Old America has come home to die.
Bosses treat you like shit on their shoe
they can scrape off any time.
And they do.
From the Great Lakes, where
he’d worked freighters
in minus-
zero
weather, lost
half his damn fingers and toes
to frostbite. From the mines
at Crater Falls, Idaho, where
his lungs turned the hue
of anthracite. And from Moab,
Utah, where he’d been incarcerated
seven years for a rob-
bery he hadn’t done,
Old America has come home to die.
Romantic life of a “hobo”
lasts until your legs go.
Old America freckled with melanomas,
straggly hair to his shoulders
like the boy-General Custer, and
fester-
ing sores
on his back, sides, and belly
has come home to die
where no one remembers him—
“Uncle Eli?”
who’d sent postcards
from the West long faded
in Granma’s photo album
as out of a void
in an era before Polaroid
Old America has come home to die.
Old America with a blind left eye.
Old America with a stump
of his gangrenous left leg, amp-
utated at the knee.
How bad I treated my family
who loved me.
Come home to say I am sorry and I love you.
Great-Granma’s youngest sister’s
son Eli who’d left the farm in 1931
to work on the Erie Canal, but no—
disappeared somewhere west
beyond Pocatello, Idaho. We’d guessed
you’d died in the Yukon, or in
the Eagle Mine in Utah. Capsized
in the Bering Strait, or vaporized
at the Fearing Nevada Test Site
or murdered by railroad cops
and flung into the Mississippi—
poor Uncle Eli!
Sins I have committed these many
years, I regret. Wash my soul
clean before I die.
Trying to explain why
he’d left home except—
Where is Marta? Please
let me see Marta—his brother’s wife
he was in love with, and Marta told him
she was pregnant, and he abandoned
her to her violent husband like a coward.
Years I never thought of Marta, or Ma—
any of you. Now, that’s all I think about.
Forgive me how bad I behaved
when I was young . . .
Old America, we are not cruel
people, but the fact is mostly we’ve
forgotten you. And Great-Aunt Marta
too—died in 1961. And her oldest
son Ethan, who’d be the one
you’d want to see, is gone, too—
somewhere south of the 38th parallel,
Korea.
Where are my brothers—Frank, Joseph, Frederic?
My sisters—Margaret, Elizabeth?
My cousin Leah?—so many cousins . . .
Old America, frantic to repent,
has brought us presents—
flute carved out of a walrus tusk, Inuit
doll and soapstone skulls, beaded belts and
miniature pelts and something that causes Maya to scream,
Oh God—is that an Indian scalp?
Old America has come home to die
this first week of December
in time for Maya to videotape
an interview with Great-Uncle Eli
for her American Studies seminar at Wesleyan—
Life of an Oldtime “Hobo.”
Her classmates will be impressed—
Old America is like awesome, fantastic—
and her professor will grade an A—
Tragic, vividly rendered & iconic.
Jubilate:
An Homage in Catterel* Verse
For I will consider my Cat Cherie
for she is the very apotheosis of Cat-Beauty
which is to say, nothing extraordinary
for in the Cat, beauty is ordinary
like the bliss
conferred
upon us
in the hypnosis
of purr-
ing.
She has been known
to knead her claws
upon a sleeve.
And on a knee.
And on bare skin,
sharp claws sinking in—
just a warning.
For she is of the tribe of Tyger
and eyes burning bright
though cuddling
at night
until you wake to discover—
where is she? Cher-ie?
Don’t inquire.
* * *
For in considering my Cat Cherie
I am considering Catitude—
each Cat the (essential)
equivalent of all others
not varying freak-
ishly in size
(like crude D*gs)
but pleas-
ingly Platonic.
Cat-chutzpah
is the “sheathed
claw”—
no heart borne
upon a foreleg,
but
your challenge
to decode,
like poetry
of a subtlety
that does not bark
its meaning
but forces us to
be just a little
smarter than
we are.
(Unlike D*gs
whose un-
critical adulation
makes us
dumber.)
* * *
Of Twitter it is estimated
somewhere beyond thirty-one percent
who tweet are feline,
in nocturnal prowl
slyly retweeting
their kind,
reproducing,
replicating
the dark rapacious ever-
fecund feral soul
that is the sea
upon which “civilization”
floats, uneasily.
For such eloquent Kitty-Twitter,
only the most elegant Kitty-Litter.
But if you ask, Cherie, what
is this?, the reply is
blank blinking innocence.
Mew? What’s with you?
* * *
—“Live free
or die”—is the Cat’s
very soul, that
makes of us,
by contrast,
fawning and obsequious
beings (not unlike
D*gs). Such beauty
instructs us in its own
perfection
for it is beyond
mere “use”—no work-
cats, watch-cats,
plebian beings
but each descended
of gods
as ancient Egypt
honored; and how
like a deity, to sink
teeth into a rat,
a creature that
squeamish
mankind abhors,
while maintaining
purest Cat-
innocence.
* * *
Sandpaper tongue,
utter long-
ing.
Cat-love the nudge
of furry-hard head.
But oh, where has she gone?
Kitty-kitty-kitty! She may come
when called
(like the D*g)
but mostly
she will not
for
(unlike the D*g),
she has got
an interior life,
inscrutable,
inaccessible,
unpossessable.
She does not aim
to please, or aim
at all. Her blessing
is a fluke, as readily
withdrawn as given.
Never will she do your bidding.
Never will she falsely flatter,
nor deceive you
that you much matter
beyond the reach
of the hand that pets
and feeds.
Also she has got
much busyness
out-of-doors
by moonlight.
Don’t inquire.
* * *
But there she has gone
headfirst through
the Plexiglas cat door
to return with,
dropped on the floor
at my feet,
a small carcass very still.
Oh Cherie, what have you done?
* * *
Only the Cat’s gift is freely given.
The Dog in subservience as in chains
has no free will, and so—
* * *
For I will consider my Cat Cherie
whose tail switches irritably
across these keys
when confronted with prose
found wanting.
For it is irrefutable, the Cat
is the harshest critic of prose, cattedly
rejecting what has been doggedly
written.
This will not do, at all.
This is not it. At all
where the D*g drools
delight with very mediocrity,
in complicity.
Sometimes, the furry Cat-
sprawl
obliterates the typescript
utterly
for you dare not move
a limb, a tail—
even (gingerly)
from the laptop—
at risk
of provoking a hiss—
Mew! Whom’re you touching, you!
* * *
If I dare rise
from this desk
prematurely—
if I dare plead
(human) exhaustion—
vehemently
Cherie will dig in her claws
securing my knees
with the cry Mew!
Where d’you think you’re going, you!
Thus hours, days & ages
accumulate in pages
and pages into books
and books into oeuvres.
Purrlific the literary
judgment.
* * *
The very best books (it is said)
are not ghost- but cat-written.
Simenon, Colette, John le Carré
not least Hemingway—
Auden, Eliot, Philip K. Dick—
Borges and Burroughs and
Patricia Highsmith—
Jean Cocteau and Henry David Thoreau—
H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe—
(“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat!”)—
Twain, Bradbury, Raymond Chandler—
Sartre, Sylvia Plath, and—Daniel Handler?—
not least Samuel Johnson—
(“But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no Hodge
shall not be shot”)—
rapidly retreating into the mists of Time
where Muse is suffused with Mouse
until the two are merged in mystery—
Cat and collaborator.
Kite Poem
for Billy Collins
Some-
thing there
is in the American
soul that soars with
kites that soar! Some-
thing alive with the roar
of the wind lifting the kite
that soars above rooftops, tree-
tops, and awestruck heads! And yet—
Something there is not in the
American soul to adore the
kite that fails to soar.
The kite whose tail
is tattered in the
TV antenna.
The kite that rises
thrillingly
at dawn
then crashes
vertically
at your feet
in a heap.
American Sign Language
At the podium
measured and grave as a metronome
the (white, male) poet with bald-
gleaming head broods in gnom-
ic syllables on the death
of twelve-year-old (black) Tamir Rice
shot in a trice in a park
by a Cleveland police officer
claiming to believe
the boy’s plastic pistol
was a “real gun”
like his own eager
to discharge and slay
while twelve feet away
at the edge
of the bright-lit stage
the (white, female) interpreter
signing for the deaf is stricken
with emotion—
horror, pity, disbelief—
outrage, sorrow—
young-woman face contorted
and eyes spilling tears
like Tamir Rice’s mother
perhaps, or the sister
made to witness
the child’s bleeding out
in the Cleveland playground.
We are made to stare
as the interpreter’s fingers
pluck the poet’s words out of the air
like bullets, break open stanzas
tight as conches with the deft
ferocity of a cormo-
rant and render gnome-speech
as human terror
wet-eyed and mouth-grimace
where words that can be uttered
cannot follow.
Hometown Waiting For You
All these decades we’ve been waiting here for you. Welcome!
You do look lonely.
No one knows you the way we know you.
And you know us.
Did you actually (once) tell yourself—I am better than this?
One day actually (once) tell yourself—I deserve better than this?
Fact is, you couldn’t escape us.
And we have been waiting for you. Welcome home!
Boasting how a scholarship bore you away
like a chariot of the gods except
where you are born, your soul remains.
We all die young here.
Not one of us outlived young here.
Check out obituaries
in the Lockport Union Sun & Journal.
Car crash,
overdose.
Gunshot, fire.
Cancers of breast,
ovaries, lung,
colon. Heart
attack, cirrhosis
of liver.
Assault, battery.
Stroke! And—
did I say over-
dose? Car
crash?
Filling up the cemeteries here.
Plastic trash here.
Unbiodegradable Styrofoam here.
Three-quarters of your seventh-
grade class now
in urns, ash.
Those flashy cars
you’d have given your soul
to ride in,
just once, now
eyeless
rusting hulks
in tall grass.
Those eyes you’d
wished might crawl
upon you like ants,
in graveyards
of broken glass.
Atwater Park where
you’d wep
t
in obscure shame
and now whatever
his name who’d trampled
your heart, he’s
ash.
Proud as hell
of you though
(we admit)
never read a
goddamn word
you’ve written.
We never forgave you. We hate winners.
Still, it’s not too late.
Did I say overdose?
Why otherwise are you here?
IV.
“This Is the Time . . .”
Hatefugue
This is what I hate.
I hate that the bullies & thugs of the world
who wound, damage, devastate others
are then by the dark magic of art
enshrined in the art of those others
who have survived, & whose survival is commemorated
in art; I hate that the suffering of victims
flowers into art, white helichrysums bravely enduring
in frost, through bleached rib cages.
And hateful the pride in survival, the words victim,
survival. And hateful the pride of triumph—
You did not murder us utterly, we are still here.
Are you surprised, some of us are still here?
And we will multiply!
I hate that pride, so small it fits into a Grimm’s thimble.
I hate that Celan’s great poem of the Holocaust,
“Death Fugue,” flowers out of the dung heap of the dead
& could not have come into being otherwise.
I hate the necessity of art that is compensatory
for such evil.
I hate the very triumph of such art that would suggest
the horror is not absolute, for such art
has flowered from it.
I hate the meager survivals,
the crushed straw through which the drowning man breathes,
and such gratitude in such breathing
through the crushed straw. I hate
the dirges, the dances on broken feet,
the sound of shattering glass
that is the voice of defiance in sorrow.
I hate the fact of it that is irremediable,
and I hate the history that enshrines the fact.
I hate this having to pay such rapt attention to the bullies & thugs.
I hate how they continue to command our attention,
I hate that the greatest revenge seems to be beyond us—
to erase, to forget. To obliterate the memory of such evil,
the swastika, the silly mustache commanding
the marching men, smokestacks and empty skies,
the swagger of the bully, the mean smile of murder,
the swill of evil,
the smells.
I hate that the great art that has flowered from such carrion,
yet carries the whiff of carrion, the terror of the victims,
the suffering of the innocent that never ceases,
and the bearing witness that must never cease—
I hate that such knowing annuls all possibility
of not-knowing.
And most, I hate that the bullies & thugs are the prime movers,
whose polished boots set all into motion,