Abandoned Poems Read online

  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

  to help a soldier

  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,