A Welter of Memories
Body Years
D.O.A.
The Nazi's Dilemma
Hamlet Behind the Curtain
Good Night Nurse
Picasso
The Mirror at Center Stage
In the Cadaver Room at St. Thomas, 1816
Contagion
Heirloom
Gardening
Housecleaning
Downtown Sunday
The Winds of Anarchy
Stranger Reunions
Inspiration
Immaculate Conception
Epiphany
Rise
Feeding Time
Cat
The Pillage of the Hive
Vision
Crows
For My Daughter
Not a Baby Anymore
To My Son
Christmas Night, 1984
Returning Home (Xmas Eve)
First Christmas
Poetry
Rhyme
Thomas Hardy Works at Texaco
When I Was One Dumb Yuppy
Nude Ascending a Staircase
Hack
Pygmies
Epilogue To and About the Reader
As has been said before,
nothing unites two people more
than shared memories.
May we share this, then?
On either side
of your mother's head
sat your plush bear and you
as proud as antlers.
Suddenly, beneath the barber
pole, she broke
into a little jig
and the pebbled surface
of a puddle.
The plush bear and you
could not help but join in
and jiggle in turn.
When the barber pole
no longer spins for custom
and tomorrow's rain sweeps
that street like a tired
charwoman, we may stop
at different times and think
back on this.
Yet, as I watched your ponytail
wave a farewell
I wondered how I could appreciate
this fresh memory
with equally fresh hindsight
when I cannot even recall
my own? The glass unicorn
blanketed in gray
on my end table
or the print of wildflowers
that grows dim in the sun-
Hadn't they a loving
and a joyful hand
at their creation, as in yours?
Weren't they given
with a similar love
the memory of which
is grown as dull
as the finish on old coins?
It's the conception of flesh
that never breaks,
a fleeting wryness
of the eyes,
a well-timed remark,
or my child's squeal,
is what remains vivid.
As with phobias,
even you may fixate your delight
on the bear, or the drizzle,
anything but the experience.
As with raindrops,
memories are merely the sum
of their parts
to the beholder.
The people hunch and cringe
as if afraid of melting,
and naturally do not care
to notice:
A welter of missed memories
appear and rinse from view
like unfertilized ovum.
"How' ja like to feel how he looks?"
---Groucho Marx
Why do you,
my friends, set
all your clocks five minutes
ahead? Even such an innocent
larceny of time
offers as many guarantees
as the stars that import
their Doppler legacies
to earth's shore.
I keep time
by the blood that flows surer
than the jaundiced blindness
of fortune
for intelligence corrupts all,
including itself,
making the sun a patient assassin
which paces all our motions
to the grave.
Instead, it and our world embrace
a void wanting ageless emotions---
Memory, sensation, and desire
on the pulse
are the only rings
in my bones.
Stumbling out of the film noir
evening and into your house,
I must've looked a little like
Edmund O'Brien or Dennis Quaid
announcing their own murder
to the police. But that was evident
to them as they kicked me
out of my girlfriend's house.
Was it murder or suicide,
I ask myself, as if motive
isn't academic to a dead
man on the run.
Forgive me, my friends,
for dragging my body
into your tidy home.
What more has this corpse
to offer but its plea of guilty
for its own annihilation?
What feral-eyed actor
could possibly make my desperation
heroic?
In your home, you let time
slide like a trickle of blood
down a gutter.
You probably wonder why I'm forever
setting the chronographs
on your VCR, microwave oven,
and clocks with the right time.
The fact is,
condemned men are the worst
chronophobes. I have this thing
about time, how I must always
keep track of it, as if it were
my personal assassin.
Even the calendar seems
as unlikely a friend.
So many poems...
so few words.
How miraculous these people seem,
poised on eternity!
The flames of Auschwitz never played
as in their eyes---
What hallucinating humanity
had herded them
from their pastures
to this documentary of death?
The men in black
have told me
I need not know
but how to deal
in mass infinity.
Cattle-eyed they file
past me every day,
hardly daring to look up
or breathe, silently on their way
to the final crystal ablution.
What fascist philosopher said,
"We are, in fact,
speeding nature's toil,
as well as that of selective
evolution"?---
What beer hall
putsch
or propaganda
could insinuate itself
into these sorrowful eyes,
or uplift these hearts
into philosophy?
That man, the grocer
whose store my mother sent
me scampering to every day,
does he remember me,
as I, in my Munich boyhood,
laughing with the secret
of an apple
stolen from his cart,
before paying the toll
of knowledge?
What more is there to take?
He wears David's golden star
like a cross---
Is mine of iron mine to bear?
The Jew slaves work
beside my people,
shoveling the ashes of their kin
from their short tombs.
Each slammed door
is a lost
heartbeat.
O Gonzago, you paper man,
mute as Yorick,
and deader,
how indicative you are of every age!
'T is not enough I have inspired
purple, guilty rage to spill
in the dark---
I, character, impotent creation,
unstrung puppet, dare to create
in my own right.
Is there nothing outside this castle,
unseen Wittenberg, the clowns,
and the graveyard?
Who once inhabited this skull,
that even decays artfully?
Yorick, was it truly -
yours, born and killed off to be my prop?
You, one of the most famous
characters of all,
who never spoke a line,
dully but faithfully reflect
the spotlight as I endlessly reminisce
over artificial memories.
All of me you do not know
was all that was never said,
a cruel hoax on that faculty.
God! to have kinsmen
with such depth
not the closing of a book
not the guillotining of a curtain
may put them to rest!
May the echoes of our shadowy pasts
ripple and form a future,
where at the bottom
lies the stone of just one
act of volition.
Let there be words
trailing our heels
like an endless cape
in the opening scene,
plots hot in the wings,
angels perched on sandbags,
and a history for you,
poor, unlived Yorick.
Third shift; the patients
are sorted and shelved in their beds
as neatly as boxes
of gauze strips and bandages.
The awful pastels, too,
are more sedate by bare moonlight
and throb less.
At least the trauma room
is all business
and wastes no space
on loud and unconvincing hope.
The prison infirmary
seems like a night beast
in hiding, measuring its breath
before a sudden leap.
But even now,
I am equal to a code blue.
"What's a nurse? One who saves lives
Before the doctor arrives,"
we chime to eachother,
reaffirming our importance
against a backdrop of routine
and corporate intrigue.
"Physicians come and go and pay no mind,
But it's the nurses who must stay behind."
How could I not worry about
the 18 year old in for offing
her abusive boyfriend,
now in ICU from a botched abortion,
or the hyperglycemic girl
whose fate was veiled
during my vacation?
Though miles apart,
we sleep in common beds,
cuddled and nuzzled by fear.
Back now, hardly rested,
I take stock of everyone and everything,
examining the new faces
and scrutinizing the familiar,
before looking at the charts.
"Sugar count: 600,
Hyperglycemic, Now 350 and leveling."
I tuck her sheet in by reflex,
though she likely
will never set eyes on me.
Divorced by fate
and its invisible agents,
we are nevertheless bonded,
like oranges
and syringes.
Time has finally foreclosed
on the mortgage of your life---
you repay
your borrowed dust
with tremendous interest.
You see, these days,
even death is akin
to a business.
Just ask the woman below
who is rowing awfully toward God.
Now the vultures may descend
upon your tortured bulls.
Wild with Protean spirits,
you deserted Braque,
although you jointly disinterred
Paul Cezanne from
his coffin full of seeds,
growing shattered lilies
on his plot.
Too small for life,
yet big enough for art,
you loved your little ones
in paint until they outgrew
the boundaries of your canvas.
As if behind a glass, the tiny
harlequins pressed for liberation.
What chorus advised
those who did not know
the limits of his Stygian!
night, each picture a window
of his own unrelieved hell?
Yet what had this scribe
of purgatorial visions revealed
but the demon's lair
that we've been letting build
within ourselves
with each drop
of virulence?
And when Francoise left,
you searched, as when
you did in Vallauris,
for the debris of lives,
except this time
the life was yours
(the one who had once drawn
the weeping woman now a weeping man),
and rearranged them
into a priest
for an exorcism of grief.
And finally,
you died a weary god on earth,
exiled by that ingrate, time.
Only now have we the right to love you.
And as the night before the new dawn draws
so ever shorter, we will pause
and yet know
Picasso.
When Pablo jaunts through Juan les Pins
the cyclists ride Castillian bulls
that madly rear their basket skulls,
one which becomes a minotaur,
and being dragged into its lair,
a nubile woman combs her hair
while changing into a guitar
played on by a musician fine.
A prostitute blows on a fife:
a metaphor's new lease on life.
When Pablo jaunts throughout the town,
he carries half back upside down.
Like a Roman mob
in the wake of the spectacle,
the class surrounds the pit,
the loser awaiting
a grace of sorts.
A hush as sharp as alcohol
eclipses talk
as Dr. Hammond enters
with a sublime gravity,
striding up to the fallen man,
professionally disregarding
the departed spark
which until lately had kept
these split limbs supple,
this heart red and vital.
The chest cavity
has already been invaded.
"This man expired, you see,
because of his heart,
Hammond explains.
"His heart attacked him."
"'He jests at scars
that never never felt a wound,'"
thinks Keats,
outlining the margins
of his notebook
with daisies.
All the lines from poets' pens
he loves have enviably
outlived the flesh of Spenser
and will outstrip
this white and purple heap
below as well as the hand
now warm and capable
and the different one
that will seduce poetry,
and the last,
through which Coleridge
will shake death's:
A pet lamb sent
from a sentimental
farce to a bloody altar.
Across the sick world,
a madman justifies our
murdering in the name of war;
With careful regret, we follow him to hell.
Closer to home,
police are given a license
to kill the lawless
within our cities.
In my worst nightmares,
I see a nation bound
by tattered yellow ribbons
twisting in dark winds.
Let us praise grandfather
for his Yankee sense
in making the old new,
more practical than Picasso ever was.
This phone, which has mouthed
the moments of history,
the passons of hearts and minds
no more,
is now a lamp,
an instrument that now appeals
to the eye.
Who knows why grandfather
wouldn't part with it,
and even converted it
into a tool of truth.
What a contrast to our day,
as the earth gets indigestion
from our refuse.
It can now unmask a tabloid,
amplify cigarette smoke,
betray a glare.
When a phone, it was a hostage
between two sides of a war
of words, words, words.
Let there be light.
Dandelions as soft
as a baby's eyelash,
Chinese lanterns about to reveal
with a miraculous origami
their tender hearts...
There are still no weeds
in Grandmother's garden.
Her granddaughter discovers
amid the underbrush that rock
brought back from the camping trip
in the Catskills,
New Hampshire...
She dusts it off,
pours water on it.
Tiny waterfalls darken
the sun-bleached bark mulch.
She still recalls Grandmother,
the amateur geologist,
picking up a stone
and, after examining it,
breaking it in half
and being rewarded
with a rough amethyst.
She will always appreciate
the Old World's knack
for wresting beauty
from harshness.
"Your father never threw
anything away," your husband growls
as we work to clean the garage.
Indeed, this vault of a time capsule
is like going back to my father's
adjacent our house on Cadillac Circle.
It is a gardener's shrine to the 60's,
containing treasures of junk unseen
for 30 years or more.
So many things
bought and unused! These implements,
themselves, have gone to seed.
We trod in dust possibly kicked around
by your parents- I fancy that we're overlapping
their ghosts. After assiduously trying to sell
this house, the reality sets in.
No more
of those damned Sunday open houses,
when you would have the memories to yourself,
no more regurgitating endless figures for those
who would ignorantly tread on their old property.
All our kids will miss are the blueberry harvests
every summer, climbing the tree
in the front yard, the apple picking-
Ingrid will miss the stone in the backyard,
brought back from a camping trip.
She will miss the Chinese lanterns
and the remnants of her grandparents' garden.
We sullenly divide the dusty possessions,
the wheelbarrow, the hoses, stakes, and the rest,
as after the reading of a poor will.
The amputated husband
stumbles through downtown---
he reaches for a hand
that is no more his own.
The young widow's shadow
leans over the candle
in the shaded window
as if whispering farewell.
In morning's stubborn mist
the headlights push on:
Main Street's like a lost
funeral procession.
The hurricane not past, I took a chance
And did a morbid, short reconnaissance
and saw as I looked through a shattered fence
that I was not alone.
And in a glance-
I thought of Adolph Hitler's little dance
atop the graves of Oceana's sons.
What were they, smiling at the twisted trees?---
elated at the winds of anarchy,
caged animals that heard the clink of keys.
Stranger Reunions
Your face as blank
as an unsigned yearbook,
your eyes as haunting
as half-learned lessons,
seeing you again is like
a schoolhouse bell
absently ringing in summer,
when, after the interval
of expectation,
no children run out.
Who knows from whence
it comes, when it wants,
unbidden, unexpected,
like bad boys' whispers
after bedtime?
it is a stray seeing eye dog
finding refuge
in a blind home;
a moth playing shadows
on the wall for the artist's
Rorschach eye;
an itinerant angel
that lights on
the tortured unasking;
mistaking a stranger
for your mind's desire
and finding that your
heart's journey is over.
Over downtown Framingham,
the North Star ripens
in the augar of dusk.
But here at the Old Colony Hotel,
its debut is not auspicious.
The silence is infected
with a thousand noises,
and hours fly past
like a string of mutated wasps,
each one stinging me
more urgently than the last.
But then, a mass
is also gathering in me:
Alone, I am conceiving
a poem.
With each mercurial minute,
the amneotic night
envelops me a little
closer, but
a dry rap of wood!
my revery scatters like
a flock of pigeons.
I grumble to the door,
and it's my landlord,
the very bust of hope.
"Sorry, Jack, next week."
He heaves a time-sodden sigh
and leaves.
The sun balefully peeks over
the stubble of rundown factories
and grimy restaurants
(I never breathe the poetry
of this town
until this hour),
but bloody arms akimbo
it shines upon
the awaiting rock pile.
The god of poets...
I close the notebook
as I would my life
and walk beneath
the phasing, vampiric crescent
that smirks like a Cheshire cat,
a pregnant man
in the womb of dusk.
He stopped in mid-ablution in the stall
Like a Rodin beneath a waterfall
And awaited the epiphany. His breath
Coveted, his muscles denied
Movement, he waited in feigned death,
Poetic predator, lest he scare it away.
His life's become a cockeyed
Shrinking tunnel of mirrors opposed,
The snake that makes a meal
Upon itself, a subject
That he's used more than once.
The poems that he would've once composed
Haunt him like the unborn children
He'd had, the ones who will never sing
Because of the fallibility
of the intellect's womb in conceiving
At every impulse.
With a hungry heart
He includes in the impossible canon
The moments of serendipity
That he'd dully eluded
Countless times.
His sanity
Discorporates like a dead cloud
While the sun waits in vain.
The breath of the world is held as the insects
Stop ticking.
Sleep recedes like a slowly pulled blanket,
And man and his dreams dissolve in morning.
The solitary jay outside the window
Perched in the paupered tree, both intricate
In their nudity, furtively picks at the bread
Impaled upon the outstretched branches,
Each bite a quickly stolen delight.
Restored, he announces the sun,
And, wing conquering the deferential air,
Is gone.
Each genesis of a day is unreal,
Not quite divorced from dream,
And uncertainties rise again
Like a resurrected enemy
Invading the siegecraft of our morals.
"Should I've apologized to her last night?"
Or, "Do I really
have to go to work today?"
The bluejay's sudden flight has shaken,
The bread with which the apple-less tree
Beckons as with unforbidden fruit.
You begin
To wonder where he flew,
Elusive as a dawning.
The wolf claws uselessly on damp cement,
While the convicted man comes by to feed
The animals.
If only paws were freed
They'd do what bloodied hands had only meant.
The alien refraction of your eyes
Illuminates the larger beast of night.
Keats would've loved to attain-
The disinterest with which you were born.
Could it have been the pharaoh's boredom
With his own ambition that had nurtured
Fascination with your race?
I at times reflect on the ambivalence
You bestow on my own, and how hard
It is for this dog lover to tell
Where the love ends and comfort
Of ownership begins, as you caress
Against my legs only to restake your claim----
But it is also said by your self-confessed
Authorities that you will kill bird,
Rodent, and the weaker ilks out of loyalty,
For us as pharaoh's legions did for him,
And I can see through your time-honored eyes
The progress of our own warring guises.
In gladiatorial regalia
he comes with harsh incense
to thieve the fruit
of their hard labor.
It enters as irresistibly
as the dreams
that it will enforce
on the queen
and her many subjects,
now stilled
in their perfect catacombs.
Ancestral memories
come uninvited, too,
when the language of dance
preceded the dancing
language of their pillagers,
of ancient wars among
untrodden clover fields
close by with rival hives,
destroying naught
but themselves.
Even antiquity
fails to tell why battles
were waged, how honey came to be.
But it evokes a time
when battlefield and home
was theirs alone.
This vision of a cardinal
in our denuded tree-
A half-healed wound
Opening in the nerves.
The minute hand tells time with nervous tics
In the old coffee shop. This time we shared
Today, my boy and I, was more my own
Than his.
The hour's come, immovable
And grim as the appointed one we all
Must face.
Back in the tattling light of day
We toddle, two survivors of a war
Of darkness.
Doughnut clutched within his small-
Brown fist, he stubbornly fights gravity.
Our trek across the narrow avenue
Must be frustrating to the motoristv
Who has to wait for us: Not all conform
To infancy. His car honks like a goose
From hell---The dumpster of the coffee shop
Releases crows as for a pauper wedding.
Our father and son tightrope act is done.
We sit in front of the door to my house.
As if on cue, his mother has arrived.
He, mystified at his bag's emptiness,
Has turned it upside down, not trusting sight.
The jimmies pitter on the concrete walk,
As if a bracelet full of charms was cut.
She's lovely with fatigue, quiet and dark
As moonless evenings. "I can't say when he'll
"Be back. With work and school, I just can't tell."
Pecked on the cheek this time is all I get.
I watch them disappear into the trees-
Obscuring Bolton Street until her lights,
Too, fade from view.
I've yet to move my butt.
Content to watch the dumpster, ugly, squat,
A large, metallic parody of me,
A parent crow with redoubled courage
Resumes its foraging. One doesn't see
The chicks discreetly perched above the search
Until the lure of dinner brings them back
To the old venue.
Re-emerging with
Some bread, it doesn't feed itself. Its first
Priority is all those gaping bills.
The chicks sit patiently atop the rim
And sun their grayness in the intervals.
Sometimes they'll make experimental flaps,
Peer in as if to jump... (next time, perhaps)
But the absurdity does not hit home
Until you see the parent and the chicks
Beside eachother- they're of equal size.
At first I think, "What gullibility,
In feeding young now old enough to swill
For their own keep."
But then, a gray one dips
Into the trash, ascending with a prize.
And suddenly, the chain that always was
Revealed itself again, that next year these
Crows will assume the black, their dullness purged,
And will contribute towards futurity,
As atavistically we all are urged.
And they will toil without complaint, the way
Their tree accepts its load with weary grace.
I would that I'll be just as wise as they,
The day my boy and I stand face to face.
May you never lose,
my ever lost love,
your spirit as pure
as the silver drizzle
in which you were conceived.
May you never perfect
the deceit which we but admire,
as that which attended
your genesis, as you roost
like a fruitbat
from your mother's catacomb,
ripening yourself in warmth
like a forbidden fruit.
O, my remembered sin,
may you never bear
as you were wrought.
My boy fidgets against me
In his Sunday best, bringing
To mind a young elk rubbing
velvet stubbornly clinging
To antlers off a helpless tree.
In the hardly relieved night
of the universe,
a distant kin of our sun gutters
out, taking its innocent young
with it one by one
in its embrace.
Elsewhere, stars too few
are a'borning,
yet too late and far
to help.
So our own speck
of earth is thus patterned
on cosmic injustice.
As a man bellows
at the thefts
of his age
he forgets that stars, too,
must fade away.
My son, come through
your finite twilight
into my endless one,
you came too late
to claim as my own,
too late to be
my salvation.