Blessed as We Were

by Blessed as We Were (retail) (epub)

  Red and Swollen

  In the museum of thumbs there was one red

  and swollen that had almost flattened out by

  pressing the metal scale constantly while the

  mouth moved differently asking questions and chewing on

  nothing, as if to distract you, as if to

  assure you there was swollen love in his heart and

  once you got the hang of it you realized

  there were other brutal thumbs, and that the

  museum was full of our red and swollen history

  and what you said was the butcher in the old

  A&P on State Street in Trenton but what it was

  was really Lockheed Martin in Maryland hard by the Pentagon.

  Baby Rat

  for LUKAS MUSHER AND MELINA GIAKOUMIS

  A blind baby rat Luke and Melina tell me

  staggering, hopeless, alone, on a burning street

  near Columbia, maybe on Amsterdam,

  north of St. John’s, his two eyes empty

  the sockets a dirty red, either born that

  way or plucked out by a hungry

  crow, the eyeball the crow’s first delight,

  the sweet and slippery taste thereof; someone

  will kick the baby rat into a sewer

  or pick him up with a tissue and throw him back

  and get on his phone in a second to rid himself

  somehow of the horrible sight, and I who

  for two days now was thinking of the redwoods

  and our walk in Muir Woods in the 1970s

  thought of placing him in one of the upper villages

  three hundred feet in the air protected by

  maybe a spider’s web, maybe

  a few odd twigs, guaranteed

  at least an hour of peace

  for I have the privilege now

  which I didn’t have forty, fifty years ago

  looking up and almost toppling over.

  The Cost of Love

  If I had to I could have banged my head

  on the mud-packed walls of my underground office

  and maybe get a gash or two from the crystals

  either on my oversized forehead or my cheekbones

  for that is the cost of love I have been adding

  up in the red, the one on the right, it’s tricky to

  do a balance isn’t it? For values are

  hard to measure and I didn’t read the book

  of pain—I say enough of pain, and down with

  666—I’ll take kindness, most of all

  kindness, for love is the murdered thing.

  Hearts Amiss

  How wrong it was to look at those hearts incised

  in maples and birches with a loving

  arrow between them, especially when the tree

  grew larger and the hearts expanded

  the way they do, and love took over the tree

  and we said, “Here’s another,” and our own hearts

  broke in two with envy and regret,

  but what we didn’t know then was they were emblems,

  signs, of something deeper and more discordant

  for they—the lovers—had turned to sacrifice

  and torn the other’s heart out from its moorings

  and held the wet organ in their own hands,

  loose and disconnected from the strings,

  the hearts of lovers deeply separated

  from what were once such arrows of desire,

  and some were painted red on buried stones

  planted in the ground like broken teeth.

  Hebrish

  At the confluence of tea roses and Russian sage

  we made a right at the curved iron fence,

  one of my dead friends beside me explaining how trees communicated

  but I couldn’t understand a thing because it was all blurry—

  the way it gets—and though I knew him well

  I couldn’t say for sure now whether it was Larry or

  Phil or Galway or Charlie until I realized it was me

  talking in some kind of Hebrish they spoke

  in my town by the Delaware and it was used

  for code the way one of the Amerindian languages

  was used in World War II the Germans couldn’t in a

  million years break since they weren’t as pragmatic

  irrational and in-your-face as the English and Americans were.

  I noticed the bees were digging in for a late lunch

  of what for them was boiled beef and horseradish

  or maybe it was just for me, and they were bent over

  guzzling madly while paying no attention to the two

  of us or in anyway tired of the nectars since it

  ran the whole gamut from oysters to soup to—well—

  boiled beef to strawberry-rhubarb pie

  and a little whiskey after, some of it spilled on the

  vanilla ice cream that underlay the pie it had once overlaid,

  all of this depending on the blossoms they circled over

  and bent down upon, a cafeteria as good as the one

  on Broadway called Stanley’s I circled and bent over

  expending nickels dimes and quarters when the Dulles brothers

  ran the country.

  It was Larry, I’m sure now,

  and what we talked about was cardboard

  and we were amazed that in the open spaces

  beside the hotel on 47th Street

  there were four or five small cardboard “houses,”

  both of us remembered,

  the homeless had claimed to sleep in and provide

  a safe place for their black plastic garbage bags,

  the size of a room at the Sloane House on 34th Street

  near Pennsylvania Station where I put up

  the price of a meal then for a clean pillowcase

  with little or no stuffing and a cardboard

  bed as stiff as metal and a cardboard

  breakfast of cardboard bread and eggs and between us

  we talked cardboard, shirts from the cleaners with sheets of

  cardboard we drew on, cardboard soles in ruined shoes

  we both wore when we were children, cardboard hats,

  cardboard to lie on listening to outdoor concerts

  and cardboard masks we made with scissors and crayon

  for costume dances, Balls is what we called them

  as if we were art students in Paris about to

  swim in the nearest fountain.

  Though what I want to

  say is the bees were too busy to do us any

  harm and it was packs of wild dogs, not swarms

  of bees, that terrified me (Larry too) except for one

  occasion when I pushed the wrong end of an old

  broom into a hive of yellow jackets on the underside

  of a low-lying garage roof and an angry swarm chased

  me through the yard and over a fence, hating

  any form of criminal intrusion, urban renewal or

  gentrification, I who couldn’t resist intrusions,

  who never could, omnivorous as I was, living on

  apples and bananas as well as baby lamb chops,

  who ran like hell that day (Larry too)

  for we in our separate ways didn’t want to be

  paralyzed then eaten by larvae, none of us dead ones did.

  Cherries

  I was waiting to try out one of my inventions

  from the flattop garage roof—parachutes this time—

  when I tasted a black cherry from the next yard,

  wondering even at that age

  who had prior rights and what was constitutional,

  so instead of jumping I wrote a brief brief

  called Yaakov vs. the Tree Trunk

  where everyone laughed herself crazy

  at Marlboro vs. Madison

  or Red Stain vs. the State of
New Jersey,

  so bless me you fools

  for aren’t you mortals?

  and don’t you bend your body down

  over the water to taste the ice?

  and who, in your family,

  even ever just thought of

  swallowing a goldfish from the bowl,

  say, picking up its slippery body,

  bending your neck back and gulping it down

  even before they entered law school.

  No Kissing There

  It wasn’t only Eleanor I kissed

  but de Beauvoir with her net bag

  on the Street of the Butchers,

  and I would have made it Red Emma

  if I were a little older and Mary Shelley

  a century before, I was so prone to

  kissing, and I kissed in this life, on her mouth,

  Meryl Streep who stopped at my boughten table,

  and when did it start, this kissing?

  and when did kissing itself start?

  And was it the nose or the mouth?

  Let’s name children, grandchildren, dogs,

  books, lovers, wives, friends,

  and don’t forget kissing the air

  in Rome and Buenos Aires to show your distance

  and don’t forget kissing your teachers who

  taught you one thing through neglect and abuse

  and don’t forget Rilke’s simplistic separation

  of life and art, no kissing there.

  Lake Country

  We were either fighting against time

  or not paying any attention to it

  and one of us was upstairs in the back bedroom

  sleeping with one hand on the cold floorboards

  or it was the knuckles thereof and

  one of us was in the kitchen making coffee and

  arguing against Artaud’s unfair reading

  of “The Ancient Mariner” and insisting it was his madness

  got in the way or maybe it was just that he was

  French and misunderstood English poetry,

  continuing, as he did, the absurdity of Poe’s

  genius, somewhat in the same fog-ridden craziness

  as the lore of Jerry Lewis,

  that ridiculous freak with the gooney

  voice at last growing old,

  and though the coffee brewer protested Poe

  wasn’t a poet the way Stevens was, or Frost,

  he still remembered exactly where and when

  Artaud refused to include him

  in his anthology though he did include Mussolini,

  and we all decided to drive down to Philadelphia

  for liverwurst and onion sandwiches at the Olney Diner,

  somebody’s birthday, one of the calamities of the late fifties.

  Wet Peach

  He reached inside his chest for understanding,

  where there was a loose heart attached by strings

  that could be stretched and severed he could grab

  and joggle, and wet as it was in his wet

  hands, and (finally) holding it there in his palm

  he almost moaned for he was thin-skinned to

  an extreme and moved by the slow beating such

  that he wore the strings on his sleeve that sometimes

  drained in red on the rag he carried with him

  for just that possibility or likelihood

  and stuffed it like a peach in his side pocket.

  March 17th

  My song of the pea has me

  and my wife carefully pouring

  the packet of dry seeds

  into the water holes,

  the river on one side, the

  canal on the other, the

  soil perfect for early peas,

  the wind scarring our bare ankles,

  our thighs wracked with pain—

  as it has me planting my walking stick

  into the high ground and the roots taking hold,

  and ripping it out when the first peas appear—

  not to forget the great snow of the early nineties

  the day after I bought two bicycles

  to welcome in the spring,

  the ice on the water a foot thick—

  as it was in Boston on St. Patrick’s Day

  in an Irish bar lecturing my poor son

  on potatoes and him trying to shut me up—

  as it was—I remember—in Kansas State

  a one-man show and a private showing

  of Thomas Hart Benton’s work, the docent

  hinting at a certain closeness between her and

  the master, the wife, as I recall

  after his extensive travels throughout the state

  only saying, “My husband is a great painter”—

  the Russian sage smelling the same everywhere,

  my fingers savoring the odor.

  No House

  Suddenly there was no house

  but most important the hand-sewn curtains

  were on the living-room windowsill facing the front porch

  though they constantly presented a confusion

  since at the same time all the windows

  in the front room were already covered

  with lace to add a certain stiffness

  to accompany the formally placed

  furniture: armchairs, cupboards, rugs, including

  the one I carried across Crete, up a steep hill,

  on a plane, a car, some steps, but Lord,

  the rug on the second floor is the Greek one,

  the Mexican rug is on the first floor

  near Gershom Scholem and Ralph Waldo, the mind,

  which I love above all things, is so sloppy.

  In the meantime, the poet, whatever

  his honors, always writes his new poems

  in obscurity, he’s always a beginner,

  even if he’s already living in his hut.

  Mount Hope Cemetery

  At last I’m taking the accusation

  seriously and I’ll surprise you

  by singing José’s song to Carmen

  instead of the nostalgic crap I’ve been living on

  I first heard at the ornate old opera house

  in Rabelais’s city in the South,

  sitting in a box of faded velour chairs

  meant for smaller people a bare three feet away

  from the smugglers and card sharks

  singing their hearts out, my very first opera

  I never heard again even the two years

  you bought season tickets to the Met

  all of which should convince you to lie down beside me

  thirty, thirty-five years from now

  in the Jewish section of Mount Hope

  on the bluff facing Grant Street

  even though (as you say) you’re not Jewish

  and I would sing too much

  and you’re too young to die

  and, anyhow, “I had a crush on the rabbi”

  I sometimes ate lunch with, though it was Kabbalah

  and its cousin Zen we talked about

  in the years she lived my side of the river

  where she is now buried in my favorite valley

  above the small city where I first met her

  and danced and sang a brucha across the street from—I think—

  the People’s Store almost at

  the corner of Bridge and Union

  where we often had a late lunch at Guiseppe’s,

  mostly minestrone or Greek salad,

  she with her motorcycle, I with my bag of books,

  she with her Gabirol, I with my dictionaries.

  Red Jungle Fowl

  Among the whatnots and the barnyard animals

  in my small living room in Lambertville

  there are two or three red jungle fowl

  of beaten tin and bent iron

  which we call chicken

  in among the sofas and tabl
es

  which I’ll call a fatted fowl,

  in its own way like the fatted calf

  we burned all night

  while Moishe was negotiating on a mountain,

  or so he said, with something invisible.

  But the fowl and fowls like him

  whether they are gods or not

  and whether they’re smeared with gold or not

  are different from the young bulls we called calves

  who were worshipped, you know, for their strength and courage,

  so unlike chickens who are mean and cowardly,

  eat anything, and scratch anyone’s eyes out,

  and though all fake gods shit,

  not all are as brutal and ugly as they are.

  And if you think the talk of sacrifice

  is hardly relevant then just walk

  through Jerusalem as I have

  and listen to the crazies talk about another Temple

  and high priests burning fat for the Name

  and studying the plans of Ezekiel

  as if they were at the drawing boards

  at Caltech or MIT,

  so many cubits for the inner and outer walls,

  so many (Hebrew) feet for the high altar,

  and for the sink you wash your hands in,

  and parapets for drums of burning oil

  and a small stage for the flute and one for the horns

  and rows of straw shoes for cleanliness,

  and in the back a kitchen for the priests

  to have a little bite of fowl

  and a silver cup for a schnapps

  to drown it in.

  And no woman in the inner court

  and no woman anywhere in pants

  or short skirts

  or bare arms or shoulders,

  and no cleavage

  or low-cut jeans

  belly buttons, bare feet,

  hair, T-shirts,

  breasts, thighs, ankles,

  necks, lips, eyes,

  or without an arm a leg or a head,

  or shaved anywhere,

  and butcher blocks with cedar-cladded openings

  for razor-sharp knives to slice the necks

  and cut the yellow skin off,

  the best schmaltz money could buy

  and the best cock-a-doodle you ever heard

  mostly to warn the Arabs

  who walk on the roof.

  Knucklebones

  Like Frida, who had a bellyful of nihilists