dead, you’re dead.
You can wait
for the earth to
turn. You are
earth, almost
then they finally
dig you out.
You explode into
headlines like
dancing skeletons.
All flash and
drama. All
mystery and
romance.
“Romantic
Romanovs” . . .
deadly to Lenin.
“Stupid girls,” he
must have
thought.
Well, he thought
too much
And imagined
too little.
Grand Tour
The Hoyt Corporation
build a huge multiplex
near here, that
went out of
business soon after
it opened.
I’d like to tour
it: wander down
the main concourse
and pop my
head in each
single theater
and stare at
where each screen
would have been,
should have been.
I’d like to observe
the spaces for the
audience, too, those
popcorn munching
multitudes, those
laughing, sobbing
hordes who now
get their fair
share of entertainment
elsewhere.
There’s a ghostly
silence in
Hoyt’s Multiplex
now. Maybe a
few mice, a
few rats, some
bugs.
Nothing, really,
to disturb the
eerie dream-
world without
lights, camera,
action.
Close
I asked a friend to
meet me at a diner.
She said, “Is that
the body diner?’ She
thrilled to think it
was the one the
mafia corpse was
discovered at.
“No.” I felt bad
telling her no.
It wasn’t the body
diner, it was only
the one on the White
Horse Pike. The
body diner was
off at the circle
end of 130, near
the Delaware River
and so-o-o con-
venient to Phila-
delphia.
Today I passed
the real, the
genuine body diner.
I thrilled to think
a corpse, open-
mouthed, had been
discovered there.
I speculated about
the state of the
world and the
Mafia wars. I
felt proud to
live so
close.
On Mickle Street
I met a man
who knew a
woman, an old
woman, who,
as a little child,
knew Walt
Whitman in
Camden.
Wonder what
that was like?
Sitting on the
stoop with
Walt Whitman.
Having some
vague, childish
notion that
this gray-maned
old man was
different, special,
one for the
ages.
Perhaps you
showed him
your favorite
marble or
demonstrated
your knowledge
of a top?
Maybe you
came to
him with
a dirty face or
mud-pie hands?
It gets humid
in Camden. The
river gives off
a pungent river
smell. Various
merchants hawk
their wares
up and down
Mickle Street.
Fishmongers, milk-
men, bread-
men, and he
man who
delivers ice.
Walt Whitman
never seems to
do much of
anything except
sit and look
and listen.
That’s why
you like him . . .
he does
listen.
Jersey Girl
(in memory of P.M.)
Our friendship was
like the night I
had to work late
at the Kmart
and walking
out to my
car, I looked
down and spotted
an elegant
serpentine
necklace:
gold and
entirely
unexpected.
Now you have
slipped your
mortal coil,
removed your
physicality like
a bracelet or
necklace or
ring.
But driving
down the street
to the convenience
store, I
think of
what a Jersey
girl you were
and, in my
mind’s eye,
will always
be.
Renaissance
The best room I
never lived in
was the one
in Florence that
was lined
with Botticellis.
It was like
being inside
some sweet
brain.
Beautiful
women who
weren’t
cow-like but
refined. Soft
pinks and
blues and
that coolly
resigned
tilt of the
head as if to
say, “I
deign to be
born.”
Don’t ya just
love it?
Wouldn’t ya
like to stay there
forever? They
nearly had
to
kick me
out of
the place.
Penance
Peg Albertine
has been dead
a long time. She
was the leathery
faced, gray
haired dyke
who worked in
the customer service
department at
W.B. Saunders
Publishing Company
and who scandalized
all the girls/women/
chicks on the
seventh floor
with her
demonstration
of the menstrual
sponge.
Everybody thought:
“This homely
old dyke must
be out of her
cotton-picking
mind, with all
these women’s
lib ideas
of hers.”
If she had
been young and
beautiful and
said exactly
the same
thing, she
would have
been loved.
You know,
it’s shitty
the way they
shunned
that poor
woman. She
had no
fr
iends at all
there, in
customer service,
on the
seventh floor.
But she was
homely and
I feared her
like a
disease.
Extremes
I read a biography that said
that the father of the
famed photographer of
sadomasochist scenes,
Robert Mapplethorpe,
used to inspect toasters for a living.
No wonder his son felt so
compelled to
go to
extremes.
Balancing Act
Remember Ed
Sullivan, when he
used to have
on those jugglers,
only they didn’t
really juggle
they just
balanced spinning
plates on sticks
leg raised,
spinning a
hoop and
keeping hoops
spinning, too,
about their
forearms
while way up
high,
balanced on
the plates
beneath the
spotlight was
a lone,
jittery coffee
cup? And
how the
performer
would sweat
as he,
like Atlas,
balanced all
this crap?
For some strange
reason this
activity has
fallen out
of fashion.
That’s a shame.
Maybe some day
I’ll take
it
up.
Spoken Word
I’m worried about the
land filling up. I’m
wondering where all
the dryer lint goes.
It’s all the same:
shit in, shit out.
So much matter
is what’s the
matter.
Exploit, expend.
Do it again.
Even computers, those
brainchildren of misfit
mathematicians, get
tossed in the trash,
sooner or later. Certain
of their elements
leach into the
soil and only
make things
worse.
Or maybe it’s
just me I’m
worried about.
Me, the victim
of my own
mortality.
The only thing
that makes things
better is knowing
great poetry has
been written of
dust to dust.
From the fall of
Troy to the
Battle of Stalin-
grad. From
Sappho to
Frost.
You don’t see
landfills filling
up with
alliteration or
metaphor.
Yes, we is
pretty.
Hermitage
I was sitting with my niece Melanie in the living room of her home in Nashville. We were talking about visiting President Andrew Jackson’s house, The Hermitage. In front of us, Melanie’s six-year-old daughter Sarah sat playing with a doll that was nearly as big as she was. The doll had pink skin, blue eyes, and blond hair made out of some coarse synthetic fiber. Sarah had brown skin, brown eyes, and springy soft black hair. Strangely enough, her African American grandmother had sent her the Caucasian doll. Melanie said that she had found it on sale somewhere. Hard for doting grandmothers to resist a sale.
“I don’t think Sarah is ready for that conversation,” Melanie was telling me. She was referring to the fact that The Hermitage had been a slave-worked plantation. If Melanie and Sarah went with my brother Bob and me to the Hermitage, Sarah would inevitably raise certain questions. Sarah was a bright child, alert to nuances and evasions. She was also very sensitive.
“I understand,” I told Melanie. I was disappointed that she and Sarah wouldn’t be joining us, but I could understand why. However, I was determined to enjoy myself. This was my first trip to Nashville. I wanted to see all the sights . . . politically dicey or no. I had been happy when Melanie and her musician husband Ken had decided to move there from Los Angeles a year earlier. Nashville is much closer to New Jersey than is Los Angeles, and I had always been curious about the “flavor” of Southern life.
The next morning Bob and I set out in our rental Pontiac, heading onto 155 East. One of the things I like best about Bob is that he never criticizes my driving. He’s developmentally disabled—but he can read and loves to do so. He also loves to see sightsee. I thought he’d get a kick out of a trip to Nashville—that’s why I took him along. After a few minutes on Old Hickory Boulevard, we made a right onto Rachel’s Lane, so named after Andrew Jackson’s beloved wife.
You can’t see The Hermitage mansion from the road. You first enter the one-story visitor’s center. Inside, we picked up our audio headphones and began looking around. As we did, any thought that Melanie could have avoided telling Sarah about slavery during a visit was quickly dispelled. Interspersed between exhibits of Jackson’s personal belongings were placards telling about the various house slaves who had catered to him and his family. One showed Hannah Jackson, a thin, unsmiling woman who was head of the house servants. Hannah was wearing a white apron over homespun and held a walking stick in her right hand. The bottom section of her face was sunken in, as if she had no teeth. Another photograph was of Betty, the family cook, and her great-grandchildren, circa 1867. She looked grim-faced, clad in a coarse jacket and dress; the children were ragged and unsmiling.
We then left the visitors’ center and walked up a path to the white-brick mansion, which was nested between tall trees. From a cheerful lady docent dressed in period costume, we learned that the original mansion had burned in 1834 and been rebuilt in Greek Revival style. It had Doric columns and a white picket balcony. Inside the large center hall, French neo-classical wallpaper depicted a scene from the Odyssey: the visit of Telemachus to the island of Calypso in search of his father. I had already known that the Southern aristocracy fancied itself heir to the ancient Greeks. Here was more proof.
Up the elegant, elliptical stairway, there were several bedrooms. Inside each one was a canopied four poster bed, so high you needed steps to climb into it. Adjacent to the bedroom Andrew Jackson died in was his library, containing over six hundred volumes. The docent told us that the Ladies’ Hermitage Association had had to buy back most of the original furniture after Andrew Jackson’s adopted son sold it to pay off his debts. Evidently Andrew Jr. had let the family fortune slide through his hands. So much for inherited wealth.
At the foot of the back stairs was a huge dining room with Venetian blinds, elaborate place settings, and a wall-to-wall cloth floor covering, the height of fashion circa 1836. Out the back door, the kitchen stood in its own small building. We were told that it had been separated from the rest of the mansion to prevent fires and to keep odors and heat from entering the house.
Outside another docent pointed out a bell on a pillar that was used to call the slaves. The docent told us that there were wires connecting rooms in the mansion to other, various-sized bells. Depending on the tone of the bell, a slave could tell in which room his or her services were requested. Then the slave would have to drop whatever he or she was doing and go to attend that person.
“What if the person was a pain in the ass?” I wondered.
Bob was content to take pictures.
Next we walked around the side of the mansion to the Jacksons’ tomb. It stood within a lovely English garden. It was a Greek Revival cupola made of
Tennessee limestone and coated with copper. It stood over two stone slabs . . . Andrew’s and Rachel’s. A few paces to the right sat another grave. This grave belonged to Betty’s son, Alfred. After a lifetime spent at The Hermitage, Alfred had requested (demanded?) to be buried within spitting distance of his dead master. Since Alfred chose to stay on the property even after emancipation, the powers that be acceded to his request. It couldn’t have been that Alfred particularly enjoyed servitude. Our audio tour noted that when Alfred heard a white visitor say that slavery wasn’t so bad, he asked the man, “Would you like to be a slave?”
I speculated about Alfred. Perhaps he had asked to be buried close to Jackson because he knew that millions of people would visit the place. Perhaps he wanted those visitors to know that slaves had built it. However, we’ll never know for sure, since the slaves at the Hermitage, as elsewhere, were prevented from learning to write.
Bob and I then walked over to a slave cabin. It had a plank floor, a window, and a fireplace. There was no French wallpaper depicting Telemachus’s journey. There were no oil paintings or canopied bed. We had the option of taking a walk to see more of the cabins, but since the temperature was over one hundred degrees, we decided to go to lunch instead. I doubted if the other cabins would have differed much from this one. Uniformity was kind of the point of slave habitations.
As Bob and I sat eating our lunch in the cafeteria, I realized that there was no way that Melanie could have taken Sarah to see The Hermitage. This was sad, because in one respect, Andrew Jackson was a great man. He had expanded American democracy to include the average man . . . average white man, that is. But he kicked the Cherokee Indians out of Tennessee and lived in luxury while blacks lived in abject servitude. He thought that was the natural order of things. I could imagine little Sarah asking, “Mommy, what’s a slave? Why were only black people slaves? Why did they have to live in little houses while the white people lived in big houses? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?”
When Bob and I returned to my niece’s house, I told Melanie that she had made the right decision.
“There’s no way,” I said, “you could have avoided the subject.” A little while later, Melanie’s husband Ken walked upstairs to get a soda. He had a studio downstairs where he produced music. Ken’s family had been landowners who had been run out of Mississippi decades earlier by the Ku Klux Klan and who had eventually made their way to California. Although I didn’t ask Ken, something told me that he was in no hurry to visit The Hermitage. I wondered too about him bringing his family to Tennessee. But Nashville is more liberal than other parts of the South.