Arabesques on the Statue of Liberty

A rapist on the Staten Island Ferry lusts after the Statue of Liberty. On Canal Street, a Chinese wife makes a break for freedom. And then King Kong and the Statue of Liberty switch places. A new revision of an old New York poem.

1

Bad Dingo rides

the Staten Island ferry

dusk till dawn,

clinging to rail,

nestling an all-night

tumescence,

hard at the sight

of the robed lady,

vast,

unapproachable.

He’s stalking her,

biding his time.

Some night

there’d be a fog,

a power failure.

He’d come up behind her,

prodding the small

of her spine

with his imperious knife,

jostling her bronze buttocks

with his ardent flesh prod.

She’d drop the tablet;

the torch would sputter.

He’d push her off her pedestal.

Bad Dingo would give it to her good

the way he did to all the white ladies

in parks and stairwells and subway cars.

This would be the rape of all rapes,

the pinnacle of his career,

the ultimate boast

“See that toppled goddess

in the harbor--

she ain’t so proud now

since someone had her,

made her moan.

Bad Dingo had her,

stuck it to the Statue,

white-lady Liberty!”

2

In Chinatown,

Mrs. Wang mounts

a quiet rebellion

against the ways of the elders.

She has done all

her mother asked her:

married the boy

the matchmaker ordained,

bore sons and daughters

in regular order

burned joss and incense

at every altar,

sending ghost gold and peaches,

phantom cars and televisions

Hong Kong Hell dollars

to the teeming, greedy dead.

Now her husband travels,

has mistresses, won’t talk

about his gambling.

Her children are gone,

married to foreign devils

Her round-eyed grandchildren

won’t learn Mandarin,

will never send joss riches

to her when she is dead.

Now she becomes a whirlwind:

She sells her jade and porcelain,

cleans out her savings account,

buys an airline ticket

for San Francisco —

from there, who knows?

She pawns the statuette

of pearly white Kuan-Yin,

the Goddess of Mercy

whose only blessing

was endless childbirth

and washing and ironing,

On a whim she buys another

to take its place at her bedside:

a foot-high Statue of Liberty

with batteries and glowing torch.

She leaves it for her husband,

her wedding ring

on its spiky crown.

3

Today two New York titans

switch places.

A grumpy Green Liberty

strides up Fifth Avenue,

crushing pedestrians in verdigris.

Her sandalled feet

send buses flying,

kiosks shattering.

Her great head turns

among the office towers.

She reaches in,

pulls screaming executives

through razor edge panes,

undresses them

with her copper fingers,

discards them one by one

to the pavement

twenty stories below.

The man she wants

is not among them. He’s got

to be a real American,

one of those Arrow short models,

blond, and a screamer,

a yielding but unwilling male

under her stern metallic nails.

The more he cries out, Put me down,

the more she likes him.

Uptown, she finds him:

a tousle-headed messenger,

scooped up from his bicycle.

She cups him in one palm,

drops her tablet,

rolls up her sleeves,

and starts the painful ascent

of the Empire State Building.

Downtown

on Liberty Island,

King Kong wields a torch,

incinerates all passing freighters,

capsizes the passenger ships.

He hurls great boulders skyward,

picks off incoming airplanes one by one.

He is guarding the harbor now.

He is a real American

and he shouts his slogans:

America First.

Stay out.

Go home.

No foreigners allowed.

First Snow

i
No breath of wind
disturbs this perfect canvas:
dwarf roses, faded, leafless;
twisted branches gray and brown;
intricate overlay
of pristine snow, pyramidal
tracings of every line and arc
in flakes of fallen crystal.
Suspended within
     this latticework
a thousand rose hips burn
like sour radishes
or petrified cherries,
a memory of blushes
and blood-flushed passion
caught unawares by winter.

ii
An hour later, I pass again.
The snow’s calligraphy
is still untouched by wind.
Rose hips still beam
their ruddy messages.
The sun has slid
across the ice-sky
to its low-slung zenith
and one hundred
astonished roses
have opened their petals —
     dying as fast
     as they unfurl,
their wilting edges burned
by unkind frost,

virgin Juliets
no sooner born
     than entombed.
The suicidal blooms
lean to the sun, pleading
their disbelief of darkness,
the impossibility
of sudden perishing.

Love comes unbidden thus,
as the capricious rose.

The Company of an Eagle

I have a date

with my eagle lover —

bird-killing bird,

rabbit hunter,

assassin of squirrels,

sneak thief of cub and pup and kitten.

His prominence

(one- or two-headed)

on flags and coins,

seals and warplanes

must have enthralled me.

And of course he might,

just might be Zeus in disguise.

I cleared my calendar,

cleaned house,

turned balcony

into a landing pad/eyrie.

Maybe my kind enjoy

being swooped down upon.

The phone will not ring,

the door chime

hoards expectant silences.

Nothing will precede him

except an updraft

and the sound of wingbeats.

Wingbeats, yes. The dull

thud of contact, then

something rolls

into my living room,

The outspread wings and talons

guiding it.

That predator egg he brought

sits on the couch

between us,

and if it hatches,

what then of dinner and wine

and candlelight?

Will the eaglet choke down

my proffered feast,

preening his downy feathers

and asking for more?

When our entre nous

becomes a raptor nursery,

shall our tryst be forgotten?

Will his nestling stay, too,

curled in my laundry hamper?

Isn’t there a Mrs. Eagle

to take charge here?

Dare I tip-toe out and back

from the bathroom

without the admonishing screech

of its never-abating hunger?

Will he remain

to hear my poems,

to loan me his wingspan,

his shadow, his mute

but overarching company?

Or is it just about him?

“Look, I have made an egg!”

He never said there was a she-eagle,

or that he’s a single dad-in-waiting.

It may not hatch at all.

What if it’s dead?

What if it’s only good

for making an omelet?

I could have chosen wolf,

or lion, sky-hawk or tiger

as my companion.

But here we sit, the eagle,

the egg and I,

the embarrassed silence,

the shudder of wing-shrug,

the raptor eye fixed on me.

There is nothing else to do.

Slowly, I begin to undress.

Image: Magritte, Domain of Arnheim, 1938.

The Battle of Pydna

This painting, showing the surrender of the Macedonian leader Perseus to the Romans, followed one of the most important battles in history, the Battle of Pydna in 186 BCE. Never heard of it? Neither did I, until today. Alexander the Great was a Macedonian, and the vast empire he conquered was divided among his generals when he died in 323 BCE. Macedonia remained a powerful kingdom amid all the struggles of Alexander's successors, making and breaking all kinds of treaties with the other Greek kingdoms. But the end came in this battle, with the Romans.
The battle involved more than 80,000 men and 22 elephants. The Romans broke up and destroyed the classic Greek "phalanx" formation and slaughtered the Macedonians. Mass plunder and rape followed, for the Roman soldiers were unmatched in brutality. More than 300,000 Macedonians were sold into slavery. 
Macedonia was finished, and Rome was now the Great Power.
Never again would Greeks be more than second-tier players in history. The dream of Alexander -- one world under one wise ruler -- died at Pydna. All of this is a stern reminder that so much of history is brutal, horrible and inhuman, and that a turning point comes, and no one knows it is the actual end of something. If the moment comes that the United States, as a Republic, is "finished," no one in that moment will know it.
History is a long process. It is a text, written slowly and patiently, corrected by hindsight, and by shards found in ruins and lost testimony, but it conheres and makes sense.
Weep for Pydna, for Greece, for the glory of Alexander.
Tremble at the thought of the Roman wolf, the Roman eagle, ascendant.

The Loved Dead (Ode 15)

1

Another year,

the sun resembles itself

but does not fool the trees

who shun its cool imposture.

Buds open reluctantly,

their slanted eyes askew

with annual doubts.

It is never the same,

each lap of light a ghost

of former springs, each ray

a waning monument

from where a darkling star

gluts space

with ever-diminishing mass.

The year we met,

is the immemorial year, the year

that cannot be repeated.

What world is this,

in which you do not wake,

and sleep, and call me?

The universe forgets itself —

the idiot sun implodes

into a fathomless mouth,

both feaster and food

adjourning to nothingness

at the event horizon.

The earth spins blindly on.

First, love can die.

And then the loved

becomes the loved dead.

What if, in world-wipe,

you never existed?

2

I swear, I have not lost you.

Your disassembled eyes

rode in another’s skull today.

I saw them — there was no blue

akin to your lapis irises.

Your disconnected arm

hooked onto mine at dusk.

(I walked alone, and blushed

at how and where

the hand-touch held me.)

Tonight before I slept

your mouth surprised me.

(The room was empty.)

It is better this way —

each bit of you a ghost

returning on an X-ray wind.

Each day some icy shard of you

drops off some glacial height

onto an unsuspecting face,

as though the gods that made you,

singular, keep trying

to make another.

The universe deceives itself.

One thing may be like another;

one thing is not the other.

Though ardent spring explodes

upon the feathered fields,

it is a new spring, slate clean.

The past — if there is a past —

is amnesia’d in wormhole transit

to the fiercely blazing present.

I wait in solitude. If ghosts

could ever present themselves,

they’d rage because they could

not say their names.

If phantom faces seem to be yours,

I love them for the lie they speak,

of being you.

3

In park-walk past, I came upon

your ancestor’s statue,

a soldier patriot who served

with General Washington.

He has your face. The bronze

has weathered little. I stand,

and stand, and cannot stop looking.

Not acid rain, nor pigeon insult

has weathered it. I have you yet,

and yet have nothing. A few things

we touched in common: a bowl,

a red-glass pitcher whose breaking

I dread to think of. Not one photo.

Who is alive who ever

saw us together?

What proof but memory,

a weave of cell and synapse?

In the hard light

of a winter afternoon,

I am cheerful in graveyard

until I see the name

of one of your countrymen.
Joy is eclipsed.
The sun, slunk low,
beams hard into my eyes.

Amid these tombs and columns,

sphinxes and obelisks,

what is there left

but never-ending mourning?

What is there left

except to live on out

our ever-precious moments

in their honor, and in their names?

The loved dead

who never come again

except in shards and glances,

moment of shuddering grief

and the remembering smile,

by what of you, and why,

am I haunted?

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.

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.