Besides a blue horse and childish tan maiden by Gauguin—
Backs, bellies, and scrolls,
Stradivarius, Guarnerius, Amati,
Colored like a calabash-and-meerschaum pipe bowl’s
Warmed, matured body—
The color of the young light-skinned colored girl we had then.
I used to dream about her often,
In sheets she’d have to change the day after.
I was thirteen, had just been bar mitzvah.
My hero, once I’d read about him,
Was the emperor Hadrian; my villain, Bar Kokhba,
The Jew Hadrian had crushed out at Jerusalem:
Both in the Cambridge Ancient History’s Hadrian chapter (1936
Edition), by some German. (The Olympics
Year of my birth and Jesse Owens’s putsch it had appeared.)
Even then, in ’49, my mother was dying.
Dressed in her fresh-air blue starched uniform,
The maid would come from Mother’s room crying
With my mother’s tears shining on her arm,
And run to grab her beads and crucifix and missal,
I to find my violin and tuning whistle
To practice my lessons. Mendelssohn. Or Bach,
Whose Lutheran fingering had helped pluck
The tonsured monks like toadstools from their lawns,
And now riddled the armor I would have to shuck:
His were life-sized hands behind his puppet Mendelssohn’s.
One night, by the blue of her nitelite, I watched the maid
Weaving before her mirror in the dark, naked.
Her eyes rolled, whiskey-bright; the glass was black, dead.
“Will you come true? It’s me, it’s me,” she said.
Her hands and her hips clung to her rolling pelvis.
Her lips smacked and I saw her smile, pure lead
And silver, like a child, and shape a kiss.
All night I tossed. I saw the face,
The shoulders and the slight breasts—but a boy’s face,
A soft thing tangled, singing, in his arms,
Singing and foaming, while his blinding pelvis,
Scooped out, streamed. His white eyes dreamed,
While the black face pounded with syncope and madness.
And then, in clear soprano, we both screamed.
What a world of mirrored darkness! Agonized, elated,
Again years later I would see it with my naked
Eye—see Harlem: doped up and heartless,
Loved up by heroin, running out of veins
And out of money and out of arms to hold it—where
I saw dead saplings wired to stakes in lanes
Of ice, like hair out cold in hair straightener.
And that wintry morning, trudging through Harlem
Looking for furnished rooms, I heard the solemn
Pedal-toned bowing of the Bach Chaconne.
I’d played it once! How many tears
Had shined on Mother’s maids since then?
Ten years! I had been trying to find a room ten years,
It seemed that day, and been turned down again and again.
No violin could thaw
The rickety and raw
Purple window I shivered below, stamping my shoes.
Two boys in galoshes came goose-stepping down
The sheer-ice long white center line of Lenox Avenue.
A blue-stormcoated Negro patrolman,
With a yellowing badge star, bawled at them. I left too.
I had given up violin and left St. Louis,
I had given up being Jewish,
To be at Harvard just another
Greek nose in street clothes in Harvard Yard.
Mother went on half dying.
I wanted to live in Harlem. I was almost unarmored …
Almost alone—like Hadrian crying
As his death came on, “Your Hadrianus
Misses you, Antinous,
Misses your ankles slender as your wrists,
Dear child. We want to be alone.
His back was the city gates of Rome.
And now Jerusalem is dust in the sun,
His skies are blue. He’s coming, child, I come.”
A WIDOWER
He still reads his paper in there; the john’s what he comes home for.
The door kept locked the way some men keep a whore
Was his whore while his wife lived. Still up at eight,
In bed by ten. But now sometimes he’s up late,
Biting his tongue to tears, to masturbate.
And now always his angina schreis like a boiling kettle.
His breath shrieks when he reaches to wash the newsprint away,
Still seated, from his cigar-stained fingers. Like rusted metal
The white and gray tiles: a veined, brownish light gray.
When he tries to think of her face,
He sees the drops clinging to the faucet droop and ache.
He sees his shadow on the pebbled glass,
Covered with the tears he’s held back.
Outside the door, his visiting granddaughter barks at the dog,
Asleep there, gassing and grumbling. One foot must be bare—
The other in what must be her grandmother’s beach clog,
She slops down the hall rug. She should care?
The bathroom cares for him like a wife.
But his little legs, swastika-like
In black sharkskin, still run his coalyards and his life,
He has no say. His dry throat stabs him, like a spike
Of unpaid bills, counting the white tiles, then again the gray.
He’d like a cigar for every time that kvetch killed
Him in her dreams every day
And knew he knew it—and was thrilled!
Except—the almost odorless warm sand and the smell of salt—
Where?—where they were happy. Atlantic City? L.A.?
The waves gush in fizzing, halt,
Trailing seaweed and sunlight, and flush away.
On its back, opened up, his billfold sweats on the damp tiles,
As if helpless, where it was dropped. His wife’s snapshot smiles
Up from the floor—he opens the door. Turning gold-
Rimmed silver cartwheels on the hall rug, the blond child …
Shocked by the static in his kisses, she starts to scold.
THE COALMAN
Past nine and still snowing.
It will stop and go below zero.
The next-to-last truck disappears,
And the hiss of its tires as they unspool
Their usage, like miles of adhesive.
The last truck goes, it’s time to go.
Still there, into the New Year,
The Mine Workers’ huge Santa Claus
Made of coal derivatives beams
His head-lamp on their new all-glass office—
My eyes burn; my headlights swallow snow
Block after block down the soft street.
And already it’s colder now.
When the small streets crack like sticks,
If they snap a gas pipe,
We’ll reroute our light trucks.
We’ll go nowhere.
The world is getting warmer.
I always bicker with last year—
And the cold cut as dull as garden shears
Last year. Even when
We’re filling up half-full bins,
Outdistancing the need, delays set in,
Some driver cocks his empty head for spring.
Once winter was the dragon, revered,
Because we were poor. Its carborundum heels
Wore inches off my uncles and my father
Before their iron-wheeled coal carts
Sliced it into water—and a Santa Claus now.
My boy still calls tire chains sleigh bells.
The trucks and the
drivers will be back
By midnight, unless they stop for a bite.
The pipe layers, tomorrow,
Have their third raise in three years.
The ice wind has flattened the river.
It tears the skin from my lips like Bible paper.
I see me and the miners, the drivers,
And some poor nigger customers
Who can’t buy the smokeless fuel
Eating our soft coal whole,
And vomiting and vomiting slick eels
Of blackness. I can see this.
A NEGRO JUDGE
The juice glass throbs against his lips,
He rubs it across his brow, while a draft sips
At the bare grate and palpitates in the chimney.
His cigarette fingers are the color of whiskey.
Week nights he sleeps in town.
Seeming nakeder each weekend, in the bluebook-blue nightgown,
His wife cuts the daffodils—
The Sunday scissors shine and glint like the onset of chills.
Backed up love kills
The loving eye with its quills.
Once, his nerves would have stood and stared, prongs on a mace,
His meatless Jansenist hooked face …
Spawning salmon’s face, the lippy death’s-head
Fighting starvation to get to its deathbed.
Around the lawn, sparrows flit through the thaw
Trailing rabbinical beards of straw.
His favorite magistrate—favorite piece of justice:
Fielding committed a T. Jones for assaulting a bawd with his cutlass.
The lean law
Warbles the galliambic scripture through lips fat as pads of a paw.
And law-hagged America dreams on, with disgust, of a hairy,
Plenary,
Incessant lust,
A God-like black penis, a white buttocks-sized bust.
A large, slow tear, a hangover,
Rolls down his cheek, magnifying each unshaved pore …
Now the dark rose-pimples come up from so low,
Like pebbles tossed at a dark window!
From the judge’s seat, a world of widow’s peaks!
Where the lying defendant shrieks,
“Your Honor, I believe! Help thou mine unbelief!”
And slavers with hate and grief.
Plaintiff is awarded the judge! Passerine,
Perched on branch and vine,
Plaintiff spreads its smallish wings—
Brownish white, whitish brown—and sings.
THE HEART ATTACK
(An old man’s dream, terminated by a heart attack: he dreams he hears a long-dead mistress haranguing him.)
You may forget: as I crouch near
Your love-sleep, yours on hers, that knife
You shaved me with is all I hear—
The scraping, this way, that way, like your breathing. Life
Has one career, and mine was bare.
You can’t dig out the veined and knotted world despair
Tucked in your senses. Death slits you unbound.
I watch you drag yourselves around
The streets. If slovenry is mashed
And washed away, the stocks compound.
But tell it to the marsh mosquitoes and the gnashed
And Nile-green waste the gutters pass.
Bedded on tissues of roses, this still is Sybaris;
And even roses bruise your fulsome flesh.
Are hook-nosed stallions wearing mesh
Caparisons still taught to dance
To flutes? We saw them once—like fresh,
But this time virgin, Vestals—horse-hierophants.
What when Crotonian or Celt
Masters the flute and trips the brawny Romans, svelte
And all, into their fancy horses’ pies
Of filth? I slit my wrists. Your prize,
Queered, arrow-eaten legionnaire,
Just back from Hatra, boy-starved, flies
To watch the lions get a Roman—daily fare
In Rome like pasta: armpit air,
A crush of bodies, fear. The one time we were there
You gagged and nearly fainted. Fail to feed
The raving masses all they need
Of vomit from the state’s gorged throat,
And they may use you as the reed
To tickle up a gladiator. You still dote
On walks and naps, on simple toys,
Silk fans that needn’t keep the flies away. Your joys
Are simpler than the wax work of the bees
Housed in the propped-up laurel trees
On your estate. You suck that child,
And think of me. Once, while a breeze
Feathered the sapling laurels, I found a bee the mild
South wind had injured, which, while my palm
Softly lifted it to its hive, woke from its calm
And stung its puny life into my hand,
And died—leaving me to demand
My vengeance from your whimpering lips
Which sucked the poison. Old men stand
That poison till they die. A bee, that fingertips
Deep sweetness, gives up sweets to spend
Its deadly, bitter ardor. Letting go’s the end.
The rest is free, the rest of it is free,
That swells the schooner, pulls the sea
Out calm while lip-fresh Venus bathes
Close to the beach where a flower and bee
Barter the short summer, and land crabs back down the paths
Of slime where Pompey’s tubas spray,
And ladies split their wishbones for Marc Antony.
You know Augustus banned adultery—
You could be blackmailed. You should see
Her gnawed-down thumb nails. Do you shake
The stars out of our Forum tree
With that poor girl? Or can’t you now? They used to streak
Above us grinding in the grass,
And light us to the sunrise Tiber, where I’d pass
An hour, in silver, washing you away.
You made me love it. But the way
You nibbled, nibbled, in the pool
Near Acragas that August day.
And after, clinging to the bottom to stay cool,
I watched your body from below,
So papery and small afloat. I’d wondered how
Men drowned—and then you woke up, coughed, and smeared.
You made me. But your mouth is reared,
It waters for me, and my rut
Is dry. You liked it with your beard
Between my clenched thighs; now I’m willinger to shut
It all in with you. Ear to ear,
You swell—till pulsing like a baby, you burst clear—
You suck for air. Your girlfriend shrieks with fear.
DAYLEY ISLAND
Gulls spiral high above
The porch tiles and my gulf-green,
Cliff-hanging lawn, with their
Out-of-breath wail, as
Dawn catches the silver ball
Set in the dried-up bird bath
To scare the gulls. My slippers
Exhale lamé.
I was egged on by old age—
To sell that house,
Winterize this house,
Give up my practice … that
You, Pauli, gave up
At Belzec, our son at Belsen,
And one at Maidenek,
Our last at Maidenek.
Below the cliff, the shallows
Tear apart, beating
Themselves white and black,
While the sea’s smooth other edge
Towers, reddening,
Over the surfacing sun.
I rise early, always,
Earlier each day …
Holding on.
But it’s the island that’s locked in
By the sea—a case
/> Of vaginismus, Pauli—
Except for the one bridge
To the next island. I’m free—
Dayley’s first once Jewish,
Nonpracticing analyst:
Old, but she has no helper;
Station wagon, but
She’s not a tourist; poor for
An island Venus or matron.
The man who sells me fish
Says he fought my Nazis,
The captured ones talked
Just like me—I’m somebody.
Last week—March-cold
In the middle of August,
Snow-blue, high, thin skies—
I drove the hour to Brunswick
To drop my suits at
Maine’s Only Chinese Laundry,
A down-easter’s,
With a Negro presser.
The man was just then off
For Hagard to shoot rabbits
For the reward,
Three miles off Dayley’s east shore.
Years before,
A mainlander
Had loosed two white rabbits
There; now it was theirs.
Frail, pink-veined, pale ears,
And pink as perfect gums,
Pink eyes, rose noses, as if
Diseased—I’d been there.
The lead-gray Yankee owner,
After the shotgun blast,
Strode forward, gathered the bunch,
And one by one, grabbed each
By its hind legs while it sobbed,
And swinging it against
The bare lawn, slapped it dead,
And swung it to the shrubs.
I left the cleaners wanting
So to tell you. The sun’s
Well up now. Our blue carpet’s
Fading evergreen, Pauli.
THANKSGIVING DAY
1.
I was the only child,
And a first boyfriend’s brother,
Dead—in a shell-shocked truck
Crash, I think—in Sweden,
Couldn’t make the war matter.
We wore parachute
Synthetic silk ball gowns
That year, at the Assemblies,
Which, looking back, all seem
A shifting, newsreel gray.
All I remember is, no one
Liked Truman, that there was
No gas for cars to speak of,
That the good things, my mother
Said, were rare-red and rationed.
The boy who would be my husband
Lived six blocks away,
And I didn’t know him. Where
I lived, and where he lived,
And where we live now, you
Can see the bay apartments
And the crumbling prewar pier
And wharves—there, unused,
Poems 1959-2009 Page 31