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Issue # 44 Spring 2021
Poetry
Poetry Edited by Roger Mitchell
Heavy in My Hand
I want to dismantle her veiled
intentions, to reveal
the plot. I have work to do
in the garden, at the desk,
but first, I want
to take her apart.
She’s a stone
heavy in my hand, a poem’s
disturbing verbs,
a burst of toxic air,
the deep beauty
of what confuses me about her.
She’s kept cash left
in a borrowed book,
smothered an insect
to watch it curl,
sabotaged a friendship.
And she’s regretted nothing.
Maybe that’s
what I love
about her,
that she hates
so I don’t
have to.
A class convened in my closet.
I was assigned
to write a story in dirt.
Drawn templates,
laid flat on surfaces,
assembled broken pieces
into a landscape of symbols.
My classmates stood for their written speeches,
read tangled lines
from transparent papers
in tenuous light.
As they recited,
I arranged tables in rows,
shaped sod and laid it out.
Loam veined with hair-thin roots
left from some forgotten mother
became evolving forms.
It was the story of your life.
Every stage was presented in fragrant earth.
Peaks, valleys, plateaus.
Fairy lights inlaid promontories,
encircled what I thought I knew about you.
The last table held your death
under a gray blanket.
A muddy pillow for your head.
But your bed was empty.
You were gone from there.
Long gone
from there.
After Sappho
I’ve lost my good intentions.
This is the gift from a
ruinous god who lives inside me.
I swear I didn’t love the negative space between us then,
but now because the years have taught me
the reasons neither you nor I were capable of good,
nothing much appeals to my better nature.
Like you, I’ve learned to embrace
fabulous, broken things.
into the dry dry
hills on a dust rocks
fire-road so sun
exposed
Joggers
terrier-walkers
ladyfriends loud talk
half-liter in hand
& me in
trouble above the shoulders
In the laureltops
a breeze barely trying loose ends
of skinny birdcalls a fly
zig zags faceward
Was that a hawk
low russet swoop
sorry for your no name
in my poem
Where the trail widens
back to one rattle-down
lane I am some bones
& skin in the open
Even if it's not
a flower
moss is can I say blooming
on the fallen
Monterey pine limbs
Motors go burning up the world
Dylan won
the prize today that is made
from explosives in Sweden
I look for his
song but the words
crumble
Sunlight comes late
to the party & leaves
again The wind my
actual friend returns
to tell me what
I can't say
Where the evidence I
try to assemble
thins tree shadows
patch up the hillside
Zippery flies reckon
with something not
visible in pineneedle dirt
Willow Tr.
prevented by health regulations
from visiting the city of my birth
I wander its neighbourhoods in my mind
from childhood to young manhood
through mature decades of family responsibility
the montage of houses and addresses
everyone must preserve past identities in
and though I may not immediately know
a former self by sight the place
and time of day or year are familiar
as bird song or the ripple of light through trees
fair recompense of cumulative individuality
forgiving and welcoming however long
deliberate or inadvertent absence has intervened
the trees by the well
where we were born
were planted by an ancestor
of the village
for the women who draw water
wash out linen
the value of their shade
was immeasurable
this happened before
the killing began
and flayed animals
left to rot in the water
the trees were felled too
green leaves
dried to brittle ash
in the war fire
all our fathers were captive or lost
and our mothers
returned to their fathers
who won’t allow us
we’ve always believed
it would always be here
the blue sky
flat as a wash of paint
the renewable green space
and its creatures
whose dedication to us
and our needs
we are taught
is their reason for being
days for work
nights for sleep
the year divided
like a round loaf
into four even
but distinct seasons
all our stories
and our ways of telling them
adhere to
at least until now
a soldier posted on the frontier
listening to women pound grain into flour
or slap wet clothes against the rocks
beside the stream
recalls the sounds his wife made
at similar tasks around their distant home
it is as if he can hear
beyond the span of so many months and miles
the surreptitiously murmured song of peace
requiring no one to shed another’s blood
but for now his weapons are his husbandry
keeping them free of rust
keen-edged for what may
or may not come
You Encourage Me
Keep them lean and undiluted, you advise.
Keep them in cyclamens and bone meal.
Promote banter across misshapen bodies of water.
The list goes on.
You encourage me to kerosene the rigmarole,
ditch the diction filtering station.
You point out signs I would otherwise miss:
CLOUDS ARE NOT ALLOWED TO BE ANGELS HERE.
Good to know for a diffident lobby-sitter,
arrived early, waiting for her room to be readied.
Stop breaking everything down. It happens
in one motion, part of a singular sweep, you instruct,
impatiently illustrating, your arm the length of Chile.
If you sense I’m losing focus in the haze
of some northern chain of gently aluminum lakes,
you show up in an orange vest
wielding a red flag to wave me through.
Only a few ruinous taxis get through.
Everybody! Quiet please!
There is chamber rock
and cup custard,
planes taking off.
Let’s keep our eyes peeled
before the shadows further attach
to all this architecture.
They join forces and the day is over.
Charming or grim, it can be made
to look older than it is.
If it’s soft, milkweed is the measure.
If it’s failing at some basic love
you’ll be greeted with a large menu
of assorted penitences, each corresponding
price an elegant integer floating
on the opposite side for balance.
To absence presence is a bit of a bully.
Sad errands are a welcome interruption.
You’re thinking you could have been more
curious about the sauce when they asked
what you were having, at least
given it a little more thought.
The Beach House In Autumn
-Gloucester, Massachusetts, The North Cape
Early morning and taut wind lathers curling waves, chills
empty dunes and beach, a seawall railing. This house
is white with red shutters, likely empty
since early September. Today will be slate, another
weary hint of winter. There's a loft, high windows
wet with mist, one large rolltop desk, what must
be oak shelves rising on white walls
heavy under the weight of books. Facing the Atlantic
a large red door, white stone steps,
a patch of lawn. Close to the seawall path
one granite bench is beckoning
anyone to rest one moment, read the tribute
carved for a son taken by AIDS in 1986.
For one or many reasons that will always be unknown
to those wandering by, someone
has nailed a For Sale sign to the door, jittery
black letters on white-washed cardboard. Does it imply
giving up, giving in, despair or relief? The truth
as Oscar Wilde once wrote is rarely
pure and never simple.
You could allow any reverie to spin out, take
one form, or another, then one more.
For now it might be best to ease down
on the bench, sit and stare out
at endless gray sky now threatening rain.
Behind you always the red door, rolltop desk,
thick library of books, that might
suggest a soothing truth. How not
to soil any simmering reverie.
Rough wind off Lake Champlain and rain
visible in Vermont, while here
on the New York shore, rain
is a scent in the chill,
damp air seeping
through one open window. Last night
there was frost. The crisp
painted leaves had been flaring,
vibrant, since late September.
Now I doubt any clean, true
October wash of color
will linger, if rain
cuts the bright leaves loose
on the wind, leaving
all the branches bare. The pandemic
will remain, flu season
must arrive as always, and winter
sleet will likely come
early, a prelude of greasy roads.
There was a harvest moon last night,
ice-white, a dapple of crystals
sparkling on the quiet lake.
Yet now rain
today, again tomorrow. Rain
biting hard at a slant,
soaking the grass and roiling
down the storm pipes.
Waves foam as Vermont dissolves
within a deep mist. The rain
hisses, slaps every window
in its now inevitable, relentless way.
What Would Your Closest Friend Do?
My closest friend would do nothing
since he is dead. I've had
other friends, but none
as close. They drift away
in time, or I have been the drifter.
If my closest friend was still alive
he would do it, and insist
I do it, and not whine,
perseverate, or attempt to calculate
any best outcome of options.
He died young, leaving me unsure
he would urge me now to act
as he would act when he was alive
in what were good old days,
in ways not always that good.
Now he might remind me to wear
a mask to conceal myself
from the pandemic, drive north
to the Canadian border, turn back
as now we all must. When I arrive
home in dim afternoon light
I'll toss a rough piece of granite
into Lake Champlain waves
churning in a cold, rising wind, wonder
if the dark will come slow or quick, decide
to do what I need to do.
Still a Stranger
(When I Leave)
Watchful in the desert,
I listen for the skitter of a scorpion,
distant sweet whistle of a train.
Sun flash in a mirror marks
the toil of traffic on the highway.
Dust clouds, like dirty rags, drift
tangles of cholla and mesquite.
A trio of backpack wanderers hike
craggy angles of a high point plateau.
A rock slide, a hunter’s rifle shot echoes
passage through a canyon’s acrid air.
Like Mitchum, I took a job.
Told to take some money
across a border bridge,
repercussions now swoop
like a Harris hawk.
Heat scrubs a month as the running ends.
Geckos dart walls and porch.
I’m waiting under adobe
for the tracing call that says:
Head back to the city.
Leave now.
Leaves fallen to tin awning of family stores,
barren elms reach above two-toned flats.
Sparrows spread and gather
under a descending sun.
The Ice Moon prepares its pool,
evening clouds revealed
by halogen beam, landing lights.
Beside the sandstone church,
we step aside from the stamping crowd,
talk by chance on a sidewalk bench.
Weary of war and the wounded bed,
a mirror’s injury assessment,
we stretch coffee, then beers,
tackle the quirks of
a bullet’s rise, a Medevac flight.
I laugh in torrents over
his Fresca quest, serving a thirsty DJ.
Food truck tacos make a meal.
We wrangle about Hendrix vs Hammett,
twelve step vs a Jagerbomb road to recovery.
Tonight’s barricades are going up.
The trains stop in an hour.
Pulled to his feet,
he twists away to call for Uber.
Cigar butt tossed at the transit track,
I watch it scatter sparks and die.
Shrugging a wave,
I mumble my way to the El Camino
and the Causeway home.
Stillness through rainy fog—
car’s creep through flood pools,
sidewalks padded with oak leaves cloak.
Light held, luminous, grieving.
This dying is no surprise.
Helicopter’s flyover burr
flattens through its sweep.
Ferals slink the pavement’s driest line,
shadows skew under
streetlamp, dripping bough.
Cooping in a stairwell,
a panhandler’s broken shoes
soak in standing water.
Incense of pot smoke, cooling charcoal
disorders the slow-stirring breeze.
In other days, it was easy
to speak of the dead.
Bright day to bitter afternoon,
never trust the suicide’s mythology.
I stand with a cell phone in the rain,
waiting on a call from the Underworld.
I stole a wallet from a man on fire,
took his racing jacket and his Corvette keys.
He didn’t ask who bought the torch.
I won’t suggest the debts were paid.
Persephone loves to see repentance,
refuses my sincerest word.
Alliance broken,
we are tagging mistakes
brutal as the mountain rock,
aiming hell to empty darkness.
Distrust sears passage of
a sinking, divided year.
She keeps me down in Marrakesh,
hunting werewolves through the alley stone.
What I know, what I remember
are travelers in silk at overland wells,
broken glass shine from lanterns and Glenlivet,
the way our beautiful coats
swirled, glimmering in firelight
at the mouth of a river.
Arithmetic of Dementia
The nurses say she doesn’t have a head
For figures anymore, but I know better.
After all, she taught me
How to write my numerals.
It’s just that now she prefers
To stick the 4
Into a sliver of soap
To make a sailboat.
After tea, she cracks the 3 in half
Over her knee for a pair of horseshoes
To toss at the 1 for a ringer. Later,
7s inspire in her a game of hangman.
She slips her finger
Through the loop in a 2
Then ties a knot—pulling the ends tight—
As an aid to remember something.
On the dowel in the cedar closet
An upside down 5 is hooked
As a place to hang his ties—
The ones she would never give away.
With a little doing, she twists
The 6 and 9 into a pair of spectacles
That frame her blue eyes as she sits
In a chair by the window staring into space.
She dreams of placing a 0
On the ceiling to create a hole
Through which she can climb out
And launch into the night sky
Toward starlight in a distant galaxy
Sitting astride a sideways 8—
A celestial motorcycle, winged and bound
For vanishing into the infinite.
Lost in Somerville Again
The facades of triple-deckers
repel me with their simple
but utile carpentry braced
against post-industrial backdrops
of power plant and warehouse,
blackened brick and metal siding.
Although some of my friends live
in these houses, their faces
have faded like the new moon
The whispers of curtains and blinds
express the fears that shield us
from notions that could kill us.
Somerville, named after a lord,
tries to look as blue-collar
as a filthy dented pickup truck.
But high rents shrug off people
thickened by poverty diets
and unable to afford the gym.
Living in the inner suburbs
is like shipwrecking on islands
in plain sight of the mainland.
I’m trying to get to Belmont
despite the cold night already
seeping from the sewers and drains.
I drive against the grain of traffic
and groan as traffic lights wink
with complicity. I’d stop and buy
a bottle of screw-top wine
from California just to warm me
with its cabernet-color glowing.
But I’m deeply lost and uncertain,
the streets meeting at steep angles
and the bored look of the houses
warning that I’m about to lose
whatever sense of geometry
I learned in my unfocused youth.
Grave Robbing for Fun and Profit
Grave robbing is a hobby,
not a vocation. Winnowing
for jewelry, trophies, watches,
rifles, chainsaws, and trombones
is a form of archaeology
I conduct with professional skill.
Sometimes I uncover a car
or pickup truck containing
a withered but perky corpse.
I leave such tableaux in peace.
Once after hours of digging
I found a diesel locomotive
wrapped in heavy plastic sheeting.
I retain only objects I can pawn.
Guitars, laptop computers,
kitchen utensils, designer bags.
Everyone wants to be buried
with their favorite baubles and toys.
I never disturb the bodies
because they’ve been known to snap
their jaws and rattle their bones
if awoken from their séance.
If I find cremains, I’ll sift them
for scraps of gold but return them
intact to their well-wrought urns.
I’m not a midnight creeper working
by lantern light. I set up canvas
around my chosen grave and work
in daylight, looking official.
If asked I sigh, “Exhumation,”
and no one inquires any further.
I like my hobby and learn a lot
from the objects people regard
as necessary after death—
the dark of the grave not dark enough
to elide the faith in matter
that always crudely betrays us.
To the Child I Never Had
I wish I could tell you what my life has really been like,
but even after all I've been through
I still understand so little of it,
and it seems I've left such scant trace.
I confess that for a long time I was afraid of you.
And wondered at times if the voice I heard myself speaking,
sometimes sounding strange even to myself,
would turn out to be your voice as well.
No matter now. You will never enter my world,
though I sense the long arc of my life getting closer,
and closer, to yours.
The city was on the edge of the sea
and when I came to live there
I felt it as a falling away from some larger life.
The people I met there were broken and unafraid.
The city long worn down by the force of the sun.
Long lines of cars on the beach roads.
Heat and glare and too much sky.
At night the waves whispered
of the sea's dark machineries.
On the edge of the sea, from then on
I understood my longing as a kind of seeing.
And felt how that edge went through my heart,
through my whole life,
a border I would never cross but in dreams.
In that late time, living alone by the beach,
as he drank he sometimes spoke of women,
of their hardships and burdens – mostly unseen by men -
with a strange new conviction.
He saw them then as if at a great distance,
across a chasm. All the old longing
he had carried so many years
transformed into this late wonder
at the deep and abiding power of loneliness.
It was an homage then, his sitting and drinking the days,
watching the light slowly change in the skies.
Early on, finding no plan or map for the long going,
I straggled out unknowing into a life of mistakes.
Looking in whatever I encountered
to discern the plot of my own obscure story.
How could I have known that
in all my long wandering I was enlarging the space,
until you were in it?
Mapping out the whole extent of this late love,
in all its clarity and fierceness,
that is my heart's real home.
She sat on her cushion, I sat on my cushion.
She in her loose red robe and scarves
and faintly jingling necklaces and bracelets.
Faint muffled music and sounds of talk
came from another room. She asked if I had
any questions, but I had none.
She closed her eyes, sat in silence for several minutes.
Sitting as if rooted to her spot, immovable.
The sounds from the other room
gradually faded from my awareness
and I sensed a deeper layer
of underlying silence in me and settled into it.
When she finally opened her eyes and spoke,
her voice was like that of a naturalist
observing an interesting bird.
She said I think you are unusual in spirit—maybe you have
the spirit of a priest but a priest who has decided
for some reason to fully inhabit the messy, turbulent world
instead of escaping to a more spiritual life.
She said, I wonder why.
I could think of no response,
but later it made me think of when I was a sailor,
the times I wandered alone in strange cities,
places where I knew nothing and no one,
just to feel at home in my own subtle momentum,
carrying my own life with me as I went.
Howie Good
Ghosts of Breath
Jack Kerouac had just returned from Mexico on a gust of melancholy. Bluish ash covered the ground. It made for a strangely buoyant surface to walk on. Very few Americans seemed willing to question whether the ash was real or the mental projection of former high-level Nazis now employed by the U.S. government. Kerouac would spend much of the rest of his life in a kind of inebriated minimalism, sometimes waiting hours on a street corner for his friend, William Burroughs, to materialize. Burroughs liked being a ghost – you get to sleep late into the day so you can work at night.
Famous Long Ago
The police in Concord, Massachusetts, mistook a tree whose branches were thrashing in the wind for Thoreau, but let it go with just a warning when they realized their mistake. Baudelaire wore rouge in a pitiful attempt to hide his decayed magnificence. Each morning on waking, Nietzsche would eat nine yellow raisins that had been soaked for nine days in a jar of gin, a ritual that he said contributed to his affectionate relationships with trollops. Then Dali unrolled a mysterious shade of blue like a scroll, and mirrors began to warp and reflections to weep and shriek. Plague rats were seen driving cars. If Poe was still around, he would have been riding in the back.
Revolution #49
About 600 miles south of the North Pole stands the world's northernmost statue of Lenin. The face is like a mask, with a guarded but threatening expression. Many people have admitted to feeling uneasy in its presence. The old Bolshevik seems to be sizing them up through narrowed eyes. On the pedestal is a quotation from his writings: “We’re the rifles our ancestors didn’t have.” But, as is generally the case, irony has had the last word. Pigeons with the harp-shaped wings of angels roost and worse on the statue.
Touched by Fire
I drank from the fur cup. It tasted like you – orange blossom honey infused with fire. If our forebears had remained in the Pale of Settlement, herding cows, exhorting God, they would have been destroyed with the rest, and we would never have happened. History is riddled with obscure coincidences. The poète maudit Stéphane Mallarme died from the same disease I have. There is no cure, no absolution, no escape. I am not only a prisoner, but also the prison. Please spare me visits from the sort of people who refer to poetry as “verse.” I just want to stand chest-deep in your flames.
Disguises
That figure in plaid from the branches’
dappled light, approaching or departing,
arriving after years or at last leaving,
walking the forest path, who is it in
the middle distance, wavering, like
a flame, a lost cadence of the heart?
Listen to oranges of the dwarf navel
tree on the balcony fall one by one
of their own weight, fruit full of sugar
with ripeness too heavy for the stems
just as at evening once from his bed
the poet John Keats heard the thuds
of ponderous apples in the orchard.
Your disguise someone in disguise?
Have you noticed lately the mirrors
stray, grown tired of our reflection?
In the glass the lifting little finger
doesn’t stir, and that surface smile
hiding a big cat’s teeth, a leopard’s
yellow eyes leaping from the wall,
its coat with spots like fingerprints.
Taking shelter from rain on a red
bougainvillea the sleeping moth’s
brown wings embossed like fallen
twigs portray a forest floor. Another
day an early jet left a scarlet contrail
across the white-gray sky, low and
perfect horizontal, a Yang first line
of daylight’s unfolding hexagram.
At the farm in autumn at the cottage
the walnuts with blonde meat inside
the stone shells free of green husks
hit echoing like pistol shots against
a cedar deck but in the yard at a late
rose the yellow swallowtail’s black-
striped wing held the violet oasis.
Those sloped clouds before morning,
night’s remnants, star-crossed, dormant
are different from clouds at evening
but with the dawn still turn crimson
however dark winds shaped them.
In a fever I threw off the costume
of a wolf, folding tail, ears and legs.
I put the fur away, a lamb again I
ran to yearlings all in pantomime.
Simultaneous
I listen to the wet snort of my mare,
my childhood mare, who blows oats across my face
as I face the past. She lifts her head,
heading past me from the trough and back—
Back to the stall and the fresh-mown hay.
Hay I scythed by hand and still hold and
hold in blistered hands that slide across her brown back
as she backs away from me into memory.
I remember lying in the oat field with my dog
(my first dog Heidi) and hooting to a mockingbird,
mocking his mimicry with my human voice
which he voiced back—what listening that was.
These are concurrent lives.
Life rises again and again, so listen:
The river of time is running;
the water knows itself as one poem.
Girl with Cumulus
after Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights
Heat blossoms into summer thermals––
she wants to rise with the flocks,
pulse through vapor and wind
to implacable heights.
She wants to see their faces. Swifts––
whirlwind sailors of the sky.
They are dark grains
cast against bright clouds,
clusters of black crosses,
flickering silhouettes culled from night.
Their screams corrode brick and glass.
Then, flung toward the earth’s curvature
they are gone––
the sky swept clean
and she is back in the park
binoculars slung from her neck.
Once she found a dead swift below a bridge,
studied it in her hand––husk of a bird––
a feathered, dusted seriousness.
The river scribbled reflections on the stone arches.
She wrapped it in cloth, took it home,
unsure what to do. Their lightness––
airborne for months, they sleep on the wing.
Their gaping beaks sift insect-laden currents.
Awake at night, she counts the layers
between her bed and the earth’s center
––crust, mantle, outer core, inner core––
then the spheres above, unreachable.
Her vesper flight––to drift up and up
into the complicated, unstable air.
Some people like it giddy and sweet.
Some people can’t help probe the knife’s sharp edge.
There was the time we wondered, “Is this a coup?”
Then we remembered the basics––
you need a plan for that.
You need the military.
Happy after all, we danced in the street.
Granted, the world has become harsher.
Or my eyes more attuned?
I saw a daughter’s trepidation––in France,
a young Muslim girl whom the police questioned
after her teacher was beheaded. After all,
this was reported, and we saw the picture,
the girl seated on a couch
and next to her a grey-cloaked woman
whom I mistook for her grandmother.
(I have much to learn about the ways of others.)
Still, we want another chapter in our romance with death.
The marvelous trees are catching the sun, after all.
Someday that girl may be the leader we need.
Distance to Here
Two letters in the fluorescent grocery store sign
flicker on the verge of burning out
like frantic broken morse code.
Cracked display window held together
with masking tape & last week’s sales circular,
resembles an oversized belated birthday gift
from a distant, alcoholic relative.
Craters in the maroon stucco
look like the pockmarked surface of Mars.
Buildings like bodies decay
over time. Twenty years ago
the facade face-lift was fresh.
New automatic doors swung wide
as if welcoming the future with a rush
of frigid conditioned air
& mineral smell of fresh asphalt.
Recently-crowned third generation
grocery store heirs reined.
Royalty by proximity with pleated khakis
penny loafers & comb-overs.
Masters of everything in their purview,
ready to rebuild
their hand-me-down empire.
They ignored the replaceable bagboys,
too stoned to care about these jobs
or this town. Our futures
were yellow brick roads
laid ahead of us in golden promise.
Confident they destined us anywhere
but here, in that parking lot one night
we made a wager to see who
would move farthest fastest.
Your sights were set on Seattle.
We never noticed
the funeral home across the street
where I stand now. Neither
of our younger selves would ever believe
this is where the future ends.
Distance from there & then
to here & now is a stunted fifty yards.
Place a mask over my face,
guide myself by the hand into your wake,
back into the unrelenting present
where you now reside in my past.
Mourners stay arms length away.
Grieve your short life, your long death.
Your breath held for years,
waited for the future to start
until you chose to stop
waiting & breathing.
Elemental Order
The rage of motors recedes
and he finds the Rouge
where it muscles over rocks
and froths and falls. Downstream,
the fools of another age poured
concrete to contain it and Ford
built his stone mansion here.
What of it? Water turns
indifferently past as it has
and must, a choreography of erasure
bearing away walleye and carp
toward Zug Island and U.S Steel,
bearing also alluvial sand
and some curse he’s spit.
He’s followed his dog into the woods.
In the world he's just left,
cranes are raising new walls.
Upstream--weeds and glassy calm.
The dog edges near and sips.
An oak bends to admire
its fair double. Geese pull
behind them broad wakes
which melt back into a hush
older than lines on our maps.
It’s blowing crazy out of the southwest
so I’m leaning into it the whole way,
but it’s my birthday and I need to talk
to someone older. Choices grow slim.
They stand together like old men
at an open bar after a wedding,
and they lean toward me as I approach.
All along they’ve kept one hand
resting on sunlight while the wind
drove them north and east.
As their branches twitch in the gale,
these soldiers half again my age
grip down through mud and clay
into the granite that will hold
what’s left of the roots when
the sun flames out. Age
adds no heft for the rootless.
Six inch anchor bolts tie our homes
to cinderblocks and more than storms
rip us from stays. The oaks nod
and confer, knowing we’ll leave
the bungalows soon enough.
Spared, somehow, from plows
and plat lines, a remnant of an endless
wind-breathing wood, they abide here,
thickened and wise, visited only
by a pair of hawks, a bounty of squirrels,
and the errant balls of children.
For a time tonight they endure
my airy questions and rasp their
encouragement before they return
to their slow work in dirt and sky
and I to my elemental tasks.
Winter, 2021
having shed the two who leapt
from the stands to ride along on his moment
as though he needed another reminder
that anyone could get to him, even
these dufuses even the half-literate
klansmen mailing him death threats
and, from a friend’s living room, I watch,
half-surprised--having lost my passion
after a brief stint in the pro game
as a fourteen year old assistant usher--
that the Milwaukee hero of the fifties,
the young face on a baseball card
in my brother’s shoebox, still wore
a uniform, still drove balls into seats
or, that night into a frantic bullpen.
Photos show a face altered
by all the slights that a Black man
in America is heir to, by the drain
of facing it each day even while
his quick wrists turned a bat
into a blur, a ball into a number--
forty or more in eight seasons
over three decades--and all of it
into a story in which he rounds
third in Atlanta twenty years
after Brown versus the Board, after slavery
and sharecropping and lynching and separate
and unequal. He rounds third
striding evenly though he’s forty
and carries more than his own weight
and his mother stands behind a throng
of teammates. She’s come to meet him
at home because of love and pride
and terror that a sniper even now
lurks even here to take it all away.
Now at the end of the Klan
Presidency, Aaron departs,
leaving us gaping at his grace,
so heavy in our winter coats.
Much
There wasn’t much to begin with.
But what there was,
Became everything.
The Conductor
The conductor’s retiring tomorrow
He stands by the door and looks nostalgic
He waves goodbye to a female passenger
As the doors close he says, one last time
He explains to a man
Who doesn’t speak English
That today is his last day
He shakes that man’s hand
This is the conductor
Who says hello to his passengers
Who asks how work is going
It may be more pronounced
With female passengers, but still
He appears to be well liked
Today every stop is his last stop
And he looks like he might cry
The conductor’s retiring tomorrow
But the train will stay on its tracks
Commuters will keep commuting
The work is never finished
Stale and yellow milk
(for Charles Bukowski)
as he became older
and closer to death
the books became thicker,
just flabby
with gut-fat at first,
round and hard
like a retired rugby player,
but then heavy with that sickened
tumor weight,
crippled at the knees
like bags of milk,
stale and yellow,
robbing the sinew
of the earlier poems
and snapping it like wire,
turning
from a skeleton
lean with dog-terror
into a successful old man
in bed
gut rotten
and needing help to piss.
he had a joke he told, apparently,
about keeping a boy to write his stuff for him
and maybe that wouldn't have been so bad
maybe slaves write better than kings.
maybe there isn't much
else
to write about.
maybe the word comes
from only having so much time to say it
like daffodils blooming in springtime
and that's why it's not so sad sometimes
when people finally do
take the time to die.
This Highway
This highway was engineered by whim and habit.
This highway bucked the fuzz-faced Booker twins
And their Ford Mustang into the black night air,
Into the only tree in ten miles.
This highway bends in the wrong places
Tricking both the sober and the sodden to pull
The wheel too tight, igniting that giddy moment when the rocks
Scatter, the car slides, the mailbox flies, the ditch looms.
This highway connects Hamburg to Clifton to Jasonville to Blue Point
To Sunbury to Steel City to Sully to Mystic, to Paulina and Red Oak.
This highway connects the sad, the lonely, the happy, the shy,
The sinful, the stupid, the blind, the silly, the sweet, the flatfooted,
The delinquent, the singer, the doctor,
The girl in the yellow print dress, the boy with the broken nose,
The salesman smelling of meat and bourbon.
This highway carries dreams away and leaves trouble at the door.
This highway has a number: 175. A reputation: flat, hilly, narrow, slippery,
Broken, blue, low, bloody, pathetic, wrong, necessary.
This highway brings Robert Robbins to Cynthia Pope’s back door
Whenever Johnny Pope is herding his 18-wheeler across the country.
This highway takes George Denison to look for his reckless daughter
Who saw this highway as the road to freedom.
This highway doesn’t discriminate between sin and success,
Maintaining a high tolerance for coincidence, for t-boning and sideswiping.
This highway rubs flesh from bone, serves snake, venison, raccoon, turkey.
It is a crow’s dinner plate, the snow’s clean dream,
A paradise of nails.
This highway would be straight if the world wasn’t crooked.
Green Fox Fur
(I recently learned about Frieda Neiman’s heroism upon reading an entry in the Ozeryany Yiskor Book. Ozeryany is the town in Western Ukraine where my grandmother’s family lived before WWII. Numbering in the thousands and originally written in Yiddish, Yiskor books have only recently become available in English due to the efforts of a dedicated group of translators.)
Frieda Neiman refused to give
her green fox fur coat to the SS
who burst through her door. “Better to die
in it than to let them have it,” she said.
Its ermine eyes kept watch, its throat,
a growl, she set it around her shoulders,
as three heavy-booted SS, raised
their pistols, dragged her between them,
so that only her toes touched ground,
and ordered her to keep walking over the thin spines
of leaves, their smell gone to musk
to a forest where other Jewish men and women
were rounded up. Some of them stood above
a pit, the earth still sweet, and others inside it,
their corpses “stacked like wood,”
a squad leader later testified.
A solider aimed and ordered her to step
on a plank and strip. As if the springs on a trap flew
open, she leapt forward, knocked the pistol
out of the soldier’s hands, fired back.
Another soldier swung his knife.
She grabbed it, stabbed him in his palm and ran
to the pine trees that crouched nearby,
waving to her with their arms open
when a pistol’s deep hollow click entered her spine.
Then she fell. It snowed all night.
Her brother Avram lay on top of the fresh
killed with this vision of his sister,
wrapped in her fur, running toward the pines,
in the moment before she is shot, coating his body,
torn at the seams, until dawn,
when he dares to take his first dazed steps.
**
Quilted, hooded, drawn in at the waist,
a fox fur hangs in my closet,
soft enough that I can stroke
the bellies and touch
the tapered hairs of the hundreds of animals
it took to make it.
Long ago, a boyfriend
bought it for me at the Goodwill to survive winters.
The immense racks filled with coats.
The screech of hangers.
The mirrors held us
as I twirled front to back
in fur after fur.
It was green, a color I had never seen
on a fur, green as sea waves
from a plane’s window and wind
and bright green crickets.
Green gone to seed,
a fallow field
ready to be sown again.
If I met you, cousin,
would we share a resemblance?
My great grandmother,
Malka Majmann,
who stood rubbing the tip
of her boot in mud,
was the only one of seven siblings
to flee Ozeryany in time.
Ozeryany, a town known for its bookbinders,
glass blowers, cattle herders, poultry breeders,
weavers, tailors, tanners, a thriving market town,
on the limestone banks of the Dniester
where fish fossils trace back to the Pleistocene.
Each time I move
I reconsider
whether I should carry it along.
Prodigal, it summons
the body’s wildness,
the material revealed.
I lift it off its hanger
and bury
my face in it.
**
The black leather cover on the Ozeryany Yiskor Book
is embossed with an eternal lamp. Painted red,
it glows from a top shelf. With a librarian’s help,
I am permitted to take down and hold,
etch with my finger and read the words
Frieda’s brother Avram, conveyed to a handful
of landschaften, in that moment when he shook
off the snow that covered him to touch
the first spring sprigs that felt like hair
connecting him to what once was: the pastures, the bending
riverbank—that moment flows
through time to me. How else to describe
key pads installed on pre-school doors.
The anger of men who smashed a hundred gravestones
at Mt. Carmel, killed eleven congregants
at a synagogue baby naming. I thought
I wasn’t being in the world anymore,
no being in the world or being of the world,
only hunted, so that space becomes a crosshair,
filled with the smell of smoke, no pretending to avoid it.
**
The library shelves shake,
the floor slopes,
the room is swirling,
ablaze in ultraviolet light.
The buttons on my blouse pop open,
my chest exposed.
My hands grow cold
to be given—what?—
the wind’s crash?,
the creak of barn
doors back in Ukraine?
I hear a sound from far
away. It’s horses’ hooves.
They sound giddy,
thudding against the earth.
The horse hooves come
closer, bringing with them
the scent of smashed
gooseberries. I panic
and fall forward. My head hits
the library table,
but I don’t feel any pain.
I’m numb all over,
like I’m about to give birth
and my perineum is stretched
so large its tearing. She is in my body.
The Dniester was once my river. I practiced holding my breath
to beat my best time and swim across before it became filled
with the torn-up dollar bills released from the pockets
of those being led to their deaths
No one saved them and we cannot save ourselves.
My great aunts floated so slowly, their children by their sides
become the sunken vestments of every oath every vow. I see what early morning
looks like the flow of light on a surface
moving into my own body liquid tendered down my spine.
I empty my pockets shred my crumpled handful of bills and release them
into the river. As I watch the pieces float away
loosened greenish-gold making their way downstream
I become a child again regretting my bad decisions.
Why did I tear up my money then watch it drift
floating slow enough for me to crawl on the wet earth reach my arm
through the thickets and plunge my hand in the water convinced
that the act of tearing them might free them
so that the sound of their names and the sound of my calling them
and the ripples on the water roar with life
I’m storing it in my pockets
like women back in the old country
to ward off the evil eye.
This salt that has seeped in
from my grandmother’s sea crossing.
Its traces cling to my lips
and are encrusted within the folds of my skin.
Kinahora, my grandmother used to say.
Never look at a neighbor’s crop
while the grain is standing
or a pregnant woman.
Your envy will infect your neighbor’s wheat
with worms. Its roots will wither and die.
The pregnant woman’s slippers will scurry
from the side of her bed, taunting her
as she trips over them
and miscarries. Instead of staring at her belly longingly
spit three times over your shoulder,
sprinkle words of praise.
But can we always trust our eyes
to show us what is there
or does the unseen overtake us
the way the sky at sunset gives back scattered light,
striking the winter trees, each limb
marked with fiery rage.
I was destined to be like salt,
swelling the tongue
minerals traced to a past
filled with blood and sawdust,
a lost existence,
rusting, eroding,
which has taught me to pry open
the wound, extract the words from.
It’s Not that You Drifted
that betrayed my compass of care. It’s human to leave the rational world
for a wilderness wild as self. How else learn the language of tame, the
appointment you made to hear restraint spark like a broken bulb. Your
blue apologies whispered at breakfast for choosing skin instead of wood
to frame your collection of scars, honey, please, I understand more about
suffering’s love of suffering than you’ll ever know. You said, lets talk
when the tide is low, on the beach with a whip and chair. I loved watching
our marriage vows, weak & pale on the rocks of real, burn like smiling tourists.
Distraction broke its promise to save a little time for me.
I prayed into the remote control
which sang the names of the dead-on demand
to make sure I was there.
If waking up means Pandemic fatigue
means set your bed on fire, a morning offering
paid to the body’s billowing white-flagged pole,
let surrender cut the last bouquet
when thorns protected beauty before
crowned and savior-ready.
Nature broke its promise to save a little time for me.
If there’s one thing
I’m not
it’s wilderness weary.
Give me Fir trees in heels
seducing the stars
with eagle eyeliner
smeared across heaven.
Give me black muddy runways
of perilous fields
where Trumpeter swans
blow horns for coyotes.
Earth is the biggest Queen
I know, all stubble & lipstick,
ripped nylons,
and sorrow.
I’d tip with my body
if it would fit between
the moons on her chest.
Landing on Mars
We’ve heard the wind on Mars
Its sandy whisper brought
engineers to tears
It is likely they were crying
about something
altogether different
Such distance
Such silent and stolid miles
where wind and weeping die
An expanse of carnelian
proof of iron and rust
Here no one looks you in the eye
From an impossible distance
comes the instruction to
land gently and wander alone
Drill down with expensive alloys
in dead deltas, observe desolation
with a clear, dry lens
Caught Moments
A chicken in the snow
on this February morning
when my intended focus
was the bluebird house,
yesterday’s busy in
and out equally odd
while dips below freezing
remain a threat.
I’m told it’s common
for the male to strut
his stuff, bent on
impressing the female
with serious house-hunting,
even avian staging with dry
grasses, pine needles,
how, when time and temp
allow, a nest might glow
with its brood to be.
But about that chicken,
it’s one of two the neighbors
keep, coop-free twice
a day to “range”
in the fenced backyard.
Sometimes—lucky bird,
lucky me—the caught
moment of a Buff
Orpington’s golden hue
agreeably cradled
in the young wife’s arms.
Hooked, we stopped to read the red wall,
its long horizontal sign declaring
SEAN MURPHY BUTCHERS,
below that a window framing the neon glow
of OPEN, bold caps of BEEF and LAMB,
to the left of the window a six-foot vertical sign
proclaiming FIVER FRIDAY, meaning any
item five euros…steak mince, back rashers,
pork chops, chicken Maryland, and next door,
swirling in this frontispiece of Irish commerce,
the peppermint pole of Jimmy’s Barber Shop.
The four of us—house-sitting Americans out
to “buy local” in Hacketstown—stood
at the meat counter, asking about the lamb chops,
face to face with the young proprietor himself,
his grin-delivered brogue thick as Irish stew,
leaving my wife and me embarrassed,
unable to decipher his response.
Our friends, their ears eight weeks more attuned
than ours—newly arrived among the welcoming Celts—
quickly translated the moment that ended
with a feast of laughter and language,
though not before we popped for a large
stuffed chicken (€6,50 on the chalkboard)
to extend the banter…the music of purchase…
Sean’s parting “Safe home…” as we returned
to the winding roads of County Wicklow.
The Diving Bell
In Plato’s works, Atlantis rises like a seaswell;
some imagine salt pillars, others casks of coins and fruit.
What we can’t see
is often what we can.
Once, my mother left out a row of glasses in the storm,
lined down the front walkway like divers’ pearls;
by morning they all stood upright, bloated with water,
but one.
What I mean to say is,
sometimes what is left
is also what’s missing.
How to atone for not taking a life
but taking the closest thing to it? How to mend
what’s slowly drawn away, what’s been severed,
what right you felt you once had
to enter a body and pull your desire out like an unsteered ship,
as if something were below the surface, some pillar, some cask,
some bounty of undiscovered land.
Those glasses
were urns.
Sometimes, the men appear against riverbanks,
or slitting fish, or holding women back by their hair,
or converting birds
into beds. Wedding rings caked to the hilt
in mire. An apology is only an apology
until it’s been determined otherwise; a city beneath the floods
is only a city
until a woman comes to rule it.
Have you regained your faith in mirrors?
Was it easy for you to be lost at first?
Are you the knife, the raven, or the thorn?
If you can, write a song for your held tongue,
for your stolen sleep. The winters will be hard.
One morning, a clot could pass through you like a storm,
hair spilling down your back like leaves.
I know you.
You have measured the dark
and found it lacking.
You are not any closer to feeling found.
There are still men left to forgive.
In dreams, the village healer beads a necklace of serotonin;
you swallow as many as you can.
Every new moon an untaught alchemy,
pines raising over the mountains like bone.
2020 tanka
Weird year in review,
I probably spent more time
alone getting to
know me than any period
since in utero.
Opera’s Tragedies
Just once can Violetta fly to Paris with Alfredo
and Tosca not leap from the parapet.
Just once can Leonora refuse to swallow poison
and Brunnhilde ride her horse down to this fragile earth
instead of into Siegfried’s funeral pyre, living
on to tell stories of the gods to her grandchildren.
What would it take to find just the right incantation,
just the right resolving chord or
set of syllables to alter the outcome?
Circling on the loop of a Mobius strip,
we watch Madama Butterfly, bitter and abandoned,
stab herself again after blindfolding her small son.
We watch Mimi die in a frigid attic for the fiftieth time,
hear Rodolfo’s agonized cry as the curtain lowers,
and allow our frozen tears to flow.
Shoe
Under the bed, that weeping,
The shoes feeling for each other,
That longing of thing
For thing, unceasing.
Or just one alone,
Kicked aside from anger
Or plain cussedness,
Waiting for the other to fall
and bounce his way.
On their flesh is written
The only story they know:
The story of the body’s perambulations,
The minor adventures
The shoe is tied to.
As the pencil ages
It becomes bent and chewed,
As we all do
who have been pressed
Under the thumb of others.
As it leans to the page
We believe we can see
The tattered remains of a
Skullcap clinging to the crown
Of an old scholar's head.
It reaches a point
Where it wonders
What is left to say.
Still, like a ventriloquist’s
dummy, the pencil says
What it is given to say.
At the little Greek place
Down in the Village
We ate moussaka and shared
A bottle of Retsina.
You were my elder. You told me
Who to read. Feeling good
And hoping to win your regard,
I declared to you
The wine is on me. Thanks,
You replied, patting your belly,
But you
Have to pay for the whole meal.
A Place in the Woods
My daughter bought a 1000-piece
jigsaw puzzle to keep her busy while
staying at home. It’s called A Place
in the Woods. (I consulted the Modern
Language Association style manual
for how to format the name of a jigsaw
puzzle, but they didn’t provide one,
so I did it in italics.) It’s very bucolic.
There’s a cottage by a stream, a wooden
bridge over the stream, a happy pair
of swans gliding down the stream,
a canoe on the bank, a family of deer
drinking from the stream, two cardinals
in a tree above the stream, a robin flying.
There are two Adirondack chairs, one green,
one red, a well for water or a wishing well
(which one is really impossible to tell)
and there are flowers, flowers, flowers,
flowers by the hundreds all over the place,
tulips, pansies, hyacinths, daffodils,
and lots whose names I do not know.
It must be springtime, or summer,
but there is also snow. Snow is everywhere.
And icicles. Can you believe it? Icicles.
Spring flowers, summer flowers, winter snow
and icicles. It’s Eden in every season but fall.
It’s Paradise before the Fall. It’s a puzzle.
Order
In order to order yourself you must decide
Whether you want to be nonchalant
Or go for broke, if you feed the brightest
Pigs of any kind, whether they be almost shoats
Or the small asses feeding on the side
Of the river running down below Charlotte,
Or Angier, where lived a doctor who saved me from meningitis,
When I was a boy singing songs I learned by rote,
Plus: you must be ready to savor digressions and ride
For the air between your ass and the withers if prosperity
Passes you by for a chock full of nuts and the timeless
Flight of chickens over a fence for no purpose but to polish their notes
When they cackle and fluff their feathers in memory
Of the casual way they grew from biddies to full-blown hens
Or roosters or peckers or rooters without snouts along the bay.
Hogs of any kind, for example, make different sounds.
I am more familiar with the Duroc whose body is a pink lumbering
Fullness of future bacon and eggs when
I get up mornings to go down to the Valley of Promises to retrieve the boy’s way
His mind seems to be onto something as he trails off into rounds
Of girls he used to know or into woods of timber
He has cut in Beaver Dam where sows from their pens
Rooted with little piglets snuggling tits in a daze
He remembers as day-drams in Nature’s lounge.
Nature is one big happy family: you must be careful
Or you will lose your part of it more than now
In your civilized role of poet and critic,
Particularly if you try to sound like Donne.
Let what mind you have riff in a dutiful
Flourish around and around the boat you row
In your streaming stream round with ring and nary a worry toward any city
That certainly is not made of gold, for that’s no fun.
Furthermore, if you work too hard, you become forgetful.
Operating controls turns the animals loose to scold
You and me for imposing and reigning the lines in; what a pity
That is. You and I are left with our pants down like a fox on the run
Panting and lifting red or gray feet to cry Everything is beautiful
In its own way, as the song goes, your eyes, your lips, your bold
Hips and stance in whatever nightmare comes, even after little bitty
Tears fall out of desperation when Black & Tan
Chases the Red or Gray and sleep becomes the hysterical
Mare or man or woman until awakening bares the old
Bones creaking once more; then the critic critically
Acclaims what ancient ends begin to expand
Until, poof, Addison becomes Steele to speculate satirically
What Dr. Johnson looses on the page of untold
Sayings Boswell goes crazy over, trying to make even a little
Inroad in the courtyard of his farm.
So I am done with trying to put up apples
In jars when the word “golden” becomes delicious
And the word “jar” takes Mason on a boat ride
To popular culture’s vessel to find some order.
Get a broom and a dustpan and a flapper,
If you like: sweep up the dirt and dust into a system of precious
Jewell-bits in the eye of the beholder who sighs
And let’s do what others do, seeing herself, himself, a reporter
No longer in charge of the bachelors
Or the single women who know instinct like the interior of a feral cat’s decision
To put composure in howls of the insinuating tide
Coming in or out of what glances loiter
On our way to the zoo to feed the animals
In their cages, two looking at two,
One and the same, just as my friend Bill
Said, “The Road Not Taken” is about
The road not taken. That pretty much accounts
For the meat, whether you are a meat-eater
Or not. A complete diet of squash is no thrill.
It is not even a what-not.
Remember those little shelves of, for me, long ago, beside mantels
In every house in the country, the corner snug with a few
Trinkets, including a white and blue doggie whose tail sang a rill,
As if it flowed upward out of its sculpted crack?
My father said one time that most people have about as much sense
As the hole right under a dog’s tail.
He was a very orderly man.
He had been there and done that.
He was the great grandson of Pap George who was bent
Over so badly, my father said, when his greatgrandfather died, a frail
Man, beaten down by his plantation, he suffered a thin
Spirit and body; they could hardly get him in his coffin. How about that?
How about the run of his Household Mill,
Out of order, unused, broken, his seventeen slaves a trail
Of mounds unmarked in the grave-land
Across the road, his nineteen children, two wives, scattered like bats.
What It’s Like to Want to Forget
With cans coming in with every load
and his Toyota pickup parked in the weeds
Alonzo lets it be known: “The State
can fire me if it wants.”
“Do you want these or shall I just pour
them in the recycle-bin?”
He points to the growing pile
of cans of glinting aluminum.
His cap shouts Las Vegas or Bust
and he wears boots too big and floppy
for all his pant-legs to fit inside.
I do not ask him where he is from
or what makes him so set in his ways,
why he knows the State wants him to represent
obstructions, dreams, schemes, reflections
rolling around his guardianship.
I picture him with a wife at home:
she’s sitting by the windowlight,
waiting for him to come from work in a snapshot.
She wants to tell him of the bright
birds that flutter at the feeders
while he’s sorting cans from debris
he thanks neighbors for, as they accommodate the dump
and present him with their scant profusions.
I imagine him as a kind of side-man
to life’s other side, the dirt’s way
of piling up in hours to stall
whether Alonzo traps animals or not at end of day.
His lot ends at the Pleasant Grove Convenient Center.
That’s a euphemism for people
like me who want to hold on to garbage and then enter
the semi-clean world of home’s simple
living, with a burn-barrel for trash, and with youth,
I can tell, then, as now, for his job is for one man
who lives with no formula in his cadence
as he backs his truck over and over, forward, flattening his cans.
Talk about the Mortal Acts,
The rhymester tries to go straight when words arch
And fall to sleep until the Muses bet
That wisdom branches in a stream beset
With twigs which clog the trickle clarity
Roots for human sway to include colors
Of races already run before my family’s slaves danced
In the eyes of masters and landlords whose dames
Seemed glad with clear delight to enjoy
Their company in house and field without envy.
Let the poet follow his family
Out of the big house his father finally
Left because he wanted a house by the side of the road.
July, the Slave Girl, right here, lived her girlhood.
Prose allows the balladeer to expand with documents of the tainted
Past: example, July’s Bill of Sale in basest form resounds the troubles of Sally Hemings.
Problem is that the person who fits the “grandfather” image
Is the scribe’s Pap George, actual kin. July was ten when she was seized
To live and work for Fate, this child of Joy
Who started having babies at twelve and lived to die too young to enjoy
More than the servant’s life on Pap’s plantation, her keep
Within his farm ending when he sold her like kreep,
That rare gemstone on the moon of her liveliness,
As she had to adjust to being scattered like fertilizer
For Seth Woodall’s Hands to make
His crops grow until 1873 when she died, a maid,
Still, as she is listed in the Co-habitation Notes.
What freedom means in those days denotes
The transition from being property to becoming one
On the move to worry’s diversion, then outrun
The past and come back home from slavery’s pen.
Let the poetry and prose together remove patrolmen,
Include them in words controlled in the question:
Was their solace in the air of earth’s first settlers?
The Hill they descended stops and starts at my front ramp
To circle the back stoop where Lee Terry stood and revamped
His day to ask William Paul Stephenson,
The lyricist’s father, if he had work for him to do, the season
Being winter’s way of desiring a fire, he, this Lee Terry,
Might build in his hearth which centers this troubadour’s territory.
Umbrella
Today we will blame the difficult child
for the rain, for our wishing to stay indoors,
and our mother for the wind that assimilates
confrontation, and the dog for our lack
of friends, the dog’s indiscriminate democracy
of affection, his inimical shedding. Perhaps
it’s a good day to clean the snake cage,
if you’re bored. Or perhaps we should locate
our black-clasped golashes in the closet
and see if the weather itself has raised
any objections, if there are puddles enough
to be stomped and dispersed by our mood,
mud so inimitible we can track it throughout
the house, leave an accurate map of where
we can be found, if anyone cares to look.
Doggerland
Driver for the light colonel out along the sand banks of the Canoochee on the back ranges of old Camp Stewart in southeastern Georgia
In a WWII Jeep that needed to be brought to a dead stop to get into low range or four-wheel drive
Looking down over the OD running board into the palmetto spotted swales of Indian yellow sand
Imagining the officers, their drivers, stopping like that to shift down who might have been locked in by a sniper
Savvy snipers maybe would have nailed the driver first so as to have a second shot at the officer as he vaulted out of the back with his forty-five drawn crawling for cover behind a wheel on the safe side
Although a sure shot on a PFC or corporal probably worth only about a tenth of bagging a field grade officer
Camp Stewart way back then a small tank camp with a recon platoon, now is Fort Stewart reconstructed and gargantuanized after the Cuban Missile Crisis as the home base for imperial concerns in Latin America
Incidentally, and as it’s been all along, infantry is Saxony blue, artillery scarlet, armor chrome yellow
With military expansion nearly limitless in this country we generally obliquely dismiss the sorts of self-doubts that haunt the British
Now as Brexit’s Halloween deadline approaches, “They are the only people who can experience Schadenfreude at their own misfortunes” (Tony Judt)
More Little England all over again
Jacob sheep, indigenous to Britain, piebald and multi-horned
England as if slope shouldered and pale, stricken in a Pre-Raphaelite droop
Recently BBC ran a special on mental health issues’ linkage to Brexit
Taken for a post-prandial on The Boltons which she told me was the second richest street in London
And the beat goes on
Tries her very best to be cool and interesting, to not be a glib verbalist, but her PhD mannerisms prevail
Then her presence her voice her bearing her manner her measured confidence her alertness and savvy her sharp sense of irony, her graceful mien
A lot like that memorable Russian woman in 1960
Distantly possible that July evening in a Moscow apartment gathering of Russian film people that it was Anna Akhmatova who was among them
Russian eagerness way back then for contact with the West
With obviously a couple of watch-dogging informers among them too that evening, probably in our little group too
There with my Russian-speaking brother, d. 1988
“…You love your brother, / now suddenly you can hardly stand / the love flooding you for your brother” (Philip Levine)
Akhmatova was in Moscow on June 11, 1960, as she noted on at least one poem
She dated her work, often with its site of composition
We were in the capital for a few days later in June, and again for a week in early July after the Crimea
And that statuesque woman was there through that long-light June evening
Her iconic profile and respected presence stood out in spades
Recalling her, but none of the others there for that surprisingly copious buffet with its rapid-fire conversations
Akhmatova, d. 1966, was in Moscow frequently then, and traveled to Italy and the UK in the early 1960s, she could have been in Moscow from Leningrad that evening and could have joined the film people reception for foreign visitors, it might have been
Recollect that woman very well, but probably only Akhmatova’s name was familiar to the two of us then
Her poetry often like the grandeur of the Shostakovich Piano Trio no. 2, Op. 67 (1944)
Russian music, vivid proof that there are ways valid beyond matter-of-fact and phlegmatic moralism
"In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. Once, someone 'recognized' me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard of me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): 'Can you describe this?' And I answered, 'Yes, I can.' Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face." (Akhmatova, Requiem)
Yezhov, a monstrous shrimp of a man at 5’0”, superintended a million deaths by execution or exile to the gulag
Lavrentiy Beria, the grand monster himself, brought a groveling Yezhov to execution in Moscow in 1940 as if by the scruff of the neck
The scrambling careerism of Stalin era survival, dog eat dog, sharks and little fishes, bullet behind the ear basement executions
“…like a useless appendage, Leningrad / Swung from its prisons” (Prologue to Akhmatova’s Requiem)
She located her poems of that period as being from “Besieged Leningrad”
“January 5, 1941. In the window the ghost of a snow-covered maple… The wind is howling in the stovepipe” (Akhmatova, Poem Without a Hero)
And early in the German starvation siege of her Leningrad, she remained until the government evacuated her to Tashkent where she recovered from typhus in 1942
“The canals murmured to themselves / And the carnations smelled of Asia” (her Tashkent Pages)
Always a witness and her vision true nearly throughout
The Russian Revolution and the midcentury Totentanz evil of Hitler/Stalin as the backdrop her life left her to nearly singularly maintain poetic survival
Most of the other European greats fell away either to death or diminishment in exile
She lived on through her “cruel era” as she called it, albeit deflected “like a river from its course” through a career of more than sixty years
In great part the Stalinist years
While German pursuance of cultural and historical wished-for destiny marshaled against French nationalism, Norwegian individualism, Jewish survival strategies of evasion and alleviation, and general Euro opportunistic compliance, led to unique – but for Stalin – levels of mass barbarism
By the end of WWII ninety percent of the Jewish children of occupied Europe had been murdered
“…our odyssey, a Jewish odyssey of the 20th century, and the tremendous pressure of wandering, adapting, pretending, silencing and forgetting” (Roger Cohen)
Those grotesque last-century numbers are recorded history
The cogency of our own stultifying numbers is not yet set but they already assure an onrush of this century’s fated future
“We also know that the coming changes will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children, and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean nothing to us.” (David Wallace-Wells, 2019)
In the way that yellow clothing patches in the shape of a Star of David with a centered “Jude” or “Juif” links to the memory of the Holocaust, a symbol for our extended era is not even incipient
Like those grotesque lead-tin yellow hexagram patches of giallorino, giallolino, massicot, genuli, gelb
Marking those millions the Germans wished to cull
As terrible in their explicit simplicity as a recitation the names of the camps themselves
Our evolving catastrophe’s symbol might be an image of a gabion
More obvious could be a melting glacier, a starved child’s remains, a derelict cityscape, an empty river bottom, a proscenium red sky behind massive forest fires, a brownfield’s littered plain, a drone’s view of mass death and dislocation
But a stark gray gabion in perspective would be more pertinent to this era of all too foreseeable ongoing destruction
A gabion as symbol of the disastrous all too obvious already now deep decay of the planet’s viability
“And the poets, / who should have spoken for us were busy // panning landscape, gunning / their electrics, going / I-I-I-I-I” (Heather McHugh, “Blue Streak”)
Dead dark gray, not yellow as for last century’s abject horror of the Shoah, and not red, blue or pink, or certainly not green, but dead gray
Pathetically passive and stabilizing gabions that will be put in place to shore up our resistance, to block and dam the sand-water-mud seawater slurry rising to inundate and bury us
Gabionage walls, dams, embankments as sea levels rise
Gabions to divert the emerging renegade river channels
Gabions to protect the pumps
Big gray black wire basket stone-holders their color as that of volcanic glass, obsidian black to very dark bronze, heavy wire lattice enclosing the heavy dead stones within
In an engineering paradigm crisis flung back to basic forces of hydraulics, pressure levels and brute force
Gabions moved around with groaning forklifts on flatcars and lowbeds, firmed in place by the inertia of their weight
To be buried and gone derelict with everything around them
To hold, to block, to divert in the larger world, like the long term survival polders of the Netherlands’ classic engagement with the ocean rise
The same ancient battle with the reality of tides and storm surges defining the people who lived on the flats, shoals and sandbars of Doggerland eight thousand years ago
Europe then connected from the Urals to the Irish Sea
When the coast of Northern Europe ran from eastern Britain to Denmark
“The Mesolithic coastal dwellers of Doggerland began to see their landscape change – sometimes within a single day… sometimes only when they recalled what parent and grandparents had told then about lagoons and marshes now permanently drowned by the sea.” (Steven Mithen, After the Ice)
Wholly under the North Sea now between East Anglia and the Netherlands, Doggerland surrendered to the salt and tide around 6,500 BC
Its high ground still on the charts as Dogger Bank off Newcastle between 1º30’ and 3º East on the way to Norway
Eight thousand years ago the last of it was the Dogger Hills in whatever language they spoke there then
Those Mesolithic hunters and foragers with their centuries of seasonal residence, the coastal inlets in summer, the shelter of inland hills and valleys in the cold
The whole pre-cultivation spectrum there in what was one of the most bounteous regions of northern Europe, and Doggerland was even larger than modern Denmark
With a climate nearly what it is now, Gulf Stream warming restored as the currents stabilized after the great ice melt
Doggerland thrived for thousands of years
Perhaps even submerged megaliths lie on an ancient plain below, as in nearby Britain and all down the French Atlantic coast
Have sailed over Doggerland, passing within hailing distance of the small, stubby Outer Gabbard Lightship
A painting crew of three skinny Brits, jerkinesque shirts, rowdily drinking beer, at work there, white and shiny-black spattered paint buckets hanging near the bell
Forearms on the rail of the catwalk encircling the pitching and rolling lightship’s beacon they shouted and sang things over at us that we couldn’t make out
As we sailed on, bound for the Kiel Canal and Denmark
We had left Portsmouth Water for the North that morning
While alone at the wheel motoring that night in fog before the Elbe, a churning tanker loomed up like a cliff dead ahead, swinging hard to starboard we cleared, barely
But one of those times at sea not to forget
In place out there now is the Greater Gabbard Wind Farm, set in fresh permanence over the Doggerland shoals
As of mid-2018 there were forty wind farms in the North Sea operated variously by the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Belgium
The Carolina and Georgia low country now feels what Mesolithic Doggerlanders experienced as they began to move higher ground
It is flooding frequently now
As when Hurricane Matthew produced thirteen inches of rain along the Lumber River in 2016 flooding and destroying communities all the way to the coast
Even more severely in 2018 when Hurricane Florence dropped thirty-five inches of rain in places killing fifty-four, washed out hundreds of roads, displaced fifteen thousand people to emergency shelter
The scheme of things there is changing dramatically, homes and patterns of life have been abandoned and assumptions about “hundred year” events are erased and climate change accepted as reality
For the moment, down on the sandy tracks of Fort Stewart by the Cabooche River in coastal Georgia, things go on for the US Army much the same as they always do
Another lieutenant colonel bouncing around the back ranges a half century on driven by another PFC
The sand the same, palmettos and pines, rattlers and eastern cottonmouths, southern black racers and green anoles, hot summer days, warm nights
Hurricanes and tropical depressions arrive in summer and fall, heavy rains in winter
All as it has been for a long time
What is different now is that weather patterns change relentlessly
Altering the stability of all that lives
For as long our era’s natural equilibrium has held, weather generally supported and enhanced life as it developed
With climate change a complex negative feedback is rising and what lives is threatened rather than thriving in symbiosis with environment
The world, natural and otherwise, is beginning to struggle with the bubble within which it lives more intensely than at any time since the onset of the last ice age
Things turned on their head in a chiasmic inversion, from stability enhancing life, to fighting the ambient to survive
From live to eat, to eat to live
From grow to thrive, to live on to survive
Since never in the collective memory, since no one quite imagines
The Poem Wrote Itself
Well, almost. I did have a hand in it—
the mention of the Italian Riviera was all mine.
I showed the poem to my wife who said
“This poem wrote itself” though I don’t think
she and the poem were in cahoots. I put
the poem in a folder, on top of the other hopefuls
and I swear I saw the crisp, blue sky of Italy.
The player says “Thanks to God”
after delivering the game winning hit,
but never after having struck out
for the final out with the winning
runs begging, stranded on base.
We say “Thanks to God” for rain
when the drought has hung us dry,
but never when the bombs from the sky
smash deep into our buildings.
We could go on with a ‘Thanks to God’
talk forever, one of biblical proportions
in its own right. Jesus had so much
to recalibrate, it’s too bad he died young.
I trundle over the dying leaves
that are rigid as a carpet on the ground.
I’m thinking of the afterlife, always
liking to get way ahead of myself,
imagining what might be against
what there seldom is. Should I see myself
standing on the horizon, waving,
I’ll wave back, almost certain destruction
and other assorted tragedies have been
flung into oblivion, quickening my steps
to greet myself with shameless abandon,
asking which castles in the air are being
prepared to put us up for all the days to come.
They are Never Late the Sweet Early Days
for Ted
In the cellar of the Cornelia Street Café
we listened to the featured poets, thinking
they would have been better—the abiding
hope of all poetry readings. But we listened
with as much attention as we could muster,
glad to be in our haven with about twenty
others who braved the godawful rain outside.
Afterwards we popped open our umbrellas
the instant we hit the street and of course
the rain stopped and the fading mist dying out
at St. Marks made the Village seem new,
even beautiful, the poets who read forgotten.
We said Goodnight and headed home—you
to Jersey and me to Queens. I went down
the steps to the subway and on the platform
composed a poem in my head, the train giving
me the time I needed by not arriving till eternity.
A poem you would have liked—it took no prisoners.
After the Retreat
The cafeteria where I ate and studied
Was nearly empty, strange at noon
On a workday.
In the street I saw a man in a sandwich board
That read: “Resist—Resist and pray.
Overhead, the sky was blue and castled
With solid-looking clouds,
Cold for a summer’s day.
The mourning doves did their best
To loiter around the capital fountain,
But no one was intent on feeding them.
Even the children’s faces were solemn.
Fox
Nubbed, noduled and muculent,
this cork nose
came from nowhere.
This grim mouth,
this thin face,
this snaggletooth.
This narrow neck,
begging to be petted (only in your mind),
that hinges this sleek jaw,
that runnels to the soft padded feet
supplanted to the nothing
at the end of these lithe legs,
came from nothing too.
This infinite-to-its-course
stomach
dictates hunger
to each and every twitching cell.
These coarse wise whiskers.
This long bushy tail
remarkably terse enough
to haul a truck,
came from nowhere.
Opening his eye,
the aqueous brain-hooked history of fox
steadily courses forth
from nowhere.
What he knows
is sharper than a coral knife
and could kill your
came-from-nothing skin.
Philadelphia Influenza, 1918
after the Liberty Loan parade
a germ explosion
settled onto the city
streets were crossed
when strangers coughed
gauze and masks
held life at the gateway
hospitals stacked bodies
in packing crates
death notices commanded
columns and pages
released from their cells
seminarians and convicts
were thrown together
into fields with shovels
to dig graves
thousands dead in weeks
in this amazingly disastrous autumn
Lincoln Park
A whistle in the trees, in the middle
of the ballpark, a couple in the dugout
eating a sandwich, their dog runs
dead ahead, to another dog,
also unleashed, there they start
chasing in circles, wind at their ears.
No missiles flying here, no rat-tat-tat
bullets, it’s peacetime afternoon,
budding magnolia, and soon,
long walks, bursts of color.
In a plague year we’re resigned to many things.
We thirst for light, for the city to return.
The sky is utterly clear and blue, it hurts me
that one of us always scans it for smoke.
Sparrows under the table,
opera music from Petite Bain next door.
Fall in the air, wet rag of the hour,
trees holding tight their last strand of light.
“Lady of Canton”, I spotted the name
of the restaurant boat in Chinese characters.
Money-red, menstrual-red, red in a river of gray.
My language, my province, though truly,
mine was a castaway island.
I bought drinks from the African bartender,
flamboyant in his panama hat, neck kerchief, taking
his time to impress the two sisters, and gesturing---
since everyone came with different languages,
the sweet in Mai Tai, the aftertaste of a double Triple Sec.
They sipped and swooned, would
one of them fall in love with him, or both?
The Seine flew before us, past this old
industrial winery, now new with outdoor cafes,
a swimming pool named after Josephine Baker.
They called her Black Pearl, Creole Goddess,
looking at her photographs I saw that radiance
and a woman who left home to find a country.
Rain scattered and returned, the river
ran toward other cities and towns,
known and little known canals and estuaries,
legends and myths. On the other side
large green buses plastered with discounted fares sped.
Disembarked passengers made their way
across the bridge, bags trailing.
I saw a young girl, her long hair tied up,
looking every which way for directions.
I was like her once, finding myself
on the verge of a strange city,
no home, no country to claim me,
in damp air and in dim light,
in mercy of the divine unknown.
in terms of gear efficiency
It was only later that he
realized the abacus was
critical to his inventory
taking. He'd ignored it
for months, came back to
correct his mistake only
after consumption of a
James Lee Burke novel
& a chance visit to some
downtown bar when a
zydeco band was playing.
From the Pound Cantos: CENTO XXI
I cannot make it cohere to achieve
the possible, learn of the green world.
What can be thy place? Careless or un-
aware, working up to a climax. No man
can find site for his dwelling. A light
moves on the north sky line. Rain; empty
river; a voyage. Evening is like a curtain
of cloud, a cold tune amid reeds, out of
which things seeking an exit throw rocks
to stone us. There is a great deal of man-
ipulation. As to why they go wrong?
Many errors. Wrecks lie about me. She
gave me a paper to write on, the power
over wild beasts. My notes do not cohere.
Serpentine yearnings. Or, else-
wise, following behind a woman
with the Laura poems of Petrarch,
in the original Italian, no less, dis-
played across her rhomboids. The
rain doesn't help, makes it hard to
read, causes insularity among the
scribes who follow me around,
transcribing my thoughts, which,
unlike the Petrarch, are full of mis-
spellings. The sonnet in front of me
is replaced by another one, & I
realize it's an LED display, not a
tattoo. Then a boy on a bicycle with
a baguette in his bouche rides by, &
I lose all track of what Laura is up to.
T H E H A M I L T O N S T O N E R E V I E W
Virgens de Guadalupe by Lynda Schor