blowing wet jokes, loud as a whole
slumber party bouncing till the bed breaks.
I go round and round you sometimes, scouting,
blundering, seeking a way in, the high boxwood
maze I penetrate running lungs bursting
toward the fountain of green fire at the heart.
Sometimes you open wide as cathedral doors
and yank me inside. Sometimes you slither
into me like a snake into its burrow.
Sometimes you march in with a brass band.
Ten years of fitting our bodies together
and still they sing wild songs in new keys.
It is more and less than love: timing,
chemistry, magic and will and luck.
One plus one equals one, unknowable except
in the moment, not convertible into words,
not explicable or philosophically interesting.
But it is. And it is. And it is. Amein.
Sun-day poacher
My uncle Zimmy worked the face down in the soft
coal mines that hollowed out the long ridged
mountains of Pennsylvania, where the enamel
under the spigot in the claw tub at home
was stained the color of rust from iron.
In the winter he went down before the sun
came up, and when he rose, it had sunk,
a world of darkness down in the damp,
then up in the cold where the stars burned
like the sparks you see on squinted eyes.
On Sunday he hunted, gliding over the bristly
ridges that hid the tunnels, hollow rocks
whose blasted faces were bearded by shining ice.
That was his way to the sun blessing his eyes
and the tingling air the pines electrified.
He could only go with a rifle on his shoulder.
Men couldn’t just walk and look. He had
to be doing something. With tenderness he sighted
the deer and shot true, disemboweled on the spot,
the snow marked with a widening rose of blood.
He butchered there and brought home venison,
better than the wan meat of the company store.
Nothing but bones would mark the spot in three
days. In winter, every bird and beast burns
with hunger, eats or snuffs out with cold.
He walked on top of the mountains he mined within
where and how he pleased, quiet as the snow
to kill. My aunt Margaret fell in love
with him and her father mocked and threatened.
A schoolteacher marry a miner? She did, fast.
You could see the way he touched her the power
they kindled between them. It was a dance
at Monday’s Corner. He roared home on the icy
roads with the whiskey stoking that furnace hot.
That was how men drove: fast and often drunk.
He loved her still the year she lingered on.
Money could have saved her, of course.
A child, I ate his venison adoring him,
the strength and speed of a great black bear,
the same fatality in his embrace.
Burial by salt
The day after Thanksgiving I took you to the sea.
The sky was low and scudding. The wind was stiff.
The sea broke over itself in seething froth
like whipped up eggwhites, blowing to settle
in slowly popping masses at my feet.
I ran, boots on, into the bucking surf
taking you in handfuls, tossing you
into wind, into water, into the elements:
go back, give back. Time is all spent,
the flesh is spent to ashes.
Mother’s were colored like a mosaic,
vivid hues of the inside of conch shells,
pastels, pearls, green, salmon as feathers
of tropical birds. They fit in my cupped hands.
I put her in the rose garden and said Kaddish.
Your ashes are old movies, black into grey.
Heavy as iron filings, they sag the box
sides. They fill it to overflowing.
Handful after handful I give to the waves
which seize and churn you over and under.
I am silent as I give you to the cold
winter ocean grey as a ship of war,
the color of your eyes, grey with green
and blue washed in, that so seldom met
my gaze, that looked right through me.
What is to be said? Did you have a religion?
If so, you never spoke of it to me.
I remember your saying No, saying it often
and loud, I remember your saying, Never,
I remember, I won’t have that in my house.
I grew up under the threat of your anger
as peasants occupy the slopes of a volcano
sniffing the wind, repeating old adages,
reading birdflight and always waiting, even
in sleep for the ground to quake and open.
My injustices, my pains, my resentments;
they are numerous, precious as the marbles
I kept in a jar, not so much for playing
as simply rolling in my hands to see
the colors trap the light and swell.
Tossing your ashes in my hands as the waves
drag the sand from under me, trying to topple
me into the turning eddy of far storms,
I want to cast that anger from me, finally
to say, you begot me and although my body
my hair, my eyes are my mother’s so that at your
funeral, your brother called me by her name,
I will agree that in the long bones of my legs,
in my knees, in my Welsh mouth that sits oddly
in my Jewish Tartar face, you are imprinted.
I was born the wrong sex to a woman
in her mid-forties who had tried to get pregnant
for five years. A hard birth,
I was her miracle and your disappointment.
Everything followed from that, downhill.
I search now through the ashes of my old pain
to find something to praise, and I find that
withholding love, you made me strive to be worthy,
reaching, always reaching, thinking that when I leaped
high enough you would be watching. You weren’t.
That did not cancel the leaping or the fruit
at last grasped in the hand and gnawed to the pit.
You were the stone on which I built my strength.
Your indifference honed me. Your coldness
toughened my flesh. You anger stropped me.
I was reading maps for family trips at age
five, navigating from the backseat. Till
I was twenty, I did not know other children
did not direct all turns and plot route numbers.
When Mother feigned helplessness, I was factotum.
Nurse, houseboy, carpenter’s helper, maid,
whatever chinks appeared I filled, responsible
and rebellious with equal passion, equal time,
and thus quite primed to charge like a rocket
out the door trailing sparks at seventeen.
We were illsuited as fox and bull. Once
I stopped following baseball, we could not talk.
I’d ask you how some process was done—open
hearth steel, how generators worked.
Your answers had a clarity I savored.
I did with Mother as I had promised her,
I took her from you and brought her home to me,
I buried her as a Jew and mourn her still.
To you I made no promises. You asked none.
Forty-nine years we spoke of nothing real.
For
decades I thought someday we would talk
at last. In California I came to you in the mountains
at the dam carrying that fantasy like a picnic
lunch beautifully cooked and packed, but never
to be eaten. Not by you and me.
When I think of the rare good times
I am ten or eleven and we are working together
on some task in silence. In silence I faded into
the cartoon son. Hand me the chisel. I handed.
Bevel the edge smooth. I always got bored.
I’d start asking questions, I’d start asking
why and wherefore and how come and who said so.
I was lonely on the icefield, I was lonely
in the ice caves of your sometime favor.
I kept trying to start a fire or conversation.
Time burns down and the dark rushes in in waves.
I can’t lie. What was between us was history,
not love. I have striven to be just to you,
stranger, first cause, old man, my father,
and now I give you over to salt and silence.
Eat fruit
Keep your legs crossed, Mother said. Drinking
leads to babies. Don’t hang around street corners.
I rushed to gulp moonshine on corners, hip outthrust.
So why in the butter of my brain does one marble tablet
shine bearing my mother’s commandment, eat fruit?
Here I stand, the only poet from whom
you can confidently obtain after a reading
enough mushy tan bananas to bake bread
should you happen to feel the urge at ten
some night in East Lansing or Boise.
Others litter ash, beer cans. I leak pits.
As we descend into Halifax while my seat partner
is snorting the last of his coke, I am the one
choking as I gobble three apples in five minutes,
agricultural contraband seized at borders.
Customs agents throw open my suitcase and draw
out with gingerly leer from under my negligee
a melon. Drug smugglers feed their self-importance,
but me they hate along with the guy trying to smuggle
in a salami from the old country his uncle gave him.
I am the slob who makes gory stains on railroad seats
with fermenting strawberries. You can recognize me
by the happy cloud of winged creatures following my head.
I have raised more fruitflies than genetics labs.
I have endowed ant orphanages and retirement communities.
However, I tell you smugly, I am regular in Nome,
in Paducah, in both Portlands and all Springfields.
While you are eating McMuffins I am savoring a bruised
but extremely sophisticated pear that has seen five
airports and four cities and grown old in wisdom.
Dead Waters
At Aigues Mortes the dog was a practiced beggar.
He patrolled not the big lot where buses disgorge
but a small seaward lot near the private quarter.
We ate our picnic lunch, gazing at the ramparts.
He honed his longing stare on us till we tossed
bits of sausage he caught deftly and bolted.
Finally we threw him a baguette, whole and slightly
stale, thinking he would leave it, teasing him.
But his ears rose as if he heard a fine clear
high note our ears could not reach. He caught the loaf.
He laid it down to examine and then he seized it,
tossed his head smartly and set off at a rapid trot,
the prized baguette in his teeth. Other picnickers called
to him, we tossed after him a bit of sausage, but
he could not be lured back. Off he went in a straight
line at the ramparts and then all along them
to the far gate when he headed in and ran home,
never pausing under the white fish eye of the sun.
A whole loaf of bread. What did that mean to him?
The thing humans never give him? Therefore precious?
Or simply something entire, seamless, perfect for once.
The housing project at Drancy
Trains without signs flee through Paris.
Wrong trains. The wrong station.
The world as microwave oven, burning from within.
We arrive. Drancy looks like Inkster,
Gary, the farther reaches of Newark.
In the station they won’t give directions.
C’est pas notre affaire. We don’t deal with that.
Outside five buses limp in five directions
into the hot plain drugged with exhaust.
Nobody ever heard of the camp. They turn away.
Out on the bridge, over marshaling yards:
here Jews were stuffed into cars nailed shut.
Here children too young to know their names
were counted like so many shoes
as they begged the French police hemming them in,
Take me to the bathroom, please, please,
before I wet myself. Mother, I have been so good,
and it is so very dark. Dear concierge,
I am writing to you as everyone else
is dead now and they are taking me away.
Yes, to the land children named Pitchepois,
giant’s skull land grimmer than Hansel came to.
On the bridge I saw an old bald workman
staring down and I told myself desperately,
He is a Communist and will answer me.
I asked him where the camp was, now a housing
project. He asked, Why do you want to know?
I had that one ready. No talk of novels, research.
My aunt was there. Oh, in that case,
he pointed to distant towers. You want that bus.
Where we descended the bus, Never heard of it.
Eyes that won’t look. Then a woman asked that
same question, Why do you want to know?
A housing project crammed with mothers.
The guard towers are torn down and lindens grow.
In flats now with heat and plumbing, not eighty
but one family lives. Pain still rises,
the groaning of machinery deep underfoot.
Crimes ignored sink into the soil like PCBs
and enter the bones of children.
Black Mountain
On Montagne Noire creeping everywhere under the beech trees
were immense black slugs the size and pattern
of blown truck tires exploded by the superhighway.
Diamonds patterned their glossy and glittering backs.
As we watched, leaves, whole flowers disappeared in three bites.
Such avidity rebuked our stomachs skittish with alien
water and strange food. In patches of sunlight filtered
down, the slugs shone like wet black glass.
Battlefields are like any other fields; a forest
where men and women fought tanks with sten guns
houses as many owl and rabbit and deer as the next hill
where nothing’s happened since the Romans passed by.
Yet I have come without hesitation through the maze
of lumbering roads to this spot where the small marker
tells us we have reached a destination. To die here
under hemlock’s dark drooping boughs, better I think
than shoved into the showers of gas to croak like roaches
too packed in to flail in the intense slow pain
as the minutes like lava cooling petrified the jammed
bodies into living rock, basalt pillars whose fingers
gouged grooves in cement. Yes, better to drop in the high
clean air and let your blood soak into the rich leaf mold.
Better to get off one good shot. Better to remember trains
derailed, turntables wrecked with plastique, raids
on the munitions dump. Better to die with a gun
in your hand you chose to pick up and had time to shoot.
Dying you pass out of choice. The others come, put up
a monument decorated with crosses, no Mogen Davids.
I come avid and omnivorous as the shining slugs.
I have eaten your history and made it myth;
among the tall trees of your pain my characters walk.
A saw whines in the valley. I say Kaddish for you.
Blessed only is the act. The act of defiance,
the act of justice that fills the mouth with blood.
Blessed is the act of survival that saves the blood.
Blessed is the act of art that paints the blood
redder than real and quicker, that restores
the fallen tree to its height and birds. Memory
is the simplest form of prayer. Today you glow
like warm precious lumps of amber in my mind.
The ram’s horn sounding
1.
Giant porcupine, I walk a rope braided
of my intestines and veins, beige and blue and red,
while clutched in my arms, you lie glaring
sore eyed, snuffling and sticking your spines at me.
Always I am finding quills worked into some unsuspected
muscle, an innocent pillow of fat pierced by you.
We sleep in the same bed nightly and you take it all.
I wake shuddering with cold, the quilt stripped from me.
No, not a porcupine: a leopard cub.
Beautiful you are as light and as darkness.
Avid, fierce, demanding with sharp teeth