s village, this was a meal at Weinstein’s:
chopped liver first or herring or eggs and onions, then
matzo-ball soup or noodle or knaidel, followed by
roast veal or boiled beef and horseradish
or roast chicken and vegetables, coleslaw
and Jewish pickles on the side and plates
of cookies and poppy-seed cakes and strudel,
Yiddish the lingua franca, tea in a glass,
the world we should have stayed in, for in America
you burn in one place, then you burn in another.
Divine Nothingness
I have to say I can’t find the Book of Brightness
anywhere, not Amazon, not even the library at
Princeton, though I almost scream at the librarian
“it was carried across the border
from Provence into Spain and Portugal
and tied with hemp under the warm saddle
of the wisest donkey east and north of Madrid,”
and for herself I show her my ten fingers
and explain the separations and what the messages were
and how the years of baseball had interfered
through breakage and swelling now permanent and how
there are ten candles waiting to be lit
and what the permutations and distortions were
and h
ow I wasn’t crazy but had to find
the book to round out my education
and I was losing faith in Princeton, what with the
shoes and dresses in the windows and I could have
gotten in touch with the unfathomable
if only Princeton had it and I gave her the
title in Hebrew as well as a short lecture
and what came out of what but I had to go through
the glass doors with nothing but an egg sandwich
wrapped in plastic the way it used to be wrapped
in wax paper and either go down to Trenton
or figure out the permutations by myself
and I blamed Allen Ginsberg for all this
since I know they had the Book of Pure Suffering
written in the same century as The Brightness.
He Who Is Filthy
He who has a forehead
will have a forehead still,
and she who has a little brown egg
will have her nest and give her milk
in the most unlikely place of all;
and Johnny Cash will sit with his hand
on one leg and his other hand holding his head up,
and Learned Cohen will get on his knees
before his brilliant violinist;
and he who is filthy will be filthy still
and most of all, Thelonious Monk
will turn around again and again,
a different tic from mine
but equally respectable.
Lifewatch
Good to lie down in a yard of shadowing bimbo trees
against a dying redbud near a Japanese maple
whose deliquescent branches year by year
it gets darker and darker.
Good to be near a fence which unlike its neighbors
both up and down it’s all of wire a see-through
chain-link different from the wooden walls,
the jails nearby, the swimming pools and sling chairs.
Good to be here finally filling in the gaps
and drinking coconut milk again
and out of debt forever.
from Galaxy Love
Bio VIII
Refusing to listen to just any song that comes my way,
playing the mouth organ in homage to Stephen Foster,
Blessed as We Were Page 11
