Poems 1959-2009

by Frederick Seidel

  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,