Before we could see that far.
One year, a new police
Patrol boat docked there, later
A small yawl. But the red iron
Pier understructure, resoldered
And buttressed, rusted and fell through
That year, and no one walks there.
2.
There’s a small park near the wharves,
And a playground—
But no lovers, never children.
A few old folks sunned there.
Some see the gangs, some hear.
On summer vacations from Ann Arbor
We used to walk there.
The one water fountain
Was a lush affair
Between two angels, fat as Paradise,
Nubile, and male and female,
Holding winged hands around
A base of rose stone,
While from heaven above, an aquiline
Brass bird, a green dove,
Gargled up, it seemed,
All the city’s water,
Year after year.
It was never turned off,
And stood a foot deep
In pond-green watery refuse,
And was never used.
We’d thought of getting married there.
3.
The warped, smutted kitchen window
Ripples the blue fume of November
Over the shore apartments and the wharves.
The window wavers in the oven’s heat.
The street flows like lava, and the playground.
My baby stirs. Time to eat for it.
Cuddled in me—lovely! It will
Die in me, I know it will.
My child is breathing in my life,
Its heart is pressing on my heart.
You won’t be here if you die on me
Before I have your child.
It’s why I’m here.
To spoon the drugs up to your lips,
Be near your sleep,
Make you live an extra week.
What we have to bear
Will take two months, no more.
It can’t feel you at all:
It rots the stitches and the lymph strings,
And gums you … dressing;
You go down rich, changed, sea-green
As tomalley. Cancer.
Balls of your groin, heart of your heart.
I feel you. The oven bell
Dings, and you call—the front door bell;
And in the hall, Papa and your mother
Gabble about our unborn daughter or son.
A perfect bird. Fatty sweat
Gleams on its bursting goosepimpled breast.
A YEAR ABROAD
(In A.D. 9 Q. Varus marched three legions into an ambush in Teutoburg Forest. “From ancient times onward the circumstances surrounding the end of Roman rule in Germany have been an occasion for prejudice and rhetoric. Varus was made the scapegoat for the miscalculations of Roman policy; the contrast between the inertia or benevolence of Varus and the energy or perfidy of Arminius, between the Roman governor and the native prince, was drawn in vivid colours, and artfully employed to personify the opposition between civilization and freedom.”)
Holding his breath, he watched the whole wing flex
And flex and saw the bouncing jet pods stream
With condensation as they plowed through clouds.
He saw the stewardess back down the aisle
Smiling at seat belts. His lap was headlines—now
Another Electra had burst in two and still
No planes were grounded. Down there somewhere crowds
Hushed in the bars: the un-trust-busted Yankees
Were squeezing a World Series in the till—
Millions puffed and stared, the beer suds spilled.
The diplomatic pilot dipped a wing,
Lufthansa’s bow to the United States …
His Volkswagen was waiting. If he drove
On through the night, by dawn he could salute
The Arch of Titus with his German plates.
Cologne he knew—Jew-baiting mothers who
Just couldn’t get enough and chewed their hair.
Roman Agrippina had been born there.
Nineteen and weeping for perfection, he’d
Been lost each morning. He would wake with a start
Pacing along a lot that faced the Dom.
Powdered bricks had made the ground lip-red,
Electric bells bonged in the shaved-off belfry.
He’d watch the pigeons rise and settle, rise
And settle, gobbling, then he’d go buy bread.
Cologne to Wolfsburg for the People’s Car,
Through Lippe, Saltus Teutoburgiensis.
Though it was Varus who when Herod died
Crunched up Judaea, from Teutoburg Forest he
Would bear the Eagles of Varus back to Rome:
History’s straight-man, ambushed by his aide,
His trusted German, into suicide,
Bald, civilized, delicious—never praised,
But chosen by Augustus. Rome gawked, amazed …
The NATO general salutes the prizes.
His Holiness stops at et credo, and rises
To touch the braid and tatters. Washington
And Bonn have flown the long-lost Eagles home.
The place is crushed! the packed, cowed faces hushed,
Underdeveloped stomachs aching to cheer.
He heard the engines screaming for more air.
He pushed and drifted—waking smelled like steam.
Below him were the blank and linked-up roofs
Of suburbs … showers, crematoria …
The john tiles where his father’s soft eyes worked
The crossword puzzle jackpots, poetry
Of Jews, ten thousand dollars for first prize.
Red bullets to the brain, the Seconal …
The world was turning into dawn, just as
The jet plane’s sixteen landing wheels set down.
“THE BEAST IS IN CHAINS”
Waving News of the World, the other customer
Whines in his bib with laughter:
“‘The Nazi bombers still
Drop stink-bombs through the window,
But lobotomized now, she doesn’t mind the smell!’”
The barber grabs me by the nose;
The blade flashes around my lips.
Leaving the Ritz, I watch the sun
Volley between the windows of the place Vendôme;
The column points the hour. My Le Monde
Is covered with bombs
Stuck like gum to café chairs and station lockers
Exploding in Paris, Oran, Le Havre.
I sit down in the Tuileries.
Kennedy banquet at Versailles.
A Russian, Gagarin, in space.
No one is here—a day
As bleak as Boston, despite the sun. I remember
My father saying, “What should we do?”
I was fifteen, my mother forty-three.
“This will be our decision.”
Tumbling gold whorls of hair shaved back for the incision;
The skin, as always, Madonna-smooth,
Without a care, below the bandages;
Greener than ever, her eyes are open—
“How are you?” she asks, “how are you?”
And starts to smile, and is wheeled past.
My father’s grief-stunned eyes clung to his face like starfish.
I recross the street: the zoot-suited Arab
Flashes his butter-blond Rubenses,
In black and white, sold by the pack,
As two more Black Marias
Bray through the rue de Rivoli
Toward place de la Concorde.
The column’s shadow points the hour.
The plans for the place Vendôme
Called for a statue less than ha
lf its height.
Twelve hundred cannons seized at Austerlitz
Napoleon melted and wrapped around the stone
In a spiral of bronze. On the top he sits,
Surveying the City of Light,
Weighing the American flags brought out,
Those enormous banners, with outsize stars,
Stripes brighter than life, worth thousands of dollars.
They wave magnificence! Guarding the president,
There’ll be the horsemen of the Garde républicaine!
Golden helmets afire, on chestnut stallions!
The West has bombed and bombed. Absinthe
Is now on Thorazine, the breaker of obsessions.
SPRING
1.
Itching from Kotex pads, from green, polluted perch,
The Seine scratches itself lovingly along the quais—
Itching from the new spring!
Hot prickly yellow wool covers the evening.
The Eiffel Tower is full of hot air, full to bursting
Hearing the countdown
Start and stop again, then again.
Brains, thoughts swell,
Like bulls snorting out
Passionate red roses from black nostrils.
While passersby’s eyes lock with theirs in various grips,
Young Americans
Are swigging French beer on benches by the river.
He is there. This is Lucifer’s palace
For his angels’ vices. At midnight, when Paris
Looks at her face in the mirror, she sees a buttocks,
And straps on a device. Green
Is rumbling. Like a cat’s sharpening claws,
The cracks in the sidewalks
Stretch out and dig in.
2.
All startling legs and eventful spirit—
Corsaged handlebar, spring straw hat—
Bicycling on the flat through the snow
To Sever Hall, to recite her Sappho.
On hair like Hera’s, black swansdown,
She wore white ribbons freshly ironed.
Unmarriageable Minoan eyes,
All intuition, delicately lidded.
The way she walked,
You’d have thought her body talked.
Those Harvard years
His ego hovered like a hummingbird,
Wingless, songless—halfway
Between his knees and shoulders.
Perhaps it wanted to embrace the universe.
Closing his eyes to caress
This girl or that, he saw stars.
Time the leukotome!
Softly slicing
The frontal lobes. That girl,
Bashed in by his love,
Happily married now … ?
He tries to remember what was happening:
The taste of zinc—the sight, without the sound,
Of thousands of hands clapping.
The empty beer bottle slaps the water
And sinks, hiccuping whitecaps.
3.
Along the row of square, snow-white igloos
The white chestnut tree blossom clusters
Sift through each other
In the damp light and few breaths of air
Like the slow shuffling of a tambourine.
Even ugly new buildings here are rare.
Compared to French windows, these are loopholes.
The tight, washed rooms are small enough for nuns—
Small for maid’s rooms! There are no closets.
Room after room is stained and pervaded
By traditionally ugly, self-absorbed,
Talmudic-brown armoires.
One shelf of each supports one kepi, at least—
A son’s or father’s—a beaked pillbox
Banded with gold or silver, police or army,
To keep the armoire company
With the nineteenth, the last French century.
There are no shutters. Everywhere,
Even just across the street,
Faded shutters are drawn.
Orange rungs climb the Persian carpets,
Scale sujets religieux and mount the sideboards.
The family, if it’s home, is in the bedrooms.
The maid has turned the kitchen light out, it is so hot.
She cuts up cucumbers with the butcher knife
In thick, crude slices, a folded soaked zero
Under each arm, her neck shining.
Her old buttocks and vagina contract.
She has a vicious, weakly mind—
Sympathized with, it comes off on your hands.
Or is it a mind too generous, too deep for her,
Always in the clouds, straining to rain?
Outside, he is passing by,
His eyes on the ground, on his way home.
4.
Greeting the opening door,
Drafts dash around the room,
Like a terrier sprinting in circles
Around its home-from-work owner.
The lampshades bow like tutus.
Fresh air—but freshened where?
The lace curtains billow like the Graces’ nightgowns,
Then split and kick the cancan—
Higher! Nearer—
No, farther away, farther:
The click of heels.
The air has stopped, stands still.
Across the way, a light goes on and off,
But a girl with a chiffon scarf
Was standing by the window.
Not a cloud, not a thought of rain.
The great night is pacing the slot above the street,
And down into the street, back and forth …
Like Hamlet sweltering in velvet Elizabethan mourning.
His head is in the sheer, temperatureless stratosphere;
His heart is smothering.
The dark is clear.
Still, some of his thoughts connect,
And are stars.
AMERICANS IN ROME
Below the window wine-washed Rome
Is drying and the concrete lane
Weaves in the rose direction home
Southwestward. I’ll take her off to Ischia and Spain
And marry her, and make her love
Her rashness. Then we pause—we stay where they smile clove
And garlic in the earthy air. We’ll stay,
We’ll mend the bedsheets when they fray
Ourselves, and seize the hours and work
Them into full-lipped ovened clay
Vessels of content. Her shy, bare fingers jerk
The satin ribbons and unbox
My saved-up present to her, a snakeskin purse which locks
Inside it the love poem I want to read.
“Only I don’t intend to plead
With you to listen. Don’t I know
The Fathers say I’ll never lead
You to the altar? Let them go—and even so,
You love them, don’t you? And you dare
Not love me just for wanting you alone? Then swear
You couldn’t love the others and be true
To me—swear something or we’re through.”
But that’s not all. You were so shy
A girl, a child. Where is she? You
Have lost her here. How can I convalesce what I
Corrupted when infection struts
Around this city whose street lights are sidewalk sluts?
She sits there glowering at the shadow-moths
Her thumbs twiddle around the oilcloths
Soiling the walls. The curtain’s sleeves
Of mellow vespertine blue sloths
Of air are all my twenty-two years of life receives
From life, besides a wobbly bed
And tabletop and chairs. The poor are richer dead …
Yet my starved spider dangling from the wall,
My seeing-eye, wants nothing at all
Except
what gives itself away
By moving, and only wants what’s small
Enough to count as riches. Where’s the charm to lay
Between our pillows? It’s not grace,
Not the unspoken tenderness—or in the place
Of tenderness a tepidarium.
You venture so much and you come
To loathe life’s honey on your hands—
And once love worked like a green thumb
In the hot weather. And she longed for Rome. Rome stands
For hope—pocked, wired, original,
Electric as a honeycomb or a staked skull.
And all those blue-eyed souls blinded by thorns,
All the poor souls loving suborns
And scales down to the irony
Of middle age, can kiss the corns
Of gold from Peter’s toe, can give to piety
Their ego, for amnesia.
That jet plane’s vapor trail is time’s aphasia
Coiled over St. Peter’s—but that tail will crack
The silence. Then it all comes back:
The glaring doorway and the door
Open, her husband—and the black
Missal the priest held: “Paid? She’s paid? And you’re some whore?”
There is no God. They taught her wrong,
The smooth-faced Sisters. Depilation kept them strong,
But lessons can’t fit Spellman’s corpulence
Through the bright groove the penitents’
Blue knees carved to an altar rail
In stone Trastevere, where rents
Split with indulgences, where love hangs on its nail.
I turn the light out … I am sure
Of nothing—just the moon, brassiered and soap-sleek, pure
Perfumed Spellman, stinking with allure.
THE WALK THERE
As he approaches each tree goes on,
And the girls one by one
Glance down at their blouses. A nun,
Then six or seven, hop in
A cream station wagon,
White-beaked blackbirds baked in a pie.
In his mind is
The lid of an eye
The dark dilated closing behind him.
Levy. Arched eyebrows and shadowed
Moist eyes. An El Greco. Swart, slim.
He’s late to her. He thinks of her, waiting,
Limb by limb.
Her defenselessness and childlike trust!
Smiling to be combed out
And parted—and her lust
Touching the comb like a lyre.
To have been told by her not to trust her!
And he distrusts her.
And everywhere he sees
Poems 1959-2009 Page 32