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Issue # 46 Spring 2022
Poetry
Edited by Kevin Stein
Weeds. The Full Moon. A Single Housefly
A day laborer leans in to hoe every godawful weed running
down the length of bean rows that parallel the gravel road
from corncrib to creek bed, row upon row, lopping off
pigweed, Queen Ann’s lace, burdock & those blood-
thirsty, needling Canadian thistles, never once straightening up
to relieve an aching back as he lashes out with his short-handled hoe
so that each swing becomes a prayer to bless his faraway family & himself
with a good night’s sleep when the day ends. He pulls his red bandanna
from around his neck, wipes sweat off his forehead & the back of his
head before retying it in place.
And yet…& yet when night comes
& sleeplessness continues as a plague without end, the moon looks
in to find him lying there, face up, bone-weary & still very wide awake
with both of his eyes open & glued to the shadows of the trailer’s ceiling.
The ice-cold moon sees through the window, intrigued as she always is with
all the varieties of human frustrations, & now this one, a man bothered by
that one very small creature overhead, a single fly that drones & zeroes
in to land on the hair stubble crowding in the chin’s hollow cleft
without once asking permission to roam there. This small one
forges on ahead to higher ground from where it surveys the entire
frontier that lies beyond, the unexplored land waiting to be mapped.
Soon, very soon, the fly manages to cover all the enormity of this
troubled, leathery expanse, that vast open continent, in a belief
that this is its singular destiny, this one leisurely, luxurious walk-
about over all the valleys & uplands of a human’s broad neck & face
that God has so beneficently provided. The fly sidles down & explores
further into each of two cavernous, cabbage leaf folds, the farmhand’s ears, without
once asking if this might be the furthest reach of this or any human’s
endurance. The moon’s luminous face lights up as she enjoys how this fly moves
on to explore the man’s forehead’s many furrows, indentions that measure out
countless sleepless nights, & yet here he remains, one still capable of vision,
a man far from home imagining he’s no longer weeding another’s field but
dreaming of how life once was, his past when he was free to play outside
as a child in his mother’s kitchen garden. The moon slides behind the
window curtain: the fly abruptly takes off. Such irritation might be
a gift sent from on high to test a man’s steely endurance’s which, if met,
may well be a blessing from the saints who have already inherited the
promised land far above & beyond each who struggle here below.
must’ve been startled as she flew head-
first into the sliding glass door, flying directly out
of the blinding, early-morning sun with its glare off
October's first hard frost, the riveting reflection
conning her into a belief that there was something
of a Beyond beyond what seemed to lie before her,
the illusion of massive oaks going on & on with
absolutely no end in sight to their upgathered tangle
of tree limbs. What remained were only a few century-
old oaks between suburban house & house, once a forest
that native peoples freely roamed through & hunted in
when needs arose. Today, what appeared to this bird
as a sanctuary was a reflection, the mirroring of tree
limbs-in-glass, inviting her in although that picture
abruptly vanished, leaving her stunned & lying
flat on the patio cement floor, staring up into
a confluence of autumn’s rusty-brown oak leaves.
As a young Audubon might've once stood over her,
I debated whether to sketch her beak rimmed in blood or
rather make of her something much simpler, a single mark
in my fledgling life-list notebook. Now, I am contented
with oven bird & write this down in marked reverence
as I pray to her God & mine that this will be worthy
of her & what she'll forever be for me for eternity
Carrying Only a Fiver & the Key to the Kingdom
Squirreling away five bucks & squeezing it
into the toe of my shoe to hide the wad safely
before leaving my sixth-floor shared walkup,
then hanging the key tied to a bit of string
around my neck, the string, grimy & black
with body sweat since this August day promised
to skyrocket into the high nineties, maybe even above
one hundred, a headline for all the riders on the J
line as they read the Daily News over each
other’s shoulder, trying their best to maintain
balance in one more oppressive dog day in NYC.
That was how I found myself stranded as the world
swirled & spun about as it threatened to run out
of control around me in the summer of '68
with five bucks shoved in the toe of my shoe
& a key dangling about my neck while my head
drifted off into the choking smog while I chewed over
whatever of Spinoza's thoughts I could recall from reading
a page or two before I dropped off to sleep the night before.
Exhausted, finally. What thief would force me out of my shoes
with their cardboard soles to get at my few lousy bucks?
Home, when I returned, was filled with ten adults
& three Puerto Rican urchins stacked in like
so much cordwood at the apartment off Avenue D,
a kingdom all its own that did welcome me back to an un-
occupied mattress from my shift at a cosmetic factory in Queens.
But each day sent me out to the streets with a good omen,
my five bucks & that key like a St. Christopher medal
dangling from around my neck as able & ready protection.
Unspoken
Lately I’ve been discovering wind
in places I’d least expect it--the drawer
where I keep my summer shirts, or the basement
when I go down to bring out the folding summer chairs.
It’s a sudden puff or flurry, a tiny explosion
of memory against my face; it makes me
stop breathing for a moment. But where does the wind,
any wind, come from? Is it like language,
emerging from cries and chortles, into
a forest full of paths and grottoes, mushrooms
and berries we could survive on, if
we had to. Luckily we don’t have to do that,
at least not yet. And we don’t even know
the names of all the insects that live there, or the tiny
orchids that push up through the marl
in the root-crotches down by the creek, and nod
in the wind that sweeps across the ground
or the moss that stays wet all summer, glowing
even on the days when the sun stays hidden,
like the wind in the album of photographs of you
as a young person, waving at the camera to turn
away, look elsewhere, let me comb my hair
and put on nicer clothes, to catch me for the future
in the moment I was beautiful. This wind is like a secret self,
the self that got dressed up, and smiled--but was never
captured in a snap-shot. Inside your body
is another kind of wind, full of everything you never did,
all you have forgotten now, glittering like dust-motes,
or the wings of certain insects as they land in the blossoms
and poke around, quivering, with what might look like joy.
What the Heart Wants
“The heart’s rhythm is normally
controlled by a natural pacemaker
(the sinus node)…. [It] sends
electrical signals that normally
start each heartbeat.”
—Mayo cCinic
For three hours and twenty-two minutes, my mother has been on a ventilator. I know
breathing is only possible with a functioning brainstem. I learned this on a college
biology test I failed. My heart stutter-steps. A massive stroke killed my mother’s brain.
Sickle Cell Anemia strangled it and shoved it into the top of her spinal cord. My heart
stutter-steps. I watch a monitor’s iridescent, steady green peaks, and valleys map my
mother’s beating heart for two hours. Hear the ventilator’s hiss floosh hiss floosh hiss
floosh as her white-sheeted chest rises falls rises falls rises falls. My heart stutter-
steps. Now, a nurse, I think her name is Regina, removes white medical tape from the
sides of my mother’s hazelnut face. From around the hard white plastic funnel in her
mouth. Regina de-snakes a plastic tube clogged with pale greenness from my mother’s
dry lips. My heart stutter-steps. The monitor continues to frame emerald hills’ rise fall.
Her right shoulder seems to draw up. Deep inside her body, fluid gurgles. My heart
stutter-steps. I want blackness’s blunt closing, blankness’s slick smearing; dissolution’s
grit dancing on my tongue. I want to taste the elasticity of thickness pump blood in and
out of my mother’s heart, her breathless body. My heart stutter-steps. I wet my right
index finger, wipe away a glob of green wetness from my mother’s gaping mouth.
i.
Under the Speedy Queeny Laundromat’s
flickering fluorescent lights, I stand behind
a table folding black yoga pants. The older
woman, leaning on a dryer next to me, stares.
My fiancé died, and his family blames me, pours
out of her mouth like bleach’s, warnings:
“mix me with ammonia and die,” or “splash me
on colored clothes, and they will bleed.”
I nod my head continue smoothing
wrinkles from a yellow cotton tee-shirt.
He comes to me at night. Stands
at the foot of my bed and talks to me,
slides sideways from her lips, matching
the swish-swishing tempo from the
Speedy Queeny’s washing machines.
I turn to look at her. She does not blink.
Her eyes are blue and clear.
I nod my head in agreement.
ii.
All the clothes dryers
are empty black holes.
Not one sock lingers
in the darkness.
—after Lucille Clifton
Open windows. Celebrate
these first fragile breaths with
white-hot sparklers. Me,
nourished, empty thoughts that
punishing thumb. Everyday.
I always knew something
hard, bruising, has
binding powers. Tried
sitting still, keeping hard-to-
hold back-bent poses. Kill-
ing fragile lace edges, me.
Open all the rusted locks and
release everything it has—
the tasteless arsenic failed.
Venus Born
The boy wrote the story of a painter named Rainbow.
The teacher said Rembrandt, but Rainbow
was what stuck in the boy’s mind. And thanks god
because, had he seen them, he wouldn’t have liked
the shadowy interiors, the pale flesh and dark browns,
the dusty burgundy and gold. Named Rainbow
and this famous artist, the boy wrote, threw a girl
onto the canvas. Painters do it, he had learned.
They throw things around and this time the thing
was a bony, little child. He thought of his sister,
six years old and a pest. The girl fell from the painter’s
hand, hit the canvas, skimmed on it as if on black ice
leaving an horizontal streak, a long splash of vivid,
sequined hues, a summary of her dance tutu,
her swimsuit and her Halloween odalisque. The girl
wasn’t hurt, the boy specified.
And the teacher who couldn’t, he said, stand
the smell of cut flowers because, he explained,
flowers meant funerals, they meant dead…
So the girl who fell from a creator’s sweaty palm
and onto the canvas tried to recall what flowers
smelled like. Many flowers, as if in the back
of the florist shop, as if in a sacristy before Mass.
She recalled a damp, slightly smothering, inebriating,
moist cloud, quite dizzying, hypnotic. She recalled
but that, she realized, wasn’t the scent of flowers.
The teacher was wrong. What the teacher inhaled
and it made him shiver, made him cringe was,
of course, the smell of the cut.
Instructions to a Portrait Painter
Paint me as a riddle
solved with
cautionary patience.
Paint me small.
My hair flecked with petals.
Be generous.
Show me grateful for the dance.
Maybe after I’ve been loved?
Paint me true to a higher self
Not blue from thought patterns
Resuscitated again.
Paint me without that
which hardens
others against me.
Use your palette knife
Create a patch of victory.
Paint me in the spray
On a July afternoon.
Use your brushes to reveal
mother, daughter, sister, aunt.
A Pisces, flat-footed
With asymmetrical breasts.
Paint me
like music reverberating
against these
blooming walls.
Solitaire
It's a three-of-clubs kind of day.
Dark morning, late,
orange streetlights still on
impersonating the moon. So
I'm killing time until lunch—
salmon and cucumbers—
but then the phone, a telemarketer
calling with information, she says,
about the back brace I requested.
And at first I thought hers
was an actual human voice,
because she paused like I would have—
you would have—then said "OK"
like she meant it, like she knew
the taste of dill in a sour cream sauce,
knew the speed of the arrow
zeroing in on every human head.
But then the beautiful stone of her voice
rolled so relentlessly on,
I knew. And it's no secret
the sun was late that day,
and I never requested anything
about a back brace, and the guy
across the street was mowing his lawn
for the third straight obsessive day,
and everyone knows I'm a sucker
for women on the telephone,
and solitaire is just a way of saying
you don't have anything that day,
not a winning hand, or a life
beyond the desk, and you're hungry
for just about any voice—
but I hung up. Even though she
told me "please don't hang up, I…"
with so much almost-human feeling
I felt sorry for the real woman
who'd recorded the message;
how much rejection she'd anticipated
to sound like that, how when
she looks up at the moon must believe
it's impersonating the sun,
and when she has lunch
it's usually fish and alone.
from visiting the Sistine chapel,
my cat had died, poor guy,
of my being gone—
he had so little to live for.
And the silver maple
that shaded my garden
for 20 dark years was gone
except for the stump.
Suddenly my yard
was flooded with the light
I’d always wanted.
My wife had told the cat
to live until we got back,
but he declined; the deaf guy
with the chainsaw said
it would be at least six months
before he could get to us,
but presto, while we were gone
there he was.
We should have put him down—
the cat, I mean—before we left,
his atrophied legs,
his body a black balloon
poised on four small strings.
And the tree with rot veining
all three of its skewed trunks
should have been pulled down
years ago.
And Michelangelo, at the end
of his life, tired of scaffolds,
painted God in His twilight
in a single day: pink robes,
hands in the air, struggling
to separate light from darkness.
Poor God. I thought
he looked in trouble, His beard
a hive of cosmic curlicues,
caught in His own opposites—
sun and moon, water and sky,
drunk and sober, back and front,
Adam and Eve, cat and tree.
On damp days I can still smell
cat like mold in the corner;
on sunny days the garden
is perfectly framed in raw light.
And today the cardinal is red
against the grey-green pine—
as if God had invented the color wheel
which he did. Years later
the sons of Adam would invent
the fresco, irony, ambiguity,
the look on God’s face wondering
at his own diminishing.
I woke singing
that song of betrayal,
Leslie Gore, 1963--
you know the one.
And all day it drowned out
the Brahms I’d been
trying to remember.
“And I’ll cry if I want to,
cry if I want to, cry
if I want to.” Nothing
could stand in the way
of that cri de coeur,
not the hawk
screeching in the maple,
not the shards of the fence
blown down.
“You would cry too,”
Gore and I sang all morning—
my wife on the road,
her daily drive to the radiologist—
“You would cry too
if it happened to you.” So
it’s evening again, the world’s
big shadow, and I’ve
cued up the Brahms.
Not the “Tragic Overture,”—
enough of that—
but an early piano trio
without weeping,
just allegro, scherzo,
adagio, allegro
the melody handed around
piano to cello to violin—
doubling, separating,
rising and falling,
then recapitulation, like
marriage, like water
falling over water
falling over water.
Treva’s home,
her breast rough
and burned. Then
dinner, talk of the clinic,
the others she’s beginning
to know, to nod to, wonder about
when they don’t show up.
Then sleep, rising and falling,
capitulation and recapitulation,
then maybe crying
if you want to.
Gravity Is the Weakest Force
Do you notice facts are floating away
like helium balloons at a birthday?
Only you don’t really care.
But you used to, didn’t you? Inconsolable
tears as the mylar shapes sailed off. Mothers
shushing and wiping wet faces.
The capital of Nigeria, the names of the nine
justices, the amount of sugar in a cinnamon flan.
Does it matter?
But it did once, didn’t it? When your house was filled
with crinkled aunts and clamorous kids,
impatient for a cake to cool.
Are you leaving in bits and pieces, wearing
blurry drugstore glasses to avoid reading
of another shot, another coffin.
Do you forget to charge your hearing aids,
a relief not to hear the timpani of traffic
or so sorry your test was positive.
My grandchildren are stashing stories
like winter nuts. Grammy, tell the story
of stealing your sister’s car.
Tell the story of getting caught
cheating on a spelling test. Tell the story
of getting lost in Death Valley.
Later they will recite them and the little
that is left will smile at the tales
I am hearing for the first time.
Pick-up Lines of the Surrealists
Turn to page 155 of your hymnal
And burn it.
Is this your fish?
Congratulations for the pewter flower
In your head, for conducting such personal
Lightning, for surviving drowning,
The inadequacy of your umbrella
And your untrikaidekaphobic breasts
That show themselves off so even without
Your arms tied behind your back.
I’m standing on oceans when I look at you
Which is why I learned to fold an origami rose
While rolling on my back like a gob-smacked beetle,
Inflate the red bladder of my neck,
Add my howls to the moon’s
And come to the edge of the mist and stop
Like any sensible pyrotechnician would.
So I try to keep someone else’s dog
From being afraid of me by kneeling.
So I smile like a manikin of bees,
A muffin with so many berries
It jeopardizes its integrity, its very self-definition,
A cloud that’s nothing but literary allusion
Nonetheless we all wander lonely in
I’m not getting through, am I?
Allow me to pluck out the Quetzalcoatl of my heart
And drop it at your feet.
Go ahead, step on it.
It squeaks.
It turns out to be rubber.
Currently in oblivion, it’s 43 and partly
with a slight chance of tomorrow.
It’s not a question of solid or gas
or any sublimation between,
not if you believe god is a rock or mouse,
Santa Claus or the mass’s opiates,
you can overdub as much as you want,
it’s still just you singing by yourself.
Sometimes people call it quits when a song
conflicts with their own as if love
could survive without a good fugue.
The lord throws down ladders for us,
and it’s a trick, we just fall through,
delivery trucks arriving upside down,
the robots unloading them hardly
holding on, a green puddle in the street
refusing to evaporate such is the constant
struggle, a bird screaming like all get-out
in a thorn bush, sunflower grown from a skull,
half a lifetime spent trying to coax butterflies
from grinding stones, pretty pretty bits,
a tree pretending it’s not on fire
and as far as I can see, our only hope
is the people in this room.
First Information
I
I take the police inspector around the house
and show him how the crimson Virginia creepers
and what remains of fruit trees in the backyard—
loquat, mulberry, guava
raised in good decades—
have been hacked and torched by miscreants.
The boxwood hedge and the lawn have been turned
to ashes. It’s not the first time.
I have reported awful incidents before—
a break-in, a robbery,
and a threat to kill the family.
In all this he sees increasing crime
staring the trees still here
—the apricot in flower, stand-alone lime,
and assures a full investigation this time.
The butterflies and sparrows that come here daily
for sap or seeds and shade are now hasty visitors.
II
The next day I drive to the police station
to pick up a copy of the First Information Report.
The ditch in the middle of the road yawns;
wants to swallow me.
Now a big toad jumps atop
what looks like a gutter,
about eight inches above the road level;
opens its mouth for a full body tremolo.
I turn the wheel around; park aside
to take a look at what I can hardly face.
Inside, it looks like a clay oven
saved from Gandhara antiquaries.
Maybe it was used to bake your own bread.
But roaches swarm the place,
stealing food and water supplies in doggone odors.
Everything flows down here in other forms.
Praise this model management by roaches
in there, a fulsome colony
of cadre termites and silverfish
in the street, home, and forest, keen
and diligent through the under-cracks.
III
They scurry out of this rotting neighborhood every dark hour
and change into anthros in baggy pantaloons:
upholstered, fanged, ever in office.
Nights, my sleep is riddled with bullet holes;
abrupt rounds fired from Mr. Kalashnikov’s zealous
rifle in bigoted hands. Who will give
a reason? O how to get past encroachments
into the civil terrain? Fresh body parts are sold
as scrap, and lamb’s blood is daily spilled
in the street where you and I are trying to live.
IV
In the meantime, the car engine has overheated
and has to be turned off.
Give it fifteen minutes,
so that everybody can blow their horn at you.
You restart, reverse, and half circle around
to get to the next turning, at a mere 30 miles an hour.
Without a warning sign, you next hit
a speed breaker the size of the Great Wall.
Your head knocks into the car ceiling.
It’s a speed bump,
yes, on your dear head.
The traffic warden shows his face in the muddle,
gives you a ticket—for being careless, sir, about your head.
You leave the car at the roadside
with emergency lights on, hail a taxi
and ask to be taken back to your house,
even as the trees and the flowers are all but gone.
Zorba the Greek
That dream where Nikos Kazantzakis comes to dance with me on a beach in Crete.
The part where Carlos Fuentes arrives and tells me Aura is the one I must love—both the
young woman and the hag.
The sequence when Kawabata smokes a cigarette somehow through my mouth, not his.
Then Remedios Varo comes to settle all the birds that have taken refuge in my brain,
Borges dressed in a skirt as her secretary with heels.
Dark lovely water I float into and through.
Whitmanesque in all my various mouths.
Then the urge to pee, and a deeper sleep calming me.
And I’m in a coffeehouse in Madrid, and Vicente Aleixandre arrives with the spine of
some ancient sea creature from Mallorca.
God knows I love him and his primordial pain.
Lord knows he holds in his bowels the shadows of both Lorca and Hernández.
That part of my dream where Delvaux confides he’s been painting worm castings, not
women.
And Bachelard begs me not to fall asleep again beneath his floorboards.
And all the poets named René approach, folded into one another—Daumal, Crevel, Char,
and some janitor named René from Lucerne who swears he adores poetry but wants to
cleanse my mouth.
And Julio Cortázar hands me his cat to care for while he bakes bread—and somehow I
don’t sneeze, though Cortázar is actually outside in the pampas planting trees.
The wind, the wind, the terrible wind.
Vallejo keeps inscribing me into some book he carries, that is actually the body of a dead
man.
And Arthur Waley rises from his deathbed at Highgate, where the curtains dance when he
speaks—though he looks exactly like Baryshnikov. And translates the body of a dead
man into the folding doors of a corpse.
And I’m puzzled, drinking tea with Tu Fu, who’s also Rodney Dangerfield, but somehow
I’m also in the garden playing cards with Lee Miller and Dora Maar.
And in a teahouse in Kyoto, Kawabata returns as Takahashi Shinkichi who’s somehow a
giraffe back in Crete strangely able to swim, wind from the long purple tongue of his
Dada poems threatening to consume me.
And I’m on the beach again, but Kazantzakis is gone. The wind is gone. And the dark
waters arise to the sound of the santouri, and I sense they are afraid of the dawn and
the clarity of meaning it might bring.
There was a crow trying to fly through
the darkness of my body. Three cows
in the pasture looked up into what they thought
was nothing but dead air.
Indiana oaks and maples bent their way
back through me. A tornado was spotted
forty-five minutes southwest in Kankakee,
we heard through the starts and stops
of radio static. And we lit candles
in the basement before the Icon of St. George.
Now, the sky turns a pale anemic green.
I turn to the poems of René Daumal, grateful
my lungs aren’t housing consumption
like his did for him. I light a candle
and place it on my chest—the white horse
of my chest—lying down to absorb
the wind and all its aching.
Yes, my family taught me what it means
to be Greek. Whenever I stand by a river
or swamp, I watch for the wind in the trees
and imagine the boat ride
across. All the names on the ship’s log
I cannot pronounce. One death beckoning another.
Photo of My Great-Grandmother and Three Children Weeks Before They Board the Boat for the New World, Circa 1918
Yet another day when I ponder the dust, finger the rain.
This time, it’s mud blotches on Nono’s knickers.
Those two dark stains remind me
of what I carry inside.
Great-grandmother Angeline is clutching
Nono’s sleeve. Trying to tame the animal
that has taken over the boy, the animal
that brought the entire village of Bohalis down
to the Zakynthos docks a few weeks later, cheering
that the boy and his wild ways were leaving.
His younger brother, Dan, looks confused.
Head cocked, ears he has not yet grown
into, eyes drifting in and out
of some foggy forecast
he’s trying to hear in the shivering
leaves of the olives
about a New World, better food,
perhaps, and more to eat. Aunt Martha—
just a toddler in frilly dress—is holding
a tiny purse, as if the coming journey across
the Atlantic could be contained
in a little sling bag and one day make her
the kind of woman she adores
in her mother’s cooked dandelion greens
with olive oil, lemon, and oregano. The cross
that hangs on great-grandmother’s neck is large.
Looks heavy as the black peasant blouse
and long skirt that keep her
modest in a rural village where rumors—
not just the evil eye—can kill.
It rests across her breast like the weight
of Byzantium that somehow bolsters
yet breaks the daily bread
of the poor. Where is Stelios,
my great-grandfather, in this photo?
I imagine he’s either at work in the factory
in Chicago Heights, or relaxing afterwards,
sipping retsina and smoking a cigar
in a tiny apartment, having already crossed
the ocean. Alone. He’s waiting
just a few more weeks for the family
he sent for. He knows there is no going back
to little food and to what in America
might be called a shack. A war-ravaged
village, where Nono—my grandfather Giorgos—
used to sneak loaves of bread
past the Turkish troops, tying them up, tucked,
under the bellies of his goats. This is the dawn
of a dark world coming into view
with all the light of the Ionian Sea
tempering the photo, entering
my cells with dark, luminous light.
A sirocco blowing in from North Africa,
dusting the wind-whipped pines
with bits of sand all the way from Algiers.
Yet another day fingering the dark and its drenching
rain. My family is standing there, waiting for me.
Bookkeeping
These words course toward a whirlpool, a frothy zero.
The auditor in me sounds them through a fog
and hears work worthy only of being written off.
Will salt keep me afloat or must I flail my arms?
Pretensions, busy griefs— hard to account why I do it,
adding to the traffic of language and font.
Weekdays I count beans to be in another black,
one that endures a weight of common deficits…
Let’s toss this draft, its promise in default.
No need to stop there: I’ve decommissioned the pen,
consolations I’ve set store on jettisoned, though I sense
it follows me like a wake on moonlit water.
The Phoenicians gave us a sparse alphabet, strokes
to book and reckon their hauls when holds had emptied.
Our pantry brims, my jottings double-entered in another’s books,
passable comforts credited to a numbers game.
Who balances new belief with a creed’s abandonments?
My discarded precepts poke through old ground,
asters sticking their necks out on a stubbled shore.
So I yield, picking up the pen as I might a sorcerer’s wand,
an arthritic Yes washing over hours of No,
an old Viking sailor limping from the banquet hall,
a faux druid without spells: I wave pen over paper
and find it’s left words not righting my list.
I try a fresh sheet, a palpable blankness
to rasp away barnacles before a muddy tide returns.
Like a clerk from ancient Tyre I scribble customary symbols,
lines I let float with all that freights them.
Perhaps an inkling will approach as some grayling truth,
and if I hook then release it to its own heading,
it might phosphoresce before going dark,
before waters take it and all that was in my hold.
French Bath
I scrub my face with the good soap.
then down my neck with a soapy washcloth,
beneath each arm, under my breasts,
and then in the dark V between my legs.
A French bath, my mother called it,
but she had prostitutes in mind, not
her blue-eyed girl. A lick and a promise,
she would say but left the promise
to the imagination.
Renoir must have seen the promise
in his lush bathers, all sumptuous flesh,
round and rosy as a baby’s bottom,
sitting by the stream or next to a tree
en plein air.
Model and muse, no wonder they wore
a look of quiet confidence, paid to become
canvases suffused with light, no jot of pigment
washed away in their French bath.
An Instrument of Peace
Years ago, in Galway, where a garden of foxglove
and rhododendron gave way to wilder things,
I leaned against a low stone wall to play
the tin whistle – Gentle Maiden, Salley Gardens . . . .
The afternoon was still enough, black bees
buzzing, salmon splashing the stream,
keeping time, and the air sweet with
summer grass and clover.
And so it was that a ring of heifers gathered silently
at my back, against my neck the gruff breath
of cows, coming, I don’t know, out of respect
for the music, the mere curiosity of a girl
lost in the lure that is Ireland. And when I stopped,
just as quietly, they moved on, swaying, nodding.
Only then did I dare turn about.
Recollection, I can tell you, is an unselective gift.
Within my kitchen is the dark chapel
of the silverware. Nestled,
the spoons whimper with self-pity,
hungry orphans who have forgotten
the delicacies of hope. The forks
gossip among themselves, piercing
to the bone. The butter knives pray –
humble servants at the meal –
while their corrugated brethren,
the steak knives, weave in and out
of the pews, sizing up the crowd –
this religion stuff’s a bite.
Such is the civil clangor of belief.
The Lottery of ’69
ONE
Most of us eighteen students sat
on the worn carpet, or stood crowded
in the doorway of the dilapidated
19th century house with a victorian
facade, just west of University Avenue.
Six bedrooms upstairs, three students
crammed into a room in a place
called Longhorn co-op. Dining room
long ago converted to our television
room, where we gathered that night,
staring at an old Emerson B/W TV
screen, 8:30 CST, the first evening
in December of that year. Crowded, but
hushed room, as if waiting for a storm.
We watched the congressman from
New York, Alexander Pirnei, draw
the first ball with a birthdate stamped
on the side, ping-pong balls, scrambled
and placed inside a glass container.
TWO
First number drawn: September 14.
No one in the room responded until
four more balls were drawn, then
Jerry from San Marcos, to my left, groaned
like he had been gutted with a fish knife,
but then growled. “What the hell, time
to forget about college. I’ll volunteer
for the navy like my old man in WW2.”
A few moments later, Jorge at number
25, from Laredo, leaped up demanding:
“How high are these damn draft board’s
gonna draft?” And Ricky from Killeen
ventured to say: “That depends on
the draft board in your hometown,
but in my mine, they’re drafting up
to 100, so I’ve heard. Ken Rose
from Amarillo at number 37, standing
by the door, uttered a curse. “Aw well,
I was getting tired of studying finance
anyway.” “Hey, look at the bright side,”
Jose from San Antonio said, “Nobody
gets those 2S college deferments anymore.”
THREE
Though we had classes to prepare,
few of us studied that night, some
lingered on in the tv room until
all 365 were read. Out on the porch,
we heard Larry Hunter cursing
his luck, yelling out, “Ya’ll watch me,
I always wanted to go to Canada!
Just see if I don’t!” And someone
upstairs called back, “And do what?”
Photograph polar bears?” “Hey,
why not? Can’t be as dumb and
dangerous as the shit storm over
in Vietnam!” I stood up. My palms
were wet, my mouth dry, I wiped
sweat from my eyebrows. I’d stayed
too long there in that crowded room.
I looked away when Kevin, one
of my roomies, nudged my arm.
“Say, Rollie, call your birthday yet?
“Tell you later,” said I, reflecting that
I would soon be making the biggest
decision of my life. I was no longer
listening to the numbers called.
I was thinking: we all seemed caught
up in some bizarre rite-of-passage,
like we were a bunch of youths down
In the Amazon, sitting inside a lodge
house and drawing out stones
from a basket, so that the chief could
tell us who was going to be selected
to go to the ongoing war. Most of us,
just sophomores or juniors, we were
for the first time seeing beyond
the 40 acres of the old, plowing field
of the university school yard.
FOUR
Some went to the campus library,
not just to study but to check
the world map to see again
where Vietnam was located.
Some could hardly believe where
our country’s military had spread
like fungus across the globe.
Now, I felt we were living in a time
when history was rushing us
in a bullying way, when what
we mostly thought about was
finishing term papers and
studying for finals or dating that
brunette girl from Hamilton. So
others that night did not go to
the library. I found myself hurrying
down Nueces Street, then blindly
walking through an alley way, then
passing along sorority row on
the campus’ south perimeter and
under grandfather oaks. A guy
was parked with a girl and listening
to Janis Joplin’s “Bobbi McGee”
from his car radio. I wandered on
along a dry creek bed under more
sycamore trees. To calm down, I
inhaled the raw, herbal scent
of leaves that still shaded streets
from streetlights in early December,
the dry sycamore leaves still clinging
to branches despite November’s
cold snaps that had brought frost.
FIVE
I passed along Waggoner hall, and
remembered my philosophy class.
There, Henri Bergson writing:
the future was impossible to know,
due to the strands of inter-weaving
and cross-stitching of events,
beyond people’s control. But I had
a gnawing paranoia that our
future was actually being planned
by and played with by cynical
bureaucrats up in Washington D.C.
As I hurried on, I crunched more
dry sycamore leaves beneath
my feet. Now I thought of my T/TH
class in Greek drama, and saw
the scene of us 18 in that TV room
as a latter-day extension of those
Athenian youths, 50 generations
before, sitting around a campfire,
and an elder, looking much like
Socrates, informing us that now
we must start training to defend
against the invading Persians, who
were crossing the Bosphorus. But
as I stepped under the mist of
Littlefield Fountain on West 21st street,
built to honor those students who
died in the nation’s wars, I realized
I had the picture backward. More
apropos to say we students were
Persian youths, being forced to go
to subjugate lands across the seas.
As I stepped up some outdoor stairs
and walked on along the green below
the tall Texas Tower, I thought of
the historical accident that many of us
faced in 1969. Students going out
to serve in a new kind of American war,
one well funded and organized to fight,
but, strangely, not calculated to win.
SIX
We knew some students would go
on to take prestigious jobs in Houston,
Dallas or San Antonio, careers
that one day would give them
a brief paragraph in the “Alcalde”
alumni magazine to show how planned
and admirable social success in
Texan life seemed, when and if
belonging to a degreed-middle-class
society, where work for the corporation
or institution was the “raison d’être”
for living. But another student’s life,
casually extinguished by the force
of a bomb or by an enemy’s bullet or
maimed by war’s memory before he
could even vote. Those of us who
read the campus obits knew that
within three years, five students in that
room would be dead from a random
hand of fate selected from a glass
jar that December evening in 1969.
After that year, I lost touch with all
in that room but for Jack Kitchener
from El Paso, who wrote me before
he was lost in Vietnam: “Whether we
were drafted, volunteered, fled to
Canada, or got a high number so’s
to finish our degree, the lottery of ’69
drew a dividing line in the hourglass
sand between all that came before and
all that would come after—in the story
of our lives—passed too soon.”
Organic Living
The lawn-sized tractor
hauls a rotting rotcart
to the compost pile
brambled high out back,
where tireless Life
sucks hard on the living,
on the very air, on the grass,
which snakes limp and tangled,
where angleworms slink
like vandals, into, through,
around the blackened peels
of bananas, of grapefruit
once yellow-bright as desire,
now mold-ridden, cadavered,
the slavered bacteria
bent on putrefaction,
where ruthless Life, bent on life,
endless life, afterlife,
emboldened by decay,
turns up the heat,
bakes each dandled thing,
bakes it bare, that little thing,
till done, devours one,
then one, another one, takes care
that none, not one, gets away.
From out of the perfect dark,
incoming just past midnight,
whistling mortars weave-walk
through camp, dropping luck
and boom onto this hooch
or that. In the morning mess
we’re sullen, shuffling for food
spooned out of mermite cans.
Most silent, some mumblers
hardly heard, hardly there.
One harbors jarred-ear souvenirs.
Another, spent cartridges.
We live the real unreal
every day, X each out at night.
Once down to double digits,
we think our luck may hold
after all—if paddy stench
and heat, dense and mean,
don’t roast us first. We nurse
word wounds that piss us off
and hard-hammered wounds
from shrapnel and dings on the job.
And all is shades of dirt
in this foreign scrub of land,
and our faces grey, our shoulders
stooped in olive fray. We clutch tin
pots hot with rations. One guy mutters
in a semi-southern slur,
Ain’t no shit like this back in the world.
The Story
1.
This is the story you were told
when you were too young to understand the story
but could tell from the telling that you were meant to remember,
and carry it forward
as if that were a kind of understanding,
and some day you would pass it on by telling it again
as I am telling it to you.
The story is simple:
He was knifed, you're told, in a camp in some place
called North Africa—breaking up a fight
between another soldier and someone
who, in each of the tellings, is an Arab,
and this is why there's a Gold Star decal
in your great grandmother’s window
and why she sometimes leans her head to the white handkerchief
as she rocks in the tiny rocker remembering
what seems, as you hear the telling, very long ago.
Though it wasn't.
And that is why they take you to stand next to a white stone
and tell you that the man you will never know, was a hero,
even a kind of Christ, though they don't quite say that,
because he sacrificed himself to save another,
and so we must remember him. And as you listen,
you understand that this is now a kind of duty,
even though you are too young to wonder why
or ask to know more.
So you take the story
and remember it as something owed to someone.
Perhaps to your great grandmother
who holds you tighter than the others do
as if you somehow mattered.
Or perhaps to him who is in that other time,
the one that is long ago, but isn't.
2
In this chain of forgetting that we call remembering,
there is an end point. Or would be if we could follow it back,
hand over hand, to a center and say here
is the center: two men fighting and a knife blade
glinting in the desert sun. Or a young man, say from Ohio,
sunburned and far from home, quarreling with a local boy
over something said, or a look, or a pilfered loaf of bread.
Or it's evening and the dice settling in the lantern light:
So many stories that might have been the story
that was his death, and too whatever story
the officer offered as he handed the woman
the folded flag and embossed envelope—the formality
of the phrasing like a priest reciting this is my body,
and later the story they each, in their faith,
told one another, and the one you are told
as if you must tell it again, believing there is
a chain we call remembering,
and an end point, which is to say
a beginning that we might know.
3.
Had you been older you might have asked why
was there a fight? Even why a war? And,
older still, as you are now, even wondered if it mattered.
In the story you were told these things don't matter.
What matters is the story, not its truth—
More the believing one could know, and believing
the knowing matters, and the remembering,
too, as if remembering is owed to someone, to something,
and so you are told the story as I am telling it to you.
And each telling is a fading like the ripples on a pond's surface
on a day when all is still except for the ripples
as they calm outward from a point where a small stone
you didn't throw and didn't see complete its arc
has cut into the water—a momentary disturbance,
and from that you know there was a center.
Hide and Seek
In the parsonage we lived
to hide beneath the spiral
staircase even though
it always smelled of the time
the cat peed. Our games
took the whole house.
We’d make sleds of cardboard
and thump down the stairs
in winter. I loved
The dark red carpeting
in the bathroom. How odd
it wasn’t tiled. Where
My brother stood over
the sink, my mother placing
a blown-out matchhead
against the tick in his brown
arm, trying to make it
back out. I remember Legos
in that sink filled with water
on a day I felt shame
for telling a secret. In spring
I’d twirl in my celery green
nightgown. Make it flare
as I circled. Cut my own hair
tied with yarn. We lived to seek
each other. My sister’s
Wizard of Oz books were beyond me.
My room had babies and cribs.
I pasted my handprint turkey
to the side of my dresser. The kitchen
where dinner simmered. That day
I climbed the stairs to see
my mother after her hysterectomy.
In her bed that I stayed in
when I was sick. That twinge of fear
and compassion in the back of my thighs.
And the diningroom. A ketchup stain
on the ceiling from my brother
pounding a packet with his fist.
My brothers’ adoptions always
in the background, but their dark skin
was always in their foreground. Hoang
had changed his name to Stephen
here. Had learned English here. Beyond
what he’d learned as an orphan in the war.
Ron overcame his stammer. Heard
people on the sidewalk call him names.
School Street in Middleboro, Massachusetts.
Our cat came home and died on the porch.
I took her collar to school
in my show of grief. Each time we’d leave
we played in the car, stuck our heads
out the tailgate of the station wagon
to feel our hair take off into the air.
There was so much room
for each of us to fit.
After Reading Neruda's "Walking Around"
The moon was never promised
to be yellow. The sheep never green.
I was told and so I left that wrong
answer behind. Corrected.
I am tired of being so domestic. In service.
Like the kitchen countertops, knife-nicked
and loosened from the frame. Lift me
and see everything kept in my drawers.
The plastic and the glinting cutlery. There
is stickiness left by everyone else. It’s in
the treads of my shoes. Underneath
my fingernails. What I want to do is walk
and dance. Why can’t people feel my
rhythm? People will think I’m a lunatic.
Gesturing at the air. Galloping. My hair
decorated with a tattered napkin. My garbage
will be treasures left in small mousy places.
On my walks I see the brick walls
and birds who don’t like me at all. The river water
that falls faster now that it’s rained a torrent.
I go into the jewelry shop and pick up
my resized wedding ring. The gold looks
newer after. I could bite it like a chocolate bar
with the wrapper on. I remember
wearing it for the first time. How it looked
against the tan beach sand and the blue
of sky. How the water glittered. The five
sapphires spun out in my eyes. I am tired
of the coffee stain that has promised me
it would be cleaned. The alarm promised
me it would wake. I am tired of everything
but the things I have yet to do. Things
I’ll wait to do until I come home
and no one is there. No car in the driveway.
No dish to wash but my own favorite
coffee mug. One plate. One fork and spoon.
What I want to do versus what I actually do.
My rage is not near as strong as others’.
Why I always find the river so mighty
the rocks disappear. The spice of ground
peppercorns puts me in a room with oil paint.
The scent of a bookstore puts me in mind
of telling a friend what happened to make me so sad.
scout pocket
mom sewed the patches on my uniform
with a pack of marlboro lights in the pocket
and i never got that.
cross legged on her bed, 6pm news, a call from
her sister across town. she finished them, these patches and
shirt on my dresser by the end of the evening when i came upstairs.
she sang in a band and we, poor, lived in a wicked rich town
in north jersey and i was embarrassed as hell
by her picking me up in slippers at school when she could make it.
and the unfair cigarette reek on MY clothes from riding in her old malibu classic
and the turtlenecks she wore, pilled with buttons up the side.
(other moms in navy tights and denim skirts and sweaters with christmas stuff.)
i thought then and i think now when i spend time on what the hell is wrong with me that i was a
mean kid for this running mom shame.
and she told me she enjoyed these cigarettes, that she liked the taste
and this made me wild, disbelieving.
mom sewed the patches of the latest rank i had tried and succeeded
to attain in scouts. but we really just fucked around and took no doze,
chris and i, in the basement of the community church, monday evenings
and sometime soon
we were both asked to leave the troop from stealing beer and keeping it
in the quartermaster's closet where it was easily, instantly found.
there were also patches for small, specific mini achievements, delineations of rank and things called
arrow of light and places to have been like the real camp where the movie camp was where jason
killed everybody in the camp.
i found this sad little boy man uniform later after mom died by cigarette.
in a hot and crowded closet, in another state far down south where my stepdad
took her when he was done punching people in new jersey.
and i knew how and why she kept the marlboro lights there.
instantly, easily: that she had them there to keep the needle
from going through the back
and close the pocket for good.
My Father’s Teacher
Vincent Godeski
sent a Christmas card every year
that hung in our display, like an envoy
from a mythical, mysterious past
before I was born.
My father said he’d worked with him
at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston,
side by side in the kitchen,
an older man and a just-out-of
high school kid.
Vincent taught my father how to
scrape potatoes and how to
take the shells off hard-boiled eggs
and, without words, he taught my father
he needed more education
or he might still be in a kitchen at fifty,
like Vincent Godeski,
still peeling vegetables, washing pots.
My father added classes at Northeastern
to the scraping, peeling and rinsing.
In a few years, he left Beth Israel, a lawyer.
My mother put Vincent Godeski
on our holiday list, sent him a card every year.
I don’t remember when his cards stopped.
My mother copied my father’s way of
peeling eggs, the one he’d learned from
Vincent and she passed that on to me.
Today, cracking a hard-boiled egg, I thought of
Vincent Godeski, a man I’d never met, how
some of what he’d taught was alive in my hands.
Hindemith Flute Sonata
It didn’t matter that it was I
listening to it at seven
on an early LP,
ruining myself forever for popular music.
It didn’t matter, and seemed that I
was no longer merely I –
there was a kind of impersonal invitation;
I was being let in on something.
A solemn call, dancing in
the square, flirtation in corners
leading to woods
by a river – barely as yet conceived
in this world, were occurring in
another. Different. Not just foreign,
other. Like the jokes.
I remember trying to see the buildings:
they had spires, carvings of gods
who were never serious or had been honorably
defeated. The people had the eyes of cats,
and none would willingly do
harm. The very ability
was buried, latent, a vestigial organ.
CV
I held a seed between my teeth,
sucked the salt, then cracked it.
Tito was the only name; my parents
whispered who they were. Along
the southern border, sun flowers
promised so abundantly our sun
grew pale. In Dubrovnik, a man
could not remain himself -- its
stones too old and pitted. When
war befell our streets, we wept --
atoning within our subterrane.
In Notre Dame I was barely six.
My sins raised and graven high,
above the Christ, above the bells
that prayed. My father, hobbled
by the war, loved the hunchback.
He told a modern tale – a cellist
in tuxedo played to a huddled
square, while shrapnel insisted
into flesh. Why he played, my
father said, you must remember.
By the time I mastered French,
I lived in Tribeca with an uncle,
thought lost, as beyond a map.
I studied anthropology, my thesis
dealt with sacrifice; who bore our
sins, un-spotted us, as sunlight
grown to market. Sacrifice did
not pay, I took up stocks. In exile
over Vesey Street, my head phones
on when steel began to groan.
In rubble, I listened with a clerk;
we were two chambers of a heart.
He’d brought me envelopes marked
urgent, dispatched from higher up.
We clung together in a coarsened
womb, listened to Cello Sonata
Number 1, in E Minor. Hummed.
I promised Carnegie Hall. He
no longer, nor am I, a dream
above the gargoyles, searched for
by dogs. The seed was Brahms.
Ways in which I Wasted my Youth
Into the mail chute outside a hospital wait room,
I slid metal plackets to be read from the X-ray lab,
the pay pretty great, though I’d be leaving soon
for college, beside me was a trained tech, a real loutish lad
and a receptionist with plucked brows and a red mouth
he and everyone flirted with, though she had a steady
and confided how at her second job at a drive thru photo booth,
she let him rob her two times while cute security
guards took her statement, always asking for her home phone,
and when she was hungover, she’d have me put the sensors to rest
on the old guys wheeled in for an EKG, scared and prone,
and me an unschooled seventeen, dabbed those cold breasts
and swore that if I lived to sixty (which was in doubt) I’d rather die
than live my whole life on a fat paycheck, in a lab, with a lie.
Big Girls’ Bunk
The summer I was ten, for reasons I don’t recall, they stuck me in the big girls’ bunk, where every
duffle bag, except mine, contained tampons, both regular and super.
And bras.
When those fourteen-year-olds would rush to the waterfront, their boobs would jiggle gelatin-like
and spill from the tops of their swimsuits.
But my little niblet breasts remained in place, immutable as freckles.
During the long, lazy late afternoons, right before dinner, the older girls would race me to the
bathhouse where, naked and bristly, they’d take over the shower stalls, compare shampoos, shave
their legs.
I’d wait my turn on the hard wooden bench, pulling a towel around my hairless body like a worm
in a cocoon.
Later, back in the tent, they’d giggle together, plotting forays across the lake, a rendez-vous at the
boys’ camp.
I’d sit quietly on the edge of my cot, wrapping crochet thread around four nails on a wooden spool,
watching the loopy chain grow longer and longer, keeping myself busy until I grew up.
Resurrection Song
I was born in the rain and the dark – a vague but sinister omen. Almost immediately, familiar
words were given unfamiliar meanings; familiar objects, unfamiliar names. I grew up surrounded
on three sides by ghosts imprisoned behind barbed wire. Today’s rain falls on yesterday. A 100-
year-old former concentration camp guard has been arrested in Bavaria on 3,518 counts of being
an accessory to murder. Up, you corpses! Get up! Wounds heal from the inside out. It’s only a
matter of weeks perhaps before there are wild roses the size of bonfires.
I told the doctors flat out, “Cure me or kill me,” only to be strapped down like a ladder on the roof
of a beat-up work van, though not before I managed to channel the zealotry of martyrs and
declare every day should be a mental health day, something that was feeling suddenly necessary
now that a first cousin about my age had died from an overdose, Alzheimer’s, an unsuspected
heart condition, invisibility, if the invisible is defined as “what light cannot illuminate” or less
strictly as just so much sadness.