SPEAKER: --off the spring series on January 21 with the poet
Dean Young in this auditorium.
After the reading in the hall, we
hope you will join us for a little reception.
We have-- the bookstore has for sale Steve Orlen's books.
And Alison Deming's new book, Monarch,
will be available tonight.
Tonight's reader will be introduced by the poet
and teacher Tony Hoagland.
[APPLAUSE]
TONY HOAGLAND: Hello.
Thank you for coming tonight to hear Steve Orlen.
He's published-- I'm going to just [MUTED] brief essay.
He's published four collections of poetry: Permission to Speak,
A Place at the Table, The Bridge of Sighs,
and most recently this book, Kisses,
from Miami Ohio University Press.
And Steve has also won as many NEA grants as you can win.
It's a real pleasure for me to introduce him
because I'm a former student of his
and also because I love his poems
and also because I've been watching
him, his process over his shoulder, for 15 or 16 years
now.
And it's been a very educational experience.
So I'm going to give a mini essay.
And the subject of my mini essay to introduce Steve
is a quote from the poet and essayist Jonathan Holden.
And the quote is, "Poets are the elites of literature,
literary critics are the sports writers."
Now the idea of a poet as an athlete has a history
but it's so obvious that I'm surprised that no one said it
before Jonathan Holden.
It's good because it makes poets sound agile and muscular
and that's good for their image.
And it also seems simply accurate as a description
of what poems do.
An acrobatic performance which combines
freedom and control, gravity, anti-gravity,
death-defying love, love-defying death.
When we watch an athlete, we're reminded of how
amazing the human body is.
When we listen to a poet, we're reminded of how
capacious the human psyche is.
And then there are a lot of game-related injuries
in both poetry and athletics.
The Chinese poet Li Po, for example,
drowned while attempting to copulate with the reflection
of the moon.
[LAUGHTER]
Poets have a history of forgetting the oven is on,
falling off bridges by accident, and poets and athletes, finally,
also seem to have in common what might be called a short shelf
life.
By which I don't mean how many years
a poet writes, but the period of time
in which he or she is actively inventing a way of speaking
and discovering subject matter.
Arrested development is more the rule than the exception.
And this is what I want to testify to
in Steve Orlen's work.
Especially his work over the last few years, which
you'll be hearing tonight.
Stamina and persistence, and study and discipline
are all parts of an artist's talent.
But to be able to reconceive your own limitations
and to have the spiritual readiness
that inspiration requires--
qualities that represent another kind of work, inner work,
and that's why I'm introducing Steve Orlen as an athlete
tonight.
His imagination is muscular and quick
and tender and above all, in the poems
you're going to hear tonight, is surprising and unpredictable.
His feet are big and flat.
And he is not so slim as he once was,
but he is at the peak of his form and I hope you enjoy him.
[APPLAUSE]
STEVE ORLEN: That's a hard act to follow.
Thank you, Tony, and thank you all for coming.
I've stood out in the hallway with a sandwich board
for the last week asking everybody to come
and you all came.
It's very nice.
I'm all dressed up now.
I can take it off, right.
It's warm up here.
I'm going to read some poems from the new book Kisses
and then I'm going to read some newer poems.
The first poem is called "Nobody's Jew."
This takes place in a restaurant kitchen, et cetera.
The chef of the restaurant was a big bluff man
who looked like some palooka from the comics.
In the kitchen, among the chowders and the steaks,
he'd pump out his brave stories and take
the giant, spiny, 12-pound old man lobster dripping
from its tank and wave it like an obscene flag
in someone's passing face.
He abused the cooks and waiters equally.
But one cook in particular, the apprentice saucier,
he humiliated most for some reason I couldn't quite yet get,
going for whatever jugular throb that moment
in the kitchen culture.
I don't know how the saucier knew I was Jewish like him.
But one night in the larder, he confided that the chef
despised the Jews.
So watch your step.
I can still feel him breathing in my face
and speaking out his awful, personal, historical truths
about our exile, our pogroms, our Holocaust.
And as the summer passed, he tried in various ways
without success to enlist me in the ancient wars
between the Gentiles and the Jews.
The problem was I couldn't stand him.
Bookish, smug, overly alert to nuances
everyone else let pass, his face kept
that sour look of the willfully dispossessed
like those immigrants my uncles chuckled at with their side
locks, their prayer books, and yarmulkes,
their passive, bearded, ghetto insistence
on being kept a race apart.
And though I thought of myself as just
another American working-class kid, who wanted to write poetry
like the immortal Yeats, what he said nagged at me
and wouldn't let me go.
So that night in the kitchen, when the chef yelled something
to the saucier something like, hey Jew
boy, come taste the soup, and the silence in its wake
was like thick grease and the humid odors of the kitchen
itself, whatever gorge there was in me rose.
And as I tasted it, it yelled, watch your mouth.
The chef was a coward and he made a joke.
But in that moment I hated the saucier, not the chef.
I hated his potato nose, and his chummy confiding sneers,
and the loneliness he hoarded like so much aging
cheese he finally got to share.
I hated him the way one hates oneself.
The way one hates one's family, in oneself.
Those little tics of character consigned
to genes that rise to the ceiling in the dark and blind
you so you can't sleep.
Incessant shrugs and bickering.
The constant emotional deals we made from room to room,
from house to house, a block, a neighborhood,
an insisted, noisy, inventive, tribal nation of us.
We roamed the Earth, despised.
I hated all of it: how could we have survived?
Einstein, Freud, and all the private melancholic schlumps,
my uncles, my father, my brother.
I'm just a guy like anybody else,
was all I could think of to say later to the saucier
at my station as I let my indifferent gaze fall equally
on customers, on silverware, and plates.
And the next day, when I got fired I said it again.
I'm just a guy like anybody else, in that spoken American
fudged pentameter I was trying to steal from Yeats,
himself among the haters of the Jews.
And saw myself as far from the human race
as that great dumb golem of a lobster,
crawling the mucky bottom on display.
I wanted to raise it from its briny stew
and shake it in his face, and say, I'm not your Jew.
I'm nobody's Jew.
This is a love poem.
It's called "The Meaning of Romance."
And you all get to hear me sing tonight.
I can't sing very well.
But there's some old '50s doo-wop songs in it
and I'll do my best.
I don't know if there's anything I have to say about it.
I guess not.
Called "The Meaning of Romance."
You got to imagine two people in the living room that
got a little baby, the wife is nursing,
and things go on from there.
The baby's cranky and the night is hot.
First one breast then the other, his mouth
moving in a graspy snuffle.
And before he knows just what he's got, he's fast asleep.
My wife adrift in the darkened parlor on the couch,
oiling her dark and heavy breasts, her head lolling back,
and her socks off asked me to tell the same old stories that
pulled us together when we were younger into a shared
romance of our pasts.
We had a style of dancing Friday nights we called inner shuffle.
Like a tango or a bop, but slower,
done together in a stiff staccato
meter to the sweet and sensual doo-wop of the day.
This in the flats among the factories
1957 after spinning silk into cloth all week
in Skinner's mills.
Do it, she says, so I get my comb
and wet it and return with my hair slicked back
into a crest like a bold and silly bird and my chest puffed
up beneath my striped pajama top.
And suddenly, we're gathered in the crowded, dark,
high-ceilinged, rectangular dance hall with all the Joes
and Marys from the projects, all the Aces, Frenchies, Butches,
all the Babs and Ruths and Dots.
Show me, she says, do it.
So I rise from the couch and she puts the records on her 45s.
(SINGING) Tonight, tonight, more than any other night.
I pull her-- pretty awful.
[LAUGHTER]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Ah-ha, thanks.
Ah-ha.
I pull her close half naked and we begin.
My body canted slightly to the left and hers straight on.
Me walking forward and her going back,
and every three steps, a stop on a dime, a freeze, a stare, then
a sort of rhythmic wiggly shuffle
and on around the parlor moving to the old tunes, the doo-wops,
and finally, the fast one, "Hey Bo Diddley."
And I remove my pajama top and she her bottom.
And here we are again doing the dirty boogie,
crooning in our sweetest imitations of a cappella
baritone, a cappella soprano.
(SINGING) Oh, we papa cow, papa cow, papa cow, cow.
Oh, we papa cow, papa cow, cow, cow.
I promise to remember the meaning of romance.
[LAUGHTER]
Sorry about that.
The baby sleeps.
The baby snores.
My wife shakes side to side, shoulders back, her blackened,
oiled nipples scattering drops of milk.
Then bump, bump, two hips striking metal.
Ace and Frenchie, Ruth, Dot, who made cloth from silk
30 years ago in Skinner's mills.
What wonders are you spinning out?
What teenagers have you wrought?
Are you as proud and tough, as silly and as sentimental?
Do you shine like oiled silk?
And is the night as hot?
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
This next poem is called, "I Want To Be A Girl."
And the only thing I think I have
to tell you is, first of all, is that some
of the facts in the poem which are funny and awful are true.
And the other one is, I don't know
if anybody will recognize this.
I mean, I don't know how many generations of kids
learned how to write cursive in Palmer Method script.
Do you all remember it and do you all have that?
Well, that happens in the end of the poem.
So, "I Want To Be A Girl."
I am reading the paper every morning.
And every morning, the big sadnesses
make their loud noises.
100 Xs have suffocated in the humid explosive gases
of a chemical plant and 200 Ys were crushed
in an earthquake because of three dishonest building
inspectors.
After the great storm, the subheadline: only three people
drowned.
I know.
Maybe a hundred human beings were at risk.
But still to say, only, hurts everyone yet doesn't
hurt enough to make us cry.
And then there are the back pages
where the little people live.
Maybe you knew them.
I think maybe some tears there.
Because I know how important it is to be
moved, to be cleansed by tears.
This morning in the obituaries, I
see that one Mickey Rubenstein has died and is now
shopping with her grandmother.
This is in the Tucson Citizen or the Star.
And the next one's true too.
I see that Ima U. Eggman died.
These are facts.
And around the breakfast table, we
laughed more than we cried because maybe she
developed a sense of humor like a stopped thermometer
because some stupid parent decided
to make a joke that would last for nearly nine decades.
All my life I wanted to be with them one night.
I say all my life meaning, when I was a little boy,
I wanted to sit beside every dying human being I had ever
heard of.
The displaced princess of Bohemia in her bed
of 1,000 flowers and that drowning 10-year-old girl
in the mundane pissy waters of the YMCA swimming pool.
I wanted to hold their hands in mine the way
a child holds a piece of ice and watch the small soul melt
from the body and cry.
I knew even then there was nothing worse than death.
I know I have squandered a few tears at movies.
And once, on drugs, I wept at the slow, painful birth
of a yellow cactus flower.
I remember in sixth grade one day,
Joyce Mendelsohn suddenly broke into tears.
Nobody had died.
I know for a fact that nobody had insulted her
that day for her crossed eyes and chubby cheeks.
After school, Miss Donahue whispered to me, she's a girl
and girls need no special reason to cry.
As a boy, I wanted to dog after the small sadnesses walking down
Hillside Avenue.
I knew by their wringing hands and the slight erosion
of sunlight around their bodies that something terrible
had happened.
I wanted to hold their hands and say, there, there.
And maybe cry a few small tears with them.
But I never did.
The barely pregnant, acned, teenaged
Helen Geoffrey, abandoned by her boyfriend,
and the immigrant Mrs. Ephros with her hairy upper lip
who was just cheated at the corner grocery,
and Arno Becher whose father used
to slug him for no reason he could think of.
I know that my street was just as important as ancient Greece.
And I know they talked about themselves in the dark.
And pretty soon they were weeping,
although nobody would read about it, nobody would cry.
Therefore, I want to be a girl.
Some Joyce Mendelsohn singing her inner overtures.
Therefore, I send my divining rod
over the small earth of my backyard.
But no sudden jerk of gravity pulls the branch down
toward those rich and helpless waters.
I want to be a girl, I tell my wife.
You big silly, she says cheerfully and pulls me so close
I have no other place to go.
There was no reason for tears between us.
My wife is a wise woman.
When somebody dies, she skips the funeral
and writes them a personal letter in perfectly slanted
Palmer Method cursive script and buries it in the backyard.
[APPLAUSE]
This is a shorter poem.
It's called, "In the House of the Voice of Maria Callas."
Maria Callas was a great diva, an opera star,
who died not too many years ago.
"In the House of the Voice of Maria Callas."
In the house of the voice of Maria Callas
we hear a baby's cries, and the after-supper rattle
of silverware, and three clocks ticking to different tunes,
and ripe plums sleeping in their chipped bowl,
and traffic sounds dissecting the avenues outside.
And we hear, like water pouring over time itself,
the pure distillate arias of the numerous pampered queens
who have reigned, and the working girls who
have suffered the envious knives,
and the breathless brides with their horned helmets
who have fallen in love and gone crazy or fallen in love
and died on the grand stage at their appointed moments.
And no one will sing of them again.
Maria Callas is dead.
Although the full lips, and slanting eyes,
and flaring nostrils of her voice resurrect dramas
we are able to imagine in this parlor on evenings
like this one.
Adding some color, adding some order.
Of whom it was said she could imagine almost anything
and give voice to it.
This poem is called "A Practical Joke"
and it's in some ways it's an elegy for my father-in-law, who
died some years ago.
Every morning I strolled out to the garden
in my huge green, baggy, oversized bathrobe
and peered down at the big leaves
surrounding nothing as yet but a hopeful pocket of air
and waited.
I was patient the way a man might learn wisdom
after so much suffering it becomes a family joke.
And one morning there it was: that first orbital, crenellated,
rugate, white intellectual vegetable
I can never remember the name of.
I thought it was smiling at me.
Me, the big papa of vegetables.
I called out to my wife and her parents, hey, look,
this is what it looks like before you buy it
in the supermarket.
My father-in-law had dropped it in the night before like a baby
no one had expected so soon.
Some years later he died.
It was an awful dying.
Two weeks like two years, pissing and shitting himself,
and sweating buckets.
And the three of us standing our vigils
with the doctors who spoke no consolation
in the dead Latin of medicine.
We bought the coffin.
It was almost like buying a vacation.
The man advised us to choose just the right socks
and underpants, and his best shined shoes, a white shirt,
a suit and tie even.
So he met his maker the same way he met each morning going off
to work.
The brain is a leaky vegetable and some of us
are blessed with forgetfulness.
People take the place of people we have loved.
The place in the brain the dead once
occupied becomes a smaller and then an even smaller room.
And then becomes, in this case, a photo
on the wall of a young fellow on his way to work, grinning.
Like a man about to tell a joke.
Such was this man, my father-in-law, Egon Marcus.
A short fellow, balding, neat as a pin
even in the morning first thing on vacation.
Wearing his dark salesman suit as he
gazed over my measly garden and shining out 10 feet
from his pointing finger, the cauliflower.
Now I remember its name.
Already thinking its cauliflower thought.
I would like to be remembered after I've died in such a way,
at such a moment, dressed in my funeral suit,
chuckling, playing a practical joke.
Or there in sunlight beside myself in my bathrobe,
surprised, taking a joke.
Or like the cauliflower, let me be eaten and forgotten.
[APPLAUSE]
This poem is called--
I don't even know how to pronounce it--
"Onomastics and the Falling Snow."
Onomastics is the study of naming practices, how
people got their last names--
surnames.
This is a long poem.
A couple of pages.
And it's sort of a rapture.
"Onomastics and the Falling Snow."
The name and the spirit are inseparable.
And most everything has a name except the falling snow.
By which I mean each flake, each one different as one spirit
is different from another.
And close up under a microscope, crystalline, like a thing
made by a master watchmaker with a motor the size of a fingernail
and an awl as fine as a hair.
Sillier men than I have tried to name the flakes of snow
while standing hapless at a bus stop.
From where comes this human urge to name each thing?
Each man and each woman.
As though we're not all the same thing
repeated endlessly, the human race.
Did you know that among the ancient Hebrew tribes,
babies were given two names at birth, one sacred, one profane?
The child wasn't told the sacred one.
So we walked around with two names.
One by which to be called in from the sheepfold
and the other intricate, mysterious,
useless like the snow.
And in Norway circa early 20th century,
there were so few hereditary names to pass down everyone
must have thought everyone else a cousin.
Maybe that's why they're so polite, so orderly.
That's why if it's snowing in Oslo
there will always be a helpful soul standing beside you
to offer space the size of an umbrella while waiting
for the bus.
In America, a name means nothing.
A marker to be called in, a convenience.
You can look up an old lost acquaintance
in a phone directory while passing through a city.
But until you call him up, he's only
the name without the spirit.
And his name won't tell us anything about what
he does with his days.
Mr. Weaver at his loom, Mr. Lavender
who makes soap, or how he looks, Señor Roja
for the color of his beard or hair growth, the fat man who
stood in line waiting for the greedy minions of the fanatic
Empress, Maria Teresa, to take his money
and bestow upon him a name to be passed down
to fat and skinny children alike.
Or, if he were even poor and as a mean joke,
to be called the German equivalent of grease, or monkey
weed, or do not borrow from, or gallows rope.
These are real names by the way.
In Russia, there's a word here, ukase.
It means an edict.
It's a Russian word.
In Russia in 1802, to raise an army,
Czar Alexander sent out a ukase ordering each Jew
to take a last name.
Like a poem, mind sprung and wholly inspired on first draft,
then inscribing it on the forehead of a neighbor, each one
befitting.
Isaac, he who laughs.
Or Mazel, lucky man.
Or Trubnik for chimney sweep.
Or Soroka the magpie, meaning the gossip.
And babies in those days were sometimes given ugly names
to turn aside the assiduous bureaucratic angel of death.
Or in illness, a child was renamed
to befuddle the same angel coming down with his empty sack
to collect for God's heavens.
But naming the snow, each flake, each deliquescing cryptic coat
of arms.
That would be a game for only the most inventive hopeless man.
For after all, the snowflakes are the soon to be dead.
Those who float a while, then fall,
and merging, pile up like corpses
on some northern battlefield.
And there melt, flow down as water
to the river which has one name only.
It so happens it's snowing where I'm standing now
at a bus stop in Oslo, between one
moment and the next, feeling nostalgic, homesick,
trying to remember the names of everyone I've ever known.
Hopeless, of course.
So to name is also duty and is also good.
So it worries me that my son, who is more like me
than I care to think about and who bears my last name,
could recite the names of each child in his kindergarten class
after only one week of sitting with his hands folded
on his desk.
He wasn't praying, he told me.
He was waiting for the names to sink in so one morning he could
say suddenly to each one, Hi.
Because it's good to be remembered by anyone,
for the name and the spirit are inseparable.
By the time we are old, we have known so many people
by name we could baptize each flake of falling snow
while waiting for a bus.
They grew away from me.
They became snow.
Fuzzy at this distance, just beyond my reach, waiting
to be called upon again.
[APPLAUSE]
This is a poem called "The Chateau
Near the Top of the Hill."
And it's almost like a short story.
We had seen it in a movie, the chateau on the hill
in a Mediterranean city.
And we wanted to visit it, to live
in it even or outside its stuccoed walls, ancient seeming,
especially at certain times of day.
So my companions, my friend and her little boy,
were both quiet and disquieted by the scene.
On pedestals, several plaster busts of men and women who must
have been important at one time.
And hedges bordering disused garden plots.
And creepers reaching out to snag a jacket sleeve also
lush and unattended.
We imagined God's overgrown Eden after the fall.
We reached it by concrete steps.
The scrolled railings were rusted,
some yanked by the weather from their sockets.
And the steps, although they kept going up,
seemed to have no goal, until they ended abruptly
at the doorway where the old woman was standing.
I'm Jewish, she told us, speaking
English in what I heard as biblical accents swarming
with sand and psalms.
She stood as if expecting us and she was thinking
the no thoughts of the very wise, or so we believed,
being tourists, seekers--
Old mysterious of daydreams realized.
Each evening we arrived, her face
lay in the shadows of the elephant-leafed tree.
So we didn't know whether she was
glad to see us because she lived alone and was sometimes seeking
company, even the company of strangers,
or whether, in shadow, she was frowning at our interruption.
Nevertheless, the light in the front sitting
room at that time of evening always
had a golden cast because of the light
through the crosshatch windows, and later as we
sat, because of the gold service of the tea
set and the golden figures on the chessboard on a low table
behind the sofa.
The figures hadn't been moved since we'd been visiting
for what must have been a week.
And the boy always sat himself down before the chess set
and stroked each piece delicately
as if they were miniature kittens frozen in time.
A diversion the adult conversation which, such as it
was, always began the same way.
It became almost irritating.
And we'd glance at each other.
I'm a foreigner and have always been.
I've lived here a long time.
Then we'd go to the window and look out
at the lights of the city just coming on,
street by curved street.
So it made a sort of map of people's lives.
A stage set.
Little restaurants and shops and the crowded-in apartment
buildings with people beginning to chop the carrots
and onions, skin the eggplant, pour the first glass of wine.
And in one window, two women were sometimes kissing.
And beyond them the sea, serene and reasonable,
corroding the shore.
Our conversation always went on.
What have you been doing since I last saw you?
Entertain me.
And my companion would begin the story of our trip
all over again.
We came to America to find this place we saw in a movie.
We were unhappy with our lives.
[APPLAUSE]
You know how when you go to the seashore or a nice place
with a stream in the country and you pick up
all these beautiful rocks--
wet rocks-- and they're real pretty.
And then you take them home and they're dry
and they don't look so pretty anymore.
Well, that's the metaphor behind this poem.
"Like Water On a Rock."
This is for the middle aged among us.
The homely man sees the beautiful passing woman
as otherworldly creature.
But to the homely man, the homely woman is also beautiful.
But of an order of beauty that can be lived with
and sniffed at like a pillow or a towel
that can best be appreciated close up,
like a rock or a flower.
And when you drip a little water on the rock on Saturday
night before you take it out to dinner,
the rock looks beautiful for a while.
[LAUGHTER]
The same with the flower.
For days you pass by it in its little pot, the jonquil,
and sniff its unpleasant odor and remark to your wife,
how beautiful.
Then in a week or so it's gone.
But you don't say to your wife, it's gone, it's dead,
our little flower.
You simply move on with your life.
So it is with marriage, with aging.
You wake up one morning and your wife
has gotten so tubby you can't see her face anymore.
And your husband, those cute little lines running down
from the sides of his nose to the sides of his mouth
have become rivulets, washes, canyons, riverbeds.
Therefore, late in life we tend to go
around blind with our watering cans, wearing our slippers,
kissing the rocks, kissing the flowers.
[APPLAUSE]
This is a rather long poem.
So I hope I can keep your attention.
This is a narrative.
And it's called, "Cruelty."
And it's about junkies.
He stole money from a dying woman.
I'm sure it was summer because we were all sweaty and irritable
in a sort of jerky hurry, like junkies always are.
My friend and the dope-dealer and his girlfriend, the dying
woman, and me who always came along.
And also because I remember the smell of the nose-opening ether
they used to cut heroin with mixing
with the bitter, smelly, grape-ade effusions
off the purple flowers of a jacaranda tree,
whose top brushed the window of the dealer's third floor
apartment.
And the tingle of mold that rises from a carpet when
spring is over.
The dying woman was a short black stub
dressed like a clerk or a secretary on her lunch break.
Someone who works every day without complaint.
And because I didn't know her very well,
I could say that maybe she also lived in a rundown dump
like this, with a lumpy sofa she slept on,
and a TV set, and a table with one wooden chair for eating.
But I imagine she kept her place clean,
dusted and swept because that's how she looked
with her flowered blouse tucked in
and her straight skirt pulled below her knees
even as she was nodding into an overdose like someone
falling into an afternoon nap.
When the nodding stopped her head spasmed and jerked back
and her eyes, stuck open for a moment, showed only the whites.
When the dealer began slapping her hard across the face,
I knew there was no cruelty in it, only panic.
And beneath the panic, the sure knowledge of his trade.
When he ripped off her blouse and pinched her purple nipples
hard enough to almost tear them off too,
there was no cruelty in that either.
I can only picture her now as a rag doll being tortured
by a frightened child.
Or the child herself being beaten up
by a drunken mother for her own good
because her mother loves her.
The way the dying woman's body moved only
when the dealer moved it.
Then failing to revive her, he lugged her deadweight
into the shower and ran ice cold water over her half-naked body
which was so black I thought it, too,
was purple glistening under the shower spray.
When the dealer positioned himself like a boxer,
he set his feet just so and jabbed methodically
her wet and slippery body.
And while we watched, she kept falling and the dealer
kept lifting her up to lean her against the wall unbearably.
This is when it happened.
The one moment I keep thinking about like a window
within a window on a terrible event,
although 40 years have passed.
As I tell myself the story of that summer and still
feel jittery about it as though I might still get caught or feel
empty or not in my body at all.
This is when my friend picked up the dying woman's
black plastic imitation patent leather purse from the floor
and rifled it and held up the small wad of bills
like a birthday present to himself,
or a prize won at the amusement park, and grinned at me.
Then we moved on to the next connection's apartment
and bought some dope and I watched him shoot it up.
I remember that afterwards we always walked around,
we always stopped to play with the little kids on the street.
We'd talk and flirt with that buzzing knot
of girls who hung around in front of the grocery store.
Maybe we'd bait a barking dog.
Or talk with a vagrant to hear where he had been.
The woman died.
I don't know what happened to the dealer.
My friend is dead now too.
10 years later, shot in the chest
in an alley by a teenage boy he was
blackmailing for being queer.
And if anyone got what he deserved, my friend did.
If ever you can say such a thing.
And what about me, you might ask?
I didn't run to the telephone if there even was one
and dial 9-1-1 which they didn't have back then and yell, hey,
there's a woman here dying of an overdose.
I didn't do any more than shake my head and purse
my lips like a schoolteacher at a naughty boy.
Let's go get in trouble, he used to say afterwards,
after the dope walking and the little bouts of talk.
And we'd move on.
Moving on.
That was it.
That was the cruelest thing I did in those days.
[APPLAUSE]
Seventh-inning stretch.
This also seems to use a similar image from one of the poems.
It's called, "Spit on a Rock."
Wouldn't we all just for a little while
like to be emptied out?
To lie like a bear in the sun without memories.
Those heavy trinkets without obligations,
those fogged-up mirrors in our bedrooms and our baths.
Like a heavy bear in sunlight in the forest,
fur-thickened, well-fattened, smiling our bear
smiles and be stupid and sensual for a while.
Instead, we go around with our troubles,
our hopes, our prayers.
We wear them like heavy coats though it is summer.
It is Saturday.
The driven, deranged, teenaged Joan of Arc
they called the little flea must have done it
at least once on a day neglected by the history books.
Must have emptied herself out like a long sigh, like a morning
pee, and sat there in the French forest before the battle
not thinking of anything.
To fortify herself against the impending flames
and the subsequent obligations to history.
In such moments, the coming battle fields
are trees so rooted in serenity they
can't move against each other.
Their arms wave.
Hello, or goodbye, it doesn't matter.
And in a hollow between two birches
lies the bear, my totem animal, on this Saturday
of wishful thinking.
He is scratching one itch, forgetting it,
scratching at another.
He sticks out his tongue and the honey comes to it
and the bees sing their useless frenzied song.
Meanwhile, in the forest far enough away,
the bear can't catch their scent.
Groups of soldiers on horseback with swords and lances
are moving slowly and heavily towards one another.
And the man who has taken up the rear,
a farmer in his former life, alights from his horse,
bends and picks up a rounded rock,
then snaps off a dead flower whose name he once knew
and for this moment doesn't care to remember.
Cleans his teeth with a dry stem, spits on the rock,
shines it with his elbow, and says to no one in particular,
to the trees, fine flower you got there, mother nature.
Fine rock.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm going to read two more poems.
This poem is called "The Wandering Jew."
And it describes something like an out-of-body experience.
And there's one allusion in here that you might not know.
Josephus is mentioned.
He was born in 37 AD and lived till about 100 AD.
He was a Jewish historian and a general
who wrote and miswrote about the Jews at the time.
"The Wandering Jew."
Don't believe in anything but the evidence of your senses.
Licked in through the eyes, ears,
skin, mouth, then planted chemically,
then merged, turned on like a light bulb,
and retrieved when needed to be able to go on simply
with your life.
And remember that even memory is suspect.
Even history.
Even Josephus who told our edited tale to the world.
And stories, too.
I did this and she did that, and murmurs in the dark,
and exclamations in the light, even when it is our memory,
our lesions, joys, cravings.
But one moment in time.
May the third, 1968, around seven PM.
"The Wandering Jew."
Don't believe in anything but the evidence of your senses.
Licked in through the eyes, ears,
skin, mouth, then planted chemically,
then merged, turned on like a light bulb,
and retrieved when needed to be able to go on simply
with your life.
And remember that even memory is suspect.
Even history.
Even Josephus who told our edited tale to the world.
And stories, too.
I did this and she did that, and murmurs in the dark,
and exclamations in the light, even when it is our memory,
our lesions, joys, cravings.
But one moment in time.
May the third, 1968, around seven PM.
And I know I was sober walking down Hillside Avenue where
such things happen.
Dusk, after supper, feeling pleasantly full.
And me not so much thinking as letting the mind
do its random clerical work.
And I was struck.
Wham.
As by an actual hammer blow pushing me into another time,
another place, where I was shorter,
skinnier, bearded, a Jew, with a Jew's jumpy thoughts.
And no wife, no children, no parents.
With a first name only, a short name like,
a bark or command called out in the street.
I looked up and no one was there.
So I walked down the 3 stone stairs and hauled out the box.
Raw gold.
Fat, irregular chunks, yellow as flowers, grained with soot.
And the tools of my trade walked here
on the longest journey of my life
from Vilna, city of learned men, Jerusalem of the North.
Outside, it was Paris.
The year was 1366 and I, Goldschmidt, now resided
in a large and livid city not my own.
Where dogs barked and soldiers strolled around
in 3s and filthy women sold them for supper.
And at the alley's end, I entered a door.
And there among the men, men just like me, foreigners
all muttering in the world's seven languages,
I began to pray.
Shema Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Then out from my brain into a lamp
lit street, Hillside Avenue.
I have lived here all my life in memory and forgetfulness.
A familiar boy and a familiar man but always a stranger.
A dog barked, straining at its leash.
Behind the windows, my neighbors were
settling in, washing dishes, reading the transcript telegram.
I felt dizzy, nauseous, anonymous, lost.
I haven't mentioned this to anyone.
And I have no further curiosity.
For I know that this was me before I was me.
A simple man with a trade who would sit for hours at a bench,
bent, working a nugget into the circle that signifies
certain eternal arrangements.
[APPLAUSE]
And this is the last poem.
It's also rather long.
And it's about my mother.
And I wish if you meet my mother that you don't tell her
that I wrote this poem and read it before a large crowd.
Because she would be embarrassed.
The poem is-- and I'm embarrassed too--
the poem is called, "Taboo."
In this photograph of my mother posed and taken by my father
several years before I was born when they were or were not yet
married, depending upon who is telling the story,
my mother is standing, is still standing because of the way
photographs make chumps of us, fool us into thinking time
has taken its summer vacation and the subject
of the photograph is locked in the dead center
of the warp of time.
And you have only to reach out and take her hand
and tell her it's time to get moving, get dressed, honey,
we're going home.
My mother stands with her long back, flank, and legs
to the camera and her face both haughty and coy
in profile in front of a mass of mountain rock under an opaque,
embellishing waterfall whose drops
scatter over her shoulders.
She is wearing nothing but a white bathing cap which I
imagine was either a bow to nicety or a brilliant perverse
touch of my father's.
[LAUGHTER]
The photograph in black and white circa 1939
has been enlarged and so is a bit grainy.
And it seems as though her smooth back which
conspires with the water to make her appear even more
beautiful and more vulnerable to the eye is disintegrating.
Although she is quite young, maybe 17,
I will know from later photographs
that her hair tucked under the cap
is full and auburn and long with waves
here and there in an unruly falling.
But I will still be too young to possess
with all of memories, obligations, and privileges
any actual memory of such events as the picnics
and parades my father favored.
And I would never see her actual body.
Because it is probably a dangerous thing for a son
to see his mother's naked body.
Psychologists speak of the primal event.
That moment or moments in which a child
hears through the closed door the muffled sounds of sex
and know suddenly.
What does the child know?
It sounds as though some terrible wounding is taking
place and the child wants to burst
in like a hero, chain mail on a huge horse
that has ridden out of the etching in a library book
and save his mother.
Throw his body between his father's and hers,
to cover his mother's body with his own.
And for a while, or so they say, the child
will both hate and fear the father
and wish to take his place.
I can't see her breasts, but know
they are as large and overripe as melons in a field
because my proud father told me this as a child.
And because lately, in her old age,
she complains that her breasts pull her shoulders down
in a traitorous falling and make them ache.
They're my burden, she said last night in the kitchen,
holding them up in both hands, smiling,
as though what was once pride is still
pride but the exempting pride of having outlived the body.
I would like and would not like to cover the naked and shapely,
as yet unrepentant, distracting body of my mother,
shimmering and disintegrating in this old photograph I dug up
from the bottom of the pile in the basement of my parents'
house.
My father at 87 is blind and emaciated
and slowly metastasizing upstairs in his narrow bed,
dying.
And my mother at 83 is, for this particular eternity,
the beautiful naked water-splashed woman
in this photograph.
It both embarrasses me and draws me in.
The thick black leather bound cover of the album
is embossed with a golden bird, a blazing phoenix,
hesitating in its upwards flight drawn for a moment to its ashes
down below before it moves on, as it surely must.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]