Tillie

Steel-town Tillie

was my first bag lady.

As a child I trailed her,

just out of reach

of the miasma of sour milk

and spoiled meat.

She stopped before the five-and-dime

to comb her thinning hair,

mouse brown now streaked

with yellow-white

no manner of primping

could beautify.

She had a Hepburn face,

high cheekbones.

She’d stop in every doorway

to see herself mirrored

and re-arrange her scarf.

Dogs sniffed the oily stains

that marked her bundles and rags.

Starving birds pecked

at the trail of crumbs,

burst buttons and candy wraps,

the lengths of multi-colored thread

that dropped through her
bottomless pockets.

Don’t ask her age, how many

winters she’d tramped the streets —

how many weddings and funerals

she’d watched, like the uninvited fairy

from the shadowed, latter-most pew.

(She had a wedding once, they say.

Asked where her husband is,

folks look away.)

She’d talk, if you ask,

of her house on the hill —

new furniture just in,

painting in progress,

wallpaper sample books

thumbed through.

She doubled back

when no one watched

to the abandoned car

by the railroad tracks,

where she slept,

cradling her packages

like swaddled infants.

Year by year

she was gaunter, thinner.

Finally, they cornered her,

shoved her screaming

into an ambulance.

Word spread around town

of an abscess gone wild,

a hole in Tillie’s neck

where everything she drank

gushed out as from

a cartoon bullet hole.

They paused in the taverns,

in the vomit-scented Moose Hall,

with litanies of “Tillie, poor Tillie!”

On side streets,

her shadow shambled without her,

frail as a moth wing,

picked apart by moonlight,

scattered by cicadas,

waiting to reassemble

if she returned

to her appointed rounds.

Hearing the Wendigo

All the Native Americans from the Appalachians all the way North to the Hudson Bay. share the common myth of the invisible smiter who walks on the winter wind. British writer Algernon Blackwood heard the myths from Native American guides in Canada and wrote a story about it. He called the creature The Wendigo. It is campfire lore everywhere. Here is my version of the myth. My great-grandmother was probably a Pennsylvania Mingo, so this is also a family story.

There is a place

where the winds meet howling

cold nights in frozen forest

snapping the tree trunks

in haste for their reunion.

Gone is the summer they brooded in,

gone their autumn awakening.

Now at last they slide off glaciers,

sail the spreading ice floes,

hitch a ride with winter.

Great bears retreat and slumber,

owls flee

and whippoorwills shudder.

Whole herds of caribou

stampede on the tundra

in the madness of hunger,

the terror of thunder-winds.

The snow-piled Huron packs tight

the animal skins around his doorway,

hopes his small fire and its thin smoke

escape the notice of Boreal eyes.

He will not look out at the night sky,

for fear of what might look back.

Only brave Orion, hunter among

his fellow stars, watches

as icy vectors collide in air.

Trees break like tent poles,

earth sunders to craters

beneath the giant foot stamps.

Birds rise to whirlwind updraft

and come down bones and feathers.

I have not seen the Wendigo —

I scarcely dare to name it! —

the wind’s collective consciousness,

id proud and hammer-hard.

To see is to be plucked

into the very eye of madness.

Yet I have felt its upward urge

like hands beneath my shoulders,

lifting and beckoning.

It says, You dream of flying?

Then fly with me!

I answer No,

not with your hungry eye above me,

not with those teeth
like roaring chain saws,

not with those pile-driving footsteps —

Like the wise Huron sachem,

the long-gone Erie, the Mingo,

the Seneca, the Onondaga,

like all Hodenosaunee-born,

I too avert my eyes

against the thing that summons me.

Screaming, the airborne smiter

rips off the tops of conifers,

crushes a row of power-line towers,

peppers the hillside with saurian tracks,

then leaps straight up at the Dog Star

as though its anger could crack the cosmos

as though the sky bowl were not infinite,

and wind alone could touch the stars

and eat them.

The Dead End

This old poem, now revised, was based on a dream of finding a mysterious courtyard in Greenwich Village. Visiting Manhattan last November, I found the place that almost certainly inspired the dream and the poem. 

Far west, beyond the numbered avenues,

there is a street, accessed by a curious courtyard,

a peopled lane

where, lost on a moonlit but foggy night,

you seem to know the passers-by.

House numbers seem too high,

the street signs are illegible

but you feel recognized, and safe.

Each casual stroller,

each idling window shopper,

seems known to you.

Each, when looked at, imparts a smile,

an instant’s head-nod,

but then a pause, a head-shake,

implying: my error, I do not know you.

And then it comes to you—

the vague acquaintances,

childhood friends you moved away from,

once-met and nearly-forgotten lovers,

all of whom suddenly — or so they said —

just up and died.

You never saw a body.

The service was over before you heard.

The players reshuffled and life went on.

You never quite believed it, of course,

and now you have the proof:

the disappeared have all just moved

to this brick-lined street,

took up new names and furtive jobs:

caretaker, night watchman

lobster shift foreman

invisible cook in the diner kitchen

night worker in office tower

unlisted phone, anonymous
in a nameless lodging.

I found the street once, then lost it.

I’ve never managed to find it again,

can’t help but wonder
about those houses —

brownstones and bricks
backed by a high-rise tower —

whose windows were those
whose curtains parted?

whose astonished eyes saw me
and pulled away?

Wish I could go up and read
the nameplates,

knock on a certain door or two,

resume an interrupted dialogue,

give or receive an embrace

I’m sorry I never shared.

But all too soon

I’ll be there anyway,

an anagram, a pseudonym,

a permanent resident

of Incognito Village.

One Day's News

Not quite a "found poem," but a poem from "found" news. While living in Weehawken NJ in 1995, I was startled by the overall gruesome tone of one day's headlines and news stories. They seemed indicative of where we are as a species.

ONE DAY’S NEWS
from The Jersey Journal,
Nov. 21, 1995

Five years before millennium
and here is one day’s news:
An Oklahoma teen
is chained in a well house,
burned with an iron,
scalded with bleach,
shocked with high voltage.
Give back the money!
his tormenters scream.
He didn’t take
his mother’s
drug-dealing treasury,
but she won’t hear it.
Beat him! she tells her husband.

Well-oiled gears
crave Aztec offerings.
An escalator rips off
three tiny toes
from a three-year-old girl
on the New York subway. 

A leaf shredder sucks
park-worker’s hand
into the chopping blades
in maple-red Hoboken.
A head and a leg
wash up in Newark.
Cops say they match
a torso found
in an unmarked suitcase.

Thieves shoot cabbies
in back of the head,
then strip off their socks
to get their money.

Wanting a baby,
an Illinois woman
kills her pregnant rival,
cuts open her abdomen
with a pair of scissors
to deliver a boy.
She flees the scene,
but not before
she slashes the throats
of the woman’s other children.
Arrested, she asked
“So what’s the problem?
Just why am I being charged?”

Down in San Juan
the livestock are killed
by chupacabras,
goatsucker vampires
that drink the blood
and eat the innards.
Two cats, five goats
and twenty parakeets
already murdered,
the baffled police admit.

Just one day’s news.
Sufficient to one day
is the evil thereof.

School Children Set Fire to London

Every year in Great Britain, school children recreate the Great London Fire of 1666. They build miniature streets of Tudor houses, take them out to the schoolyard, and then watch in merriment as the whole thing burns down, building by building. See what you missed in your boring American school days.

Snofru the Mad

One of the oddest-sounding names for a ruler (at least to English ears) is the Egyptian "Snofru." My poem starts with a child's embarrassment about the sound of his name, and leads to more and more outre and outrageous obsessions. This is a fantasy, of course, but grounded in an obscure chapter in Egyptian history.

Snofru or Snefru was Pharaoh in the Fourth Dynasty and the immediate predecessor of Khufu (Cheops), builder of the Great Pyramid. Historians are baffled as to why Snofru built himself three separate pyramids. Snofru was the first Pharaoh to enclose his name in a cartouche on monuments.

SNOFRU THE MAD

With a name like Snofru

you’d better be good

as a Pharaoh, as a survivor.

Would the gods laugh, he wondered,

when his weighing time came up —

his heart against a feather

on the fatal balance —

would tittering among them

make his recitation falter?

A careful planner,

he lays four boats in his pyramid,

one pointed in each direction —

he’d launch all four

so his soul could elude

the pursuing god Set

and confound old Ammit,

the Eater of the Dead.

Grave robbers? He’d baffle them,

build three great pyramids

for Snofru the Pharaoh —

hang the cost!

He’d bury an imposter

in each sarcophagus.

The gods alone would know

his final resting place,

a well-appointed tomb

whose architect he’d strangled.

As for his Queen Hetephras,

dead these three years now,

he left her innards

in an alabaster jar,

yet carried her mummy away.

Nights, he unwinds her wrappings,

kisses her natron-scented lips,

caresses her sewn-up belly,

then carefully restores

her royal bandages,

her mask and jewels.

His courtiers avoid him,

smell death despite

the unguents and incense.

An impudent general

already makes eyes

at his daughter. They shceme.

There is talk, there is talk.

He will neither make war, nor peace,

turns back ambassadors

as he spends his days divining

how to turn his eye-blink life

into the gods’ eternity.

One night he slips away.

The upstart will assume his name,

bed his black-eyed daughter,

inherit his unused pyramid —

the better to advance his stratagem.

With pride and pomp

he circled his name

on a hundred monuments,

but he is far from Memphis now,

where he speaks to his servants

in but a whisper.

His modest sarcophagus,

when that time comes,

is inscribed with another name.

His journey West

will be uneventful.

Then, coming and going

among the living the dead,

he’ll watch as the proud

are judged and eaten,

then take his place, unsandaled,

plain as the commonest slave,

serving his mummy-bride

at the table of the gods.

The Anaconda Poems

From my 2005 collection, a touched-up version of my animal reincarnation poem, which came to me after reading an article about the sex life of the giant anaconda snake.

1

Some want to come back from death,

reliving their human folly

again and again,

life after dreary life

until they get it right,

then slide down the chute

to soulless oblivion.

We who don’t care for perfection

are doomed to come back as animals.

Do we return

according to our habits,

the heaped accounts of karma,

or can we choose?

I choose,

study the animal kingdom

for the soul’s best condo,

the leafiest turf,

the longest return engagement.

Choosing is hard for a hermit poet.

No herd instinct for me,

no hive or flock or pride

if you please.

Let me be something

solitary yet strong,

lordly and unapproachable.

I search for incarnations

on top of the food chain.

I’ll eat

but not be eaten

hunt, but elude the hunter.

At last I find it —

the giant anaconda.

Female I’ll have to be —

the males are nothing.

Mother of all snakes,

I’ll grow to thirty feet,

spend all day lazing

in the waters of the Amazon.

Nights I’ll wait

at the edge of the river,

when deer and rabbit,

panther and lemur

come to drink.

My fangs attach

to whatever approaches;

I throw throw my coils

with amazing speed.

The astonished prey

immobile, breathless

as I squeeze squeeze

squeeze

to heart-stop stillness.

Compacted to sausage shape

the still warm animals

slide down my gullet,

my inward turning teeth

guiding them onwards.

I have no enemies,

swim unconcerned

among piranha

electric eels

and crocodile caymans.

Not even my prey

seem to notice me

as I mount skyward

to the treetop banquet,

my green and black camouflage

matching the dappled forest.

Parrots and toucans

I eat like candy.

Only the monkeys fear me

somersault screaming

at the sight of me —

Oh, and the hairless apes

in the jungle villages:

I need but show my tongue,

my unblinking eye,

to make them run away.

Taking the sun

on a bank a-burst

with yellow blossoms

I am a jasmine empress

irresistible

to the males of my species.

I sense them coming,

feel the grass parting,

a dozen today

twining about me.

I turn with them,

move toward mud.

Hours we coil together —

puny as they are, it

feels good everywhere —

one of them will find the spot.

2

I stow away

on an airplane’s cargo hold,

emerge at La Guardia,

hitch ride on a luggage rack

through tunnel to Manhattan.

I mean to eat my way around —

a big green worm

in the big green Apple!

City Hall Park has plenty of trees,

pigeons abounding.

I study the populace,

learn how to move among them

with camouflage and mimicry.

This is going to be easy.

I will have my fill of man-food.

Homeless Anaconda

a garbage bag

unraveled to wrap me

gets me a night

in the city shelter

(lots to eat,

but it needed washing)

Hip-Hop Anaconda,

plenty of room for me

in those baggy pants.

Ate well on 125th Street

but had to spit out

gold chains and a boom box.

Transvestite Anaconda

prowling the piers

in matching alligator

accessories. Honey

I could just eat you alive.

An Anaconda Dowager

draped in furs

indulging my sweet

incisors

with the ladies

at Rumpelmeyers.

Roller Blade Anaconda

knocking down doormen

on Central Park South,

scarfing up poodles

at the curbside.

Painted purple,

welcomed as Barney,

I am Day Care Anaconda,

turning a jungle gym

into my cafeteria

(I really must start

counting calories!)

I’m unadorned as

Bowery Anaconda —

an hallucination —

acquiring a taste

for marinated men

left out for the taking

in cardboard boxes!

The Anaconda Nun

in her floppy habit

waylays worshipers

in the nave of St. Patrick’s.

The Irish cardinal

wouldn’t know a snake

if he saw one.

Resting now, I am

Steam Tunnel Anaconda

need time to digest

all my victims

time to prepare

for the progeny

already swelling in my belly.

I’ll winter here in warmth,

no rent no taxes,

won’t need a green card

welfare or Medicaid

They can’t zoo or jail me

I have immunity

endangered species status.

When my seventy-five babies

emerge from manhole covers

on Easter morning

on lower Fifth Avenue

they’ll already be citizens —

American Anacondas!

The Exhumation of Goethe

In 1970, the East German Communist government wanted to create an international cultural tourist attraction that would rival Red Square in Moscow. So they decided to exhume the body of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest of all German poets and thinkers, so they could make a mummy of him, like the preserved body of Lenin in Red Square. Things did not go well. We never got have that Faust theme park, or be welcomed by docents dressed as Werther, Gretchen or Mephistopheles.

East Germany, 1970

By all means do this at night, while Weimar
sleeps, while even those whose job it is to watch
the watchers, sleep. In merciful dark,
the third shift silence when the local electric plant
shuts down for the Good of the State,

take a cart — no, not a car,
a hand-drawn cart —
dampen its wheels so your journeys to,

and from, and back
to the foggy graveyard are soundless.

Do not awaken the burghers!
Here are the keys to the wrought-iron gates —
mind you don’t rattle them.
The crypt has been purposefully left unlocked.
You need but draw the door.
The cart will just squeeze through
(Engineer Heinrich has measured everything!)

Open the sarcophagus as quietly as possible.
Watch the fingers! Don’t leave a mark
on the hand-carved cover.
Be sure it’s Goethe, the one with a “G.”
We don’t want his crypt-mate Schiller
(too many anti-People tendencies).

Lift up the whole thing gently.
The bones will want to fly apart.
Only the shroud, and some mummified meat
keep him in the semblance of skeleton.
Just scoop the whole thing up
like a pancake, then into the cart.

Here’s a bag for the skull. Don’t muss
those ash-gray laurel leaves.
We plan to coat them in polymer
after we study that Aryan skull
whose brain conceived Faust,
Egmont, and sorrowful Werther.

We’re going to wire the bones together,
strip off that nasty flesh,
maybe bleach him a little,
make a respectable ghost of Goethe.

Who knows, if he looks good enough,
in a newly-lined sarcophagus,
we could put him on display.
Come to Kulturstadt!
See Goethe’s body!
Even better than Lenin!
(Can we say that?)

It will be a world attraction.

We’ll pipe in lieder and opera.
Tour guides will be dressed as Gretchen.
Maybe a fun house
with Mephistopheles,
a sausage-fest at Brander’s Inn.

Ah! the cart is here! The bones,
yes, the bones. Unfortunate, the odor.
We can work on that.
The colors, mein Gott,
(excuse the expression)
they will not please —

over there, Klaus,

if you’re going to be sick —

It’s such a little skeleton —
was he really so short?

The books said he towered

over his contemporaries.

So much for the books!
And the shroud — that color —
not at all what we imagined.
Perhaps the opera house
could make a new one.

Watch those ribs —

so many little bones

in the fingers.

Things are just not . . .

holding together.

I can’t do this.

The project is cancelled.

Poets are just too — flimsy.

Put this mess back
where it came from.
Next time let’s exhume a general,
Bismarck, the Kaiser,
someone with a sword and epaulets.
Armor would be even better.
The People want giants!

Just One More

Midnight has passed. The kerosene lamp

is the only thing on in the kitchen.

I tip-toe out for our secret ritual.

“Hungry again,” my grandmother asks?

I nod. There wasn’t much to eat

now that the garden had browned out

and snow came up to the porch-step.

In the tiny pool of yellow light

on the oilcoth-covered table,

she opens a stack of saltine crackers,

splits the wax paper wrapping

to a domino line of leaning squares,

salt-crackled and crisp. The dish

of butter was already waiting.

With one broad knife she spreads

the golden soft butter on one,

then two, then half a dozen.

Hunched over the cracker feast,

we nibble as quietly as mice.

In every room, the sleepers breathe.

We bite – one snorts – we chew —

another begins to snore – we swallow —

as someone moans and turns to one side.

They never hear us, and never will.

“One more?” my grandmother asks me,

broad butter knife in hand.

“Just one,” I say. If I eat one,

she eats another. Somehow we always

find two at the bottom.

A cup of spring water to wash them down,

a good-night wave at the kitchen door,

and I creep back to bed. You never

go to bed hungry if a grandmother is there.

In Chill November

There is a day in November, when you walk in the woods (here, it is Pittsburgh's vast Frick Park), when you see a great stand of leafless trees, and, at a distance, you cannot tell if they have lost their leaves, or if they were dead already. How could you tell? This revised poem comes from that quandary.

IN CHILL NOVEMBER

The leaves be red,

The nuts be brown,

They hang so high

They will not fall down.

—Elizabethan Round, Anon.

The snow has come.

The leaves have fallen.

Long nights commit the chill

low sun and flannel clouds cannot disperse.

We walk the park, stripped now

     to mere schematics,

vision drawn out to farther hills

now that the forest is blanked

like flesh turned glass on X-ray negative.

These woods are sham so near the solstice,

play out a murder mystery of birch and maple.

The riddle is, who’s dead and who’s pretending?

That witches’ elm with clinging broomsticks —

     is it deceased or somnolent?

Which of these trees will never bloom again:

     A Lombardy poplar stripped by blight—

     A maple picked clean by gypsy moths —

     A thunder-blasted pedestal of ash —

     A moribund sycamore whose only life

          came in a few vain buds

          (growing like dead men’s hair and nails,

          slow to acknowledge the rot below)?

The ground’s a color cacophony,

     alive, alive!

the treeline a study in gray and brown.

So, who can tell

     the bare tree from the dead,

     the thin man from the skeleton?

Which denizens of wood-lot shed these leaves?

Which is a corpse? a zombie?

Which one is but a vermin shell?

Which treads the night on portable roots,

festooned with bats,

sinking its web of trailing vines

into the veins of saplings?

Which stalwart oaks will topple,

which trunks cave in to termite nests?

Which is the next victim of carpenter ants?

How can we tell the living from the dead?

It is just the month: November lies.

October always tells the truth.

You could no more fake

the shedding of leaves

than simulate a pulse in stone.

Only the living fall in love,

only the living cry for joy,

only the living relinquish that month

in red and yellow shuddering!

The pines,

those steeple-capped Puritans,

what price their ever-green?

Scrooge trees, they hoard their summers,

withhold their foliage,

refuse to give the frost his due.

Ah, they are prudent,

Scotch pine and wily cedar,

touch-me-not fir and hemlock.

They will live to a ripe old age

(if you can call that living).

I shun this sham Novembering.

Turn back the calendar: there, Halloween,

no, further back to the start of leaf-fall!

There! The first-frost autumn shuddering!

Love! Burn! Sing! Crumble!

Dance! Wind! Fall! Tumble!

Into the wind-blown pyramid of leaves!

Spin in a whirling dust-devil waltz!

Leaf-pile! Treetops! Tramping on clouds!

Weightless, flying, red-caped October!