on dirty bus fronts
--poems from back in the day (1980-90), remastered April 2020
lord’s prayer
At Home with Marcel*
afterbirth
Srilanka
crepuscule
Tito’s Widow
on dirty bus fronts
American Express
catch
Traviata
take it
done express**
after**
Proust
Jacob
home
Pay Dirt
*The Connecticut Poetry Review, vol. 8, no. 1, 1989
** The Little Magazine, vol. 14, no. 4. 1985
lord’s prayer
Now you’re where you
are and that’s alright I’m
working on the sides and the
back when we’re
both here it’ll
be like before I ask my
self is there enough
time I know most of them
don’t but we’ll have a
thing to say any
way I don’t ever
worry I’m waiting in some bus
station for mine or high
on a u-haul wondering if
she’ll hold if
she’ll make it when
we left I took them
with me it’s just
touches I’ll show you
pictures just touches to
turn them out to
weather it soon.
At Home With Marcel
i. Proust at Noon
A storm in the day. A row
of candles balanced, not lit
on a sill in first light.
Thick glass
turns the sun.
A certain way
of walking--whose?--a song
heard twice in one day twenty-three
years four months five days ago.
Time for bed.
ii. After Midnight
That part of the world
questions him. Warm milk in the bowl,
the quilt like a man
sleeping in a train station.
Lying against the swell of feathers,
mouth closed, stitched with ink,
Proust signs to himself,
cautions
his fingers to silence,
At two
the distant shock of morning
wakes him. Ten more minutes
dreaming
loops of script so tiny--fine girl’s strokes--
two generations will untie them.
He rises, pulls shoes on,
shuffles to the table.
Writes till dawn--eyes
darkly open, nose whimpering
mournfully, like a dog
in a nightmare.
His hand moves quickly,
chasing
that other century.
iii. Coffee
A gauze of sunlight
across his eyes. The rug folded
against the seep of ten o’clock
beneath his sill.
He walks to the window. The street
is littered with impressions.
Extinguished streetlamps float, blind,
over soft cobbles. Wet leaves wrap the curb
in brown paper. No--not brown paper.
At last the knock, the man,
the steaming bowl full
of coffee, empty of
detail.
afterbirth
I’ve studied this
site some. Process
ing processing. Truths
show their dowdy
heads with a little
poking.
Work-a-day, finally. No
sticky mystery. Fancy
knots, lean-to. Camp
craft, Womanlore.
Rub sticks
better than most. Still
sticks. Still fast trains
out.
Srilanka
I’ll build all my life, he said
around this girl he said
I’ll put her in the middle
of my life
--- for there were to be circles
around steps, beyond a dining room
in a kitchen, hours
for all of them, smiles
and a time for them ---
then she turned into things,
first disappearing, then a book
on a shelf and a dream cycle
like a computation of how, of where.
The others thought it good, he alone--told
him so and gave reasons, examples,
visiting him on their way
--- but there were to have been tables
he thought, a chair, a window and spoons
on tables. There were to have been times
for their visits
and other times
for clutching and laughing,
the two of them
alone ---
so he thanked them
and hated and
waited pursing his lips holding
the book from the shelf,
computing how where
when she was
--- and then she came back
astonishing
and a set of steps was found
encircled by the fall weeks
passing. The others visited
sobered
to find clutching and laughing
and left hating and
waiting as if it hadn’t happened ---
but it had
crépuscule
In the twilight
my dreams passed
beside the bed
where there was no wall,
no table, the empty room
open, filled
with the cold
waiting.
Passed
through a street
like the hall by your room
in the house, the high
ceiling of the dusk
or dawn, the walls
smooth, pale as the damp
plaster, the floor
black with rain, deep
as the stained mirror
on the mantelpiece.
Until
the end of the street,
your side steps, stained by
the mist, powder
settling; your front door
traced with rain, webbed
with faint marks like
tears, like
the paths of snails.
Tito’s Widow
I.
Arrival was not simple.
We waited days for our heads
to clear and still the morning
sunlight hung between us for hours;
until noon that first week
we had only each other.
II.
Nights merged with the Adriatic’s chill.
At last the numbness woke us for dawn, for
breakfast. The languages bewildered us,
everyone knowing two we didn’t,
our three useless
except to pun with each other at
dinner, loneliness and surprisingly high prices
converging to teach us how to
gaze past each other, wounded,
while the waiters rushed angrily by.
III.
Will you come back? I wonder.
Not to Yugoslavia,
not till the tall cliffs are sand
(how you hated wearing shoes to the water,
even naked it made you feel put upon!)--
no, to New York where at least we can still be
understood by strangers.
In San Francisco you again have
the rocky shore, the solitude.
When did you gain
that aloneness, time cascading past
your childless life? Wasn’t it by
Pag on that slowest of ships, the French boys
offering flat bellies to the sun, you?
Why didn’t we conceive then--
a plan at least--
you to Greece, me to Cornell?
Timetables, you say. I nod now
as I nodded then,
and go to make arrangements
in German.
IV.
In Baltimore, I invade
your mother’s house, marvelling
at the depth of shadow here.
The light falls even more thickly in the closets
(high-ceilinged closets--my god,
how we noticed things back then!)
light falls even heavier
in your mother’s contented confusion,
handed whole from her
to us.
I contemplate your father at thirty,
not even considering
an early heart attack yet,
without the faintest idea of what made
your mother hold herself so far from him.
No second degrees available for
“girls” then. Only two
in her law school class,
your mother tells me again this visit.
Why is her loyalty to you so perfect?
In her mind you are your father
and yourself. I am
the widow
of the partisan, the hero,
a Tito framed in every
bakery window, above every
barber’s chair.
on
dirty
bus fronts
girls’ names in
hearts till it rains
not yours Maryvonne
I scratch yours in
good in deep
with my best
blade
American Express
Last I saw of myself was Holland. I
woke in a stone-shouldered room,
a white tunnel, no phone.
Next I’m walking,
an hour to kill, thinking about
my brother Steven. The streets
aren’t straight but Steven would have
no problem. I walk, hand on my
wallet, not seeing much
past the shops, the Dutch.
What I want to know is: I look
for a good meal, right? Just go in?
I’m not much on talking, rubbing
elbows. But it’s six o’clock, I’m
hungry, it’s Holland. I go in.
All I do is sit, order,
and two guys are looking at
my Trinity class ring.
You call that friendly?
catch
fast dancing I
saw her watching we
caught by the door went
out the night open white
stone the sky her
footsteps broken her
place up stairs the
wood the walls spilled
glass washed her dress her
legs bent we lay down took
turns slept in the
morning sheets turned
back showing things me
the white scar lip
line she her bangs
longer in a picture we
found eggs at
the corner made the day
long waiting I took
off not shaving she
knew don’t stand looking
out with no blinds no
bangs don’t even
smile
Traviata
The one who strayed
it means or nearly so,
she who turned left instead of right
for good of family, for piety,
for good anyway so not to blame.
From this the absence of plot,
rendered undistracting
as in a poem.
Amore misterioso, their
two voices posed wanting, having
lost already while the first
feast candles burn, giving
the ghost already when the first
toast approaches consummation-
spittled lips and he longs,
bellowing, to be infected.
They suffer in purity,
in a vacuum of circumstance--
she his father’s daughter’s
savior, and his hatred love,
and his pain.
That the unity, their
cries of passion
merging into lamentation;
his unheard plea unheard
again when his father’s father’s
made a corpse of she who wandered.
Her sharp want, her
fevered hymeneal hymn become
a deathbed moan of eternal
faith without a pause, a seam
of happiness to separate
the separations.
Take it
you had
suspenders your jump
suit my shirt was knotted did
that mean virgin?
take it
easy on me now we’re
not talking I know you
can hurt me more than I
hurt you your
thoughts I
believe in lightning.
When I think how
warm I get tired wanting
you leave me just enough
to get by How
are you?
I ask why you
threw my all away I come
up with sure your
life you'd choose small
arms I just wanted every
thing I could give
you could've turned out
the same if we'd tried
again why not worth it you
say I just
talk against your
belly hair turn
away from me I'm
long for them for
you flat captions you're
listening though aren't
you? wake up the
night smell the pillow?
done express
He took two delicious sugared
aspirin (big tablets, like fizzies, stamped
with commandments) and watched
the Orient Express, him inside, stalled
at Strasbourg (two languages holding the
train captive at 4 a.m.) Counted
the way he felt--one, two,
three, to be in the rain, on
train, alone again.
He drank the cola, ate
Linzertorte (chewy raspberry in a
nutty crust) actually from Vienna but
he headed for Linz after thirty-five years of his
father’s life, only twenty-three of his own, never
having seen the place where his father was born.
He bought the tart in Paris
along with a piece of cheesecake and
the beignet, and the crudités sandwich like egg-salad
on a bulky with lettuce and tomatoes--and a slice of cold pizza--
bought it before he’d gone and
not taken his train because he’d
forgotten (left quickly on the dresser
with the too-heavy dictionary in the borrowed
apartment above Gare St. Lazare) two things: almost
all his money, and his passport, which seemed a silly
thing without which to travel.
Then he’d gone and found her and they’d spent
two delicious sugared hours (the last one, she
not found until dark, until the second, the last
train too was pointing east) two hours
together and then had made it mistake of touching
words, talking words, like
commandments, her to him, so that
he’d almost left that last train behind
too, going fast nowhere, his passport
on him then, his money, but the crudités, the
pizza, the beignet inside them along with the timetable
he’d been following all day, still oriented in
Paris (after eight months the metro lines like friendly
cousins), first on the Ile St. Louis looking for
her (he’d known she’d be walking through to
Beaubourg) then waiting at her place past the Star
while the German countryside rolled
past that first train (Karlsruhe
by then) while he waited for her
to be found
all day, counting one, two, three,
to be in the rain, on the train, to be again
alone, but suddenly not yet, because he’d
missed it.
after
The pupil met his teacher
in another place.
Teacher, he said,
I have done much
of what we first did together.
His teacher looked, smiled
to think of it,
of all the new artifacts somewhere.
Looked, smiled,
to see that although
he and the pupil looked
not at all alike
(the teacher taller, stooped)
they had become,
crossing time,
similarly alone
like old lovers.
He was filled
with a thick, dry joy,
like old comb honey,
pollen dusted.
Proust
I kiss Marcel
the moment I recognize him. He is a thin
dark boy, studying his
map, his letter, his letter and his map,
on that metro ride through Paris. I cross
the narrow aisle. “Pardon.”
I lean over him. He
looks up, his dark eyes see me.
I take him.
Jacob*
On the edge of laughter,
his hands on the man’s
breast, his face hidden
before the strength wresting
beneath him testing him,
taking. Seeing no one,
no face, not the other’s, his own
spin throwing him,
the shadows twisted round
his brows and the angel’s
cheek damp in the hollow
of his shank.
Seek, the angel said, you shall
uncover. But Jacob woke, caught
at himself with trembling
fingers to find himself
alone, sandy, the dawn
dim, discolored, the quiet
across the water, the people
watching, standing,
waiting.
*Jacob Wrestles With God
22 That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23 After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions.
24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”
But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
27 The man asked him, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered.
28 Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,[a] because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”
29 Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”
But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.
30 So Jacob called the place Peniel,[b] saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
31 The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel,[c] and he was limping because of his hip.
home
Taking this
world spatula and
hotpot in two
rooms windowless, waterless;
having made good two
month fixtures fee small dog
hall mirror, neighbors’ trust I
trace the building’s echos. Learn
campcraft, woman
lore. Realize I knew it
all before. Every stick rubbing, each
spelunker’s careful pleated
rope. Still, it fascinates. How
they wiggle free, light their
fires in the rain.
Pay Dirt
Hunkering down costs
considerable. In advance
the back forty, the flowered apron,
stained hands plumbing depths,
eyes averted
while the vitals collect themselves.
Buses, pregnant; dolphins,
whatever solid is and
laden, casts its warmth
inward. Dark roils form
into grapeshot, pit-black,
animal perfect.
Leggings, fiber vests,
down-filled, deep mohair.
Mercy! It’s all part
payday, part showtime!
--Trousers over work shoes
brush linoleum.