maggid

grandpa will go to bed with those stories

in his whistling earlobes

stretched, long, squishy.

grandpa will not share the load

no matter how fiercely we beg

he will go to bed and so will the ships

their cracking wooden floorboards.

the ships and the trolleys, the coal

and the wooden crates. really there are three

only three stories he gives us

wrapped delicately, humorously in cheese cloth--

the wooden crates, the cherry tomatoes,

the stutters. the rest are under

grandpa's tongue, the edge peeking out

only when, open-mouthed in his recliner,

head tilted back, he snores.

so grandpa's snores are the farms

of East New York, a violent crash

to the depths of ocean water,

grandpa's snores are churning windmill,

a whole pizza pie across from the office,

manicured lawns, empty lots,

hat factories, angry wooden spoons,

suicidal sons, the pouches under a wife's eyelids,

gun in the dresser drawer, side of the freeway,

nachos with canned mushrooms. 

sha, shtill--

grandpa, grandpa what will you give me?

how much is in your open palm

the softness of aged fingers

and if your hand is empty

but it is still a hand, is it enough?

new year

when the covers are tucked

under the bed frame

so tight ankles stiffen

toes only point

to the end

cannot sleep like this

chunks of something

at the back of my throat

to start a new decade

friends, their bodies

weigh down the covers

on either side

of my body

hold me when it shakes

bring liquids

speak what they truly want

across my hairline

put me to sleep

when i am with child

there is only a moment

for my body

its shaking and

upheaval

no privacy with her

calling my name

beyond the door

my own hand and head

against porcelain

only for a moment

if i was a child

someone would always

touch me

when things hurt

lay hands on forehead

and chest, cheek on belly

stay with me

until deep breaths

women with cars

i could have driven her somewhere

from the corner of my block 

car stopped for a moment

red light, radio blaring the news

she pounds on my window

begging, words i barely hear

only his reassurance, to me

but i'm her husband

her husband- yes

that's what i was afraid of

Ariana told me- in the women's group

most if them have jumped

from moving cars

some on the highway

to escape men

i could have driven her somewhere

the sick dance happened so fast

two bodies circling my car

my own arms, reaching and retracting

to pull up the lock, find my cellphone

neither motions i could commit to 

Tracy's voice haunted me as a child-

won't do no good to call

the police

always come late

if they come at all

and when they arrive...

i could have driven her somewhere

to a sister or a cousin

across a state border

yes of course i will help you

yes we are both women

Audre begins Zami with dedications

i read only yesterday

one for a small white girl

screaming for help on a dark street

and when the car door opens to her

girl runs, terrified by her rescuer's color

back towards that man, white

his boots rounding the corner

she, Audre says, will die stupid

i could have driven her somewhere

but if anyone in the bus stop crowd

judged me, i do not know

they stood, silent greek chorus

as if this is what happens

every time we wait for the B11,

a red light

Zach says they could be con-artists

trying to get in my car

i did the right thing

yes, i say but i don't think so

and to him, to all the boys 

that is the end

but i am bent over

in the guise of touching my toes

to cry, unseen, steady this shaking

this churning stomach

i could have driven her somewhere

circled back around the block

picked her up out of sight

away from the man, the bus stop

but don't think of it

until i'm fifteen blocks too late

too late- it happened too fast

drive on, try to clear my vision

see the road behind my wheel

and later, i lie in bed

window open a crack

(radiator too high) and the cars

on the BQE are a part-time waterfall

my own car parked underneath

sheltered from snow and

i can drive anywhere, anytime 

my day, fades behind me

the disturbing way these things become

stories we tell later

prompt: masturbation

there is a game

i play with myself

look with eyes not implanted in this body

darkened window, mirror, lid of the piano-

any reflective surface. then move away

strap in and sit in 

the cold with no covers

i am hot in the core, just taken

from the boiling pot

summon the image- not a rippling

view from above the neck, but straight ahead-

just as before.  then unbuckle, inspect

i do not know for how long

get-give no relief, shifting my weight

adjusting my very atoms

imagine the little old lady 

sleeping beside the kitchen wall

i would carry on that way but for her

she must be a light sleeper

tossing, out of time with Sidney Bechet

who's strangely, fittingly begun to play 

muskrat blues.  please, don't pull out, keep me

tangled in elastic netting, fingers dangling

limp in the gaps of flexible cloth-

almost a holding on.  in the last moments

there was no old lady, no 1930s

you were a thermal wave in the sky

a firm gelatinous tendril curled in on itself

she came in and out of being, but

i was always there.

in the presence of Adrienne Rich

i heard Adrienne Rich read tonight at the Grand Army Plaza Brooklyn Public Library.  she was frail, fierce, and fiery (ha!  taught my 2nd graders about alliteration today, guess it wore off on me.)  i was tired but i dragged myself out because how could i turn down the opportunity to be in the presence of such a powerful woman?  and let me say, she was not perfect.  it may be sacrilege, but i did not love the new work she read.  the new poems were less urgent, less sensual than her older work that i am familiar with.  but in a way, it does not matter.  it's hard to see that heroines are not infallible super-heroines.  but it's also incredibly relieving.  and i was in no way disappointed-- her presence, her history was huge and tangible.  wow.

i bought a new book of her's to read, but in the meantime, below are two classic and favorite Adrienne Rich poems.  the first one, i have read many times and yet reading it just now i feel an ache in my core, my eyes get watery.  lines from this poem echo in my head and resurface at times.  and the second one, well you can hear the author read part of here.

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

by Adrienne Rich

I was in danger of verbalizing my  moral impulses out of existence.    --Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore
 

1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics textbook in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. "The burning of a book," he says, "arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book."

Back there: the library, walled
with green Britannicas
Looking again
in Durer's Complete Works
for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman

the crocodiles in Herodotus
the Book of the Dead
the Trial of Jeanne d'Arc, so blue
I think, It is her color

and they take the book away
because I dream of her too often
love and fear in a house
knowledge of the oppressor
I know it hurts to burn

2. To imagine a time of silence
or few words
a time of chemistry and music

the hollows above your buttocks
traced by my hand
or, hair is like flesh, you said

an age of long silence

relief

from this tongue this slab of limestone
or reinforced concrete
fanatics and traders
dumped on this coast wildgreen clayred
that breathed once
in signals of smoke
sweep of the wind

knowledge of the oppressor
this is the oppressor's language

yet I need it to talk to you

3. People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes.

(the fracture of order
the repair of speech
to overcome this suffering)

4. We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed

dryness of mouth
after panting

there are books that describe all this
and they are useless

You walk into the woods behind a house
there in that country
you find a temple
built eighteen hundred years ago
you enter without knowing
what it is you enter

so it is with us

no one knows what may happen
though the books tell everything

burn the texts said Artaud

5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language.

21 Love Poems                     by Adrienne Rich

 

The Dream of A Common Language

 

I 

Whenever in this city, screens flicker

with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,

victimized hirelings bending to the lash,

we also have to walk...if simply as we walk

through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties

of our own neighborhoods.

We need to grasp our lives inseparable

from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,

and the red begonia perilously flashing

from a tenement still six stories high,

or the long-legged young girls playing ball

in the junior highschool playground.

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,

sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,

dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,

our animal passion rooted in the city.  

 

II

 

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.

Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,

You've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:

our friend the poet comes into my room

where I've been writing for days,

drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,

and I want to show her one poem

which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,

and wake. You've kissed my hair

to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,

I say, a poem I wanted to show someone...

and I laugh and fall dreaming again

of the desire to show you to everyone I love,

to move openly together

in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,

which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

every poem is you, brooklyn

i swear this platform shakes

as wind blows over Mcdonald Ave

we wait, spitting into space,

level with tops of brick apartments, warehouses 

selling wooden doors and tombstones. 

here someone has written

Hiroshima ain't nothing compared

--never finished or maybe obscured 

by illegible tags, making this line's neat print

all the more glaring.

i reentered this city on my own,

a shrinking circle of daily listening,

expanding net of unknowns--

a best friend crying beside me

on a bench on a street near childhood.

we are grown and i don't know if she wants

to be held (i always do.)

the bodies around us keep moving

talking of how it smells like rain,

getting in and out of cars, carrying groceries,

talking loudly, adjusting their clothes.

i swear i have been here most my life--

eaten various flat breads, chickpeas and lentils.

in some shops, barbers, sign-painters, cooks, musicians

know my name and want me to join them for tea--

this is no secret city, not the first time

i've seen you- sang along

you look like a city but you feel like religion to me

oh!  i want to be able to leave you

and there is nowhere else to go.

i want you inside me,

whispering through my pores as i sleep.

i walked home talking loudly, holding my pants in place,

past curses and kisses, and it never did rain.

woke in a pool of sweat, an unseasonably hot morning.

today, the subway like so many times,

waiting above ground, swooshing around phlegm

in our cheeks before letting it go,

launching it into quivering space.

today like so many times

i want to know just what you did to me,

but i cannot see everything.

staggering

blood hardened inside me.

here it is-- a clump, staggering

to the depths of toilet bowl.

almost went in after it, to know

how it clings to flesh between fingers,

slides off palms, but let it disappear.

enough.  this is what my body gives.

you can hear the sadness and wanting

in my voice but i am not afraid

or embarrassed.  this is how i came into the world.

a bloody mass.  so listen!

some songs just come out this way,

lapping at your heels and disposing of their own mess.

feed my body so much good food but

not exactly what it wants.  you cannot

hold anything in rubber between flesh

forever.  and when i let it all go, each drop

doesn't matter-- slithers and staggers

and stops, somewhere beyond my vision.

sonnet

androgynous child with gorgeous hands

man-child with no regard for dirt,

snuggles with the 9 PM downtown 2 express.

his hands, things that could makes sense

inside you.  today you are wanted deeply,

a dark yellow earnestness, a possibility

of opening wide enough for all five fingers.

your history of wanting-- over breakfast, between

songs, in the middle of the block, looking

in the mirror, the river, waiting for a ride.

wanting too much and then

getting what you want.

her light all about, her thighs on your mother's couch,

her raw scent, scaly on the skin of your hands.

this young boy is your woman so she is here

in every part of your skin as before--

a loving so complete in leaves you woozy,

begging for stillness as you remember to inhale.

Mingus

comically escorted to the police car
his instrument abandoned beside two mattresses
at the curb with the garbage,
the reporters, his wife. if i were her
i would not rescue that wooden bass.

in his space with his
small, white daughter. feeding her
wine, rants...
'in this country they'd call me
a nymphomaniac.' erect
for three days, minimum. he teaches her
how to rip thick rope,
split it into pieces with her bare hands.
speaks to a five-year-old
like a grown woman. and if i looked back
would my childhood be much different.

father teaches her how to enjoy
dark beer and piano players.
'and when you grow up, how many men
will you love... say it again.'
one man. speech that is all

poetry, all contradictions, all
up on that soap box. i want
to hear these same words from someone else.

waving around an ancient rifle.
(his son will wail 'too many bullets
not enough soul.')
with a camera in his face
'i hope you all get blown up by the communists.'
when they come for him

a brassy bass sound
by fat fingers pulling like falling.
used gravity in his favor.
audience that doesn't know when to clap,
when to shut up and listen.

listen to that man with cameras
in his face. says he speaks for all negroes.
a temper turns revelation to lunacy.
'no education,' he says. a big, angry, sexed-up, black
jazz musician man. small, white girl.
large, black rifle. large, brown bass.
it's hard to hear when you're white. it's hard
to know what to say when you're an example.
all instinct, no discipline in the mouth.

and why should he be different
than the rest of us. sinking
in my chair. hope for compassion behind
the audiences' laughter. oh, the comedy! the tragedy!
the cops are the two to his third stooge.
the bass-- the greek chorus. 'the victims,'
he says, 'which they call citizens...'
they are going to throw out his instrument.