Poems 1959-2009 (38 page)

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.”

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

(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.

 

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