Lines Overheard

Behind a freshman couple
on the first day of classes:
Well, if anybody bothers us,
there can always be an accident.

On Thayer Street, behind a girl
who's drawn with ball-point pen
fake track marks on both her arms:
Once, I drank rubbing alcohol.

Heard on my doorstep
through the closed door:
I'm just going to rob and rob
until somebody stops me.

At Eddie's Diner, amid a lull
in table talk, one voice
of four Italian businessmen:
So who's gonna do this --
your hit man or mine?

The Dead Rose

He bought her the rose as a joke.
After all, he was gay —
she was the frat boys’ tramp
and they had spent all of a night
joking about the ones they’d had
in common.

He didn’t deliver it:
on a perverse whim
he held the rose an extra day.
By the next morning it was
a limp and withered hagbloom,
the petals pale, the nectar dry,
the dust as from a tomb or trashcan
marring its too perfect face.

Would he nurse the thorn
with the blood of his hand?

Would he wet the leaf
with a tear? Not in this life.

He wrapped his sad sigil of mock love
in gaily-colored paper,
added a card
headed Memento amorae,
told her their “grand affair”
was already over:
hence the dead
instead of the living
red rose.

Did she weep at the thought of his laughter?
Did he smile at the thought of her tears?
The saddest thing is: he really only did this
so he could write a poem.

Years later he thinks about his callowness.
Finding the poem he wrote to her,
he destroys it with a shudder.
An irony, since most of the women he knows,
now, are Gothically inclined,
preferring dead roses to living ones.
But way back then,
no fraternity boy ever gave her, or him,
a single rose, alive or dead.

My Book of Revelations

as out of the burning bush
the meteor's heart
the hieroglyph
the tablet
spoke god

it said
I am the sum
of all that is

I     have never
written a book
dictated a law
taken a wife
       sired son or angel.
I do not answer
plea or prayer.

love whom you may.
eat what you must.
the planet is yours,
     stars too
if you can reach them

but neither out
nor inward seek me.
I am not at the Pole Star
turning orbs mechanical.
I have no wish
to visit your dreams

I am and will be a mystery,
the riddle between zero and unity.
How could death bring you to me
when you cannot discern me now?

Go, now, and tell your brethren
that god's wish
is to be left alone.
I have spoken
and will not speak
again.

Providence Nocturne: Two Portraits

TUGBOAT MAN 

He rides an old tugboat, slathered in scum,

a stubby, inelegant craft, good only

for pushing or pulling, decades unpainted,

its underside roiled with barnacles.

He owns a fleet of them, proud

amid the beer-can condom flotsam

of the shallow bay. Nothing

enters this harbor without his help.

Oil tankers, ocean liners, barges laden

with toxic ash or scrap or lumber,

all lost without his men there, tugging,

pulling, day and night, fair and foul.

He squints for his hated rival, that upstart,
for two old families ply the upper Bay,
each in its own eyes the elder, the better.
Their captains' proud tonnage slides by
and even at near collision no nod, no hoot
of the horn acknowledges the other.
Each waits to buy the other out
at the Grim Reaper's auction house.

Strange he seems in his suit and tie,

one of those New England faces

with skin pinched tight as a drumhead.

He has just come from his club,

the ancestral, restricted one

from whose leather chairs the scions

of older families chide those of the younger,

and the cowed waiters dare not confuse

the pecking order in the reading room.

Me first. My family was here

with Roger Williams. He's just

a johnny-come-carpetbagger.

I won't touch The New York Times

if he's pawed through it first.

The talk had been, as usual,

about those god-damn interlopers —

Jews on the library board, Italians

helping to run the historical society,

women running amuck. “Don’t ask me

to kiss the ring of that Episcopal bishop,

a woman! a woman! Next thing you know,

they’ll be marrying lesbians, and men to men!”

On the tugboat, everything seems clear:

the clean, colonial line of the hill,

those proper white steeples, those mansions

from the days of rum, Negroes and molasses,

when business was business and it was

nobody’s business what you bought or sold.

Up at the college with its Greek-front halls

they once taught Latin and Greek and classics.
Look at it now! A woman in charge, a Negress!

Marxist professors! Tattooed coeds! Hipping

and hopping with language unfit to hear!

Out of the closet perverts running the city!

And now the damn Indians everywhere,

dancing on the Arcade steps, wanting their land back!

He looks west, where once good people lived,

streets full of fine Victorian houses.

He shouts at the hulking hills: “Niggers!

Spics and Niggers! Wogs and Slant-Eyes!”

But his voice only reaches the hurricane barrier,

his only audience the wharf rats and one

whom they call —

.

THE FISH MAN

Everyone has seen him. In fact, your arrival

in Providence is marked by the first encounter.

We always ask newcomers this:
“Have you seen the fish man yet?”

His head is conical, and bright red,

mottled, hairless, shiny as an apple,

icthyc and chinless with horrible lips.

One of his ears is twice the size

of  the other, and webbed as well.

Fish man, the Innsmouth look,

we think as he hurtles by

on a bicycle stripped of gears and brakes.

Stand in his way and he calls out

epithets amid a cloud of spittle.

Odd job man, he may be the one

who washes your plates in the unseen kitchen,

   the one who comes in by the back door only..

His furtive broom might clean the pier

     long after closing time,

behind the seafood restaurant,

before he glides away

     into the rat and ‘possum night.

He’s tried all the invisible jobs in town:

an undertaker’s assistant, perhaps –

his hands might be the last to touch you

as he places your body gently

on the furnace conveyor belt.

Has he done the night watch?

    the lobster shift at some printery?

Too bad

there are no more mad scientists to serve!

Who knows where he sleeps,

    or who mothered him?

What’s in his mind? Has he an erotic life,

a round of afternoon lovers,

millionaires’ wives who moan for him?

Does he have a library card?

Has he secretly memorized all of Milton?

Does he have a fondness for lilacs,

fireflies, and gibbous moons?

Has he ever heard of H.P. Lovecraft?

In fact, he is descended from one

of the oldest families,

could take his place,

   if he wanted,

at the club on Benevolent Street.

I'll have that New York Times,

first, if you please.

But we know him only by his kid-cruel nickname,

as we recount to one another

the odd frisson of another 

Peckerhead sighting.

To the Shah

Adapted from Hafiz via Emerson

For whom does great Arcturus raise

his shining spear each eve and morn?

For thee, great Shah: thy foes he hunts,

thy fawning courtiers he slays!

That Moment

A prisoner in Stalin's camps kept this notebook, made of wood and birch bark, hidden under his straw bedding. He wrote on this page, from memory, a 1917 poem by Anna Akhmatova. Below, I have made my own version of the poem followed by a few lines of my own about the photo.

I know precisely when it happened --
Monday, the twenty-first. At night,
the roofs of the city enshrouded in mist --
and what -- some idling fool decided
there was a thing in the world called love.

And look at us -- from boredom
or laziness, we bought the lie
and we live it thus: daily we
look forward to meetings; nightly
we dread the moment of parting.
And, oh, we fall slaves
to every passing love song.

But, gradually, this thing I know
will be passed on to everyone,
and a hush will descend.
I figured this out by accident,
and since, have parted ways
from the self I was formerly.
                                             --- Anna Akhmatova, 1917

              ****

Somewhere, a nameless man,
a cipher in an unmapped gulag
makes, and conceals
   beneath his dank straw bed,
a birch-bark notebook.
With god knows only what for ink
he writes this poem from memory.
"Akhmatova," he sighs. "I love her."
They have never met. Her bleak work
and its desolating music
his one last link to things of beauty.

Young Girl's Prayer to Eos, at Corinth

I pray to rosy-fingered dawn,

the goddess Eos,

for a good day. Today

especially, I need the luck.

I call her mama.

She calls me daughter,

and other endearments:

my little ransom, my lock
of golden ram-fleece,
my little vindication.
My real name a murmur only

as she prays for herself and for me,

to the floor-crack goddess

whose name is contagion

to even utter aloud.

The old nurse Iole calls her "mistress,"

and fears her tantrums,

her whip-snaps over rusty water

or herbs picked in haste

without their medicinal roots.

Yet mama takes counsel

from the only countrywoman she has

among these Attic strangers.

What would she do if Iole

were not there to hold her back?

I dread to think it.

Only papa calls her by name --

always a trembling vocative

as though she were a goddess,

each glance or word or embrace

a begged-for beneficence.

As it should be,

considering our lineage,

daughters of kings.

Just days ago he called to me.

I ran to meet him. Beware

your mother, he warned me.

When her eyes go all black

the way they do most every day now,

I want you to run and hide.

Of course I didn’t.

I do the eye thing, too,

but not as well as my mother does.

Just yesterday, beneath the oak,

on the hilltop in view of the palace

mama and I made a little hecatomb,

and as she watched and said the words,

I burned the effigy of the king,

and a blond-haired doll

to represent his daughter.

And papa? I asked,

thrusting the helmeted doll

head first into the twig-fire,

shall we burn papa?

She seized the doll and squeezed it.

No, she said. Not papa.

And she held it to her bosom,

eyes closed and rocking,

so long that I crept away.

Let me never love anyone

if it hurts that much!

Another day, Eos:

promise me the dawn

of tomorrow, and all will be well.

For this is the day

of my initiation: the world below,

and the one above both joined

in a terrible drama.

And here it comes: she is calling us.

Children, children, come!

I tremble and look at my brother.

She is at the doorway,

her eyes all black, her arms

extended rigidly.

Darker, lower, her voice again:

Children, children come! Now!

I push my brother,

the golden-locked fool. You first,

I say. He runs to her embrace.

I watch what she does.

It is over quickly, as with a chicken

or a hare. Come daughter,

come! she beckons me.

I step over my brother. It is my turn.

My eyes go to Hecate. I lift

my throat and take in my grasp

my mama’s trembling knife hand.

I know I am there. I know

a crimson ribbon is leaving me

and flooding everywhere.

I hear the howl of a man.

It is papa. He has seen it.

I hear the long, low laughter

as mama mocks him.

In a while I will do

what mama taught me.

My eyes will return from Hecate,

and the ribbon of my blood

will furl back inward,

and I shall be whole again.

Who asks for this day, Eos,

and for another dawn tomorrow?

I am Medea, daughter of Medea.

And my daughter who comes after

will be Medea, daughter of Medea.

And we will make men sorry

they were ever born.