209 Nostalgia poems

(Oakland) Make it the place it was then, so full it split vision to live there in winter so late & wet abundance toppled toward awful—birds of paradise a profusion the ripe colors of anodized metal; in gutters umbrellas smashed like pigeons, bent ribs bright among black slack fluttering; camellias’ pink imagoes dropping into water & rotting, sweet stink— & did not stop : the inundated eye, over- populous urban eye, the whole place, to look at it, was a footprint in January : everywhere cloudy water rising to fill in the outlines, & meanwhile indoors differed by degree alone : without love, loosed from God, there were lovers & touch rushing in to redraw your boundaries constantly because it was a tune you kept getting wrong, the refrain of what it meant to live alone, months of that and then . sudden summer, sheer release, streets all cigarettes & sashay, balls-out tube tops, low-riders & belly fat, the girls on the block all like Oh no she didn’t, and girl, she did, she was mad skills with press-ons & a cell phone telling him where to stick it, a kid on her hip, just like that, summer, sheer beauty & lip gloss that smelled like peaches, & you going to the store for whiskey & condoms like everyone else on a hot, long afternoon so long & hot it would just be sunburn to walk anywhere if it weren’t also a pleasure, thoughtless & shiftless & horny & drunk, just someone thinking summer wasn’t up to anything deep, & lo there he was, his punk ass pink as a Viking in a tight wifebeater & lingering by the public pool, drinking beer so sly it didn’t look illegal, & he wasn’t a good idea but did you have a light? & it seemed the whole summer went like that, taking fire out of your pocket & giving it away, a ditty you could whistle it was so cliché, like the numbers they gave you after & you never called, the number of swollen nodes of the kissing colds you got & later the number to call to get tested, the number of the bus to the clinic, the number they gave you when they asked you to wait, the number of questions asked, number of partners, number of risks, number of previous tests, the number of pricks —one—to draw the blood, the number of minutes you waited before results, & then you decided you had to get the tune right, the how to live it so it doesn’t kill you, to take a number & wait in the long line of the city’s bankrupt humanism like the bus that never comes no matter how long you wait, & the grocery bag breaking, & if you were going to sing that one, the one that sounds like all I got is bruised tomatoes, broken glass & dirty bread & no one waiting at home, would you . start with genius, as in, the spirit of a place?, &small, as in of the back, wet in heat & the urge to touch him there, skin just visible between his jeans & t-shirt, to see if he’s sweating, to see if he feels what you feel?, & if he does, is that all the spirit the place will give, a small thing shared, just a phrase, not a whole song, but something to build on?, & if it isn’t bread & if it sure ain’t tomatoes it isn’t empty, is it, like the signage you walk by that fronts the Lakeside Church of Practical Christianity, hawking a knowledge of God so modest it seems trivial?, & it isn’t ever, is it, the how to live it so it doesn’t kill you, the where to touch it, the when will genius sing your name so it sounds like a place you can live?

Beside the highway, the Giant Slide with its rusty undulations lifts out of the weeds. It hasn’t been used for a generation. The ticket booth tilts to that side where the nickels shifted over the years. A chain link fence keeps out the children and drunks. Blue morning glories climb halfway up the stairs, bright clusters of laughter. Call it a passing fancy, this slide that nobody slides down now. Those screams have all gone east on a wind that will never stop blowing down from the Rockies and over the plains, where things catch on for a little while, bright leaves in a fence, and then are gone.

If your bearded friend helps you catch the trout barehanded in the pool of the dream and you carry it in his pail barefoot up the rocky stream to the playhouse where he fries it in his pan; if you snip the dill for the carrots and then swim until your lips are bluer than the lake where will it take you? Not anywhere as pure and primal as these sunstruck days sistered by starstruck nights. Don’t cloud the drowning brightness of your eyes, don’t answer my asking look with anything but the truth, don’t spill the fresh-picked raspberries on the car seat and stain your shirt with indelible blood. Or spill them, darling. How else will you know the color of crushed time; how else will you feel what it is to change and remember, to lose and absorb this summer inside you, xylem and phloem of your leafy future already starting to spread its shade above us?

We have been cruising, half a block at a time, my wife, my two children, all morning, and I have been pointing out unhurriedly and with some feeling places of consequence, sacred places, backyards, lush fields, garages, alleyways. “There,” I say, “by this big cottonwood, That’s where I dropped the fly ball, 1959.” “And in 1961,” I say, “at this very corner, Barry Sapolsky tripped me up with his gym bag.” My son has fallen asleep, my daughter has been nodding “yes” indiscriminately for the last half hour, and my wife has the frozen, wide-eyed look of the undead. “Maybe lunch,” I say, though I’m making now my fourth approach to Curtin Jr. High School, yellow-bricked, large-windowed, gothic, where Frank Marone preyed on our terror once and Janice Lehman walked in beauty. “Salute, everyone,” I say, “salute,” bringing my hand up to my brow as we pass the gilded entrance, “This is where things of importance happened,” and I am pulling out from under the car seat a photo album of old school pictures, “Page 8,” I say, “Fred Decker, John Carlson by the bike rack, Mr. Burkett … ,” and driving on, following the invisible map before my eyes. Now we are drifting toward my boyhood house and I am showing my wife trellised porches, bike routes, more than she’d care to see; “Why this longing?” she says, “What about now, the kids, our lives together, lunch, me?” I give her a kiss and turn right on Cherry and there in front of our eyes, barely changed, is the house where all my memories converge. “Look at the windows of my room,” I say, “see, there, the shadowy figure moving behind them?” And before anyone can hope to answer, I have grabbed my camera, I am snapping pictures through the windshield, bricks, dormers, railings, fences, streets, all are falling thrall to my aim. “We could be happy here,” I say, putting another roll of film in and beginning to nose my car toward Bill Corson’s house. “Really, Daddy,” my daughter says; “No chance,” my wife tacks on, but all I’m hearing is the crack of bats in the neighborhood lot and Danny’s pearl-handled cap gun going off and the drone of bees around honeysuckle and Dewey Waugh’s gravelly voice urging on his mower, and the sound of wind in the cottonwoods is like water, I am coasting, there is time for everything.

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.

The name itself is dismal. Stumbling Into adulthood, I spent a year there, On a narrow, much interrupted street. My austere block had a single, sick tree. Tim Fender and I rented a row house For only 50 bucks a month. Basically, It was a shell, bought by this gay man Who thought he would fix it up, but Grays Ferry made him so depressed, He just had to bolt. Being Catholic Irish, This hood couldn’t have been congenial To someone gay, unless he’s a priest. Still, I seriously doubt the neighbors did Or said anything. They certainly didn’t Show hostility to Tim or I, two art fags. Everyone suffered in Grays Ferry, and In 1986, it literally stank, for there were two Huge lots filled with garbage, thanks to a Twenty-day strike by Philly’s garbage men. I had left art school without a degree, For why borrow money to learn painting From all these failed artists? Why not just Slink somewhere and paint? Though I never Amounted to crap as a painter, I’ve taught Myself to write, sort of, instead of hocking My life to a bank, just so I could be misled And muddled by stunted or puffed up typists. That year, I manned up and mainlined Celine’s Death on the Installment Plan and his Journey To the End of the Night

The evening empty as a convex coconut split down the seam: not that it can be filled. The evening empty as a gourd that twists on an iron thread: the rough skin of the sphere. .            .          .            .           . Not that there was a spoken word to recall the moment of seeing the short span when the clocks ceased to revolve and hands met in jest or benediction time of the vortex into which hibiscus and almond trees strayed and windows made of aluminum. The stars are suddenly remote candescent petals night throws above the yard, the beautiful things. .             .          .            .           . The great house is a hotel and a museum of victory how some lived at the epoch of planters and governors visible in the paintings the armchairs and gilded glass articulate artifacts and floors polished by daylight in a country of green hills and water wheels and wagons and sun coming out after a rain the labor is hidden that built the house long ago, and ploughed the land to make it bear fruit .             .          .            .           . In British poetry, gentle woodland creatures gaze at the hermit with marble eyes lit from within. A single bird defends the song. Among the pines draped with snow from the whole land only a secret footfall teases the senses awake like white breath on white canvas. Ideal forms crowd the auditorium. The sky deepens on the surface of a lake, in a cradle of stars. A coppice of isolated birch trees climbs the mountainside to touch the moon's scar, benevolent witness washed of color and fragmentary illuminating the village below. .             .          .            .           . In New World poetry, an invisible river runs this way and that. A car(t) eases on a bumpy track over small hills and into shallows. The world is a tangle of leaves. Towards sundown a driver gets out and pushes into the forest, drawn by a noise he cannot identify: perhaps the hiss of water below. It's only the river on its way. Ideal forms crowd the auditorium things present and things past scattered beneath the poinciana. The car heads into higher country then out into space where fields suddenly lie down beneath the seer cattle pastures and agricultural lands that have always been there watched over by the great house from its hilltop, like a sentinel. .             .          .            .           . In British poetry, the forms of desire darken with the change of seasons: green leaves once they fade and turn gold and fall to earth, and make a carpet in the forest, awaiting the rain. For each season has its sonata. Silence and sound in balance belong to the decline of autumn. In winter the notes are fewer. Silence comes into its kingdom crown of the father, who departs. The world of white prepares to conquer the earth with silence. .             .          .            .           . In British poetry, articulate hues speak as they are visible to the mind audible colors played on a piano primary sounds in an empty forest. And then above a lake, the moon in motion suspended like a dancer as the music temporarily ceases depriving her body of its rhythm. .             .          .            .           . Ideal forms crowd the auditorium. The light of day starts to fade and a mist settles in the valleys. The great house is lit from within. .             .          .            .           . As they were, in other windows you want to see their ghosts the slaves, like black posts staggered through the fields. You want to make a picture that shows the strange overlords at intervals watch the misery of torsos laboring to plant and harvest the seas of sugar. .             .          .            .           . The green beds of sugar cane extend from here to the hills. Bright heads grazed by the light of paradise become its negative. .             .          .            .           . In time, would the land irritate us as it must have irritated the masters the tropical caress of the air unavoidable getting up each day to see once more the rolling green hills and cattle ponds tranquil in the valleys, the horses collected at the water trough, content to stand or to walk over the grass. A comely scene worthy of an oil painting (fruit trees dappled with sunlight). They have escaped from seasons into the monotony of a terrible beauty. (Who is speaking?) .             .          .            .           . Away from the coast the car passes through a shadowy green world of tropical syntax ragged slopes and curves. .             .          .            .           . What then was promised by the evening lights that spangled about the hills? .             .          .            .           . Endless tall grasses, a landscape composed of variations on a color. The after-image of elliptical forms transparent as the cry of a seagull. .             .          .            .           . A tablet of scripted exclamations: there, a poinciana with pink blossoms overhangs the road, there a scrawl of fighting tendrils, an indigo grammar of petals offering illumination to fan-shaped pristine hieroglyphs waving to greener punctuations of banana trees and mango, a tangle of writing over writing closed to further interventions. Visible palimpsest of a book without letters the tangle of leaves has no secret key and cannot be deciphered, wordless monads travelling contours of silence. .             .          .            .           . Mimesis touches the world with an imperceptible tenderness, only hardly like wind an Aeolian harp. .             .          .            .           . There is a point when the sky pivots to face the dawn, to face the dark side of personality, that of a sensible man recanting the mysteries he embraced as a youth, when the angels spoke to him and he ran towards them with arms wide open across a field, beneath the painted stars. .             .          .            .           . Say that the world is a drinking glass containing things of the life and language and say that a poet wakes up one morning thinking of capturing for the future those petals inside that glass, broken vowels. A vase of orchids stands on a kitchen table. Not that it is abstract, or a luminous symbol, nonetheless it is an algebra of forces, like the equations of space-time, which rule outside the mental universe. As if an image should leave its mirror behind (the thing of which it is but a ghost) like bodiless speech, and yet sensuous, in the way a dream can leave its mark on the dreamer— Esse est percipi, so speaketh the Law. Wind begins to touch an Aeolian harp. The great house is a place of articulation word calls to other words, in transit. Compelled by the beauty of flowers the mind creates a space for other things. .             .          .            .           . (By British I mean Romantic idealist.) Warm night descends like a cloak. The whistle of tree frogs supplies a melody, and crickets invisible to the moon begin their Parliament. The birds sleep with their young. The air is otherwise still.

That was the week it didn’t stop snowing. That was the week five-fingered trees fell on houses & power lines broke like somebody waiting for payday in a snowstorm. That snow week, my daughter & I trudged over the broken branches fidgeting through snow like hungry fingers through an empty pocket. Over the termite-hollowed stump as squat as a flat tire. Over the hollow the fox dives into when we open the back door at night. That was the week of snow & it glittered like every Christmas card we could remember while my daughter poked around for the best place to stand a snowman. One with a pinecone nose. One with thumb-pressed eyes to see the whole picture once things warm up.

As a kid I tried to coax its coming By sleeping beneath light sheets Weeks before The funeral of the summer locusts in the yard; Then when Granny peeled down the crucifix of flypaper that dangled from the ceiling of the kitchen Magic wasn't needed any longer To fill the air with pigskins.   The air itself Acrid, lambent, bright As the robes of the Chinese gods inside their house of glass In the Field Museum by the lake. Even practice could be fun— The way, say, even sepia photographs of old-time All Americans could be pirates' gold Like my favorite Bill Corbus, Stanford's "Baby- Face Assassin" crouching at right guard, the last to play without a helmet on— And the fun of testing muscles out Like new shoes; the odor of the locker room pungent As the inside of a pumpkin; And the sting of that wet towel twirled against bare butt by a genial, roaring Ziggy, Mt. Carmel's All State tackle from Immaculate Conception Parish near the mills; And then the victory, especially the close shaves, could feel Like finally getting beneath a girl's brassiere She'll let you keep Unhooked for hours while you neck Until the windshield of your Granddad's Ford V-8 Becomes filled by a fog Not even Fu Manchu could penetrate.   Jack, Next football weather my son Luke will be in high school, Bigger than I was and well-coordinated—but Couldn't care a plenary indulgence If he ever lugs a pigskin down the turf Or hits a long shot on the court.   At times, I wish he would. So he might taste the happiness you knew Snagging Chris Zoukis' low pass to torpedo nine long yards to touchdown And sink archrival Lawrence High 45 years ago come this Thanksgiving Day.   Still, He has his own intensities As wild as sports and writing were for us: Luke's the seventh Rolling Stone, His electric guitar elegant and shiny black As a quiet street at night Glazed by rain and pumpkin frost.