Letter from Brooklyn
Page 3
in quite the same way
as mine.
AT FIFTEEN
After Elizabeth Bachinsky, after Irving Layton
Unclasping girls’ bras awkward-like, like
my first sneakers’ knotted laces. Those girls’
braced grins, I loved, before fumbling forever
at their backs in light-less rooms. The stubborn
strap stayed tight. I’m sorry (I’d whisper)
and they’d unlatch the clasps (or not). Those locked
faces at fifteen . . . alright, it was eighteen . . . when
I loosed the first hook. I liked girls more before
when we played simpler games: tight-rope,
spotting her by the old train tracks. Undoing
nothing. My hand a hand’s half-width away.
Needing not to touch, just stand close, I knew
to catch her before she’d fall (for me). I was good
at that. The trick of staying, as she crossed.
EXPLAINING SONNET 73 TO THE ALIENS
Let’s call the speaker of this poem “you.”
You are speaking to me in metaphors,
which are kinds of lies.
You begin by telling me you are the season, autumn.
Well, you are the end
of autumn. More specifically, you are the leaves
that have changed colour and fallen
from a tree. Well, most of them have fallen.
You are the few leaves that haven’t fallen
in the tree limbs that shake in the wind.
You are trying to tell me
you feel old. Though it is worth mentioning
the leaves will grow back
in a year’s time. A year is not that long,
really. You want to be the trees, too.
You are the whole damn season.
You are the branches, you say,
and you are empty. Your limbs
are ruined choirs, because
the birds that sang on them are gone.
This alludes to monasteries, which were houses,
where men did little else
but eat, sleep, sing, and pray.
These houses were destroyed.
Though not by time.
But in a way by time.
A prayer is an asking of strength
and an asking that when that strength
doesn’t come, we are strong enough
to endure without it.
You compare yourself to when the sun sinks.
Even though many couples
enjoy spending this time together,
you turn it into a negative thing.
You think of nighttime as Death’s avatar
in the world of the living.
You say all this in a fairly precise rhythmic pattern.
It sounds like an old clock.
We seem to think we talk like the sound of time being measured.
Or how time used to sound
being measured.
There is also a scheme to rhyme.
The last words of certain lines sound
similar to the last words of other lines. I’m sorry,
that’s not a good explanation.
Rhyme is hard to define.
The dictionary says it’s when one word agrees with another,
terminally, which strikes me as a good definition
for a lot things.
For your final lie,
you tell me you are a fire going out.
You observe that fire extinguishes, once it burns,
everything it uses to sustain itself.
So your youth, you tell me, is no longer
the solid wood it once was.
You end by stating our fleeting presence here
causes us to love well, or at least
more stubbornly. This is said
in a couple of rhyming lines
which for poems like this are a kind of punch line
to a joke that isn’t supposed to be funny.
Jokes are like prayers.
ODE TO THE DOUBLE RAINBOW GUY
“It’s starting to look like a triple rainbow! Oh god! What does this mean?”
— Paul Vasquez
You lost your shit over shades of light
or as you proclaimed, oh my god
a double rainbow all the way —
and were received like all our prophets,
with scorn. Too filled with emotion to reflect
tranquility, you burst into tears
that from some odd angle
made a small rainbow, somewhere.
Oh god, oh my god, you spoke like Job
in reverse, suddenly seeing that we’d
been given everything, and asked
god, what does this mean?
We answered you with laughter
because we no longer know
what it means to be astonished.
For this, for everything, we are auto-tuned.
Oh my god, what does it mean
to care about something or someone
that much. Woo! You knew
triple rainbows were impossible.
NATURE
Easily startled
by how her voice carries
over water. His ears perk
and his head rises.
She is close now,
having paddled deep
into the bulrushes
to find him. He stares,
then lowers his head
to let her know
if she gets any closer
he will charge.
TO MY BEARD
Whose absence haunted adolescence
Whose barren field I examined nightly for signs of life
Who grew on all the other boys first
Whose no-show suggested the absence of hair in other places, too
Whose absence I shaved with a Mach 3 razor one night till I bled
Who I glued on with shavings left in my father’s drain
Whose first, stubbly signs appeared one day miraculous as
Isaac’s birth
Who, if left alone, now grows blond and burly as the face of Western Christ
Who a century ago had to be long and full
Who the Cossacks forced Yacob Scheier to eat till he stopped breathing
Who no longer grows like assimilation
Whose absence is tolerance
Who stays stuck to faces of men in North York Jerusalem East Williamsburg
Who does not recognize me as I pass
THE REDHEADS OF SUDBURY
I want to write a poem called “The Redheads of Sudbury for
Rocco de Giacomo.”
I want this poem to account for how so many of the girls there
have a hair colour reminding me of candies
I ate as a boy: big foots, hot lips, and sour balls —
the tangy, cherry-flavoured ones.
Those girls all looked like something bad for you
and awfully nostalgic.
Near the end of this poem I want
one of us to sleep with the city’s one-legged stripper,
who also has red hair.
This is the kind of thing the male poets of our national anthologies
used to write about it. In my poem
I make it sound like something that just kind of happened,
you know, and isn’t all that big a deal.
I would like the poem to account for how I felt
and perhaps how others feel upon lea
ving somewhere
where it’s still winter in April.
To leave somewhere north and come home to Toronto
during that brief season
that is neither winter nor spring. Where rain is pervasive
whether falling or not.
I want a certain kind of reader to feel a little sentimental
when I mention the Honda dealership on the outskirts of the city
and the rain gathering on the windshields.
When we pass the suburbs and see a billboard — for what, I forget —
with our area code on it, I feel close
to the way I imagine others do when they speak of feeling patriotic.
The feeling of being from somewhere.
Rocco de Giacomo told me he hadn’t noticed
that so many of the girls had red hair, and asked me if I wanted to fuck any of them.
I said of course of course I wanted to fuck them all.
He talked about being married, said he was lucky.
It was a longer conversation, but that’s the part that matters.
I don’t want to be married for a long time or ever, I think.
But I was jealous of his obliviousness. Nothing at the end of
the poem
“The Redheads of Sudbury for Rocco de Giacoma”
happened in real life. The truth is we drank a lot and passed out.
The one-legged stripper part is true,
but neither of us slept with her
or even went to the strip club. But I can explain that.
My reasons for going to bed alone that night
have little to do with this feeling I’ve been having lately
of not being entirely young anymore.
Rather, it’s only because the Canada Council
no longer gives grants for poems about that sort of thing.
MY MOTHER DIES IN REVERSE
After Robert Priest’s Reading the Bible Backwards
I dig up the dirt
& tell the rabbi
to recant
his prayer
I say
I do not
glorify
praise
or bless
I do not say
amen
I say
a woman
& he sews
the garments
back together
& I take her
to Mt. Sinai
oncology
before she begins
breathing again
& I open her eyes
& breath enters
her mouth
& mumbles ravel
into words
& sentences
rejoin each other
& she puts her hand
into her mouth
& pulls
from her throat
valiums
like sapphire beads
& she pees
morphine
like a crystal river
& perspires
radiation
till it’s all gone
& she finds
her breasts
on the operating table
& sews them
back
to her chest
like a garment
uncut
& moonwalks
down the corridors
& into
an ambulance
driver’s seat
& rides
home
CAUSALITY
Some believe cause and effect are simultaneous.
The window breaks at the exact moment
the stone kisses the pane. And I want to ask you
about falling in, then out, if it doesn’t happen
at the same time. Though Hume said
a cause might be nothing more than a name
we give to one thing following another.
But if he were right, I would think
the covers rolling from your shoulders
used to cause the morning. The point is,
I went to college, and that doesn’t make it any easier
to walk over the Williamsburg Bridge
when no one is waiting for me
on either side and it rains so thinly
the drops are only visible afterwards,
cascading from the cables.
I might think it wasn’t raining at all,
except I am cold and wet, and fog obscures
the Chrysler building. But I can still see it, drawn
from my memory onto the vanished skyline.
It looks kind of the way it does
in all the old movies
I refused to watch with you. This longing
the effect of having loved
poorly. And the cause. But I can’t
change what has come before. Only make
fog fold in on itself as I walk through it.
How causing it to disappear
is one of our powers.
Like the way we banish the night
by falling asleep, limbs pressed
like coin inscriptions,
or lying a body’s length apart
or in different rooms in different cities.
How once in a while we cause the rain, too,
but by doing what, I have no idea.
ACTUAL PINGPONG
“Don’t be afraid of me because I am just coming back from the mental hospital — I’m your mother —”
— Naomi Ginsberg
“I’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in your straightjacket that you’re losing
the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss”
— Allen Ginsberg
Through the gauzy air of some wonderful benzo, I recall you
now chemo-bald, flannel-robed, a Buddha or just some crazy
lady who is also my mother, pontificating
plastic spoon metaphysics. “If you dug deep and hard enough,
wasn’t it possible for anything to be a tool of suicide?”
Mastectomized cubist breast falling
statically from the gown slanting across your chest like a sash.
Miss Psych Ward, USA. Though the crown belonged truly to
the pretty girls, thin
and achromatic Modiglianis, queued in a slow, wavy
kindergarten line outside the Plexiglas planet of the
nurse’s station. You waved to them
and said “This is my son. He’s 19. He writes poems, too.”
Did you know then, despite the supposed gravity of the
situation, I couldn’t help looking
at those faded girls in their loose swaying gowns and yet
years later taking my own stay on the 17th floor of St. Mike’s
(the family pilgrimage to the bughouse)
the girls ignored me? High school all over again in the psych
ward, as I waited for the sad hour selected from all years
(till the next hour) for a smoke —
a memory interrupted by you, a memory of you in the ward,
telling the half-catatonic lady with honey-coloured hair shot out
in all directions like a child’s drawing
of the sun, “This is my son. He’s taking time off to decide what
he wants to do with his life.” I pull your gown back over your
absence of breasts and gas
seems pumped up from the floorboards — the perceivable air
and told you about, this dream
in which you were dying and losing your mind and saying, “This
is my son, he’s going to be a doctor and invent the cure for being
on earth.” Everything you said, coded
or nonsense. I wanted to remind you about my 18th birthday, the
Selected Poems 1947–1995, your inscription, The key is in the window,
the key is in the sunlight at the window. Love,
your mother. Here this becomes ironic or here you are beyond irony.
Was it prophetic? Insanity, the last respite from the Ironic Age, I told
myself on the 17th floor staring
at the key hidden in the shadows of the bars of the window. How your
delusions started to bore me — I wanted to hear Nixon was stealing
your Jell-O and Reagan, your breasts. Or McCarthy
forced you to blow him in the basement of 1504 Ocean Ave., 1953.
Instead, uncreative paranoia — friends and colleagues out to “destroy”
you and every attempt to dissuade,
a confirmation. You thought you were clever for unveiling the basic
structure, just stating what we are all trying to ignore. Did you think
you were the first lunatic
to figure out civilization? Neither insight nor madness, but unadorned
honesty destroying your mind. Of course, I was a pawn in “the
conspiracy” that is life. “Do you want to play table tennis?”
you asked, suddenly back in the game of ordinariness. We approached
the green slab at the end of the corridor. The girls gathered round and
watched as you lost (badly) a game of actual pingpong.
ELEGY
This is about the first time
my mother died.
The second time was the normal way,
decaying in stasis.
Now, webs of storm-splintered wood line the shore
like shanty-church stained glass.
The ocean a loud whisper, and
too beautiful for god.
Her body, a chronology of scars,
becomes salt-stung air.
She is not anything that has happened to her,
only the pure and fine pain, alone.
IN MEMORY OF HOWARD ZINN
After W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”
Not a saint, but an angel of history,