Blessed as We Were

by Blessed as We Were (retail) (epub)

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,