He still provides occasional horseshit,
God’s love, for birds of a feather.
He invented grapes not wine, wheat not bread,
blind trees He feeds with sunlight and rain.
He invented crossbreeding and hybrids—the living.
He did not invent metaphors, the psalms,
versification, artificial intelligence.
Milton justified the ways of God to man,
creation vs invention.
I sum up: the Lord created colors not paint.
Paint cracks, falls off walls, mosaics last longer,
gardens survive without any human attention.
He prefers gardens to city streets
with their skyscrapers and glass windows.
His face is everything we see and cannot see—
what? Where?
Near our cottage in Chalk River, Ontario,
lightning made a matchstick of an oak.
Surrounded by forest fires, I heard
Protestant and Catholic bells
summoning the volunteer fire brigade.
Does He need money? Perhaps water is His currency.
Does He prefer to be called Father
or another of His forty four names?
Dearest Forest Fire,
sometimes I prefer a pond to ocean,
a lit match to a forest fire,
a rocking chair to an earthquake,
today, an act of a woman to an act of God.
—2018
SONG OF THE PRESENT
We fall back from making love
to noticing things
like the kind of day it is—
it was a kind of vision
to be blind to the world.
We have still to know
that time gives to bronze
a certain beauty and hardship.
It was bedtime,
it mattered what we did,
if I enter you or not—
kissing you before and now,
changes us and the world.
What time does
to this morning’s lovemaking
it does to ancient marble,
turns it golden,
the colors wash away.
Darkness and light
crack and break,
lie with us in darkness,
fixed in our idea of beauty,
with the sweet present of touch,
smell, and taste.
—1998
THE POEM OF SELF
I often write in my diary the obsolete poem of self
with my obsolescent pen and ink.
So I throw a poem for a lark, like my hat,
off the Brooklyn Bridge, where Hart Crane, bless him,
“dumped the ashes of his dad in a condom.”
I watch my hat glide toward the Atlantic,
wait for a miraculous rescue—
but my poem-hat alights, drifts, sinks down
among the bottom feeders,
the fluke, crab, catfish in sewage
of the East River, still musical, distantly related
to the North Sea. I hope my drowned hat
shelters blind, half-dead newborns
that lip the taste of my sweatband,
the taste of me their first breakfast
of undigested unleavened waste.
The River Styx has clean water where Elijah
swims with the Angels Gabriel and Raphael.
So the poem of self gone,
poetry must face, may two-face,
must honor the language, point out to readers
the garden of delights, hell to paradise,
almost, but never seen before.
Are the playhouses of God metaphors?
Is God rhyme? The God of everyone obsolete?
Then in the beginning was the Word,
the Word, let’s say, Fish, a live-bearer—
the fish grew fins, then feet,
asked questions without answers.
To wish or not to wish that is the question.
Every word is a question.
Put a question mark after each word,
the question mark is a fish breaking water:
poetry? mother? anything? kiss? glory?
So remembering and forgetting are over,
useless boredom is plagiarized,
human beings are spawned,
trees genuflect, there are
Stop! Look! and Listen! prayers
at railroad crossings.
Truth is, je, yo, ich,
stole the word “so” from a friend—
seems a petty theft but is a felony
when the word packs a deadly weapon.
Looking back, God is a verb, adjective,
article, contraction, infinitive, any part of speech,
any language, since every living thing speaks God.
God is a verb—
“He was godded once by the Lord,”
means created or killed, and God is a noun,
adjective, article, infinitive, any part of speech,
birdsong, neigh, hee-haw,
bark, bray, buzz, all God’s speech.
Now the poem of you is obsolete
and the poem of he, she, we obsolete—penis and vagina,
mouth, anus, hands
holding on for dear life to each other,
everything that dreams obsolete,
everything but what in the good old days we called “love.”
Now Johann Sebastian Bach
is a verb. Bach you! Bach you!
So help us or don’t help us, God,
we have the luxury of tears, others weep
with fluttering wings, falling leaves, so help us
or don’t help us, God,
breaking my vow, so help me God.
MARX BROTHERS IN MOSCOW
When I was ten, my dentist uncle Philip
told me he was with the Marx Brothers
when they landed in the Kremlin because Chico
confused the Winter Palace with the old Palace
and signed up for a two-week engagement.
They crashed the Communist party plenary session,
Groucho demanding, because they were Marx’s grandsons,
a ruble for every bottle of vodka sold in Moscow.
Then Groucho danced Swan Lake at the Bolshoi,
Harpo played Tchaikovsky
while my uncle drilled Stalin’s tooth,
giving him that special yance
he reserved for the Stalinists and Nazis.
Groucho reviewed the May Day Parade
standing with the politburo on the balcony.
Harpo honked and threatened with his rubber horn
red star battalions of rocket engineers,
while Chico sold paper Stalin mustaches
to the crowds. Then they tricked the G.P.U.
into shipping the real Comrade Stalin
suffering from a toothache
to the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce.
Groucho, the false Stalin, sold the Kremlin
to a Florida real estate developer
who called it the Moscow Fontainebleau.
I kissed my uncle
and told him he was better than the movies.
—1975
UBUNTU
I salute a word, I stand up and give it my chair,
because this one Zulu word, ubuntu,
holds what English takes seven to say:
“the essential dignity of every human being.”
I give my hand to ubuntu—
the simple, everyday South African word
for the English mouthful.
I do not know the black Jerusalems of Africa,
or how to dance its sacred dances.
I cannot play Christ’s two commandments on the drums:
“Love God” and “Love thy neighbor as thys
elf.”
I do not believe the spirits of the dead
are closer to God than the living,
nor do I take to my heart
the Christ-like word ubuntu
that teaches reconciliation
of murderers, torturers, accomplices,
with victims still living.
Jefferson was wrong:
it is not blood but ubuntu
that is the manure of freedom,
freedom.
SM
With spray can paint,
I illuminate my name
on the subway cars and handball courts,
in the public school yards of New York,
S M
written in sky-above-the-ocean-blue,
surrounded by a valentine splash
of red and white, not for Spiritus Mundi,
but for a life and death, part al fresco
part catacomb, against the city fathers
who have made a crime of signaling
with paint to passengers and pedestrians.
For the ghetto population of my city
who often walk turning to look
behind, guarding their backs,
I spray my name
with those who stand for a public art.
In secret if I must
and wearing sneakers, I sign with those
who have signed for me.
A VISIT TO THE DEVIL’S MUSEUM IN KAUNAS
I put on my Mosaic horns, a pointed beard,
my goat-hoof feet—my nose, eyes, hair and ears
are just right—and walk the streets of the old ghetto.
In May under the giant lilac and blooming chestnut trees
I am the only dirty word in the Lithuanian language.
I taxi to the death camp and to the forest
where only the birds are gay, freight trains still screech,
scream and stop. I have origins here, not roots,
origins among the ashes of shoemakers
and scholars, below the roots of these Christmas trees,
and below the pits filled with charred splinters of bone
covered with fathoms of concrete. But I am the devil,
I know in the city someone wears the good gold watch
given to him by a mother to save her infant daughter
thrown in a sewer. Someone still tells time by that watch,
I think it is the town clock.
Perhaps Lithuanian that has three words for soul
needs more words for murder—murder as bread:
“Please pass the murder and butter” gets you to:
“The wine you are drinking is my blood,
the murder you are eating is my body.”
Who planted the lilac and chestnut trees?
Whose woods are these? I think I know.
I do my little devil dance,
my goat hooves click on the stone streets.
Das Lied von der Erde
ist Murder, Murder, Murder.
KAUNAS, LITHUANIA MEMORIAL
They have built a colossal holocaust
sculpture monument,
a mountainous bird wing, cement crags and steel
in the sky above the 9th fortress of death.
Children come in busloads.
Children of murderers are taught history,
climb up the wing 5 stories high.
I can't hear them,
I think they are playing hide-and-seek.
—1993
IN THE ADIRONDACKS
I knew no more of death than a rabbit or turtle,
when I was three. I was wild with joy
because we rented a log cabin
with no plumbing. I found
a lost kitten, the least among us, Trixie.
After a while my father and sister
told me Trixie died, disappeared
because I fed her too much spaghetti.
4th of July,
I sentenced myself to the electric chair.
Spaghetti with tomato sauce in most states
is not a deadly weapon.
A child grave digger, at five
I found a dead red-winged blackbird,
the first time I touched the dead,
not the last—surprised how light
the bird was to lift and carry to the grave
I buried the motionless body
near blueberries, without a coffin.
I had to go back to public school soon.
A farmer, not a schoolteacher, taught me:
“You tell a crow from a raven by its tail.”
Late August I awoke,
saw two bats making love on my chest,
a miracle I did not push away.
Satisfied, they flew out an open window.
Another bat was trying to escape,
flew into a wall then a clothes closet,
the helpless thing terrified to hear me.
I caught him or her in father’s landing net,
its hooked mouth and wings caught in webbing.
Outside, I set the struggling wonder free.
Watchman, what did I learn that night?
I taught myself the only flying mammal,
the bat, is lighter than a hummingbird
that beats its wings a hundred times a minute.
—1999
RECITATIVE
I am a man without history,
a man who isn’t, but who shall be,
I come from no town,
I am not black, white, yellow, or brown,
born in no country, born in no city,
I am a man without history,
I come from no town,
I am not black, white, yellow, or brown,
I am a man of questions,
I am a man of questions,
who am I? who am I?
I am nothing, I am nothing,
except when I sing,
except when I sing.
TABOO
Fed on mother’s milk
a nursing infant’s shit
smells sweet as oatmeal with cinnamon.
When he or she gets to cereal,
apples and prunes, the shit stinks.
Listen
the shitting newborn has an orgasm,
the lover may be life itself.
—2001
THE BATHERS
1.
In the great bronze tub of summer,
with the lions’ heads cast on each side,
couples come and bathe together: each touches only
his or her lover, as he or she falls back
into the warm eucalyptus-scented waters.
It is a hot summer evening and the last
sunlight clings to the lighter and darker blues
of grapes and to the white and rose plate
on the bare marble table. Now the lovers
plunge, surface, drift—an intruding elder
would not know if there were six or two,
or be aware of the entering and withdrawing.
There is a sudden stillness of water,
the bathers whisper in the classical manner,
intimate distant things. They are forgetful
that the darkness called night is always present,
sunlight is the guest. It is the moment
of departure. They dress, by mistake exchange
some of their clothing, and linger
in the glaring night traffic of the old city.
2.
I hosed down the tub after four hundred years
of lovemaking, and my few summers.
I did not know the touch of naked bodies
would give to bronze a fragile gold patina,
or that women in love jump in their lovers’ tubs.
God of tubs, take pity on solitary bathers
who scrub their flesh with rough stone
and have nothing to show for bathing
but cleanliness and disillusion.
Some believe the Gods come as swans,
showers of gold, themselves, or not at all.
I think they come as bathers: lovers,
whales fountaining, hippopotami
squatting in the mud.
SNAKE IN A BASKET OF GROCERIES
1
Today is Flag Day,
I fly the American flag everyday
from my porch rail, not a flagpole.
I’ve got a fever and misguided swollen feet.
My housekeeper, nurse, friend, Naomi Etienne,
says if I don’t stop working,
she’ll call the police.
I have no memory of falling asleep,
I only remember waking up.
Mayday, mayday!
I call to myself for rescue.
I find myself longitude 6 feet 2 ½,
latitude belt 40.
I suck on another’s milky words,
half asleep, I hope my apparel oft proclaims me,
I’m true to mine own self.
I cannot remember my Social Security
or fax numbers—the beginning of this.
I don’t forget my Naval Service Number:
6161612.
With this snake in a basket of groceries,
how can I develop a metaphor?
I remember the poems of others
that keep me alive, and music
that accompanies me, my closest friend.
* * *
The fish soup I make in Riverdale
is zuppa di pesce along the Arno. Grownups
no longer tuck napkins under their chins
as they did in Dante’s time,
when his currency was the gold florin,
Saint John on one side, the fleur-de-lis on the other.
Names keep secrets, Da “to give”
was short for Dante,
that was Durante.
I am among the last in Dante’s train
to San Miniato. I live with Guelphs vs
Ghibellines, Pope vs Emperor.
The years are silent as water lilies,
buggy, turning brown—
holding onto a twig on a sunny day,
a caterpillar eats through to the edge
of a leaf, builds his chrysalis.
After time enough to change, he breaks open,
unfolds a single black wing,
then two yellow and black wings
open into the world.
Someone is answering my phone calls:
“Is anyone there?” Moshi moshi,
hello, in Japanese. Hard to believe
no one said “Hello” before the 19th century.