soaking my big toe in memory of Libby, left foot,
and reading Hardy, all I ignored out of musical prejudice,
thinking seriously about the foothills north of Tampa, the Alps,
hating the thirty-five-story apartment buildings in South Beach,
always loving the fish sandwiches in Key Largo, the fishermen,
trying to get it straight about Stevens and Hemingway, who punched whom,
reading Ezra’s chinoiserie for its gossip
thinking Jane Freilicher’s eyes are like mine, only mine are browner
listening to Bach’s Unaccompanied Suites, listening to “Helpless.”
Hiphole
As far as the hiphole, every night I dug
into the dirt so I could put my body
partly underground on my long walk from
Lake Garda to Venice and thence to Bologna
and then third class to Florence, for the body
on either side can’t rest on a flat surface,
say a wooden floor, but when we slept in
trees we must have slept facedown on top of
a branch and locked our hands to keep from falling
especially if we moved too much in our sleep
for we were monsters then and led alternative
lives with leopard skin of sorts and powerful
tails not to mention sharp teeth for cutting
and jaws for ripping and bird-like claws for holding
on and sometimes for piercing and sometimes just for
flea abatement or simply musing and scratching,
though we had holes too in the crowded forest
close to our trees, surrounded by our bushes,
for we lived mostly in the understories
and that way we left our lakes for distant cities
or what we took for cities then, the thought
was still with us when we were eating
mortadella and warm tomatoes and washing
our faces at the spigots stopping in
the Romanesques to look at the renderings;
we already knew the routes, we had our knapsacks
packed with toothbrushes, dictionaries, sweaters,
and Swiss knives, though we still walked on our knuckles.
Blue Particles
Don’t ever think of Coney Island
where the rabbits once ran wild
or the afternoon we went swimming
though it was only May for we had graduated
and we spent the night eating hot dogs at Nathan’s
and took the Screamer back to 96th Street.
Nor should you love too much the white pole
or the long and noisy ride through Brooklyn
the No. 2 that delivered you to your front door
and the Dutch freighter that delivered you to Antwerp,
then the Gare du Nord.
Nor your stubbornness every morning at the small table
and what it was like to walk out into the sunlight
and how the blue particles were your chief influence,
that and the Book of Isaiah
and King Lear rolling in the dirt on Chalk Mountain
the early part of your life.
Ghost
You could have stared all day
and it would rather get more radical than less
or more complex or more fragmental,
chaotic is what I would say,
a rabbit with its own rules,
its nose twitching maybe its ears
the last thing to go
the ears are the last thing to go
the gift of hearing
with no sign of life
neither heart nor lung
but the hearing remains
even if it’s like an echo
a tunnel a hole where it goes the ghost goes.
Ich Bin Jude
Who was it threatened to murder
a streetcar full of fucking Nazis in Wien
when he was in the country only two hours
and watched the car empty
including the festooned conductor and the decorated motorman?
The rain wouldn’t stop.
The cheapest place in Europe—
September, October, November, 1954.
Your darling city.
Azaleas
There isn’t a bee swimming in milk
here, just a perfect recollection of the azaleas
at 23 York next door to the funeral parlor
and what the date was they appeared or when you
first discovered or rediscovered them was
and what their color was or what the word was
and what kind of insects inhabited them
and how the tourists were shocked by the beauty
and what the blessing is for azaleas I would have to ask
Rabbi Diana who has the thick books at her disposal
and I think understands the nature of endless gratitude
and whom I ask to plant something lowly on my hill
when the time comes and not to spend too long
on the Babylonian and to speak for me
and what I love and even to read this,
attested to May 11, 2014, Christian time.
Perish the Day
It’s not just Larry who keeps going to
meetings when there’s no one there—I went
to one in the latrine where a body was hanging
from a pipe and a finger had written in vapor
Just a Warning but whoever dragged him in
forgot to take his boots off before or after
and there was only one person there one live
person and he was cleaning the toilet with Ajax the magic
cleanser and he had an Irish accent mixed with
English I myself heard in Scotland
so that makes two when in walks Larry and then
for an hour or more he and Jonathan Swift, the
Ajax man, talked horses and, as Larry said,
an angel disguised as a fly flew into the ear
then into the brain of the horse, you should watch
where you put the swab and you should scratch the smooth skin
closest to the skull so your hand can slip
onto the horse’s head which he would shake free
and move along the fence so he could bend down
for new weed and as for the meeting it lasted
just long enough to cut the dead man down and
wash him off but it was hard getting the boots
off without cutting or snipping for
there were no laces that’s what I want to say
there were no laces on the day we unhanged him.
Poverty
Poverty I learned from the romance of my grandfather
coming over on steerage with three or was it six
dollars sewn into his vest and he ate
cheap and slept cheaper going from this bed to that and
by the time he was twenty he owned a string
of nickelodeons and at thirty he owned
the Mayflower Hotel in Atlantic City
plus the jitneys on Atlantic Avenue
but lost it all in the postwar depression
except he sewed a fifty-dollar bill
in his favorite vest and from this fresh start
he made a killing on Seventh Avenue
with a dollar bill in every right-hand pocket
the way there was a penny in penny loafers
and I put a twenty under my insole and
one time I had to tear my shoe apart
to pay for my supper the restaurant had the best
sweet potatoes anywhere my favorite vegetable
and Brussels sprouts my other and beets and cauliflower
but I had other shoes and found another
twenty and lived by a river with the birds
so loud in May I had to lock the doors
there were three and I had a table with
papers and dozens of books and sometimes
food and animal figurines, a small
wooden pelican, a glass rabbit, a
clay canary, and on a shelf a Deco
clock, a rooster and two pigs disguised
as salt and pepper shakers and some pots
I bought in Iowa and a photograph
of my parents in their store in Detroit, two
orphans almost in tears and in the next room
thirty-five books I am working with just now
and photos and dishes and manuscripts and candlesticks
and tin roses in a cloisonné vase
and more in the next room where I take my naps
and paintings and two thousand books upstairs
and boxes full of letters and rugs on the floor I
dragged from other continents and though I am rich now
by the old standards I always have a twenty
in one of my heels, usually the left foot and
usually underneath the insole I say
it’s there for a rainy day I say it’s just
in case I say it’s for an emergency
though what it could buy now—not nearly enough
for a straw hat to cover my sunspots.
Bess, Zickel, Warhol, Arendt
Aunt Bess died from forgetting and when I
visited her at her last apartment she kept
asking me if I had eaten and poured
bowl after bowl of Rice Krispies for me though
I might add no banana, no milk
no sugar and most of all, no spoon.
And Zickel, my bewildered cousin, who suffered from
spinal curvature and dwarfism
both of which kept him in his small chair
in his little room down the hall and like the prophet
he was named for he fell down from his trances
and he was given to Utopian thinking
and lived by an old canal like the first one.
And there was a kind of Warholian laughter
which Andy and I used to resort to
walking across the Seventh Street Bridge
now the Warhol Bridge—the Allegheny River—
though there is no Gerald Stern Bridge anywhere
nor Michel Foucault nor Jacques Derrida.
And Hannah Arendt—I’m sure you remember her—
who went back to her lover her teacher in a
peasant’s hut in the Black Forest and wept
in his arms as he in hers as he brushed the crumbs
from her Hebrew lips with his Nazi fingers
and published his last explanation in Der Spiegel
after his death in 1976.
Merwin
The way it was in the eighties
when we carried pockets full of quarters
to give to the destitute
and William ran a whole block south once
to give extra quarters because of the man’s dog
a second giving for him
and it was his own Chow he mourned
for weeks on end and how
delighted he was—and shocked—
to see the Chow next door
with his characteristic blue tongue
and his proud and distant way
so that now in the time of no-age
that we share together though across
six hours of land
and six or more of water
I think of him writing in his room full of white light
as our friend Mary Ann describes it
where he’s loading his pockets
and he will run down the best he can
to give a second time to the man
with the Border collie though it’s more
like a third time now that I think of it.
Route 29
This is the place, isn’t it?
I parked my car on the shoulder
and walked into the woods
thirty yards to the pool
of water the opposite side
of the canal and the river
the great maples and spruces
sometimes three feet deep
in the freestanding water.
And there is the stretch, isn’t it,
where I told an astonished young policeman
I was a professor of police science
when he stopped me one night for weaving.
And this is the time of no-time
you get to know in your eighties
reading Paul Goodman and
studying the last poems of Duncan
identical to the typed manuscript
he inscribed for me as a gesture
of love in 1985
at the Pound conference in San Jose
where a door was flung open
in the room where the coats were hung.
Though the canary was red that time
and for a change his name wasn’t Dickey
and he flew back into his cage
to get at the calcium,
he who loved horses
and died with his thin legs in the air
and was carried out secretly
to the 1938 Pontiac,
one of the many things
that disappeared around me
since those who first loved me have gone on without me.
Two Boats
I was eating half a chicken and keeping
my head away from the redbud branch that stoops
sometimes to poke me or just to caress me
as well as keeping the sun and wind away,
and sometimes I was Samuel Coleridge and sometimes
Oswald Spengler and I thought if we had
bought the houseboat in 1950 and started
up the Ohio, then down past Steubenville
to Cincinnati and the Mississippi,
how it all would have been radically different
for Donald and me, floating to New Orleans,
but his father never gave him the money and anyhow
he was too boring to live with for such a length
of time—I would have killed him—
and if Thanksgiving,
two years later in watery Sète, I had
closed a deal with the French sea captain
to rent a boat and cruise the Mediterranean
from Morocco on the left to Greece on the right
including Crete and Spain and Egypt, six of us,
all students at Montpellier, for what was then
a pittance, I think a thousand dollars a month
simple fare included, that makes a hundred
seventy dollars for each of us, the boat
was built I think when the Phoenicians
founded Carthage, the sail was red, a motor
was added for modernity—but we had our lives
to lead, or so we said, in four
or five cities, including school and jobs
and fiancées—but I have only a drop of
regret, the size of a raindrop that barely escapes
my redbud leaves, I sometimes shake them
to have a little drink, and I have abandoned
Spengler a hundred years ago and now it’s
pauvre Spinoza again, he goes with my chicken.
Silence
I once planned a room for pure silence
the walls two feet thick
where I could listen to the Quartets
or just the loose notes floating by.
But I never minded the sound
of Stanley’s cornet
mixed as it was
with the sound of the wind
and the shrieks of small birds
blown about over the water.
He, Stan, who stood on his front porch
facing the river
and blasted away at the black locusts
living there.
He—Stan—who borrowed my rowboat
to get a little exercise before he died
just after his displacement and heart attack
and just before Flo’s breakdown and suicide.
For he was a D.P. American style,
his retirement stolen one day,
the owner in a cloud somewhere
and twenty-six years of work—
steel for Yankee Stadium and Verrazzano Bridge—
gone overnight,
his ’53 Dodge truck in the backyard
with its hood up
just like his gold-laden mouth stood open in disbelief,
the grass growing up foot by foot in the dirt around him
for which I added two coats of green wall paint
whose purpose it was to create another layer
of foolproof sound intervention
to keep the grief out.
A Walk Back from the Restaurant
How fitting it was to see a fat and evil cat
in the dirt and dead leaves of a cement pot
next door to the Presbyters, the same self-righteous
bastards that moved dear Robbie Burns in his
modest apologia, “Holy Willie’s Prayer,”
the single best poem of 1785,
and try to figure out which century the wood trim
and railings and such were last painted
and who the old woman was who lived there with her twenty cats
and how many years ago her loving husband died in his sleep
and how—and if at all—it was possible to disentangle
we’d have to probe the ultimate secret again
since the in-your-face and self-congratulating mayor
couldn’t, in spite of his bulk and his slanted forehead, help us with that.
The Year of Everything
It was while he was collapsing under the weight of
the chifforobe that he considered inner and outer things
though at the moment inner was his pain and outer was
him at the other end in addition to the chifforobe itself.
He used to think of balance, harmony it could be
called, with maybe a slight tilt inward as if he were
moving his mind east ah gradually and even considering
the lotus and some straw to sleep on instead of the hairy
mattress and spring and headboard it would be impossible
to carry up Iron Mountain or Black or Red or Ragged,
Blessed as We Were Page 12
