The.American.Word.If when I see it I know it then
I’ll know that I’m far from home
because the sights here and the things
we never see leave me always wanting
more. I mean, desire for change, really,
is a wanting more than what we want just
for one, two,
three of us, but for all of us and actually
not just us but them too, should there really be
a them, a line across the way, a line we cross when
we become something else,
or far from home
Berrigan Wedding Coat
As yet unburied, my friend Gerry met me at the station –
His directions a mystery, he’d said OK, I’ll come fetch you –
And took me to his new house, new at least to me.
I hadn’t seen him for ten years, though I must have thought
His name a thousand times, measured myself
Against how he might have seen me
if he’d seen me
Again.
Crossing half the upper range, New York to Chicago,
I stopped hard by Erie, Gerry in the angle against the lake,
Clad, the two of us, in coats we’d bought
To celebrate the coat
Ted Berrigan had bought
to celebrate the wedding
Of Ron Padgett, we’d thought.
Berrigan died younger than me now –
the summer I was seventeen,
summer in Colorado. Judy joined me there
the next year, then Gerry the first of us
to finish school and go. And here now,
long later, he ducks his head down
and angles across the road to collect me.
Red Squares (May 1, 1992)
I.
Fortress walls of the Kremlin thunder once again. Loudspeakers drone out the laughter of orphans dancing. Folk dancers, clowns posing for photos, bears dancing the Lambada, and Russian army jazz musicians: All fold up their tents.
Red flags wave beside the bus-barricaded Revolution Square. The thousands march, chanting “Down with Yeltsin!” Red banners embroidered in gold. Chests proudly port Five and Dime store medallions. Relics scrapped in the ash heap of Party annals.
Goo-goo eyed, sub-urban children now snap photos of St. Basil’s Cathedral, then coo at the high and long step rhythm of the changing of the guard, “Juri, where are you???” Searching for their guide, Innocents Abroad brush aside Old Believers.
“Lenin should be buried along with the rest of you,” Juri scowls. Looking for a fist fight, he regrets not being there the day the empire popped like a Zeppelin but somehow without dropping from the sky in flames.
His friends— defiant— stood up upon a tank, their photo immortalized. “You’re lucky to be on the winning side,” I tell him, “After Tiananmen, satellite images still tell a thousand words.”
A moment of silence. “Lenin! Lenin! Lenin!” the Old Believers shout.
But there is no transmigration of souls: The embalmed one declines the invitation of the Spanish tourist board to visit the Canary Islands.
His sarcophagus winces in grief: Upon the façade of the old Dumas he so detested, black letters in Russian and English blare in new Newspeak, “Freedom Works!”
The ceremony comes to a close. Old Believers file from the square, cursing Innocents Abroad. Knives darting from their eyeballs slash publicity desecrating such hallowed turf.
Before the former Karl Marx Metro stop, clarinets sway from out of the roaring twenties. Son of Fuehrer II clichés in stereophonic sound.
Autograph hunters supplicate before the gaze of a celluloid star. I buy his newspaper but foreswear his signature, my guilty fingertips now smudged with radioactive ink.
II.
I talk to the one man in the crowd who will respond in English.
Tall, aristocrat of the street, long white coat, a high school English teacher, he tells me in perfect English, “he just loves to talk to foreigners,” he says (for a few dollars, it is understood)— and has corresponded with a “delightful” lady in Holland for many years.
His eyes never look directly at me.
Speaking Jabberwocky, we discuss the global ramifications of Humpty Dumpty’s fall in front of the Bolshoi while sub-urban children collect Red Army souvenirs and haggle for scalped tickets (starting at twenty dollars, getting down to five, sometimes even less).
One young soldier is willing to sell his pants for a few greenbacks; my street guide tells me that, by the way, he also has caviar and army uniforms to sell…. As if on a fashion runway, sub-urban children then port their newfound khaki camouflage to Swan Lake— to the evident disdain of the audience.
Then, as he stares [ ] into the clouds, he tells me that his son just happens to be a fighter pilot in the Far East and has much to tell me— but he’s not permitted to speak to foreigners, he adds.
Needless to say, I decline the invitation.
—1992
Seaside
We are a family at the seaside,
wearing seaside clothes and hats,
seaside smiles, seaside shoes,
seaside skin, oiled to a high gloss.
If we could we would stop time now,
here, on this day before the world
unravels; the universe on its sure
implosion course.
We would find some way
to keep her tan line just like that,
the sumptuous dinner on the deck
the long shadows of umbrellas
radio dishes tuned on the sun.
Her half-devoured book,
resting on her lap, right there,
page 112,
as she drifts in daydream.
Sometimes you have to wonder what
keeps us going, gunning toward
almost certain suffering.
But look across the sand, the way
it buttresses the beach, the sky
wrapped around like a gift,
And it happens, she turns, slowly,
to look back, the shadow of her hat
lies down on her neck, so quietly,
and you see it: the reason.
Food and prayer and sin centered in our family squarely around the din of suppers. I have seen my sister Alice sublime drinking can beer and eating cold pizza hours before her wedding, years after her divorce. Grace at our table was so long and inclusive the dead never made it to the past or the living futured. “Eat fast,” my father wised up the bewildered. The broiled hamburger hump on Tuesday nights, onioned, served with mixed boiled frozen vegetables and apple sauce still triggers tics: The trick: drop some on the floor, hide some in the napkin, store some in the mouth, mumble up excuses to the bathroom and flush some, camouflage the rest around the plate like stations of the cross, some art. Meanwhile, Nixon might roar from my father’s milk, the older brothers snort into their forks and swallow deferments, one kidney bean at a time. My mother must have been close to heaven, overcooked and overworked and dead each night at nine. All our sins must leave this world like grated cheese for good and live on in other udders, some grumpy hungers I pray, gnawing for pasta and a piece of hard bread, the heels.
We pass on this poem by Martín Espada, not about a president, but about others on this Presidents’ Day, written and first published some years ago – Eds.
Imagine the Angels of Bread
This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.
This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.
If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.
You remember how those giant
transport craft had once soared
one by one like eagles over your sandbox
where your model jets roared
missile strikes against tanks and toy soldiers.
You were not even born when
those Hercules C-130s had once landed
packed with aluminum cased coffins
draped in Red&White&Blue…
My poor cousin from the Blue Hen
state with its own Mason-Dixon line
(that so neatly divides the northern corporations
from southerners farming chickens),
you took the very first chance you could
to see the world after those evil Saracens
struck the WTC and Pentagon.
Now far from your Dover sand box
you play volleyball and soccer
with your fellow General Issue
next to shark-infested waters.
Some flew in from Af-ghan-ee-stan;
others got it easy in Ku-wait;
and like yourself, other warriors
are on weekend leave from I-raq.
“It’s not so bad…” you start off affirmatively
“but there’s really not too much
to do sometimes… not at all like
they say it is in the News.”
You pause a bit, staring off
over the dunes; you’ve said exactly
what you’ve been told to say…
toes fidgeting in the sand nervously.
“Yeah, it’s great to take a rest,
even if only for a couple of days, but
you ain’t allowed no more ‘dan two beers
per night!” Worse still, you’ve been granted
only one hour of shopping— transported
to a weird land where it’s dangerous
to even glance at the flash of a woman’s
eyes behind black shrouds hidden.
“At night… the latrine is a couple
hundred feet from the barracks …
If ya’ got ta’ go, ya’ got to take a flashlight
out to check for scorpions scamperin’
at your feet… but just lightin’
a match can make ya’ a real
sittin’ duck for snipers…”
(It would be a good several
months before the big bad News
began to murmur that kind of report…)
With a wistful smile you assert,
“You know I never dreamed
Dover to be so damn beautiful…
Had always wanted to get the hell out…
It’s only six more months
before I’ll be shipped back…”
—2005
Lake Life
Here are the fat flies
the woozy stars
silver nets the spiders have cast
Look here, the sunflowers have come in
boats buzz the shore
the scented moon
Steaks are broiling
children are barefoot
cats asleep in their beds of mint
Here is August
with its flowery yaw
dusted pollen road to the park
The motorcycle boys
roaring back to town
stale oak breath of the shore
Here are the halter top girls
with their tan lines and bangs
scented with sunscreen and strawberry gloss
Here it is again and soon it will be gone
back to the marina, back to the forest,
back, back, back, to the vault of summers
Where it will wait for us, anthropologists
of happiness, to excavate its dew and heat,
the smack of hulls on the skin of the lake.
We will find the pulse of crickets
and engines, the mantises on their knees
whispering their small green prayers.
The.American.Word. 