by Stanley Moss
I don’t want to be called by mistake a “vanity.”
Leave me to an orphanage,
to kids who never had a desk,
or sooner or later, being 19th Century American,
I’ll end up auctioned.
I’m told Japanese furniture revolted,
the emperor sleeps on the floor."
HOW I CAME TO MEET THE FATES
I was walking in Puglia,
I found myself almost lost, uncertain,
the sandy woods full of violets and nightshade,
I came to a house half-cave, I walked through
an open door between olive and fig trees
in a village where they still speak Greek.
I saw three large women dressed in black and silver,
silver threads from distaff to spindle.
There was no food on the shelves
except, I believe, honey and fragoline di Nemi.
Beyond the orchards I heard crowds weeping
in temples, waterwheels, slave songs, blessings,
curses, battle cries, like flocks passing overhead.
The three were not persons, still they were ladies—
one wore a necklace, a live blind snake,
no, the necklace was a string of eyes
sometimes blue, sometimes green.
I have it, three sisters, personifications.
I heard their names in voices that first echoed,
then groans and winks, bruised agony.
I wondered, “can I ask questions?”
I knew if they answered I would never get home again.
I asked, “how long have I got?”
Nona said, “nine days after your life began,
the time of your death was determined by me.
I gave you two months,
then because your mother prayed to Ocean
in the Rockaways, Zeus said,
“Give him a sweet death, in sugarcane bull rushes.”
There was snow on the ground, and fire.
The snow did not melt, changed color.
I’ve seen blood on snow, but the red
seemed more August sunset. Then I asked,
“Fates, make me a sweater
of many-colored threads that Achilles
might choose rather than a sword.” I came to the point:
“Name the day, the time, the place.”
They said, “a Saturday night after we’ve finished
your turtleneck sweater, longer than the life
of a turtle—if you don’t fall first.”
I saw a thread made of lightning
struck from spindle to sun to moon.
I kissed Morta, whose scissors were not mortal,
too large for simple thread, smoky,
useful in Carthaginian peace—with a single closing
they slaughtered herds of goats and wildebeests,
sheared flocks of sheep grazing on the moor.
In the marketplace I saw an actor, a tragedian
playing Tiresias as man and woman.
When he spoke, an eagle left his roost:
“poets are masculine, poetry is feminine,
the poem the child.”
I kissed the Three Fates goodbye.
They used their rough tongues, I thought my thoughts.
Informed by all occasions,
a life full of despites,
I’ll have one last love affaire.
I’ll die an upstart.
Before the Fates I listen to Boris Godunov,
his dying words “I am still Tsar.”
SUPPOSE
Love’s shadow was yesterday.
Today casts no shadow.
I sit in the shadows, I’m here today.
I walk in the garden right now,
see and smell a better world.
I’ve heard flowers grow in the night.
Love does not offend a garden that needs care.
Where is the sun? Flowers have shadows.
There are flowers, night bloomers, without shadows.
A child, I planted tomatoes,
ate a miraculous soup. I entertain ideas.
Violets and roses do not suppose.
Winds prevail. Where are you today?
I’ve visited ancient Roman and Greek gardens,
flowers that have lived longer than I will.
I cheer the justice of their immortality.
It’s bedtime, turn out the light.
Love’s shadow was yesterday.
NAMES
Poet Esperanza thinks. Poet Hope dreams.
Esperanza makes love. Hope has a romance.
Esperanza nurses her daughter. Hope bottle-feeds.
Esperanza drinks Manzanilla. Hope drinks bourbon.
Esperanza eats olives and eels. Hope chicken fried steak.
Esperanza loves a caballero. Hope a salesman of doorknobs.
Esperanza says, “I am confounded.” Hope says, “I’m ignorant.”
Hope and Esperanza, like many persons,
are hopeless and hopeful.
Esperanza is waiting for her lover,
and Hope is waiting for the same guy:
Hope married husband 1, divorced,
then husband 2, divorced,
then went back and married 3, who was 1,
(please never say again, ‘Easy as 1, 2, 3’)
1 and 3 is an American printer,
2 an Italian doorknob salesman,
grandson of the Duke of Mantua.
There are societies like Esperanza and Hope,
where a man can have four wives.
Other cultures which allow a woman several husbands
in and out of her cottage. Merrily,
the more animal in us the more male or female,
perhaps the more thinking, too.
Some lion in us, some alley cat.
We speak about knowing our onions.
What about vegetables rooted or flowering—
the potato, flowering and rooted,
the Jerusalem artichoke, the carciofi alla Giudìa?
What about human male and female names—
I’ve never known a lady named Abraham
or a Sarah who is a guy.
If I called myself Sarah for a day, so what?
If I called myself Sarah for a year,
I would laugh more wearing makeup and a dress.
There is or was a theory: woman is a man
turned inside out.
Why do I walk downtown and uptown on the east
or west side of the street?
I make choices for reasons I don’t know.
Esperanza is waiting for me in a café.
Esperanza, my middle name is David.
I regret I seldom use my full name.
My passport gives my full name,
and occupation: writer.
Asked by an English customs inspector
what I write, I said, “Poetry.”
He said in his North Ireland accent,
“You should wear a flower in your buttonhole.”
Will my next book be known or unknown:
Abandoned Poems by Stanley David Moss?
It’s closer to the truth.
And yes, I’ve read Hope Abandoned.
Should my logo be the sloth, the only green mammal,
half rat, half monkey?
SUNNY DAY
What of the winds’ coming and going.
Poetry and painting can show winds
moving through this spring’s uncut grass,
dandelions down the lawn.
In different countries there are often
different names for the Lord and dandelions:
England’s golden lads, chimney sweepers,
France’s dent de lion, Ireland’s Irish daisies.
Some grasses bend toward a sugar maple,
others bend away on the same hillside
because an oak has partially blocked th
e wind.
No one can count as many dandelions as I can.
I can write and paint a little.
There are ways of telling in words what is,
while a painter may paint the same thing—
sometimes things equal to the same thing
are not equal to each other.
There are words for colors, and colors for words.
Your sparrow, owl, dandelion is feathered,
petaled for passionate reasons.
I cannot smell a cherished owl or sparrow.
In the wind I smell the flowers nearby.
My faithful senses have intercourse
with every available living thing—
on some summer days, I could shout, “Rape!”
I’d rather have ink dry on the page, rewrite,
rewrite, than wait for oils to dry on canvas
before I change colors, burnt sienna
to cobalt blue to Mediterranean.
I mix powdered pigments for paintings and poems:
a poem’s pigment is sound,
the different intimate voice of every word.
In English, there are changing wordcolors,
English is "country dancing" since the Normans—
half truths, how trees spend their weekends,
true to nature, indifferent to seasons.
Music or thunder can be a painter’s model.
Beauty does not interrupt me
like a deer or groundhog in the garden.
Lightning catches my eye. Thunder encourages me.
Yes, it is poetry to say
no sunny day is like any other day,
no rose like any other—
there are lookalikes for lazy eyes.
Words use us. On a sunny day,
I try to follow the winds’ comings and goings.
LEAVE IT FOR NOW
1
Hi. This telephone call is part poetry.
You ask how many rooms and beds I’ve slept in.
I remember a furnished room in Dublin.
The porter said a pram in the hall “had fallen asunder.”
I heard a whale splashing like church bells
sounding different hours, Irish and Roman
laughter in the streets. Now a bird sings
I do not want to meet you if you believe in nothing.
I kiss my friends goodnight while they sleep.
I kiss you all after you’re dead.
You say, “That’s a good reason for departure.”
I am my own student and my own master.
I am a poor student, but a good master.
I’m soaking wet with reasons—it’s raining hard,
and every raindrop is a reason.
Far from my neighborhood in Queens,
another time, same life, Teresa of Avila
and her little brother were my childhood friends.
I went with them to be murdered by the Moors,
but I was stopped by the snarling wolf of Gubbio,
before he went with St Francis to a notary,
signed the famous contract not to eat children.
There were wolves in our house. My family used to play
Rossini’s Largo al factotum when I was 3
to stop me from crying. I remember angry laughter.
I am tall, but bamboo shaken by wind and rain
may grow 3 feet in a day. I saw forbidden
chocolate Easter bunnies in store windows.
Later, it seems only a few days after childhood,
I bought a sack of candies in Cordoba,
a little glass crucifix—tucked into the cross
two knife blades. To make a crucifix a knife
that kills, that can also peel potatoes,
sounds like Andalucía.
2
I feel chilled, pull up the blanket.
Awake, it comes to mind when I was eighteen,
I watched a sailor in uniform wade into the ocean.
I thought he was going for a swim. Then I understood,
I had no time to kill, he was drowning himself—
half naked, I ran into the water, couldn’t find him.
I felt the undertow, went with it
till the whale opened its mouth,
and I swam back to the bloodless beach.
At liberty, in a rented rowboat, I went fishing
with a Marine suffering from elephantiasis,
“moo moo,” huge swollen testicles
he got from a South Pacific bug bite—
his balls strapped to his waist, mine hardboiled eggs.
We caught a few flounder we gave back to the ocean.
He said "lake fishing is Mozart, the ocean is Wagner."
I knew our ocean was two-thirds of the earth
a half note in the universe. I was an eyelash
flying with a flock of red-winged blackbirds.
I was a gob, medically discharged,
with a 4 point average because I obeyed orders,
not because I’d learned how little I mattered.
(Sorry, PhD’s to me are anchors on freighters.)
I’m a poor student and a good master.
Still in bed, I thought of the good flat tires in my life:
in the Sahara, a Michelin flat
while driving toward the Atlas Mountains,
sounds like Camus, tires deep in sand—
I walked an hour, leaving a frightened Francine,
found an Arab village, trusted my French,
received kindness and sweet tea.
Another apocryphal chapbook revelation:
I had a Citroën quinze splendid flat tire in Tarifa,
southern most town of Spain,
with its Atlantic and Mediterranean winds—
not long ago the “Pillars of Hercules,”
the end of the known world—
I knocked on a door of a white cave house,
was received into a peasant society
I never hoped to enter. I felt I belonged,
being ancient Iberian on my father’s side.
Before there were cities, countries, or religions,
there were olive trees and goats.
A fire by a stream was high civilization.
There were limestone cliffs, unattended fields,
no alphabet—there were cave paintings
fashioned with shells and sharpened stones,
black animal blood, oil from bogs—
pre-Magi horned beasts, sacred giant human hands.
In my tradition, I had a distant grandfather who painted
giant Godly eyes in a self portrait.
His tribe threw rocks at him, exiled him from shelter.
He wandered along a path made by wild goats.
He dined on figs and dates, goats’ milk.
The goats looked like him and me,
with their long faces, a big nose. From time to time,
they danced on their hind legs, bucked each other.
JUNE 21, 2017
A few candles on my birthday cake.
One puff of my lucky breath, I blow
the new little flirtations out.
I salute Mr. Death, his concubines,
and veiled Mrs. Death,
his is an invisible family,
invisible children play among the living,
Brain Hemorrhage and Heart Attack are pals.
Mrs. Death prefers the title Angel of Death,
she insists loving kindness is a fungus
that lives on her labors,
she's the inventor of starvation, religious wars.
Modernists, the Deaths somersault with joy,
they play with Cancer, a favorite child,
except for visible Melanoma.
Old age, Leukemia, and Sarcoma sit around
a Thanksgiving table with abortions,
the turkey stuffed with Dementia,
decorated with assassination parsley.
The Deaths really have a good time,
the more people on earth
the more they have the pleasures to kill,
they take pride in statistically fatal accidents.
Their deep sadness these days: extinct species.
Saturn often drops in for barbeques.
The Deaths’ ancient favorite entertainment:
they watched Hittite gods fight each other,
then the winners fought the oracles.
* * *
The Death family sweeps the city streets
clean of forgotten dead. When necessary,
His Unholiness and His Mrs. throw forgotten waste
into the fields of nowhere that grow nothing—
occasionally old photographs.
What do Mr. and Mrs. Death do in bed,
what do their “private parts” look like?
Find out for yourself when they fuck you.
Mrs. D kisses every newborn
because they are beginning to die.
A child, she played Sleep was her brother.
True, praying to your God keeps Deaths out of mind.
What is a good Death—one or the other drops in
on those surrounded by love. Their last minutes
are close as humankind comes to eternal life.
Death can play a little Bach or Stravinsky
with a spoon on your tea or coffee cup.
Coda
There were spirits before scribes and cuneiform,
a giant tiger’s paw scratched a boulder.
Writing sent Death back to the beginning
when Death was the first word.
Orpheus sang I’ve lost my Eurydice, Zeus didn't care.
Eros, that little winged god, rode the back
of an old centaur younger than I am—
the centaur’s hands tied behind his back.
Death is a grape, then a raisin, a bye bye,
he is a traveller tumbling
through the universe, proof
Death is a many-colored harlequin.
He twirls a lightning walking stick, I choose
not to use on my 92nd birthday.
JUST BORN
A child is born, an egg hatched
in rivers, thousands swim out
of what was spawn. Most of us justborns
devoured, given a few minutes
or less life, regret nothing.
GLIMPSE
If nouns are men and women are verbs,
I take the view
it’s high time, dear,
I conjugate you.
If nouns are women, verbs are men,
who am I—an adjective, adverb, contraction,
not without gender. I’ve preferences,
