Sunday, January 14, 2018

The Poet's Press Loft in Manhattan


This two-part poem is a recollection of sitting on the balcony of The Poet's Press Manhattan loft in 1973, while the printing press ran inside, and then visiting the locale two decades later. I photographed the building this past November. The building is 668 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue to locals).

OF THE MAKING OF BOOKS

1973
What is it about ink
poised over virgin paper
if pen, a word at a time,
why not a press,
page upon page repeating?
Plate, blanket, roller,
compressor, roller, sucker, gripper
(the guts of unromantic offset
supplanting Gutenberg)
the lift and thrust of the sheet
no hand has touched,
the slurring commingle
of ink and water in foaming fountain

till stanza follows stanza
canto and chapter —
sheaves to be folded and sewn
into a hundred books,
five hundred books!
I call it making paper babies,
my dingy loft on Sixth Avenue
a hatching hive of chapbooks.

I sit on the fire escape
outside my soot-grime windows.
The moon has long since set,
street dark in cast-iron canyons.
It is insufferable August —
I want to sleep in coolness —
the press churns on behind me,
the infeed pile diminishing,
the finished sheets descending.

I know its sound like a heartbeat,
just how long I can linger
before the ink needs tending.

I watch the late-night drifters below:
rag pickers and winos and psychopaths,
a junkie laden with burglar tools
eyeing each storefront,
some swearing brawlers
from the lesbian cycle bar
around the corner,
the blur of cabs with
rolled-down windows,
blear-eyed drivers barreling
in homeward trucks,
the dilatory patrol car
beaming the doorways
for sleeping bums
or a glimpse of frenzied sodomy.

Inside, I empty the paper bins.
It is three a.m. I can still print
another signature, wait out
the early dawn on the fire escape.
I cannot sleep anyway.
Sometimes it seems I work
for the machine.

There has been little profit in this,
yet everywhere I go in this rusted city,
poets are gathering.
A multitude of hands lift up
these books.
In chorus they chant
Just off the press
My latest
Please buy one


1996
The cast-iron street is floodlit now
the columns as white as marble
bed bath and book and clothing stores
draw thousands here. I always pause
to look up at the forgotten loft
where I began my consummate folly.

I have dragged this book madness
two decades now. My closets explode
with unsold volumes,
projects half bound
and then abandoned, the beached whale
guillotine cutter in my bedroom.

The poets I published are dying off:
the Village Sibyl, Barbara Holland, gone,
now Emilie Glen, my poetry mother.
I hear it said at her memorial
that these things mattered after all,
that little books are voyagers,
bottle messages into indifferent seas,
rockets to the future.

In this world of too many books,
so much bad verse and rotten prose,
it is hard to believe it.
Yet it was thus with Poe,
Whitman and Dickinson.
Barbara haunts Morton Street,
and Emilie, Barrow.
Only their books wing onwards,
perching on brownstone rooftops,
flapping their shiny covers,
ready to plunge when least expected,
open to that page,
that singular poem,
that line with its magic

in words that stay.

Saturday, January 13, 2018

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.



Wednesday, January 10, 2018

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.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

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!