Saturday, December 22, 2007
(A true account of my father talking to Frank O’Hara in lower Manhattan)
1.
Is the cotton dirty?
no that’s old glitter it’s supposed to be snow
it’s 90 degrees it’s unseasonable but the Ball Square CVS
has snow behind glass
Up and down Kidder Avenue spears of forsythia
wave yellow the pollen coats my car lilacs
on all the lawns Walt Whitman’s […]
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Thursday, December 15, 2005
(for my father)
At the hospital room window. You, watching the headlights
On FDR Drive, the way to the co-ops,
The view of Essex, the public bath brimming now with snow, later
With sounds of children, rising from the water—
My voice soon among them. Before any of this,
Blur of helicopter blades overhead, vacant blue.
You decide yes there is a […]
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Saturday, December 10, 2005
(Sally Mann, b/w, 1989)
At most six, expressionless, back perfectly straight,
Her fingers loosely curled, fidgeting with the sheer white tulle
That veils her thighs, while the older girl
Maybe eight or nine pulls at the white lycra below the littler one’s
Neck and applies—is it
Eye makeup? rouge? the younger girl
Offering her cheek, her eyes straying to the bull-dog at […]
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Fridays we crossed the George Washington Bridge
to sit at her table.
Each time, she said, as if sure
he would forget, “Sol, what about the boy?
Give the boy his wine . . .”
Here she is:
my mother’s mother,
propped on the metal frame she pushes this way, through the grass.
On the bench, my grandfather sits behind an open NY […]
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Thursday, February 24, 2005
1.
The hospice nurse checks again
The water temperature.
Swelling in the hands,
The legs, the sensitive feet,
My father in the lift device
Shows no discomfort,
Even beams a little,
Looking at me.
Fluorescent light in the poster frames.
Around a breezy field, silver coastline . . .
The patient closes his eyes
And moans as he is washed.
2.
Dream #2: I pull into the driveway
With a […]
Frank Newton and Vic Dickenson
Are playing ping pong in the kitchen
From the window, Union Sq
Listen! it’s Peewee Russell on the gramophone
Peewee got a letter all the way from China
To The Maker Of Heavenly Music
Nick’s, USA
And the pennies we always threw, by the net, in the rug
Anybody who shows up with pennies
Throws them on the floor
Tonight […]
With my low rent and my solitude and my Bachelor’s
in English, I’m on the West Coast, I’m getting religious
and I’m up to my elbows in dishwater
and I hear voices: Blessed art thou, God of our Fathers,
they say, chanting name after name, from Abraham
to the present, stopping predictably, at the name
of my father. Sunlight through the […]
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I think even your Grandpa Ben was embarrassed
By how Grandma Gert clung to him when he showed up
At a bar-mitzvah. We’d heard he’d taken another name,
Married someone else, run another business,
But it was like he never left . . .
Once, I think I was eleven, she took me to meet him for lunch.
We stood outside […]
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3.
He saw
his own life—
New York, 1939: The 3 Deuces,
The Onyx —
Or in Chinatown,
where a hardhat tried to play him
for a nickel—calling
Christmas gift
Christmas gift
He looked up as it fell—
the girders
strung with lights
Or on Swing Street,
where a guy in uniform buys him
a whiskey because
“his color doesn’t matter
when he plays”—
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