In a Dybbuk's Raincoat: Collected Poems

In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series V. B. Price, Series Editor Also available in the Univ...

Author: Bert Meyers

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In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat

Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series V. B. Price, Series Editor

Also available in the University of New Mexico Press Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series

Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era edited by Estelle Gershgoren Novak Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral edited by Ursula K. Le Guin Deeply Dug In by R. L. Barth Amulet Songs: Poems Selected and New by Lucile Adler In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960 edited by Lee Bartlett, V. B. Price, and Dianne Edenﬁeld Edwards Tiempos Lejanos: Poetic Images from the Past by Nasario García Refuge of Whirling Light by Mary Beath The River Is Wide/ El río es ancho: Twenty Mexican Poets, a Bilingual Anthology edited and translated by Marlon L. Fick A Scar Upon our Voice by Robin Coffee CrashBoomLove: A Novel in Verse by Juan Felipe Herrera Rebirth of Wonder: Poems of the Common Life by David Johnson

In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat Collected Poems BERT MEYERS edited by Morton Marcus and Daniel Meyers foreword by Morton Marcus introduction by Denise Levertov

university of new mexico press ■

albuquerque

2007 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2007 Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 08 07

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meyers, Bert, 1928–1979. In a dybbuk’s raincoat : collected poems / Bert Meyers ; edited by Morton Marcus and Daniel Meyers ; foreword by Morton Marcus ; introduction by Denise Levertov. p. cm. — (Mary Burritt Christiansen poetry series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8263-3787-0 (alk. paper) I. Marcus, Morton. II. Meyers, Daniel, 1960– III. Title. PS3525.E955I53 2007 811’.54—dc22 2006036511 All photos herein are family photos reproduced courtesy of Daniel Meyers unless otherwise noted.

design and composition: Mina Yamashita

CONTENTS Foreword by Morton Marcus / xiii Introduction by Denise Levertov / xvii COLLECTED POEMS From Early Rain (Alan Swallow Press, 1960) Because There’s So Much Speed / 3 In Those Mountains / 4 On the Hill / 5 The Cougar Has Been Shot / 6 Origin / 7 And, Sometimes It Seems / 8 Porcupine / 9 Once, in Autumn / 10 Before I Sleep / 11 The Death of a Lucky Man / 12 We Thank the Heart / 13 On a Summer Night / 14 At Night / 15 Legend / 16 I Took the Wild / 18 Rainy Day / 19 At My Window / 20 In the Alley / 21 My Parents / 22 The Garlic / 23 Picture Framing / 24 October Poem / 25 Evening on the Farm / 26 Now It’s Friday / 27 At Work / 28 A Short Speech to the Hungry / 29 This Morning / 30

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From The Dark Birds (Doubleday and Co., 1968) The Dark Birds / 31 They Who Waste Me / 32 Eichman / 33 Pigeons / 34 Madman Songs / 36 Gulls Have Come Again / 41 Funeral / 42 A Tree Stump at Noon / 43 The Accident / 44 Winter / 45 A Year in a Small Town / 46 Windy Night / 47 Sometimes / 48 Icon / 49 Lullaby / 50 One Morning / 51 The Curse / 52 The King at Evening / 53 The Poet / 54 Apprentice / 56 When She Sleeps / 57 From Any Hill / 58 Picture Framing / 59 Cigarette / 60 Follow the Child / 61 The Family / 62 A Child’s an Apple / 63 Now I Sleep in the Afternoon / 64 The Wanderer / 65 The Drive / 66 In the Yard / 67 Stars Climb Girders of Light / 68

Contents

From Sunlight on the Wall (Kayak, 1976) Foothills / 69 By the Sea / 70 L.A. / 71 G. F. / 72 A. C. / 73 O’Keeffe / 74 Jose / 75 Twilight at the Shop / 76 Next Door / 77 I Can’t Sleep / 78 Watercolor Days / 79 From The Wild Olive Tree (West Coast Poetry Review, 1979) Signature / 80 These Days / 81 Some Deﬁnitions at Work / 83 Landscapes / 85 Pebble / 88 Old / 89 Eviction / 90 A Citizen / 91 To My Enemies / 93 After the Meal / 94 All Around Me / 95 Pencil Sharpener / 97 Pliers / 98 The Old Engraver / 99 The Gilder / 100 Suburban Dusk / 101 Postcards / 102 The Return / 112 Homecoming / 113

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Lament / 115 Driving Home at Night with My Children After Their Grandfather’s Funeral / 116 The Widow / 117 Tree / 118 For W. R. Rodgers / 119 Spleen / 120 With Animals / 121 And Still / 124 Gently, Gently / 125 Daybreak / 127 From The Blue Café—Poems (Jazz Press and PapaBach Editions, 1982) Sawdust This Evening / 129 Another Caterpillar Poem / 130 In Saigon / 131 Retarded Child / 133 August / 134 Sunﬂowers / 135 The Daughter / 136 The Son / 137 The Poets / 138 Maybe / 139 Images Images—for Odette / 140

Contents

The Blue Café—songs for Anat and Daniel The Old Café / 145 Unearthly Lady / 147 Without a Chance / 148 It’s Very Nice / 150 Public Places / 151 It’s All Dissolving / 152 They Say / 154 One Tree One Fish / 155 Here’s the Autumn / 157 Unpublished Poems A Memorie / 158 A Nocturne / 159 A Dawn / 160 Greybird / 161 A Fifty-Year-Old-Woman / 162 Wilshire Bus / 163 Mary, Mary / 164 It’s a Pleasure to Be Sick / 165 She Spoke of Love / 166 Korea / 167 Poem in Summer / 168 Footnote for Today / 170 But We, My Love / 171 To __________ / 172 Marriage Proposal / 173 Sunday Morning / 176 I Dreamed / 177 How I Feel / 178 A Survivor / 179 Someone We Knew / 180 English / 181 Untitled / 182

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Always / 183 For Ami / 184 When I Came to Israel / 185 Haiku—Various / 187 Untitled—or, “To Be a Poet” / 190 Untitled / 191 Unpublished Songs Life Is a God / 192 You and I / 193 I Saw a Poor Young Woman / 195 Once in Los Angeles / 197 I Drive an Old Dodge / 199 College Town Blues / 201 The Mind That Kills / 203 Before the Storm / 205 Atlantis / 207 Selected Prose Journal—Spring 1969 / 213 Bert Meyers’s Words on Poetry / 238 Images and Notes from Journals 1972–75 / 241 A Short History of Twentieth-Century American Poetry / 248 Articles on Bert Meyers and His Poetry “Cello” by Garrett Hongo / 255 “Secrets of a Teacher” by Jack Miles / 260 About the Author / 269

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Foreword

I

have been asked to write a foreword to this volume, telling how the manuscript weathered its

stormy journey of, at this writing, twenty-eight years, and how Daniel Meyers and I became its editors. It is, indeed, a story worth telling, if for no other reason than to acknowledge the names of those who rescued the shipwrecked book and its author from oblivion and are responsible for bringing it now to the public’s attention. From the start, it should be understood that I was neither a close friend of Bert’s nor one of his many students, just an admiring fellow poet and, in Bert’s last days, a warm acquaintance. Bert was a handsome man, with chiseled movie-star good looks, which, along with a forceful personality, lent him an undeniable magnetism. Both of us had books out from Kayak Press, as well as continual representation in the pages of Kayak Magazine, and we ﬁrst met at the house of Kayak’s publisher, George Hitchcock, in 1975, and a dozen times thereafter until Bert’s untimely death in 1979 at the age of ﬁfty-one. Like so many other poets of the sixties and seventies, I had been enormously impressed by Bert’s poems for their briefness and delicacy. They were built like tiny, precision engines fueled by

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his unique, mesmerizing images and subtle rhythms. In poem after poem he showed the world anew, making the reader see it in fresh ways. As far as I was concerned, his stripping away of rhetoric in favor of an at times metaphysical and always socially engaged poetry, which was expressed almost completely through images, had gone several steps beyond the much-lauded work of James Wright. Therefore, I ﬂatter myself when I say there was mutual rapport between Bert and me, and I say this not only because our meetings were cordial and ﬁlled with intense conversations about the nature of poetry, but because Bert’s widow Odette corresponded with me by mail or talked with me by phone concerning Bert’s work at least several times each year after Bert’s death. Odette is the real energy behind this book. Her devotion to Bert and his work was fervent and never-ending. A poet, teacher, and prose writer herself (Doors to Madame Marie: University of Washington Press, 1997; and The Enchanted Umbrella: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), she never stopped lobbying publishers and fellow poets on Bert’s behalf, wanting to keep his voice and vision from fading like Keats’s dryad into the trees. Bert had chosen a selected poems shortly before his death, and it was that manuscript that Odette carried like a sacred text into the future. Many well-known poets and well wishers promised to boost the volume and get it published. One kept the volume for seventeen years, continually assuring Odette that he would get the book into print. But for one reason or another, all efforts came to nothing. In 1997, Odette called me in desperation. She had just learned she had cancer and didn’t know how long she had to live. She had ﬁnally taken Bert’s manuscript back from the poet who had held it for seventeen years, and she wondered if I knew of anyone who might want to publish it. By then, I was working with several

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different publishers who were handling my work, and I thought there was a chance that I could do what others hadn’t. But after several years of mixed signals and lost manuscripts on the publishers’ parts, my efforts, like the others’, came to nothing. In the last year of her life, Odette and I were thinking of publishing the “Selected” privately, with all work done gratis by a friend of mine who was a book designer. Before any of that effort went beyond the preliminary stages, however, Odette died, leaving copies of the manuscript and attendant papers with me. Less than a year later I began my association with a press who had signed to do one of my books. I showed the editor Bert’s selected poems manuscript and he was so impressed he offered to do Bert’s “collected” poems. I had all of Bert’s books and could easily have put together a collected poems, but I thought at this point I had best get in touch with Bert’s daughter and son, Anat and Daniel, who I hadn’t seen since they were children. Daniel, who lived in Paris, was handling his father’s literary estate and was excited about a substantial portion of his father’s work ﬁnally ﬁnding its way into print. Within the month, Daniel and Anat put Bert’s collected poems on disc, and several months later Daniel came to the United States, where, rummaging through his mother’s storage facility, he found his father’s old notebooks, journals, letters, and halfwritten poems, some from when Bert was sixteen years old. Samplings from that material, along with articles written about Bert, will be found in the back of this volume. They will not only show what prominent fellow poets thought of Bert’s poetry, but the journals, letters, and poem fragments will allow the reader to catch a glimpse of the man and to peek at his mind at work. That is how this book came to take shape. But its storm-tossed fate was not yet over. Having struggled to stay aﬂoat in the rough business conditions of the new century’s early years, the press that

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had signed to do Bert’s collected poems sunk into bankruptcy and dragged Bert’s manuscript with it into oblivion. If you are reading these words now, it means the manuscript has ﬁnally found its way into print. I certainly hope so, not only for the sake of American literary history, nor for Bert and Odette’s sake, but for Daniel’s. Daniel’s commitment to seeing this project through to completion has been unwavering. At times his energy has had about it an almost biblical aura of the son fulﬁlling his parents’ ﬁnal wishes as a sacred duty. It has been a delight getting to know him and to work with him. He cannot be praised enough. Nor can several other people whose aid is responsible for ﬁnally making this volume ﬁnd print. First are Bert’s old friends, Professor Maximillian E. Novak and Estelle Gershgoren Novak, poet and editor, who suggested the manuscript be sent to the UNM Press. Second is Gene Frumkin, Bert’s friend and fellow poet and professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico, who brought the manuscript to the Press. And third is Luther Wilson, director of the Press, who had the taste, good graces, and temerity to publish the book of a long-dead poet. My involvement in the project, apart from seeking a publisher for the manuscript over the years, has been, with Daniel, to winnow and select from Bert’s work and the critical articles written about him, and in the end to shape the volume you now hold. It has been motivated not only by promises and friendship but by the hope that the prospective reader will discover and be enriched by the work of one of the most original poets of the last half of the twentieth century. Now, Odette, it is done. Rest in peace. Morton Marcus Santa Cruz, California, January 2007

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Introduction Bert Meyers Denise Levertov*

B

ert Meyers’ death has deprived us of one of the best poets of our time. I feel strongly the irony

of my making that statement, since I “discovered” his work only months before his death; and that discovery need not have been so tardy, for I had seen his name, seen (but not really read) poems of his in Kayak and perhaps elsewhere, and even— some six months before I did at last recognize the value of his work—had met him. Fortunately I did enter the world of Bert’s poems before ﬁnding out that he had cancer; so that I have had no need to wonder whether knowing that he was seriously ill inﬂuenced my response. It was only after I wrote to tell him I had fallen in love with poem after poem in The Wild Olive Tree,† the manuscript of which ——————————————————— •

From Light Up the Cave, copyright © 1981 by New

Direction Publishing Corp. Reprinted with permission of New Direction Publishing Corp. †

Published in 1979 by West Coast Poetry Review Press,

Reno, Nevada.

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he had sent me, that he wrote back telling me he had been found to have lung cancer. (And reading that letter I shuddered to recall having noticed that he was a heavy smoker.) Bert Meyers’ work seems all to have been lyrical; he was not drawn to the epic, narrative, or dramatic modes and eschewed the hortatory or didactic. For clarity of discourse, I would reserve the term “major” for poets whose range of genres and also quantity of work seem equal in breadth to the depth of their poems. But the term “great” should be applicable to those who produce deep and exquisite work in fewer modes, or in a single one; though here too some sense of abundance seems to form part of what “great” implies. I feel Meyers can be called great because of the extraordinary intensity and perfection of his poems and the consistency with which he illumined what he experienced, bodying it forth in images that enable readers to share his vision and thereby extend the boundaries of their own lives. The image is unequivocally at the center of his work; indeed, a sequence of short poems, not posthumously published in the volume Windowsills,‡ is named simply “Images.” Often there are single lines, or brief syntactic units, within longer poems of his, that seem fully poems in themselves—random examples would be: Night lifts the moon like a coffee cup from the skyline’s cluttered shelf, or Fog— sailing for hours in the same spot; ——————————————————————— ‡

Published in 1979 by Common Table, New Haven, Connecticut.

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and the joyful sound of the invisible sea. Or this: All around me, butterﬂies, ecstatic hinges, hunt for the ideal door. It is apparent that Meyers himself recognized, and cultivated, this ability to ﬁnd images that can function autonomously; the “Images” section of Windowsills begins with a two-line poem, a discrete image: Bales of hay—cartons of sunlight fading in a ﬁeld. And the poem “Train” begins and ends with single lines that are entities separated from the middle stanzas: “Sunlight plays its ﬂute in the treetops,” says the ﬁrst one, and “Green keeps changing itself from green to green,” says the last. But he also knew that the image was a building block out of which he could construct longer poems: one of his strengths is the way in which every longer poem of his is built up of an accumulation of such image blocks, each of which has such integrity that the whole ediﬁce is dense and strong. In this way his poems, like the best haiku, are capable of imparting a sense of his life and values, his emotions and deepest loyalties, with a minimum of stated opinion. Though an intense feeling for the beauty and strangeness of the sense-apprehensible world informs most of his work, he does not ignore the hideous nor shrink from the ugly terms necessary to depict it:

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And here are also ﬁlthy streets, leprous walls that sunlight never touched, smeared with crud, battered like garbage cans . . . the cracks in a stone are the landscape of nerves; the air’s a perpetual fart and even the shadows wear rags (from “Paris”) Though he did not like “engaged” poetry, feeling that it violated what he believed was the essentially evocative and non-didactic nature of the art, he at times encompassed historical comment, e.g., “Arc de Triomphe”: Nothing but gray seen through the arch as if triumph were an abyss into which a nation marches And in a poem such as “Saigon” (though I believe he decided to pull it out of The Wild Olive Tree which was in process of publication at the time of his death) he did make a very direct criticism of the corrupting inﬂuence of the United States—the poem’s epigraph is, “In our own image we created them,” and it describes teenage thugs in pre-liberation Saigon: Their smiles are gun belts, their brains, nuclear clouds; and they speak a dialect that sounds like money . . .

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Around them, the landscape’s a ﬂag that fell from the sky: red roads, bloody stripes; whitened by bones and stars that explode; blue, like genocide’s queer smoke. Again, though a love of the earth and its creatures and things, and of his friends and family, is the predominating spirit in his poetry, anger recurs in a poem like “To My Enemies,” and once more is seen to be, despite his anti-polemical bias, a social criticism: . . . Maddened by you for whom the cash register, with its clerical bells, is the national church . . . . . . Your president is a tsetse ﬂy . . . In this poem his humor (like James Stephens’ in “A Glass of Beer”) ﬁnds expression in a curse: May your wife go to paradise with the garbage man, your prick hang like a shoelace, your balls become raisins, hair grow on the whites of your eyes. These are the wild arabesques in which a gentle man draws his rage; a hard man would curse without fantasy.

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His eye is keen as an animal’s; in “Paris” he sees that A child carries a long, thin loaf of bread. O.K., any of us would have seen that. But he sees more: Its sides are chipped like the molding of a gilded frame. That’s a detailed observation both of the loaf and of its analogue (he had been for years a frame maker) demonstrating how the habit of observation can provide metaphors the occasion of need for which could never have been foreseen. And from the security of image that this combination of quick gaze and verbal accuracy established, there arose, in turn, a further kind of image, a taking off into an analogy that could not have been predicted but which, “far-fetched” though its reference may be—who could believe, in advance, that one could leap meaningfully from bread to picture frames?—is “earned.” It therefore satisﬁes one’s sense of aesthetic propriety and enables one to see and feel that baguette, almost to smell it; and at the same time to feel one’s imagination pulled into an exotic revelation: The crust looks warm, dented, as if the baker were a blacksmith who hammered and sold the sun’s rays. That’s the reward of ﬁdelity to the object, of a humble, intense, disinterested and unﬂinching attention. In a Machado-esque portion of the same “Paris” poem something similar happens:

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In a little square, a man ﬁlls a bottle at a fountain. The sound of water stops, continues. A woman leans from a window to see how the sky feels. Clouds rub their silver polish over the sun. Here we have four lines of plain description, “poetic” only in their simplicity and the clustered associations of “little square,” “fountain,” “the sound of water,” “leans from a window.” Then in line ﬁve a subjective estimation of what the woman is doing makes poet and reader look up and see the sky she sees—and like her we experience the visual in empathic tactile terms, becoming, as we do so, the diaphanous clouds paradoxically engaged in the homely action of rubbing, and at the same time the sun itself, being rubbed, its ﬁre a white glare behind the gauze. Because most of his images are such direct fusions, montages that synthesize into a new image, he was able to use the word “like” on occasion with the authority of genuine simile rather than in imperfectly realized metaphor: On the horizon, late at night, a ship glows like the last café still open at the end of a boulevard after the rain. The difference between such simile and the immediacy of a montage-image can be clearly seen in these lines: Passengers board the ship at twilight. The people who wave from the pier

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light matches—they become a crowd of candles on the shore. The boat, a huge altar, dissolves in the fog. The syntactic difference is called for not merely because altars don’t typically dissolve in fog, don’t even seem to dissolve in fog, but because the degree to which the boat is felt by the poet to be an altar—not only visually but because it bears what is sacred to the people who are watching it, and who themselves have been for the nonce transformed into votive candles—is intense: this boat isn’t “like” an altar the way the other boat is “like” a café; it is one, and at the same time it is still a boat. The simile, on the other hand, is a device that itself conveys something of the wistful sense of distance one experiences in looking down that long boulevard towards the café, its lights (and the street lights, too) reﬂected in the wet pavement, an Impressionist painting. . . . It is a mark of the most profound poetic instinct to comprehend, in the act of making poems, the degrees of analogy: and so to avoid mufﬂing the perception of coalescence, which demands metaphor, with the word “like”; or, on the other hand, failing to note resemblance with the appropriate ﬁgure of speech, simile. It seems obvious enough so stated, but thousands of poems bear witness to the unacknowledged confusion of all but the most gifted poets regarding this essential matter. Bert Meyers’ intuition in this, as in other things, seems to have been faultless.

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COLLECTED POEMS

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From Early Rain (Alan Swallow Press, 1960)

Because There’s So Much Speed Because there’s so much speed without any place to go, and driven, blind as light, we rush from stone to stone and bump against the world, I like the subtle snail: wrapped in its wooden fog it crawls across my yard; and where it goes, it paints the ground with useless roads. Day and night, in its world, leaves fall without a sound; and ﬂowers become suns that bugs like little planets in a green astronomy go round and round and round.

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From Early Rain

In Those Mountains In those mountains, time ﬁlled one bush with castor beans, another with wild roses . . . Death was something distant that made a buzzard stir its whirlpool in the sky. By a tree, I found the deer hunters lost—a ﬂower of ants in the bullet hole and a root held its leap. There sunlight came down a trail and green nature reddened at the tip. Yucca struck at the wind, turned dull and rusted in the fall. Lizards split the rocks, then ran; snakes passed and left their clothes. Below, a little town, like a tumor, began to spread.

From Early Rain

On the Hill Wind—and a mild army of mustard runs uphill; this town shakes in a shrub and children, now and then, abandoned in their kites, leave home on a long string and climb into the sky. I walk at the wild edge: behold! a buzzard drills for the dry oil of death; the air snaps like a log, shrill birds like sparks ﬂy out.

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From Early Rain

The Cougar Has Been Shot Something of the mountains, something that wrinkled, muscle of sunlight in the trees, crept like a slope at evening to a stream, washed its paws, sticky with sunset, death . . . something of the mountains: the cougar has been shot. Good! the weekend hunters say. When night hunched anonymous, snarling in the leaves, who could divide those eyes from stars that trailed us branch to branch overhead? And once, I heard the gullies raging, underbrush grow furious, roots, rock, the air, rise up to join a giant mating . . . Brought to life by their guns, the weekend hunters worry: such mountain breaking, making passion, in a living thing is dangerous.

From Early Rain

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Origin Daily the sea sprayed my town with gulls . . . it could have murdered me. I took a shell whose mask of tides was a reﬁnement of the sea. The brawny boats went where they pleased; I traveled in a twisted bone. That’s how I discovered islands where hungry shadows quarry stone.

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From Early Rain

And, Sometimes It Seems And, sometimes it seems that: because a man, being born in a tear when his mother wept, never takes off his sweat or really ﬁnds a friend, already in the cradle makes his little ﬁst. But what a brave thing he is, who has a fountain at his hips, a brain: that blossom on the spine! And, when I look at the earth and the earth is someone I love, then it seems: what a pity man becomes a melancholy beast that likes to think.

From Early Rain

Porcupine A little Saint Sebastian (body of barbs that hardly hurt) and like a Saint misunderstood, when he appears he scares the wood. We love to catch an animal; then, petting it, insist the beast should lick our hand. But porcupines: they’re very mean to have such spines.

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From Early Rain

Once, in Autumn Once, in autumn, I saw the sun pause in the wrinkles of a tree like passion on an old man’s face. My father, armed with shears, came out and trimmed the little shrubs to death. And always, in a wild backyard my father stepped upon his ﬂesh (those blind galoshes struck the earth) and tough as trucks, his hands ran loose killing the plants they couldn’t name. A lawn—or passion—if ignored may rise around a house like ﬁre. Son, my father said, Fight back the garden with its big green hips. I fought a beast of leaves instead. But, with a scowl, my iron dad cut down the grass to a proper ﬂame. He said: Too many ﬂowers. And then (though with a hose I’d been their stem) my scowling conscience cut them off.

From Early Rain

Before I Sleep I go to the window to breathe before I sleep. I hear a driveway growl, the valves of darkness leak. Hills roll in their blankets, the crickets turn to rain; and as I close my eyes I feel the stars take aim. I’m still a child at night, who knows the world is round. Soon, sunrise with its paint will brighten up this town.

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From Early Rain

The Death of a Lucky Man They were seen, now and then (by all the cameras) very happy under the sun in Hollywood. The brute stem ﬂowered in her soil. He starred on the wide screen of her eyes and found the goddess without her make-up. One afternoon (they’d said: that boy’s a lucky man!) he awoke. His great blood was wetting the bed. And, beautiful, she came to court dressed in a little grief, hot from the ﬂame upon the altar between her thighs.

From Early Rain

We Thank the Heart It came from nowhere, the impossible car. Some of his thin hair is stuck in the glass. There’s so much blood the warm sun walks like Christ upon it. A needle’s eye in his tattered head is losing his life’s essential thread; the crowd kneels down. A siren blows. The man tries to straighten out his body, like a suit of clothes. We see the tailor in his chest And we thank the heart, and nothing else, that patched his head, that he smiles at us and isn’t dead.

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From Early Rain

On a Summer Night On a golden boulevard I watch the women: so many ﬂow past me. And their hips rock like little ships that need a mast to go to sea. Now at the walls the men appear. Mounted upon a myth, they hunt— their eyes deep in the high-heeled waves— that fallen cup of sacrament. I thought I saw in a passing face how love to lovers will be good. Gayly they’ll ﬁsh all night to ﬁnd that jovial serpent in the blood. But I go to a familiar door. And wait until she asks who’s there. And always, in the dark, she opens without pleasure—and without despair. I see myself in a bulging sheet, no-body to her, although, so near. I think: You’re a ghost; and ﬂee before she asks what I’m doing here. A white cat climbs over that wall and all the stars are out of place. Buildings grow in their tall gray robes; coldly the headlights peel my face.

From Early Rain

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At Night At night, when the mouse is murdered by cheese, when the tired walls turn away, when the body can’t stand anymore, then death parts my hair and I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die! The asthma weeps. The asthma burns in its leaves. The medicines consult, aware of their labels, by the bed. But death comes: out of the faucets, the ﬂoors, from the big clock that bleeds weakening in its springs, it comes shoveling out my chest. And I don’t know why but I know the heart beats and beats a man to death.

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From Early Rain

Legend Lucky Aladdin had had a lamp that he would rub. Metal, it showed its love in sensible delight: gave him a golden life. But now, the gods are gone, and we are on our own. Bold Rustem beat the deevs; with heavenly assistance shook all the gaudy tents of Asia like a tree against his majesty. But now, the gods are gone, and we are on our own.

From Early Rain

The lonely, young or old, who tossed all night in bed, were heard and comforted. Not fantasy, but ﬂesh lay down to share their wish. But now, the gods are gone, and we are on our own. Then, as green as money were the distant ﬁelds. And all who stood upon a hill and swore they would fulﬁll their dreams before they died, had lightning at their side. But now, the gods are gone, and we are on our own.

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From Early Rain

I Took the Wild An old man is a bundle of leaves; I saw one scattered in the street. The police came. They put his pieces, like stolen jewels, in a little can. People felt themselves. Slowly, someone nobody saw slipped a white glove over his hand. Before I went, I closed my eyes and took the wild poinsettia that grew where his mouth had been.

From Early Rain

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Rainy Day Outside, nothing moves: only the rain nailing the house up like a cofﬁn. Remember, in childhood, when it rained? Then, the whole world sailed down the alley: leaves, paper, old shoes, the buildings, everything like a circus going to sea. Now, the rain, the iron rain, with its little keys is closing all the doors . . . and I think we’re all dead. See how the sky sits like a tombstone on the roofs.

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From Early Rain

At My Window Across the street nine boys in the weeds scream, hurling rocks. Blackbirds are headlines overhead. One boy looks at the sun. And I look back at how I stood, under a tree, my hands hot with stones. A squirrel, tail up and balanced on a bough, faced me like a question I couldn’t answer. Here, on this jewel of earth, time tears at the green edge. This pane, thin water, makes two small islands of my eyes; and the sky always seems to be the sail of a great ship that never reaches land. Below, on the sidewalk, a neighbor’s little girl, tall as a yardstick, her eyes in glasses, on her bike rides by singing, Oh lady of Spain, I adore you . . .

From Early Rain

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In the Alley At noon an airplane, a hard drop of sweat, rolls down the sky’s big forehead. The dry alley dreams of water— trampled root. Fenced-off, the housewife trees multiply their fruit. Later, a man gray as gravel, comes up the alley. At a garbage can an alarm of ﬂies goes off in his face. Scared by a wind that walks through gates, among the leaves the fallen man curls around a wall like smoke, and disappears . . . In the yards, the trees drop loquats, and yellow ripe round pears.

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From Early Rain

My Parents When my mother puts her ﬂowers in a bowl—amaryllis, rose— light from a different afternoon still makes her lonely body glow. And still my father comes, poor man, a hard day on his knees from money. My mother turns to an old piano, her hands snowbound among the keys. I know they sleep in the same dream, while the fat moth spreads its dust. My parents wear each other’s breath; their clock’s forgotten how to tell the time.

From Early Rain

The Garlic Rabbi of condiments, whose breath is a verb, wearing a thin beard and a white robe; you who are pale and small and shaped like a ﬁst, a synagogue, bless our bitterness, transcend the kitchen to sweeten death— our wax in the ﬂame and our seed in the bread. Now, my parents pray, my grandfather sits, my uncles ﬁll my mouth with ashes.

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From Early Rain

Picture Framing My ﬁngers graze in the ﬁelds of wood. I sand pine, walnut, bass, and sweat to raise their grain. Paints, powder and brush, are the seasons of my trade. At the end of the day I drive home the proud cattle of my hands.

From Early Rain

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October Poem October smokes a long cigar and hangs its leather in the sun. Metal on metal as the mind feels the limber oil grow thin. When I came home, after work, I saw an old man mow his lawn. Sweet rain fell from those blades; and death smelled like a baby in its bed.

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From Early Rain

Evening on the Farm Time for a jacket now, and to put my hands away. I must learn from the stars how a ﬁeld should look. But one by one, bright children, the stars rush downstairs to meet my horses and hay with an astonished eye.

From Early Rain

Now It’s Friday I came for coffee to water my deep heart Now it’s Friday and my hands still hurt from Monday Tuesday But a cup of coffee is a big brown eye that looks at anyone Where is the door that opens like a hug When you’re always alone at night there are the stars The sky’s a plate of salt And you wait growing hard like a loaf of bread

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From Early Rain

At Work He said: The sky’s so blue there, you could bathe your feet in it. And his emotion rose like dust behind a passing truck. He always coughs on his lunch. His eyes are faded, like his shirt. He smiles: I was strong then, as big as a young barn. What can you do for a man? Time is an old boss we hate together. I look at his hands. Those bent ﬂowers by the wall, they still live! Even if the wind should never have put them here.

From Early Rain

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A Short Speech to the Hungry Because so many children dream the full moon is a bowl of milk, if you forget your hands— those wonderful roots— you feel your right mind fail: unlike the bee stuck to its hod you see creation in a cloud and fear the wind that tears orchard, ﬁeld and mankind down. While the celery’s green fountains rust, you, for whom the earth has no concern, must think: we live in our belts and we have been like the blind ant who pulls his daily ton in company; The smile that ripens for a friend, the word that strengthens us like bread, rot in the mouths of hungry men. When the satisﬁed say: The wind! The wind! you will understand who tears orchard, ﬁeld and mankind down.

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From Early Rain

This Morning We were the rain last night. Our smell still lingers in the ﬂower beds. The white hills rise like crumpled moons; a swarm of insects lights a lawn’s dull face. We go to see ourselves in puddles, you and I, clear fragments of the ﬂood.

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From The Dark Birds (Doubleday and Co., 1968)

The Dark Birds The dark birds came, I didn’t know their name. They walked in Hebrew on the sand so I’d understand. They sang, the sea ﬂowed, though no one made a road. I shivered on the shore when the water closed its door. Then as I felt the birds return to me like ashes to an urn, and sunlight warmed the stones, ﬁre undressed my bones.

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From The Dark Birds

They Who Waste Me When I ask for a hand, they give me a shovel. If I complain, they say, Worms are needles at work to clothe a corpse for spring. I sigh. Whoever breathes has inhaled a neighbor.

From The Dark Birds

Eichman This familiar form displayed in the glass is a sample of man who can live before he’s born. Because such creatures read and write without compassion, your little time and even your teeth aren’t safe. You, when you see him, should be frightened. He comes from a large family whose business prospers.

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From The Dark Birds

Pigeons Wherever I go to ﬁnd peace or an island under palms in the afternoon at midnight to pity my neighborhood at dawn in the shrubs to look for a child I hear them they ﬂy by applauding themselves I see them they pray as they walk their eyes are halos around a pit they look amazed Who are these that come as a cloud to our windows who rush up like smoke before the town burns

From The Dark Birds

You will ﬁnd one on a mountain in a carpenter’s shop at home on the lawn of an old estate at the library in the forehead of paradise Whoever is mad can accuse them thousands were killed in a day What happens to them happens to me when I can’t sleep they moan and I’m there and it’s still like that

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From The Dark Birds

Madman Songs 1 People go home to rest in vaults curtains soothe their faults bright windows show their money I hated home it caused me pain cloudy days and evenings came I leaned against the iron rain 2 Someone held me there was harm now each word’s an alarm the man who looks so calm will turn into a bomb Woman daughter son I wake up and put them on they hide me from the law My desire’s a blade of grass I trample as I pass Fear me what I hate will fall

From The Dark Birds

3 In summer small cones of dirt beside a fence erupt with the weddings of the ants a moth staggers from a shrub People turn their sprinklers on to watch the water girls dance on their lawn I don’t go out until they’ve all gone in They might come near with large damp wings love and other things

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From The Dark Birds

4 When I don’t sleep the crickets weep When I say My life will pass they scrape the dark glass When the wall begins to fall where I strain they ﬁle the chain When I rise I wear an orange shirt A green woman is rinsing her skirt She imagines me

From The Dark Birds

5 David’s gone Goliath’s strong ﬂocks of pebbles bleat their brittle cries of light fade where the leaves lie dry harps near a stream Jacob warmed a rock the rock and Jacob dreamed I’m burning I’m alone everyone’s a stone I break my feelings on 6 I sat on the sidewalk with my own box of chalk and all day long I made the whole world by myself That’s not the world they said Then I rose at dawn I put a label on it wore me out by noon All day I swung a brush to see the buildings bloom Just painting on a wall won’t change a man at all or make the stone turn blue So I sat down once more What else could I do

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From The Dark Birds

7 People go home Twilight’s a glass through which they pass The carver calms his arm and leaves his passion in the grain The one who ran runs back again We live in pain The moon’s an aspirin

From The Dark Birds

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Gulls Have Come Again Gulls have come again to consider another beautiful death of the sun. People were ﬂowers that grew by the shore; twilight takes them home, they fade together at their tables. In the tall green shops the pulleys of birds lower the last light, the eyelid of a shadow shuts the hills, the sound of the ocean walks over the land. Nobody wants to die.

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From The Dark Birds

Funeral Surely a dead moth’s the skull of a tiny horse, and the moon’s a saint who pities the sea. Peace, peace to this child of rain and light, and the people who stay holding candles and lilies, tasting their tears, naked in a dream, over the long drawer they’ve closed in the earth.

From The Dark Birds

A Tree Stump at Noon The light drips like oil from an old machine; a crow, big as a boot, ﬂies over the roofs and begins to scream at the men who build. The huge root lies like a head on a vacant ﬁeld.

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From The Dark Birds

The Accident* There’s so much blood the warm sun walks like Christ upon it. A needle’s eye in his tattered head is losing his life’s thread. The crowd kneels down. We see the tailor in his chest work overtime. A siren blows. The man tries to straighten out his body, like a suit of clothes.

————————————— * Revised version of “We Thank the Heart,” published in Early Rain (Alan Swallow Press, 1960)

From The Dark Birds

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Winter The oils of autumn have dried, branches crack the sky. The walls of the world are old, my friend . . . Eat the wind’s iron apple, breathe razor blades; drive home and bless your photographs.

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From The Dark Birds

A Year in a Small Town 1 Surrounded by ﬂowers, bees are drowning in the housepainter’s pot. 2 Today, I know I haven’t done as much for this world as a tree. 3 Children bring home stones instead of friends; the blackbird has a golden eye. 4 Spring, that young man is wearing the shirt I was wounded in.

From The Dark Birds

Windy Night The sound of the wind is the sound of a man alone with himself in the forest of sleep. A tree, a mind holding on. So many dry leaves fall, then at last the rain.

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From The Dark Birds

Sometimes You see a gray sky, an inﬁnite sidewalk: no one’s there and it’s noon. Silence opens an eye, now you’re a small cloud heavier than a moon.

From The Dark Birds

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Icon That burnished antique metal, worn at the world’s edge, illuminates an orchard, a ﬁeld, and people planting there: shadows the mind casts to pose in a breathless valley. As airplanes punch the town with invisible ﬁsts of sound, praise these walls before they fall and those good buttons we push. Tonight, we want the moon to be dressed as a nurse.

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From The Dark Birds

Lullaby 1963, Cuban missile crisis Go to sleep my daughter go to sleep my son once this world was water without anyone

From The Dark Birds

One Morning I told myself, A single man’s like water where nobody swims. And I went out. In gardens, doves were broken jars a wind blew through. Beds of ivy were spread with webs, old underwear; forgotten wives, moths, or the wrong ﬁgures of men, lay at the roots. While sparrows strained their tiny springs to live, I heard how people damned another day. Later, I found some blackberries under a porch and leaves as rough as a cat’s tongue.

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From The Dark Birds

The Curse Because you lie there, curled between the ﬁngers of her legs, expecting death, though her green eyes close, she smiles, and her face ﬂows to the edge of the world . . . Be the cold water that comes from the tap at dawn, the sun, spilled on a lawn, its egg broken in the dew. Die, slowly, like the snow. Fall apart in your own glue.

From The Dark Birds

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The King at Evening What a sad face the lizard has. I walk by in my clothes, the lizard hides, ashamed. What a sad face it has. The day burns out in the grass. Evening comes, made of silk, the lizard grins and goes. I rise, arranging my robes. The odors of autumn build sweet bedrooms in the air.

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From The Dark Birds

The Poet 1 They said, Go, rise each day with her, become the reliable dough a family needs. I wouldn’t. I walked away from the kitchen, the store she was building in her breast . . . And everything grows dim like the little stone brought home from the shore. 2 What will I bring if I come to your house? A cold wind at the door, bad dreams to your spouse. There isn’t a tree in your backyard; the lawns are plastic, the chairs are too hard. No, I wouldn’t talk. I’d be full of spite and I’d strike my head like a match that won’t light.

From The Dark Birds

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3 Woman, mirror of all my sides, I pass through you to the window. When I lay my hand on the grass forgive me if I call the earth my child. 4 Always poor, he knows the crickets will leave him small jars of money. He waits, he admires a weed. His dreams are addressed. At night by his desk he becomes a ﬂower; children are bees in his arms, a little pain making honey.

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From The Dark Birds

Apprentice Because I love you I’ve learned to be this hammer that runs all day like a horse with its hoof in its head. In the afternoon my hands lie down together for a minute.

From The Dark Birds

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When She Sleeps When she sleeps I rise. The naked light bulb burns and makes the moths outside beat against the screen. A moth comes out of me. It ﬂies to the light, then staggers back in pain to rest in me again. She sleeps and holds her peace, though I’m consumed by this.

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From The Dark Birds

From Any Hill On any hill at night lovers grow from the height. A town’s their Christmas tree. She listens, her limbs are stirred as he with only his word opens packages of light. They go wandering down to the root of that town, and day and night they hear how each was a long shaft, a hump on the other’s back, that brought them weeping there.

From The Dark Birds

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Picture Framing* My ﬁngers feed in the ﬁelds of wood. I sand pine, walnut, oak, and sweat to raise their grain. Paints, powder, and brush are the seasons of my trade. At the end of the day I drive home the proud cattle of my hands.

———————————————— * Revised version of “Picture Framing,” published in Early Rain (Alan Swallow Press, 1960)

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From The Dark Birds

Cigarette Often you light a fuse to prove you won’t explode. All the smoke shows the power that dies in you. You sigh as you tap your way to the end. The hand is the blind child called to the blackboard.

From The Dark Birds

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Follow the Child Follow the child who feels green gates of childhood close: the enchanted eye will ﬁnd only what it knows, and a gray-haired hunter stalks that forest in his blood. You too will see the ﬁrm parental towers fall at the quiet stroke; the mighty adult crawl to what it hates; and hear a long collapsing sky. Then come those visitors all wise men abhor— but others let them in. His own voice at the door, the haunted man lies down. He whitens in a white room.

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From The Dark Birds

The Family The boy will grow and be a man. He’ll have no father then. The girl, assuming womanhood, will burn herself in bed. The father leaves the house at dawn. The mother turns her dream-world on. Still, night brings them all together, to shriek and shudder.

From The Dark Birds

A Child’s an Apple Those who are tall look down. They show their keys, the dead birds in their hands. They open and close volumes of doors. They smile. Their teeth are the stones in the graveyard at noon. They’re always hungry and when they love they bite.

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From The Dark Birds

Now I Sleep in the Afternoon We gaze at the beautiful forms, at the dark hair of delicate dials— we want to hold and move the world. Often as we extend our hands, nothing happens: loose wires hang from the plaster of our sleeves. I have dreams in the afternoon of khaki-colored leaves, and men who fall, of cities like rain coming down.

From The Dark Birds

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The Wanderer The towns were tables, set by the road each night. A woman came to the door. The builders needed help. My sandwich was the sun between two hills at noon. What I’ve seen is true: when the starved gull speaks an old gate opens in the sky and the ﬁshing boats rise from the sea.

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From The Dark Birds

The Drive Because their bed was calm and they’d never done what they read about, they drove to the hills, left the car, and climbed high over the shale and spread her dress in the dirt. Soft ceramic quail, the natives there, stared from the chaparral while they groaned and hurt themselves. The heat made ants bubble out of the ground. The hill was a ﬂower that evening closed. They were naked and very small, and they put on their clothes. The car would give them back their power.

From The Dark Birds

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In the Yard The grasshopper goes for a ride, its little sprocket spins over the earth. The lizard, ﬁve inches of stream, ﬂows under a board. The leaf runs from the cat. A moth’s a pharaoh in search of a tomb full of light, and a bumblebee explains to the morning-glories the joy of being a telephone. Only the woman knows what the man’s for.

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From The Dark Birds

Stars Climb Girders of Light Stars climb girders of light. They arrange themselves in the usual place, they quit before dawn, and nothing’s been done. Then men come out. Their helmets ﬁll the sky; their cities rise and fall and men descend, proud carpenters of dew. Man brief as the storm, more than ﬁve feet of lightning, twisted and beautiful. Man made like his roads, with somewhere to go.

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From Sunlight on the Wall (Kayak, 1976)

Foothills* Every morning here, black-plumed the knightly quail go riding through the grass. In the wind, a mild army of mustard runs uphill. The yucca toss their spears. Now and then, a child, abandoned in its kite, drifts out into the sky. At twilight, the foothills are a pile of rose petals the color of grapes . . . There went the sun in a crumpled hat, to see the rest of the world.

———————————————— * Revised version of “On the Hill,” published in Early Rain (Alan Swallow Press, 1960)

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From Sunlight on the Wall

By the Sea Across that loud scroll of water ﬁshermen still sail out to earn a living, a boat leaves for Peru . . . And always, a multitude unpacks a paradise of Sundays on the sand to celebrate the passage of its blood.

From Sunlight on the Wall

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L.A. The world’s largest ash-tray, the latest in concrete, capital of the absurd; one huge studio where people drive from set to set and everyone’s from a different planet. For miles, the palm trees, exotic janitors, sweep out the sky at dusk. The gray air molds. Geraniums heat the alleys. Jasmine and gasoline undress the night. This is the desert that lost its mind, the place that boredom built. Freeways, condominiums, malls, where cartons of trash and diamonds and ideologies are opened, used, dumped near the sea.

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From Sunlight on the Wall

G. F. He’s a law about to be broken a man rippling at the edge He edits news of a material world while under his tongue intelligent nouns are preparing their adjectives for a view of the city without crime This man encircles himself his waist is his own embrace his smile is a private door I admire him for his agile fat a mind like an animal’s jaw his poems that escape from their chains He awakens to books like birthdays He tries to grow where he stands He’s a warm wall his daughter climbs This man has put his ear to his heart and kept the secret At the head of his round table far from the ancient onion of mother he settles between his shoulders to be a calm king of argument though his castle burns and his people are alone.

From Sunlight on the Wall

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A. C. He smiles he wants to be wise He comes on a shrewd donkey of wit He peddles his innocence His ﬁst opens when asked the ambivalent cow of his hand gives a little But Christ he gets mad I want to report his teeth his cloud his envelope And there he goes always an exile never undressed with a ﬂute full of leaves beads growing in his beard still ready to climb the soft Himalaya of hope in his eyes.

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From Sunlight on the Wall

O’Keeffe One morning, Georgia O’Keeffe cobblestoned the inﬁnite with clouds. She stared at space. It blushed. She smiled. Fire and sword, mountain range and stream— the vulva’s green silk rippled— everything burned to its bone and a black cross grew from the radiant grave of forms.

From Sunlight on the Wall

Jose Through with work his hands waxed and polished where the big rings shine a chocolate jacket apricot shoes and the dark glasses to hide the scar that withered rose stem love had stitched near his eye he entered the cheap café and whistled whistled the neighborhood’s old king of ﬁsts of mockingbirds gigolos and ﬁnishers Everyone looked even the dishwater glowed Then coffee reﬁlled our cups darkness the windows

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From Sunlight on the Wall

Twilight at the Shop A whole day at the saw— when they come for the rubbish, I throw myself out with the dust. We smile and smoke and praise what’s left of the sun. Dark trees have bottled its light. They glow like many beers.

From Sunlight on the Wall

Next Door The Black man’s horn, sweet summer, played; night blooming jasmine ﬂoated in. They danced and danced like a diesel’s windshield wiper blade, on a hard ﬂoor, in the saffron rain that falls from a light, while their music slowly seeped each bitter night under the skin of a clean and quiet town’s disdain.

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From Sunlight on the Wall

I Can’t Sleep I can’t sleep. I wish we were young, in a different house, in a different town. I can hear the dog run away in her dream; outside, raindrops— their tender hoofbeats trapped in the courtyard of a leaf.

From Sunlight on the Wall

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Watercolor Days Pull up the shade, look outside. November sent a card to you— an antique world upon a shelf. These are the watercolor days, there’s never been anything else. Trees that have lost most of their leaves are sketched and delicate and look like music written in the air. A faint blue wash and that’s the sky. One hill, neither green, nor brown. Sunlight warms a tired wall’s face. A few clouds, a few old ladies with twilight tinted hair . . .

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From The Wild Olive Tree (West Coast Poetry Review, )

Signature I earn a living and I have a family but to tell the truth I’m a wild olive tree I like cognac and a proud Jewish song I live wherever I don’t belong I watch the world decay on every page on every face it’s a sick man’s clouded eye that rolls around in space And my obsession’s a line I can’t revise to be a gardener in paradise

From The Wild Olive Tree

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These Days homage to Attilla József These days, everything’s bad. The future waits in a button. No one plans, nobody says: Three years from now . . . Evening falls upon a porch; bloody, black and white, it opens like the paper. Someone bursts into ﬂames. Winter, a grim warehouse, delivers the wind. An angry truck rattles by— the inconsolable self, strumming its gas pedal, tuning up for the storm. Lies! so many lies! Windows malignant with things. When at last the nail strangles the hammer and even the ant howls.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

Then riﬂes, rockets— “O what a time, what a time!” And, like an old ideal, the moon’s been reached. A few astonished ﬂies wrinkle the dust on its face. Be like the rain that wears a ragged coat and ﬁnds a lamp in the smallest stone and sings for nothing from street to street.

From The Wild Olive Tree

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Some Definitions at Work The hammer lowered its horns and the rusty nail shrieked pulled from the place where it lived The table-saw whined like a virtuous bee that knows it will die in a meadow of dust The sandpaper sighed as it killed itself caressing the sugar pine the ash The housepainter’s brush hermaphrodite with a long stem a vaginal voice and a spring in its bristle swayed satisﬁed with itself on the wall Glue the woodworker’s sperm began to boil in the pot

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From The Wild Olive Tree

The rags their breath full of turpentine demanded their rights and threatened to burst like the sun Then the woman who turned into a mop disheveled gray worn out by the ﬂoor and the man who’d become a broom his broad shoulder lost in the dirt noticed how even a motor bleeds when it breaks drops of oil stare from its skin like the eyes of frightened ﬁsh

From The Wild Olive Tree

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Landscapes

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The City

The city grows from a highway’s stem: it’s a glittering circuit board, a crystal that palpitates. Night’s swept away like a broken glass. The day begins. It prints the parking lots; doors work like switches; people are impulses in a system. But often, a siren occurs— the awakened man’s incredulous wail. And the sky, that rotten lung, bleeds, then blackens; the windows on the walls multiply their cells Still curious, the infected moon regulates its lens.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

On the Outskirts

On the outskirts, the factory— somebody’s chemistry set; a junkyard, where the town keeps throwing itself away; rust clots on the mangled iron; pain in the sun’s aluminum glare . . . There’s a hubcap, going blind in a ditch; the dust, spreading its cataract; and a few yellow machines that die like sunﬂowers, dropping their parts in a ﬁeld. The hills are a pile of rags in a pail of dirty thinner; scrap metal trees crinkle in the wind’s gray ﬂame; and the tumbleweeds roll their barbed wire over the roads . . . An airplane roars like a sperm through a crack in the smog’s deep stone.

From The Wild Olive Tree

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Along the Coast

You stare (propped like a sick man) from the car’s enchanted bed. A hill nibbles at a ﬁeld’s green fork; an old arthritic fence hobbles up toward a cloud. A little factory smoke grows abstract in the sky. Only the cows have reached perfection. Their quiet minds look empty. The landscape requires them . . . When the cows eat, the ground, the shadows, even boulders, rise and bow to each other. Far away, the suburbs— one cube cloning itself, like the stone at the veterans’ cemetery. And all along the coast the sun drives over the sea. Its windshields glitter in the waves.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

Pebble Fragment of the ﬁrst chunk Irregular moon Perpetual cloud The dust’s blind eye The mite’s crude planet Durable friend between the ﬁngers Destroyer of giants Something that grows immense in a shoe The boulder’s crumb The rock’s quiet child The ﬂower’s pure disciple Wasteland’s embryo Despair’s gray seed Staunch member in the brotherhood of water polishers Wisdom’s jewel The weed’s eternal fruit The raindrop’s tomb

From The Wild Olive Tree

Old Their children are gone; almost everyone they loved and half of what they understood, has disappeared. But the door’s still open, the porch light’s on; a little wind at night and they hear footsteps when a few leaves fall.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

Eviction Where could he go from a house hidden by trees, whose days were pebbles in a stream of birds, with his wife, his children, all the books like bottles of wine that glow on their shelves? To a neighborhood of crypts with windows, high-rise transistors, cars brighter than people; where everyone stares like a loaded gun and the grass is sinister . . . He stood in the yard. A rose opened its wound, a spider repaired its net, an old leaf touched him like his father’s hand; and the trucks delivered, or took away.

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A Citizen 1 The spider I hit, loose thread on the ﬂoor, clenches its ﬁst. The cat lies down; it looks at me as if through a window. 2 I’m a coat hanger twisted by rage. 3 Everything shrinks from my hands— that landscape threatened by planes, a woman’s astonished face. 4 I served the giant who ate the villages, whose arms swept aside the stars like raindrops on a windshield; who broke the sky, man’s sacred mirror, and promised peace . . .

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From The Wild Olive Tree

5 I did these things for freedom, endless as a boulevard where all the lights are green. 6 My car won’t start. Dead leaves follow me— they’re scribbling my name. 7 I’m a swastika, the headless man whose iron limbs grind the world. 8 I want to change. Even a wall gets painted again.

From The Wild Olive Tree

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To My Enemies I’m still here, in a skin thinner than a dybbuk’s raincoat; strange as the birds who scrounge, those stubborn pumps that bring up nothing . . . Maddened by you for whom the cash register, with its clerical bells, is a national church; you, whose instant smile cracks the earth at my feet . . . May your wife go to paradise with the garbage man, your prick hang like a shoelace, your balls become raisins, hair grow on the whites of your eyes and your eyelashes turn into lawn mowers that cut from nine to ﬁve . . . Man is a skin disease that covers the earth. The stars are antibodies approaching, your president is a tsetse-ﬂy . . .

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From The Wild Olive Tree

After the Meal 1 A suburb of coffee cups; napkins, those crumpled hills; silverware, freeways spotted with grease, with ﬂesh . . . and the ash-tray, a ghetto full of charred men with grizzled heads who wasted their ﬂame; where every breath scatters its bones and small gray mounds accumulate, then crumble, like nations or the knees of elephants. 2 Like a cleaning plant, steam comes through a hole in your face. Your exhaust is the last wild horse that gallops away. 3 Smoke waters the ﬂowers that grow in the lungs. The cigarette, like your life, is a piece of chalk that shrinks as it tries to explain.

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All Around Me All around me, butterﬂies, ecstatic hinges, hunt for the ideal door. A cicada’s ratchet tightens a place in the yard. Everything’s warmed by a wave from the tree. A bird trickles like the tap. And the dog just stands there, looking down. Run, sleep, she can’t remember. It’s hard to be conscious. From here, I can watch the freeway— ants on a windowsill. The skyline doodles, an airplane seems to ﬂoat like a ﬁsh. Nearby, a factory smokes. I’m one of its little ash-trays. Suddenly, a dinosaur, or Rome, will rise, then crumble, in the cracks on a ragged wall.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

We do marvelous things without knowing how, like the chicken whose bronze shit builds a shrine under its coop. But, even so, one gets depressed. This morning, a ﬁeld, a ﬂock of stones asleep in its mist . . . This world’s painted on a glass that has to break. I can still pay the rent and the roads aren’t lined with corpses yet.

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Pencil Sharpener It has no arms or legs, this tiny nude; yet grip it by the waist, then stir its hips: a dry leaf multiplies, a cold motor starts in the wood. Revived, still shivering, the pencil sheds itself— and there’s a butterﬂy, teeth, the fragments of a crown.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

Pliers Contour of ﬁsh, or a donkey’s intractable head . . . Open, the pliers are an eagle over its prey, closed, any woman you reach for to tighten loose nuts. The color of all common tools and, like mankind, made of steel, yet easy to use. Though, basically, it’s only a jaw, or a thumb and foreﬁnger joined by a pin.

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The Old Engraver An old engraver was out of work. He lived alone with his tools. It was summer. The sky wore jeans and every day the backyard opened its familiar shop: a worm scrolling along, the trees elaborating themselves. But in the street children were grinding each other between the gears of their parents’ wrath. Should he just walk around without a point? So, each morning he printed lots of money; and all the children went to the candy store and became sweet. Then, the police appeared. The old engraver was out in the yard, hanging dollars up to dry with his underwear. He had to go to jail. And all the children turned into broken glass until even the mountains, those solitary herds, bled to death. The moon, a giant freezer, hummed. It was going to be used.

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The Gilder The Shop, weakened by dust, was closing its eyes. The saw stopped like an ambulance. A breeze made of turpentine still hung around his hands. Outside, the walls in the alley were gold leaf ﬂuttering on their frames; clouds, retired housepainters, relaxed in the sky. A little cello began to throb in his throat. Suddenly, he saw the sun overturn like a truckload of oranges at the end of a street—its light scatter and roll through the windows on a hill. What’s that got to do with Wittgenstein, or how we live? voices shouted in his head. Nothing . . . nothing at all.

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Suburban Dusk One girl in a red dress leaves the shopping center with empty hands: and you believe in the future— you’ve seen a drop of blood ﬂee from the luminous cells of a corpse. But the sky slips a coin in the slot between two buildings. Lights go on. Distorted creatures appear. A car, like an angry heart, explodes. And a vast erysipelas spreads over the hills. What can you do? Each night, the city becomes a butterﬂy, trembling it its oil.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

Postcards For Odette Ocean There it is: an immense, gray, agitated circle . . . and all day long the boat goes on like a cartridge across a turntable, an old shoe in a storm, dipping itself in the spume. *** If the sun shines, the water grinds its glass. *** When calm, the sea’s so blue you could paint the sky with it. Sometimes, it’s a green tablecloth laid on the wind. Fog— sailing for hours in the same spot; and the joyful sound of the invisible sea. ***

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On the horizon, late at night, a ship glows like the last café still open at the end of a boulevard after the rain. Island. Dwarfs and hunchbacks are loading wagons. Gardens drip in the heat. Flowers burst from the walls. An ox appears like a hillside in an alley. *** At the grocery store, chamber pots display their bottoms from the rafters, chicks lament among the onions . . . So poor, a box of baking soda’s smaller than a cigarette pack. *** A group of boys, in double ﬁle, marches down a street. A young, skinny priest, a scorched twig, walks behind them, reading Scripture. Pale girls lean on their windowsills, framed like the earliest photographs. ***

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Passengers board the ship at twilight. The people who wave from the pier light matches—they become a crowd of candles on the shore. The boat, a huge altar, dissolves in the fog. Arrival Two sailboats cross the bay, as if the wind wore tennis shoes. *** Villages, like broken pots, or baskets of apples, scattered on a mountainside. *** And the light, so much light! a harp burning in a glass. Village A farmer swings a scythe, tilting the blade’s sharp edge. The weeds are waves that fall on a glistening coastline. When he stands it up, the scythe’s a tall, one-legged bird, whose long bill the farmer cleans. ***

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The cemetery’s such a pretty town— old, quiet, full of mansions. People, ﬂowers, crows, everyone comes. *** A market in the street. Herbs, those quiet housewives, wearing their modest prints, were found in the ﬁelds at dawn. Clods of garlic, the kitchen’s diamond, hang from every stall. Cheese, like the walls of France; red peppers with a plastic glow . . . *** The cook speaks softly, gesturing, as if she were washing her hands in French. She loves to look at the sea when the water ripples and a gaggle of rowboats wobbles near the shore. She talks to the chickens in the garden. They’re very intelligent, she says . . . They’d tell us beautiful stories if they weren’t so busy eating. *** Frogs croak twenty-one in French all night. ***

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From The Wild Olive Tree

In the morning, calves stare at the world with their mother’s eyes. The rabbits quiver— they know so much about freedom, death. *** Inside the moldy church you’re wrapped in a damp rag. A Christ, as smooth as soap, hangs from a cross near the entrance. A bland virgin in a faded blue robe gestures from a niche. *** Outdoors, a breeze makes all the shrubs look sociable. White butterﬂies in a ﬁeld are the frayed handkerchiefs of those who didn’t ﬁnish saying good-bye. Train Sunlight plays its ﬂute in the treetops. *** A village where a church, with one arm raised to the sky, sinks in a cauldron of tiles . . .

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and a castle whose towers rise like a charred town from the murky water of its walls. *** Train station. Empty platform, not even a cat. A ﬂock of bells crosses the tracks. *** Green keeps changing itself from green to green. Paris City, where every wall’s a canvas (a torn poster’s an allegorical town) and time goes around painting the past . . . Night lifts the moon like a coffee cup from the skyline’s cluttered shelf. Each day, spring comes in the middle of fall. Neighborhoods are history books, leather-bound and stacked in their centuries. *** In a little square, a man ﬁlls a bottle at a fountain. The sound of water stops, continues. A woman leans from a window to see how the sky feels. Clouds rub their silver polish over the sun.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

*** And here are also ﬁlthy streets, leprous walls that sunlight never touched, smeared with crud, battered like garbage cans . . . the cracks in a stone are a landscape of nerves; the air’s a perpetual fart and even the shadows wear rags. *** An old dog, a four-legged bundle of straw, leaves the café and goes to the gutter for a drink. When he returns, his footprints are a crooked row of tiny vases, each one with four ﬂowers, on the sidewalk. *** A child carries a long, thin loaf of bread. Its sides are chipped like the molding of a gilded frame. The crust looks warm, dented, as if the baker were a blacksmith who hammered and sold the sun’s rays. ***

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Jardin du Luxembourg Birds, in their brown suits, hurry home from business. Clouds lie rumpled in the sky like napkins after dinner. A chandelier of rain hangs over the lake. The queens of France are always here. Their poignant pride endures the casual gaze of foreigners, the pigeons and the years. Arc de Triomphe Nothing but gray seen through the arch— as if triumph were an abyss into which a nation marches. 14th of July Fireworks—an empire’s crown that lasts for a moment. A tough guy shows a timid girl how to dance in the street. Buttes-Chaumont From this melancholy cliff the park unrolls, a thick green mist below . . .

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From The Wild Olive Tree

And Paris, like a sea without its water— the world’s most delicate accumulation of debris. *** Some days are harpsichords under the chestnut trees. Nothing lasts, their strings break, the gold turns gray, a drizzle falls . . . And then the gold’s restored. People leave their tables, birds their narrow benches in the walls. An old woman sits and bathes her tired feet that look like marble in a puddle near the market stalls. *** Among the antique dealers, a pigeon on the sidewalk’s a little baron who struts through a village of bric-a-brac. *** It rained and rained in the courtyard and an old man in a gray coat sang to empty windows. The laundry wept for hours. ***

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The round slate roofs of grand hotels, mythical in their scales, ﬂoat through the radiant water of the air. But the buildings of the poor divide their bread with everyone. At night, each window’s a glass of wine the darkness drinks as it passes. *** Sometimes, a blind violinist helps us through the street. You shed a few coins in his cup— a shop front glitters like an accordion in the rain. *** Cars whirl around a monument. People smile, horns blare, headlights shine like brass. The whole square’s a carousel. Suddenly, you’re a child who’s had his turn, a stranger; the others stay, but you go home. *** Now, from the dawn’s gray chemical, a café’s a postcard in the distance . . . a barge strolls through Paris on the Seine . . .

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From The Wild Olive Tree

The Return I thought our house was on a hill that wore its tenants like a crown. The sidewalk sparkled in the sun and all the doorways knew my name. Broken windows, the grass is brown . . . only a little gray hunchback wears the neighborhood like a shawl. Now, everything’s so old and small.

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Homecoming 1 My father was a tender man whose blue eyes would overcast by noon. Every dusk he ﬂoated home in the soiled wind of his clothes. I ﬂew to the ceiling in his arms. The silverware sang as he came to the table and the bright room rolled like a train that climbs its ladder through the dark. 2 His hands are cobwebs full of ﬂies, trembling in his lap. They’ve locked him up with strangers, because he drools too much; and I imagine freeing him. We’d go to a town that isn’t there, where everyone he cries for now (wrapped in the bed’s thick bandage) would come to shake his hand. He laughs. He lifts a child and grows. He drinks and drinks the meadowlark, he smoothes a stone’s gray hair . . . But he stinks, he’s a huge bib; a loose scab, a rotten cornﬂake, clings to his lip.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

3 There are mouths so cold the salmon-colored tongue leaps without a sound; lonely ditches where a broken dove mourns in the rubble of a face. Men, at the mercy of their parts: grime in the skull, despair corroding the rainbows in their wires. 4 My home was a watercolor I left in the rain . . . Tonight, the crickets ring and ring, nobody answers; the shadows of men are looking for blood. Someone has stepped on the classical face of the moon. Dawn comes, a gradual mountain range of ashes. 5 The mockingbirds, those joyful books that opened in the sky, then closed their pages on a branch, awake and go mad, chewing the bones of their old songs; and the ﬂies, such tiny fenders, batter themselves in the air.

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Lament 1 I looked for you at the cemetery. You have two addresses on a metal door in the grass; but you don’t live at either one. 2 When I was a child and sick at night, you were the moon above my bed. Father, father, I saw you smile at a sparrow the way you smiled at me. 3 What else awakes and knows it was born, it will die. The same clouds come and go; the same bird sings or ﬂies.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

Driving Home at Night with My Children After Their Grandfather’s Funeral See how the moon follows us? That’s Grandpa’s face in the sky. It smiles; so, he’s still the same. Sleep. The way home’s always shorter than the way you came. Shhh . . . The car’s a steel measure that swallows the road like a tape; and we’ll all live twice as long as it takes the snail to go around the world on its crumpled skate.

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The Widow Leaves gnaw at the porch. The century, like her family, disappears. Life is a movie she’s already seen. Her cheeks are rose petals in the book of better days. Wrinkled and powdered and rouged, bewildered by others, alone wherever she is, she opens her purse, she opens a drawer: it’s twilight—she enters a photograph.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

Tree Thirty years in that yard— and what a wild, melancholy mind, I know you were. Autumn, the gifts come down. I still see yours multiplying, bruised, there on the ground. My dear, ironic tree, what did we do? Your neglected fruit has poisoned me.

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For W. R. Rodgers (1909–69) I knew a candle of a man, whose voice, meandering in a ﬂame, could make the shadows on the wall listen to what he said. Time ﬂowed from a vein that ran its blue crack through his pale forehead. He’s done. You’d need a broom to arouse him now. All things burn before they’re dead. Some men are words that warmed a room.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

Spleen Sometimes, I just hang around like a dead man’s coat, or a vacant lot that trembles when construction crews pass. I go to a coffee shop and sit for hours to watch a window’s silent ﬁlm— people, scrawled and erased on a long, gray page. Later, when clouds blaze, then suddenly grow old and sad, I take a walk. Evening begins with headlights and a sound track of birds that fades from tree to tree. Behind a garage, a few strange weeds, taller than men . . .

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With Animals 1 I feel like the elephant enlightened boulder held back by a chain 2 I act like the camel with its melancholy sensual eyes and fastidious lips 3 I see the dung-colored crumbling bison an entire town evicted even its sofas falling apart The young look over the fence their eyes are maple leaves after the rain American lakes a hundred years ago Their mothers stare at the ground their fathers shrink like the countryside The moon the oldest streetlight touches them with its intangible snow

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4 I envy the tortoise primordial hand whose neck is a thumb measuring time and the grass 5 I understand the stork the way it paces scholar or wandering Jew whoever waits for the real world to be born 6 I want to comfort the ostrich that mad woman wearing her grandmother’s clothes and be like the mountain goats who lick each other’s forehead 7 But look at the huge green toad sanctimonious phlegm the crocodile hell’s pavement bats those weird umbrellas that open only at night

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8 The baboon sulks on a shelf prehistoric priest whose rump is a festival its face a sports car his eyes glum headlights that glare 9 There’s that insect winding itself again another ant berserk on its boulevard 10 And somewhere a ﬁeld mouse sits by the sea

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And Still Nobody’s honest nothing matters That’s why I’m always adjusting myself my chemicals my complaints And every day I ﬂy around in my insect-colored car The city’s a carcass streets quiver like meat In my own voice I hear a broom that sighs while it waves farewell to the past And still it happens a few leaves come around a corner demonstrate then disappear Mozart arrives in an ice-cream truck a long war ends I feel like a streetlight tall and radiant my face was made to shine among the others

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Gently, Gently We, too, began with joy. Then, sickness came; then, poverty. We were poor, so poor, our children were our only friends. Gently, gently, through anger and pain, love justiﬁed itself, like the nails in the house during a storm. Somehow, we created hope, reliable drum in the shadow’s wrist; a tuning fork on the sidewalk of dreams.

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From The Wild Olive Tree

At night, I was the one who became a cello, strung with all our roads, where memory hums to itself like a tire. And you, mad as a clarinet where the street divides; a city of raindrops in a bush; the slow honey that drips from the sky’s old ladle . . . the reason I’m frightened of death. I swear by the wings love spreads at my waist, that I’ll carry your tune until my tired strings break.

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Daybreak Birds drip from the trees. The moon’s a little goat over there on the hill; dawn, as blue as her milk, ﬁlls the sky’s tin pail. The air’s so cold a gas station glitters in an ice-cube. The freeway hums like a pipe when the water’s on. Streetlights turn off their dew. The sun climbs down from a roof, stops by a house and strikes its long match on a wall, takes out a ring of brass keys and opens every door.

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From The Blue Café—Poems (Jazz Press and PapaBach Editions, 1982)

Each day the town gets changed; and I have memories that never built a thing. The brand new blocks are lit— computers without a past.

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Sawdust This Evening The day was beaten, stomped, smeared on a wall . . . Now, rows of buildings close their books; the moon thumbs through a billion sad pages; the past, like an old friend, goes by with a strange face.

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From The Blue Café—Poems

Another Caterpillar Poem for Robert Bly As I lift the coffee cup I see a caterpillar crawl over the sheet of airmail stamps. Its head is a microphone dragging its cord. Used pipe cleaner, so many little accordions open and close like a mountain range of exhausted joy. I pick up the blood-colored sheet and the caterpillar undulates like smoke at the edge of a ﬁeld, then rises— an electrician bewildered by wires, a man whose remote feet are anxious staples gripping the ground. Should I speak now about wings and the ﬂower’s sexual glare? I think it’s November again. Leaves are the grandparents of spring. I don’t mind that I’ve failed at times. The desperate summer sleeps in the shade. The sweet legs of the grass have gone away. I see the earth’s plain face, its wrinkled belly, the family loaf that rises under the moon. The caterpillar dreams, dark lightning, on the desk.

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In Saigon In our own image we created them In Saigon, teen-age men wear red bandanas and ten-gallon hats. Knives, lean mercenaries glare from their waists. They spur old half-breed Hondas through the town. When a right hand roars on its handlebar, people shiver like jewels. The boys carry cleavers and, whooping it up, swing them around their heads. One’s an American chopper gliding close to the ground. If he sees a woman wearing a bracelet, or a man with a wristwatch, he swoops, cuts off an arm, wipes the gore from his blade like grease from his chrome, then ambles on . . .

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From The Blue Café—Poems

Their smiles are gun belts, their brains, nuclear clouds; and they speak a dialect that sounds like money, or the language left on the moon. Around them, the landscape’s a ﬂag that fell from the sky; red roads, bloody stripes; whitened by bones and stars that explode; blue, like genocide’s queer smoke.

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Retarded Child She walks like an old woman wading in a pool. Her blond hair pours down her back— sunlight from a renaissance cloud. When her father carries her home, she’s a frail lamp that glistens under a parchment shade, a loose wire sparkling in his arm.

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From The Blue Café—Poems

August Suddenly, a mockingbird spurts from the top of a telephone pole— clear water ﬁlls the stagnant air. And summer, brown and hairy, hums to itself around the yard, like a bee in a window box.

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Sunflowers No one spoke to the sunﬂowers, those antique microphones in the vacant lot. So, they hung their heads and, slowly, fell apart.

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From The Blue Café—Poems

The Daughter She won’t believe she was born without wings. Why can’t I live in the ceiling? The heart’s a wagon one pulls, empties and ﬁlls, from door to door . . . Once, she put some blocks and a few bricks in a hole she dug, watered them, and said, I’m growing a house. Today, she stuck a green branch in the ground. Look, I’ve made a fountain! The porch is her piano. When I play on the steps, our neighbors smile. We’re like the Family of Man. At bedtime, shadows hang the world inside a gray museum. All the pictures grow dim in the sky. Then, her face wanders on the pillow like a ﬂashlight in the dark.

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The Son He arranged some rocks in circles on the rug. These are nests for invisible birds. The ﬂy’s my friend. How old is it? Near the beach he sees the fog open a jar of vaseline headlights fumble with their yellow spoons. Frightened, he sails away in his mother’s arms. Tomorrow, he’ll claim he didn’t sleep all night to make the sky, I pinned up a blue cloth when I ran out of paint and I used a dirty quilt for Chicago. Death drives a man like a nail into the ground; his head turns to metal and shines in the grass . . . But here, at home, when the morning washes my window, time returns in a golden bus. I want to ride as long as I can.

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From The Blue Café—Poems

The Poets There he sat among them (his old friends) a walking ash that knows how to smile. And he still dreamed of a style so clear it could wash a face, or make a dry mouth sing. But they laughed, having found themselves more astonishing. They would drive their minds prismatic, strange, each wrapped in his own ecstatic wires, over a cliff for language, while he remained to raise a few birds from a blank page.

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Maybe (for Ami) We love the sunlight on an old wall’s broken face. Now and then, we want to lie around all afternoon in a personal cloud. At night, after a storm, we wake our children to show them the fragile city of raindrops in a tree. We wish that one clear hour could last a year; that we could buy a dinner with our dreams and stroll out the door, past reality, down a street where everyone says, Hello. We ﬁlled the moon and the stars and everything on earth with our desire; and still, life doesn’t hum like a hedge in summer. Well, maybe one by one we’ll announce when it’s time to dress in our ideal selves; then, celebrate the days that grow—fresh from the cleaners, the bakery, the pages of a brand new book. Those beautiful days, those sensible days, almost everyone knew just had to come.

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From The Blue Café—Poems

Images Images—for Odette I Bales of hay—cartons of sunlight fading in a ﬁeld. II Shadows rise like water, white fences comb their hair. III Leaves everywhere— shreds of a giant eraser; an oak leaf, becoming an antique. IV Outside, a snowfall’s passed and painted all the windowsills, even the curb’s gray putty. V Sunlight in a window— a ﬂower in a glass.

From The Blue Café—Poems

VI The highway’s an old surrealist’s granite hair; and the sea’s become a sky full of clouds. A wind records the waves, then plays them in the trees. VII A ﬂock of crows dissolves in the mist— a cigarette’s ash in a glass of water; and sunlight twitching in a puddle. VIII Now the night drives up. Distant buildings are golden radiators, the sky’s a black cloud full of sparks . . . Sirens, dogs; and he just stood there, by the police car, with those handcuffs on, staring at the moon.

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From The Blue Café—Poems

IX After the rain a streetlight hangs the shadow of trees like laundry on a wall. X Hands, twin sisters to whom everyone’s a wrinkle that needs to be smoothed, a stranger who should be fed. Hands, those humble wings that make each day ﬂy toward its goal; at rest, still holding the shape of a tool.

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XI Proletarian aristocrat whose forehead glows like imagination’s egg; when you’re asleep you look like the death mask of Keats, alone with yourself again—absolute, relieved. XII I wish we were two birds living in a courtyard near St.-Germain-Des-Prés. Leaves spread their tablecloths, trees open their cafés; all day the sun’s a barrel of beer, at night the earth’s a woman, the full moon’s her mirror.

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From The Blue Café—Poems

The Blue Café—songs for Anat and Daniel

What we want is simple a country like a poem that’s beautiful and true and makes us feel at home

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The Old Café There’s an old café open everyday and all night long on the boulevard of time Jeremiah wept there Plato came to teach it’s where proud Baudelaire stroked his boredom’s endless hair and Gandhi learned to preach and everyone at least just once saw the wonder in the grime watching people all the people on the boulevard of time You and I sat there when we were young We saw Joan of Arc talking to her angel at a nearby table heard Cain condemning Abel Marx and Freud trying to analyze the void between reality and desire

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From The Blue Café—Poems

And I saw beauty love and passion in two thousand years of fashion always look the same sitting in the old café on the boulevard of time It’s getting late Come spare an hour and join a table where people spread like petals around a ﬂower faces bloom like roses strangers greeting strangers tourists from the stars and have a little wine before it closes on the boulevard of time

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Unearthly Lady I passed you on the boulevard I saw you by the sea I sat near you in a blue café you were sipping a pale green tea I thought of a seagull in the air of a shadow on the grass of grapes that grow inside the moon and lightning in a glass A rainbow ﬂuttered like a ﬂame on your shoulders in your hands Your eyes were other planets strange imaginary lands But I haven’t seen you lately though I go out to look each day and now my little place seems empty my bed’s a mound of cold white clay Lady unearthly lady I wish you hadn’t gone away

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From The Blue Café—Poems

Without a Chance You were born without a chance and you don’t stand a chance tonight You see eternity come into sight as that big shiny car pulls up to the curb Oh those are knives not headlights in the leaves and something breaks your nerve and then your knees The moon looks down and doesn’t care when your blood lights up your pretty hair

From The Blue Café—Poems

You were born without a chance and you don’t stand a chance tonight Eternity’s as long as the car that pulls up to the curb space opens at your feet Everything gets blurred the moon has a dirty face the stars are broken glass in a dark and empty street

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From The Blue Café—Poems

It’s Very Nice It’s very nice to sit by a stream where life’s the water’s brilliant dream then chop a tree to make a ﬁre burning the wood and your desire saying the world’s all rotten everything should be forgotten But it’s just bitterness all the voices that you miss the ones that gave you happiness are murmuring in the leaves Hatred is the battered heart’s disease People are made to be together like a jacket and cold weather like a sister and a brother When you’re lonely what do you do you paint the walls black and blue and cry nobody cares for you they’re all cracks the wind blows through saints are selﬁsh love’s a sham it’s so damned hard who gives a damn But it’s just bitterness all the voices that you miss the ones that gave you happiness are inside you saying please Hatred is the battered heart’s disease People were made to be together like Cyrano and his feather like a father and a mother But hatred is the battered heart’s disease

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Public Places In the small cafés the bars the public places you can be alone not lonely your face is one among the faces like an apple on an apple tree You can sit there for an hour you can sit there for a day and plan the revolution or like Shakespeare write a tragic play about your love and indecision or watch the rain come down and see the buildings ﬂoat away But you’re not lonely here just alone no need to fear as long as you can pay Light a cigarette and dream time is an ocean not a stream the voices rise and fall like waves It’s beautiful and sad to be alive as all the ash-trays turn to graves

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From The Blue Café—Poems

It’s All Dissolving It’s all dissolving like an aspirin in a glass of doom Speak quietly there’s a microphone in every tree and a White House on the moon They’ve killed today and put tomorrow in a cage and feed it promises and lies Sometimes you’re glowing with a silent rage and broken bloodshot eyes The unemployed are hungry the boss plays in the snow

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It’s all dissolving and there ain’t no place to go I felt a raindrop burn I heard bones crumble in a breeze Chemicals are everywhere and everything’s diseased And the funerals drive by with their headlights on at noon through cancer’s crazy city where everyone dies too soon But when the rich and mighty were at their banquet feeling safe and sound blind Samson had a vision and pulled the temple down

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From The Blue Café—Poems

They Say They say you’re just a soft computer designed by the times and the only choice you have is to revise your lines But don’t you believe it you’re the magic lightning the spirit in the air the one who turns a parking lot into a county fair Your imagination conquers power you take the stones they threw at you and build a tower You can’t be classiﬁed Your name’s not in the yellow pages of despair You’re a bodhisattva in disguise Your tears are oceans your mind contains the skies

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One Tree One Fish There’s one tree on a mountain one ﬁsh inside the sea scientists say have immortality unless cruel fate an accident an enemy strikes them down like death strikes you and me Oh little light Oh little rain it’s only human to complain we can’t remain and it’s so lovely here Sometimes I sit and wish I were a tree or an immortal ﬁsh a ray of sunlight from a holy cloud anything but someone a light bulb life turned on that burns and then goes out Oh little light Oh little rain it’s only human to complain we can’t remain and it’s so lovely here

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From The Blue Café—Poems

A tortoise lives quite long a star shines on and on a building lasts for centuries so does the tune a shepherd plays But why a star why a tortoise why a building or a tune and not my nights and days Oh little light Oh little rain it’s only human to complain we can’t remain and it’s so lovely here

From The Blue Café—Poems

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Here’s the Autumn Well we’ve reached the autumn when it’s all run-down leaves peel like paint the edge of things get brown Days are made of paper thrown out with trash the sky’s a window that needs to be washed Youth’s like sunlight fading in a pair of jeans and we’ve become the century’s exhausted dreams We’re growing old my dear our minds are turning gray The friends we had aren’t here This world’s a painting on a wall that ﬂows away

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A Memorie How often in the evening: tense and full of agony, I entered the place with one dim lamp shining misted yellow upon a bright brown table . . . pulled down the shades, listened to the voices of my parents from their room . . . then feeling approaching, vague warmth and love, relaxed in a chair to look at paintings on the wall and dream. 1947

Unpublished Poems

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A Nocturne Green moons are blooming in the leavelight . . . and over the dark, subtle meadows, white ﬂowers open their shining mouths to tell waiting eyes it is time to sleep. 1947

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A Dawn Without a sound, night slips away, and day begins spreading across the sky in the East . . . overhead, a last dim star drops down to fall asleep in the hair of a tall tree. 1947

Unpublished Poems

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Greybird They screamed, Get out! and I’ve become a pile of trash that mumbles to itself on the sidewalk while others go toward home. In a little room behind my forehead, people are talking about me. They’re at a table and they have yellow voices. I’m a bell they’ve buried in the snow. Sometimes I feel so vast, the stars come out upon my skin. And, each night I hope to meet a stranger who’ll be a friend . . . A man drags a woman to a car; a drunken streetlight dribbles in the gutter; the same fool stares at the broken glass in a parking lot, as if it were the starry sky. 1950

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A Fifty-Year-Old Woman Something’s wrong, the world or she. The skin has melted on her bones, a mirror shows her ﬁrm as youth. In a girlish skirt, with orange hair, the ﬁfty-yearold painted woman parades through the neighborhood. Men look. She thinks that she’s desired. In the park, pretty women aren’t ignored. Flowering by a tree, she’ll be picked. But men can hear her open like a rusty gate and feel her arms like weeds. On the grass she waits, a gaudy grave where only derelicts lie down. Pride, loneliness, the collectors of beauty and the fear of death, have made her a ﬂaming rag of ﬂesh that walks from block to block. But there, sunlight throws tiny jewels in the pavement; and a sky full of stars smells so good. 1952

Unpublished Poems

Wilshire Bus These ladies concentrate on how they look. No one’s too friendly; this place is public. Dressed up like a gift, delivered by the bus. Each woman feels unique, mysterious . . . but sad to be unwrapped again, at home— that cave where everything’s asleep, assumed, and known. 1952

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Mary, Mary Mary, Mary, quite contrary, young woman, what do you know? I spread my legs, they come; when I give myself, they go. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, what have you done? Cut my hair and swaggered around to be my father’s son. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, why do you go to school? I have a passion for the truth and I hate a pretty fool. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, when will you wed? When they paint me and dress me up like a doll and give me a box for a bed. 1953

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It’s a Pleasure to Be Sick You feel that world outside the skin rising, rising, like a mountain, to keep you down? The child in man knows what to do: lie in bed and dream it through— it’s pleasure to be sick. That girl you love, loves another? Don’t feel guilty, go to mother. She’ll be glad to have you. It’s dark and dull, but soft in there, with only birth and death to fear. It’s such a pleasure to be sick. But what of those who do lie down too long to laugh or call it fun, and no one can arouse? They see the whole world wearing black and, color-blind, they answer back: it’s a pleasure to be sick. Most men exult in what they’ve done, wearing achievement like a sun that pulls the world to them. But those who refuse to work for love (afraid they’ll never earn enough) have gray haired hearts and cry, Unfair! and woo the world with their despair. It’s their pleasure to be sick. 1953

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She Spoke of Love So, she spoke of love as if no man gave more than a senseless shove. And, although it’s true men often turn aside when their urgent, crude desire’s been satisﬁed— leaving the woman then— I know of one, though proud, as rare and passionate as all his blinding words— who, after that wild ride inside the sensual cloud, will bloom there, full of birds. 1953

Unpublished Poems

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Korea A country lies in ruins. No one I know or care to know has any business there. While fear, the perfect cop, patrols our minds like our streets, we imagine peace. Peace, when the sunlight falls aﬂame in the builder’s steel; rain on the ﬁeld, snow on the roof; and every window welcomes the calm and passionate dark face of night. 1953

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Poem in Summer Always, the summer sun that pours its chemicals into the trees and takes a shape in fruit we like; all produce of the thoughtless bees, the wind—nature’s routine lusts; are dumped on the indifferent ground. The celery’s green fountain rusts. Winter, fall, are permanent. But in the greenhouse of the mind the world ﬂowers, or burns, by other seasons: man’s laboring ways. Unlike the bee stuck to its hod man sees the atom in a cloud, but still, lives in a ritual daze.

Unpublished Poems

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The violent rich who stalk the earth absorb the sun and auction off all the summer’s golden stream, leaving us to eat, rebuild and dream. We dream of feasts, of happy towns, the green, yet warring earth controlled; and nothing bought and nothing sold. The bee that builds, the breathing leaf, each of nature’s subtle robots must diet, turn its wheels, and die; but we could choose the way we live: against all senseless death unite the single life to common force and make our days and nights become great open warehouses of the sun. 1953

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Footnote for Today They say, the sky that leans upon the roofs, will turn to iron and suddenly fall. They say, the roofs will fall; or, that someday the sea will wander into town, then, ﬁsh swim overhead. Always, when the worn out ﬂags come down, the poor walk closer to their goal— the ways of love and law are changed each day like clothes: always then, some see a total doom before them. And still, the world remains. Though we endure the dark we can’t believe in death, now seeing the sleeping rise and human dreams at last take life. We know tomorrow will dance upon today. 1953

Unpublished Poems

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But We, My Love To skin-deep lovers, when deep in bed, love is an island in the head above the body’s rising tide. On their own shores they climb all night and hope for heaven at the dawn. Such lovers never look upon the salty creatures of their ﬂesh: those hairy plants would make them blush. Made to blend, the world in the heart while they ﬁt keeps them apart. There are no lights in that dark place where the body’s in disgrace. But, we, my love, behold are fair! and can be loved for what we are. Now in each other’s waters come, washing darkness from this room. We’ll the sea beast of our love: that jovial serpent in our blood. If we, who are so intimate, need more than love to honor it, why we can say, our lewd delight more than our god, makes human life. 1954

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To ________________ We smile and sit down far apart; we, who once had a single heart. And you, married now, look at me as if looking were adultery— fearing this new love’s only true if all that other love is through. Memory might dull the polished plans of matrimony’s pots and pans. But dear, what could one give, or be, except a piece of property, with such a love? Now, if instead, you can bring to your board and bed all of the love that’s ﬁlled your life, couldn’t you love me and be his wife? 1954

Unpublished Poems

Marriage Proposal This was a good home. My mother’s beautiful and now and then my father laughs. How blue his eyes are! I had love; and a long childhood. I was prince in this small world. We were fortunate: in the yard fruit always fell, we had lilies and a great tree blessed with birds. At night, we said: Surely, the stars like sparks ﬂy up. Yet wrath damaged the walls, tore down the roses, how hate could make a ﬁst of friendship! I would say these oak ﬂoors are still broken where tears dropped. But there was music; the long rain fell but we were warm.

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We were undisciplined, dramatic natures, and half my hair, my raven hair, is gray to prove it. I thought, once, I’d never leave. Yet, today, with you I forgot my home. Young woman, you’ve taken away my mother, my father, and you’ve taken away my home—old house yellow as a daisy— that kneels here to mountains. Be my mother, my home, oh be a tree to me, be my wife. Here, on this jewel of earth, let’s make each other shine. Sweat and poetry nature and a sweet glue have bound us.

Unpublished Poems

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Come, give with me everything we have, turn on the turning world. There is a mystery here, something that makes the beast in man cry with joy. Please, give with me what we can, Odette; more lives and loves than ours have gone out among the stars. Burning, let’s grow gray together. October 20, 1957

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Sunday Morning Day dynamites the rock of sleep. Again, you and I and all this furniture are still the same. We stare at the yard through a window and wonder why the blue jay goes from the fence to the lemon tree. 1957

Unpublished Poems

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I Dreamed I dreamed of a light that kills; there wasn’t a sound from man. A clinic of clouds appeared where the moon went, dressed as a nurse. Then, all the dead leaves of the world marched in their uniforms; the bloody walls cracked with rage; a broom at the corner whispered, Peace. At last, generals and bank vaults were changed into nails and you and I became two hammers with one blow that builds. 1960

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How I Feel I’m the sound of a rusty nail being pulled from the wall, a bomb in the street without instructions . . . My mirrors are old photographs. Almost every day I want to sleep or explode, because a friend kept on his shirt when I came; because men light small countries like cigars and inhale their neighbors; because my children are seeds I put to bed; because the cities, as sure as their walls go up, will like rain come down. 1961

Unpublished Poems

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A Survivor As he ﬁnished smoking after lunch in Warsaw, when it was summer and the warm street smelled like hay and women wore thin dresses, and then he almost told someone— the arms, the legs, the little children in the ash-tray. 1962

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Someone We Knew after E. A. R. When she sat down to share the public grass beside our company that afternoon, one thought of summer lightning in a glass, or cold wet grapes that glow upon the moon. We envied her, whose nerves were silverware with which she calmly ate us. Girl, who seemed beyond the good and evil in the air: someone who couldn’t fail and never dreamed. And she was satisﬁed—she told us so; then she smiled at anyone who didn’t reply. We felt the sun grow dim, the darkness ﬂow; the clouds piled up like autos in the sky. And as we worked and planned to meet again and couldn’t discover what it was we lacked, we heard she’d suddenly gone where everyone must go who has forgotten how to act. 1963

Unpublished Poems

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English My teacher was doctor Thomas Earp, who tortured books and called it work. He taught me the rule for perfect theses: mix Shakespeare’s gold with Luther’s feces. I’ve traveled far upon my chair, colleges are everywhere; met Boswell, Crunk and Samuel C.— it’s all a question of degree. I thrive in this Babbitt Shangri-La (sit down, sit down, don’t stand in awe). Sometimes, I even use my brain. My hair’s grown gorgeous from the strain. I know so much it’s frightening. I have spent my life deciphering the latest attitudes toward rhyme and why an author mentions Time. Poems are made by those who see a solar system in a tree; but only a critic can discern Heidegger’s ash in a Grecian urn. 1969

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Untitled These are the water-colored days . . . Trees that have lost most of their leaves are sketched and delicate and look like music, written silent in the air. Clouds build a renaissance at ﬁve, grow old and disappear. Sit by a window, watch it rain. 1970

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Always Bad weather, like common sense, tries and tries to extinguish that butterﬂy. 1970

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For Ami* Nothing cares about us— only we and our animals. Nature just mixes things. A road will take us somewhere; or turn and throw us away. You’ve become a precious stone whose name sticks in our throats. And you left such a big hole, we walk around, falling in . . . It’s impossible! Please, Ami, please don’t drive as you did. 1974

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•

For his daughter’s boyfriend who died at the age of

twenty-one in an auto accident.

Unpublished Poems

When I Came to Israel I saw my daughter when I came to Israel. She sat between its wars by a soldier on a hill. Stones and olive trees and the bright air all around ... So many stones! like stars painted yellow and brown. Suddenly, my son appeared, carrying on his back the soft horizon like a huge, blue knapsack. He strode from a ﬁeld and lifted me, the way a young cliff lifts the gray haired sea.

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My little father, he said, at last you’re here. The ﬁelds, the orchards, everything seemed so clear. Then my daughter ran down down the hillside, excited like a stream. She called me; and I cried. But my wife was like a dove in the wailing wall. She lit the moon. Snow began to fall. And she laid the snow, as if at home again, proudly, under the lights of Jerusalem. 1978

Unpublished Poems

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Haiku—Various

*** I can only laugh when my daughter spreads her arms to catch the cold wind 9/23/60 *** So many men, tools and weeks to pave an alley. I hear the heavy dust. 9/23/60 *** Not too far from here as the bird of wisdom ﬂies, men mean what they say. 9/23/60 *** when the baby calls the older children also pretend they’re busy 9/5/60 ***

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the baby puts out her arms, when a sudden wind stops to wipe her face 9/5/60 *** when my daughter cries I wonder what’s become of all my childhood friends. 9/5/60 *** I’d like to remind you, you tired old window you— a full moon tonight! 9/6/60 *** The father also smiles as he puts his ﬁnger in the baby’s mouth 12/5/60 ***

Unpublished Poems

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all night long crickets break their bottles in the dark; men also seem to sing. 12/5/60 *** A new poem from an old friend when I came home. The rain almost stopped. 12/24/60 *** It makes me angry— in vacant lots sunﬂowers grow taller than men. 9/62

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Untitled—or, “To Be a Poet” I turned to poetry the way a man turns to a woman, in order to live; the way an animal moans or a bird sings, to relieve myself of pain and joy. Words, to me, are sonorous nipples— each one a lozenge full of memories under the tongue, a liquid in the throat. I found Whitman and believed a poet should express his country; Rilke, and pitied my middle-class self for a while; Blake and saw politics in every line; Issa and wished to be so compassionate and humble. Emily Dickinson taught me to rely on metaphor; Yeats showed me the value of music in a time of portentous prose. Ten years as a picture framer and gilder convinced me that even poems should be beautifully made. I’ve known waitresses and janitors from whom great images ﬂowed like trafﬁc on a freeway. I prefer fairy tales to most literature and I believe that the last stanza of “Mary had a little lamb” is more profound than The Cantos or The Waste Land.

Unpublished Poems

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Untitled A little glass, sturdy, plain, 2/3 full of white wax the color of bed sheets, brides, bandages or shrouds . . . the ﬂame writhes from side to side frantically, sadly . . . the color of the sun at dusk sun through the smog . . . it makes a large black replica of its ideal self on the inside of the glass . . . a charred silhouette shaped like a leaf, now and then one sees the ﬂame through this black smudge, like looking through a window of a burnt house . . . the melted wax slowly rises and drowns the wick . . .

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Unpublished Songs

Life Is a God Life is a god with many arms that dances on the ruins It plays a ﬂute and butterﬂies and children are its tunes The miseries that role their boulders over us the broken bodies and the love that turn to bitter dust are painted dreams it juggles the somber worlds are bubbles But the butterﬂies and children are the dancer’s favorite tunes

Unpublished Songs

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You and I You and I will live like tourists in our neighborhood and sail the moon each night across our bed We’ll have the hills at breakfast fresh from the sun’s bright oven for our bread We’ll be poor but very rich and let the living live and pity the living dead Do you see that tree it’s a big green glass the year breaks gradually Winter sweeps the pieces up Do you see that picket fence a row of white piano keys Do you hear the sunlight’s dance The store-fronts are paintings and the streets are galleries

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We’ll be two ﬂowers in the air without a stem a copper gong in space struck by a laughing mandarin And we won’t work and we won’t bitch and we won’t join the common war We’ll stroll around instead We’ll be poor but very rich and let the living live and pity the living dead

Unpublished Songs

I Saw a Poor Young Woman I saw a poor young woman against a drugstore wall foaming at the mouth about to fall A crowd began to shout they laughed they called her dirty names then kicked her when she fell She was a beautiful but ugly sight just like the city night Blood oozed from her mouth like jam from a broken jar Someone said she was drunk Someone said she’s a whore I thought she was a fallen star run over by the street So I bent down to calm her twitching feet and wipe away the blood the spit as thick as glue

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And I took her by the hand the hardest thing to do past everyone who jeered to a lousy room which was her home and left her there alone until that time when the moon sinks like a magic stone in the suburban slime and you just have to bear the burden of a conscious mind

Unpublished Songs

Once in Los Angeles I woke up one morning looked out the window and saw tomorrow in the street today All the people were there They had a lot to say they talked and danced and sang for hours the ofﬁce buildings swayed like ﬂowers the freeways rose and went another way towards paradise across the sea into the sky where the red balloon is president and ideals never die Then I heard the sirens and saw the cops come down on every woman man and child in that enlightened town But suddenly a shining saucer stopped over City Hall

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Angels walked upon the air stretched out their rainbow hands and stopped that massacre The cops and cars just disappeared people seemed to ﬂoat and ﬂy around and there was paradise near First and Spring The angels left without a sound

Unpublished Songs

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I Drive an Old Dodge I drive an old Dodge and I lead a dumb life I’m going up to Frisco to live with my wife Get along little car get along and fast if you don’t get there soon you’ll run out of gas I’ve marched in the street I’ve worked in the shops spent time in the jail was beaten by cops Get along little car get along and fast I want a quiet life before that ﬁnal blast I tried the revolution and I even tried school now all I can say is I was a damn fool Get along little car get along and fast if I don’t get there soon my desire won’t last

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The people I knew have all gotten rich while I’m still wearing jeans and digging my ditch Get along little car get along and fast I’m as ﬂat as a ﬂag taken down from the mast Now I’ll fold my visions and pack them in a box they were just some rain that fell on a great big pile of rocks Get along little car get along and fast my head’s in the present but my heart’s in the past

Unpublished Songs

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College Town Blues Switzerland’s O.K. you know pretty lakes and lots of snow but the people all have clocks for hearts and cheese for faces the mountains look like tooth decay I’d rather be in Paris the sunlight’s made of wine clouds go by like baby carriages who cares about the time the boulevards shine like stars at night you’re in the sky But I’m still here in a college town suburban armpit U.S.A. the smog just oozes over from L.A. in a place called Maria’s where the coffee’s boiled diarrhea and the people all look the same

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Campbell’s soups in different sizes everybody smiles even the dirt apologizes it’s neat and clean But late at night the gentle wind leaps like a rapist from a bush the walls of ivy creak and all the Ph.D.s stare at their TVs gossip drink play cards but never never scream

Unpublished Songs

The Mind That Kills The mind that kills from year to year the simple things we used to do killed whales and buffalo Indians and Eskimo And where are all the houses the vacant lots I knew The hand that kills from day to day likes speed and parking lots and burns the sky It builds on every block a fancy graveyard plot a condominium called Town and Country A world where aerials grow instead of trees from plaster cells programmed with TVs No love no childhood nothing’s really true But where are all the houses the vacant lots I knew

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Now’s the only time Inhale the present There’s no place to run to throw a ball or dream Drive go buy a gun and hear the sirens scream for you for you so cold and blue and far away

Unpublished Songs

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Before the Storm I’m tired of all the evil work the banks the wars those frightened chains upon the doors I want to walk around and wear the sunlight like a shirt Oh women water the friendly trees children birds I’m tired of all the evil work The years are raindrops in an angel’s burning hair voices call us from a place that isn’t there I’ll say hello to people I don’t know I’ll be an eye in solitude’s green wall and watch the mighty rise and fall I’m so tired of all the evil work the banks the wars those frightened chains upon the doors

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Oh women water the friendly trees children birds I’m tired of all the evil work I’ll just walk around to ﬁnd the voice I heard until they hang the moon in a tyrant’s living room and turn the sea to plastic I know I know dust to dust ashes to ashes but this earth’s fantastic Until the storm I’ll wear the sunlight like a shirt

Unpublished Songs

Atlantis Come hold my hand hold my hand the afternoon that burned to ashes in the clouds was the world as it passes doomsday in the sky we’re growing old we’re going to die it’s raining now I don’t know why nobody knows if night will end in day Come hold my hand and drown with me We’ll be two windows at the bottom of the sea two different dreams that are the same two characters they call insane

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But we’ll be waves we’ll be ripples in the temples of Atlantis while the nations war like planets in a fantasy Come drown with me Come drown with me escape the madness and ripple through while the nations war like planets in a fantasy

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Photo by Elliott Erwitt, Magnum

SELECTED PROSE

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Journal—Spring 1969 On Sabbatical leave from Pitzer College and traveling with his wife and children in Europe. Note: Bracketed material indicates marginalia or emendations of the author.

[Leaving _____ a landscape . . . burn banana skins] thick, and wet like gesso . . . thin brown roads straggling like shoelaces down from the woods . . . no animals anywhere, perhaps they’re underground . . . an occasional hawk in the air . . . villages like a few broken boxes dumped on the earth . . . now & then a little graveyard, the stones are doors where nobody lives . . . dead cars, tractors, everywhere, nothing’s repaired; things are used, worn-out, discarded . . . snow falling on small hills and forests in Kansas, a banana colored light in the air . . .

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[The kegs of feed left in the ﬁelds during winter, a shipwreck . . . ] detergent, like ﬂocks of shapeless [nuclear birds/babies] birds, on the Mississippi . . . In the dining car, the “silverware” sings at the empty tables . . . The waiter, one of those tall black men with long legs, short torso, protruding muscular rump, pants too short, wearing a little apron, large but delicate hands, curly gray hair ﬂuffed out at the back of the neck and a lower lip that sticks out expressing, in an old fashioned way, a sense of good taste and the dignity of his position ~ like a whiskey ad . . . New York lit up at night, the buildings shine like gigantic switchboards, transistor radios, IBM systems, the rooftops covered with moving air conditioning vents look like tape recorders, the sky’s black as bakelite and the half moon tilted like a porcelain coffee cup . . . during the day automobiles & cabs move like neat fragments of light through a million wires, people pass like impulses . . . When the snow dries in the park some of it remains in patches on the ground, like a ﬂock of sheep on the animal colored [fawney] grass . . . the bare trees look like bundles of wire, a landscape of nerves . . . Bill Cole’s too suave; James Wright’s too insecure, in spite of all his talent & knowledge. I think Olga Carlisle’s a typical Russian emigrée, capitalizing on her authenticity and her so-called love of freedom . . . The sick man, huge, wearing a black coat, hunched on the deck chair, like a lump of coal in a dish of brown rice . . .

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The librarian’s a suspicious little man. If he feels someone’s watching him, he looks back without turning his head, like a rabbit moving its large eyeball . . . an intellectual, unlike the other crew members who look people straight in the face . . . The boat always seems to be in the middle of an immense, grey, restless circle; it’s all grey, even the sky, except for moments of foam and a few white clouds . . . the sea’s color isn’t really grey, or blue, it’s more like a surgeon’s rubber glove, a thin metallic kind of synthetic substance glistening, the waves foaming like soap on its surface . . . The ﬁrst day I went on deck the light was so clear I could hardly see . . . no smog, no buildings, nothing but sunlight, water, air, a blue sky full of small clouds . . . Did Hesse get his idea for the magic theater in Steppenwolf from the optical shows at the beginning of Mann’s Magic Mt.? The ocean’s slate colored, otherwise it looks like a giant, agitated quartz . . . A very strange couple, two men, one a gigantic, grey-haired, petulant faced German who slouches about in a suit the color of iron ﬁlings, with long underwear showing below his trouser cuffs when he sits down—the other a black man, also middle aged, who waddles slightly, smokes a cheap pipe, wears wire rimmed glasses and talks very loudly about his knowledge of foreign languages and pipe tobacco—they are photo retouchers and live in Maine where they have a business in their own home . . . the black man claims to have studied music in his youth, “not jazz, but real music—” the German doesn’t respond to children . . .

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wife of chemistry teacher, an absolute bitch—self-centered, proprietress of her little enterprise called family . . . Vulgar couple—he must be an AC/DC gigolo; she, dressed like an ancient greek gladiator must be the despised daughter of a rich alcoholic suicide . . . ____________________________ [this line cut off on Xerox] believe being here. It’s as if the landscape were a gigantic postcard standing in the ocean, something in my mind. My sense of time has dissolved. The people are short, moody looking; in the ﬁshing village the children beg, green snot running from their noses, sores on their legs. One boy has an ear lobe that looks like a moldy lemon peel. Another, a bright little boy, speaks four languages, asking for money to buy food in each. The brooms are bundles of straw tied to branches. The street cleaner walks along, sweeping peanut shells & cigarette butts into a little dust pan. The store-keeper has black curly hair, wears glasses . . . the shop has a low roof,* [* hundreds of chamber pots hang like swollen breasts from the rafters] chickens cheep behind a crib full of bananas. There are little boxes of baking soda, no bigger than cigarette packs . . . people are too poor to buy things in larger quantities. The streets are paved with pebbles from the beaches which are arranged in patterns, the pebbles are dark, bluish grey, shaped like almonds and smooth . . . There are many dwarfs and small hunchbacks among the workers . . . The people here cultivate the land in a series of terraces that extend from the shore to the top of the island, nearly 6–700 above sea level. The place is rich, green, full of waterfalls and ﬂowing

Selected Prose

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streams. The houses are painted with great taste and a love of color ~ yellow, shades of blue, orange, and white. Many homes have a square tile depicting Christ or the Virgin over the front door. All kinds of ﬂowers grow everywhere. People build right into the hillsides; they dry their clothing on the tile roofs of their homes; they walk in the ﬁelds & along the roads carrying small sickles, wearing gunny sacks over their heads . . . Funchal is clean, neat, probably because of the tourist trade . . . I saw oxen for the ﬁrst time in my life . . . Yes, they are sad animals, so huge and yet so docile . . . poor little narrow streets where people can hardly walk anymore because of the cars & buses . . . We saw the Coast of North Africa, then Gibraltar. A huge rock, its silhouette like a pregnant woman . . . At night it looks like an ant hill of lights ﬂickering in the sea . . . The tall, attractive woman, reddish brown hair, white suit, high heels . . . always smiling, as if convinced that everyone’s looking at her, so she’s in a constant state of courteous response . . . The young, fat little man from Naples . . . visiting his family . . . he’s been working as an automobile designer in Canada. He changes his clothes every hour and acts benevolent, like a good boy who’s made his fortune . . . I’m sure he has a terrible temper ... Amalﬁ drive, fantastic view, frightening but absolutely no way back . . . God praise the driver’s dour skill . . . Pompeii’s a bore when seen with a guide among a crowd of tourists . . . One should walk alone through the place on a sunny day . . . but I’ve seen Vesuvius!

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Naples is noisy, full of cards, and, like all cities, thousands of shops . . . but we had a pleasant time sitting in the galleria Umberto . . . Except for the orange groves and the short, powerful looking people working in them, I don’t like what I’ve seen of Italy . . . it’s cheap, gaudy, full of noise . . . the young women have thin, rickety legs . . . The boat has ﬁnally anchored in Cannes . . . Here the Mediterranean is really blue, like stained glass . . . France is beautiful! In Italy, the countryside was ancient, the buildings were falling apart, some without roofs or missing a wall, the stone was leprous . . . but everything looked like a city dump . . . here, in Provence, the air is a transparent gold, like the music from a harp . . . everything is old, but neat . . . France is beautiful, like thousands of antique shops surrounded by ﬁelds and rivers . . . radiant like an old harp with a young girl’s voice . . . the air is like a new harp, with blue strings and a green voice . . . Here, in Edmond’s yard, the birds sing and hop around like Italian businessmen hurrying through the Park . . . We have fresh milk every morning from the farm next door . . .

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Today we saw the _______ . . . they have the same mild eyes as their mothers . . . The cows are kept in the barn until the weather gets warm . . . The smell of wine, mixed with hay and shit is almost staggering at ﬁrst; then, it becomes bearable and ﬁnally ~ though it’s extremely hot and sour ~ almost sweet . . . The rooster’s arrogant, a bundle of sheer impulse surrounded by feathers and two dark eyes staring out of its rufﬂing arrogant rust ... The rabbits are fat, their grey sides always shivering, soft as felt; their noses move like separate creatures trying to scurry into a hole . . . their sides twitch like nervous lead . . . here, we have food from all over Europe ~ oranges from Spain, Israel, and Algeria, etc ~ In America such things would be very expensive and exotic, but here they come next door and are taken for granted . . . We saw Domont’s old church, a monument from the 12th Century . . . a hideous, cold, grey place with a clumsy vaulted interior, cheap little wooden chairs, the kind that fold and belong with card tables in a welfare institution . . . A Christ as smooth as soap hanging from a small cross on one wall, the virgin, a bland little creature in a faded blue robe gesturing from a niche . . . A few old women sitting quietly near the altar, some candles burning, little wax lampposts in a corner . . . Outside, the walls look like rotten cheese . . . Daniel says the ocean sometimes looks like a wrinkled tablecloth . . . I’d say it looks like a huge grey silk cloth on a table of restless wind . . .

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I gave a reading at the University of Aix—not much feeling for the poems anymore—I sounded like a cello reciting phone numbers ... We live on the rue du Faubourg St. Antoine, in an artist’s apt, a tiny, cold, disorganized place on the second ﬂoor in a courtyard that must be close to a hundred years old . . . Algerian Jewish children play hopscotch all day in the courtyard, complacent little creatures who seem to love rules more than mystery . . . There’s a cabinet-maker’s shop at the rear of the courtyard . . . men in blue smocks begin working at 8 AM, the saws hum like gigantic bees in a meadow of sawdust . . . now & then the men come out, smoke, talk, load a wagon that looks older than California and disappear through a passage in the building . . . They must have large power saws in the cabinet & ﬁxture shop— when they shut off a saw it sounds like an ambulance coming to a stop . . . Perhaps the artist who never gets recognition always dresses like a young man ~ wearing sport shirt, baggy sweater, work pants, a corduroy jacket and moccasin style shoes ~ to maintain the hope he had when young of maturing and being great someday ~ also, because he feels like a boy when he compares himself to the men whose work he admires ~ perhaps it’s also poverty, or the need to look “artistic” ~ Perhaps there’s a relationship between the collages of Schwitters, or the work of many European non-objective painters, and the walls of old buildings here . . . the walls are mottled with various shades of white, black, green, and brown . . . their texture seems applied with a putty knife . . . they’re full of cracks . . . the window sash and shutters look like the skeletons of little boats that

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have been dredged up from the sea . . . the buildings in richer neighborhoods have slanted roofs made of slate tile that look like huge charcoal-colored ﬁsh ﬂoating in the radiant air . . . We saw the Jardin de Luxembourg ~ green, a bluish grey sky overhead, like 18C French painting . . . The French are ruled by geometry ~ even the wild part of the garden was restrained ~ I didn’t see Rilke’s Carousel . . . I saw Villon on the Place de la Sorbonne. We were sitting in a café, when a little man about thirty years old walked by. He was slightly bow-legged, had delicate but strong hands, wore grey corduroy pants, a blue wool sport jacket, turtle neck sweater . . . his hair was cut around his head like a medieval priest’s; he was almost ugly except for his large, shrewd, intelligent dark eyes and the dignity of a real individual which appeared obvious from the way he walked ~ he rolled slightly, almost like a sailor and his lips were ﬁrm though full ~ he seemed arrogant, gay yet serious, small but tough . . . At dusk the sky, full of clouds and chimney smoke, becomes a soft grey ~ it looks as if the slate roofs were slowly melting away in the air, becoming doves . . . An old man, tall, wearing a huge blue overcoat which, dampened & frizzled by the rain, looked like steel wool ~ he stands below in the courtyard and sings a monotonous melancholy song ~ no one looks from the windows, no one throws any money down, and he goes away . . .

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Black music: 1) the body stripped of illusions, the unashamed yet intelligent voice of desire 2) One speaking for many Western music: 1) the desire to be rid of the body while the body yearns for self-expression 2) many becoming one man arrested ~ a ragged yet intense fellow, growing bald perhaps from illness, poverty, insists on going back in a café after being thrown out because of an argument, short stocky plainclothesman in blue raincoat yanks him back and with the aid of another cop handcuffs the fellow, the fellow kicks the cop in the leg, people gather, police call for a wagon . . . prostitutes on the Place de la Republique ~ one greets another: Alors! T’as éteé baisée? An old woman wearing a long grey ragged coat and a dirty apron, her leg skinny as twigs, a toothless mouth, dancing like the granddaughter of death with a proud young worker in the street . . . Railroad station at St. Denis ~ looking at the wheels of a train which keeps going back and forth along one track . . . few simple forms modiﬁed and intelligently assembled become something complex ~ the parts of a machine, the human body, etc ~ so much can be done with a circle, a line, a square . . . The children saw a gypsy washing her feet in the gutter after the rain . . .

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The little birch in Edmond’s yard ~ I must see if it’s shed its bandages now that it’s spring, or if it’s become all white . . . The sky’s as blue as Frenchman’s smock, the trees in the square have silhouettes shaped like a technical illustration of the heart, they glow like a cathedral’s windows . . . So many delicate fresh light green leaves, no wonder the French naïf painters are so precise when painting a tree . . . Perhaps the non-objective painter wants his work to be admired for its beauty, the way it equals those acts of nature that seem to express emotion in purely spontaneous designs . . . He resents the pleasure people show at seeing his early representational work because he feels they’re really moved by the subject, not by him . . . But the non-objective painting is also an object that represents a subject, which is the artist—but only the artist, because only the artist knows what his materials mean to him . . . Here one can sit for hours at a sidewalk café, drink one glass of beer, wine, coffee, hot chocolat or tea, and not be bothered by anything but the noise of trafﬁc or a sudden shower . . . and one can do this on any block in Paris . . . The classic French woman has ﬁrm features with a full, open forehead, a frank appearance with a calm, practical kind of affection and gentleness, unlike Italian women, who conduct an opera when they speak, French women combine the precision of chamber music with the joy of a song in their gestures . . . The French like to eat & drink, but sensibly . . . they drink small cups of coffee, one of which is enough for the occasion, they often water their wine . . . but they love sugar and treat

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themselves to sweets everyday . . . When they are babies they lie placidly bundled up in chrome-plated dark blue buggies, staring at the air above them; and, as adults, they can sit for hours at a café, sipping one glass of beer while staring through the passersby, dreaming, waiting . . . The fascist youth are __________ by the respect they receive for being ordinary . . . this they have in common with the average leftist . . . But while the leftist wants to destroy present authority and replace it with something which seems more humane, the fascist wants to strengthen & preserve existing law and order . . . the fascist youth yearns for the gov’t to be his father and the policeman his uncle so he can freely express his anger at being unimportant by attacking those he suspects of being better than himself . . . He knows the artist, the saint, the Jew, the now articulate Negro, black, the young women, even children, are all his superiors in some subtle, undeﬁnable way . . . the way, after all, has something to do with intelligence and morality, the right to condemn society as it is March 1969 Work experience since 18: picture framing

10 yrs

housepainting

2 yrs

ditchdigging

1/2 yr

janitor

1 1/2 yr

warehouseman

3 yrs

College teacher

2 yrs

Printing

1 yr

sheet metal worker

1/2 yr

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A Bestiary at the Jardin des Plantes—Paris The camel has melancholy sensual eyes and curly hair . . . a fallen aristocrat chewing his apathy with pleasure . . . The Elephant is a landscape of fog in which one wrinkled boulder moves, trying to talk . . . The wooly sheep whose horns look like a kerchief tied upside down . . . she’s overweight and panting in the heat, her whole body’s a big, heavy heart . . . The stork paces like a philosopher or the wandering Jew . . . The ostrich is a mad woman dressed in her grandmother’s clothes . . . The little mountain goats lick each other’s foreheads . . . The yak is an abandoned truck . . . The Vultures scowl like retired generals . . . The eagle is a mad believer in the beauty of death . . . The doves in the trees are the voices of people who have turned to smoke . . . The bison palpitate . . . I know them, the way their beautiful brown hair rots in patches, my country falling apart . . . but the young ones have brighter eyes than their mothers do . . . the old bison withdraw like a mountain chain disappearing into a small iron door . . .

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The antelope browsing in the grass are four legged sparrows . . . The tiger strides from one end of the cage to other, right up to the walls, and never looks at anything . . . The male baboon, one has a face like a sportscar, the other who looks like a prehistoric priest has a rump that resembles a festival on Jupiter or an impressionist’s palette . . . they both have heavy brows and dark angry eyes that glare like burnt-out headlights . . . The spider when struck becomes a skeleton’s ﬁst . . . Black man in metro tunnel, nervous, walking near the wall and striking it with his ﬁst ~ he must be American! Dobzinsky has a marvelous library of poetry ~ he shows me the work of a great Romanian, a Czech whose poems are better, he says, than Holub’s, an Hungarian, poets I’ve never heard of . . . We live all alone in America, receiving mail now & then from the rest of the world ~ Young Americans playing their folk songs on the steps of the Sacre Coeur . . . long hair, leather jackets, a banjo and a guitar . . . the French people look at them and pass by . . . a gendarme politely tells them to be quiet ~ Four people on a bench in a little park near the Gard du Nord . . . something out of Villon’s world . . . two women, one huge and sprawling, showing her panties and powerful thighs, her breasts are immense and sagging, almost toothless . . . her ankles embrace a tree trunk while her lover, a tough guy, tattooed and muscular, kisses her neck . . . she looks at the sky and laughs . . .

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the other two are thin, almost boney, dressed in black, shabby, red-eyed, _______ and muttering to themselves ~ Then, they were quiet, almost asleep, and he spread over her like the darkness outside that rests upon the street when all the cars are gone and lights shine here and there like memories . . . We met an American woman in the house ~ blonde, pale, clear complexion, slender and attractive ~ yet she had that shrill, tense voice, like a banjo string about to snap, a suppressed hysteria that Frenchmen have described when talking about American women ~ she’s a chemist for some big business in Rhode Island, in Europe for the ﬁrst time in her life ~ very excited, happy . . . she loves France, Switzerland even more ~ She works very hard as a chemist (only has a B.S.) and would like to teach, but doesn’t want to go back to being a student ~ It was pleasant talking to her while we ate lunch ~ Palermo, Sicily ~ ancient, _____ streets, then long thoroughfares where gigantic housing projects made of poured concrete that’s already beginning to crack rise twenty stories in the warm, faded air . . . below them, hovels blossom near the curbs, tiny houses made of rock, abandoned sheet metal, old boards, ﬂowers ﬂourishing all around them . . . so many shops, cars, so much dust and noise . . . In the old buildings near the ancient part of the town one sees pale, dark eyed, black haired girls wearing black dresses leaning on their windowsills, gazing at the street . . .

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A group of little boys comes down a hill with a priest all in black behind them . . . tonight, we watched Sicilians boarding the ship ~ old men & women, young people, children, kissed each other goodbye ~ they kept waving, whistling, calling out to each other long after they were on deck ~ it grew dark and as the boat began to sail away from the pier people on shore lit matches and moved toward the water’s edge, holding the little ﬂames until they went out ~ those on the boat continued calling, waving, until the boat was out at sea . . . Old friends have become clichés. A lives in an abandoned store, has grown a beard and begun to paint immense non-objective things . . . he has a black poodle and drives a classic MG . . . the vocabulary of Zen provides him with consolation for the discrepancy between his daily life and his youthful ideals . . . he works 40 hrs. a week for a pornographic magazine and visits his children twice a month . . . his son, a tall, slender, shy, gentle, sixteen year old has talent as a musician . . . A begs him to play the violin and while he does, obediently, A looks out the window as if he were listening critically, but one can see the struggle in his neck as he tries not to gaze with pain and pleasure at the boy . . . A has stomach ulcers and a slipped disc . . . he smokes Sano pipe tobacco, not to irritate his ulcers with nicotine, and every twenty minutes he squats to stretch his spine . . . he wears an iron medallion on a leather thong around his neck and mod clothing, colors that match his dark complexion and black hair . . . he walks with a slight stoop, as if his waist were frozen . . . He believes that LSD helps one achieve illumination, “quickly,” he says with enthusiasm. “Not like Buddha had to do it.”

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G also uses drugs, but he prefers marijuana because it takes his troubled mind by the hand, like an invisible girl, and leads him into the quiet cave of himself . . . he’s become almost obese, smokes a pipe or a cigar constantly, takes off his shoes which reveals his twisted toes and lies back like an intelligent walrus on the sofa to doze . . . G recently got into trouble with the authorities where he teaches for reading Lenore Kandel’s Love poems in public . . . now, his troubles are digniﬁed because they are the result of external circumstances, the establishment, etc . . . He moves about like Orson Wells, talking loudly, almost shouting, lecturing, angrily expressing his opinions on poetry, Zen, the failure of socialism and all idealistic causes . . . he has high blood pressure, heart murmurs, and weak circulation that makes his hands occasionally numb . . . his appearance, unlike A, is disorderly, but his likes & dislikes, his personal style, are more or less correct for the times . . . ___ has left his wife and children . . . he’s bought property near the beach and hopes to make enough proﬁt to supplement his income, he has so many debts and responsibilities now that he’s left his family . . . he lives chaotically, taking drugs, going to wild rock parties where he dances like a teenager for hours . . . he’s found that he prefers boys to women, probably because he was a virgin who married an older woman and now young men restore his adolescence; lately, he’s decided to become a professional model, which he’s been told he’ll do well at because of his height and grey hair . . . He works with great care at his scholarship, while doing everything he can to advance his literary career, by traveling all over the country ~ and even Europe ~ to meet writers, acquire contacts, and arrange for readings of his work . . . he dresses like a boy of 30 yrs ago, wearing jeans, sandals, a sport shirt with the sleeves rolled up . . . Often, he has sores around

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his mouth and looks exhausted, yet at other times he shows up with suntan, bearing himself like a steel worker’s vigorous son who’s ready to conquer the world of letters and neon-lights . . . he insists on being exactly as he pleases and, for that reason, may never live at all, in spite of his enormous energy, intelligence, and terrifying honesty . . . he too, like A & G, is desperate to be young . . . Whitman is an American male transcendental Mme. Bovary, a voyeur into the unconscious life of America ~ Why do we love him so? Because he gloriﬁes our materialism and justiﬁes our imperialism and because he tells us everything will be alright. If I were capable of making a ﬁlm I’d do a companion to Brecht’s “Little Old Lady” ~ it would be about my father, an old man conﬁned to a convalescent home, imprisoned, forced to live among strangers, his memories and all the sources of his life going out one by one like streetlights in his brain, the world fading like a family album before his eyes . . . Then, one day in summer, his son comes and takes him out and brings him to a little, rambling, old fashioned village, no bigger than a city block . . . and there are all his friends and fellow workers, all the people he has loved and been happy with, and even himself as a child, a boy, a young and hopeful man . . . everyone greets him, even the dogs, the sun is shining, Sullivan County 50 yrs ago can be seen in the distance . . . he laughs, he cries, he shakes everybody’s hand, he smiles again the way he did before his mouth froze like an empty ditch in his thin, old face . . . The little station ringing its bells a mile away, a few sheep ﬂoating home at midnight . . . ﬂoating over the town at night The spider who lives in the rosebush becomes a bud, then whitens and dies, like my mother . . .

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Pencil Shavings: a beggar’s crown, a birthday cap for fairies, the wings of a butterﬂy who was born in a mound of sawdust. My father looks like a walking scab, a staggering bib covered with slobber, breakfast, lunch . . . his hand shakes like a spastic counting money, like a mad old spider stumbling in its web . . . Mozart ~ an angel enjoying his impeccably orchestrated melodious bones . . . Ginestier concentrates on how poets relate to machinery through mythology. This only shows how clever Ginestier is and how poets have failed to deal with machines directly. To hell with reality. I prefer, when I walk through a door, to believe I’ve walked through a wall . . . Your cities crystallize they expand —saliva in the mouth of darkness consuming themselves Hide, the stars are bacteria Girls laugh dogs bark the cars scream, strangled by curves . . . birds those books that open in the air and close their pages in a tree awake and go mad— chewing the bones of their old songs. Flies rush, glittering, ________ everywhere.

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Towns, little galaxies in the hills the stars, little towns in the sky the railroad tracks a ladder leading to the towns the stars at dawn they disappear like dew twilight shatters the mirror of day where we see ourselves in the others the broken glass of our day shines on everywhere in the dark The desert lies below like a huge leaf dry river beds are its veins a city’s little lights, all arranged in patterns, rows, like a circuit box . . . I believe black people are often considered more beautiful than white people because they can be seen better, especially during the day time or whenever the light shines on them . . . but white people have their own peculiar beauty when they come, suddenly, out of the dark, like the moon, a streetlight, ghosts . . . One could make something of this purely visual fact. A black woman once told her grandson that God made white people that way so they could be caught when stealing from others at night . . . I suppose a white person would say the reverse is true, blaming it on Satan . . . Still, the music of black people lacks what I would call soul. It has the vigor of physical and social reality and is, therefore, superior in some ways to western classical music, as the best folk music

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often is. Yet I, personally, feel the older I get that I want something ~ I don’t know what ~ more satisfying than an expression of humanity at its most ordinary moments. An interesting aspect of _________ poetic revolutions is the paradox that lies in their reliance on prose to set them free of the past while, at the same time, they seem to be rebelling against the rational character of prose. Longfellow’s poetry, for example, wasn’t really inﬂuenced by his work in translation, because he knew the languages from which he did most of his translating and believed in making a strict English equivalent of the original ~ Whitman, on the other hand, was inﬂuenced not only by Emerson’s prose style but also by the bible, and works of eastern religion, which were translated in a semi-ecstatic prose . . . today, also, American poets are being inﬂuenced by poetry in translation. But the translations are prose by comparison with the originals . . . therefore, the poets can concentrate on only one aspect of poetry, the metaphor—or, as in the case of the projective verse poets, they try to create imaginative effects by typographical emotion . . . Just as critics and cultured people select the literature that will continue to be read, the common people select the songs they will continue to sing . . . the difference is that the ﬁrst group makes its choice according to standards that seem more complex than the latter’s; while the latter, if the truth were really told, decides entirely according to its sense of reality and pleasure . . . Why do the critics insist on trying to understand Marvell’s death of Faun through religion & philosophy? Isn’t it because the text of the poem doesn’t supply them with sufﬁcient knowledge of the occasion ~ or reason ~ for which it was written? Do his satires

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arouse such speculation, once one is familiar with their historical background? Perhaps, if one were to place M’s lyric poems within another a context other than the usual intellectual, a context such as Appleton house, one could speculate more less imaginatively & more sympathetically with concerning the origin of their composition. Poems are not the result of a logical reaction to life; nor are they prose that rhymes. Writing of this sort is only read by scholars and students, not by people seeking for a recreation of that expressi experience . . . Poetry & Prose ~ esp. the novel ~ differ from each other in one essential way ~ the novel forces you to live someone else’s life as if it were your own; while the lyric poem allows you to re-live with great intensity the essence, not the events, of your own life. I ﬂoat alone in my car powerful at peace the day a shattered mirror lies like the galaxy below, as I descend from a hill . . . Now only the mind, that _______ computer exists . . . Irony: a defensive gesture which suggests deep feeling but actually conceals an ambivalence, a lack of compassion, perhaps even hatred . . . People believed the story teller because of his dramatic narrative skill ~ he aroused their imagination ~ now, because of TV & movies, people prefer to see a story and let the form do all the work. What will become of people?

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The apples of France are small and wrinkled like little grandmothers But bite into one The apples of America are huge they shine like movie stars like plastic bite one and taste America and birds those books thumbed by the wind And the television set Ganglia dangling its picture tube on the ﬂoor resembles a man who has lost his head I carried her an armful of loose twigs wrapped in yellow dress / like sunlight her long blond hair like a breeze full of sparks from the wrong wire her eyes were wet leaves like the eyes of animals she couldn’t talk The desire to be TV images, not human beings limited by their bodies, gravity, time, etc ~ free, full of endless power & sensations

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~ to be miraculous objects in an electronic paradise, conscious currents of delighted energy [conscious currents delighted by gratiﬁed energy] ~ We have replaced heaven and all our myths with the world of TV images . . . B. Singer & P. Roth appeal to Jews because they portray the Jewish people as being ordinary human beings, not the chosen people one ﬁnds in Rabbi Nachman, Peretz, or Sholem Aleichem, or even Agnon. So, if the Jews have really become Gentiles, then why exterminate them? Such writers are part of the trend toward assimilation, which is inspired by physical fear and spiritual fatigue. Sometimes I think that a longing for the ineffable ~ all the delicate rhetoric and exquisite gesturing that accompany as revelation of desire for the radiance hidden behind the garish wall of daily life ~ is really a gloriﬁcation of moral weakness and an unconscious expression of shame for one’s concealed lust The paintbrush has a vaginal voice I feel its thirst the spring in its bristle an angel enjoying its bones Poetry gives pleasure, but the pleasure it gives isn’t merely aesthetic. The method is aesthetic, but the real pleasure lies in the truth which the poetry expresses. Therefore, the ultimate pleasure of poetry is moral, not entertaining, and is not to be confused with its method.

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The mystery which always intrigues man is his bestial origin, how he would behave if liberated from social restraint. the two principal forms of fascination this takes with the average mind are sex and murder. The superior mind, however, concerns itself with the miracle of how life could produce in each generation a few people capable of trying to be human. I love a style that’s like a razor blade rippling at the edge A Candidate’s Spleen The English Professor Speaks to the Doctoral Candidate I heard a haughty critic crow, if only you knew what I know. He raised an academic quill: read Murray Krieger and then you will. Baudelaire despises the fad / or long poems & praises the short poem. He criticizes the use of drugs, saying they are of no help to either the businessman or the Artist.

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Bert Meyers’s Words on Poetry (contains two paragraphs of “Bert on Poetry”) My favorite poets are Issa, Blake, Baudelaire, and Emily Dickinson; but I prefer folk songs and fairy tales to literature. I worked for more than ﬁfteen years at various kinds of manual labor and during that time I met many men and women who could see and speak as poetically as those who are gloriﬁed by the printing press and the universities. I don’t argue anymore about taste. I have my own standards, which I feel are right. Yet I’m sure they’ll change, as they have in the past. But who knows what poetry is? I think we do, when we see it, with the same instinct as when we spot a beautiful face in the street, no matter what country we’re in. Now, I’d say poetry’s the right combination of music, rhythm, beauty, ambiguity and truth in words; and that great poetry is something people can read or listen to for hundreds of years, because it tells them how it feels to be alive in a way they never grow tired of. To me, the most profound lines of poetry are from the nursery rhyme Why does the lamb love Mary so? Mary loves the lamb, you know. ***

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(Bert on poetry ________ & translation) I worked for more than ﬁfteen years at various kinds of manual labor and during that time I met many men and women who could see and speak poetically as those who are gloriﬁed by the printing press and the university. I don’t argue any more about taste. I think the most important inﬂuence on recent American poetry has been the model provided by foreign poetry in translation. Since imagery is the only aspect of poetry that can be translated, a kind of prose poem—or prosm, as Ponge called it—has been the logical result. One difference between poetry and prose used to be that in poetry the right hand margin was never arbitrary. The prose poem was invented by French poets who wished to be free of this convention at times, because traditional forms couldn’t wouldn’t yield to the pressure of what they had to say. Yet, if one reads the prose poems of Bertrand, Baudelaire, or Rimbaud in the original, one sees that this form is no more arbitrary than the traditional poem. Many people in America are writing what looks like poetry. They imitate the appearance rely learn from translations usually made by people who can’t read the originals; so, we have a body of work a literature something that resembles poetry typographically, either the conventional poem or the prose poem only in typographically appearance. Often, they have important things to say, but they don’t want to be restricted by form. Yet why should any one for whom life

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is both difﬁcult and wonderful read such their work more than once? Perhaps we’re entering a new era; one in which the old standards are becoming extinct. Disposable art, disposable lives, etc. Or, a great poet in English will soon take the best of the present and the past and give us what we’re waiting for. But who knows what poetry is? I think we do, when we see it, with the same instinct as when we spot a beautiful face in the street, no matter what country we’re in. Great is that combination of words My own belief is that poetry’s the right combination people can read or listen to for centuries because it tells them how it feels to be alive in a way they never grow tired of.

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Images and Notes from Journals 1972–75

The Hebrew alphabet— a radiant row of tortured angels Swaying in a window covered with rain. 1975 We were so poor and lonely, we thought it rained only on our house . . . 1974 When it rains and the windows are grey, weeping like grandparents, and the bright world’s gone away, Suddenly, you tell me everything depends on the number three. Then, we talk until the moon strikes one. 1973 The street reﬂects the stars . . . the quiet street dark water full of stars . . . 1973

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A parking lot’s a set of watercolors in a tray. One by one, the colors grow wheels and disappear. The headlights begin to glow. 1974 And some pass, the twisted, lame, whose eyes are ash-trays, chamber pots, mistakes made by the great machine. A man so thin, he could travel in an envelope; a lady whose face is a wad of gum. 1974 We, too, wrote our names in blood and sweat on the walls of our time. 1974 A lost dog in this world, trying to cross the freeway. 1974 Everson Reading—he read an hour long poem about his sex life, comparing its ups and downs, etc, with the course of a powerful river through the American landscape ~ a bi-centennial event ~ the metaphysical fascism of ecological lust orchestrated by a Hollywood director who read Hopkins and Jeffers . . . (religion, alliteration & rhythm)

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What shit! 1976 A face, a whole neighborhood, Can disappear like trash . . . Since my father died, my mother ﬂoats away on her sofa, over the past, seven ﬂoors above the ground . . . 1972 I tried lots of women cards liquor and pool now all I can say is I was a damn fool I’ve been in the factory I’ve worked in the shops . . . I’m as glum as a ﬂag . . . taken down from the mast 1976 Wm Stafford—the northwest’s Robert Frost, St. Francis of the suburbs, the good, gentile troubled boy scout of American Verse, a poet of wrinkled distances, of tame frontiers . . . the frontier at the ﬁngertips, behind the forehead, under the slippered footstep . . . sly, plain as milk, homogenized, not very nourishing . . . 1974

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I knew a lady who looked like a seagull You think that’s funny It’s not they took her away twisting her head ﬂapping her arms but the marvelous gulls go where they please 1974 The pebble’s a rigid little blob which, according to the ﬂy, will never be small or disappear . . . It’s absolutely ignorant and needs children, for example, to teach it how to live ~ to build, to surf, to lie around and glow when desire lands upon it . . . Sometimes, it smells like rain smeared on an iron plum’s pit . . . helpless thing in the hand that wants to throw it away . . . 1976 Sometimes, I think Yeats rang a silver bell in a church made of ashes. Any one who reads “Lapus Lazuli” without realizing what a sinister snake hides in that garden of rhetoric, is still hypnotized by that sonorous mastery of rhythm and vowels. People, when they can’t ﬁnd another reason, praise Pound for his “ear.” But who ever honored a man for being a radar station? I think Yeats also needs to be criticized for all his vulgar platitudes, although he, more than other modern English poets, could make abstractions seem more real than our daily lives. Yet, his poems on women or old age are banal, for the way they portray sex as a kind of celestial gasoline and never deal with love. 1973

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Invisible wells hopping around, ecstatic power lines . . . 1974 Osborne looked at the book I was reading and asked what it was. Blake, I said, Have you read him? He giggled, then smirked and sat down at the table across from me, dipping a tea bag in a cup of hot water . . . Blake’s alive, again in Sta. Monica, he whispered . . . He twisted his neck and squirmed around in his stomach and back, like a long sack that something was struggling to get out of . . . 1974 They howled confessed discovered their breath and explored their depths they scrounged among translations for images creative tourists they ﬁlled their palms with animals with ghosts with American Indians then they got tired and came home to praise their drunks their cities their medio critics soon they’ll wallow in patriotism 1974

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The desire for roots— a romantic, parasitic relationship with those who produce and had traditions will lead us to fascism . . . 1974 There’s an ideal world portrayed at ease on a tapestry, but look at the back, the other side in the dark against the wall . . . a slum of loose ends, tangled in despair, like the rose garden’s roots . . . And the “perfect” man, carved in his ﬂesh, born in his shoes; but you know a mad cell in his marble is xeroxing itself and that a dark alley full of bays smells like a ﬁsh in the shadows of his brain . . . 1974 Concrete poetry ~ intelligent people who can do anything well with their brains: engineers, physicists, advertising artists, typographers, etc. . . . but nothing well enough to be considered signiﬁcant or necessary . . . they need an outlet for personal expression, their energy, intelligence, but they lack the moral or visionary concerns that contribute to a real artist’s need to create ~ they don’t know to convey the experience of love, hate, fear, etc, in an imaginative and convincing way . . . So, they choose the media of abstract art: painting, concrete poetry . . . because art is the only medium in a state of chaos without commonly accepted laws, rules, etc ~ an open form in which they can assert authority without having to earn it . . . 1974 dog’s after birth ~ smells like wet leather mixed with liver, cold metal, and a damp dirty wash-rag . . . 1972

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Man who was handsome, approaching 45, looks at a young lady in a coffee shop ~ she’s reading a book while eating a hamburger, stops now & then & puts a ﬁnger to her mouth, astonished, as if she’d just learned something horrible . . . man’s vague sexual urge vanishes in a feeling of tenderness ~ he thinks of how his daughter will be at that age . . . 1972 These young people from wealthy families are peculiar ~ they ask such questions or stare so dumbly when someone simply talks about life, you’d think they were born as little photographs which hung on their parents’ walls and grew there until they reached life size . . . then, someone pushed a button and they stepped down from their frames and marched off to college . . . 1973

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A Short History of Twentieth-Century American Poetry Sent as a letter to his good friend Sac Van Bercovitch, Professor Emeritus in American Literature at Harvard, in the early 1970s Dear Saki, Around 1912 modern poetry began with the imagists ~ [Ezra] Pound, H. D., etc. Imagist poems were short, prosaic in diction, and free verse in form. Their style became formalized in Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese, which were begun after 1916. The various styles in Pound’s Personae (1912–1918?) reﬂect a desire for models other than those found in the English language. The ﬁrst great wave of translations from “modern” French poetry probably began in the latter half of the 19C with Swinburne and [Arthur] Symons—[Charles] Baudelaire, [Paul] Verlaine, [T.] Gautier, etc. Translations of Rimbaud and [Andre] Breton, as well as [Paul] Eluard, [Henri] Michaux, [Luis] Aragon, etc, began to appear during the 2nd World War. Generally speaking, the tone of American poetry between 1918 and 1950, let’s say, was determined by [T. S.] Eliot and the New Critics, ie, metaphysical, well-made, ironic, etc. Examples, aside from major poets, would be [Alan] Tate, [John Crowe] Ransom, [Karl] Shapiro, [Robert] Lowell, etc. After the 2nd World War poetry, like painting, became more international in style. American poems (some, that is) began looking for models outside the English tradition. Surrealism offered the best way of restoring the unconscious, the irrational image, a contemporary sense of reality, free verse, etc, to an honorable role in making poems. This process occurred in other countries, eg, Turkey, China, Korea, Japan, Spain, Latin America, earlier than in the U.S. Except for Dylan Thomas, David Gascoygne, Edith Sitwell, etc, English

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poets haven’t been inﬂuenced by surrealism. In Germany, since 1945, poets are using a neo-surrealist style, combined with the expressionism that characterized their poetry and their painting around 1910–1918. In the U.S. since 1950 American poetry has developed in two principal directions—(1) the prosaic, rational American voice dependent on erratic speech rhythms, inﬂuenced by Pound and [William Carlos] Williams (2) the surrealist-like metaphorical release of the unconscious using rhythms that resemble those of translated poems. The latter style tries to avoid all the traditional devices of prosody, such as alliteration, rhyme, and the “meaning” that lies in vowel-consonant relationships and in the play of speech rhythm vs. meter. Instead, the meaning comes from the image, the most easily translatable part of a poem. Such poems tend to all sound alike, and could have been written anywhere. In this way they are “international” like nonobjective painting, junk sculpture, and electronic music. In the 1960s Robert Bly began a magazine in which he criticized the establishment, and advocated the poetry (in translation) of such men as [Juan Ramon] Jiménez, [Gottfried] Benn, [René] Char, [Pablo] Neruda, etc, as more rewarding models for American poets. He also reviewed and criticized the work of new American poets, such as W. S. Merwin, James Dickey, Louis Simpson, John Logan, James Wright, etc. Bly’s criticism consisted chieﬂy in attacking their tendency toward using abstraction, traditional forms, and their fear of the unconscious. Also, he deplored their harsh attitude toward women, their lack of reference to animals, and their assumption that man is a “superior” being apart from the rest of nature. With the exception of Dickey each of these poets has broken away from the style Bly criticized and begun to write poems that resemble what I earlier called the international style. Both groups of post war American poets show a social consciousness, unlike their predecessors who dealt with the more

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conventional subject matter of poetry in an ironic tone. Those inﬂuenced by Pound and Williams, such as [Robert] Creeley, Leroi Jones, Charles Olson, [Louis] Zukovsky, etc, criticize their culture and its relationship to the world, as do the neo-surrealists who follow Bly’s criticism. The neo-surrealists, however, seem to be concerned with a “deeper” sense of international reality than the Pound-Williams group, which expresses a more aggressive nationalism—ie, a more “American” vocabulary, and a rejection of foreign models. One could, perhaps, polarize characterize the two groups as being expressive of the old struggle between Classic (Pound-Williams, etc.) and Romantic (Bly, etc.). Actually, though, the neo-surrealists reveal a sense of being—of the irrational, the fearsome, the darkness, etc—that one ﬁnds throughout preﬁrst World War poetry and pre-2nd World War poetry in Europe. Indians re-appear, for example, in the poetry of Simpson and Wright in a way no one since Whitman used them. Now, however, the Indians represent what is uncorrupt and suppressed in the American character. Animals are identiﬁed with a “personiﬁed,” something unusual in English language poetry since Ruskin and Eliot. The Beat poets, such as Ginsberg and Corso, have been inﬂuenced by surrealism, but mainly by the surrealist tendency toward “convulsion,” excitement, the uninhibited or automatic ﬂow of imagery usually released by drugs, ecstasy, hallucination, etc. Their revelations usually assert a private religious experience which claims cosmic signiﬁcant, whereas the poets directly or indirectly associated with Bly maintain a quieter tone, a less compelling rhythm, and a more subtle use of imagery. Love, Bert

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“Cello” by Garrett Hongo*

I

n school at Pomona College in Southern California I took on extra courses my sophomore

year to fulﬁll some requirements. I wanted the luxury the following term to study with Bert Meyers, a poet I’d heard about who taught at Pitzer College, an afﬁliated school in the same town. You could cross-register, and the course would count for my graduation. Other students I’d admired had studied with him, and they’d written poems that impressed me. I had to ﬁnd out about this poet. I wanted to study with Bert Meyers. I’d seen him around the combined campuses. He was a Jew. The story was, Meyers himself had never gone to college but had been admitted to a graduate school in literature on the strength of his poetry. He’d been hired, then, without completing the Ph.D. He was a poet. His face was sharp like an axblade’s, his hair silvery and wiry and full of curls, rufﬂed like the surface of a lagoon just before a big rain. It rode up against one side of his head and seemed to crest there and hold itself like the high face of a large wave, poised just before crashing. —————————————————————————

*

From Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii by Garrett Hongo.

Copyright © 1995 by Garrett Hongo, used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

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He had eyes like a dromedary and smoked long brown unﬁltered cigarettes that came in a red cardboard box. But it was his voice, a deep and resonant baritone rising to tenor, that summoned everyone when he spoke. It seemed to me that he did not actually speak, but was softly bowing, with the velvet cords in his throat, the strings of a tiny Cremona cello that was embedded there. His sentences came slowly, lavishly, with music and deliberation as if they were scored. At a public lecture, I heard him talk about “Baud’laire,” and it seemed as if he were speaking of a beautiful, sickened forest, restored to life by energetic rains. He talked about Aimé Césaire of Martinique, about the Caribbean and the poetry of “Négritude,” and his words sparked fresh thoughts through my mind concerning my own native land. A visiting poet from the Midwest, decked out in a varicolored Mexican poncho, once teased him about the largeness of his eyes, and Meyers said, “Fuck you” out loud and ﬂipped the arrogant visitor the bird. I decided this Meyers guy was for me. I took his class the next term. It met in the evening, and I arrived a little late for the ﬁrst session. The poet nodded to me to take the only seat available, which was next to him in the small seminar room. There were less than a dozen others in the class, all scruffy and long-haired, pseudo-hippie types of the middle to upper class. I noticed Meyers had brought his own thermos of coffee to class, a big blue-and-silver stainless-steel thing like the one my father carried to work on the night shift. The poet sipped while the little workshop of student poets talked. A man with long blond hair and a puckered face that gathered down to a ginger beard introduced the topic of Walt Whitman and his homosexuality. A woman with long, braided brown hair, smelling of patchouli oil, cited some critics and a discussion she’d been involved in at a writers’ conference in Vermont that past summer. I felt awe at how complicated their acquaintanceship with the

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subject was, how socialized. I’d barely begun to read poetry, let alone discuss it with adults in a public place. The poet said “That’s bullshit,” then proceeded to provide us with an extended critique of this particular journalistic and decidedly unliterary approach to the discussion of Whitman. He said that Whitman was a poet who may have been gay, who may not have been gay, but what was important about him was that he had this feeling for humankind, for the wounded lying in the Union hospitals, for the workers and builders and teamsters and for women that compelled him to write a strange, prosaic, but chant-like non-metric verse, slightly imitative of what he thought Indian vedic scripture was like, slightly imitative of what he thought Native American storytelling and ceremonial chant were like, and taking off on what he’d vaguely heard about as vers libre from the French; borrowing certain common American religious ideas; joining all of them to what he felt was the elite fashion of literary transcendentalism; and from that, he, Walt Whitman, a newspaperman and profound sentimentalist, had accomplished the building, along with Emily Dickinson, a spinster, of what had come to us as our American poetry. Homosexuality was not the issue, nor was heterosexuality. It was poetry that was the issue and he, Meyers, would not allow our discussions to be turned over to whatever fashionable or scholarly controversies had arisen to divert attention away from what was important. Poetry was poetry, he said, and although gay rights and women’s rights and minority rights were important, it was poetic content and poetic style and poetic tradition which we would emphasize, and not the social controversies, not the debunking and not the dismissing. Unlike my usual literature professors who cultivated a studied mildness, Bert Meyers had passion, he had opinions, and he was not afraid to state them. He had an attitude, and he felt conﬁdent in exposing us to it. And that attitude had the music of eloquence.

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There were some student poems handed out and read. Meyers said critiques would begin the following week. He ended the class session by reading aloud some translations from postwar Polish poetry—poems commemorating the work of rebuilding the country and its culture in the aftermath of World War II. He read from a pamphlet—an issue of a literary magazine. No books were yet available, he said. When he was ﬁnished, he tucked the pamphlet into his outer coat pocket, reassembled his coffee thermos, and started for the door. He asked if I’d walk with him, as I’d said nothing during class and it puzzled him. We left the building through a glass door. His wife and teenage son and daughter were there to meet him. They were walking the family dog, a black Labrador, and invited me to trail along. We trudged back through a foggy night, across asphalt tennis courts, azalea-lined walks, and under olive trees through one college’s campus and then another. I found myself walking beside the poet, who’d produced a pipe and was having trouble keeping it lit. He’d stop from time to time, relighting the tobacco, and I’d stop with him to keep him company. “I know why you’re so pissed off,” Meyers said, sucking on the stem of his pipe. Sprinklers hissed on a lawn somewhere nearby. His wife and children and dog were up ahead of us. I was stunned, ﬁxed to the sidewalk in my sturdy tennis shoes. He stared at me. “Your parents were in those Camps,” he said, and a puff of smoke swirled around the dark blade of his face. He said he’d been a kid in high school in Los Angeles. It was World War II, a few months after Pearl Harbor. He was a gymnast at Marshall High. There were lots of Japanese American kids in his school. He’d grown up with them. He’d gone to the picnics in MacArthur Park, where the Nisei would bring their kids every weekend and share food—rice balls and ﬁsh cakes and sweet pieces of marinated meat—he’d run around, he was a kid

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and could ask anyone, a Jewish kid with his Jewish parents, Sephardic Jews from Spain via Brooklyn, and he’d grown up with them, playing baseball, stealing hubcaps, trying to get dates, when, all of a sudden, one morning, all the Japanese American kids were gone! Just gone. He couldn’t believe it. Our government had taken all of them, rounded them up like cattle and marched them off into trains and shipped them away to God-knowswhere, to Kingdom Come, to concentration camps in the desert. His schoolmates were stunned, but everyone seemed to accept it after a while. His father Manuel raged about it at home. It was a crummy deal. But Meyers knew about it. He could tell me. He could look into my eyes and see into the history I was not myself ready to address, to live by. He knew part of my story, the part no one else knew or seemed to want to know, and he said he would help me with it. He was telling me that. I followed him.

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“Secrets of a Teacher” by Jack Miles*† On April 29, I happened upon a notice on an outdoor bulletin board announcing that poets Garrett Hongo and Maurya Simon would read that afternoon at Pitzer College. I admire the work of both. Though I had other work to do, I decided to seize the moment. As it turned out, that afternoon Hongo and Simon were reading not their own work, but poetry by their late teacher, Bert Meyers. I had never read Meyers, but his work, as they recited it, was better than good: rhymes that fell as delicately on the ear as a petal on water; images of a perfection so hard and poignant that the breath caught, the muscles froze. Hongo and Simon read Meyers with an affectionate ﬁerceness. Their grief that he was gone seemed close to the surface. His picture stood beside them on a simple tripod as a reminder. As a prelude to their reading, Hongo read a memoir of his ﬁrst steps toward Meyers and, equally important, Meyers’ ﬁrst steps toward him. Meyers’ poetry seminar “met in the evening, and I arrived a little late for the ﬁrst session. . . . The poet nodded to me to take the only seat available, which was next to him in the small seminar room. There were fewer than a dozen others in the class . . .

—————————————————————————

*

Copyright, 1994, Los Angeles Times. [May 29, 1994.] Reprinted with

permission. †

The material from Hongo’s essay quoted here came from an earlier version

of “Cello” that Hongo gave to Jack Miles after the reading. Hongo revised the essay into its ﬁnal form and later published it as part of his memoir, Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii, in 1995.

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“A man with long, blond hair and a puckered face that gathered down to a ginger beard introduced the topic of Walt Whitman and his homosexuality. A woman with long, braided brown hair, smelling of patchouli oil, cited some critics and some discussion she’d been involved in at a writers’ conference in Vermont that past summer. I felt awe at how complicated their acquaintance with the subject was, how socialized. I’d barely begun to read poetry, let alone discuss it with adults in a public place.” But Meyers was notably less impressed than Hongo—at the time a scholarship boy from South-Central Los Angeles—with the socialization being shown off. Of homosexuality as the key to Whitman, he said: “‘That’s {crap},’ then proceeded to provide us with an extended critique of that particular, journalistic and decidedly unliterary approach to the discussion of Whitman. He said that Whitman was a poet who may have been gay, who may not have been gay, who might have been multi-sexual or asexual or non-sexual in whatever physical way, but what was important about him was that he had this feeling for humankind, for the wounded dying in the Union hospitals, for the workers and builders and Teamsters and for women that compelled him to write a strange, prosaic but chant-like non-metric verse, slightly imitative of what he thought Indian Vedic scripture was like, slightly imitative of what he thought Native American storytelling and ceremonial chant was like, and taking off on what he’d vaguely heard about as vers libre from the French; borrowing certain common American religious ideas; joining all of them to what he felt was the elite fashion of literary Transcendentalism; and, from that, he, a newspaperman and profound sentimentalist, had accomplished the building, with Emily Dickinson, of what had come to us as our American poetry. Homosexuality was not the issue, nor was heterosexuality.”

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Whew! Bert Meyers was formidably learned, but the rumor that he was a college dropout was true. He had taught himself to write, won admission to graduate school on the strength of his poetry alone, dropped out before completing his doctorate and found work at Pitzer at ﬁrst only as a kind of substitute teacher. Soon enough, the college recognized that he was a brilliant teacher as well as a gifted poet; but when told he had been awarded tenure, Meyers asked, “Why?” Hongo obviously cherished the memory of that ﬁrst torrential disquisition, but the learning stood in service to something that he cherished more: “Bert had an attitude, as is said in the ghetto, and it pleased me he felt conﬁdent in exposing us to it. And that attitude had the music of eloquence.” As that ﬁrst class ended, Meyers asked his new student to walk him home, “as I’d said nothing during class and it puzzled him.” “We trudged back through a foggy night, across asphalt tennis courts, azalea-lined walks, and under olive trees through one college’s campus and then another {Claremont is home to ﬁve}. The poet produced a pipe and was having trouble keeping it lit. He’d stop from time to time, relighting the tobacco, and I’d stop with him to keep him company, to stay in the aura of his regard. “‘I know why you’re so pissed off,’ he said, sucking on the stem of his pipe. Sprinklers hissed on a lawn somewhere nearby. His wife and children and dog were up ahead of us. I was stunned, ﬁxed to the sidewalk in my sturdy tennis shoes. He caught my eye. “‘Your parents were in those camps,’ he said, and a puff of smoke swirled around the dark blade of his face. “He said he’d been a kid in high school in Los Angeles. It was World War II, a few months after Pearl Harbor. He was a gymnast at Belmont High. There were lots of Japanese American kids in his school. He’d grown up with them . . . playing baseball, stealing hubcaps, trying to get dates, when, all of a sudden, one morning,

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all the Japanese American kids were gone! Just gone. He couldn’t believe it. Our government had taken all of them, rounded them up like cattle and marched them off into trains and shipped them away to God-knows-where, to Kingdom Come, to concentration camps in the desert. His schoolmates were stunned, but everyone seemed to accept it after a while. His father raged about it at home. He felt it was a crummy deal. “Bert knew about it. He could tell me. He could look into my eyes and see into the history I was not myself ready to address, to bring up, to live by, and he told me it was all right. He knew part of my story, the part no one else knew or seemed to want to know, and he would help me with it. He was telling me that.” Bert Meyers, a Sephardic Jew whose parents had come to Los Angeles from Spain via Brooklyn, knew why Garrett Hongo was pissed off at a time in Hongo’s life when Hongo himself did not know. Yes, Hongo’s parents had been in the camps. This was to be one of Hongo’s subjects, among those that would win him the Lamont prize in 1987, but he didn’t know it yet. How did Meyers know it? He couldn’t, in fact, have had more than a hunch, but such hunches only come to teachers who are watching their students’ every move, thinking about them with intelligence and love, and willing to push them to the brink to open their eyes. That kind of teacher tends also to be the kind who insists, with the aggressive edge that Meyers brought to his discussion of Whitman, that “it doesn’t matter” whether you are gay or straight, or Asian or Caucasian, or name your polar pair. Why does it work this way? Because only those who believe that group identity is secondary acquire the habit of attending to the individual as primary. Not all Japanese American writers are called to write about ethnic identity. With the wrong Japanese American student, Meyers’ “I know why you’re pissed off” could have been a clumsy and perhaps a crippling mistake. Meyers took

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a chance, then, but he was the kind who watches closely enough to know when and with whom to take such a chance. In the individual identity of this Japanese American student, there was indeed some speciﬁcally Japanese American literary work to be done. If Meyers had not believed that his own Jewishness, his own group identity, was as ﬁnally irrelevant, however undeniable, as Whitman’s homosexuality, he would have been blinded to his own individual identity, not to speak of Hongo’s. Fortunately, it was not Meyers’ way (it has become, unfortunately, too often the American way) to elevate the group above the individual. Poetry proceeds by a heightening of the precision and clarity of ordinary perception. Meyers, to judge from what was said about him at the memorial service, brought some of this precision to his perception of people. Those who know he loved them know also that he knew them, or so it seemed as they spoke. Meyers’ personality is remembered as hot and prickly rather than warm and fuzzy. Simon recalls him saying to her once, in a burst, “Be on guard!” But vigilance was evidently just another variety of attention in an exceptionally attentive man. It is now common for teachers of writing, poetry included, to say with becoming modesty that they merely teach the craft, the part that can be taught. The craft counts, of course. Meyers, the college dropout, was a frame maker by trade, proud of the ﬁneness of his work, and as careful about words as about wood. But nothing was clearer from Hongo’s story than that Meyers also taught things that allegedly can’t be taught. One of Meyers’ poems is “Apprentice”: Because I love you I’ve learned to be this hammer that runs

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all day like a horse with its hoof in its head. In the afternoon my hands lie down together for a minute. Meyers taught his students to prepare for the obsessiveness that all artists must endure, “like a horse with its hoof in its head.” He taught them how to recognize the exceptional, as Whitman was exceptional, and honor it. He showed them how, for love, to tell a stranger that you know his secret. This is what the very greatest literature does: It tells you a secret you didn’t know you were keeping. Meyers’ body of work is small; but small as it is, it deserves to be reissued and brought to a new audience. Al Wachtel, a Pitzer colleague, calls Meyers “an imagist born out of time,” referring to a post-Romantic movement in French and English poetry that sought, rather than exalt emotion, to displace it from where the reader might expect it to some unexpected place. Imagist poems are often easy on ﬁrst reading, deceptively casual, like haikus; they become deep or difﬁcult, paradoxically, only on repeated reading. Meyers, who knew that his unbreakable tobacco habit would eventually kill him, displaced his despair from the cigarette, where it was expected, to the teacher’s stump of chalk, where it wasn’t: Smoke waters the ﬂowers that grow in the lungs. The cigarette, like your life, is a piece of chalk that shrinks as it tries to explain.

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The imagist part of Meyers’ spirit may be the part that Maurya Simon has taken away. There was no more intense moment in the memorial service than her reading of Meyers’ dry-eyed “The Poets,” a poem apparently written near the end of his life: There he sat among them (his old friends) a walking ash that knows how to smile. And he still dreamed of a style so clear it could wash a face, or make a dry mouth sing. But they laughed, having found themselves more astonishing. They would drive their minds prismatic, strange, each wrapped in his own ecstatic wires, over a cliff for language, while he remained to raise a few birds from a blank page. As she read him, one believed it possible. Any stranger happening on this memorial reading would have guessed, as I did, that Meyers had just recently died. And been wrong: He died fully 15 years ago. American memories are said to be short, student memories shortest of all. Teach what can’t be taught, though, and your students will remember you forever.

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About the Author

B

ert Meyers was born in Los Angeles on March 20, 1928. Months before graduating

from high school, he decided to drop out and become a poet. Over the next eighteen years, he worked ﬁrst at a number of manual labor jobs, including janitor, carpenter’s apprentice, and worker at an airplane factory, and then became a master picture-framer and gilder. Although he had never taken undergraduate classes, in 1964 he was admitted to the Claremont Graduate School on the basis of his poetic achievements. By 1967, he had completed all work for a Ph.D. in English literature and was hired to teach poetry workshops and literature at Pitzer College. Over the years he published his poems in many journals and in ﬁve books. In 1979, shortly before his death at the age of ﬁfty-one, Meyers assembled a slim volume of those poems he considered his best work. For twenty years, his widow, Odette Meyers, attempted to get the manuscript published, but ﬁnally turned to Bert’s friend, Morton Marcus, for help. After Odette passed away, Marcus and Meyers’s son, Daniel, searched through Bert’s private papers and enlarged and restructured the collection in order to provide a sense of Bert Meyers as a man as well as the poet. The result is In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat.