Leftover Poems
Leftover Poems
Christmas Eve alone:
tying up ends
unwrapped gifts
unraveled crochet
Memories of you.
Stillness undoing:
trying to forget
tying knots
while trying to
untie knots
Your tatting on my heart.
12/24/85
Hushed Love Sonnet
How good it is to
Have done things with you
In the secret night
that I can never write about.
There is no testament
To those compressed moments
Like our bodies ~ suspended ~
Lightly, before their fall.
Words not grounded to paper
Are traced in the memory
With vanishing whispers,
Etched forever in silence.
And the circle of my love
Needs no sound to be complete.
Fall, ’84
MESSY CLEANUP
SNOW LIKE DETERGENT
IN AN OLD BENDIX
RUN AMOK . . .
DEPRESSES ME.
circa ’84
Two Lane Turnpike
Two lane turnpike
Somewhere in the country,
Directions cleft by
Concrete road dividers,
I stand wordless,
Choking on the wake
Of this escape.
You pulled away so fast
It left skid marks
And a mocking spray of
Gravel that pits the skin.
Eyes smart in exhaust
Of your withdrawal —
Rapid vanishing traffic.
Panic of the phobic
Hyperventilating,
Expands the spongy lungs.
Not good, this dense illusion —
Don’t breathe it yet
The air will clear
And then you might survive.
Familiar with the
Gasping fear — always
Delayed its congestion;
But grown phthisic with
The fever of love and
In rarified air so long,
I have aspired too much
On this last breath.
’84
Birdcage
Prisoner of her nervous system
Of her demons, woes a victim
How by throat she grasps you fast
Cat-scratched, wing-clipped, to nest in past.
Roseate, dawning, my love I open
But darkling, frowning, withdraw forsaken;
For lives before you are dangled as blackmail
And fledglings dismembered make wills and will fail.
Thus disdained I decry contempt
Yet my freedom is likewise spent.
Circa ’84 – ’85
Growing Impatient With Lover
I feel as if I were lying in,
a Victorian lady,
indulging parturiency
as though it were neurasthenia.
I need your presence to allay
the suffering and ennui
to occasionally cheer
with treat or delicious madeleine.
Sometimes you may unburden me
of tedious chores and gravid worries
while I am housebound, dormant.
These months we share much labor.
But soon the day of lightening
will dawn and I’ll toil alone
until my quickening with you
will only be a stillborn memory.
Circa ’85
Moon Chant
Cycling through twenty eight days
A woman is like the moon
A witch on a bike instead of a broom
Pedaling her body
In tandem to la lune
And tonight I ovulate
In the fullness of the moon
I feel its round looming face
Sucking on my womb
And ovaries undertow
From a swollen room
That rocks the lurking ovum
My blood’s hormones croon
And howl redundant song
Like sirens that tune
Fallopian tubes
With redundant lun-
acy
My madness of the moon.
Circa ’85
Before the Journey
In the desert
I seek the
burning phoenix,
its rebirth.
But I am frightened;
you let go my hand.
Be well you say.
I may come for you
later.
In the nights
we have left
I touch your face
My hands drink
from the shallows
of your eyes
and remember
with their own eyes,
the shape of your face.
My hands cover
the vast case
of your thoughts,
conservatory
of your words
cavern of your
labyrinth.
My fingers kneel
on the soft cushion
of the temple,
which shares with
cheekbone,
the horizon
of your dark,
purple-lidded sky.
I push my wrists
between your teeth,
hoping
to draw blood.
Even my fingernails
long to invade you,
scrape your chest,
catch your hair.
My palm cradles
the sloping cheek,
searching for tears,
their salt to lick.
And now with
your own hand,
you cover the well
of my mouth,
drowning the sobs
with your descent.
’85
When a Tree Falls (based on Peter Taft’s story “Change Creeps Up on Hog Wallow”, THE NEW YORK TIMES, April 21, 1985)
The philosopher asked,
When a tree falls
in the forest and
nobody hears it,
does it make a sound?
I think they’re still
discussing this one;
they’ve gone beyond
esse est percipi
(regarding the
existence of the scene),
and have decided
it certainly est;
(solipsism’s out).
The question seems to be:
do the sound waves make noise
if there’s no organ
of perception around?
(Now psychologists
discuss it too.)
Meanwhile, in the Pine
Barrens, Emil Brown waits.
He lives in the same
tarpaper shack where
McPhee (the writer from
the worldly New Yorker)
found his father
some twenty years before.
John McPhee made Fred Brown
famous, but Fred
didn’t care a bit and
slipped right back into
the cranberry bog
in Hog Wallow.
It was his home,
after all, and the way
he wanted to live.
People were surprised
to learn of him, this man
who dwelt in a dense
back woods just an hour
from Philadelphia,
Princeton and New York.
Such a person could
be fathomed in
Mississippi,
Kentucky or
West Virginia, but
hardly in well
paved New Jersey.
Yet there he was,
and the Pinelands
were declared a
park and the state
came advising on
how to preserve.
Up-to-date cranberry
bogs got bigger
(not all the Barrens was
declared sacred park),
closing upon Fred’s home
with the wide open mouths
of modern machines.
His little cabin was
swallowed by neat rows of
wet gums cleared with their teeth.
Then Fred died; son Emil
kept his father’s shack,
mourning the good old days
recalling how
deserted Route
563, how
isolated
“Oswiggle”* Lake.
The Piney Woods are
no longer barren:
tourists proliferate
them with debris.
But still some forest stands,
conserved by Act and God
and Emil carries on
his father’s great
traditions: Pretty Girls,
Whiskey and Tall Tales.
Emil says to
the reporter:
“I’ll be honest with you.
The best days ended
in the ’60’s.
You could walk anywheres.
You didn’t see
no one in the woods.
No one bothered you.”
He looks up to the sky.
“Wasn’t no noise,
no aeroplanes.”
He spreads his arms wide.
“When you’re in the woods
you’re all right. How
can anyone say
anything against you
in the woods? Can
a guy chase you
of town? Yes, but can
a guy way anything
against you in the woods?”
And when a tree, alone,
falls in the forest,
does it make a sound?
Spring, ’85
*Oswego Lake
* * * * *
My love
Your absence is a black quiet
That envelopes me in its tunnel
Swelling
My own flowering turns
To loss and swallows
Involution.
Pity on My Dress (Paranoia)
One day one of our schizophrenics,
an old woman whose psychic
functions were so fragmented
she lived far more in the
right brain world of lyrics
than in reality, said to me:
I don’t like this dress any longer.
I won’t wear it; there is pity
on it; there is pity on this dress.
I stared stupidly at the
torn soiled dress, expecting
to see pity, like a wine stain,
spreading out over the
faded yellow flowers.
Days later I wonder if
I am not paranoid.
I feel the pity of my neighbors,
unspoken; I see them toss it
at me like cups of wine that
spill down the front of my
rosebudding camisole.
My neighbors stare stupidly
as I pull out my driveway.
I see them behind their
curtains as I open the door
and my lover enters.
Poor thing, I hear them think,
her husband finally left her;
she has no more country club
and friends; soon they’ll sell her home;
she’ll even lose her son.
How angry their pity makes me.
I do not like it any longer.
They buy new sprinkler systems and
add their paneled dens. Don’t they see
that with my schizophrene I’m free?
I don’t need their frock of pity anymore.
Circa ’84-’85
Legacy of Ghosts
the boy eats
his cold cereal
alone in the kitchen
seeking the dark
as dawn’s
chiaroscuro
slips across
refrozen snow
his solitude
is sharpened
pricked keenly with
nature’s waking focus
upstairs
his mother
lies sleeping off
last night’s desperations
her furtive excursions
into communion
gropings of
bodies half clothed
perhaps she will
still be here
when he returns
from school
it would be better
to view her
combed and glossed
like a groomed poodle
than to have
to face
her plundered warm
morning redolence
her rumpled
half-wakened dreams
are so troubling to him
at this hour
she seems almost young
and too accessible
it makes him shudder
he wonders how she could
have mothered all these
awkward limbs
and blemishes
a soft door knock
and a muffled
good-bye
then hours later
it is as he expected
she is in the kitchen
brushing with shades
she looks at him
with vacant and
confused eyes
but anxious
as if searching
for him
in some dimly
lit labyrinth
he tries to tell her
but she shakes
her head
in perplexity
she cannot
recall
What Is The Boy Saying?
What Does He Want?
her face puckers
and draws
with concentration
while she strains
wringing her brain
in the effort to stir
some deep hidden estuary
but the fruit is
deceptive it is
beyond ripening
turned to pulp
crumbling like
a brittle skeleton
disturbed from
centuries of sleep
she can only smile blankly
a smile that’s sucked from
her face like the skull of a
long and hollow scream
then guiltily
sneak back
to the bare bones
of her verse
as her now dead
mother had done
so many
years before
absorbed
it will be some time
before
she notices his absence
perhaps he will see
his father tonight
when the darkness
has returned.
’84
Consort
It has gotten so
I can no longer write.
Once your withdrawals
hurt so much, as if
you’d dipped your hands
deep into me and
then scooped out my heart.
I could see its bloody
shreds sticking to your
fingers that spread with
horror to shake them off:
Away clinging heart,
Why do you stay so?
Stanch damn blood, oh
why do you let it flow?
But flow I let it and
wrote and wrote, filling
pages with its life, the
ink you drew from me,
unwilling Draculan
lover, who knew not what
he did thus never
gloated, thus blameless be.
Understand my need now:
once bitten I depend
on you for life; the
vampire’s beloved
is the masochist.
Return and inspire my
night as you drink from me
that I might write again.
Circa ’84-’85
Sonnet
The unacknowledged poetry
of our nights is what has been
most beautiful to me: our hands —
always those hands — hush my mouth
so that I won’t repeat
these secrets, the places we go with one another
that people do not write about . . .
or less likely, confess.
Later, you take warm water
and wash me: gravely, gently
with deep humility;
gratitude is speechless in the
purity of such acts of love.
’85
That Which Is Understood
Your kisses shape me as
Images spring to life
Between the lines, the
Weight borne in what the
Memory can supply,
The concentric waves
Spelling chills the thrilling
Mouth alone cannot
Begin to create
Unless with spaces,
These pauses in between.
’85
BREAKDANCE
THAT POEM SHARPLY
TRUNCATES LIKE
BREAKDANCING . . .
STRANGE, DISJOINTED TROCHEES.
Circa ’85-’86
it is often hard for
me to comprehend that
you treat me so harshly
because you never thought
you’d care this much merely
expecting that you’d be
infatuated and
intoxicated with
some fair appearance and
impossibility
your anger is the sharp
betrayal of your own
feelings loss of command
you love and cannot bear
it consigned to such a
vulnerability
you rage like Lear against
your own mortality.
Circa ’84-’85
BLIZZARD SOUND BARRIER
PLANE SO FAST,
AIR SO FROZEN . . .
THEY CRASH LIKE AN
ICE BREAKER IN THE SKY.
Circa ’84-’85
Irrevocable Acts
Oh Mother remember
how happy you were
on my wedding day
and how blue the sky?
Still I see the sun
shining even on
the sundial where
Mark Rudd’s followers
together were called
from shadowed circle near Uris Hall.*
But acts like trees felled,
irrevocable, were being spelled
in ink permanent;
anger, bravado and elastic
youth could not carry him
through the day of delirium
the hysteria that trailed
behind hot arcs blazed.
So too I shone
in protest, alone and angry, opting
for the criminal, adopting
his knowledge of life
which arrives as his knife
slices with finality
all cords of humanity.
You always hoped for something
much better for me
than that which you’d had.
Unique seemed the sunset
on this day in June
as we drove towards home
across the dark argent bridge I’ve known
all my life, the key forgotten.
Never, ever would I have foreseen
this sorrow, this bite so keen
the paper cannot support
the weight of its words.
Only loss of child could exceed that
and my whitening heart
cannot start to look at
such dread; perhaps it will be spared yet.
Circa ’82
*Wed in June, 1968, on the Columbia campus, amidst the siege by Mark Rudd and followers of Lowe Library.
SELF-PORTRAIT
FOOLISH BIRD STILL
TENDING NEST . . .
WHEN WELL YOU KNOW
YOUR MATE WAS FELLED IN FLIGHT.
Circa ’83
DECISION
I CAN NO LONGER
LIVE
IN YOUR GRAVEYARD . . .
AWAITING RESURRECTIONS.
Circa ’83 ’84
COMMENT
THAT BRANCH BEARS
ODD FRUIT OF EAST . . .
THAT LIKES NOT GRAFTING
TO THE WEST!
Circa ’84
Musician of My Night
Dark Bearded Seducer
Of deep icy eyes
Wild Draculan beauty
And Saturnine smile
Though pleading resistance
You’re calling me still
Your long night compels me
I sleep-walk unwilled
The ages are blurry
Seeing only your charm
As the Bass is enfolded
I’m embraced in your arms
My meandering minstrel
Earth’s Wandering Jew
Pied piper luring
The spell of the Muse
A lonely adventure
Over rocky terrain
Is all that you promise
I’m forsaken again
But I know I must follow
Show me your dream
Teach me your music
Give me your reed.
7/4/84
HAIKU
SEVENTEEN SYLLABLES
TWISTING ‘ROUND MY PEN ; ; ;
SEMI-COLONS
DANCING.
’84
PRAYER
HEATHEN BOY,
MAY YOU GROW UP
A HORN – ED GOD . . .
NOT ANOTHER CHRISTIAN.
’84
ADVICE FOR WITCHES
BREATHE DEEPLY OF THE SMOKE,
SO THAT THE
BURNING FLAMES . . .
WILL NOT CONSUME YOU.
’84
A Charm
On the scrap of tape which
Covetously binds this book,
I found stuck today a
Curling strand of your black bushy hair.
And with this same vital filament
That now minds my love vows
I cast a magic spell
That binds your love to mine
Until the day you find
This twining amulet
And secrete it from
My witch possession.
’84
Try to understand this:
I did not tell
But in anger
To turn and see you squirm;
I told from fleeing
Fear and Panic,
Loss of Confidence.
. . . .
A love story
Is like a fine limoges:
Beautiful, valued,
Aesthetically whole;
Porcelain strong,
Staving fire of coal:
Yet frail boned, fragile,
A filigreed gold.
. . . .
And the grasp is always
Vulnerable.
All this with just one slip —
May be shattered,
Splintered heart shards,
Ever beyond amend.
8/6/84
The Limoges
The Limoges Box you gave to me
Is not sequestered in my cupboard
As you had fleetingly feared;
I have filled it with rose petals
And opened it for the world to see.
Will you do likewise with our love, or will
The buds wither drier than pot-pourri?
Fall ’84
Our Crucible
One night as we had lain late awake
Talking of the Jews and your Grandfather
His hair all ablaze on the train
That hurtled through his dreams full of gentiles,
And I was ashamed as though I’d set fire to him too,
You leaned into me and whispered, half jest:
Make it up to me tonight
Make up for all those years of suffering.
And I knew that though you’d said
Race would never count between us
(It pained you to think I felt it could),
There were ashes so deep my poor small body
Might never be able to cradle them,
And that it matters not whether the iron
Or its mark sears us apart;
The wounding is all the same.
For I too have been damaged enough
To know such burns may leave scars
The warm suns of love cannot lick,
Their soothing womb-balm only blistering deeper.
Circa ’84 – ’85
My White Hotel
I cannot let you read my poems
Lest you should see how meagerly you
Figured in my poetry, in my life.
Those endless days of White Hotels
Of snow in Summer, fallen freely
That blinded you ’til your eyes burst —
Retinas ripped away from the walls
That could no longer support my
Huge and hungry abdomen —
Appear but moments of delirium,
Small comas in my lifetime.
Fat, Juicy, and overfed seemed I
Though merely waiting for the moment
When another drone would reappear and
I would gather the amoebic flowing
Of my sluggish larval latency, then
Arise, deceptively elegant
After all that buttery aliment
Surprising you with my unfolding
Slenderness following such feed and sleep
And abandon your toiling wretched quarter.
I can live with my abandonment
But I can never let you know
How much I wasn’t there.
’83
Found on the Front of a Home Made Mother’s Day Card:
Forgotten Photo, Rediscovered
Look at what you gave me,
Laughing there in the back row.
Look at what we gave each other!
How can I ever regret?
Circa ’82 – ’83
SUNSET
WINTER TWILIGHT WARMS
THE BARE EARTH MAUVE . . .
EVEN BIRCH TREES
TURN LAVENDER.
1980’s
offspring
you are like a poem
I have written we have written
whole complete
i can return retreat
and change your words here there
but you remain
yourself the same
like a dandelion blown in may
i can never replay call away
pull back or
recapture all your
soft seeds into one
plump bundle
everywhere you are
scattered about over
and over repeating
the swirling scene
as you reel careen
windward falling
charmed escape from flaw
artless inspiring awe
that you live alone all
unique forever signed eternal.
’83
January, 1984
To what end, my friend?
The breed of men that I
Inspire tends toward
Philosophy, the lyre —
Impoverished, renegade
If not in fact then myth.
The thrust of vigor
I can give to you
Through tender buried shoots
Does not match the order
Of force you seek or need.
You said you hate this snow and
So I wonder how you’d feel
When I revealed to you
One day, too late to stop
My subtle humble seeds?