Josephine Humphries, author of Nowhere Else On Earth, Dreams of Sleep, Rich In Love
With intense human vulnerability and wondrous irony, Newberry’s matter-of-fact, descriptive storytelling renders the poignant moments of life in an earnest tone that is both sensuous and nostalgic. Where it Goes, altogether luminous and universal, relates us to one another, bringing us closer to a rich understanding of our world and ourselves. Anne Tammel - author of fiction and poetry Founder, Tammel Productions, leads Poets and Dreamers series
Gabriel Ricard, writer for Drunk Monkeys Magazine
d e e r b r o o k e d i t io n s
Deerbrook Editions PO Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com POETRY
Where it Goes
p o e m s
The work in Martina Newberry’s poetry collection Where It Goes is breathtaking in its variety and originality and in how well it reminds us that our memories can be as wonderful and dangerous as the reality staring us right in the face. Newberry presents poetry rich with reflections from past events in her life, and then blurs the lines of the reality of those memories. [Her poems] introduce us to a writer able to live in the world, but then make visits to the fringes, in order to review everything properly. What those vacations to the world’s end of her specific world give us is dazzling again and again.
w h e r e i t g o e s m a rt i na r e i s z n ew b e rry
I ’ m j u s t p l a i n b o w l e d o v e r by Martina Newberry’s poetry collection Where It Goes. These are poems I’ll read over and over again, for the pure strength of their language and the surprises, light and dark, that they unroll.
Martina Reisz Newberry poems
Where it Goes Martina Reisz Newberry poems
deerbrook editions
published by
Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com issuu.com/deerbrookeditions 207-829-5038 first edition
Š 2014 by Martina Reisz Newberry All rights reserved Page 137 constitutes an extension of this copyright page ISBN: 978-0-9904287-0-1 Book design by Jeffrey Haste Cover photo by Eleanor Bennett www.eleanorleonnebennett.com
for my mother, Mary Dombrowski Reisz
Contents 6
A Dream of Thunder 13 Where it Goes 14 The Mursi of Ethiopia 15 Toast 16 East End 17 The Will 19 Those Who Pray 20 The Insurgency Tree 21 The Other Poem 23 Gertrude Stein, Home Movie, Circa 1927 25 Prima Serata (Early Evening) 26 About Colin Schroeder 28 Mid-February Late at Night 29 Incantation 30 Putting in Work 31 Phantom Limb 33 About a Man 34 Inland Empire Again 35 On South Vermont 37 About the Rain 38 Oranges 39 Blooms 40 Cello Lesson 43 Marble Hill 44 Rest on the Flight into Egypt 46 Nor Ought but Love 47 Geothermal Activity in the World 49 Lullaby 51 ( הנילפיצסידDiscipline) 53 Gulbahar to Sultan Mehmed II 54 Redhead—Three About Sadie and Me 55 Morning 59 Mustard 60 July 2012 62 Homesick 63 Why I Write Poems with a Pen 64 Area: 498 Sq. Miles, Elevation: 233 Ft. 65 Palm Springs, 115 Degrees 67 A Day in the Death of Metaphors 68 Craving Sleep 70 Summer 2012 71 Crosshairs 73 New Verities 75 The Sonnet of the Locked Box and What I Found There 77 Independence Day 78
6:30 A.M. July 79 Ripening 80 American Family I 82 Too Much Love Will Kill You 83 The Easy Part 84 American Family II 85 Rapunzel Talks to Annie Askew 86 Downey Jasmine 88 Anthem 89 Redecoration 91 Lamplight 92 Hollywood and Western 94 The Great Pixie Stix Caper 95 Old Macdonald’s Lament 97 Three Tankas 98 Drumming to a Raghs-E-Ghasemabadi 99 Truly, Really 101 The Emerald Tablet of Hermes 103 The Old, Stern Gods 106 Beer Flood 108 Mountain 109 Fear’s Orphanage 110 Happy Hour 111 Los Dinamos Creek 112 Tourmaline 113 Why Ulysses Refused to Listen to Birdsong, Finches 115 Low Bridge 116 Either Way 117 The Bottomless Famine 119 A Cete of Badgers, a Sleuth of Bears 120 Return Trip 121 Korban 123 What Happens Now That There is No Pope? 124 Where it Starts 125 Nearing 70 126 Giving Thanks 127 Caricatura 128 Night 129 Knell 130 Where it Goes II 131 Notes & Acknowledgments
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Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving Ah, but then you know it’s time for them to go But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving I do not count the time For who knows where the time goes? Who knows where the time goes? A.E.M. Denny
Where it Goes
A Dream of Thunder Something rumbles, maybe thunder, maybe the voice of Poseidon maybe I dreamed this Maybe my dreams have escaped and are free to find me wherever I am I think dreams can do that At night, my eyes are like clenched teeth, trying to keep the dreams away because they’re dreadful and strange. Later, when the smallest thorn of light pokes through the dark outside I sleep at ease not dreaming not feeling or knowing anything In the background just above the mountain, a raggedy marching band turns then returns like a dream of thunder or of rain
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Where it Goes 14
Where does it go, all that living? It was real when you lived it. Then, it felt like parakeet pecks on your lips. Then, tiny spots you could see when you wiped your mouth on a white napkin. The specks were proof of life. The feathers in the cage were proof of nothing. You ask everyone, where did it go? They like to think you’re drunk again so they can smile at the horror of your question. It’s horrible to be human, huh, kiddo? Horrible to know what you’ve done wrong and to know that you can’t fix it. Mad dogs don’t know these things, humans do. Where does it go, all that living? You close your eyes for a nap, open them, and your passion has wilted like a picked wildflower. Tragic. Oh tragic. So, what now? Your rhythms are poverty-stricken— last grains of rice on a paper plate. You’ve got death in your sneakers and your ears ring with the sounds of no one saying anything anymore. That’s just the way it is. The best you’re going to do after dark tonight is decide whether or not to feel, whether or not to bleed.
The Mursi of Ethiopia My Uncle Gib said maybe they were all touched in the head in New Jersey, but in Cleveland nobody he knew believed a word of it. WAR OF THE WORLDS was a joke, he said. They broadcast it the night before Halloween for Chrissakes, so wasn’t that a clue? His wife said she’d been a little scared. Uncle Gib laughed, hacked, cleared his throat. “Well, hell kid, (he always called her ‘kid’), you were in Cincinnati. They’ll believe any goddam thing in Cincinnati. Taft and 3.2% beer came out of Cincinnati.” My dad had to speak up then. He said “I don’t know much about science fiction, but the Cincinnati Bearcats have Oscar Robertson and he’s no slouch. 32.6 average in college.” what my dad didn’t know about science fiction, my uncle didn’t know about basketball. I sat quiet and squinted through my thick glasses into a National Geographic Magazine. Girls with lip plates and bare breasts stared into the camera lens. Their hands looked skilled. Their white, clay-covered faces said they understood everything. On the ride back home, my father talked about Orson Welles and The Panic Broadcast. Dad said he didn’t know anyone in New Jersey, but the whole War-of-the-Worlds idea seemed pretty dumb to him. Behind my closed eyes, I saw the flash of white smiles. I hoped very hard that the Mursi of Ethiopia never heard that broadcast.
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Toast 16
Watching the dead rise has become our newest, least forgiving hobby. We wake, have coffee, or a bun, or a piece of toast, and begin a kind of scrapbooking. Mother first, then Dad, then Aunt and cousins—what they said, how they looked and played, how we hurt each other, how they were never there for us (as no one ever is). Then: first love, first heartbreak (and there have been too many of them), first job, first marriage, sometimes second and third (all of them real brain bleachers). First child—how strong, how beautiful! Second child— so sweet, hated naps. Friends, old now, moved away or dead, waiting to have their deeds remembered It takes until late afternoon to let the dead rest while we saunter off to be ourselves; the long hours to night, dinner (mother’s meatloaf), the before-dinner drink and then, later, a bedtime toddy to take the chill off. We lie on our backs in bed, watch the dead rise until we sleep—our denial of resurrection.
East End What you see on the east end of Santa Monica Blvd. are the young meth heads and the old junkies and some hookers—toothless Buddhas—laughing and poking at passersby: “Got a dollar?” Silver hair, long and greased with the exhaust from a thousand cars, sinks onto soiled shoulders. They sit on the bus stop bench, make jokes about the trannies, the ones they’d really like to take for a ride, if they could still ride (all the years diving down into all that H has tethered their pricks to the syringe) but if they could… Across the street, the hookers and the crack saints curl up under fast-food seats, showing the worst they have to offer. “They used to be hipsters” says a guy who’s trying to hand me something wrapped in tin foil, “but look at them now. May as well throw raw meat into their cages and give them blood to drink. Fifty bucks, friend, good stuff.” An old hoochie-coochie girl in a blond wig has lost a fake eyelash. She’s looking all over the parking lot for it. She giggles and her nose bleeds. She laughs out loud. “ . . . can’t be coke,” she says, “I can’t afford coke.” Santa Monica Blvd east—this is America where everyone grows their own regrets. She never finds the eyelash, instead has a seizure, falls, blacks out and wakes to find a paper cup of sweet red wine next to her. The others are hanging at the bus stop. A tall, beautiful hustler shares a joint with a young junkie. They’re telling the story of their lives to each other and feel glad that it’s not raining,
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They decide to find a place to sleep together (not sex, you understand) an actual sleeping place. It is 3 am. in America on Santa Monica Blvd east. We are all looking for a place to sleep. Alone, together just somewhere to take off the day’s rags, curl our bones into warmth, and rest.
The Will Our house’s code for “It’s none of your business” was a silence as heavy as plasma, the color of cinders and sand. Defiant, strong in its roof boards and drywall, it turned away from all my questions. Growing up, I went deep down a ten-story leap into my self, no net waiting found there a woman who thinks with her body, a woman who finds it hard to recall her own features. I resented it whispers side-glances all of that to remind me that something there is that doesn’t love a child or that child’s god damned continuous curiosity. 60-odd years later, I am here at the dining room table writing my will…had to be done. The form asks Names of those to get personal property Names of those to get cash money or stocks/bonds Names of those to give those things to if my first choices die. While my heart mud-wrestles my head, I understand everything. It was simple all along from birth to the now, nothing is any of my business.
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Those Who Pray 20
Morning’s air is fat-free milk. This is the reason we pray for full daylight (those who pray). Dawn comes, we float on our backs, blink to focus. Outside, the storm drains are waiting for debris from last night’s dreams. We give our work freely. Of course we do. Our employers listen for the sound of tiles from our workspaces—Mahjong which entertains the blank walls and nothing else. We search our pockets for something that means something and find only coffee change and a sodden prayer. When Prospero’s bell rings, we walk out and guess at why the afternoon is so old, gray instead of gold. It shuffles along, won’t let us make out who comes there wading through the gray. Sadness billows, sways in the twilight breeze like a full skirt. Time to go home. Home is where the heart is. What can that mean when home is where we debut the saddest bits of ourselves? Dinner, then some TV. After television, there is meditation. After contemplation, there is television. Outside, the souls of the big machines wind down. We listen, unsnap the rivets of our madness, put on night clothes and wait for morning, for the air of morning fat-free milk the reason we pray for the unfettered fingers of daylight (those who pray).
The Insurgency Tree I believe in revolutions, all of them, any of them. I am marked by my gender, my age, my body type. I’d be crazy not to want a revolution; I’m a poet. I have climbed this tree and stretched myself out to the very edge of the most fragile branch. I’ll stay here until a revolution brings me down. I live under a deluge of bubble gum comics that won’t let me forget, that stops my memory cold. I believe in revolutions; the ones that begin and end in a single day, the ones that turn women into warriors and beauty queens into barber poles. I believe in the revolutions that end wars and start the snakes of reality moving. I believe in the revolutions started at bars with the first drink order and the drink order before the last. Behind the windows of the houses on my street, the gray revolutionaries meet and discuss their betrayals and their love stories.
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They make their marks with inked thumbs and forefingers. They stare as I stroll by. They know I‘m waiting for the Grand Marshall of all revolutions— the one we bought tickets for on our birth days, the one that collects those tickets, then hands us a list of our cruelties: the winners now, the winners before, the winners ever after.
The Other Poem for Brian 23 This is not the poem about the glories of battle, the courage on the battlefield, the beauty in loss and the nobility of death. No, this is not that poem. And this is not the poem about returning soldiers and laughing families and special deals at the restaurants for veterans. This is not the poem in praise of drugs that get us through the night, nights that strain toward daylight, the letters from the fields, the letters from the field hospitals, the photos of seven guys and a girl on a tank smiling for the camera, smiling their sweet lives away on top of a fucking tank. No, this is not that poem. It is not the poem that clarifies, beatifies, lionizes. Thirty days or ten years, of going away and coming back have made fighting no clearer to me now than it ever was. Birds of prey see us as weak and foolish. They cannot love such stupid beings
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but they can scan the bare dirt of wartime and eat from what lies there. This is not the poem that has blocked egregious combat from our real lives. (I wish that nice poem was here now to come all this way with me. Life has been so much more serious than that poem was.) You see, I hate it. Every battle, every death, every mutilation, every POW, every lonely wife, sister, parent, husband waiting in line for good news. I hate the vision and the circumstances, the hope, the foolishness, the ravage. Well, what to say now…? All I can do is look up at you and admit that I’ve lied. You have guessed it, haven’t you, that this is, absolutely, that poem?
Gertrude Stein, Home Movie, Circa 1927 Alice B has long relinquished Ms. Stein to her madness. Gertie turns a blank face to the camera. Her eyes pull the rest of her bulky body along a pretty path where there are well-to-do guests and they glance at the camera and wonder who she is that friends are taking these movies of her. She walks slowly, holds tough to herself as do her poems ripe with words like spite like barbed wire like flattened peony petals. Alice B does not smile, does not look pleasant. Perhaps she has given Gertie the results of recent X-rays so Gertie knows why she hurts. It’s Alice B’s responsibility. Some youngster, some man on either side of the lumbering poet . . . The day is ripe for well-to-do guests. It’s clear, in this place, only Gertrude truly knows where she is.
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Prima Serata (Early Evening) 26
The nightingale’s high note is heard; It is the hour when lovers’ vows Seem sweet in every whispered word —Lord Byron That’s me in the funky yellow sweatshirt. You can’t tell I bite my nails because my fingers are out of the picture. The soundtrack from “Jane Eyre” is blaring away which ought to make me soppy and soft inside but it doesn’t. I’m crying for Jane and Rochester, and, at the same time, scratching out the angry words of a woman (me) who is pretty much sick of everything. I’m sick of war and governments and politics and diets and insurance companies and growing older and sick of being aware of a mortality that won’t be wished away or written away. I’m in here copying this poem out of my red notebook. I originally wrote it with a particular pen I like, and I’m writing for my life, for our lives, Baby, for the best idea we ever had which was each other and the only thing really worth shouting about—for happy or for sad. The soundtrack from “Jane Eyre” is playing and I don’t question its beauty or its sexuality. But I do glare at my screen and remind the music not to touch me while I’m this wound up. Let me alone in this furious search I’m on for some God to give my pent- up prayers to. Hold me hard and close while I fight for our passion and fight our way out of slavery. God pisses ice. I know he’s there—someone’s there—doing some insider trading or checking out the Fall collection from Abercrombie and Fitch maybe. But, I need him to know I don’t care much for what’s waiting when I’m done writing this or when we’re done making love on a
gorgeous night in February and suddenly the Middle East starts making nuclear mud pies for us to wake up to. Dear God/Goddess, not happy with the new lines around the eyes and even less happy with citizens mowed down like stubborn weeds on a lawn by some anti-aircraft gun converted for ground support. That being said, you’ve set your hand is on the small of my back and your breath on my neck is making me weightless, I’ll leave off thinking about what waits for us, what always waits for everyone, I guess. We will smolder awhile instead, Baby. I’ll look for God another time.
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About Colin Schroeder 28
What the hell really happened to my sweet old poet friend, Colin Schroeder, whose starving eyes would not release me throughout my entire visit to Chicago, 1969? Did he really choke to death on a fishbone? I don’t think so. More likely he was blown up by a shotgun pointed at him courtesy of an angry husband in Chi town where Colin chose to live. “All the angels are there,” he said. “They fled New York, came to Chicago to write poems and drink Ripple wine.” I stayed where I was in the Inland Empire. Nothing happens there except spousal abuse and strong, hot winds. Safe enough. It seems to me that Colin chose a bad place to die whether you believe the official version of his passing or mine. When I traveled to stand by his gravesite with other more appropriate friends, I thought of us, Colin Shroeder and me, gripping each other like Velcro tape at the bus station, him saying “Come with,” me saying, “I can’t.”
Mid-February Late At Night Intimidated by the glass, I reach to touch a near-full moon suspended on a near-black string. It strays across tonight as I have wandered across blank paper, decorum over and done with. The strange bones of my hands find their own way (hasn’t always been so). Outdoors, the moon lights up the dirt, hides behind clouds that start to spill rain. The environment reeks of failure and I, unmoved by its intent, start to despise the rain. I have stood in this place a long time waiting for shame to produce the wild, tender thoughts I’ve called up in the past. Where is the book I’ve not written? Where is the house and the barn I saw when I slept then wrote about when I woke? Where are the lumbering animals that will find their way back home and the farm wife in her wrinkled jeans and patterned apron? Maybe they’ve been cast upward into God’s shadows. I reach to touch a sky that has filled my life with false promises. The old olive tree looks so cold. Soon it will be Spring: warm, blameless.
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Incantation 30
I’ve buried my dead and, still, they come back to me, breathing their names in the dark. I try to hold on to them, hugging their ghostly bodies to mine as I hold yours to mine. I beg my sad ghosts, stay stay to give me time for amends. It is their revenge to drift off before enough “I’m sorrys” can leave my mouth. True, before forgiveness, there must be regret. Kneel for one, stand for the other. If the sprits refuse, I ask Our Lady of Sorrows. I reach far back behind myself to the old ways. The Precious Blood and Mother winks in gold from the cover of an old prayer book. I open its pages, thin as moth wings, and sink into the comfortable aged words. There are many more contemporary books of prayer, but they don’t list the stupendous grand prizes won from praying as this one does. Recitation of the Seven Offerings 300 days indulgence. Plenary indulgence once a month under the usual conditions, if recited daily—granted by Pope Leo XII, September 1827. Say the prayers, close the book. Souls and dreams are the same things. If I sleep finally, will I wake up as a different being, pure of spirit, forgiven? I don’t think so. I think I’ll awaken with my brain steeped in mystery (a weak tea), and Fear, that ancient prime suspect, making a clearing through the tall, dusty ragweed of my burned-out memory.
Putting In Work We’re living in the belly of the beast Watching while it takes its feast… And dancing with Armageddon. —Brendan McCloud America, you’ve turned into the Emperor of Naught; you’re a gang member now; you’re the gang member’s switchblade, the switchblade’s bloody edge. You are the gang member’s flash car bling-blinged and bonnarooed beyond recognition. America, your eyes are as dark as the belly of a Black Widow Spider. You are no longer the nicest guy in town. You’ve embedded diamonds in your teeth and glued razor blades to the toes of your Forzieris America, you’ve slicked your hair back and painted your fingernails ebony. Your turbulent seas no longer float saints. Your deserts are alive with creeping devils. America, you’ve got “goodbye” hanging out of your back pocket and your people’s throats are too strep-ridden to call you out. There won’t be any candles in the bedroom tonight, America; wanting, taking is what you do best now: more, harder, better. Wanting is what you do best. Your deceptions rise and fall—dunes at the side of a beach highway. The world has heard your rumbling. It is feeding time in the lion house of the government. Citizens throw raw meat into your cages. They remove the blood of dissidents and children from your marble floors.
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America, you’ve given your people an erector-set country to live in, all skeletons and metal braces. Your gift to your people is terror. Their bodies rage and the music inside their heads frightens them. Your people crave petitions, prayers, want someone punished or honored, or rewarded or assassinated—almost anyone will do. America, what our ancestors gave you was more naked than the feet of a stone goddess. It began and ended with hope and the inexhaustible processions of broken, wild things fallen onto your roads from countless nests in countless trees across the planet. This poem may be ended, America. I may grit my teeth and squeeze tight my eyes. I may block my ears and pretend to hear nothing. But know this, my country: there is always a space in the air where destruction has been and it is a law of physics that no space remains empty for very long. On your knees, America! Quickly. Quickly.
Phantom Limb The way sunlight pounds through traffic to reach my body on the sidewalk— this, this is always with me and also the snarling city cops looking for something to smash and how they always find it and also the night noises: howling sirens, shouts, something breaking, the coyotes up by the Hollywood sign—nobody’s babies and also watching where I step, the growling citizenry, the sly smiles, the shrugs, the caution, the desperate religion, the snorting busses, the cast-off shoe under the bus bench and also and also Leaving my city—an amputation—a mistake of such egregious proportions that the only rectification come in dreams and also and also pungent sidewalks, unlit laundry room in my old apartment, roach baits to be purchased every 60 days, my city, my love A shrink told me once, “Contrary to popular mythology, people DO die of a broken heart.” So it goes… so it is this grief of mine, this missing city I want you even when I am with you.
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About A Man 34
A man gets a book from the library, reads it and smiles to himself with no one around to tell why he’s smiling. He likes it that way. He likes the book in his hands and the steady light in the reading room. He comes here to hide from his father who, though dead these last ten years, searches for him. His mother, also dead, searches for her Hairpins, always mislaid. His is a perfect loneliness: dark, dreary, full of blues songs and burglaries. He rejoices in the stillness, a quiet not unlike that of a weed growing out of the sand. He doubts everything. He doubts his own hands, his eyes, the photos of his family. He doubts there is such a thing as love though he loves his cat and his glass of blended whiskey which he drinks on the patio in the late afternoon. This man’s heart is dark with ancient blood, sluggish in his chest. His father and mother, before their deaths, became bone and ash, spiky gray seed pods, separate, submissive and unresisting in the relentless finality of the stars.
Inland Empire Again When I came to say goodbye, you were glad I was going, relieved as though finding yourself outside a burning house—safe, if somewhat bereft. I was married then to someone, another man, as I am at this moment. I wanted loss and something to ponder over the years, something more profound than curtains and couches and clean carpets. You gave me that. You afforded me very little mercy, left me the delicate tattoos of our lovemaking. You wanted to lose me almost as much as I wanted to be lost, loneliness being an acquired taste. I hoped for one minute that you would ask me to stay, would claim everlasting love. Though I would not have believed it, it would have been sweet to hear. All these years later, I’m glad you couldn’t, didn’t say it. This is a piss-poor explanation of what we were. I’ve had to reinvent myself in order to record it. You will decide about me when you are older, more tired than you ever imagined yourself being. The last time we spoke, you sounded resigned,
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so like you have always sounded. Your voice lacked leniency. You wanted no more or less than what you’ve always wanted. Perhaps that is almost enough.
On South Vermont I was an eternal child when we lived in the city. My own resilience amazed and delighted me. The dirty sidewalks unbuckled under my feet. Graffiti sang my praises. The tourists parted for me to walk through their families—no— float above their families on wings of urban energy. Nude bars invited me in to earn a living. They saw how flexible, how youthful my body was. Parking meters ticked off the letters of my name and busses stopped for me at unmarked places on the streets. The fierce city drew in its claws to pat my ass. The assassins, the skinheads, the private detectives, and the religious fanatics polished their rifles, shined their boots and peppered the landscape with leaflets and philosophical dung. A tourist told me, “This is a scary town.” I agreed. There was room for fear. But it was the city, you see, and there was room for everything. Even me.
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About The Rain 38
Dark, rainy morning My coat, a closeted slash Blood-red reminder Wet sand, so cheerless, The desert is too honest When it’s sad, it weeps Ragweed sends great sighs Lightning brings out its muscle It’s never afraid A white crane out there The sand doesn’t even stir Crane bringing showers
Oranges When I ran away to visit my friend, five hours by plane, we got drunk in her kitchen and stomped our feet when we laughed and dunked ice cubes with our index fingers into glasses of whiskey. One night later, she introduced me to her friend, a madman with hair like silk and I got all wrapped up in his strange colors. He sang me his songs and I, swept away, warmed to him. We wrangled that night on a twin bed in the guest room and slept, my fingers tangled in his hair, his pale back against me. The next morning he was strange, silent, beautiful still, but his eyes wanted nothing from me and, when I touched his hand, he pulled away. He reached into a bowl on the Cedar Heights buffet where there was fresh fruit. “Here,” he said, “have an orange.” Like Cisneros, I am delighted with my disasters.
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Blooms 40
My father helped Mister Hudson move his old fridge out to the garage and move the new one into the kitchen. Daddy worked at Kaiser Steel in Fontana shoveling slag and minding the Open Hearth. Mr. Hudson worked at Upland Savings and Loan. He wore a suit and a nasty face and he hated the neighborhood kids. But Daddy helped him anyway and turned down the five dollars he was offered, told old Hudson “Naah, we’re neighbors after all” and thanked him anyway. Second Avenue was old and shaded with big pepper trees. They shook at the slightest breeze, grew malformed fungi at the base of their trunks.
The gritty winds came down from Mt. Baldy. The sand smelled like copper, gleamed like copper
On Saturday, when Daddy’s friends came to visit with their permed floozies in tow: Andy Kushner with “Penny” and Bob Trow with “Brenda.” They all got loose on beers and shots of Old Crow and Daddy told about moving Hudson’s fridge. Andy Kushner, pinched his girl’s cheek with a thumb and a forefinger knobbed as tree twigs, kissed the red spot and said, “It won’t make the old bastard any friendlier, Jack.” “Why sure it will,” Daddy said, “he can’t get any damned UNfriendlier” and everybody laughed like crazy. The room filled with cigarette smoke and the flexing of calloused hands and the smell of Evening in Paris perfume. Brenda’s stockings, brand new from Sears Roebuck, got a run in them and she cried a little. Everyone went out onto the front porch and looked up.
The sky glowed like the night was on fire and maybe it was and the sounds and colors of the mill split the sky
This all happened a good 20 years before the mill closed and the skies above Fontana and Rialto and Etiwanda went blue and maybe even clean. Before I went off to college, we drove, my father and I, to the closed-up mill and the deserted shells of the machine shops and the blast furnaces and the empty soaking pits where only the ghosts of ingots lay cooling. We went right up to where he used to work—the locks on the gates weren’t locked. It all looked cold and unfriendly like old Mr. Hudson’s face. It was such
dirty work, such hard work I said, but my father said, “Naah. I was grateful because it gave us a living.” On the way home, we passed Dominic’s Bar, closed as well. All the men had drunk there and stayed too late there and left their lunch pails there and left their smelted dreams there at one time or another. Walking out of the mill, the men grinned, faces so dirty their teeth looked whitewashed fierce in the gloaming
Walking into Dominic’s Beer tasting of hops and grime Hard-boiled eggs, sausage out of jars, into steel fists
I wish we could go here again, I said. I wish I was still 9 years old and Momma and I could meet you at Dominic’s after work and I would have a hard-boiled egg and a sip of your beer and a Shirley Temple for myself. I wish Dominic’s never closed. My father said, “Me too,” and flexed his fingers. Dominic’s sign was falling off the building, My father tried to fix it. I saw Andy Kushner trying to help him. They couldn’t get it fastened back up. A week later, I was on my way to San Jose State College, wanted to be a librarian and a writer. My father hugged me hard, told me, “You’re the daughter of a working man, a steel worker. Be proud of that.” I wasn’t proud right then, but I got proud some 25 years later when an elitist bitch told me I couldn’t write worth a tinker’s damn because I didn’t have a degree. I got proud then and told her about my father and told her she ought to be slapped, but not to worry because I wasn’t into slapping and I left her class and didn’t go back.
In my dreams, my father glides over hot rolled blooms and billets. His shovel makes sparks that bounce off his grin
The alarm sounds and the door goes up to show the molten river
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red as blood and hot enough to rival hell
My father guides that river right out into the sky where the stars drink of it and continue to shine
Cello Lesson Universal query: How long can we hang on to this life before we embark on the next? God covers his mouth, giggles. No answer there. When we grasp transience, we cry. The tears choke our every nuance. It happens at different times for everyone. Sometimes very early on—maybe in elementary school. Other times, later on the subway going to a cello lesson, or seated on the bus going to a Handel’s Messiah Sing-Along. We cry at death’s familiarity, how it edges in, how it knows us in the uncomfortable biblical sense. It’s enough to make us balk at living at all. Still, comes that moment: breeze blowing the scent of Star Jasmine off the front porch. We stop dying for that moment, postpone all that aggravates us. “One more summer,” says the heart “And another after that.”
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Marble Hill 44
We walked slowly together and you were the plane-cheeked child I wanted to be—curled hair and soft accent. I imagined running away together, living and writing up on the mountain in Marble Hill where you said beauty reigned. But you were going back home, not running away from anything; not like me running from everything. We drank whiskey together—tumblers, no ice— ate cheese and sourdough bread for dinner and peach ice cream for dessert. We walked slowly together. I saw inside both of us and it struck me that I loved women as well as men. I wish we’d loved each other as lovers love, if only once. Our sister souls were so close, so fragile. I think a fleshly encounter would have strengthened us for all that was to come. We walk even more slowly together now. These are things I have not said aloud, though I thought you knew them then or maybe know them now and, still, maybe not, and, still, maybe so. I was never more alone than the day you left me at the airport. We both hate doleful goodbyes.
Oh! Sweet curled hair, soft accent, backwards wave as you walked away . . . It was, you know, the last afternoon of the world
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Rest on the Flight into Egypt a painting by Luc Olivier Merson, 1879 46 When the dream began it was vague, the colors ran together like cheap dye and some winged someone spoke, hissed at him: “You should run. Take your darling elf, hide him in a sack, get the hell out of Dodge before it’s too late.” He asked, Is this a joke? Another trick from God who thinks Virgin births are fine as long as he isn’t down here dealing with their consequences, their shame? The voice was unrelenting. “You’d better go and go quickly. Your enemies know where you are and they’re on the way.” Sad, faith-bound, he got up, roused them all from the warm place they’d found and, grumbling, fled. It was dry bread and mother’s milk for a million miles. It was wind and anger and bitter complaint, a child’s wails, a mule and a moon. When the voices stopped him, he was no happier. “Here,” they told him, “here will be fine.” But it’s ugly he said and fell, again, to sleep. “Yes, ugly,” said the spirit voice. “Sleep in it and get used to it. You own the joke. The punch line’s yours.” In silence as large as never, Egypt’s totem, sandblasted, dry, waited in the dark, for the sun child—only him—and no one else.
Nor Ought but Love If ever two were one, then surely we. —Anne Bradstreet Her poem begins, “If ever two were one…” and so will mine. Your dark lashes on the back of my neck make the world lush and take away my years especially the wasted ones. Your hands that touch me with minds of their own whisper beauty where there may or may not be any. Why would anyone want me? Still, you do, and so I walk backwards to meet you, to tie my overwhelming love into a bundle of sweetgrass to lay on your pillow. When I dream of love, I dream of you. I rage at my body, this body you honor with affection. I rage at it and tear at my fears of waking from the dream that is you and me. We are a contradiction, darling. We are the moons of Jupiter and a dragon’s tears. We are love’s leviathans. We don’t have to be here but here we are. They think us foolish. They think me a fool because my years don’t equal my dreams. They think you are a fool for being blind to the pale vintage you love. They see two fools whose ropey veins house effervescent blood.
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We have protection. The dead are looking out for us, my darling, my You. The dead tell us to inaugurate. They say, Be the cult that you are. Be the poem and the poet, the cynosure, the penumbra. Be all of it. Be One.