Selected Poems

inscribed on the Rothenberg Memorial Monument, New York City; sculptor: Madeline Segall-Marx.  Also published in An Italian Morning.

Copper Beech

on the death of a colleague

Somewhere was where he went.

Now when the campus is thick with 

summer,

the copper beech

will show the small spaces

among its leaves

as clearly empty places.

And soon in winter

ever a larger

airy emptiness

will whirl

through the tines of its branches.

Then we'll turn our eyes away -

so hard it is to witness

the tree weeping twigs

as we lament.

 in Rattapallax, and Le Pagine (Rome), tr. Luigi Bonaffini and also published in An Italian Morning.

The Consolation in Being History

". . . quarried long ago in the haze/

of an Italian morning . . . ."

I. Winter

Then slowly turning unplayful, my mother's days

were nearly still,

becoming a frieze,

each abutting a long file of earlier days,

and paling more

the more recent.

In the last of the line of them,

she breathed such thin breathing

onto her merest memories -

of a red (the satin on a candybox lid),

a green (the lake lying under the trees),

a purple (the dusk fallen between her daughters)

that they

bleached away

also.

II. Spring

Sister's door,

brother's door,

locked shut.

Mother's door,

father's door,

grass plots.

III. Autumn

With nowhere at all to place love,

I watched mummers

in a darkened barn on the straw hat circuit.

They were kind, were in a dumb show:

they looped themselves, braided air, caressed

a knee, lifted a wrist.

At the end, the music of flute stretched and collapsed

like a barber's strop,

and the footlights dimmed

to blue

and seemed the distant heaven

that is ever greedy for those we once have kissed.

IV. Winter

Wrapped in family silence,

I look at the February sea

until it seems the black marble of tombs -

miles wide

and quarried long ago in the haze

of an Italian morning,

its rough planes surprised

by the stonecutter.

On the morning of our mother's baptism,

was it already in the making?

Who ordained it then, so black

and heavy, to ride,

an ocean on an ocean,

to this Atlantic beach,

to crash here and transmute,

becoming, as I look, a surface

of Mediterranean prisms

and Adriatic hushings?

Minnows of light, love's whispers -

one needs these.

V. Summer

My brother, of the U.S. Army, has come into town!

He'll buy us a fish lunch

at the Rose Cafe,

the fans will whirr sweetly over our heads,

preserving in song his chopper's rescues,

the waiter

will snap to,

and I will drink in the sunniness

of the daisies in their stark vase.

 in Light and also published in An Italian Morning 

Gravity in Mexico

for Ramon

Roaming like moons

inside a ring of hills

we smiled all day

wore the wind as earrings

let it roll diamonds

up and down our fingers.

All day the wind was wheels

churning our bodies.

Breeze bands

careened around us.

One eely loop of wind

bumped an iguana

caromed up

landed high in a yucca and spun

into twins!

But the hills were grave.

Light lay there

like smooth fruit

weighing

yellow in the afternoon

then red and heavy in the evening.

 in Confrontation  and also published in An Italian Morning 

Love Upstate

I. Poems,

memory,

and love

are meter, not matter.

Reader, don't

for a moment

think

they are flesh.

II. You see,

I'm not in San Francisco, not

disorganizing a plate

of antipasto

in a shady garden restaurant,

not facing a kindly gaze,

but their shapes

draw me like the wind.

III. Here's a stanza tracing a shape,

a horseshoe. Long ago, a tall Cavaliere

meets a girl - my mother's being

is being begun! For good luck, check

out the horse/shoe

of her Papa's stallion.

See its twin prongs throbbing

spondees and forked lightning.

Iron is absent, and hardly missed.

IV. This stanza cradles a foetal curve -

above a beach, a halfmoon rocking

the pair who eloped my lifetime ago. . . .

Look, the moon-beams varnish

a tree while its black leaves turn

jazzy and shimmy and shake.

Half/moon, not really half-unborn.

Well, didn't I lie there in sweet caul?

Was I on the dark part or luminescent?

V. I'm not

incurious, or inattentive, or indifferent to

the thick places.

In a poem we drift straight through solidities, even

through this Brooklyn house

with its limestone facade

and long intricate curtains bracing

against the wind.

VI. Once, flying

to the West Coast

in a high lonely plane

over a pearly jungle of clouds,

I saw in the sunshine

a great rain-ring,

a round spectrum

balancing in the sky,

a target

for a rapturous arrow.

VII. This part of the poem

is the memory of a marigold.

Upstate, New York.

We crouch, denims touching.

Our faces dome it: we smell its

yellow lineaments -

odor of bookstores,

nutmeg,

sharp heat!

A heliograph!

A trumpet of topaz

flourishing for a Shakespearean king

His hand in love with my hand:

we take the marigold, and it

umbrellas our morning.

We are special, as in a Renoir,

and the air is washing meadows.

He knows a blue lake beyond the hill.

The land is like cake just for me.

Far into my memory a childish chanson winds out

of a park band. . . "Vrai, vrai. . .,"

and a carousel purrs, residence

of wooden horses festooned in gold,

ideal, their moulds

ascending along red poles, spool-turned,

turning,

and ascending.

And we, ascended to the hill's lip,

touch the empty sky.

Below us

lies the dry and shining biscuit, the lake

unlaked,

its light stable and sunken,

a half-built causeway

gashing it.

I am yet dreaming that chasm blue.

And so we run zigzag down in love

             into the gray bowl, the green and sensual hills circling it,

and we pluck two arid gray gifts,

branches,

so desiccated as to seem solid dust,

in the shape of birds flying,

tense,

when one hill strikes a chord,

marvelous concussion,

and strange!

a paper comb and mixmasters

and Moussorgsky at once,

and I startle the way a deer does,

mute,

my neck lengthened, and he cocks his head,

and soon the hill spins out a thick tuning arc

of birds,

a long low rainbow in shuddering blacks and silvers

that hums,

and brakes, and we rise

to stop the disappearance of the huge smooth song

over the other lip of the earth,

but we are left with two dry drowned forms

in our passionate hands.

 in Bitterroot and also published in An Italian Morning 

A Grand Tour

He murmured,

Love with you is seeing a

fiery sunrise on the

blue,

blue,

blue

Mediterranean.

She was breathing the

shallows among dark planets,

but thought I'll join him

in scenery-gazing.

So she floated to Europe.

And there beyond the bathing shore,

there along combustion's blue edge,

there curried by the orient light,

a ship slid

like a slow pearl swan,

and she loved it to swooning,

and again lost his sky and his sea.

 in Pivot and also published in An Italian Morning 

The Blue-Ringed Tower in El Centro, CA

for Linda Lopez McAlister

I left for El Centro

in the month of January, when

the gulls were chunking eels

in Sheepshead Bay.

The first hours in the deep

Imperial Valley stood brilliant

on corundum, emery, quartz.

I awoke the second day

to an adobe garden, was enchanted

by wrought-iron and roses

and the smooth trunk

of a palo verde. Soon

a hummingbird struck

the lush midair near a vine,

and with a yellow whirr scraped the space,

chopped out a niche,

flailed it wide enough

to vacuum-pack a small wooden saint

or (a later thought

when love had somewhat

shrunken me)

to be filled with the half-million poor

in nearby Mexicali

who were pinched dry by chollas

and might be held for an instant

in the hummingbird's hollow

as a nest-egg for a poem.

I.

On my daily drive to Calexico,

I passed a broad tower

a hundred feet high,

banded near the top

with a blue painted ribbon.

The lower desert was drawing me,

but I resisted the dry immersion.

II.

The turquoise-ringed tower

on one sleepy trip

became the knuckle

of a Mexican cacique

exiled in anger nine

foreign miles from home.

I gorged on the neighborhood's carne asada

cooked over fire in the fiery afternoon

in the tough shapes of iguana,

and I licked at beer

salty as the mineral world.

III.

The tower then was a bride's thumb, dreamily

belted by dust and blue satin.

In the season when tons of carrots

were hauled from the Valley, and the sky

very dark, cattle feedlots silent,

I fought a minor earthquake,

noting at dawn

the long watery gleams

on the patio

at the pool's narrow end.

IV.

Whoever was it told me -

sotto voce -

that the tower was a cauldron,

that it burned elements

to remake deserts?

I saw a startling power

(speeding home one night)

as its blue-bricked fist

stretched towards a comet.

Wearing thick sneakers

as advised by the postcards in arcaded shops

I went down into the desert

the week it was "a carpet of bloom."

Although two or three spines ▸

pierced rubber and skin,

among whispered hisses

I hopped and pulled them out,

and my first gray coyote

flashed over the carpet

like the shadow of a moment's tree.

V.

As for the tower, it wasn't a tower,

but a vat,

the biggest in the Valley;

through irrigant pipes it rained

on the fields,

and the owners of the nitrate plant

had hung the bracelet on it.

At Easter break, in Mexicali,

a beggar sang Cancion Mixteca,

blind, grazed thin by the half-million:

"Que lejos estoy del suelo donde he nacido!"

("How far the place where I was born!")

I bought the blue song,

and some stone rings for my mother and sister,

and a multiflowered tin-framed mirror.

VI.

Then I learned, at last, that high in the air

the robin's-egg circle

had been painted precisely at sea level.

And on the daily drive to Calexico

that blue bangle was a miracle,

caught on a post that was nailed deep

as my Datsun in the Valley,

a sapphire hoop

waiting to sail

straight east or south or west,

through caves below the mountains,

till it came to a perfect

skim on open water, always,

now, touching the foam

and never scooping so much as a drop

of the Baja Bay or Mexican Gulf

or Mediterranean or Indian Seas,

faithful to its path,

a delicate performance.

 in Light and also published in An Italian Morning 

Mosca the Cat Meets a Dragon

A snakey pile of leaves, like an old sleeping

dragon, rusty, papery, snorting in its windy

Manchurian dream, my cat boxing with its leafy

toes,

explodes!

makes her backbone bowed!

then she's a sprung fur arrow hammering

at the Blankinships' flapping ailanthus

till high in the sun's sawdust

nailing her cat-hug

she acts the anonymous

Ionic capital.

At a bay window, the pane seamless,

I somehow bond with her,

she harbors so hard,

her eyes brass screws

in the wrinkling jungle,

all those stalks cross-hatching,

all those leaves

unhinging.

 in Voices in Italian Americana and also published in An Italian Morning 

Mystery

I.

Why does he pray, every Sunday,

the old man in the pew before me -

"May my wife see the light" - ? Every Sunday,

during the parish

Intercessions, the same words float

in a cavernous whisper from his massive

chest. His head, even bowed, seems monumental,

its crop of whiteness

like a buffalo's mane in moonlight.

I hear him clearly - always he's chosen

the second row, and ritually I take the third.

And always

nearby he has the same black suitcase,

its canvas sides stuffed to bursting -

with what pantomime of possessions I

don't know.

Standing, we each hang onto

the warm wooden bench-backs,

red hymnal in hand, thin pages lying still.

No gilded transept

or carved mahogany baldachin faces us

but an altar that's plain as the plainsong

spiraling down in clear gray air from an invisible

grove of singers.

II.

I'm not certain I should be revealing all this -

that at the entreaties for Intercession

I've learned to anticipate the pained,

private words,

"May my wife see the light,"

rolling around soft and deep.

The incantation - is it his eleventh-hour

love, or

the warning crack of doom? You can see how

a person might come to dwell

on this Byzantine triptych - an ancient and homeless

groom, a rusty

and hopeless bride (her gaze darkly averted,

his flaming), and, between the two,

a figure of mystery leaning one way and then

the other, listening.

 in The New York Times and also published in An Italian Morning 

The American Wouldsman

          On noting that the "American Finance Association will

make a field trip to Chase Manhattan Bank."

What bonny bank,

what buffalo-haunted stream,

will you be chasing off to now?

Fawning, dappled

by efflorescent glints,

will you scent out mysteries

and turn into tellers

of antique tales?

In green-columned forest

will you check

your wrinkling dolors

and fold away your foxgloves

in a golden patch?

Or will you cut a sprig of rue

and, like your cheaping cousins,

will you bill and coup?

Oh breathe it, breathe it,

pecuniary pals,

the fragrance of the mint!

Lovers all,

roll, uncomptrolled,

in the clover!

 in Pivot and also published in An Italian Morning 

Veronica

I knew it kept me rare to tell my

rare friends from Queens

we must avoid a bull

when we debarked the BMT.

Above the low platform, skies

raced in from New York City, but not

faster than that bull. I

advised us to hide

our red scarves or red gloves as

we left the open station, and stuff

them into school bags, and speed

cutting for my house, and duck

by the soft blank lots,

the black clouds collapsing in

folds on the horizons, building

us a breathing bullring.

It was true. There was a bull

who lived in my Brooklyn then,

in Flatlands. A dark ton,

the core of the arena, beware -

he mashed the lots

riding on the Queen Anne's lace

straight for a ruby crucifix

or anything that was red. . . .

Those days we were in residence

in a brick two-story

mortared on the marshes, its

long stoop willful, its

cellar's eyes sinking, those

days when Wendell Wilkie and

then Tom Dewey were lost

embattled issues

in the solid brick house of

my father's governance, where,

slowly being crossed, my

father was - yes, baited -

executing his

own growing veronica.

 in Voices iin Italian Americana and also published in An Italian Morning 

The Godspeed

On All Souls' Day, a visit to the family grave

Day of the Dead. An ordinary

gathering of generations

as though it were Sunday

at the grandfather's house.

The long parlor. The crowd

of faces stiffly floating

on the marble sea of

the mantelpiece. Under a shawl

of shadows, the piano.

And there, in a bowl

emitting almond perfume,

the sculpted marzipans.

The grandfather had earlier taken

a few of the painted fruits

to the cemetery

and in a sharp wind

made love's covenant

of apricots and peaches

with his wife, dead in 1924,

his small boy, in 1916,

his daughters, in 1921, '22, '23 -

on their headstone,

carved above the tumble

of gray lilies and numerals,

a woman's frozen gaze.

At home, for his favorite

granddaughter,

the eldest, an undivined gift

waits in the dining room.

The idea, gracing

his narrow house for days,

came from an American movie -

Loretta Young leaning forward

from the wall's glitter

into the world's real darkness,

tentative,

hands toward the audience,

seeming to resemble

his grown son's grown girl.

Her asking look - come una santa -

unfurled his generosity

like the parasols in memory

that sheltered maidens

from sun or rain.

The co-star - un bel ragazzo -

offered her a cigarette,

and spun out sweet promises

in a della Robbian wreathe

of smoke.

In the morning,

the grandfather had laid out

the gift,

first on the tablecloth,

then in the center

of the granddaughter's empty plate -

a tasty, smoky, beautiful

pack of Old Golds -

as the sign he approved her modern

habit and that her modesty

was inviolable,

as an example to teach

the gentleness of family

and the contentment

mercy makes possible,

and as his concession to her -

she is just nineteen.

Her cousins brush by

the great table,

hypnotized by the grandfather's

reversal.

On the dish,

in the shaft of cold light

entering from the backyard,

the cellophane wrapping is

a little bonfire.

But the granddaughter

(yet unblessed by

his Godspeed)

stands at the front parlor window

gazing at prophecy.

The gray air whitens,

curls, beckons - as wings upon wings

join in a November flight.

 in Le Pagine (Rome), tr. Luigi Bonaffini and also published in An Italian Morning 

"This Is Verbena!"

for Cynthia

The moss accidentally

grew,

so well that the whole backyard

had the look of a billiard table.

My child and I, we

raked it gently. We expelled all grass. We'd

sweep one leaf off with our softest broom

toward a pocket by the fence.

We were soon Japanese about clutter,

about litter.

A praying mantis was barely permitted,

butterflies let in only if plain.

A botanist arrived, told us, "When moss

appears, it is a sign that soil lacks . . . ."

We would not hear what, would not

supply what.

My child and I, we

encouraged the moss,

praised the minimalism,

kept on narrowing the range of greens,

so that under our maple

never again would I cause

her eyes to darken

with pain and loss,

nor shake her small shoulders

in a hunger

to arm her too soon

(her words not ready)

with my own armor,

the richness of syllables

then ripe in our garden -

"This is verbena!

This is gaillardia, this, portulaca,

this, hydrangea,

this, anemone" -

each flower

a poem

and a treachery.

in Reconstructionist and also published in Life of Touching Mouths  

On the Fifth Anniversary of Bluma Sach's Death

Who knew her-

(God, all refused her!)

the Polish refugee,

caught seven times

in the Jew net?

Old

and fat

and poor.

Halls of applause

rattling

in a patched brain.

At last we met

and I wanted her

inside my door.

She came.

I poured the vermouth

of old sunrises

and said, Borrow my piano

in the mornings, Bluma.

And her arms flew,

and golden raisins

gleamed at the elbow,

and her dying skin

was heaving dough.

Done, shoulders damp,

she'd talk

beneath the parrots and swans

in the Roman garden

painted on my wall.

Wild Schumann huddled

beneath mute feathers,

ghastly parades

of brothers and children

kissed with soft beaks,

and I always said,

Tell me more!

Once the pain pushed

her to draw a line:

It is not fine of you,

she said.

We stared at wine,

and spoke no more of Poland.

In Warsaw's winter, once

she bartered, she the ripe artist

battered her piano

for a shredding quilt.

My guilt is worse.

I handed her a sieve of hours,

and as return

peered under old leaves

at the haunted bird.

I will go into

the small black room

where my work lies scattered

and the letters on the keys

are trembling fires

and the linoleum

is a rag of ice

under my penitent feet.

But Bluma, those mornings-

how the bright rooms laughed with music

while we wept!

in Glyph and also published in Life of Touching Mouths  

Rose Jones, Cleaning-Woman

          Hospital switchboard operator:

"Mrs. Jones expired a half hour ago."

Now you are dead thirty minutes

I will dream you

in layers

of the rain's gray light

and the dream has you singing

elegant notes

thin as silver knives

with your arms leaning

like sleeping rabbits

against your window

as long wet mercuries roll down the pane

cracking it changeably

and dreaming you

I dust secret corners in your feelings

and dream loaves of mutual balm

and you, dreaming, fire me to sweeping

all the glum minerals out

of Bed-Stuy, out,

out to the edges of the rivers,

and your sister, kneeling, bangs

tin pans

to erase with crashes

the drunken man at your funeral,

with his steel eyes and lips,

and the thunder climbs

calling back a green Carolina universe

while under the shadows of our morning noises

you sing carvings

and make a church

of gray layers there

in your newest neatness.