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

  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.