For Libby (1946–2000) and Michael
“You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes — because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue or in Flatbush . . . You can never make that crossing that she made,for such Great Voyages in this world do not anymore exist.”
— Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz, Angels in America by Tony Kushner
PRE-OCCUPY
“how weak / we were, and right.”
— Robert Lowell, “The March 2”
Under General Washington’s stone-stretched arm,
less than two hundred of us gathered on the steps
while a passing double-decker (the tourists’
photographs, our posterity) muffled
the shouts lobbed at our Bastille,
the Goldman Sachs tower. “You fucked up,
suck it up,” I mumbled, beneath the chant,
investing only so far. Behind me the
NYSE’s spangled banner stripes were
a shade of barium against the grainy day.
Police officers milled . . . Rain trickled,
smudged slogans, and dispersed the crowd.
I took cover under a Starbucks awning —
its glowing emblem swung in the wind.
LETTER FROM BROOKLYN
I can already see how this will end.
How I will grow tired of the bridge’s
steep incline, and the absent-minded tourists
wandering into the bicycle path.
The weather will turn cold.
But that all happens later.
For now it is the early edge of fall,
leaves green still while the air narrows,
is slightly crisp, almost grazing
the hair of my arm like a passing stranger,
as though the air has been forced into intimacy
by the brevity of daylight.
But when it starts darkening at 4,
this closeness, I know, will be a felt distance,
like someone drawing your attention
to their lack of intimacy.
These days I am still walking at a cathedral pace
beneath the branches bending across avenues,
brownstones like rows of lived-in chapels,
like a pop-up picture book I could have had as a child,
but didn’t. How Brooklyn makes me nostalgic
for the moment I am walking inside of.
These late afternoons filled
with a loneliness that makes me feel
distinctly myself, and an awareness
of how rare that is.
THE WORLD-CHANGING BUSINESS
“When I asked her if she feels she sacrificed her life to the Communist Party . . . (s)he says: “Sacrificed my life! Of course not. Hon, we were in the world-changing business. You can’t get much better than that.”
— Vivian Gornick (interviewing Maggie McConnel), The Romance of American Communism
The world-changing business
was the family business. My father
took me to the storefront at the edge of history,
saying one day all this will be yours.
But our store was the world and it wasn’t
supposed to belong to anyone
or it was supposed to belong to all of us.
I didn’t understand it either.
For the world already was that way
when I was a child. The way of owning nothing.
I thought the business was to make us all
children one day. Yet childhood
was disappointing. The first time
my father said we were going to a demo
I expected to see wrecking balls
spoon brick and stone. But people just stood,
or walked, or spoke, sometimes of wrecking things —
though no one ever did. My father often spoke
about the world that could be.
Should be. Would be.
I was to inherit this business
of not yet and now and always.
We lived in the future I would build one day,
though I wanted more to be a garbage man.
My father would have preferred that
to what I am doing right now.
MICHAEL’S LOWER EAST SIDE
You have a map,
ballpoint marking the streets
where you lived and my mother lived
and Carl, your best friend who committed suicide,
and Sue’s boyfriend Danny who also killed himself,
because he had cancer. Your stories conflict
with her diary. But isn’t that what always happens when Jews talk
about origins? And you don’t need to know
what your sister believed in 1968. It’s enough
that your friends are dead
and nothing on 2nd Avenue is the way you remember it.
If we walk fast enough the three dollar espressos
will turn back into night, the patio legs
fold and table tops resume their previous lives
as garbage pale lids. Right here is where you bought
egg creams at 3 a.m. The Gem Spa on St. Mark’s,
soda fountain replaced by the glossy stares of models.
Yonah Shimmel is pretty much the same,
knishes framed in the dumbwaiter.
The dumpy middle-aged man,
not unlike a knish himself, is annoyed
when you ask for cutlery
and this makes you smile. There is no celery soda
so you settle for a Dr. Brown cream. We have never looked
so similar as when resigning ourselves to what is
no longer. Carl or Danny, your parents or my mother.
How thick is absence, too. “It’s not fucking here . . . It’s gone,”
you say, looking at a vacant lot on 13th, the last place you
and your sister lived before she met my father.
Julie calms you with nothing more profound than,
“Michael, we’re on the wrong street.” You laugh, and I know
this is a story you will tell at family gatherings —
and when the times comes so will I.
The next street over is the tenement where you planned
your lessons for P.S. 110 and Sue tried
to figure out what to do with her life
after being kicked out of Berkeley and the Spartacists
and reading Whitman one evening instead of Marx —
though I made that last part up.
And there was that guy who did too much acid and jumped
out the sixth floor window and survived.
And Fred Hampton killed that same week and
you and her were going to live, okay, not forever,
but for quite some time.
RAISING THE PENTAGON
“You created the revolution first and learned from it, learned of what your revolution might consist and where it might go out of the intimate truth of the way it presented itself to your experience.”
— Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
You might have been the thin young pirate
with a large Armenian mustache
on page 149. After all, you were there
when the Pentagon was raised.
Spent the night in Occoquan
and still have that mustache,
43 years later. Ending the draft
killed the movement, you say,
as we drink beneath a stuffed gator head,
confederate flag in its teeth. We are far
from your old New England house,
where snow, as though in a koan,
gathers in the eaves and the shadows
of pines rise and recede across the hardwood.
If we drive all night we can be in Arlington
County, 1967, by morning. On the way
we will find your sister, the woman who will become
my mother, at Berkeley, handing out leaflets —
The March on the Pentagon is liberal, bourgeois . . .
She didn’t understand, she wasn’t there you say
into the empty pint. For years,
whether it was a Central Park “be in”
or trying to make peace
with your father, she would ask
the same smart-ass question,
“Raised that Pentagon yet?”
(I can only imagine what she would say
about your “Hope” T-shirt.)
Her hair a dandelion
about to disperse its seeds
she says it again from the empty stool beside us.
But remembering she’s been dead
a decade she loses the smirk and asks
how could you lift a building
but not stop your sister
from falling. And I don’t know
who is right. Maybe you didn’t,
and maybe you did
raise the Pentagon, clear
into outer space.
I am sure you tried.
You both tried.
RE: GRANDPA’S VILLAGE
About 40 years ago Julie and I found it
on a map of the NY public library on 42nd St.
The spelling would vary. Nipolukovich
is as good as any. Julie thinks it was near
the Prut river and the city of Chernoff.
This is oral history. Everybody is gone.
Love Michael.
BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
I’ve often wanted to be kept by a patron of the arts,
to look out my window and see you below
playing “Moon River” on guitar.
Sounds like my kind of life, for a while. I like not knowing
how things will turn out. Of course, I always entertain
the idea of changing you, just a little,
into the kind of woman without furniture,
someone who’d get her Givenchy sandals soaked,
follow me out of a taxi and onto a rainy movie set.
Maybe you were that kind of person, all along —
just waiting for me to deliver the perfect line. That’s what I like
about movies. The words always come at the proper time
and they’re the right words . . . And cats are found. I guess
I can revise a few autumn evenings in my imagination,
make the leaves and your dress a little yellower.
Though I wouldn’t dream of changing your iris.
And I am a little blonder
(and taller and wider) when I tell you
people do fall in love,
people do belong to each other,
because that’s the only chance anybody’s got.
Though of course I don’t say that exactly.
Just something like it — with the same passion, but my own.
I don’t know what you do then.
Even in my imagination it’s hard to imagine
you ever really leaving that taxi. It’s hard to imagine
it is ever not too late
or people change that quickly
in that way. And, sure, people fall in love,
all too often it seems, but even I want to slap Fred,
or whatever his name is,
when he talks about real happiness.
It just doesn’t work that way. I mean, after the credits roll
someone has to speak, apologize, really talk about the weather —
whatever it takes not to end up back in that cab,
failing to say the right words, or worse,
saying them, and that not changing a damn thing.
MY ONLY LOVE POEM
We met before as children, at the ferry dock. Our parents
weren’t paying attention to us, and then noticed
we had strayed and were holding each other’s mittens —
innocent enough, but still they thought it better
to gently pull us apart. I used to believe all kinds of things then,
like people could explode from eating too many blueberries,
but not that they could fall in love. I knew love
was the forever thing my mother spoke of
and so there were neither fallings in or out.
Love was the weather inside a house.
I didn’t think of you very often after we left the dock
and maybe that’s because it never happened.
The first time we met was near
a train station. About a half mile from the tracks
we could hear the train beginning to pull away
and pictured steam rising even though we knew
they had stopped making trains that way years earlier.
You were chewing gum outside a gas station
and I was holding a raspberry slushy
much too large for my hands. We were barely
teenagers. You didn’t blow bubbles, because it wasn’t
that type of gum. You just chewed and looked
at where the train would be if it were close enough to see.
I stood as though I were waiting for someone
but I just wanted to look at you. I didn’t know what to say,
so I told you
I liked chewing gum more than the bubble kind
because I didn’t know how to blow bubbles.
That was my line, I guess. You said, and this killed me,
It’s easy, I could show you sometime. That was the first time
I remember someone saying something that was not about
what they actually said. Later I would come to believe,
except when talking about money,
every adult conversation is pretty much about sex and death
regardless of the supposed subject. You weren’t talking about sex then,
not really. And you certainly weren’t talking about death.
We were at that age when nobody died.
And now seems as good a time as any
to tell you my mother was very sick then,
that she had things growing inside her.
Though she wasn’t going to die. Of course,
I didn’t mention any of this while my slushy melted
and we listened to the sound a train makes
the moment after it’s out of earshot.
I said something like, Thanks, but I’ll never learn,
referring to bubble blowing. You could say
you were more mature than me
when we met sort of near a train station in a town
I mostly invented. Still, I recognized you
when we met in Toronto last week.
We were older, my mother
was long dead. I knew how to talk about sex
without talking about it.
Though I don’t
recall, now, what we spoke about. It was New Year’s Eve
and we had been drinking. I was far from home
though I had been born only blocks away
in quite literally another century and was
not so much nursing another injured heart,
but giving the little thing hell
for once again being so unwise or unkind
and beginning to conclude
these were not different things. It was one of those thoughts
that stirs profound change. Though the only difference I could see
was that I’d taken to carrying a small bottle of Red Label
in my shoulder bag. And so I told you
I had a bottle of Scotch, because
I didn’t know how to say you were pretty
or that we had met before on a dock
and not all that far from a train station.
Or that I was ready, now,
to be taught how to make bubbles,
and my mother was not well. So I casually mentioned
the Red Label and how I would like to drink it with you.
We have known each other for three days.
We laugh about how I thought I was charming.
How you really just wanted a drink
and I was cute enough, so what the hell.
We laugh about this like it happened years ago.
For almost two days we only leave your bedroom
to refill the water glasses. But eventually
we make our way to your kitchen where through the window
a bird feeder in the shape of a house swings back and forth
and everything else is still and snow blankets the shack at the
end of the driveway
and we say how scared we would be in this house right now,
if we were alone. And this is the most honest thing I have said
in years. The only things you have to eat are cheese
and crackers, and they’re delicious. I begin to feel
life intended to bring me to this moment. Even though
that means everything has been scripted,
including my mother being dead and me nearly
dying twice, once from a thing requiring surgery
and the other time from something I care not to mention.
Yes, I am alright, in this moment,
with all that life has planned for me. And just as accepting
that there might very well not be a plan. I can’t help
Letter from Brooklyn Page 1