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Issue 9 Page 67
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Some Spent Roses
We met the night the world-
Renowned Soviet ensemble
Was in town
Playing Shostakovich: the
String quartet number eight.
“My great grandmother died
At Birkenau,” she said,
Afterwards, when we idled
On fifty-seventh Street,
Figuring out where to go.
“I can never
Get my mind around
What torment
It must have been
To be packed into a train,
Still living, among the dead.
“With tears swelling,
My grandmother often said,
I looked like her.
“When I think of her,
Trembling in the cold,
On the death line,
That I can relive,
Myself.
Although she did not survive
To tell me,
I can feel
The violent numbness of her despair.
Death is a garment
Everyone must wear.”
Her living room gave onto –
A rare thing in New York –
The great green summer fields
Of Central Park.
Out on her terrace we could see
A black night sky.
She lit a joint,
And we got high,
And went to bed together bye and bye.
In the morning,
After coffee, croissants, and kisses,
She demurred. We parted.
I left reluctantly.
She turned away to cut
Some spent roses
That climbed upon a trellis,
Using a dainty pair of silver scissors.
Without the Rain
Without the rain
The earth dries up
And blows away
Like dust.
The leaves parched and sere,
The flowers disappear.
There will be no fruit this year.
Without the breath
There is no song,
No summer’s dance,
No winter’s fantasy;
Heart does not spring,
Bounty does not fall,
Eyes cannot scan or see.
I have been mistaken.
Love is not desire
Nor a consuming fire.
Lips kiss, give birth to song.
Eyes tear,
Breath flows,
And the dull world shimmers
And glows.
Berlin, 1935
How soft his caresses were.
My heart beat against his breast.
Like velvet or fur.
My eyes felt the longing his expressed.
I yielded and felt my body yield,
It was like a dream come to life
Lost inside his strong magnetic field.
I would have served him as his wife.
The city lingered below us in the street.
Enthralled by his fearsome hardness,
I kneeled to kiss his feet,
A slave to his caress.
The night was over and he went away.
What more is there to say?
Often, I Cannot Tell You How Often
(after Verlaine)
Often, I cannot tell you how often,
Asleep, in a liquid dream, or awake,
Ambulant in a waking dream,
When hardly anyone is out
Walking in the almost winter night,
In the penumbra of a streetlamp,
Hardly in the light now, across the street
I see the figure of someone who is
Not anyone, but someone I know
Who knows me, too, someone I have
Not met, and never do, coming towards me,
My phantom, familiar, my elusive, present.
Every nerve quivers for the approach,
The heart-stifling approach of the world to come,
To rip this one apart, that still remains,
The world that is not, even as
It is – the world that encumbers.
Les Neiges D’Antan
He may be dead,
The boy I met
In Central Park
Nearly fifty years ago.
We kissed at first sight.
He danced on Broadway.
We spent the night
Winding through the summer alleys,
Through dark, shadowy curving valleys,
Tracing errant paths inside the rambles.
We were more than half in love.
Life flared.
All the branches of our bodies
Were like trees.
Our eyes outshone the stars.
The floodtide of our breath,
Up from out the wellspring of our want,
Tore and fused our flesh,
Until without him
It was raw.
Desire was a torment and a prelude,
And again a torment after he was gone.
Alas, if only I were there again,
And he were in my arms.
Have I Reach This Age..?
Have I reached this age,
And learned nothing but
Everything that begins in hope
Must end in despair?
That every desire is paired with envy?
The garden dies.
The heart lies.
The serpent survives.
That every confidence is a betrayal.
The mirror each one holds
Wherein the other sees himself:
Are those distorted images
That I see, or reflections of the self
I am and would not be?
I have lived beyond
My father’s age
And kept alive his stifled rage.
The earth is blanketed with disease
The leaves are browning on the trees.
I walk with bent and painful knees.
The storms in Lear’s shattered realm
Infect the heavens.
The curses in his heart
Blow like a tempest.
Or are they his daughters’ jealousy and rancor
Catalyzed to whip and batter him?
What does he know of sin
Until it takes its toll on him?
Poor naked wretch
Embracing the storm
Caught between a bear
And the raging sea.
Handy dandy:
Who is the master
Who the fool?
Who is kind
And who is cruel?
How long I have held
This grime in my heart,
This ash in my throat?
The voices I could not hear
Ring now incessantly
In my ear.
I thought of love
As another dimension
Where I did not dwell,
A cure for loss
And the spirit’s dissension.
I was wrong.
Love is the sirens’ song.
My tongue was burned
When I was young.
I cannot speak.
The rabbis cut my tonsils out.
I wept for days
In nameless grief
And trudged, a child
Clothed in an old man’s grief.
Now, fire is a will o’ the wisp,
A fatuous flame on a blackened heath.
What good can Gloucester do,
A man hoodwinked and unhoused,
Blinded by seeing aright,
Lost in the agony of night
A broken lantern
Betrayed by a son,
A bitter and a pitiful sight?
O, teach me to distinguish
Between foolishness and faith,
Between loss and birth.