by Stanley Moss
2
Chief Petty Officer Young told us
the Captain expected 30% casualties.
It didn’t turn out that way,
except among my boyhood friends—
the percentage was higher.
I was decorated face and chest
by the red and white ribbons of Jerry’s brains.
Arthur lost a leg. Danny the pianist
had his spine made into an accordion.
I’m told at Auschwitz a bowl of soup
shared by four was “paradise.”
God had them on a leash,
or was it the other way around.
Truth is not factual,
has pockets, saves words like money,
half truths small change, wherewithal.
A commandment or useful proverb:
Thou shalt send your kids to war,
you will live longer.
In Tuscany, I visited a villa, ancient vineyards
that were also a cattle and pig farm. The Count complained,
“Nazis stole my Renaissance locks and keys.”
I was shown 19th Century wine presses,
ladies dancing on Montepulciano grapes,
two dogs “not allowed in the house.”
There were stalls where pigs were kept.
I didn’t say to my host: Pigs are highly intelligent,
clean, sweet as dogs in the house,
they have beautiful memories, grunt appreciations.
It’s human pigs that have made swine of them.
To kill a pig is easier than killing a child.
God knows I haven’t had a ham and cheese sandwich
for years. I’m a volunteer in two armies:
Salvation and Damnation.
—2018
INSOMNIA
I was sleepless and afraid to sleep.
What was was, what is is. I’ve known
the search for love so dire, so desperate
I met a lover who fucked, he said,
the cavity of a raw chicken, plucked,
he could not tell if it was hen, or metaphor.
I was Seaman Third Class in the US Navy,
my shipmate, surname “Love,” asked me to write
a letter to his girlfriend in popular songs.
I wrote, “I’ll see you in apple blossom time.”
Killed, his head was bloody applesauce.
He did not die for a single thought, or metaphor.
His cause: the right to love and pub crawl
along the old Bowery under the elevated trains,
drunk, the right to stroll, fall, get up.
He protected the rights of others
to cross-dress on the Way of the Cross.
A single ant carries a heavy burden
to an anthill, fragment of a breadcrumb.
Will a blind ant be given equal justice by God
with Johann Sebastian Bach playing his Fugues
and Preludes in brick Lutheran churches?
The wish to give and receive is necessary
as breathing in and breathing out.
Heart beats, regular and irregular, are heaven sent.
My heart beat is allegro staccato,
whereas my kidney and liver are agnostic.
Friends of my kidney, death is justice.
Are there studies, studios, fields and factories,
working places in paradise?
* * *
I’ve also tried to oversleep history.
Around the corner, with artificial organs,
our lives may be long as we choose.
Still we shall succumb because our mechanics
and melancholy need something like grease, not blood.
Perhaps otherwise, multilingual death comes
when metaphor and reality come together.
Old hearts have a purpose, a continuing need
to hold reality and justice in a single thought.
May there still be Sundays of life.
—2018
I CHOOSE
I choose to write a poem
when my left ankle’s broken, purple,
and my right ankle’s swollen blue,
both knees banged, twice their usual size,
both my long legs “killing me,”
while a famous angel is really killing me.
I separate physical pain from the real thing—
the real thing, the soul usually dies
before the body. My soul is dancing,
welcoming spring in the garden
on a beautiful June morning,
ready to live forever.
—2018
POSTAMBLE
Free and equal,
I don’t write fiction, a dream book, a novel
with a pen and shovel,
I write a poem about what I do not know
because I want to know.
It’s time I let friends and grandchildren know
I stole a branch of laurel from the Delphic Oracle.
I push myself out of my way.
My poem may be something like
a walk in the forest, a serpent’s strike,
the 3rd of May, or come what may.
About grammar I’ve nothing to say,
a shepherd knows
a verb’s not a noun in sheep’s clothing.
In my soul’s playground, today I wrestle
in blue skies with clouds of meaning, loathing
the down to earth. I hear a sparrow’s love call
in a noisy city – a sweeter call
deep in the woods, a love call without words.
Lord, I want to understand the languages of birds.
—2018
WATER MUSIC
David told me that years ago I said:
“Fishing a Canadian lake is Mozart,
ocean fishing is Wagner.” Now I think
in a storm, the Saint Lawrence River
is Götterdämmerung, some streams
trill Scarlatti, run into head waters,
where I have fished for Gluck,
Debussy, Stravinsky, Shostakovich.
I caught nothing. I still keep fishing
in musical waters: I caught a perch
in a Chinese Lake that was Puccini,
looked exactly like a perch
from the Ashokan Reservoir.
I trapped crustaceans in the River Thames, Purcell—
his flowing theater and sacred music,
not far from Devil’s Acre. A little north,
at Oxfordshire where the Thames (Purcell)
becomes Thomas Tallis, I caught rainbow trout,
Salve Intemerata Sanctus et Benedictus.
***
Missa Solemnis from Bach to Weber
is like fishing for a “manager fish”
in the Caribbean, where slaves had to save
the best fish for their manager.
Take the Dead Sea, lowest point on earth,
lowering every year—where there’s no music
or fish in the sea’s murderous salt,
there are bacteria colonies near shore.
Still a diver in full salty gear told me he’s heard
someone or something practicing
bubbling-bassoon-scales at sea bottom,
“clown of the orchestra,” bassoon.
The Dead Sea Scrolls may be read
basso profondo, or by castrati
in their lost art. Since we first became human,
when we fished, and hunted, there was music,
love songs much like a leopard’s purring,
hands clapped to dance, heel and toe percussions;
mamas hummed wordless music that became lullabies.
Visiting fisherman, I quickstepped barefoot
over sharp Dead Sea stones to swim,
Goddamn, I cut my feet,
but the tough bare-footed Israeli I swam with
stepped and danced on
the stones
as if he were in a make believe ballroom.
I asked him with a smile,
“Do you think your feet might not be Jewish—”
a poet soldier, he didn’t like my joke.
***
I remember how friends swim,
and those who cannot swim,
original and conventional swimmers.
They carried invisible musical instruments.
No beach umbrellas. I netted crawdads
near New Orleans, where the Mississippi
became Bunk Johnson, Louis Nelson Delisle,
Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, the Hot 8,
depending on Ole Miss’s mood.
***
Traveller, not Robert E. Lee’s horse,
I was an underwater swimmer in Copland’s Hudson
without sheet music, mask, or snorkel.
I would go down 30 feet, hear the music
of cold water in my ears. Was it Bernstein’s Candide?
I heard cadenzas, never a full orchestra.
I dived with my dog Sancho after rocks
into a brook, the Bushkill, John Cage—
a dog-man game we both loved.
If Sancho was hunting in the woods,
I didn’t have to whistle to call him,
I played opera on a phonograph and he’d come
swimming across the John Cage Bushkill
from the often twelve-toned wilderness
of Schönberg, where Arnold was
the Rondout Reservoir, full of Sprech Musik,
between singing and speaking,
a Pierrot Lunaire waterfall. Sancho would run
through water music in the Dorian mode,
somewhere between universal Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral—
depending on the season. From a glen,
I saw Satie trickle, refusing to be grand.
I heard Berg and Bartok were flooding in Vienna.
Beauty, I bet my life, is not an entertainment,
it ennobles—contrast, not conflict,
F means forte, “loud,” not war. Yes, there is
reiteration, overtones, dissonance, harmony
vs counterpoint. Two melodic lines may go together.
Still there are those who prefer a person’s body
on many occasions to his or her art.
—2018
PASTURE
I will never be put out to pasture.
My old horses are put out to pasture,
some old horses are sold for dog food,
I feed dogs, share my food with them.
I might be meat for grizzlies if I stumble
into a nest of cubs. I have some memory
of seamen starving in a dory, drawing lots,
the loser: human steaks.
I will never be put out to pasture
long as I have something to say about it.
When I feed my opera-loving donkeys,
they bray: We prefer you stay inside our fence.
I live in the country, that compared
to the city, where I lived as a child,
is “out to pasture.” Some have drunk
to others only with their eyes.
I drink and graze on Irish daisies that grow
in the countryside, and steel-girdled
cemented cities with my eyes. I want
all things in nature to ride my back.
The oceans are lighter than mountains,
I don’t rear up, buck them off,
I am happy with my burden. Old horse,
I do not want to die fallen in a stall,
it’s better outside, unhitched, reins dangling,
trying to get up on my own four legs.
Now I am just a man, not a metaphor.
I say to myself: Here I am.
I see a ram, horns caught in a thicket—
I free the ram, my hands bleed from thorns.
I do not believe sacrifice is a good cause.
I make a fire that warms me, it’s not a burnt offering,
I have no favorite son.
I will not lay a hand on anyone,
except to comfort her or him.
I am grateful I can rest a while
in the kindness of green and rocky pastures.
—2018
Other Books by Stanley Moss
Almost Complete Poems, Seven Stories Press, Carcanet Press Ltd.
It's About Time, Hopewell Press, Carcanet Press Ltd.
No Tear is Commonplace, Carcanet Press Ltd.
God Breaketh Not All Men's Hearts Alike, Seven Stories Press
Rejoicing, Carcanet Press Ltd., Anvil Press Poetry Ltd.
Songs of Imperfection, Carcanet Press Ltd., Anvil Press Poetry Ltd.
A History of Color, Seven Stories Press
Asleep in the Garden, Seven Stories Press, Carcanet Press Ltd., Anvil Press Poetry Ltd.
The Intelligence of Clouds, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Carcanet Press Ltd., Anvil Press Poetry Ltd.,
Skull of Adam, Horizon Press, Carcanet Press Ltd., Anvil Press Poetry Ltd.
The Wrong Angel, Macmillan, Carcanet Press Ltd., Anvil Press Poetry Ltd.
Gedichte, translated by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hanser
Selected Poems, translated by Fu Hao, ChongQing University Press
Ya Era Hora, translated by Valerie Mejer