The Read Online Free
  • Latest Novel
  • Hot Novel
  • Completed Novel
  • Popular Novel
  • Author List
  • Romance & Love
  • Fantasy
  • Science Fiction
  • Young Adult
  • Mystery & Detective
  • Thrillers & Crime
  • Actions & Adventure
  • History & Fiction
  • Horror
  • Western
  • Humor

    The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010

    Previous Page Next Page

      shaped under the tent of her summer dress.

      I see you in my mother at thirty

      in her flapper gear, skinny legs

      and then you knocking on the tight dress.

      We hand you down like a prize feather quilt,

      our female shame and sunburst strength.

      The flying Jew

      I never met my uncle Dave.

      The most real thing I know about him

      is how he died, which he did

      again and again in the middle of the night

      my mother screaming, my father shouting,

      “Shut up, Bert, you’re having a bad dream.”

      My uncle Dave, the recurring nightmare.

      He was the Jew who flew.

      How did he manage it? Flying was for

      gentlemen, and he was a kid from the slums

      of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland—

      zaydeh one headlong leap ahead of the law

      and the Pinkertons, the goons who finally

      bashed his head in when he was organizing

      his last union, the bakery workers.

      Dave looked up between the buildings,

      higher than the filthy sparrows who pecked

      at horse dung and the pigeons who strutted

      and cooed in the tenement eaves,

      up to the grey clouds of Philadelphia,

      the rust clouds of Pittsburgh with the fires

      of the open hearth steel mills staining them,

      a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night.

      He followed into the clouds.

      My mother doesn’t know who taught

      him to fly, but he learned.

      He became one with the plane, they said.

      Off he went to France. He flew in combat,

      was shot down and survived, never

      became an ace, didn’t enjoy combat,

      the killing, but flying was better than sex.

      He took my mother up once and she wept

      the whole time. She wouldn’t fly again

      till she was seventy-five and said then

      she didn’t care if the plane went down.

      It was his only talent, his only passion

      and a good plane was a perfect fit for

      his body and his mind, his reflexes.

      The earth was something that clung to his shoes,

      something to shake off, something to gather

      all your strength into a taut charge

      and then launch forward and leave behind.

      After the war, he was lost for two years,

      tried selling, tried insurance, then off

      he went barnstorming with his war buddies.

      Time on the ground was just stalling time,

      killing time, parked in roominghouses

      and tourist homes and bedbug hotels.

      He drank little. Women were aspirin.

      Being the only Jew, he had something

      to prove every day, so he flew the fastest,

      he did the final trick that made the audience

      shriek. The planes grew older, the crowds

      thinned out. One fall day outside Cleveland

      he got his mother, sister Bert and her

      little boy to watch the act. It was a triple

      Zimmerman roll he had done five hundred

      shows but this time the plane plowed

      into the earth and a fireball rose.

      So every six months he died flaming

      in the middle of the night, and all I

      ever knew of him was Mother screaming.

      My rich uncle, whom I only met three times

      We were never invited to his house.

      We went there once while they were all in Hawaii,

      climbed steps from which someone had shoveled

      the snow, not him, to the wide terrace.

      Yellow brick, the house peered into fir and juniper.

      It was too large for me to imagine what it held

      but I was sure everyone of them, four girls

      and bony wife, each had a room of her own.

      He had been a magician and on those rare

      nights he had to stay at the Detroit Statler

      downtown, he would summon us for supper

      in the hotel restaurant. Mother would put on

      and take off every dress in her closet, all six,

      climb in the swaybacked brown Hudson muttering shame.

      He would do tricks with his napkin and pull

      quarters from my ears and spoons from his sleeves.

      He had been a clumsy acrobat, he had failed at comedy

      and vaudeville; he was entertaining for a party

      when he met a widow with four girls and an inheritance.

      He waltzed right out of her romantic movie dreams

      and he strolled into her house and she had him redone.

      He learned to talk almost like her dead husband.

      He learned to wear suits, play golf and give orders

      to servants. His name changed, his background rebuilt,

      his religion painted over, he almost fit in.

      Of my uncles, only he was unreal, arriving by plane

      to stay on the fanciest street in downtown Detroit.

      The waiter brought a phone to the table, his broker

      calling. I imagined a cowboy breaking horses.

      He made knives disappear. He made a napkin vanish.

      He was like an animated suit, no flesh, no emotions

      bubbling the blood and steaming the windows as

      my other uncles and aunts did. Only the discreet

      Persian leather smell of money droned in my nose.

      His longest trick was to render himself invisible.

      Then one night after the guests had left, he went down

      to the basement in the latest multilevel glass vast

      whatnot shelf of house and hanged himself by the furnace.

      They did not want his family at the funeral. She had

      no idea, his wife said, why would he be depressed?

      I remember his laugh like a cough and his varnished

      face, buffed till the silverware shone in his eyes.

      His last trick was to vanish himself forever.

      Your standard midlife crisis

      A friend is destroying his life

      like a set of dishes

      he has tired of, is breaking

      for the noise.

      The old wife is older

      of course. She promises

      nothing but what he knows

      he can have.

      She is an oak rocking chair,

      sturdy, plain, shapely

      something he has taken comfort

      in for years.

      This one flirts like a firefly,

      on and off, on and off.

      Where will she flash next?

      In his pocket.

      She mirrors his needs,

      she sends him messages to decode

      twisted in his hair, knotted

      in his skin.

      With me you will forget failure.

      With me you will be another.

      My youth will shave your years

      to smooth fresh skin.

      O real life, I feel! he says,

      his infatuation, a charge

      like fourteen cups of espresso

      and as lasting.

      He careens downhill, throwing off

      books, children, history,

      tossing friends, pledges, knowledge

      down into crystal canyon.

      There every cliff reflects her

      face with the eyes illuminating

      him like fireworks, doomed

      to burn themselves out.

      The visitation

      The yearling doe stands by the pile of salt

      hay, nibbling and then strolls up the path.

      Among the spring flowers she stands amazed,

      hundreds of daffodils, forsythia,

      the bright chalices of tulips, cr
    imson,

      golden, orange streaked with green, the wild

      tulips opening like stars fallen on the ground.

      She leans gracefully to taste a tarda,

      yellow and white sunburst, sees us, stops,

      uncertain. Stares at us with her head cocked.

      What are you? She is not frightened

      but bemused. Do I know you?

      The landscaping dazzles her, impresses her

      far more than the two of us on the driveway

      speaking to her in the same tone we use

      with the cats as if she had become our pet,

      as she sidles among the peach trees,

      a pink blossom clinging to her dun flank.

      Graceful among the rhododendrons, I know

      what her skittish courage represents: she

      is beautiful as those sub-Saharan children

      with the huge luminous brown eyes of star-

      vation. A hard winter following a hurricane,

      tangles of downed trees even the deer

      cannot penetrate, a long slow spring

      with the buds obdurate as pebbles,

      too much building, so she comes to stand

      in our garden, eyes flowering with wonder

      under the incandescent buffet of the fruit

      trees, this garden cafeteria she has walked

      into to graze, from the lean late woods.

      Half vulture, half eagle

      I saw it last night, the mortgage

      bird with heavy hunched shoulders

      nesting in shredded hundred dollar bills

      its long curved claws seize, devour.

      You feed it and feed it in hopes

      it will grow smaller. Does this make

      sense? After five years of my writing

      checks on the first day of every month

      it is swollen and red eyed and hungry.

      It has passed from owner to owner,

      sold by the bank to Ohio and thence

      to an ersatz company that buys up slave

      mortgages and is accountable to Panama

      or perhaps Luxembourg, cannot be

      communicated with by less than four lawyers

      connected end to end like Christmas

      tree light sets and blinking in six

      colors simultaneously by fax.

      It says, I squat on the foot of your

      bed when the medical bills shovel in.

      When your income withers like corn

      stalks in a Kansas drought, I laugh

      with a sound of sand hitting a windshield,

      laughter dry as parched kernels from which

      all water has been stolen by the sun.

      Each month I wring you a little more.

      I own a corner of your house, say

      the northeast corner the storms hit

      when they roar from the blast of the sea

      churned into grey sudsy cliffs, and as

      the storm bashes the dunes into sand

      it washes away, so I can carry off

      your house any time you fail to feed

      me promptly. Your misfortune is my

      best gamble. I am the mortgage bird

      and my weight is on your back.

      The level

      A great balance hangs in the sky

      and briefly on the black pan

      and on the blue pan, the melon

      of the moon and the blood orange

      of the sun are symmetrical

      like two unmatched eyes glowing

      at us with one desire.

      This is an instant’s equality,

      a level that at once

      starts to dip. In spring

      the sun starts up its golden

      engine earlier each dawn.

      In fall, night soaks

      its dye into the edges of day.

      But now they hang, two bright

      balls teasing us to balance

      the halves of our brain, need

      and will, gut and intellect,

      you and me in an instant’s grace—

      understanding no woman, even

      Gaia, can always make it work.

      The negative ion dance

      The ocean reopens us.

      The brass doors in the forehead swing wide.

      Light enters us like a swarm of bees

      and bees turn into white petals falling.

      The lungs expand as the salt air

      stretches them, and they sing, treble

      bagpipes eerie and serpentine.

      The bones lighten to balsa wood.

      The head bobs on air currents

      like a bright blue balloon without ballast.

      The arms want to flap. The terns

      dive around us giving hopeless instruction.

      Light is sharp, serrated, a flight of saws.

      Light enters us and is absorbed like water,

      like radiation. We take the light in

      and darken it. We look just the same.

      We shine only in the back of the eyes

      if you stare into them as you kiss.

      The light leaks out through the palms

      as they caress you later in the dark.

      The voice of the grackle

      Among the red winged blackbirds—

      latecomers clustered at the top

      of the sugar maple after the others

      have split up the better home sites

      in the marshes, along Dun’s Run—

      their buzzes, chirs and warbles,

      I hear a rasp, a harsh ruckus.

      The grackles have come north again.

      Nobody greets them with the joy

      meted out to robins, the geese

      rowing high overhead, the finches

      flitting gold and red to the feeders.

      I am their solitary welcoming

      committee, tossing extra corn.

      Their cries are no more melodious

      than the screech of unadjusted

      brakes, and yet I like their song

      of the unoiled door hinge creaking,

      the rusty saw grating, the squawk

      of an air mattress stomped on,

      unmistakable among the twitters.

      They are big and shiny, handsome

      even sulking in the rain.

      Feathers gleam like the polish

      on a new car when the sun hits them,

      black as asphalt, with oil slick

      colors shimmering, purple satin

      like hoods in their gang colors.

      We never see more than a few,

      often one alone, like the oversized

      kid who hangs out, misfit, with

      the younger crowd, slumps at the back

      of the classroom making offcolor

      comments in his cracking voice,

      awkward, half clown, half hero.

      Salt in the afternoon

      The room is a conch shell

      and echoing in it, the blood

      rushes in the ears,

      the surf of desire sliding in

      on the warm beach.

      The room is the shell of the moon

      snail, gorgeous predator

      whose shell winds round and round

      the color of moonshine

      on your pumping back.

      The bed is a slipper shell

      on which we rock, opaline

      and pearled with light sweat,

      two great deep currents

      colliding into white water.

      The clamshell opens.

      The oyster is eaten.

      The squid shoots its white ink.

      Now there is nothing but warm

      salt puddles on the flats.

      Brotherless one: Sun god

      In a family snapshot I stand in pigtails

      grinning. I hug the two pillars

      of my cracked world, my cold

      father, my hot brother, the fair and the ruddy,

      the grey eyed forbidder, the one who hit

     
    but never caressed, who shouted

      but never praised; and on the left, you.

      You were the dark pulsating sun of my childhood,

      the man whose eyes could give water

      instead of ice, eyes brown as tree bark.

      You were the one I looked like, as even

      your children looked more like me

      than like their mothers. All had the same

      dark slanted Tartar eyes glinting like blades

      and the same black hair rippling—

      coarse, abundant, grass of a tundra of night.

      We are small and scrappy.

      We go for the throat in anger.

      We have bad genes and good minds.

      We drag a load of peacock tales sweeping the dust.

      Myths come into life around us

      like butterflies hatching, bright and voracious.

      We learned sex easily as we learned to talk

      and it shaped our handshakes and our laughter.

      Trouble was our shadow, tied to our heels.

      Thus we grew out of the same mother

      but never spoke real words since I turned twelve.

      Yet you built into my psyche that space

      for a man not of ice and thumbtacks,

      a man who could think with his body,

      a man who could laugh from the soles

      of his feet, a man who could touch

      skin simply as sun does.

      You gave me a license

      for the right of the body to joy.

      Brotherless two: Palimpsest

      My friend Elizabeth said, the week you died

      and your widow would not have me at

      your funeral: you and your brother

      both had great wild imaginations.

      You put yours into books.

      He rewrote himself.

      I can remember the last honest talking that ever

      went between us, strong, jolting to me

      as straight bourbon to a child not used to beer.

     
    Previous Page Next Page
© The Read Online Free 2022~2025