Looking Back, What Eyes Fill With

The town was half-closed down when I pulled in.
The only bar was thick with lives
tangled and indistinguishable from the drinks
the barman with the tattooed arm
believed the air would pour.
Down the street, the movie theater,
all lights out and letters missing
from the next film¹s title,
held steady two days above Friday night
when the town would wash into it like a wave.

Nearby, the liquor stores and deli
shipped boxes of Oly, Coors and Bud
onto the waiting backs of pickup trucks
growling at the curb. A few streetlights,
a few more stores, some houses,
an old condemned building kneeling into the earth,
the deputy gliding silently by, over and over,
like an echo the county seat
had crooned into the night,
and the knowledge, somehow,
that a mile down the road
was the sea.

Not a bad town, mostly quiet,
its dreams dusty with summer
or drenched in the long dark season,
not quaint enough to attract the hordes.
But through the cracked white paint,
the unrepaired sidewalks,
the words on roadside advertisements
fading in the fog like so many old memories,
the charm of that town rose
on the wings of the gulls that had owned it
before the first Russian choked hard
at the sight of a redwood,
even before the old Pomos, eyes red with weeping,
crossed the mountains and discovered
the holy food of the sea,
those gulls who still carry the town aloft
into the air pierced with their haunted cries.

Just beyond, the river stretches indolently
down from the small coastal range.
Salmon and steelhead spawn there.
I stopped and listened hard for a couple of years
in a small cabin by the river. I made a friend or two,
wrote and fished and swam and dreamed,
then drifted on.

I still walk down that main street now,
anytime I climb through
the good window of the past.
There, just beyond the bend, a river
joins the sea in understanding,
and the old, unpainted houses
shake off the early morning fog
and stand dazzling
in the clear, sun-splashed, ocean air.

Lodi

for Puff

Right off, she's there in the liquor store
with her two kids, tight jeans, naturally
curly brown hair, sweet, sexy smile...
husband out in the pickup? Or single,
bringing them up by herself?
Here with friends to give a poetry reading,
I dream the simple life of Lodi for a second,
dream of settling into a small house
on the country side of town,
barbecues and baseball, PTA
and the annual neighborhood meeting
about the loud music from the new tenants
of the planned development that'll wreck everything.

Am I really going to miss all this? Never
just a simple guy, better to her than anyone
because three or four poems a year
keep me sensitive? Oh, I'd be the town radical,
stirring up trouble and embarrassing her, probably
the reporter for the Lodi Sentinel digging
to find where that city councilman got the money
for the almost new Lincoln Continental,
but still be pals with the deputies.

In Lodi, someone at the reading said,
Sacramento's the cultural mecca. We visitors laughed,
looking west to San Francisco with similar awe.
But what if concerts were once a year
and poetry readings special occasions
when you bundle up the kids
and pack them into the back of the pickup, what then?
Glowing with passion because
a few poets from Sacramento
had opened the night with language,
we'd get home late,
our dog barking until she knew it was us,
sit in the truck for a minute in the silence
that had rushed in when the engine shut down
to not disturb the spell...
And they, in their own car,
hurtling over the dark miles to Sacramento,
wondering about us, our deep silences,
our flat miles and fertilizer, our bad poetry
and the awesome joy in which it bathes us.

Work

for Norman Mailer

Dear Norman,
The other night they teased us on TV:
famous author dies. Shocking news at 11.
I waited, tense,
knowing how bad news comes at night,
in the dark, when you are alone.
How could I find out? Did I want to know?
I waited, and in the waiting, fell asleep.
No headline in the paper the next day,
so it could not be you or else our paper
is even more provincial than I think.
It wasn't -- it was Michner who had kicked off,
he of the enormously long novels of which I'd never
been able to get through even one. I thought of how you said
modern readers don't want to have to do work any more,
used to having everything handed over
as if they were burglars,
but the 50 pages or so I'd read of Hawaii weren't work,
just tedium. How can you tell the difference?
When you are working, something happens. You lift
the heavy weight of a book and suddenly are stronger.
I know you are amazed by your detractors, how little
of your work they have read, or even none. I have
known that too, people saying, I hated you
until I met you. On different scales, people like us
make stories that other people tell, friendly or not.
They become the fortification for what people already know
to be true. What we have in common is some uncanny penchant
for making sure people are,
whatever else, seldom indifferent.
That's a gift, yes? Even when we are hated.
Like you, I suspect, I mostly slough it off
onto that internal heap
where the wounds accumulate and fester,
portending some kind of death, physical or other, sooner maybe rather than later.
If it had been you dead on TV,
people I think would have been relieved.
"That's the guy who keeps talking about the rot in our world,
the cancer in our gut, and he's dead now. Serves him right."
Yet, even in relief,
they would squirm a bit in the deep knowledge
that you were right, everything you saw is how America works.
Not bad, not evil, just not deep.
People like you are the earth's faultlines.
When you write, the structures
that cover our interior world crumble.
Some of us look in.
The rest avert our eyes quickly away.

---

Monk's Dream

Sunday afternoon, two days before Christmas.
Carmen McRae is singing songs to the music of Thelonious Monk.
I remember tending bar at the old Five Spot in New York,
and Monk every night, five nights a week, for half a year.
And shooting pool with Charlie Mingus,
that night his fingers let go of the strings on his stand-up bass
in the bar across the bitter cold of 8th Street and Third Avenue
where his band members cheered him on
as I whipped him twice at eight ball.
And the night Bill Kydell returned from the dead
vanished for two years in the jungles of Columbia
rescued me at 1 a.m. in the Corner Bistro, Greenwich Village,
two giant macaws on his shoulders
his red hair flared out around him
as if civilization ended just beyond the bar.

I remember Christmas coming in the form of snow
blanketing the cars, the streets, the girls
struggling against the wind,
watching from our propped stools the only channel we needed
the Bistro's picture window.
I remember my wife Hadassah
and our apartment two stories under my sister Miranda's,
how on our only Christmas morning as husband and wife, broke,
we moved our mattress bed into the living room
under our Christmas tree
said we were each others presents
ripped the wrappings off and stayed there all day
letting Monk's "Round Midnight," the Monk/Gerry Mulligan version,
repeat over and over until my sister came to make us go out
and find an open restaurant, she said she would pay.
And New Year's day, in Brooklyn, all of Hadassah's relatives surrounding us,
the father finally asking me, "So what do you do?"
"I'm a writer," I said, and he
looking befuddled around at his family
and then back at me:
"You mean you make up your own books?"

I sit here, twenty years later,
my days of making love on a mattress in a New York walk-up
long, long gone, my forty-eighth Christmas
slipping in like the weather
from the gray parting place of sea and sky,
still trying to make up my own books,
still trying to figure out why I think Christmas at all,
a Jew, an agnostic, even an atheist when challenged.

Maybe it's just empathy.
I mean, if there was Jesus,
if He was like they say,
He couldn't really like what they'd done to his birthday,
forgive maybe, but not like.
He'd have to just about be the Son of God
to throw the money-lenders out of the temples these days.
Maybe Christmas just because
I can feel Jesus put his hand on my shoulder and say,
"Don't get pissed off, Luke,
for they really don't have a fucking clue what they're doing."
"How can you be so damn cool about it?" I ask him.
"It's your birthday and all they see are dollar signs."
I'd go with Jesus then, on a wintry afternoon, to have a brandy,
just a couple of days before his birthday,
buy it for him if I had a few bucks,
put Monk's "Just A Gigolo" on the jukebox.
He'd pull his long hair through a rubber band
and challenge me to a game of pool.
His fingers would let go of the cross
and he'd whip me pretty good at eight ball a couple of times,
each ball leaving a trail of light
as it made its way
into the holy pocket where Jesus had aimed it.

---

What Reassures Us

for my father, Harvey Breit

We walked in the darkening street together.
I was young, in my twenties,
and you,
you were alive.
My long hair flowed
over my collar, so long sometimes
you said it was hard to be seen with me.
But not that night. We were just a block or two
from the park, the breezes that stirred.
We spoke of the coming summer when
you would be going off to London, the first step
on your journey toward death, although
we did not know it then,
of my coming time in your apartment,
of where things could be found,
of what needed what kind of care.
We stopped at a red light.
The traffic had thinned and there was a serenity
the street took on that it didn't often.
You looked at me for a moment, intentlyÉ
what? Trying to see something in my eyes
that would tell you I'd be ok
while you were gone in London, or even further?
For the first time I could remember,
you put your arm around my shoulder
and then, as the light changed
and you started to remove it
you paused and patted me on the back,
just once or twice.
We started, father and son again, across the street.
You have been gone over twenty years.
Another birthday approaches, marking
almost the age you were
when you disappeared forever from the world.
I move around my house, check the doors, yawn,
my life not perfect, but good,
still feeling on my back
the touch of your hand
gently pushing me off into the world.

Cafe Trieste

for Jack Hirschman

Dear Jack,
Remember mornings at the Trieste?
You with new poems, four or five,
a translation or two,
always ready to read?
Some said it was
your self-indulgence at work,
but not me.
It was what I lived for, almost,
those new poems every morning,
with coffee and croissant
-- ahh, what an elixir,
what a way to wake up.
But I say, "almost,"
because the other was the chance that
a beautiful woman would be there, overhear
the poems, want to join you. Where
could it go from there? Anywhere.
Fifteen years have plugged themselves
like old newspapers
between the wall of that time and the wall of this,
but just the same, this morning,
in the Trieste, a tourist now myself, I got up
to get more coffee and, thinking I had left,
a beautiful young woman sat in my seat,
apologized when I came back, smiled
when I offered her part of my paper.
She's visiting too, from Germany,
an art student. In five minutes we were having
the kind of conversation you and I used to have,
about the dichotomies of the rich and poor,
what the powerful are willing to do
to glide even higher above us,
how little the story of Icarus seems to have taught them.
Tonight, both our last nights in San Francisco,
we are having dinner, my favorite Italian spot.
After? Who knows? It's fifteen years ago,
it's the Trieste, I'm wildly in love again,
and she doesn't even know I'm a poet yet.