Red and Swollen
In the museum of thumbs there was one red
and swollen that had almost flattened out by
pressing the metal scale constantly while the
mouth moved differently asking questions and chewing on
nothing, as if to distract you, as if to
assure you there was swollen love in his heart and
once you got the hang of it you realized
there were other brutal thumbs, and that the
museum was full of our red and swollen history
and what you said was the butcher in the old
A&P on State Street in Trenton but what it was
was really Lockheed Martin in Maryland hard by the Pentagon.
Baby Rat
for LUKAS MUSHER AND MELINA GIAKOUMIS
A blind baby rat Luke and Melina tell me
staggering, hopeless, alone, on a burning street
near Columbia, maybe on Amsterdam,
north of St. John’s, his two eyes empty
the sockets a dirty red, either born that
way or plucked out by a hungry
crow, the eyeball the crow’s first delight,
the sweet and slippery taste thereof; someone
will kick the baby rat into a sewer
or pick him up with a tissue and throw him back
and get on his phone in a second to rid himself
somehow of the horrible sight, and I who
for two days now was thinking of the redwoods
and our walk in Muir Woods in the 1970s
thought of placing him in one of the upper villages
three hundred feet in the air protected by
maybe a spider’s web, maybe
a few odd twigs, guaranteed
at least an hour of peace
for I have the privilege now
which I didn’t have forty, fifty years ago
looking up and almost toppling over.
The Cost of Love
If I had to I could have banged my head
on the mud-packed walls of my underground office
and maybe get a gash or two from the crystals
either on my oversized forehead or my cheekbones
for that is the cost of love I have been adding
up in the red, the one on the right, it’s tricky to
do a balance isn’t it? For values are
hard to measure and I didn’t read the book
of pain—I say enough of pain, and down with
666—I’ll take kindness, most of all
kindness, for love is the murdered thing.
Hearts Amiss
How wrong it was to look at those hearts incised
in maples and birches with a loving
arrow between them, especially when the tree
grew larger and the hearts expanded
the way they do, and love took over the tree
and we said, “Here’s another,” and our own hearts
broke in two with envy and regret,
but what we didn’t know then was they were emblems,
signs, of something deeper and more discordant
for they—the lovers—had turned to sacrifice
and torn the other’s heart out from its moorings
and held the wet organ in their own hands,
loose and disconnected from the strings,
the hearts of lovers deeply separated
from what were once such arrows of desire,
and some were painted red on buried stones
planted in the ground like broken teeth.
Hebrish
At the confluence of tea roses and Russian sage
we made a right at the curved iron fence,
one of my dead friends beside me explaining how trees communicated
but I couldn’t understand a thing because it was all blurry—
the way it gets—and though I knew him well
I couldn’t say for sure now whether it was Larry or
Phil or Galway or Charlie until I realized it was me
talking in some kind of Hebrish they spoke
in my town by the Delaware and it was used
for code the way one of the Amerindian languages
was used in World War II the Germans couldn’t in a
million years break since they weren’t as pragmatic
irrational and in-your-face as the English and Americans were.
I noticed the bees were digging in for a late lunch
of what for them was boiled beef and horseradish
or maybe it was just for me, and they were bent over
guzzling madly while paying no attention to the two
of us or in anyway tired of the nectars since it
ran the whole gamut from oysters to soup to—well—
boiled beef to strawberry-rhubarb pie
and a little whiskey after, some of it spilled on the
vanilla ice cream that underlay the pie it had once overlaid,
all of this depending on the blossoms they circled over
and bent down upon, a cafeteria as good as the one
on Broadway called Stanley’s I circled and bent over
expending nickels dimes and quarters when the Dulles brothers
ran the country.
It was Larry, I’m sure now,
and what we talked about was cardboard
and we were amazed that in the open spaces
beside the hotel on 47th Street
there were four or five small cardboard “houses,”
both of us remembered,
the homeless had claimed to sleep in and provide
a safe place for their black plastic garbage bags,
the size of a room at the Sloane House on 34th Street
near Pennsylvania Station where I put up
the price of a meal then for a clean pillowcase
with little or no stuffing and a cardboard
bed as stiff as metal and a cardboard
breakfast of cardboard bread and eggs and between us
we talked cardboard, shirts from the cleaners with sheets of
cardboard we drew on, cardboard soles in ruined shoes
we both wore when we were children, cardboard hats,
cardboard to lie on listening to outdoor concerts
and cardboard masks we made with scissors and crayon
for costume dances, Balls is what we called them
as if we were art students in Paris about to
swim in the nearest fountain.
Though what I want to
say is the bees were too busy to do us any
harm and it was packs of wild dogs, not swarms
of bees, that terrified me (Larry too) except for one
occasion when I pushed the wrong end of an old
broom into a hive of yellow jackets on the underside
of a low-lying garage roof and an angry swarm chased
me through the yard and over a fence, hating
any form of criminal intrusion, urban renewal or
gentrification, I who couldn’t resist intrusions,
who never could, omnivorous as I was, living on
apples and bananas as well as baby lamb chops,
who ran like hell that day (Larry too)
for we in our separate ways didn’t want to be
paralyzed then eaten by larvae, none of us dead ones did.
Cherries
I was waiting to try out one of my inventions
from the flattop garage roof—parachutes this time—
when I tasted a black cherry from the next yard,
wondering even at that age
who had prior rights and what was constitutional,
so instead of jumping I wrote a brief brief
called Yaakov vs. the Tree Trunk
where everyone laughed herself crazy
at Marlboro vs. Madison
or Red Stain vs. the State of
New Jersey,
so bless me you fools
for aren’t you mortals?
and don’t you bend your body down
over the water to taste the ice?
and who, in your family,
even ever just thought of
swallowing a goldfish from the bowl,
say, picking up its slippery body,
bending your neck back and gulping it down
even before they entered law school.
No Kissing There
It wasn’t only Eleanor I kissed
but de Beauvoir with her net bag
on the Street of the Butchers,
and I would have made it Red Emma
if I were a little older and Mary Shelley
a century before, I was so prone to
kissing, and I kissed in this life, on her mouth,
Meryl Streep who stopped at my boughten table,
and when did it start, this kissing?
and when did kissing itself start?
And was it the nose or the mouth?
Let’s name children, grandchildren, dogs,
books, lovers, wives, friends,
and don’t forget kissing the air
in Rome and Buenos Aires to show your distance
and don’t forget kissing your teachers who
taught you one thing through neglect and abuse
and don’t forget Rilke’s simplistic separation
of life and art, no kissing there.
Lake Country
We were either fighting against time
or not paying any attention to it
and one of us was upstairs in the back bedroom
sleeping with one hand on the cold floorboards
or it was the knuckles thereof and
one of us was in the kitchen making coffee and
arguing against Artaud’s unfair reading
of “The Ancient Mariner” and insisting it was his madness
got in the way or maybe it was just that he was
French and misunderstood English poetry,
continuing, as he did, the absurdity of Poe’s
genius, somewhat in the same fog-ridden craziness
as the lore of Jerry Lewis,
that ridiculous freak with the gooney
voice at last growing old,
and though the coffee brewer protested Poe
wasn’t a poet the way Stevens was, or Frost,
he still remembered exactly where and when
Artaud refused to include him
in his anthology though he did include Mussolini,
and we all decided to drive down to Philadelphia
for liverwurst and onion sandwiches at the Olney Diner,
somebody’s birthday, one of the calamities of the late fifties.
Wet Peach
He reached inside his chest for understanding,
where there was a loose heart attached by strings
that could be stretched and severed he could grab
and joggle, and wet as it was in his wet
hands, and (finally) holding it there in his palm
he almost moaned for he was thin-skinned to
an extreme and moved by the slow beating such
that he wore the strings on his sleeve that sometimes
drained in red on the rag he carried with him
for just that possibility or likelihood
and stuffed it like a peach in his side pocket.
March 17th
My song of the pea has me
and my wife carefully pouring
the packet of dry seeds
into the water holes,
the river on one side, the
canal on the other, the
soil perfect for early peas,
the wind scarring our bare ankles,
our thighs wracked with pain—
as it has me planting my walking stick
into the high ground and the roots taking hold,
and ripping it out when the first peas appear—
not to forget the great snow of the early nineties
the day after I bought two bicycles
to welcome in the spring,
the ice on the water a foot thick—
as it was in Boston on St. Patrick’s Day
in an Irish bar lecturing my poor son
on potatoes and him trying to shut me up—
as it was—I remember—in Kansas State
a one-man show and a private showing
of Thomas Hart Benton’s work, the docent
hinting at a certain closeness between her and
the master, the wife, as I recall
after his extensive travels throughout the state
only saying, “My husband is a great painter”—
the Russian sage smelling the same everywhere,
my fingers savoring the odor.
No House
Suddenly there was no house
but most important the hand-sewn curtains
were on the living-room windowsill facing the front porch
though they constantly presented a confusion
since at the same time all the windows
in the front room were already covered
with lace to add a certain stiffness
to accompany the formally placed
furniture: armchairs, cupboards, rugs, including
the one I carried across Crete, up a steep hill,
on a plane, a car, some steps, but Lord,
the rug on the second floor is the Greek one,
the Mexican rug is on the first floor
near Gershom Scholem and Ralph Waldo, the mind,
which I love above all things, is so sloppy.
In the meantime, the poet, whatever
his honors, always writes his new poems
in obscurity, he’s always a beginner,
even if he’s already living in his hut.
Mount Hope Cemetery
At last I’m taking the accusation
seriously and I’ll surprise you
by singing José’s song to Carmen
instead of the nostalgic crap I’ve been living on
I first heard at the ornate old opera house
in Rabelais’s city in the South,
sitting in a box of faded velour chairs
meant for smaller people a bare three feet away
from the smugglers and card sharks
singing their hearts out, my very first opera
I never heard again even the two years
you bought season tickets to the Met
all of which should convince you to lie down beside me
thirty, thirty-five years from now
in the Jewish section of Mount Hope
on the bluff facing Grant Street
even though (as you say) you’re not Jewish
and I would sing too much
and you’re too young to die
and, anyhow, “I had a crush on the rabbi”
I sometimes ate lunch with, though it was Kabbalah
and its cousin Zen we talked about
in the years she lived my side of the river
where she is now buried in my favorite valley
above the small city where I first met her
and danced and sang a brucha across the street from—I think—
the People’s Store almost at
the corner of Bridge and Union
where we often had a late lunch at Guiseppe’s,
mostly minestrone or Greek salad,
she with her motorcycle, I with my bag of books,
she with her Gabirol, I with my dictionaries.
Red Jungle Fowl
Among the whatnots and the barnyard animals
in my small living room in Lambertville
there are two or three red jungle fowl
of beaten tin and bent iron
which we call chicken
in among the sofas and tabl
es
which I’ll call a fatted fowl,
in its own way like the fatted calf
we burned all night
while Moishe was negotiating on a mountain,
or so he said, with something invisible.
But the fowl and fowls like him
whether they are gods or not
and whether they’re smeared with gold or not
are different from the young bulls we called calves
who were worshipped, you know, for their strength and courage,
so unlike chickens who are mean and cowardly,
eat anything, and scratch anyone’s eyes out,
and though all fake gods shit,
not all are as brutal and ugly as they are.
And if you think the talk of sacrifice
is hardly relevant then just walk
through Jerusalem as I have
and listen to the crazies talk about another Temple
and high priests burning fat for the Name
and studying the plans of Ezekiel
as if they were at the drawing boards
at Caltech or MIT,
so many cubits for the inner and outer walls,
so many (Hebrew) feet for the high altar,
and for the sink you wash your hands in,
and parapets for drums of burning oil
and a small stage for the flute and one for the horns
and rows of straw shoes for cleanliness,
and in the back a kitchen for the priests
to have a little bite of fowl
and a silver cup for a schnapps
to drown it in.
And no woman in the inner court
and no woman anywhere in pants
or short skirts
or bare arms or shoulders,
and no cleavage
or low-cut jeans
belly buttons, bare feet,
hair, T-shirts,
breasts, thighs, ankles,
necks, lips, eyes,
or without an arm a leg or a head,
or shaved anywhere,
and butcher blocks with cedar-cladded openings
for razor-sharp knives to slice the necks
and cut the yellow skin off,
the best schmaltz money could buy
and the best cock-a-doodle you ever heard
mostly to warn the Arabs
who walk on the roof.
Knucklebones
Like Frida, who had a bellyful of nihilists
Blessed as We Were Page 14
