the everlasting. My dogs were and are devout,
but not their master.
IN THE SWIM
1
I’m in the swim. I won’t swim across the River Styx
that is out of fashion, like the Phoenix
that lived 500 years. I am not merry
swimming to any kind of cemetery
dictionary.
I’d rather swim the Charles to a library
drink Bloody Marys with Christopher Ricks.
Toward an island of dancing skeletons,
I pole my boat, my passengers the seasons,
paradise offers eternal life without seasons.
It’s silly to think rivers belong to anyone.
It’s time to write about rivers I’ve known,
not underground, but rivers legible to mosquitos,
black flies, a beaver, the human eye—
poisoned, damned up. A stone’s throw
from their own riverbeds, they cry
out in pain, flood, are never foolish, groan,
know laughter, have children called brooks,
who, afraid, run to them, scribble on stone.
You who read and write books
with bays, waterfalls, tidal sentences, look
at a river that is a person,
who tells old wives’ tales about the ocean.
In the name of no Father and no Son,
I will never swim across the Don
or join Yeats bringing the Liffey swans
promised by his friend Oliver
when he swam across the river—
the Black and Tans’
bullets breaking water near his head like salmon.
(Gogarty loved a party, his bawdy poetry at Trinity
made him a favorite among the dons.)
2
Zeus, an eagle, flew over the Meander,
held Ganymede, a beauty, in His claws—
lightning and hail—a pause,
then thunder.
Some waters are feeders, some devour
wilderness in an hour.
The Ganges shows eternal mercy,
the dead set afire with floating flowers,
the River Jordan is salty, full of heresy—
bathe in it, get in the swim, with scribbled stone
glacial ideas broken
off from upriver mountains,
scrawled on rock “Give to the poor everything you own.”
I never tried to wash off my sins
I want to keep. Heaven is a small town.
God keeps His word
to rivers, that are oratorios without words,
half notes, quarter notes, clefs are fish and birds.
Whenever, wherever His day begins,
God’s day is not our day.
We are musical scores, we hear ourselves
say hello hello, farewell farewells.
May the last song I sing bring
joy and remembrance to others.
Rivers trust in the Beginning,
leave empty beds, their sisters and brothers.
Over the Yangtze there are bridge-temples,
sure as Buddha had big ears and dimples.
Bridges separated good life from bad death,
bad life from good death.
I sit near a bridge and watch the trees grow.
In China, the past is wherever you go.
I dive to find the great beneath.
I will not rhyme, I’ll swim freestyle to my death.
Come swim with me, idle readers,
spend a while under water. I notice
rivers flow to blue harbors under the ice,
cubist sunlight indifferent to changing seasons.
I see the curtain fall, actors in underwater theaters,
players in make-up, the cast: Allah, Jehovah, Christ.
You there, look for me in holy places, I shout
“praise the Lord,” among pickerelweeds and bottom feeders,
I’m clothed in spawn of many fish, on shore it’s rutting season.
I hold on to uncertainty, mystery, doubt
without any irritable reaching out
after fact and reason.
SOLO
I paint Spinoza’s portrait with a faithful brush.
I am not indifferent. I am aware
that in some languages I love is just a verb,
pronoun understood. Which language is better in bed?
The Verb is a good beginning.
I play iTunes, love songs and sacred music,
sometimes I need to hear others pray.
I've been knocked off my axis
by the Gods in places of worship.
I've forsaken all the Gods. I listen
to Bach’s Saint John and Saint Matthew Passions.
Saint John’s Christ died on the cross knowing
His resurrection would redeem mankind.
Saint John’s opening chorus, “Come you daughters
help me mourn.” Saint Matthew’s Passion
has less foreknowledge, Christ died a Jew,
the first words of Psalm 22 on his lips,
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me. . .”
Martin Luther On the Jews and Their Lies:
“Burn their homes and synagogues!”
I watch the flaming Horse of the Apocalypse
leap from later-on back to the present
that is “eternal transition, perpetual crisis.”
The earth is covered with tears and blood.
God is the wish to live.
DECEMBER 31, 2016
(For Norman And Cella)
Looking backward to the New Year
I hear laughter, proof of good cheer,
laughter here, there, and everywhere,
fireworks, toasts, and breaking glasses.
Cheers for the lower classes,
the uncertainty of another day,
so much uncertainty along the way.
In Spain twelve grapes are eaten at midnight,
grapes of sorrow and delight.
What cakes! Pies! And herring!
What praise for loves
coming and going
cooked by Eros who shoves
us in and out of bed all year.
I feel a parliamentary Hear, hear!
We didn’t ask, “how is this night
different from all other nights?”
We didn’t say, “next year in Jerusalem.”
Still we celebrated freedom.
What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine.
Choice, simple as white or red wine.
Love is en garde,
something between a post card
and a never-ending letter.
A poem, a little verse, says it better.
Happy New Year!
Wish you were here.
ANDRZEJ RAPACZYNSKI IN A COMA
After all our arguments I never told you,
“Don’t ride to your death on a bicycle
for Christ’s sake,” because Poland is
Christ’s country and Yiddish is not a jargon,
because your wife, daughters, and ex-wife love you,
Paradise is a social democratic state
since Hell was turned over to Stalin and Hitler,
and because I didn’t remember to tell you that
Stanley William Hayter painted his daughter
killed on a bicycle, and because your mother
told you gentlemen don’t carry packages—
they ride horses or limousines,
not bicycles on country roads.
What is there for me to do
but blow you a kiss goodbye,
say you were too good, too intelligent,
and too much loved to die,
the last of an endangered species.
A WATERCOLOR
Yehuda Amichai who fought for
her
says Jerusalem is a prostitute,
each of her lovers left a gift behind.
Writing in Jerusalem
I feel like a 19th century watercolorist.
Here is the Holy City in pale pink and yellow,
my burnt sienna view of the mount of olives,
a grave here and there, an Arab on a camel,
two pious Jews walking,
a little blood red for emphasis. Where to place it?
You may prefer my Mount Zion,
with some memory of my drawing
of the Scottish Highlands,
my American watermark shows through.
God of Abraham and Isaac,
teach me to sing of the beauty of this city
with the irreverence of love.
Sob
You loud in cloud. You end in mend.
You light in flight. You age in language.
You other in mother. You know in snow.
You ought in autumn. You fly in butterfly.
You low in willow. You rye in rhyme.
You rest in forest. You cunt in country.
You mud in Talmud. You man in woman.
You cry in Christ. You hell in shell.
You awe in law. You odd in God.
You ache in break. You bell in humble.
You ear in fear. You art in heart.
Your sobbing breaks my speech apart.
POEM WITHOUT CLOUDS
I've had a long friendship with the sky,
blue, white, black, red, grey—it’s moody,
surprisingly adolescent, forgetful.
It has no knowledge, doesn’t see anything.
The uncertain sky never learned to spell,
still it’s got a miraculous melancholy
whatever the weather. It has always been
my horizon to horizon, entrance
and exit to the universe, constantly
separating this from that, darkness from light,
falling stars from galaxies, space from place,
separating, separating,
this universe from that universe.
I love my friend, the celestial everywhere,
with or without clouds.
ODE TO THE SCALLOP
I‘m offered a Chinese scallop on a toothpick
at a Botanical Gardens Halloween pumpkins
and a hundred friendly scarecrows event.
Some kids play I am one of the hundred.
I carve an Assyrian face out of a pumpkin.
I make faces to make children laugh:
Russian, French, English scarecrow smiles,
I pull handkerchief seagulls from my sleeve.
Drunk on Irish whiskey, I talk to myself,
“Blind trees are in love with the sun,
they have green eyes, teach philosophy,
some are Buddhists.” I tell the barkeep,
“If I am born again a bivalve,
I’d rather be a scallop than a clam.
Give me a shipwreck on the rocks,
singular and numerous, please.”
I speak to a kind lady scarecrow,
“Maryrose, a scallop has a thousand eyes
inside its hinged shell, each eye akin
to a reflector telescope,
the sort first invented by Isaac Newton.
This cloudy night, I believe in the Big Bang,
but I do not know the reason why it happened.”
My old board and hay lady scarecrow
is undressed by moonlight and the wind.
Truth is, neither scarecrow nor pilgrim,
without authority, I wear a scallop shell on my hat,
I walk to Santiago and Saint James,
then to 8th Street with its five used bookstores
and two theaters. Out of the blue
a stranger says to me, “I disagree
with Oscar Wilde who wrote: art is useless.”
Stranger, in Paris I used to live where Oscar died,
at the Hôtel d’Alsace on Rue des Beaux Arts.
I am full of useless information.
I’m comfortable on Washington Square.
I step on a handy Ivory soapbox,
I speak to passersby, "Attention! I draw
your attention to the wonders of the scallop's eye:
each eye contains a miniature mirror
that reflects incoming light onto a pair of retinas,
each of a thousand eyes reflects a different part
of the scallop’s surroundings. Each eye
like a novelist or poet, penetrates self.”
Why have I left All Hallow's Eve in the Bronx?
I raise three fingers like Christ Pantocrator,
I face myself like a congregation,
an almost empty church where the old and shivering come to sleep.
I put this note in a poor box:
“A scallop swims from predators,
it opens and closes rapidly in water,
flies away from starfish and crustaceans.”
* * *
I write I speak aloud to the living and the dead,
to begin with—trees living and petrified.
Since time’s beginnings and loose ends,
osprey dive into the ocean, catch scallops in their claws,
drop the shells on rock to break them,
then devour the miraculous creatures
that have souls but no hearts. Ignorant,
I’ve often dined on Coquilles Saint Jacques.
I just discovered the mirror in the scallop’s eye
is made of molecules called guano,
crystals found in seabird excreta.
Chameleons use such crystals to help them
change the color of their skin, that means to me
so much created has nothing to do with humanity.
A paradox, guano crystals don’t reflect light on their own—
they are transparent, but their arrangement
turns them to a collective mirror.
I’m on my way to Alabama or Bethlehem,
I’m game.
I hold a scallop, a fellow of infinite jest.
Eventually the light is completely turned around,
like poetry, it heads back to the front of an eye,
it sees what it hadn’t seen before.
Like Goya, I mirror grotesque reality.
I have no one to thank for the gift of my eyes.
My hat is out of fashion. I still ask, “Who am I?”
SCARS, MOON, AND OLD STORIES
My knees were never bent in prayer.
I have a very busy mouth,
experienced eyes that look straight into your eyes, baby,
my nose broken by a friendly fist—
shaking paws, and the back of my head scarred:
age 12, I put my head in front of a rock
thrown by a pal in our rock-throwing contest.
I have a World War II limp that goes and comes back.
The keloid scar across my belly
doesn’t show if I wear a shirt.
I almost forgot my severed Achilles tendon.
I’m a volunteer—
following orders, a prenatal hate.
I respect the tip of my tongue scar,
acquired age two,
when I fell down a bluestone stairway,
forked my tongue
making my way to my grandmother’s piano.
There is the duplicitous
suicide scar on my left forearm
because I was nineteen, and Marion Greenwood
was not in her studio when I arrived
after a long bus ride, and a five mile walk.
I sliced my arm, bloodied the place,
then cleaned up, said “I cut myself on a nail.”
(Twenty-three years later, I got the news
from a mariner poet walking across a bridge
that Marion was killed on a Woodstock sidewalk
by a truck backing up.)
I take responsibility for what I was not given,
found by chance, hidden behind waterfalls.
Off Roosevelt Avenue, I was taught a lesson in reality:
I saw a man who had stood on the moon, pass in a parade
in an open car. He was so different from his TV face.
I said to myself, “That guy is human. I’m watching him.
He stood on the moon. He’s right in front of me!”
An opposite story: years before, in a cinema
on Viale Trastevere, just passed Dante’s house,
across the Ponte Garibaldi—the film Marie Antoinette,
90% of the audience Togliatti “Felice Comunisti”—
Louis XVI and his family about to be guillotined
on the Place de la Concorde, the theater audience
wept in the cheap seats, and the loge,
“Oh no, i bambini, no! I bambini, no, no!”
The movie was happening then and there before their eyes.
I’ve forgotten my Roman scars from the heart’s cuts
beginning July 2, 1948. Nothing writ in water.
THE FALL
I’ve been lying in bed
with love and death for years,
in love with you and alone.
Stretched out, caught
between the rocks since August
then under the winter ice.
Shocked senseless by the breakup
of the ice, all sense of direction
lost in the flood and the joy
of shooting the rapids, going
over the top
of that waterfall, certain
to hit the boulders below
I shout to you
and watchers along the shoreline:
“My darlings, so far so good!”
THE DAY MY ROLL TOP DESK SPOKE TO ME
Now, not remembering the impulse
I give my desk the floor:
"I am a roll top oak desk.
I can keep a confidence.
You can put your feet on me, lean an elbow,
you can write a poem on me.
I can do what a bookcase or table can’t do.
I have drawers, nooks, niches.
Why do you write in an easy chair
with a notebook in your lap?
Some write at a stand up desk.
Not to write on me when I’m here
with my legs wide open is frankly
a sign of disrespect.
I’m for books, spilling ink, poetry.
Don’t sell me to an accountant,
or someone who will try to have me
only to give him or her authority.
I don’t want a mirror over me,