Blessed as We Were

by Blessed as We Were (retail) (epub)

  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 Lawr />
  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,