and nothing to think about, except, O God,
you love her now and it makes no difference
if it isn’t spring. All seasons are warm
in the warm air
and the brass bed is always there.
If you’ve done something
and the cops get you afterwards, you
can’t remember the place again,
away from cops and streets—
it’s all unreal—
the warm air, a dream
that couldn’t save you now.
No one would care
to hear about it,
it would be heaven
far away, dark and no music,
not even a girl there.
TIME AND ISIDORE LEFKOWITZ
It is not good to feel old
for time is heavy,
time is heavy
on a man’s brain,
thrusting him down,
gasping into the earth,
out of the way of the sun
and the rain.
Look at Isidore Lefkowitz,
biting his nails, telling how
he seduces Beautiful French Canadian
Five and Ten Cent Store Girls,
beautiful, by God, and how they cry
and moan, wrapping their arms
and legs around him
when he leaves them
saying:
Good bye,
good bye.
He feels old when he tells
these stories over and over,
(how the Beautiful Five and Ten Cent Store
Girls go crazy when he puts on
his clothes and is gone),
these old lies
that maybe nobody at all believes.
He feels old thinking how
once he gave five
dollars to a girl
who made him feel like other men
and wonders if she is still alive.
If he were a millionaire,
if he could spend five dollars now,
he could show them how
he was strong and handsome then,
better than other men.
But it is not good to feel old,
time is too heavy,
it gets a man
tired, tired
when he thinks how time wears
him down
and girls, milk-fed, white,
vanish with glorious smiling millionaires
in silver limousines.
BRIDGEWATER JONES: IMPROMPTU IN A SPEAKEASY
When you’ve been through what I’ve been through
over in France where war was hell
and everything turned to blood and mud
and you get covered with blood and rain
and rain and mud
then you come back home again,
come back home and make good in business.
You don’t know how and you don’t know why;
it’s enough to make God stand still and wonder.
It’s something that makes you sit down and think
and you want to say something that’s clear and deep,
something that someone can understand:
that’s why I got to be confidential
and see things clear and say what I mean,
something that’s almost like a sermon,
O world without end,
amen.
When you can’t see things then you get like Nelly
and somebody has to put you out
and somebody has to put you away
but you can always see through Nelly.
She unrolled like a map on the office floor,
you could see her in the dark—
a blind pink cat
in the back seat of the Judge’s car.
But she’d get cold in the Globe Hotel,
singing songs like the Songs of Solomon,
making the Good Book sound immoral
then she’d say she was Mother Mary
and the strength of sin is the law.
World without end
amen.
Gentlemen, I had to fire Nelly,
she didn’t see when a man’s in business,
she didn’t know when a man’s a Christian
you can’t go singing the Songs of Solomon,
making Mother of Christ a whore,
cold as rain,
dead blood and rain like the goddam war,
cold as Nelly telling you hell you killed her baby,
then she couldn’t take a letter
but would sit down and cry
like rain.
It got so bad I couldn’t sleep
with her hair and eyes and breasts and belly
and arms around me
like rain, rain,
rain without end
amen.
I tell you gentlemen almighty God,
I didn’t kill her dead baby,
it was the rain
falling on men and girls and cities.
Ask the Judge (he’s got a girl)
about a baby:
a baby wants life and sun, not rain by God that’s death
when you float a baby down the sewer into the
East River with its lips
making foam at the stern of ships
head on for Liverpool in rain.
You can’t see what happens in rain
(only God knows, world without end)
maybe war, maybe a dead baby.
There’s no good when rain falls on a man;
I had to make it clear,
that’s what I wanted to explain.
SELECTIONS FROM
THE MCSORLEY POEMS
BY GEOFFREY BARTHOLOMEW
East Village
(Originally published in 2001)
MISYCK, THE NIGHT WATCHMAN
I sit alone here at night, listening
doors and windows twisted
by McSorley’s heavy sag
everything out of whack
creak and groan of ghosts
they speak, you know
but Woodrow Wilson there
I can’t understand him
he garbles his words
My brother Jerzy’s dead thirty years tonight
we grew up here on 7th Street
St. George’s, God and girls
stickball, cars and beer
then we started the skag
Jerzy shot up first
I was belting my arm
when he sat back
his eyes went real wide
like flooring the Buick
feeling that crazy rush
Bill McSorley up there by the icebox
resembles Teddy Roosevelt
a smaller moustache
timid eyes, sour mouth
really did love his old man
vowed to keep the bar as is
kill time in this real place
now just a face on the wall
the bar a mute witness
to Bill’s doomed love
My favorite relic is the playbill from the 1880s
a windmill and two dutchgirls
on a forlorn spit of land
the ocean a white-capped menace
What Are The Wild Waves Saying?
some March nights it blows
so hard against the windows
I’d swear it’s Jerzy’s voice
Larry, homeless black wraith, taps the window
I make him a liverwurst on rye
some nights he has d.t.s
tonight he’s souful
I fucked up, he says
shoeless, he begins again
his scabrous circle
East Village Odysseus
The ripe nude in the painting back there
I don’t like her much
she knows she’s got it
that mouth of plump disdain
&nb
sp; the parrot probably trained
to do weird shit, yeah
they liked that stuff back then
And on every wall this guy Peter Cooper
rich and famous in 1860
John McSorley’s buddy
they say he brought Lincoln here
after some Great Hall speech
that’s real strange, me here
where Lincoln once drank
At night I oil the old bar
there’s a sag in the middle
the mahogany a wornout horse
I know it’s stupid, but I think
Jerzy’s going to appear one night
we’re all gonna sit here and talk
him and Cooper and McSorley,
Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson,
maybe the fat nude, too
MAD DEEGAN
On the bustling sidewalk
as the last gray light slides
between concrete walls
I move brokenly, madness
a hunched raven on my shoulder
behind Dean & DeLuca’s glass
the elegant consume
and defecate elsewhere
invisible yet ubiquitous
I shit on dark corners
urinate with the feral
apologia to Lowry
but I am his pariah dog
still alive in the ravine
howling, quietly howling
Educated with the elite
Stuyvesant then Yale
in the Seminary I became
a brother of inculcation
so I taught God’s children
the nun Betty and I
fell in love’s despair
we quit our vows to marry
we ate acid
quickly madness won us over
with fists we fought
our words weapons of delight
Betty took a train to
somewhere, leaving then
this tunnel in my brain
a small black smudge
with their pills the shrinks
would me heal a hole
At McSorley’s I swept up
for simple cash and food
washed pots and pans despite
the burgeoning smear
which one night
blotted the running bullshit
leaving the mind a nub
where the raven pecks
I am searching the streets
catching the last sliding light
on my hunched form
the pariah dog is here
is here somewhere
THE LIFE OF JIMMY FATS
Call me Jimmy
I’m not fat, I’m obese
nowhere to hide, pal
but I learned something
people love you
if you’re real fat
I mean, really huge
you save them
So I got my first job
in Coccia’s on 7th Street
Italian sit-down deli
Jewish actors from Second Avenue
Ukey Moms from the block
laborers, clerks from Wannamaker’s
number-runners an’ schoolkids
you know the years
how they quietly roar by
I was the best short-order guy
ate like a champ
then Artie sold the building
Two doors up was the saloon
busy lunch an’ lazy afternoons
nights packed with young guys
J.J. the owner knew me from when
I was a kid, burned my arm on
his ’48 Buick, Irish guys laughing
that fat kid in the photo, that’s
me, walking by the bar in 1950
Stampalia the chef had just died
announcing lunch
he’d sound an old bugle
this time his aorta blew
I got the job
old guys in the bar whispered
but I was big, fast, an’ funny
no bugles, just Jimmy Fats
I won ’em over with laughs
I loved that place
In the doo-wop band
I sang lead, us guys
from Aviation High
we cut some songs, never made it
Joey overdosed on skag
Lou got married with kids
Willy stepped on a mine in Nam
me, I kept cooking an’ eating
McSorley’s in the ’70s
me & an’ Frank the Slob
we humped it all
Ray the waiter, then George
he was the best
took care of everyone
workers, cops, students, firemen
we played nags an’ numbers
then George quit
oldtimers died off
Frank’s fuckin’ bitch drone began
waiters coming an’ going
the only sane ones
Minnie the cat an’ me
Shit, I was up to 630 by ’79
when I fell in love
Lace was beautiful and big
so we starved an’ screwed to 260
after the baby, she got mental
nights she cried a lot
it sounded like me far off
but I can’t remember when
One black night I woke up
Lace was gone
note said she went to L.A.
that was it
I don’t think it was love
just some kind of lonely thing
fat people get
Still, I was McSorley’s chef
I was 500 an’ floating
little Tanya screaming
Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!
raising a kid alone ain’t easy
the fucking dog Blacky
big Lab, shedding
hated the heat he always did
I was on the throne when he
ripped her head halfway off
broke her neck
the funeral was like Ma’s
at Lancia’s on Second Avenue
next to the old 21 Place
the guys from the bar
murmured condolences
shook their heads
if Lacey hadn’t run away
if I hadn’t been on the shitter
if, if, a million ifs
Back at work
Frank’s fuckin’ bitch
became a foul mantra
nothing to say nor do
that’s when I began
to eat
really eat
I couldn’t get out of bed
fucking buzz in my ear
a numb hissing
finally I got up
then the buzz was a hornet
the floor rose up, stung me
sideways the last thing I saw
some pizza crust and the doll
Tanya’s dusty Barbie
That was the end of Jimmy Fats
they buried me out in Queens
between Tanya an’ Ma
the stone says 1939-1990
but how’s anybody to know
you know
what really happened?
PART III
DARKNESS VISIBLE
THE LUGER IS A 9MM AUTOMATIC HANDGUN WITH A PARABELLUM ACTION
BY JERROLD MUNDIS
Central Park
(Originally published in 1969)
Two years ago I was walking in Central Park around the shallow bowl of water beneath the dollhouse Norman castle that is the weather station. I had approached from the north. I was not thinking.
Ahab said, “You are despondent.” He mushed his consonants. His s was lisped. A five-foot branch was wedged rather far back in his mouth. The bark was rough. A string of blood and saliva dipped and swayed from his jaw.
I considered a little. “Disconsolate.”
He gagged, dropped the branch and insisted on despondence. His consonants we
re clear and his lisp was gone. I shrugged. We went on in silence. Padding alongside, he cocked his head up at intervals to look at me. Then he stopped and began snuffing the air. He pinpointed the direction and trotted off with a light springy step. His vibrancy sometimes fires me with jealousy. It was an oak, which he read with his nose. Then he made a tight circle, deciding, balanced on three legs and urinated.
He returned and said, “Disconsolation suggests an edge of emotional keenness, whereas despondence—”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“You err. Whereas, as I was saying, despondence is essentially ennui, a moribund state lightly salted with bitterness.”
“You cut me up, moving the way you do.”
“Do I?” The corners of his long mouth pulled back in his equivalent of a smile, which is not grotesque, but which, neither, is the legitimate article. You must project certain responses to understand that it is a smile. “That’s improvement,” he said.
“I don’t see it.”
“Sure you do.”
“I don’t like this conversation.”
He sat down and scratched his ear. He asked me if I would like to throw a stick for him to chase. He was attempting rapprochement, but he was also going for himself. Like everyone. Though why this should matter, I don’t know. Quivering, poised, eager, focused, he was naked and ugly in his exposure. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have minded. That is what he is, that is what he is about. But he had made me angry. And the walk had not helped. I was still weary, incredibly. Often the walks were successful. Watching him run and cavort and do all his healthy animal things, my shuffle would lengthen to a stride and I would begin to feel vigorous and defined, primed with purpose. “No, I don’t want to throw a stick for you.”
“I sigh,” he said. “Langorously.”
“Shutup.”
Climbing the walk to the weather station we came upon seven fat pigeons pecking bread crumbs in a semicircle around a thin young girl in a skirt that, it being short and she being seated, was well up her skinny thighs. She wore no stockings. Her knees were bony, like flattened golf balls. Ahab’s ears clicked forward and his shoulders bunched. He went into his stifflegged walk. Fifteen feet from the fat pigeons. His mouth opened, drops of spittle appeared. Ten feet from the fat pigeons. He breathed with explosive little pants. Five feet from the fat pigeons. He now looked a sloppily worked marionette. Four feet from the fat pigeons….
I caught him an instant before he lunged, an instant so close to the act that they shredded into one another. “Ahab, heel!”
He jerked, half wheeled, went up on his hind legs and scored the pavement with his claws when he struck, but there was no forward progress.
In place, eyes wild on the seven fat pigeons thrashing the air in panicked escape, he performed a zealot’s dance, a dance of possession. He was a plastique detonated within a steel room, all that power, all that energy—contained.
The skinny girl was on her feet. She was not pretty. Her skin was the color of sour milk. She was jabbing her finger at me and shrieking. It had to do with Ahab and the birds.