I play the game of shooting stags,
they are really papa, brother, sons.
I don’t know if Eros is a god or angel,
but I exile the little enthusiast.
The devil never takes a shower.
See how little I know?
I pin my old credo to my door.
The wind blows away my paper sign
leaving me to think life is just a door
without a roof or window.
My motto now is “what do I know?”
STREET MUSIC
I judge matters
differently now:
Captain David McDowell,
cultivated publisher
and editor,
told me in 1949
he fought the Nazis
at Monte Cassino.
An infantryman, half way up
the bloody mountain,
almost shot in half,
screamed in pain all night.
At dawn David ordered
a corporal to shoot the soldier,
whoever he was.
When the corporal refused the order,
David shot
and killed the corporal.
He was one of thousands
slaughtered on the mountain.
I did not whisper or shout
when I was told the story,
“Murderer! Murderer!”
I thought, “It happens,
war is war.”
David spoke French and Italian
without his Southern accent.
He telephoned me to go to
William Carlos Williams’ funeral
at a Rutherford church.
In attendance Bill’s sons,
grandchildren, beautiful
old ladies, ex-girlfriends
and Fanny.
I looked for asphodels
green among the flowers.
I did not recognize
a single attending poet.
I cannot count all
the babies
Bill pulled into America,
among them American poets
he freed from idols—
a few English bastards.
W.C. Williams resolved the conflict
between form and freedom in verse,
stepped lines.
When I drive near Rutherford,
where Bill was born,
along the Passaic River,
still mourning
for what’s past
I feel I’m driving a double-deck bus
along the Tiber in Rome.
I’m dreaming, void of guile,
we’re near the Isola Tiberina
the bus loaded with poets
some cold sober
some drunk some high.
I hear dozens of languages
and dialects—
cobbled, tar,
and dirt music
wherever a shoed, sandaled,
or naked foot has trod.
Montale beside me,
I hear Rimbaud say,
“Je suis un autre.”
Denise Levertov says,
“We’re all here
on this queen of long roads
because of Bill’s love of love,
his secret, American stuff
for all of us.”
We’re on the A-Line
to Michelangelo.
Bill pushes his way
from the back of the bus,
tells me, “Stop!”
He steps down,
disappears in the night
screaming in pain.
Each of us has his or her reason
to know who’s screaming.
The poets head back home,
to their lives and graves
the most serious appear
the personification of frivolity,
all of them write poetry
that would be impoverished
without nonsense.
AFTERWORD FOR HOWARD MOSS
Where are your remains, I don’t know. On second thought,
buried in books, hearts, and heads,
your heart’s histories, “dead vision” that still may lead us
with language that commands Left! Right! Truth! Beauty!
I hear Siegfried’s funeral march.
About-face. Forward, march! Beauty!—most gentle, Officer.
I wish I could believe I will see you soon.
God invented death for His believers.
Howard, it’s a sunny winter day.
Come out, come out, wherever you are. Translated.
I’m for making a distant cousin day something like Christmas.
Happiness and sorrow quarrel,
break matrimonial vows.
Sooner or later, poetry defeats the liar.
There are no gray flowers.
You planted a wild rose bed in my garden.
We discovered in our forties
we were distant gardener cousins,
our grandfathers were brothers.
We were Great Depression grandchildren,
our kin left behind in Lithuania murdered
for the fifty or sixty pleasures
murdering can bring. Family resemblance?
In our chins a certain courage.
HOUSE WINE
For Louise Glück
My friend, a poet, a mother loves her good son
I never met—I know nothing about him
except he’s a sommelier in San Francisco,
a priest of unsanctified wine. I believe
he has the right to celebrate any religion or none.
I believe in celebration, the ceremonious:
Jesus gave thanks for what he received
at the last supper—the Virgin was not invited.
Jesus ate bitter herbs, spilled some wine
for each plague, not to drink a full glass
of his enemy’s suffering. Surely Jesus was proud
of the Haggadah’s anti-slavery passages,
still he allowed his disciples their slaves—
“a fault of the times”—John Adams,
our second President, did not have or share.
He told his boy John Quincy, “You will never be alone,
always carry a book of poems with you.”
Sommelier, be proud six hundred years before
the birth of Jesus, the Babylonian Talmud
gave reasons for capital punishment—
then warned the chosen people: “any court that gives
the sentence more than once in 70 years will be
known as the Court of the Assassins.”
Dear poet’s son, you grew up in a house
where poetry was the national sport and pastime.
Words thrown across the plate of poetry,
fast balls, screw-balls, sliders, balls and strikes,
umpires cried safe! or out!
Your mother, a beauty, taught you hide-and-seek,
a game played by flowers, animals, everything that lives.
Planets and stars seem to know the game.
(There is hiding and seeking in this writing.)
You will never meet someone who does not know
something you do not know.
Leopardi was not allowed to cut
his own meat till he was twenty-five
or leave the house in the Marches without a tutor.
Feral mothers, long as they live, tell their sons
when it is bedtime, with whom to make love,
man or woman, younger or older,
like or opposite mama or father
who may have a second wife living in Boston.
There’s an ancient game, Rivals,
some call Fate, played between fathers and mothers
for sons' or daughters' love. Rivals was played to the death,
when poems were written on turtle shells, chiseled o
n stone,
since there were breasts and lullabies... mothers always win,
unless they die young. Priapic fathers love
their children, protect them from theives.
Tear out all the pages from the holy texts,
what’s left—mothers always win.
What does the woman want?
A glass of Château Pavie Cheval Blanc.
Years ago, sommelier Noah's mother told him,
“You once lived inside me.
Honey, you are pretender to my throne,
my Prince of Wales.” She gave him a harp
he hung among the willows.
In bed she kissed him and said, “Little white whale,
if you get lost, mother will always hear you
a hundred miles away.”
TO MY UNBORN FRIEND
If Jean Garrigue and Larry Rivers had not aborted their baby,
I would celebrate wassailing nights and days.
Jean's poetry lived every minute passionately, yes, I include sleep.
Jean "was our one lyric poet who made ecstasy her home."
When she walked it was on solid earth and clouds.
When she shopped, ordered potatoes, there was something
uplifting she gave the vendor. She wrote sacred history.
She introduced me to Marianne Moore
almost singing "the noblest Roman of them all."
Larry’s paintings were stuck with beauty, ideas,
humankind more than most when he was clean.
He played jazz, slept with his son, spoke Yiddish.
The newborn, 70 now, would be my friend.
In Washington Square we might speak about
following the heart, the disappearing Village—
Eleanor Roosevelt and Auden were good neighbors.
Where are the used bookstores of yesteryear,
the Chelsea, Newtown, Gramercy phone numbers
without cellphones or eBooks
Now making it new is often just new,
not what we can’t live without. Their child’s face
some Jean, some Larry, the rest left to God,
part Quaker, part wrong angel, part Jew.
I bet the aging man or woman can sing.
If in a plastic bag the fetus was thrown in the trash,
it’s still around because in the old days we said
"matter can neither be created nor destroyed."
I will not name the doctor who performed the abortion,
it was a crime before Roe v. Wade, but he was a great poet—
years afterward Larry told me the truth.
BEACHCOMBER
I know something about godforsaken places.
Walking on the beach alone, far from the Dead Sea,
I thought I saw a horseshoe crab crawling slowly—
it was a Gideon Society, black Bible cover.
Another time, washed up on a Montauk dune,
I found a Chianti wine bottle
with a letter in it. I read to myself
a child’s handwriting: “Hello,
let’s make friends. Please call,” she gave her phone number.
I held the bottle a week before calling, then asked
for Mary Jane, in my best Portuguese accent,
“I am Pessoa. I’m calling from Por-tu-gal.
I’ ll be your friend.” She called her
father and mother to the phone. I gave a good performance.
That’s the way it is with you, dear reader.
Stanley with family, February, 1935
AFTER ATHENS
A child, my ship docked at the port of Athens.
I wasn’t a child who played in sand with a pail and shovel,
the ocean swimming nearby.
Greece taught me beauty without saying a word.
I swallowed the Acropolis, a kind of Eucharist.
It never passed through my intestines.
Even so, back in Queens, life was an apparatus
belonging to the city. Life cleared streets,
plowed snow, collected garbage,
was related to an ambulance, elevated trains.
It only made sense when I saw a field of wildflowers,
what some call the hand of God.
It took time before reality became
not a hope or wish, but what is—
my occasional Doric companion.
LEAR’S WIFE
Lear’s wife rests in peace and war.
His Queen died giving birth. Three years passed,
Lear’s prince was found dead
in his gold-leaf castle-bed,
two serpents playing on his pillow-slip,
the Gods in supine negligence.
In a manner of speaking, Lear
is drawn, quartered in and out of bed,
his limbs tied to horses sent in opposite directions.
The King’s Fool says, “Poor uncle, the Prince died
of a serpent’s tooth, a grateful child.”
Regan and Goneril rub purple onions
on their cheeks to show Lear real tears.
Cordelia hoping to comfort her father
plays the lute—her sisters study suitors.
(In the play, just before he dies, when Lear says,
“Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir,”
I still think he means his fly. You may say
he doesn't wear trousers from Moss Bros.)
The King, surrounded by lead, gold, and silver darkness,
walks among his frolicking soldiers who tell
and retell their war and love stories with advantages.
Whatever his commands, the conversation,
the company, place, circumstance, Lear’s heart
is prisoned in the body of his buried Queen.
Whatever the King’s purpose, quarter-thoughts,
half-thoughts, mirrors of her life
and death come to mind: age sixteen,
she crossed the perilous straits at Dover,
her merry French girlhood left behind,
her body kissing his body much amoured
by dames at court and country inns.
She was a spring garden, summer in March.
He remembers her glorious deflowering.
Lear commands: “Our Queen and son
will never be spoken of to us or painted again.”
Then he mumbles, “Names are knives.
Are not all the dead forgotten too soon or too late?”
From his throne, Lear sees at a distance
the happy fields he won in old battles.
He cannot always tell surrendered swords,
chained together like haystacks, from haystacks.
Nor can he separate grazing war horses
from toppled oaks. Lear knows he will soon surrender
his happy fields to the command of Death.
He does not need the cares and business of sovereignty.
Lear says, “Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.”
DEPARTING FLIGHT
I’m going home from worldly London, I’m not sure I’ll come back
to see my living friends I love. Dead friends still speak to me, I
hear some of what they say. I take a cab from my hotel beside
the National Gallery to Heathrow, pass the Lyric Hammersmith
Theatre. I leave behind the living unabridged history of the
English language, I have a pocket full of Italian poppy seeds.
Under my hat, the Tibetan Book of the Dead allows a priest to
speak in the ear of the dead who still hear prayer. My passport,
not a poem, gets me through customs. British Air seats me,
gives me whiskey. A little after takeoff, I open Emily Fragos’s
manuscript, Saint Torch. Not by chance, Emily and I first met
among the cages at the American Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to A
nimals.
Now I’m with Emily over the Atlantic,
that is, with her poems, a mysterious manuscript,
she’s a church sitting on a nest of eggs in my lap.
Looking down toward the unseeable ocean,
I’m inside a giant raptor, through the window
I see an airplane wing, the intelligence of clouds.
I can’t see what I know is down there.
Her songs make me confess to myself.
A flashing light tells me to tighten my seatbelt,
we’re 35,000 feet high, it’s 71 degrees below outside.
Emily, what of the night?
A Thistle Hotel room service menu appears
when I reach for a handkerchief,
I see a page from a translated libretto,
an Italian opera I don’t know.
(Vowels aren’t vague in libretti, whereas consonants
sing the vowels away.)
We must be flying over “mad Ireland.”
I just can’t take for granted I’m flying.
No question part of me lives in another age.
I try to clean my fine tooth comb of memory, a mantilla.
Where are the flamenco dancers of yesteryear?
I eat dark atavist chocolate, I’m full of remembering,
wanting English friends I’ve left in churchyards
to come back—some others I don’t know where.
In Torch light, I give thanks to omnipresent angels:
life, death, music, everything I cannot see,
what I know is there beneath the clouds. I write this
on the title page of Emily’s manuscript: Saint Torch.
I would not write on her gravestone.
It’s not a desecration to write rhymelessly.
Emily, are you going to be buried
with cats you love, their names and ashes,
as I will be, with most of my dogs’ ashes at my feet—
except those already under daylilies,
violets, and flowering trees.
Emily, you find the God’s honest truth.
Through the plane window I see snow, Nova Scotia,
Newfoundland, ocean again, then Boston Harbor—
smooth landing.
I pass through customs, declare nothing.
A trained police dog sniffs, mounts my luggage
filled with trousers that stink of good dogs.
* * *
It happens toward the end of the play
I swim with my dogs out to sea
past the Montauk Lighthouse—
my golden retrievers and blacks labs,
and precious mutts, exhausted, they paddle
back to me. They insist I just hold them.
Dogs are not aware of death, they believe in abandonment,