Aix-en-Provence, 1952
Piano
The blind piano tuner had come to the wrong address. I said, “I’m very sorry. You must have the wrong address.” He insisted on seeing the piano, though I have none. I showed him the living room, which was being recarpeted. “A Bösendorfer! Wonderful! One of the finest! What an opportunity!” He was overjoyed, talking at length about its virtues, second to none—the crisp, clean tone, silken touch, huge bass, marvelous sustain, and so forth. He took out his tuning kit and began immediately. He claimed to have heard Schnabel play the entire Beethoven sonata cycle on one in Royal Albert Hall in London. After a short time, he played a chord. “Hear that? Wonderful. So rich.” I told him I could hear nothing, and he nodded sympathetically, even sadly, saying that to lose one’s sense of hearing was to lose a portion of one’s soul. “In his last days, Beethoven heard with his fingertips, I truly believe that,” he muttered to himself. To hear him soliloquize rhapsodically about the piano and the great performers he had heard—“Hoffman with his small hands would have loved this light action, like angel wings,” or “Perfect for Lipatti and his Chopin, so fluid and transparent”—was almost to hear the music itself, to be seated in the concert hall, center of the third row, to feel the tremble of the young woman’s shoulder in the adjacent seat, her barely repressed sighs in the crescendos of the Appassionata, that unearthly, mystical moment between the dying of the last note and the avalanche of applause. His devotion to the Bösendorfer, the obsessive attention to every detail of the tuning process, preoccupied him for most of the afternoon, and I served him coffee, then afterward offered him a martini in celebration of a job well done. “You’re a lucky man, such a fine instrument,” he said, as if to the piano itself, as he left. Yes I am, I thought, and looked back at the living room the way Beethoven must have looked at that young woman in the third row, her tear-filled eyes, the slightly parted lips, her hands pressed together as if in prayer.
Los Angeles, 1957
Moth
A moth devoured words.
—THE EXETER BOOK
A larval tunneling between pages.
Gorged on print,
wallowing in pulp, it falls into the long
sleep that later breaks and frays as wings
sluggish as oars
begin to bludgeon the heavy air,
baffled by walls of dusk and lugging
the soft body
toward a squall of light. Dun wings
flail, ribbed like Gothic vaults and
camouflaged with moons
large as owl eyes. Lurching through
the light’s rain, it veers, collides,
hugs the bulb
and falls away. And the singed antennae
recall in something like a mezzotint
the larval dark passage,
the hunger, the gray dream of with, and, the.
Triptych:
Nathan Gold, Maria,
On the Waterfront
Nathan Gold
9/14/01. So, Sollie, here I am again, an old man,
zeyde, now. You’re gone ten years, but it’s your birthday
and I’m standing here as always on Brooklyn Bridge
and staring at that skyline, writing it all down.
The longest journey in this country, Uncle Mike
would say, stretches from the Lower East Side to
the Upper East, and weekends you would see them there,
the rich, the big shots, strolling to the Met, say,
or Guggenheim to see the Rembrandts or Chagalls,
gold flecks of light drifting down through leafy branches
to settle on the shoulders of their silk, tailored suits.
So I’m halfway: a three-room near the Chelsea, not bad,
considering what might have been. Some years ago
I ran into Reznikoff at Dubrow’s on Seventh Ave.
when he was writing Holocaust, and he blurts out,
Eichmann said his entire life was founded on
one moral principle: Kant’s categorical imperative,
later modified for the “small man’s household use.”
My God, can you believe it? Food spewed from his mouth,
his hands were shaking. Thousands murdered everyday.
He read Kant and yet. . . . Language rendered useless.
Thought turned inside out. Rez wrote his poems true to fact
but often with a sense of failure. Three days ago
I knew this sense, words failing, as the towers drowned
in smoke, as the Malach HaMavet spread its wings
across the city. Rabbi Stern, a good man, a holy man,
prayed in its shadow, bewildered as the rest of us.
And so, Crane’s poem, Under thy shadow by the piers
I waited; Only in darkness is thy shadow clear . . .
but lend a myth to God? No, I don’t think so. The wings
are spread too wide this time and stain the river gray
the way that Kansas dust storm turned the sky death-gray
when we were boys on our trip out west, hitchhiking.
All that space, all that American space Crane’s bridge
embraced, and not just Brooklyn to Manhattan, but coast
to coast, Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod.
And he should be here now as I am, groping for
the words, the true ones, for a country and a city
like none anywhere whose streets are shrouded gray
(some days, Mike said, near Lublin it came down
like snow, like snow), whose skies are ruined with ash.
Maria
Maria Rasputin, b. 1899, Siberia; d. 1977, Los Angeles, California
They say the fortress has been taken; it is evening, it is dark, rebelling horseguards just went past with music. Autos race along Zagródny without cease; they are met with shouts of “Hurrah!” Soldiers and workers shoot into the air, there are few people out, it is noisy and dark; soldiers roam around in groups, smoke, and shoot aimlessly. The revolution has taken the form of a military uprising. . . . Chaos, forces of the century.
—THE DIARIES OF NIKOLAY PUNIN, 1917
A circus. Circles. Everything comes round, Pyotr.
May I call you Pyotr? I knew so many then.
Look up there, the freeway, cars trunk to tail like
circus elephants. Feed them or they’ll trample you.
I know. Ringling Brothers. I trained animals,
but lions mostly. Yes. Almost killed once, a bear
in Indiana. Russia, Budapest. And Paris,
where I danced in cabarets, then New York, later
Florida, now L.A. A riveter in Long Beach,
but too old now, I babysit for the bourgeois rich,
and when they ask for my credentials, I say,
I babysat the daughters of the Czar of Russia.
That shuts them up. You’re too polite, of course, to ask
about my father. “Mad Monk,” indeed. I don’t know,
the women, that crazy cult. And God knows I’m no saint
myself. But all past. Long time. Vodka under the bridge.
He was my father, and he loved me. History
judges him, nothing I can do. Listen: history
is a mess, just one damned thing and then another.
Believe me, I know. I was there. The door of history
closes, opens. It opened, I went through. Czar,
Czarina, children, gone. Varya, Mitia, gone.
All gone. And I survive. Two husbands, five countries,
two wars, and look, I’m here talking to Blake scholar,
yes? Blake, the one with visions, angels, yes? You come
to study in the mansion of the Railroad King.
The bourgeois rich. My father had a vision and told
Czar Nicholas, Don’t go to war. It’s Serbia,
not our affair. Everything comes round. Pyotr,
you
say your father fought in World War Two. The mess
of history being what it is, does it not amaze you,
but for a little man named Wilhelm with a withered arm,
a tiny brain, and a Germany to play with,
there might not have been a First World War, a vengeful peace,
an Adolf, another war, and you, like thousands more,
without a father? They murdered mine. Mad, maybe,
but he told him twice. Or that if the Archduke’s idiot
driver had turned right instead of left, then no
assassination, no Great War, and decades later,
no absent fathers. Maybe. But he had a vision!
He knew! History is a mess: whatever we do now,
a hundred years from now they’re burying the victims.
Bozhe moi. In Paris, just before I left, there was
a man named Kojève whose idea was the end
of history, and desire, the little engine running it.
Intellectuals in the cabarets would speak of it.
(What did I know? Like you, I come from peasants.
I just listened.) And in Ringling Brothers, something
called a freak show, was a little girl named Frieda Pushnik
with only half a body. Intelligent, so brave,
a soul, no arms to push against the world, no legs
to run away from it. Well, I’m a freak of history,
I thought. She can do it, so can I. And so I did.
So, Pyotr, look again. Up there. The freeway, trunk
to tail like circus elephants. And who will feed them?
Who will they trample to get more? There’s your desire,
your want, and trust me, it is endless. But the end
of history? Oh no, Pyotr. It’s only just begun.
On the Waterfront
know thyself
Flashlight in hand, I stand just inside the door
in my starched white shirt, red jacket nailed shut
by six gold buttons, and a plastic black bowtie,
a sort of smaller movie screen reflecting back
the larger one. Is that really you? says Mrs. Pierce,
my Latin teacher, as I lead her to her seat
between the Neiderlands, our neighbors, and Mickey Breen,
who owns the liquor store. Walking back, I see
their faces bright and childlike in the mirrored glare
of a tragic winter New York sky. I know them all,
these small-town worried faces, these natives of the known,
the real, a highway and brown fields, and New York
is a foreign land—the waterfront, unions, priests,
the tugboat’s moan—exotic as Siam or Casablanca.
I have seen this movie seven times, memorized the lines:
Edie, raised by nuns, pleading—praying, really—
Isn’t everybody a part of everybody else?
and Terry, angry, stunned with guilt, Quit worrying
about the truth. Worry about yourself, while I,
in this one-movie Kansas town where everyone
is a part of everybody else, am waiting darkly
for a self to worry over, a name, a place,
New York, on 52nd Street between the Five Spot
and Jimmy Ryan’s where bebop and blue neon lights
would fill my room and I would wear a porkpie hat
and play tenor saxophone like Lester Young, but now,
however, I am lost, and Edie, too, and Charlie,
Father Barry, Pop, even Terry because he worried
more about the truth than he did about himself,
and I scan the little mounds of bodies now lost even
to themselves as the movie rushes to its end,
car lights winging down an alley, quick shadows
fluttering across this East River of familiar faces
like storm clouds cluttering a wheat field or geese
in autumn plowing through the sun, that honking,
that moan of a boat in fog. I walk outside
to cop a smoke, I could have been a contender,
I could have been somebody instead of . . . what I am,
and look across the street at the Army-Navy store
where we would try on gas masks, and Elmer Fox
would let us hold the Purple Hearts, but it’s over now,
and they are leaving, Goodnight, Mr. Neiderland,
Goodnight, Mrs. Neiderland, Goodnight, Mick, Goodnight,
Mrs. Pierce, as she, a woman who has lived alone
for forty years and for two of those has suffered through
my botched translations from the Latin tongue, smiles,
Nosce te ipsum, and I have no idea what she means.
New Poems
The Story
It has no name and arrives from nowhere,
eager for new adventures: the murmur and cries
of the crowded streets of Istanbul or Rome
or Brooklyn, the blazing eyes of the last gray wolf
deep in a cave in New Mexico, the sob of the wind
between the disks of an abandoned tractor
on the high plains, the homeless man chasing
his runaway grocery cart down Sunset Boulevard,
a young woman looking out from the front porch
of a duplex in Enid, Oklahoma, waiting for the mail.
It has, as they say, a mind of its own, bearing
secret knowledge, truths from another world,
transparent and untranslatable, luminous
and cryptic. It arrives almost silently, only
the slight crush of lawn grass beneath its sandals,
a surprise even though you have somehow
expected it. Your hands, rough and calloused
from the toils of the imagination, reach out
to gently shake its narrow shoulders, to tousle
its well-combed hair silvered by moonlight.
Where have you been? It says nothing, of course,
walks to the far corner of the room, and begins
to pray. After waiting for hours, you offer it
coffee and a slice of pecan pie, then more coffee.
When it leaves, you follow close behind in fear
and a traveler’s anxiety. Where can a story end?
If it arrives from nowhere, where can it end?
But then, as you pass through familiar streets,
past the clapboard houses, the pomegranate tree
just coming into bloom, the blue Buick parked
by the curb, you understand, for there is your mother
among the bird cries of the porch swing, reading
a letter from a small island somewhere in the Pacific.
There is the front door with its torn screen,
the voices of a soap opera from the radio, the creak
and whisper of cottonwood branches overhead.
This is where the story ends. And now you know,
this is also where it begins, and you lean
into the light, put the pen to paper, and write.
Red Snow
A howling fluorescent dream car skids off
the highway, and I wake wracked by the fumes
of sleep’s endless traffic, stumbling into morning,
night terrors with their long nails at my back.
A fury of splayed branches overhead rakes
the dawn light and claws the windowpanes.
That crazed windshield I woke to as a boy
stares out of the wreckage, radio snarling,
horn stuck, my mother’s face veiled
in what seemed to be little glass stars or red snow.
Walking the hall. Dragging it all behind me
in the same sad robe I have worn now
nine years to breakfast. Trepidation’s rags,
grim uniform of the land of dread,
the country of forgetting. Cheerios, sliced bananas.
Oh, I had such a bad dream. Good morning,
I’ve just been to hell, pour me some orange juice.
One wakes to the world. Where is my mother?
Where is my father? I am not myself.
The Left Fielder’s Sestina
Ebbets Field, 1946
I lose it in the sun sometimes, a rain
of light, spray of shrapnel in my eyes,
flamethrowers cutting through the dark.
Then suddenly the ball finds shadows nailed
across the outfield wall glamorous with signs:
the SCHAEFER beer and CAMELS of the lost.
Lost because they’ve never known the truly lost:
the bodies floating pink with blood and rain
as we waded in, rifles held like little signs
above our heads, the dead with nightmare eyes
burning into ours. When I dream of nailing
triples high against the wall and wake to dark
hotel rooms, I see them there, lying dark
as waves along the beach that night we lost
the whole platoon except for three of us nailed
flat beneath barbed wire and a heavy rain
of cannon fire. Smart pitchers know the eyes
will sometimes give away the batter, sure signs
of hitter’s lust, to break a slump, ignore the sign
from third, waive the bunt. An Okie kid the darkest
night on Guam told me this, death swimming in his eyes
and like me sick our best years of ball were lost
to the bloody goddamned war. That night the rain
stopped. A suicide attack, and we were almost nailed
to Hirohito’s cross. Shrapnel flew like nails,
and I collapsed, a kind of seizure, bawling, signs
the war was stuck inside my brain, the pink rain
that never stops. The dead. The endless dark.
A coma is a house of dreams. You’re lost
in it, no doors or windows, but then your eyes
one day open to the world again, the eyes
of thousands staring down, and those glass nails
of blinding sunlight as you take one deep, lost
The Blue Buick Page 17