In the trees by the river, alone, sometimes
it's so simple.
You hear the noise & look up:
hundreds of beating wings black against a graying sky.
For a moment, then, it's impossible not to wonder
how many birds are up there, heading south.
But it doesn't matter, not because
there's no meaning in things -- the birds
themselves are meaning, as is the sky
& you gazing at the scene’s many aspects.
It doesn't matter because
knowing the number of birds flying
adds nothing, in the trees by the river, to
the pleasure you feel eying them as they migrate.

1
Like her 2-year-old Irina, tied
to the table leg so she, mama,
can leave for hours, there are things
that must be kept in place.

But which? Already
years ago
change was Moscow’s insomnia. Sometimes
sex anchors Marina long enough so she can put on
her wings. That’s when
body goes into soul mode. The poems come then.

2
One day it’s 1921, the next 1917 & then . . .
Her nerves are like trains crammed with peasants
who slobber over the accusations on the walls --
Leeches! Bourgeois filth!
With Sergey off fighting the reds, what’s
a wife to do?
The city’s in upheaval.
Nannies & cooks, refusing to work, prowl
the streets in gangs, climb
through broken windows, yank
books from shelves, then dig in the gaps between words for what they know is there: the cacophony
from which syllables are spawned.
Not far off
the tsar’s favorites stare poetically at old samovars.
Is the river
really on fire?
The night goes up in flames.

3
Her flights of fancy, getting only as far
as skullbone lets them, smell
of dirt & bitter herbs. With a hint
of la-la land thrown in.
But not always.
Knowing which knots hold best & which don’t, that
she decides
is true realism.
As with firing squads & tinsmithing, effort matters but
in the end it’s what results that counts.

4
A relative, a violinist, once taught her
how to steal apricots from a cart.
What a romantic insolence
she thinks approvingly now, also remembering
her mother hunched over the piano like a man
gutting a fish in a hut in Koktebel, a Black Sea town.

Pieces of old furniture burn
in the wood stove as her mind wanders. Whatever
disappears unseen through the chimney pipe, the word smoke
doesn’t quite define it. It’s snowing again. The wind’s
shrill shrieking annoys her. She won’t
be told what to do.

Lifetimes come & go
-- Moscow, Berlin, Prague, Paris, Yelabuga.
Her cuckolded husband dead, one daughter in jail
& the other, Irina, long ago
untying the rope that bound her to the table leg, ended up
a corpse in an orphanage.

One day walking in the cold, Marina spots
a whore leaning against a soldier
as the duo stumble drunk down the street –
while the woman places one hand on his crotch
with the other she slides
the wallet from his back pocket.
What a slut Freedom is, Marina later rants.

5
A hawk hunting a fieldmouse
in fields buried under Moscow’s walkups,
her imagination seeks what it can’t find:
innocence.

Because she’s like the rest of us, she’s easy
to mock.
Contradiction her addiction, she’s
a real czarina of knots
-- secure baby with this one,
use this one to leash what language forgot,
or, here, employ this one to tie what we know of logic in knots
-- why not?
She recalls what a favorite author once wrote:
“There’s no happiness in life, only peace, sometimes.”

Hair gray now, she looks around one day
& it’s August -- she’s back, east
of Moscow, east of Novgorod. Close by
the sound of 2 rivers merging is her mind
roaring between her ears.
A noose, she realizes, is nothing but a zero
made of rope.
After sticking in her neck, she kicks away the chair.
That’s it. The poetry stops.

6
Eccentric mother
bedraggled angel with an itch between her legs
occasional thief
monumental poet-genius with a fading dacha up her sleeve
the wind is her imagination, a mess of changing currents, howling through lindens in search of what it never finds

My sweet suicide.
No matter how different she and I are, I’m faithful to her
beyond the end, standing here
on the grave’s wrong side.

If it was still possible, Marina, I’d do
for you what you told Mr. Pushkin you’d do for him:
squeeze your hand
with love
but not

(a dog)

lick it

(revised)

The newly dug grave,
a black cradle. Fräulein Böhme, after

placing the embalmed infant
in, rocks him

back & forth until
the carcass rots. By then she’s got

motion sickness, having watched
the cradle’s

to and fro, a tick-tocking
like an undecided mind swinging between

this and that, no truth

in sight except that Humpty Dumpty
once sat on a wall & baby brother Eddie, soon

grown up, one day yelled
Where’s Oscar at? His mommy didn’t listen. She owned

a cat by then for killing rats, those midget Trojan horses
transporting germ armies in their bellies in order to

topple belief-systems & cities. She was
Yonkers folks said

a little nutty. Daddy told me
all about her grief. Big Ed’s

what his buddies
called him. A quiet man. I never

heard him scream, except
in my imagination when

he told the Oscar story
again, again, again. At 91

when he died, the tale
might have ended but

it didn’t. It’s the plug
in the socket in my mouth, it’s

the voltage shooting through the mind, the shock
of how behind the scenes

something lurks like a pair
of wary eyes

pacing back & forth
behind bars in the zoo.

The newly dug grave,
a black cradle. Fräulein Böhme, after

placing the embalmed infant
in, rocks him

back & forth until
the carcass rots. By then she’s got

motion sickness, having watched
the cradle’s

to and fro, a tick-tocking
like an undecided mind swinging this way then that, no truth

in sight except that Humpty Dumpty
sat on a wall & baby brother Eddie, soon

grown up, one day yelled
Where’s Oscar at? His mommy didn’t listen. She owned

a cat for killing rats, those midget Trojan horses
that transported germ armies in their bellies in order to

topple belief-systems & cities. There was blood
on the doormat after that. Daddy

told me all about it. Big Ed’s
what his buddies called him. A quiet man. I never

heard him scream, except
in my imagination when

he told the Oscar story
again, again, again. At 91

when he died, the tale
might have ended but

it didn’t. It’s the plug
in the socket in my mouth, it’s

the voltage shooting through, the shock
of how behind the scenes

something lurks, like a pair
of wary eyes pacing back & forth

behind bars
in the zoo.

Last Visit

(revision)

Two days of heavy rain. I slog
along paths in a slicker and sleep at night
in my car near the watertower.
Like mind and memory
ground and sky merge. Bone fragments
again are unearthed, men
swig from flasks, day
light turns the color
of Slowby pond’s muddy edge.
As wind and rain batter switchgrass, bending it
westward,
the sexton, with God’s voice
in his head and blood on his hands, flees
in a panic, pounding kitchen doors and begging
the armed families inside to let him in.
But no bolt or latch opens. Lurching
across fields, he finally
scurries into a barn, huddles shivering next to a hay pile and listens
to moles scraping
holes in the ground outside. It’s not
them, though, it’s
the buried body pieces, caked
with dirt and crawling forward, then organizing themselves
into a compound form, a wild stallion
with a rider holding up a sign that says,
“I am the Sanctifier! Who are you?”
In the end, the road past Volker’s farm circles back
into the mind, this graveyard where
among stone markers and patches
of jimson weed
the dead hold court. Their accounts
of turnips protected in old root cellars
echo in the night
long after November passes and snow blankets everything.

(revision)

“You’ve always had a special place in my heart, Bobby. I even kept some of your youthful writings in a box,”
you told me on the phone yesterday morning, then added
"Aunt Lori died in the nursing home last night."
Before that call, the last time you and I spoke was 19 years ago
when I showed up on a whim, no advance notice.
Toward the end of that night, in a house not far
from an old cattle-slaughtering barn, I gazed out a glass door
at a row of firs, beyond which
an abandoned engine block sat in a snow-dusted field.
Behind me you ridiculed a visiting Hindu,
an atheist cabinet maker whose fingers smelled
of coriander, which, like pure emotion, made no sense to you.
Years earlier, pregnant, you told me, “I made love to Jimmy
on the jetty,” and I pictured afternoon water
lapping the platform’s lake-eroded posts
as, after he entered you, you gasped in recognition:
violently, a single sperm extracted itself from a pack of others
then pushed, like an idea with no time for no,
through your egg’s zona pellucida while shouting,
“Bitch, this pregnancy’s for you!”
At what point in that forced marriage did your drunk husband,
his conga heart the loudest instrument in a band you didn’t know about,
first rumba by himself in his hardware store as if it was a ballroom --
and, if you know the answer, does it matter anymore?
Twenty-five years, then divorced, and it never occurred to you to ask
what you should’ve asked:
“How did those flying frogs in Africa evolve?”
or
“Was Jesus’ cross made from the wood
of the cherry tree George Washington chopped down?”
Your skull, pounding worse than with a sinus headache,
is the door Luther nailed his theses to
in Wittenberg when the Protestantism you inherited, unlike now,
still attracted the raucous-spirited: German peasants
rowdily roaming back roads as they jabbed
their pitchforks into the bellies of moneylenders fat on sauerbraten.
Dripping with those murders’ gore, I once,
in an industrial field overlooking the Hudson,
convinced an Otis Elevator secretary to jerk me off
while our grandpa, the one-eyed custodian, dusted pews in St. John’s.
I am what I am: what the weedstalk left behind,
the bad seed which sprouts, like a past
you didn’t know you had, in your mind.
Whatever you have in that box isn’t me.
I am the Jew or Hindu who befuddles you.
You went your way, I went mine:
you got elected to the local board of education,
I became a creep,
the family’s lone ecstatic,
its moody black sheep.

Only the naked are properly clothed

1
The border patrol loves when the snows come
and the fighting slows for awhile.
Even then, though, they look around. Nervously.

Slinking toward them like a white leopard
in a blizzard, an unforeseen awareness
approaches them unannounced.

Snow-covered tree branches creak in the wind,
small lights burn in Lake Dal’s icebound houseboats,
no one’s seen the moon for days.

Wind-whipped snowdrifts, changing shape
in the high passes, revel
in how dark their brightness is.

2
A few soldiers awaken frightened in their bunks, others
sleep soundly, snow-covered pine branches sag.
Like a plate of curried goat, nothing lasts forever, not even
an occupying army.
Unsure where to go, a Brahman
plods through snow, reciting
Sanskrit mantras and leaping, like a suicide into a well, into
an owl’s unblinking eye.
The night’s noises make a music beyond
ignorant notions of harmony.
Day in and day out, people’s esteem
for the mute, immovable peaks deepens.

3
A towering that long ago fell silent,
the mountains look at nothing.
The rabbit’s paw prints in the snow
know nothing about where the rabbit’s gone.
Like everything else, purity
is at large tonight, surviving the best it can.
Sleeping in the snowy forest, it hugs
its rifle while waiting for the muezzin’s morning call.
“This is what tenderness looks like,”
an observer thinks.
Snowflakes land on his eyelids
dark treetops shelter him as he goes.

It’s sin
uous. The horn’s
out

pouring. Lush
ous. Humid
opening, love

tunnel buried
under mounds
of hair. What

echoes in that passageway
reverberates here
too, in

tree trunk & in how
in the shadows
a hand closes

the dead man’s eyes. Still
a few hours until
dawn & the

trumpet player’s
blowing like there’s
no

tomorrow or (maybe)
no note after
this one now.

I don’t need a respirator to breathe yet, that’s
one good thing. Every

year when Kunda shows me
her blue morning glories, I watch
the petals close while the sun rises higher and

the mortars grows noisier
in the north. Meanwhile
the morning glory’s internal timer
strikes me as having replaced

somewhere along the line
the need for a Divine Mind. Things
are alert enough on their own, the monarch
identifying the right time to fly to Mexico and the tree
knowing exactly how high

to grow.
But let me tell you, friend, you just don’t seem
to get it, not even

the weapons part.
Too bad you don’t march
to the beat of a different drummer: the pounding

of the morning-glory’s petals
as they close!
Snapping your fingers
to the rhythm, then, you’d
finally figure it
out, how

the boneyard we each carry on our backs
weighs us down to the point where
sunk so low
we at last know what’s
underfoot.

Me walking with Yvonne down Bleeker, then
into an alley, poetry everywhere, like the pigeons
on rooftops
or her breasts plopping out of her newly opened blouse
into the dark of my mouth
We were cool then not afraid of anything

Back in the
day
Each one seemed to teach all noons from then on the meaning of bright
Sucking my cock in a walkup, she played a hidden harmonium
In the end the laboratory beakers in Freddy Firestone’s ruined mind after high school foamed sunlight as he tried to stick a carving knife in his sister’s chest, yelling later
“I just wanted to draw a picture of a menorah”
Freddy looked around, far away I sighed, Yvonne coughed
The days were long
piles of tangled seaweed lay on the Great South Bay’s beaches while shifty-eyed old men in Far Rockaway told stories that the hippest philosophers loved

One night I swaggered along streets not hearing the Ukrainians’ TB coughs, me too busy quoting the poems in Yvonne’s black hair
so thick & in it
burnt croissant flakes from her mother’s apron when the old woman
one morning going nuts with anger
took it off & tried to whip her with it while Yvonne cried
“Mommy why’d slutty Aunt Gina fly all that way just to die in Algeria?”
Later that night at the White Horse Tavern
Yvonne told me she liked to drink
“boilermakers --
a glass of existentialism
with a shot of zen thrown in”
god was she hot

Yeah hip was everywhere
it wasn’t sunglasses but a new set of eyes
it meant nodding hello to goatees blocks south of Union Square
it meant mastering the art of gazing back over one’s shoulder at trails in the eyes of jobless doormen exiting the bars

Hip was hanging out with yourself, black hair slicked back as you bided your time in dives while low-downing folks at the bar about how Zarathustra said he loved nothing more than watching the sun shine down through ruined roofs and on grass and red poppies upon broken walls

Hip was the eye as collage a twisted wire hanger with Babel’s tongues dangling from it like suet suspended from a birdfeeder

Hip was the mind in Congo mode
a firing squad of old ideas watched Lumumba dying
the next morning a rhino shook the ground while rolling over in a mudhole
look there where the river disappears among trees beyond the capital Kinshasa
that’s where all the old facts cease and real learning begins

Hip meant Yvonne until hip came apart at the seams
first I fell down the Penn View Hotel stairs, then weeks later
woke up screaming in my 10th St. room above a Greek deli in which the potato salad reflected in the wife-cashier’s panicked eyes couldn’t clarify why
no matter what I did with the dials
the clock radio kept playing inside my head and nothing
was edible anymore not even
Yvonne

Yet before that we pricked up
our ears, listened
while walking the streets
to the brilliant soliloquies
of people too alone
not to speak out loud to themselves
in more than one voice simultaneously