Sixty-Three Years After the Wire Factory Strike

“Tha’s where . . . Give or” --
“Ssshh.”
Icicles outside the bedroom window. He hears trees
bend in the wind: knee joints creak
in front of St. John’s
only a few blocks from the Hudson
as the mob flees
the cops. Soot, black
as Pastor Von Schlichten’s bible cover, falls,
life’s snow,
on everything. Rough
like the bark he wants to dig his nails into
but can’t, his heavy eyelids soon cut him off
from more than sight.
“You can let go now”
his younger brother, Wilhelm, whispers
looking down at the bed. The trail
to Bear Mountain lake winds among synapses
across which the chemical charges don’t leap
like they should. “All this, it could . . . be
somethin’ else but . . . it ain’t,”
Jonathan rasps, his hands aching
with the weight of rocks he’s barely able
to raise onto the pickup’s bed
years ago, the day
Fraulein Berger had the stroke. Hey Wilhelm
he mutters, not
making a sound, like when . . . Emerging
from the alley, Dino Salanti, playing
to the crowd, hits
the cop’s shin bone for a homer
with a length of pipe. Everybody gasps.
At least for a minute
they’re free.
Jonathan roars and his brother smiles
all those years ago.
Two months later Rick Cronin’s bride miscarried at the track.

Arbitrary Gateway to What Was Left . . .

The hurled egg dripped down the kitchen wall.
Yusef thudded into the other room, howling
“You hooligan!”
I woke up on the bench, remembering this.
Nearby was a gutter flower, which I looked at long and hard:
scrawny stem with a battered head of small gray petals.
Never before had I glimpsed so clearly
the meaninglessness of ugly and pretty.
Later I ate a cruller at a food joint’s counter on 34th.
Scottie the barmaid from Topp’s said nothing,
hunched in a booth biting her nails,
her coffee growing old.
I needed a new place to live.
In the interim, I figured, at least I wouldn’t get any phone calls
from my old man about going cold turkey
with Dr. Pete in the Fulton St. clinic
where someone once cut off
the doc’s cat’s legs and nailed her, still alive, to the wall.
Sometimes when, north of Hell Gate’s stone towers, I tried,
like Socrates in search of thinking’s rhythm, to stick
my dick in Joyce, the Czechoslovakian,
I missed and ended up on the East River’s other side,
sucking clams off the half-shell in a wharf bar I hadn’t seen before.
Where did my cruller go?
Scottie was gone now too.
Pie slices in the glassed-in case soared upward
as I fell off the stool.
Why I puked blood I’ll never know.
When I came to, Mel the owner
was stroking my hair
while Scottie, who’d returned,
wiped my mouth with a rag.

Notation

Like an idea that crescendos
when the blind gospel singer hears the day’s first light
inch forward, stubborn as a hornworm, on a tomato leaf

or like sweat beads
forming on the brow of the GI jailed two days ago
for stabbing a woman near the Tan Cang Bar by the docks --

like this, the hot night seethes
with potential.

In my dream, a boy, seeing
a butterfly perched on a coneflower, sneaks
up on it and balances
a pebble on one wing --

which is when
I awaken.
“I didn’t want to go there,” I insist.
“Where?” a voice in my head wants to know.
“Leave me alone,” I hiss.
“Shut the fuck up!” Brown
in the next bunk rasps.

A Parent’s Retrieval of Meaning

White lotuses choke
the pond’s message
Jimmy Hendrix breaks a guitar on stage
In the highlands a Hmong opium grower receives
an aerogram
of shrapnel in his eyes

Outside Hoffman’s Meat Market in York PA
Chester Roach
shotgun blasting
fires into a crowd
Blacks scream

A creek winds through pines
toward Kathrine’s house in the woods
A broken fence

We tied the Cong woman spreadeagled
to bamboo saplings, shoved a live grenade
in her pussy and ran

MLK dead, DeGaulle
almost falls, Billy’s PFC buddy Bobby’s been shipped
to the 225th Station Hospital in Munich, Germany

Daddy writes
“You don’t understand but you will in the end
It’s all part of God’s plan”

Mekong Monsoon

A sopping wet, gale-whipped green.
Raindrops pound helmets: morse code
from another era.
Once in Manilla fighting the Japanese, Billy’s dad
watched a torrential squall wash across water hyacinths
in the Pasig River.
I’ve carried that picture for thousands of miles.
Yesterday, the rain was so loud we couldn’t hear
the dying scream.
All directions lead to where
cataracts of water grow on the eyes.
We passed a pineapple grove once.
No one remembers when. Or cares.

North of the Pagoda

A path winds past a hog pen, then through
tall grass and around a cassava field
and over a hill.
The old guy in a story Brown used to tell
wanted to ride with Geronimo down a path like that
but somewhere else.
The fellow imagined galloping far beyond
his daughter’s curtained windows and men unloading lumber
from flatcars in the freight yard
while company guards looked on.
Still, he never thought of coming here or of
B52s flying low above the little boy who dances,
hair burning, in
the lemurs’ graveyard.
An hour later, someone fires a tank’s 90mm gun into roadside thickets
while other grunts hold their hands over their ears.
A hen pulls daylight away from us, beyond a hut.
I wake, fall asleep, awaken again.
I remember the front door of the Binh Thuy hospital.
On an old B&O railroad car, Geronimo and Brown’s great-granddad
travel to Khe Sanh, two oldsters too senile to know
how they got here or why
they’re screaming or even that they are.
On the morning radio, Hanoi Hanna sweet-talks,
“Sky is blue today, GI. You ok?”

Meat Hunks Yanked from Alvarez's Flesh

Wherever his mother went, she’ll return,
she always does, as does the furry tarantula --
the one called “old earth-lady with the red knees” --
to its desert home, its belly
full of potions only the studious know about.
But what does she bring? Nothing
as dramatic, just what’s needed: hot green peppers
the color of May in a heavy rain.


**************


In Mexico City, the alley’s white heat crackles
like radio static in the cantina around the corner.
Above the alley in a room, a crowd of kids sleeps
while mythology’s volcanos, hidden in their flesh, spew
lava and smoke.
Mama wakes them and drags them to mass
while the coppersmith hammers designs on a pot.
“Being born is death, but when we die we live” --
that’s what Padre Enrique claims, the sonuvabitch.
By a melon pile in the market, a dog chases flies.


**************


Mama coughs in the tube factory. Papa’s already
dead five years. Still, there’s a melody
to learn: listen to the trumpet player soloing
in a building everybody knows how to find.


**************


Every day begins with the sound
of a toilet flushing, vendors setting up shop
below, and a glass overflowing
with the sky’s implausible blue.


**************


Up north
mama’s sister hoes lettuce and later writes letters about
missing home.
Alverez goes to live with her when he’s twelve.
A month after he arrives, his youngest sister dies
above a dusty alley in which
a dog snarls
at something no one can keep away.
Someone yells in the cantina. A woman
in red shawl sells oranges on the corner.
“Why can’t I get that shawl out of my head?” he asks.


**************


Something about thick tomato slices squeezed,
seeds oozing out, between two bread slabs
beckons him at dusk into a world of seditious hungers.
Eating behind the laborers’ barracks and thinking of the sea to the west,
he sees her for the first time.
What does she have to do with here? he wonders.
Everything, he answers himself. When the stars come out
her black hair is the night sky in which they throb and burst,
light dripping thickly, stickily down a canvas
the size of God’s thigh.
Him recalling this makes the bunker cathedral-like.
I laugh, “Once upon a time a kid discovered
the only god worth worshiping now.”
He scowls, then whispers to the air,
“)El papá querido muerto, cuál es un poeta sabe, (eh!?”
Beyond the perimeter, Victor Charlie, more generous
than the Pentagon,
gives us one peaceful night.


**************


“Ah, how do you think Lucia would hold you?”
he asks his spade while digging a trench.
He knows I’m listening.
“I wish I was the dirt,” he continues
mock seriously to the spade,
“and she was caring for me with her favorite farm tools.”

Minutes later, Alvarez wipes his brow with a filthy handkerchief.
A gibbon, screeching, swings from the top of one tree to another,
then is gone.
Suddenly everyone grows uncomfortable.  It’s too quiet. 
Not even Lucia can calm him now.

Foretelling It

In the East Village no Ukrainian hails me when I return.
Nor does the river show me the suicide’s genitalia
probed by fish whose gills open wider
than truth’s door, that crack in sanity through which the real is seen.
In an old army jacket, a Beat with no beatitude to sell, I walk,
a ghost, in the footsteps of who I was, toward the Square
where Chabot, the ex-merchant seaman, still plays chess
with minds he seeds with stories they know they shouldn’t listen to
but do.
I’m the enemy then, the maestro of in-between: the riddle-teller
who loathes wordgames, the peacenik who shines
his brass knuckles nightly with Brasso
in the hope of breaking truth’s nose.
One day strung out on bennies
close to the abandoned carpetmill, I tour
the cemetery where the final nuance has been blessed and buried
by St. John’s Pastor Green.
Another day, sunlight twinkles on a Long Island bay
while I smoke a cigarette behind Gleason’s warehouse.
That night I trade warstories with my father and uncles.
They wonder who I am.

Pieces after Listening to Tracy Sing

1
Like a fly fisherman who knows each nuance of how a cast line feels,
he waited for the yank
of revelation.
Slowly, having placed
the pistol in his mouth, he pulled back the trigger, one
fraction of an inch at a time, seeking
the key to measurement.

A philosophy major with straight A’s, knowledge counted.

And he found it. Bang. Didn’t need no acid tab for that trip.
Lead’s better. Whata ticket. The instant visit.

“He read too much,” my old man insisted.


2
I woke up drunk, staring at the Tomb of the Duke of Urbino
on a postcard sent by Kathrine.
Something occurred to me. But then I forgot. One day when –
I can still smell
the apples’ sharp scent beyond her property line
in Pennsylvania
where they lay rotting in a field weeks after harvest.
Once when I hadn’t seen her for over a year, I wrote her
“I remember your house and, nearby,
the icy stream winding among
rocks like a geneology seeking thick underbrush
in which to disappear.”
Her husband had died years earlier and her face, craggy
as bark, was capable of a smile
almost too real to believe in.
Yet I believed, even when I awoke that morning on the floor of my walkup
on E. 10th between Avenues A and B.
I’d been drinking for days. The nightmare that contained
a burning clothesline and a bluebird perched
on a telephone pole didn’t matter anymore.
Only being did. And the absence of anything straight. The linear
was like Griselle who, in a story
Kathrine once told me, zigzagged
from a house behind a gate into a Bavarian forest where
she died, tracked by the Gestapo.
Hours after I recalled that, my father
and others found me lying on the floor. Orderlies
carried me down the stairs after the doc injected me
with a sleep that turned my eyelids into stale salami slices
on a sandwich even the starving wouldn’t eat.
Another lifetime later, I arrived -- here. Look
at me with my snazzy bandoleer. And the spit-shined smile.
I’m what every girlie needs: an emissary
from Herr Love’s Ubermenschen Army.
She never said it directly, but Kathrine’s whole body indicated
patience was the key.


3
Control? Not in this lifetime.
The stony field can’t stop weeds from sprouting alongside it.
The parrot on the branch squawks what it wants above the water buffalo, over there.

In what kind of room does Mr. Blue Eyes, crooning
to himself, dim the lights, then feel the useless dwindle?
Hoboken’s yesterday’s news, not tomorrow’s.
He swears, “Someday I’m gonna diddle Ava. Or maybe Lana.”
Me, I’d rather hole up with the Nelson girl. I wanna
go down so low inside her that I come out in China, hunched
over a gospel piano, playing an elegy for those who haven’t made it.

Mr. Blue Eyes sees his floozie descend
a stairwell of cigarette smoke inside his jazzy flat.
What he doesn’t see is how she disappears through a trapdoor
in the floor, then reappears, a corpse near a village well
in a place he doesn’t have the voice to sing about.
Although mama knew none of this, she loved him.
I can still hear her shout, “Who woulda thought
that stringbean of a wop could pop my heart just like that?”


4
Never a bobbysoxer, she nonetheless . . .
And now mama’s dead. As are
-- well, Dave is, and Elesio, and Kathrine’s Griselle and . . .

After the firefight, intestines, sliding from blown-open bellies
nto groundholes, disappear like enormous parasites
in search of other hosts.
The puke-covered rock’s where one whiner couldn’t
hold his vision in. Stink
of piss- and shit-messed pants floats from fleshes
triumphantly disconnected from the ego’s huntings. One survivor
snakes through grass, fast, fast. Accidentally, his hand catches on something
thin and soggy. Leaves? He looks down: his fingernails,
dragging across a wounded grunt’s burnt face, have pulled away
the skin as if peeling soggy butcher’s paper from pounds of ground veal in a hotel kitchen
that should’ve been closed by the Board of Health but wasn’t.

-- Cooly, Mr. Blue Eyes croons at the village’s edge, “Ooh, what’s this thing called love?”
From a dirt path, the Nelson girl, eyeing him while she limps toward a forest fire, sings too:
“You can hide it from me, you may never come my way
but Mother Earth is waitin’ for you, there’s a debt you got to pay.”

Evangelista Morphine, Pentecost

Above the apostles’ heads
tongues of flame leap and quiver.
Fusing, the flames become a wildfire
that burns flesh and boils rivers.

The Holy Ghost, descending
in each napalm canister that explodes,
wears a Special Forces beret
and shits in a Nazi commode.

New War

From one acre of rice paddies to another.
The freighter’s boilers clank, drowning out
behind me
a fatality’s hi to paradise.

Weeks later, waves crash, vomiting froth onto sand while the wind
bends palm trees and the mind
creaks.

Seated on the beach, I remove a curried fish
from the oil-stained newspaper sheet in which it’s wrapped
and eat it with my hands.

Under palm fronds thin men, talking among themselves,
walk home from iron mines at day’s end.
I sleep in an abandoned shed.
Near dawn, the macaw screeches.
I get up.

An intuition of things unknown, the Arabian Sea foams
inside the dead goat’s skull.

Five Klicks Northwest of Hindalga Post Office

In the morning, at a gully’s edge
near where a dead monkey sprawls
in a field, people freshen their breaths
by chewing neem twigs.

On the rice paddies’ far side,
outside a hut
in Ambavadi, laborers joke
about wrecking a landowner’s tractor.

At the yearly jatara
an old leather-worker offers
someone he doesn’t know
a swig of grain whiskey.

No one ever told us about
these details, each a hammerslam, the
driving-in of a nail
of pure meaning.

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

A noise like static on a car radio: the leaf’s
sound as he polishes the carved boar tusk with it.
The crouched tiger waits in the light
for whatever the sculptor has in mind for it.
Crosslegged outside the hut doorway, he sees
where sky and planet meet, hears the touch’s silence.
A naked toddler mutely dances with
a puppy in the dust.
From behind the hut, a woman
emerges, a bird tattoo
at each eye’s outer edge.
“The dead live on,” an ancient story says, “as spiders
in pots and corners.”
She’s heard it all.
This “here” is hers. A dried up stream in the woods. A field
over there. And in between,
the gradations.
At night when there is yelling
from the jail and banana tree shadows swallow
the rat’s grayness, the world still doesn’t decay
into black and white.
Crouched by her child, she sings an old Bhil hillsong:
Carrying a bow on his shoulder
and an arrow in his hand,
the hunter walks bravely alone
into the jungles of a dangerous land.
At dawn, the day’s colors gather
for the siege. The mind’s forts, useless now. This is
the only conquering Godkari accepts. Her child
still sleeps. Ashoka polishes
a boar tusk with a leaf.
She grows faint. Hornets buzz in their hive. Her mind.

Dev Raj

1
Brother of the pepper flowers
in the vegetable patch
west of the banana-tree-surrounded jail. Your ankles
the color of dirt. No, they are dirt.

More versatile than the dung beetle, you transport
buffalo manure from Hindalga to Ambavadi
on the soles of your feet.

Ex leather worker. Ex swabber of latrines. Comrade
to yourself. When the wind in the mango tree says
turn left, you do.

The pipe-trench digger splits the ground
with a shovel. Your chest
breaks open.
He reaches in beneath stones
and worms, feels
the heart beating.

Everyone sees it
but only the outsider cries ignorantly at night.


2
Like me, a life-taker. But different. A dark noon sky
about to give a dry field rain, your gloom
makes sense.
Still, I vacillate. 
I want the organic that I see, but how to be certain
it’s not the head’s invention?
By the rock marked with a saffron bindi, a flowering bush.
So close it seems to hide in your hair, the bulbul sings.
You eye me, comment
“Bouguns-vill-ah, that your word, no? Big bush, weed with color. It grow and grow. Each place.”
Like a plowed field with dirt clumps everywhere,
your broken English is a hectare the foreign aluminum company wants to build on.
Straining like the bull that pulls a cart, you drag
your cargo of dusk shadows
into Ambavadi.
The untouchable colony’s many voices. Each fluent. Each yours.


3
While chewing a stale chapati
in a corner with hardly any light, you squint.
The newspaper’s words grow clearer.

Durga boils coriander in a cup
of water over a wood fire, then drinks it.
“Better than chai,” she says.

No wind tonight. No moon. No anything.
Even the cows hold their breaths.
The village, the surrounding land, the nation
wait.

But for what?

You rise, go to the door, stick your head outside
and blow a nostrilful of snot into the grass.

Somewhere in the dark, a woman moves.
Her bangles jangle.

In Sangli yesterday men fought
police in the street, then set
a sugar refinery on fire.

Your hair still smells of smoke.

But Happily

Quaint but warned against by visa sellers, the man
in dirty dhoti hawks
pakoras on the street
while flies, like an absence of clarity, whine
in a noon so bright that, reflected
from an aluminum sheet, it makes you
cringe, wondering how you got here:
cow dung moldering, the stink of human sweat everywhere.
To make matters worse, nearby in a hut doorway
a widow in white sari leans her shaved head,
covered with scabs, into sunlight
while a screaming child stabs a stick
into dust at her feet as the flies still whine.
This is not good, being here. The gift shop,
a mile behind you, with its
sandalwood Buddha smiling pleasantly
at an easily arrived-at certainty, is what
you need, a way of managing the irrelevant:
flies and pungent smells and a light like vertigo.
But it isn’t in the cards. Trapped
by the expected, you pass a tea shop
in which men with filthy fingernails
stare into their cups, as if researching
the spaces between words that make no sense
in ancient texts written by depressed insomniacs.
Like a seer unaware of how the tear
inching down his cheek
sees more than the eye
it trickles from, you’re lost. Frightened,
you hasten through the streets, trying
to outrace the breakdown around every corner.
It’s too late.
Already, outside the city,
the pomegranates have morphed
into wild boars prowling through jungle underbrush
while birds screech overhead
and the tribals sentence you to death.
Why?
For putting everything you find in glass cases in the museum of your heart.
The widow in the doorway is prettier than you think
and her anarchic grandson, imitating the way
the bazaar teems with life,
plays feverishly but happily in the dust at her feet.

Going Down Low Enough to Need the Moon

1
An alley. Me and Fat Lou
on top of this guy, beating him, laughing.
Finally his ribs
caved in and his sides grew soft.
You couldn’t miss it, then,
the tuneless rhythms of his gasps, grunts.
We got 9 bucks.
Later we went drinking
at the Jericho Bar.
Only 18, and I wanted a piece of the action.
Like everybody else, I had my dreams. 


2
There were other times, too.
Bedroom bureaus yanked open, clothes
thrown around, the cash found
under a faded flannel shirt in the bottom drawer.
And those brass candle holders, in a house
filled with old Brahms albums.
And then that time, me messing
with the ignition of a parked car,
and the owner ran up yelling
and Carl smashed him over the head
with a tire iron.
Next day, scared, I searched the newspapers, wondering
if the guy was dead.


3
High on hash, I finally disappeared
around a corner.
I was gone for years.
When I returned, I was different,
Miss Belinda’s
detoxed paramour.
Spitting phlegm at park birds
or shitting blood in public toilets,
I was on the mend.
No pistol in my pocket weighed me down.


4
Sometimes I feel it in the looks I get: people thinking
the bastard hasn’t changed. To forget, I begin writing, describing
soft, moonwashed scenes ‑‑
no violence, only
a lyrical sound in the background:
flower petals opening.

But it doesn’t work.
Old crimes don’t get
obliterated so easy.


5
The low‑lifer, the bum, the worker ‑‑
even we’re human, chewing
not gum but bits
of decaying rubber gaskets.
A crowd of imbeciles, still
we’ve learned to love the world ‑‑
palm trees in Key Biscayne;
in Nebraska, miles
of moonlit wheat;
all over, a certain nakedness
just beyond our reach.


6
The moon is many things.
But most of all, it’s
a rock in space.

I like it. 

El Fanguito

for Elesio Del Manzano,1946-1968