Poemunity — your poem community

Going down the escalator of the subway, I glanced across and saw on the escalator's partner rising up someone who looked a bit like you but with hair not so soft and clean and warm as yours brushing against mine on those rare occasions when inadvertently our foreheads neared, making me wish it to stay. We were not physical lovers and never could have been. But we were close. Moved three states away, married happily or not, you are now only a person I may hope to meet momentarily, and not really then: merely in my mind, because of what I chance to see. But I am not unhappy about this or think that I am not. Because of your hair. Because of your beautiful hair.

for my grandmother, Theresa Frank Some slow evenings when the light hangs late and stubborn in the sky, gives itself up to darkness slowly and deliberately, slow cloud after slow cloud, slowness enters me like something familiar, and it feels like going home. It’s all there in the disappearing light: all the evenings of slow sky and slow loving, slow boats on sluggish bayous; the thick-middled trees with the slow-sounding names—oak, mimosa, pecan, magnolia; the slow tree sap that sticks in your hair when you lie with the trees; and the maple syrup and pancakes and grits, the butter melting slowly into and down the sides like sweat between breasts of sloe-eyed strippers; and the slow-throated blues that floats over the city like fog; and the weeping, the willows, the cut onions, the cayenne, the slow-cooking beans with marrow-thick gravy; and all the mint juleps drunk so slowly on all the slow southern porches, the bourbon and sugar and mint going down warm and brown, syrup and slow; and all the ice cubes melting in all the iced teas, all the slow-faced people sitting in all the slowly rocking rockers; and the crabs and the shrimp and crawfish, the hard shells slowly and deliberately and lovingly removed, the delicate flesh slowly sucked out of heads and legs and tails; and the slow lips that eat and drink and love and speak that slow luxurious language, savoring each word like a long-missed lover; and the slow-moving nuns, the black habits dragging the swollen ground; and the slow river that cradles it all, and the chicory coffee that cuts through it all, slow-boiled and black as dirt; and the slow dreams and the slow-healing wounds and the slow smoke of it all slipping out, ballooning into the sky—slow, deliberate, and magnificent.

—for J.R. More than a third of a century later, meeting for the first time in almost all those years, we face each other’s still somewhat familiar faces across a table in a California restaurant, and wonder why we did it, why we suddenly said that night in July in Greenwich Village “Let’s go to Connecticut,” and got on a train and ended up at midnight in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, holding hands on an empty road that wound past serious grown-up sleeping houses .... Well, I was fifteen, you were nearly twenty-one, we were experimentally “in love,” and I guess it must have seemed like “something to do”—better than Remo anyway, or the coffee houses, or the Eighth Street Bookstore, even, in that scratchy heat, better than Jones Beach: the long low sober train boring into a wall of black, the alien townships spurting past on either side (nothing very built up then), each with its deserted, brilliant platform malting for the next day’s passengers, the real people who really needed to ride that train. How cindery the windows were, and spooky with moths outside the glamorous club car where we sat with sodas on itchy plush reclining seats! And how the crickets simmered where we got out, dizzy on 7UP! Remember the hedges—lilac, honeysuckle— along the way, as we walked toward we didn’t know where? We kissed a little under one, tasting salt and 7UP on each other, not sure what next or where, then peered at the shadows on lawn after lawn, the dim bulk of chimneys, shapes of shutters, here a trike, there a plastic pool, and couples snoring, mysterious, behind those tall white walls, until we got embarrassed, still not sure what next, retraced our steps, boarded another train, and were hurried back to where we came from, feeling like voyeurs, like trespassers.

1. A canvas with less turpentine, more hard edges, less bleeding, that was good for beauty, Frankenthaler in Art News in the dining car crammed with parkas and laptops micro-waved cellophane, plastic plates and canvas bags, and the valley under fog as the cows disappeared and when the green came back into view I could see the SUVs floating on the Thruway, the cows oblivious to the revved engines of trucks. The river glistened all the way to Albany, and I could see flags on Baptist churches and resurrection trailers, “God Bless America” on pick-ups— “United We Stand” laminated to billboards as the fog settled then lifted, and when I woke a flag the size of a football field hung from the gray tower of the GW, where the tractor-trailers jammed beneath its hem as something sifted down on the silver-plated Hudson. And then the lights went out. 2. The faces on 7th Avenue blurred in the chaos of vendors and liberty scarves, freedom ties, glowing plastic torches, dollars and polyester— and inside Macy ’ s I was hit by cool air as “Stars and Stripes Forever” floated down from women's fashions into the quiet aisles of Aramis and silk scarves. I wanted to buy the Frankenthaler, a modest, early print, minimal, monochromatic; surface and perspective in dialogue; on 24th off 10th—the gallery still smelled like wood and plaster— but I didn't stop, and when the train reached the Stock Exchange the Yom Kippur streets were quiet, and the bronze statue of Washington was camouflaged by national guard. I was walking my old mail route now like a drunk knocking into people, almost hit by a cab until the roped-off streets cut me at the arm. At Broadway and Liberty the fences wound around the bursts of dust rising over the cranes and bulldozers, over the punched-out windows— I stared through a piece of rusted grid that stood like a gate to the crystal river. I was sweating in my sweatshirt now, the hood filling with soot, as I watched with others drinking Cokes and eating their pizza of disbelief. Zero began with the Sumerians who made circles with hollow reeds in wet clay and baked them for  posterity. At Broadway and Liberty. At 20 floors charred and standing. At miasma people weeping. Anna's Nail Salon, Daikichi Sushi, the vacant shops, stripped clean in the graffiti of dust-coated windows. Something blasted from a boom box in a music store, something, in the ineffable clips of light, disappeared over the river.

After the murder, I called a meeting to see if we were happy. I declared I was not — I said I liked the man we shot. You all disagreed with this. I asked if you knew him, his wife, none of you did. “Kill me, then,” I said. You all stared at me. “Why, Bernard? Of course we won’t.” “Why not?” I said. “He was a good man, a better man than me. And look at what I’ve brought you — rubbish, dodgy tales, dross.” “Easy to dismiss that,” you said. “We appreciated it all. And you wandered the wild paths to bring it back to us — your songs, your legends, magic stories, your gold.” I thanked you, but shook my head. The good man was dead. I didn’t care what I’d brought you. I needed to go. I packed up my sagas, my song lyrics, my alchemy potions, my gold, and I disappeared.

1. My son said Daddy are there words for everything? I said You mean the space between The clouds? “Yes!” “No!” Like those who love to think one word will take care of Maupassant’s tree and his landlady. But it turns out you will get no further than the words that reach and do not touch. X uses a hard word one per poem like throwing a true diamond sale or throwing a Ruby on a Corten steel table, a little gold in cardboard. There is a country where They make their own cardboard. General words the French love, a thousand eyes but only one Kaleidoscope. Even Merleau-Ponty not specific enough (said Meyer) like very pretty exit signs Without numbers. Paul Valéry said the world was made out of nothing and sometimes a bit of that Nothing shines through. No grin, no cat. But I think: The world was made of gold, and every once in a while Some of that gold shines through. You. They say it doesn’t matter that you can’t read the Book of Splendor in Aramaic. “Just leave it in your house.” Amazing debilitating magic at the door! If there were the right word for everything, each young philosopher Could dream without sleeping. Using the same ruler and we’d all Have the same measures and ladders without rungs, with regular risers. Music without words: it does a good job of caring about you, X-ray of thought the architect wanted. X-ray for the lovers— I always loved to climb that ladder without rungs, I collect them. I fight over them, I forgive My antagonist. Even the wild ladder without tongues. Even the literal is a metaphor. This is not nothing says the boy to the teacher who could care less. Multeity. And if I made up a word Would it survive like a quark of strangeness? Depends on which dictionary you’re using, I told The president of that company. And if you made it up, like a rare country? I loved you in the near distance like a word and rare cool blood. What was I thinking? “You actually think?” 2. family ways My old dead father put it to me Women of an “intimate” age Reconciled all separation He sung it out Oh family ways, ah family ways The song contained a pregnant pause pun praise Patiently he observed, as the rat jumped out Patient in music, patient in clay Patient in love and in death, a satisfied ghost

Even in fortunate times, The nectar is spiked with woe. Gods are incorrigibly Capricious, and the needy Beg in Nineveh or sleep In paper-gusting plazas Of the New World’s shopping malls. Meantime, the tyrant battens On conquest, while advisers, Angling for preferment, seek Expedient paths. Heartbroken, The faithful advocate looks Back on cities of the plain And trudges into exile. And if any era thrives, It’s only because, somewhere, In a plane tree’s shade, friends sketch The dust with theorems and proofs, Or because, instinctively, A man puts his arm around The shoulder of grief and walks It (for an hour or an age) Through all its tears and telling.

is thought to be a confession, won by endless torture, but which our interrogators must hate to record—all those old code names, dates, the standard narrative of sandpaper throats, even its remorse, fall ignored. Far away, a late (not lost) messenger stares, struck by window bargains or is it the gift of a sudden solicitude: is she going to lift up her shadow’s weight, shift hers onto it? She knows who bears whom. In that momentary museum where memory occurs more accrue of those torturers’ pincers than lessened fingernails, eyes teased to a pulp, we beg for closeups.Ormolus, objets d’art! A satyr drains an hourglass with one gulp.

I wake up with a toothache, think Ishouldwrite about a toothache, make it somehow worthwhile. It's got everything: intimacy, decay, how the body's busy, night and day, doing you in. One of the hundreds of jumpers' corpses pulled from the bay had a note in its pocket saying No reason at all except I have a toothache. Josey's grandfather shot himself after his fifth sinus operation failed. Josey says Empty Nose Syndrome and I get confused— how can hollows be hollowed? But then I go to emptynosesyndrome.org, cup my poor nose in horror, grateful for all I take for granted, can't see. Golden Gate Hank hates his nickname. If you wanted to be called Serenity Hank, Ken tells him,you shouldn't have jumped off the fucking bridge. The ones that live all say they changed their minds in the four seconds before they hit, tried to land feet first and managed it. Ken says don't tell people I think every day of how I wouldn't kill myself, they get the wrong idea. I think every day of how I'd save myself, save Josey: stab the bad guy, fall feet first, punch the Great White in his eyeball, play dead in the bullet-ridden mass grave. From the back seat of the Suburban, I heard my mother say to my father Driving across a high bridge always makes me want to jump. You might live: A seventeen year old boy hit feet first, swam to shore and walked for help, saying his back was killing him. Another guy realized he was alive and underwater, felt something brushing his broken legs.Great, now I get eaten by a shark, he thought. It happens. But this was a seal, circling, apparently the only thing that was keeping me alive, and you can not tell me that wasn't God, because that's what I believe, and that's what I'll believe until the day I die.

On Christmas Day, Kathleen and I propel a raft with plastic spoons through the hissing fur of surf, stirring as we go an Alka-Seltzer sun. We pass Bolinas-Stinson School, the fire house, and Smiley's dive; extinguished geodesic domes along the mesa road where Cream Saroyan lives. With a telescope, my sister spies the erstwhile chemist of Argonne who left his post to polish glass. As penance, he engraves a glyph of hydrogen on the blank face of every cliff from Monterey to Inverness. Beside us, cormorants describe the chop in grunts, then plunge through thirty feet of grease. I try to hold my breath as long and cheat or fail. As evening comes we pass the final spit of land. Once more around the Horn and then we'll make for home.