drugs for malaria, and you poured
the whole Pacific war into my ears
till I was raw and blistered.
Forty years later I could hear your voice,
I could see the women falling into the sea,
I could see the rotting bodies on the coral,
I remember your talking of the smell of battle,
of shit when bodies break open,
how blood stinks like spoiled meat.
You talked about how you had been promoted
then busted for hitting your sergeant,
time in stockade, beaten for being
a Jew, for being short, for having
a temper like a piñata breaking.
You were back to divorce Florence,
your second wife. You brought souvenirs
of the occupation, silks, a kimono,
glass animals, little saki cups, photos
of you with buddies, geishas, captured flags.
You marched on and on as the medicine burned
in you. I was the pit into which you shoveled
memories and then walked off.
You winked at me and you began to whistle.
In your mind you began to change the sky,
the water, the land. The stories turned
from yellow to blue. The blood turned
to paint. It smelled like glory.
It was the Fourth of July all year
and the war became a recruiting poster
featuring you.
Brotherless three: Never good enough
Suzie was my niece; she was not
your daughter: you refused her
the way someone will send back the wrong
dish in a restaurant.
The way you turned from the sons
of your third marriage. In a pique
you had a vasectomy, saying that no child
of yours ever did it right.
Did what? You seemed to have no love
to spare for them, as you pretended
your first three wives were one
dead woman. For twelve years
we had only an occasional card.
What is a half brother? Half time?
Half there? Half brother and half not?
We had different fathers. Yours, a short
stocky Jew whom imigration had labeled
a foot itch product, Courtade. The
year before your bar mitzvah, our mother
eloped with my father. Your father
took out her desertion on you.
When you were sixteen, my parents
caught you fucking your girlfriend Isabel,
forced you to marry. They tried
that on me at eighteen. I yelled
I’d take off and she’d never see me again.
A pit lined with fur and barbed wire;
roast chicken and plastique, warmth
and bile, a kiss and a razor in the ribs,
our family.
These memories tangle, a fine gold chain
with invisible barbs. As I pick out knots,
always there are tighter knots inside.
My fingers bleed. I remember
coming to see you in L.A. in ’64.
I was in civil rights. Black friends
told me L.A. was bad, stewing, smell of raw
sewage on smoggy mornings, hope eviscerated.
You said, We have no Negroes here.
Each link, a barb. Each set of links,
a knot I could never pick free.
My palms are crisscrossed with scars
as from barbed wire.
By then you were a college graduate—
who had not finished high school.
By then, your father was a Frenchman,
a French Catholic. By then, you were
a Marine hero with medals and war stories
you shared at the VFW. You drank martinis
instead of boilermakers. You speculated
in real estate near that huge
stinking sink the Salton Sea
where drowned rats wash up by the flooded
motels and the desert is laid out
with sidewalks and street signs.
Once when I read poetry in your city
you came. Afterward you stared at me.
Why do you remember those old sad things?
Why do these people come to hear you?
That old stuff, who cares?
Ah, but you cared. You could not look
me in the eyes. You could not risk
one real word
for fear I would like a big bad wolf
blow your house down
with my voice of fire.
Brotherless four: Liars dance
The myth says, he left three women,
three children, his family; his best friend
he left to die alone, so he was lonely
and unloved to the bitter end.
We live far more in fractals than in grids.
His fourth wife was Chicana, a widow
with four children who had a house
in a good section of the L.A. hills.
Of all his wives and girlfriends,
she alone resembled our mother—
small, dark, busty, flirtatious
she smiled easily and lied,
as well as he did, but not to him.
She was Spanish, an old colonial
family; he was French.
They were passionate to be proper.
Their house was papered with genealogies,
an aristocracy of Oz, detailed
as the papers of a prize schnauzer,
a past elaborated, documented
with the zeal of federal marshals
protecting a star witness.
Maybe I should simply see it
as a mating dance, two cranes
stepping about each other transfixed,
the ritual of two hot lovers
in bed pretending to be children
or Klingons or dogs—extending
the role for thirty years.
Like lovebirds in a cage,
they did not tire of the mirror
or each other.
Brotherless five: Truth as a cloud of moths
In adolescence I tried on others’
styles, shrugged on a leather coat
of tough street kid I had thrown off
to run the college marathon;
turned existentialist in black
turtleneck and black jeans;
played vamp, played Romeo
and Juliet alternate nights.
I would copy bits from movies,
wriggle my hips like this one,
pout like that. I thrust myself
into dramas and slithered out.
I’ve always seen the alternate
lives, the faces I might have worn
had I left the party with this man
or that instead of going alone
into the night’s soft rumble;
had I paused when the golden balls
were thrown before me on the race
course like Atalanta, instead
of laughing and running on.
Variant selves haunt
the corridors of my brain, people
my novels, crowd in like ghosts
drawn to blood when friends
or strangers tell me secrets
hand me their troubles,
sweaters knit of hair and wire.
Why then have I stalked for years
round and round the self you
built of forged documents,
charm, sweat and subterfuge
as if I were the sentinel of truth?
We both wrote ourselves into being.
Brotherless six: Unconversation
I buzz irritating and persistent
darting, biting at your death.
What do I hope to understand
?
Why I grieve for someone I did not know?
I was a white cedar swamp you traversed
on a wooden walkway above the black water.
You were a closet from which odd toys
and bizarre tools fell out on my head.
Our conversations were conducted
without a common language.
I gave you a foot. You handed me a balloon.
You gave me spurs. I passed you marmalade.
You thought I bore the past
like a broad sword swinging
to cleave you from your fictions
and perhaps you were right.
I’m an impolite wind that blows umbrellas
wrong side to. Now I make you up
out of pain you deposited in me decades
ago, eggs of blood red dragonflies.
I put out stories like weird fruit,
a cheap mail order novelty: GROW PEACHES
PLUMS, KIWIS, APPLES ON THE SAME TREE.
Grandma’s tales, mother’s, friends’ and strangers’:
you are stirred and mixed with them
in the incandescent melting pot of my mind.
I mother you into new ferment
who would not brother me.
Brotherless seven: Endless end
I have trouble understanding
when something is done
that was not finished.
I have to let you go
since I lack a hold,
no connection beyond a history
you had abandoned
like worn out clothes
delivered to Goodwill.
Lives are full of broken dishes
and promises, stories left
half told, apologies
that come back like letters
with insufficient postage,
keys that open no known doors.
The abandoned live with an absence
that shaped them like the canyon
of a river gone dry.
Do I mourn you, Phoenix hedonist,
or the man in the mirror
you killed in 1945,
because he was dragging you down?
I have made my own brothers,
my sisters. It is hard
to say goodbye to nothing
personal, mouthfuls bitten off
of silence and wet ashes.
from
Early Grrrl
The correct method of worshipping cats
For her name is, She who must be petted.
For her name is, She who eats from the flowered plate.
For her name is, She who wants the door always opened.
For her name is, She who must sleep between your legs.
And he is called, He who must be played with until he drops.
He is called, He who can wail loudest of all.
He is called, He who eats also from your plate.
He is called, He who sleeps in the softest chair.
And they are known as eaters and rollers in catnip
Famous among the nations for resonant purring.
Feared among the mouse multitudes. The voles
and moles also do run from their shadow.
For they perform cossack dances at 4 a.m.
For they stick their faces in your face and meow.
For they sit on the computer monitor to monitor your work.
For they make you laugh with their silly acrobatics
but their dignity is that of the oldest gods.
Because of all this we are permitted to serve them.
We are the cat servants, some well trained and some ill,
and they give us nothing but love and trouble.
The well preserved man
He was dug up from a bog
where the acid tanned him
like a good leather workboot.
He is complete, teeth, elbows,
toenails and stomach, penis,
the last meal he was fed.
Sacrificed to a god or goddess
for fertility, good weather,
an end to a plague, who knows?
Only he was fed and then killed,
as I began to realize as you
ordered the expensive wine,
urged lobster or steak, you
whose eyes always toted the bill,
I was to be terminated that night.
I could not eat my last meal.
I kept running to the ladies room.
All I could do was drink and try,
try not to weep at the table.
I was green as May leaves opening wetly,
I was new as a never folded dollar,
a child who didn’t know how the old
story always ended. Sacrificed
to a woman with more to offer,
the new May queen, lady of prominent
family, like the bog man I was
strangled with little bruising.
I lay in my bed with arms folded
believing my life had bled out.
How astonished I was to survive,
to find I was intact and hungry.
All that happened was I knew the story
now and I grew long nails and teeth.
Nightcrawler
Easy sleepers tucked in their white envelopes
with a seal that only dawn’s alarm will break:
with envy I lift away the sides of houses.
Shunted like a boxcar through broken switches
I rattle down prairie ghostlands of remember
past rusty flyblown sagging shingle towns
where the rusty sign of want creaks in the wind.
Floodlit by a blind eyeball of moon,
the past here is continuously performed,
an all night movie for insomniacs.
The floor is sticky with candy or with blood.
Voyeur, I spy on my own dead, in action.
Glued to that dim keyhole, I shout at them
Hold on! Put down that bottle. Toss those pills.
Next week a love letter will come with a check.
They don’t listen. They break each other’s
bones. They rub ground glass into their eyes
as blood flows out like satin under the door.
Always a phone rings in an empty house.
Easy sleepers, do ghosts ride your rails
all night telling stories you dread hearing?
This train runs backward toward old deaths
as fast as I pull forward toward new ones.
I vow to sleep through it
I hate New Year’s Eve.
I remember the panic to have
something, anything to do,
some kind of date
animal, vegetable, mineral,
a giant walking carrot,
a boa constrictor, a ferret,
an orangutan, a lump of coal.
I remember ringing apartment
bells on 114th Street
looking for a rumored party.
Parties with lab punch:
Mogen David, grapefruit juice
and lab alcohol, hangovers
guaranteed to anyone within
ten yards of the foaming punchbowl.
I wake the next morning
with my mouth full of mouse
turds and wood ashes.
I wake and remember
how I tried to demonstrate
the hula, my hips banging
like a misloaded washer,
how I made out with a toad.
I remember limp parties,
parties askew, everyone
straggling home with the wrong
mate, the false match.
Evenings endless and boring
as a bowling tournament
at the senior center.
Is it midnight yet?
Only 9:30? Only
9:38? At midnight
we will spill drinks on
each other’s clothes, kiss
the boors and bores we detest,
the new year like a white
tablecloth on which a drink
has already been spilled.
Midsummer night’s stroll
The attenuated silvery evenings of northern summer,
they are at once languid and fierce, white Persian
cats preparing to mate. They are pale lilies
whose fragrance paints the air of a bedroom.
The light is milky, suave and must be entered.
Who can sit inside with the lights on?
This mauve sky wants to soak through your skin.
Your body will float like a cherry blossom fallen
on a slowly moving mirroring river.
This glow will not tan but lighten your flesh
till you find yourself borne up as pollen.
Words escape you like birds startled awake.
Your lover’s face floats on this dusk, an alien
moon. You rise and vanish in the sky like a balloon.
The name of that country is lonesome
We go to meet our favorite programs
the way we might have met a lover,
the mixture of the familiar routine
and the unexpected revelation.
We can buy love at the shelter
if we get there before they have
executed it for being unwanted,
its fur cooling in the garbage.
It becomes more and more unusual
to be invited to dinner;
fast food is the family feast.
Who can be bothered with friends?
They have needs, you have to remember
their birthdays, they want to talk
when you’re just too tired.