I had a bellyful too,
only it was hellfire ecstatics
riding, as they did, on white horses
with swords sticking out of their mouths.
I lived in Alabama PA
I loved the cheap real estate
but I hated that they drank white vinegar
and ate supper at five o’clock
and what their tattoos were and where they put them
so I gave up talking
and spent the afternoon in the low mountains
and drove up and down the steep roads
studying the cows.
Frida, full of charm and cunning,
asked Henry Ford if he was a Jew.
He loved to dance with her
nor did Rivera shoot him with the .38
he carried in his hip pocket
for he was driving the new roadster Ford gave him.
So here’s to Miniver Cheevy and here’s to Shelley
and here’s to Charlemagne and here’s to Trotsky
and Trilling’s stockings and Adlai Stevenson’s shoes
and Dorothy Day and C. K. Williams and Galway
and Jack Dempsey and Brest-Litovsk and horseflies
and herring salad and beetles and dead man’s float
and the little man on the wedding cake
and the cake itself and
stuffing your mouth with sugar,
and here’s to arthritic fingers and here’s to knucklebones.
Frutta da Looma
Thinking if trees suffer pain from the cutting
there has to be blood as evidence except that
the wetness is not so often red and clotted
but something reflecting the color of the wood
itself, all of which brings me back to 1952
and the horrific contests between
big A1 Brayson and myself with half the
school watching, our axes honed to a point,
sometimes him and sometimes me dropping our
tree first, and blood you might say in half of
Long Island among the pitch pines and maples,
mementos of the forests that extended from
Maine to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,
pools of blood in the springtime flowing into
the Great Lakes or further west, the hemlocks,
the blood different it seemed from the huge white pines
though it took us a second great war to realize
that one good tree deserves another, even a
frog, for that matter, even a flower, even
a freight train, even a dress white frutta da looma.
Adonis
I forgave him the debt of having to explain
where he came from, who his angry father
and his loving mother were, or I relieved him
from any excuse and sat
dozens and dozens of years ago at the counter
of Zak’s, Broadway and 103rd,
he on the other side, his sleeves rolled up,
his hands, his arms, in steaming water, washing
dishes and frying pans and talking music,
his dream of studying at Juilliard,
the tiny practice room a rich lady
from the Upper East or Upper West Side paid for,
listening all afternoon to him playing
the small piano, his large romantic gestures,
his hair wild, his hands and fingers amazing,
classic Polish; he was from Little Italy,
a high school dropout, me a graduate student
at Columbia, then I left for a year in Europe,
and when I came back I looked him up at Zak’s,
the manager told me he was dead, no one
knew the facts, I thought of him
for years, I remember that we
took him out for dinner on Amsterdam
and he unspooled his dream again and told us
about the music he had written that week,
conducting with one hand, it was a loss
I couldn’t recover from, I was awake
night after night but I can’t even remember
his name, I lost it years ago, dear Shelley
this was Adonis too,
praise him.
Tony Was Right
Tony was right, I traveled by Greyhound bus
to New York City for seven dollars and was
a Jew of the entire world, what the Rooskies
called a Cosmopolitan, and slept in
many parks and on the ground in
France and Italy and washed at
public spigots and ate the warm tomatoes
and petted and kissed ferocious dogs, especially
near Padua, and stayed there day after day
to look at the Giottos and fainted
on the stone floor of a bank in Florence
after sleeping for two hours in the grasses of
the Boboli Gardens, and he is right, I opened
my window to yell at the rude truckers
forcing their way past cars at the entrance to tunnels
and bridges in New Jersey and I hope he remembers
our swim in the freezing water of a natural basin
carved over two million years ago in a huge
round stone at the top of a mountain
in Arizona we climbed all day to reach;
but bless him anyhow even if he doesn’t
for he does remember how I sang “La Marseillaise”
and some hits from La bohème.
And God bless Eleanor Roosevelt. And God bless Erroll Garner.
And God bless Rosey Rowswell.
Blessed as We Were
As far as love
you know the favorite challenge she throws to he,
“What color are my eyes?” and watches him squirm
and hedge, and hedgitate, and argue and lie, and
yours are brown and by the way I love
everything about you—except a little—
for what if you praised, say, everything I wrote
without so much as the smallest reservation?
Speaking of which, in my poem “Larry” you
—and Ira as well—didn’t recognize that “hog”
was the name for the huge motorcycles
that overweight and bearded veterans
ride up and down our highways sometimes
twenty or thirty, three abreast sometimes
in true formation, the size, as I said in the
poem, of a bathroom,
crowding out everything in the two small downstairs rooms
of the Utah house, and when I looked the word “hog” up
in my huge thesaurus there was no reference
to motorbike or motorcycle but there
was a reference when I looked up “motorbike”
to “pig,” ah how polite and incorrect,
I never heard it called a pig, “Let’s drive
our pigs up 611 into the mountains,
let’s mount our pigs, hang onto the ears
for support when you’re coasting downhill,”
and for the Iberian poet of the eleventh century,
Ibn Gabirol who wrote in Hebrew
but bought his food and ate in Arabic
whom I’ll be leaving, or he’ll be leaving me
for whom I write and whom I read,
and Ira and Phil and Muriel
and Galway and William and Charlie
and Levis here and Bishop there,
her “Gas Station,” her “Moose,”
and Gershom Scholem and Benedictus Spinoza
and Judith and Michael and Mihaela and Jean Valentine
and Ross Gay and Joan Larkin and Jane Mead and Wackadoodle,
or Blake and Shelley or the Rooskies and Poles
and always the French and Spanish
and Roethke and Schwartz and Berryman and Goodman, all those,
and Eddie and Li-Young, both from Chicago,
and Toi from Hamtramck, her heart in New Orleans,
where I spent an afternoon with a nun once
discussing the prophets, Micah most of all,
“do justice, love mercy, walk humbly
before your God” whom the Gideons believed foretold
the greatest of Jewish healers turned into God,
as Isaiah foretold, they said, the Virgin Birth,
who taught English and Latin in a high school
in Minneapolis I think, and wore civvies,
a white silk blouse and a plaid skirt
and small heels, short stylish boots I think,
and had an understanding that I revered—
I’ll call it knowledge—she reminded me of
Dorothy Day whose Catholic Worker I published
poems in, 1957, 1958; everyone
stubborn, disobedient, everyone loving
something greater than themselves
and, as you know, my favorite places
were the tiny shtetls, I’ll call them that,
which sometimes were under bridges or over tunnels
with endless wooden steps and sometimes piles
of garbage, cigarette wrappers, crumpled
cans of beer that mercifully when the snow
covered them were seen as tiny hills, sometimes
held down by pebbles as gravestones nearby,
Polish and German, were also held down
to keep the dead from rising and coming back,
to have just one more cigarette and look
one more time at the FDRs on the wall
cut out from the aging pages of Look magazine,
the only piece of literature in my house
aside from a clasped and ivory-covered prayer book;
and how I loved meadows, I already wrote
of the one near Cook Forest by Route 80 I called
my “bitter personal heaven” among the clover and
daisies, I said, but in a more recent poem
I called them clover and cornflowers,
but I was probably wrong the second time, I know
it’s the same meadow, a quiet, windless place;
and also the empty roads in Perry County
an hour north of Carlisle, Pennsylvania,
where I walked endlessly to pet the cows
who ate near the wire fences; and almost bought
an ancient house and land with a trout stream on it
and a covered bridge and four or five outbuildings
but lost it when the owner decided to move there
since the Plain People were building a pig farm
near her main property in Lancaster, PA.
But it was southern Spain I truly loved
where we lived, in the ten hundreds,
and that’s where I want to live again
though I have to check with Anne Marie, she is
the spine of this book as Red Emma was of another
and Sylvia Stern a third, I ask it in the minor
key we sang together in Córdoba,
the Spaniards were not yet Spaniards
and they were building plowshares into swords
somewhere up north in what was called Europe,
but blessed as we were we didn’t even know it.
The Beautiful
I never heard no
so I guess Jim Wright’s ashes
are scattered among the tea roses
in Carl Schurz Park a few steps from our apartment,
and the East River was the beautiful Ohio
in the last years he spent
with Annie before his death.
My river was the Ohio too
but more like, it was the Monongahela
or someplace between the two rivers,
that and the Allegheny,
as they merged with the Beautiful
and went a distance north before it curved around
west then south and through filthy Weirton
and godforsaken Steubenville
on its way to the mother of rivers.
He told me he used to listen to
the Pirates’ games so he knew the announcer, Rosey Rowswell,
but I doubt if he ever heard Bishop Beck
ask God to bless Rosey as well as
Mayor Scully and Councilman Wolk and Eleanor Roosevelt,
as he stood in front of his chorus of saints
with their blue evening gowns and violins
in the great church on Wylie Avenue,
a block away from where I was born.
Well, God bless Bishop Beck and
God bless Jim Wright too,
who is not, I say not, in Hell
for Hell is Martin’s Ferry—he said so himself—
where he was baptized and maybe bar mitzvahed
as well in some absurd little synagogue
and his portion, as we say, was maybe John,
the 15th chapter: “No one has greater love
than to lay down his life for his friend,”
John, a Jew, like the others, goddamn.
Torn Coat
Look what it is to have forgotten
the torn coat of “Vecchia zimarra”
from Puccini’s La bohème and to remember
the other coats from Mount Horeb on down,
and look what it is to give your own coat away,
three times now, and to walk shivering
in three different countries, oh tears
for the opportunity and tears for a horse,
all bone on a hillside without a blanket and
him laughing at me because there were no tears
left for a freezing gracehoper.
From Wackadoodle
If you grew rich, as you say, by finding
your sand dollars on the Pacific coast
near Seattle, I made a killing on the Jersey Shore
near Wildwood but who’s to say who’s the richest
and what does it matter anyway.
Anyhow, you saw yellow switchbroom and wild elk
and walked the silken sands beneath
the stippled underwings of a low-flying
osprey, and you engaged in small conversation
with a ponderous banana slug before you
went to the bank—and I only saw my once beloved
pitch pine forest from the Garden City Parkway before I turned left,
certainly south of the Atlantic City Expressway, beginning
as you know, near Philadelphia.
I don’t know where you went with your cookies
but I ended up at Wells Fargo on Bridge Street
and argued with a teller about her cheating overlords
and refused her love altogether until she
admitted their evil ways, and out of respect for her silver cross,
made her listen to something out of Jesus,
exploited, low-paid, soon-to-be-fired innocent,
trying her best to abide by the bank motto,
“Your happiness is ours” or was it
“Our only wish is your happiness”
trapped behind her small piece of marble
inside her cage.
Forfor
In New York the Second Avenue Deli is on
First Avenue for Canaanites always like to
go east—and true north is mainly for Inuits—
and as for Wells Fargo the criminals in charge
don’t go to jail for their crimes
but empty their pockets of a few crumpled bills
and some loose change which I only mention
for ages hence and where Stanley’s Cafeteria was
it’s a perfume store now, not that
onion bagels don’t stink to high heaven,
and why shouldn’t we have perfumes
that smell of pea soup or noodles
for my cat
Geoffrey has changed his name to Jacob,
for a gerund is a gerund
and my cat Nimbus was run over by
the sickleman in a 1978
Chevy on Labor Day of the same year
for Carter was still president, even on Christmas,
and my daughter Rachael had a
small graveyard for all the cats we lost
and she still has cats—I think six—
in Trickle-Down Alabama, for it’s now called Huntsville
and its greatest hero is the famous Nazi, Wernher von Braun,
for once a Nazi always a Nazi,
for once a Confederate too,
and the water in the Blacks Only fountain was delicious,
for most Ashkenazis are Canaanites and fore, as in golf,
means “I’m going forward,”
or “look out before me”
or “get the fuck out of the way”
and bless me, Father Divine,
for my son’s friends said “whadayee whadayee”
for their fathers and uncles said “whadayee whadayee” too
for it’s twilight on the trail
(and my voice is still,
please plant this heart of mine
underneath a lonesome pine
on a hill).
And as for Christopher Smart’s cat Geoffrey
consider my cat Muriel
who rose from the dead
to say her say
for she was a lion
a leopard and a cheetah,
and what are all thy forfors for
if thou lov’st not me?
Elder Blues
How dumb it was to put my box of records
on the curb when I first moved here, for I was
mostly abandoning things for a fresh start—
I guess my sixth or seventh—depending on what
you include from my first abandonment
whatever junk or sentimentality there was
in that box it also contained the songs of
Muddy Waters, Skip James and the songs
we heard one night in Philadelphia,
John Hurt I think, it was the Walnut Street Theatre
or the downtown Y at the corner of Broad and Pine
and how I hung on to a torn shirt, a
faded photograph and a pair of leather boots
for my last abandonment, the shirt a Goodwill
from Neiman Marcus,
the boots my Georgia Loggers,
the photograph the one of me in Europe
including mustache, turtleneck, and a touch of
arrogance, I guess out of Les Deux Magots,
the café where Sartre held forth.
Blessed as We Were Page 15
