Another Way to Play Read online

  20

  My father lost the store, we all went to

  work when I was ten. Then he became a

  ward heeler. My grandfather was dead before

  I knew he spoke Gaelic. My father could

  remember when they had mules instead of

  automobiles and you had to remove your cap

  and step to the curb to let the rich walk

  by. My grandfather was glad to die in the

  USA. He’d say if you can’t find a job within

  thirty miles of New York City there aren’t

  any jobs to be found. My father would say

  You can write all the poetry you want to

  when you’re a millionaire. Eddie would say

  You got to try a shoe on before you buy it.

  1960-69

  DUES

  (The Stone Wall Press 1975)

  AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

  For Emily Dickinson

  She always reported to herself

  first, then the world, then

  nature or what the mythic poem

  might someday become. The idea.

  And it cost her: the butter-

  flies she mistook for mari-

  golds, the blank blackboards.

  As Thoreau said to a friend,

  ‘One world at a time.’ Only

  faster, she might have added.

  And in the end, for radio, for

  television, if it wasn’t, she

  could not become ‘the purest

  of poets,’ or even assume the

  role. Genuine culture was an

  unreasonable aspiration & poetry.

  She left behind even the frissons.

  RE

  We are reminded of a new

  gas station inserting the

  million gallon storage tank

  beneath its inviting apron

  The sun continues to set and

  the sounds of traffic

  you call the auto harp

  Why is it

  we can get nothing on the radio

  today but Johnny Ace singing of

  his suicide and that tinselly

  background piano

  TWO POEMS WHILE SOMETHING CRUMBLED 1967

  1

  There’s no voice to my wife

  the FBI took it away with them on the phone today

  all she could get from them

  was fear

  our kid sits in her belly

  waiting to grow fingernails to bite

  hair to pull out

  in the face of such subtle suppression

  no goddamit

  he waits to get even

  which is worse

  2

  There is always the sound

  of women

  crying

  (in the hallways of my head)

  do I know them?

  are they ‘mine’?

  when the door is closed

  I must feel my stomach for wounds

  & continue to suck at dry eggs

  why?

  do they know me?

  so I destroy the calendar (paint it blue)

  take down Marlon Brando for Che Guevera

  pretend it is the wind

  and you?

  ONCE

  when I lived in a cemetery on a hill

  played with a birch tree

  called the wind lover

  read sermons to Five Mile Valley

  & taught lessons to the snow like:

  The wooden clock was

  invented by an American

  Negro

  there was a trenchcoated redhead.

  So I wore brand new shirts & drank beer

  leaving the headstones to weather

  still

  one day I came across some black sedan against my birch

  from the back seat she smiled over his shoulder

  snow

  fell

  my face went through the shattering glass laughing

  my hair turned red, my eyes, my words, I said:

  The traffic light was

  invented by an American

  Negro.

  This had been my home.

  AINT NO

  for Boles

  Never been sick

  never been sick a day in my life

  until today

  Until this machine moved over me

  until I couldn’t move no more

  couldn’t move over, couldn’t make room

  Make room, they said

  make time while the match still glows

  make yourself presentable

  I didn’t move, I couldn’t

  move, I wouldn’t move if I could’ve

  I didn’t even scream

  or stroke your leg and purr

  like they taught us to do in school

  No legs, no sound, no way out

  until they moved

  until I could see the glow from the flames

  until I could feel the fire

  This machine felt like what is left

  what couldn’t be moved

  but burned

  WATCHING YOU WALK AWAY

  For Greg Millard

  Today

  your back, cocked hat, thick clothes for cold

  the way you turned around to look again for

  what? It wasn’t there last night

  We were there, ‘it’ wasnt, why, why not

  The world is all around us, even at night, in bed

  in each others arms

  distilled & injected into the odor we leave on each others

  backs & thighs, between the knots & shields of all we lay

  down in the dark to pick up in the morning

  I like your brown eyes when you talk

  you know who you are, I like your knowing this

  maybe that’s not enough

  Let’s talk, go to plays, see each other sometimes just to

  see each other

  If we lie down in each others bodies again

  let it be for the music we hold

  not the music we might make

  REVOLUTION

  When the back of my swan

  divides your body with feathers

  it doesn’t matter that they are

  white or black

  only that they are soft

  COUNTERREVOLUTION

  Sometimes early, the children

  or maybe one child begins

  to coo to herself or maybe

  someone we cannot see

  inventing sounds we

  only remember while we hear them

  like knowing the sea intimately

  Like women children

  sometimes see us saying: love

  not saying anything

  but moving the floor in time to

  their vibrations from everything

  and us. The incredible smallness

  of their heads.

  Living with us

  they are constant reminders of

  what we had hoped to be by now.

  WEATHERMAN BLUES

  I have a brother made of cockroaches.

  Every morning I wake him and the bugs rustle

  make noises like breakfast cereal until

  he gets out of bed and starts shaving.

  Then they’re all quiet watching him scrape off

  the unlucky eggs of his chin roaches.

  I have to help him start moving and

  help him sit down and so on because

  the roaches in his joints die from the heat

  of his energy at the end of the day

  but his heart roaches and lung roaches never die

  and the roaches of his eyes and mouth are

  always fucking so that everyday he sees

  new things and tells me words

  I never heard before

  and never remember.

  Someday the roaches in his throat will

  choke him or the ones in h
is stomach will have

  cancerous babies that will kill him as though

  he’d starved but until then all I can do

  is help him around the house

  keep him covered when we go out

  find women who don’t care who they embrace or

  what enters them . . .

  Why couldn’t I have had a brother

  made of butterflies

  like other people.

  ROCKY DIES YELLOW

  (Blue Wind Press 1975)

  “NOW I’M ONLY THIRTY-TWO”

  from 5 to 30 it was

  only women, then

  for almost one year

  it was only men

  now it’s like the first

  5 years and back

  to everyone again

  YOU REMEMBER BELMAR NJ 1956

  ethnic beaches, ethnic streets,

  ethnic hangouts, jetties, kids

  got sand & their first glimpse

  of hair where it never was

  you piled into nosed & decked Chevies & Mercs

  carried baseball bats to Bradley Beach to

  beat up on Jews—You knew, they had all the

  money & no restrictions on their sex like

  Christians

  who said Hitler’s only mistake was

  being born German but

  your own Jews rode with you:

  class warfare after all

  Crazy Mixed Up kids with names like

  Sleepy, Face, Skippy, Skootch, Me Too Morrisey

  & Nutsy McConnell imitated themselves & Marlon

  Brando, danced to *Frankie Lyman & The Teenagers*

  or *Little Richard* & sometimes

  holding their fathers’ guns

  made women girls light their cigarettes trembling

  letting them see just enough of it beneath their

  pink or charcoal grey to make them happy or sick

  always glad god made man out of dirt & not sand

  you got drunk in your clubhouse or rented rooms

  pretended you were really recording In The Still of The

  Night or your own secret sleeper under

  some name like The Shrapnels or The Inserts not

  Spartans AC (Athletic Club) or The Archangels SC

  (social . . .

  the way we’re still lining up

  SONG

  Where we bend

  the world bends

  Where we join

  the air joins

  Where we lie

  the land lies

  Where we move

  the sea moves

  Where we break

  where we break

  the air breaks

  the land breaks

  the sea divides

  Where we break

  the world bends

  KENT STATE MAY 4, 1970

  1

  This is the night they turn out the trees,

  the rope we skipped, the sound of

  asphalt cooling. This is the night they

  left us. You used to say: This is

  the night they are always leaving us.

  2

  In the puzzle there are four pieces:

  the soap, the boat, the fish and the—

  It’s green, we remember that much, very

  far away and steep and has a place

  for each of four parts which are the

  boat with the sail and the bar of soap

  and the fish from the bottom of this

  puzzle, but what have you done with

  3

  Don’t even try to turn around

  4

  NEWARK POEM

  I never made it to Morocco, Paris, Tangiers,

  Tokyo, Madrid. I just live here, in Newark

  & wait, for Morocco, Paris, Tangiers, Tokyo,

  & Madrid to make it to me, here in Newark.

  DREAMING OF THE POTATO

  your grandfather being

  alone lived in it loved

  it & gave birth to another

  felt his arms noticed the potato skin

  he was hard & white & something to chew

  inside

  He had a dream called him-in-America

  where potatoes were roses

  He carried one gnarled & petrified

  to keep away arthritis

  Where he lived if you dug too deep

  the earth was white wet & hard

  “With people there has been trouble

  With the potato we have been happy”

  “WE WERE ALWAYS AFRAID OF”

  the quiet ones

  It was a myth we believed

  we invented but

  now we know while we were busy

  watching the quiet ones

  the others led us into the sea

  * * * MARILYN MONROE * * *

  Everybody

  wanted her

  to do

  a trick

  for them

  but

  she had a trick of her own

  that she wanted to do for herself

  only

  she hated

  tricks

  POEM TO 1956

  Can you hear the adolescent

  laughter in the Jersey pines?

  That sound of a gas station turning

  over in its long nights sleep?

  What is the meaning of summer

  if the menthol of your fingernails

  doesn’t touch me from the grave?

  Anemone bones we whispered of

  between trips to the car trunk

  and quick changes behind towels

  or the rest rooms of gasoline

  stations whose owners were called:

  Ma.

  Can you hear that rustling

  on the highway where the tires

  trailed our innocence behind

  like the intestines of the desire

  we kept hanging on the rear view?

  Ma, we said, where in those pine

  woods, under the tender feet of

  tourists, where in all that fur

  is there a place to tie ones skates

  and hang a key around your lovers neck?

  POETRY 1969

  The guy down the street just

  “blew his brains out” They

  carried him out on a stretcher

  all bloody faced and torn and

  the kid next door ran home

  told his ma who told us, said

  “Some guy down the street just

  got stabbed in the nose & died”

  but we found out, we found out

  different “blew his brains out”

  “Just back from Vietnam” the

  kid said later “like my dad”

  *

  Last week across the street

  some lady was raped by a tight

  rope walker, now this is true

  he lost his job in the circus

  when he fell off and hurt his

  neck so it would swing all day

  like this, while he worked here

  as a janitor and handy man and

  told all the housewives tales

  about the circus and his neck

  until the other night he tapped

  softly on this foreign womans

  door and said “It’s the main-

  tenance man, your power’s off”

  She tried the lights and said

  “What do I do?” “Let me in”

  he said “and I’ll check your

  fuse box” here the story gets

  confused but it’s clear he had

  a knife and somehow got naked

  and raped the woman before she

  got the knife away and screamed

  My wife rolled over and said

  “Did you hear that, sounded like

  five quick shots” but I wasnt
>
  saying a thing They caught him

  The bullets were fired by the guy

  across the hall from the woman

  He said he just fired to make the

  rapist halt, said he saw this man

  running out of the building, naked

  in the moonlight, but it turns out

  this guy with the revolver had

  been the best of buddies with the

  tight rope walker who happened to

  have already served time for rape

  Now they got a new janitor who has

  a neck like everybody else here

  *

  Today the guy next door told me

  if it comes down to it and we all

  find ourselves on the barricades

  we’d probably be on opposite sides

  but he promised me this “I’ll

  only shoot at your legs, cause

  youre my friend” which is better

  than my brother-in-law the cop who

  said “I’d shoot my own father if he

  was breakin the law and tryin to

  get away” he shook his head then said

  softer “Ya gotta respect the law”

  WEATHERMAN GOES OUT 1969

  I strap on my holster

  the one with the pine cone design

  shove my automatic into it

  slip a small book of famous quotations into

  my pocket to offset the weight of the gun

  take an ice pop out of the freezer

  the paper sticks to the popsicle

  sticks to my fingers sticks to my coat

  I put the popsicle down on the sink

  wash my hands and wipe off my coat

  when I pick it up again it’s melting

  I try to suck the moisture from it

  I try to avoid dripping some on my coat

  or pants or shirt or holster

  with the pine cone design on it

  or the automatic with the gas station design

  on the handle

  I fail and now the automatic is sticky

  I try to take off my coat

  without getting it sticky too

  I fail to keep the coat clean

  but succeed in removing it

  I wash my hands while whats left of the

  popsicle melts on the kitchen sink

  I roll up my sleeves

  I remove the sticky automatic from

  the holster with the pine cone design