the back room of La Pergola I take a
break from eating kasha and varnishkes
to primp and glow, damn the bushes, damn
the bald daisies, stinking blue vase, stinking Dixie cup.
E.P. 1
Nothing matters but the quality of the affection,
neither the bicyclist riding by in her black baseball cap
nor the three trees I planted in my backyard,
I should say four counting the small apple
nailed to my neighbor’s fence, nor can I
discount the memory he had of Ferdie and Fordie,
prick and snob though he was. But I never trusted his
paradise, it was too literary, nor his
final confession, nor what he said to Ginsberg—
imagine, imagine—nor, ah, the endless self-pity
taking the place of character, so un-Kung
after all, although there were two paradises,
weren’t there, lying master that he was, and
one was a shut garden of pear trees, dancing Nancy.
Albatross 1
Please listen, there’s a thing back there I killed
that’s spiritual and has two wings like anything
we love forever—take the pigeon, take the
bluebird—I would rather walk with a cane
than hurt a bluebird; I would kill anyone who stuffed
a full-grown frog into a mason jar
and threw him from a third-floor window, the glass
cutting his body, penetrating his mouth
and eyes. You have to get down there and kill
the frog yourself before you run upstairs
and beat him, holding him half out the window, let his
name be erased for the thing back there.
Never Went to Birdland
Never went to Birdland, so what, went to the Y,
danced all night for a quarter, girls sat down
on bridge chairs, can’t remember if they were smoking,
men wore jackets and ties, I know the name of
one, I’ll call her Doris—that was her name—
her grandfather was a rabbi from Bialystok
and over ninety—she was twenty, I was
twenty-one, I guess, he had to be born
before the Crimean War; and who were the gangs
that built the wide-gauge railroad tracks that reached
the Urals in 1860? He was only
five feet tall, his hands you can’t imagine
nor what the sofa was like and what our struggle was.
The Snow on the River
Snow on the river is my guess though any
change in temperature would do and sometimes
filth alone and as for the cracking, that comes
now in March and sometimes even earlier,
one cloud bumping into another as
we used to say, two sticks curling, then exploding,
some seamy actor from the fifties mixing
one smoke with another, his gum popping.
Sylvia
Across a space peopled with stars I am
laughing while my sides ache for existence
it turns out is profound though the profound
because of time it turns out is an illusion
and all of this is infinitely improbable
given the space, for which I gratefully lie
in three feet of snow making a shallow grave
I would have called an angel otherwise and
think of my own rapturous escape from
living only as dust and dirt, little sister.
Hemingway’s House
I don’t want to go to Hemingway’s house,
let him come to mine, walk in and we’ll do
The Killers at my kitchen table, he with his
back to the Japanese maple, me with my back
to the Maytag, ginger ale for one, white rum
the other; the dragon and the mayfly,
death and the knowledge of death,
Monk and Bartók all the same to me.
May 30
I had to sit on the steel railroad tracks
to eat my sandwich and you understand I wrapped it
in wax paper since that is as far as I went
in preservation and I remember my serial number
and I was an H in case somebody murdered me
for that was the day we fanned out in all directions
with poppies in one hand and quarters in the other,
the photograph that of a corporal with his balls blown off.
May Frick Be Damned
In Pittsburgh we used to say, “Tomorrow we strike,
go home, make babies,” but always with a Polish
accent and the bars were crowded at ten
in the morning. I for one was stopped once
walking on an empty street downtown
with no reason for being there—I had
three dollars in my pocket so I wasn’t
guilty of loitering—may Frick be damned
in Hell forever and ever; may money be stuffed
in all his pockets, may an immigrant
set fire to the money; let Wimpy reign,
“Let’s you and him kiss,” let love take place
in old cars, let them line up at the curb
in Lovers’ Lane and let the voyeurs go
from car to car with flashlights, I whisper this.
The Trent Lott, the McNamara Blues
I would be happy if one of them would offer his
finger or a piece of his cock and not the usual
sensitive skin by way of remorse and he could
lick the ground while he does it, either one could
go first, it doesn’t matter, one could sing his
“We Shall Overcome,” the other could do his
“Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor” but he has to
include the introduction which on hearing
in Woolworth’s over and over sitting down
at the Whites Only section in 1941
I memorized but all involuntarily,
or they could lop their arms off as the saints
of Christ did when they lost Jerusalem on
the boats going back to France and tossed them overboard;
and there is a basket just for remorseful limbs
in front of the Library hard by the bored lions
only half a block from W. W. Norton my
publisher I could walk to and sing
for this is what singers are for, little darling.
The Tie
for MARK HILLRINGHOUSE
The other time I wore a tie my friend Mark
had called me that Berrigan had died
and there was a funeral at St. Mark’s
and Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery were speaking
on his behalf to those who guard the mountain
and though it was a hundred degrees I stopped in
a Goodwill to buy the tie and a jacket as well
which made me look like a priest or a head
waiter at a French restaurant in the upper Fifties,
the tie alone gave such a look of dignity
and even stiffened my neck when it came to lowlife
poets and painters, dozens of whom were there
filling up the pews; and there was a painting by
Alice Neel of Berrigan in an armchair
facing the pews and afterwards we walked, even
sort of marched down Second Avenue to the apartment,
someone in front holding the painting up,
only Berrigan was naked and the fat rolled
over the edge of the armchair and Alice—Alice
Notley—was sitting in the back bedroom
to escape the praises and afterwards Mark and I
walked back to my car and on the way I threw
the tie and jacket into a large wire basket,
my short-sleeved shirt was soaked and we told stories
about his life in the Polish and Ukrainian marshes.
Boléro
So one day when the azalea bush was firing
away and the Japanese maple was roaring I
came into the kitchen full of daylight and
turned on my son’s Sony sliding over the
lacquered floor in my stocking feet for it was
time to rattle the canisters and see what
sugar and barley have come to and how Boléro
sounds after all these years and if I’m loyal
still and when did I have a waist that thin?
And if my style was too nostalgic and where
were you when I was burning alive, nightingale?
Stern Country
For sleeplessness, your head facedown, your shoulder blades
floating and aspirin as a last resort, when
death is threatening, though lately I have experimented
with numbers and as for dreams I’ve never been boring
and only once did I bite the arm of a woman
sitting next to me and I should be careful,
she might have a handwritten poem or a memoir
and didn’t I bite her arm and aren’t we both
poets, though I warn her that I make gurgling
noises and twitch in both legs and make the bed
jump and I am exhausted from looking at poems
and I don’t care about her nuts and bolts
and she has to go to the wilderness herself
and fuck the exercises, let her get smashed
by a Mack truck, then she’ll be ready to mourn.
Gimbel’s
For only three dollars I was able to see
D. H. Lawrence’s dirty pictures which
Scotland Yard in its artistic wisdom
let him take to New Mexico provided
he kept them there, something like that, and he was
ordered not to come back to England with a
hard-on or he would face constabulatory wrath
and he was ordered not to piss on concrete
or even the grass that grows between the cracks
but find a splintered telephone pole or a wall
and share his business there with dogs since he
himself was more an animal than a man,
he says so himself, and love belongs in the coal cellar,
I myself have proof of this; I fantasized
when I was thirty or so that the beds at Gimbel’s
the rows and rows of them, the tufted, the striped
one morning a week, not to interrupt sales,
not to make anyone nervous, or walk with her head down
or hold her hand on her mouth, would be given over
to public fucking, I would have been so happy.
Lilies
Those lilies of the field, one Sunday night
I got caught in Pocono traffic and sat there
for twenty minutes during the which in front
a madman saw me in his mirror and leaped
out of his car and running screamed Dr. Stern
I followed your advice I gave up everything
Thoreau was right simplicity I was your
student the which I stared at him the cars were
starting up again but I no longer
believed and had to leave him stranded, I
love you, I shouted, read something else, I would
have pulled off the side of the road but there was no
shoulder there and so I lost him, whatever his
name was. I made a sharp left turn and that was
that, but what I owe him in his under
shirt, how long his beard was then, his eyes
were blue, his tires were bald, what Christ owes me!
Loyal Carp
I myself a bottom-feeder I knew what
a chanson à la carp was I a lover
of carp music for I heard carp singing
behind the glass on the Delaware River,
keeping the shad themselves company
and always it was a basso, in that range there
was space for a song compleat, it was profundo
enough and just to stop and drink in that
melody and just to hum behind those
whiskers, that was muck enough for my life.
Golden Rule
MY BLUE JAY
All she wants is for you to stay away from her egg
and all she wants is for you to shut up when it comes
to the three things she hates the most: justice,
mercy, humility. She detests Jesus and she can define
what he is, and was, and wants to be while flying
unbearably low by the one word, “squawk”; and
that is why I pulled my straw hat down over
my bald head and that is why my orange cat
almost died with fear and why she won
the argument with her big black shadow while resting only on one leg.
L’Chaim
There goes that toast again, four chipped
glasses full of some kind of ruby held up
to the sun this time, death crumbs falling and rising
like dust-motes, fish eggs, bubbles, here’s to you, bubbles,
here’s to Mardi Gras, here’s to the apple tree
pinned against my fence, here’s to reproach,
here’s to doing it to music, here’s to fog,
and here’s to fog again, and life dividing
inside the fog; oh when it dissipates
let’s make a circle; here’s to the baby hiding
inside his clothes, here’s to his being
alive without me, here’s to the mountain again,
for what the hell, I might as well be on the mountain,
here’s to delectables, free health care, love, popcorn.
Cigars
The same cracked hoarse nasal sexy laugh—
I almost lifted my face out of the newspaper
to remind her of the drowned bee and the shaky
pedestrian bridge, I almost told her her
favorite passage of Mahler, we were that close
going up and down the ladders and interchanging
souls with each other, we were that overlapping,
appearing and disappearing, that prayerful,
lighting each other’s cigars inside the room of laurel-green horse laughter.
Shouldering
We were surrounded by buttercup and phlox
so you know what the month was, one of us had
Sarah Vaughan in her inner ear, one of us
Monk, who put a table there we didn’t
know but we were more or less grateful nor was it
even chained to anything and the eggs we
ate were perfect, I cracked them on my head
as I always do and shattered them with my fist,
the grape tomatoes which only cost a dollar
a pint were almost acid-free, the tire
was growing softer but I was a veteran
of real tires, and bumper jacks, I even go
back to steaming radiators, I could
tell you things, I said to Monk, I walked
two miles once with a half-gallon of gas
leaking out of an orange juice carton, “In My
Solitude” he said, “September Song,” said she.
Bejewels
It were the ink splats from a writing machine
I bought so many centuries ago I
hardly could lift it down from the luggage rack
along with my socks and such, for while the others
converted to Braille I stuck with the splats, I didn’t
even do la touche, the period in between that
lasted thirty years, I stuck with splats
although I were growing old by then and I said
floating on the horse turds first, then walking
deep in the thorns, then balancing on top
of the barbed wire for just to say I love you,
not to mention the heather there on the rocks
an hour north of Galway, and putting it down
on the coffee table with my other bejewels there.
Bio
What it was like to sit with Mr. Fox
on the Blvd. Raspail and negotiate
my post at Morlais, then Toulouse, then come back
in a riveted trunk with Henry Millers sewn
into my lining, Frank Sinatra to greet me
in the mile-square city, Dutch ships everywhere,
my father and mother in from Pittsburgh to give me
my French lesson, my fiancée pulling me down,
the mayor of New York God knows who, the president
asinine again, the dove I loved
in an army boot size eleven and a half and
dove or not, dove feathers or not, blood staining
the white chest, a cascade of snow come pouring
from the spruce’s upper limbs, cascade, waterfall,
sheet, blanket, my mountain, your roof, your dovecote,
eating fish on the Times, 103rd Street,
Zoey in a corset, even then she
was a throwback—I have unlaced a corset,
and at a vanity I have sat on a stained
bench and broken my knees against art dreco
peeling wood, and there among the powders
and creams and rouges I have read Montaigne,
Locke and Hobbes, and since it was there, I read
the rituals of the Eastern Star and studied
my face in the unsilvered mirror, what about you?
Battle of the Bulge
The way a fly who dies in sugar water,
he couldn’t find a way to lift his wings
out of there, they were so heavy, the way
a plant doesn’t need that rich a dirt, the way
it chokes from too much love, the way
Blessed as We Were Page 6