I lay on the ground, I dug a hiphole, I slept
with grass, and dirt, the way Ammon Hennacy
wore a red flannel shirt, and a tie, he was
Dorothy Day’s friend—you knew the saint?—it was
my own costume for years, he was in prison
with Berkman—in Atlanta—Berkman was there
for shooting and stabbing Frick, Hennacy for
conscience; I met Hennacy on Spruce Street
in 1958, the same year I met
Jack Lindeman who lost his hearing in Belgium,
the winter of 1944, he lives in
Fleetwood, PA, and we communicate by
fax—I never heard him ask for pity
nor did we ever talk about that winter, he
introduced me to Dorothy Day and published
his poems in the Catholic Worker—and Marvin Hadburg,
he whom I pity, he was drafted when the
government was desperate and sent to
southern Georgia for four weeks’ training
and then to Bastogne three days before Christmas
where he spent a week in a barn and came home
with both feet frozen a day or two short of two months
some of the flesh cut off, as I remember,
a gold discharge button in his lapel,
selling underwear again in his father’s store,
his head very small, his shoulders hunched, his mouth
always open—I would say he was a
collector of feathers for the Achaean archer
Teucer of the incurved bow, whose shoulder
Hector smashed with a rock, just where the clavicle
leads over to the neck and breast, thus deadening
his wrist and fingers, I would say that Ajax
knocked him down when passing by and Zeus,
deflector of arrows and breaker of spears, the father
of slaughter without end, he pissed on him.
Mars
What you say bout Orson Welles his folly, his
belly full of sheepskin, liquid of ale?
What you say bout the cave on the bluff my father oh
were packing us up one night at the end of the thirties
he knew as a child-child dark-skinned Jewish bastard
he had smoked there tobeys you know and lukewarm
RC Cola, child-child roasted potato,
and I came home from the movie at ten o’clock
and he was packing and she for they was crazy
for caves and oh them Martians and ah them Martians,
and I saw Orson in 1950 in Paris oh,
he was directing a play and he was fat-fat
and ah he bade us welcome and how did we know?
and was it Macbeth? Child-child in 1950
for I love Touch of Evil best and worst-worst
Citizen Kane of California, Hearst-Hearst.
Driven
The only star last night was cloud-riven,
a frog said that to me, but aside from the word
“riven,” which could have been “rivet” or “privet,”
for sometimes he disguises his voice, that puffed-up
goggle-eyed bug-eating monster, a machine of
sorts sitting on a pod and floating south the
way a frog floats south and he half looks
himself, and if you ask him he goes on, for
he is driven, I prefer it, that driven,
try that under your cloud, or in your big mouth,
along with steak and eggs; he says driven,
and stars are driven too, some are cloud-driven,
and some are clear and one is blue and under that
blue star I slept then I woke up
driven—I was a little dizzy, and staggered
here and there but I was driven—ah
cut his legs off and grill them, eat in the weeds
and grow two hearts, two lungs, another eye,
give yourself up for dissection, call it hiven,
better than heaven, spiders, moths, flies, frog-hiven.
Shepherd
Greece, the light of my life, but there was a man who
taught Business and one day an ex-student
from another college came to see him and she was
gorgeous enough you wanted to die, and after
thirty minutes alone they both came out
and how he sucked his pipe I could have murdered him;
but he was critical for she lay on a hillside
above new Samos and woke up to a bell for
there was a shepherd and there was a dog and after
how many minutes he fucked her with the dog
barking, and how disgusting my colleague said,
imagine, a filthy shepherd, and I was stunned
by the word “shepherd,” it meant nothing to him;
and what the sun was like that morning, the marble
she fingered the while oh two or three thousand years
there baking and freezing, but most of all I hated
how I had to accept his version of a formal
rift in order to fight him, how I retreated
behind some broken stones, a fireplace, say,
four hundred years old, and we would have to argue
about sulfa and penicillin, I wanted to
pull the pipe out of his mouth, I wanted to
have a dog like that, a bell either tied
to his white throat or at my own neck playing
Schubert or Mahler, down on my worn-out knees.
Homesick
I was reading again and French apples
were on my mind and oranges the way they sold them
in giant carts and how the skin was thick and
loosened from the flesh and how it made an
orange saucer where you placed the sections
after you pulled the threads away, the ugly word
“pith,” it’s called, and raspberries with cream—
and how it would have been if I had stayed
in the same hotel another eight or ten years and
married someone else—it always comes to
that—and taken up another trade,
for as you know what we call nostalgia
is for the life we didn’t live, so much for
homesickness, and I am homesick too for
southern Spain, where I didn’t live, but mostly for
Mogador (where I didn’t live) with the tiny
white streets and blue shutters, one store the
flutes on one side, the drums on the other, the synagogue
smaller than the African Methodist church
on North Governor Street in Iowa City
before they rounded us up, though we had two days,
for we had spies, to tear the linings open
and sew our jewels in and our thousand franc notes,
although we had to leave our heavy furniture
behind, and Libby’s picture, when we boarded
the plane for Paris, more like the camel that took us
to live with the Berbers in the Atlas Mountains
twenty-five hundred years ago than not like,
all of whose fault it was that Ezra who preached
the ups and downs; and how the Berbers welcomed us,
and how the French put us in crowded rooms
and made us sit for hours, for they believed in
égalité, so everyone should die of
boredom equally and Vive la France and
Hail to the Eagle and Rah, Miss Liberty,
one of her breasts exposed—I have nostalgia
for your life too, what are you, Mongolian?
Don’t leave the rugs behind, milk the horses!
Are you a Russian? You are great at this.
Light the samovar! I give you my past for
nothing. Here is your number. Line up, my lovers!
The Law
The world is always burning, you should fly
from the burning if you can, and you should hold
your head oh either above or below the dust
and you should be careful in the blocks of Bowery
below or above the Broome that always is changing
from one kind of drunkenness to another
for that is the law of suffering, and you know it.
She Was a Dove
for ANNE MARIE
Red are her eyes, for she was a dove once,
and green was her neck and blue and gray her throat,
croon was her cry and noisy flutter her wing once
going for water, or reaching up for another note.
And yellow her bill, though white some, and red her feet
though not to match her eyes for they were more suave,
those feet, and he who bore down above her
his feathers dropped around her like chaff from wheat.
And black was her mood, consider a dove that black,
as if some avian fury had overcome her
and overtaken my own oh lackadaisical state
for she was the one I loved and I abused her.
Blue we lived in, blue was our country seat,
and wrote our letters out on battered plates
and fought injustice and once or twice French-kissed there
and took each other out on desperate dates.
And it was a question always should we soar—
like eagles you know—or should we land and stay,
the battle I fought for sixty years or more
and still go over every day.
And there was a spot of orange above the bone
that bore a wing, though I could never explain
how that was what I lived and died for
or that it blossomed in the brain.
from Save the Last Dance
Diogenes
Diogenes for me and sleeping in a bathtub
and stealing the key to the genealogy room
close to the fake Praxiteles and ripping
a book up since the wrath had taken me
over the edge again and you understand
as no one else how when the light is lit
I have to do something, I couldn’t hold my arm up
for nothing, I couldn’t stand on the top step
barking—I’ll put it this way, living in a room
two cellars down was good, I got to smell
the earth, I carried a long red wire down
with a bulb attached—after that it never mattered.
Traveling Backwards
Traveling backwards in time is almost nothing
for here is the brain and with it I have relived
one thing after another but I am wavering
at only reliving though what is hard is being there—
I don’t know what the Germans called it, existing,
non-existing, both at once, there is a
rose explaining it, or it’s a table;
imagine that, from one tree and its branches
once it was rooted, once the leaves were glabrous
and coruscating, then came everything.
What For?
1946 there was an overcoat
with rows of buttons fifteen dollars and two
American flags for some ungodly reason
and a slight rise in the distance as the street
went over the river for which I would have breathed
the air both in and out since I was a bellows
and one by one my lungs were ruined but I wouldn’t
change my life, what for? You wouldn’t know
unless you crossed the river yourself, unless you
climbed a hill and turned around twice
to stare at the street behind you, either mud
or cobblestone, and count the wooden steps
or look through the windows longingly, the houses
piled up the one below the next, the dirt
supreme, your breathing heavy, the base of a cliff
even further below, a river shining from
time to time, your mind half-empty, your teacher
a curbstone, the mountain really hill upon hill;
you know the details, the porches pulled you up,
your face turned white at a certain point, I’m sure
you walked through a cloud how slow you learned, how absurd
the goats of Arcady or the baskets of apples
in New Jerusalem compared to that.
Bronze Roosters
How love of every single human creature
took place in my life and how it lasted for almost
a week but I had a fever; and the day
I realized finally I had to give up
running for I had lost the will, almost the
muscles themselves, I was confused since I
was never a runner as an adult, and on the
last day I was taking my antibiotics
I lost a small pink pill while in between
reading the labels, or I convinced myself
that that was the case and it took me almost an hour
to stop my coughing I was in such a state,
and I was light-headed walking over the bricks
and had to hold onto my wooden fence, amazed
that we could last the way we do compared to
birds just blown by the wind, their locomotion
beyond themselves, or ants and beetles, God,
what does the mind do there, or bronze roosters?
Blue Like That
She was a darling with her roses, though what I
like is lavender for I can dry it and
nothing is blue like that, so here I am,
in my arms a bouquet of tragic lavender,
the whole history of southern France against my
chest, the fields stretching out, the armies
killing each other, horses falling, Frenchmen
dying by the thousands, though none for love.
59 N. Sitgreaves
As if some creature down there was having a smoke
and there was a lamp with fringes and a rug
so filthy the earth was red and the blue flowers
were black and there was nothing to read and only
a shovel in my face, for such it is
under the lid that I rocked forever and changed
my clay pipe every hour; and reading what
was left of the Psalms, for they were torn and eaten,
I did so by holding a candle over my head;
and I was careful of water for in Them it says
God is filled with water and in Them it says
the valleys shout with joy, which I do here;
and also I whistle in spite of the dirt in my mouth,
and I still hate oppression and I hate slander
where there was a brick outhouse and a library
down from the kitchen and the butchered backyard maple.
Spaghetti
Not infrequently destroyed as bits of paper
of no value by the women in my family,
namely Ida, Libby, and the maid Thelma,
my drawings were gone by the time I was eleven
and so I turned to music and led orchestras
walking through the woods; and Saturday nights
we feasted on macaroni, tomato soup and falso
cheese cooked at three hundred fifty degrees
which I called spaghetti until I was twenty-one
and loved our nights there, Thelma, Libby, and Ida,
fat as I was then, fat and nearsighted
and given over to art, such as I saw it,
though smothered somewhat by the three of them;
and it would be five years of breaking loose,
reading Kropotkin first, then reading Keats,
and standing on my head and singing by which
/>
I developed the longing, though I never
turned against that spaghetti, I was always
loyal to one thing, you could almost measure
my stubbornness and my wildness by that loyalty.
Love
A part of me eats her fingers and a part of me
soaks the dishes but I hate to be scattered
for that is why it took so long and with my
hands enbubbled like that it’s up to her
mostly and I resist for I have the counter
still to scrub and I have a wet
dish towel in my hand as we walk up
eleven steps to the landing followed by six
for in the latter part of my life I’m counting
and nothing, nothing, is sweeter than her protest
or mine, for we are protestants and lie there
hours on end protesting, that is love,
in her house and mine, both the same except that
I have two sets of stairs, a front and a back,
so counting is endless, at least it’s multiple,
and you know multiple and what it goes with.
Before Eating
Here’s to your life
and here’s to your death
and here’s to coughing
and here’s to breath.
Here’s to snowfall
here’s to flurry,
here’s your hat,
what’s your hurry?
Here’s to judge,
here’s to Jewry,
here’s to beer,
here’s to brewery.
Leave me alone,
I want to worry;
make me lamb chops,
make me curry.
Here’s to Voigt,
here’s to Bidart,
here’s getting off
to a running start.
Here’s to Dove,
here’s to Levine,
here’s to the graveyards
in Berlin and Wien.
Here’s to Gilbert
who learned it from me,
here’s to the ninety-foot
Christmas tree
he fell on his head from
shortening his height,
here’s to the grimness
of his grim night;
and I could go on for
forty pages,
listing my joys
and listing my rages,
Blessed as We Were Page 7