Wild Strawberries

On either side of the path leading up the hill to our cabins at camp, tuffets of moss relax beside nervous strawberries that tremble and glisten like jelly. I am not normally a berry fancier myself, but I will make an exception in this case and stop.

O how they melt in the mouth! No sugar snowflake, no pearl in acid, no metaphor on earth could do the sensation justice.

You have to try one of these things.

No?

What is the matter with you?

Allergies?

Only to cashews, you say. And needles.

Hmm…

Oh. I see what the problem is. Only an idiot lost on his way to a party and scanning the horizon in a pirate eye-patch would suggest some connection between the succulence of strawbrerries and the proximity of a privy. Honestly. You seem to have lost your sense of depth along with your virginity today. Put down the plastic spyglass. I will take care of your cutlass. See if my eyes—this pair of binoculars—will help.

Well?

The outhouse is really on the other side of the hill—somewhere over 40—light years away, you see, past the sunset. This is camp—the eternal present—here and now.

There aren’t very many private epiphanies I am willing to part with. But, since it is you, and our roles are reversed—and you have so conveniently consented to kneel—and I am holding the cutlass to your throat—I am happy to share.

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.

Swallow, scum.

See?

Delicious.

 

 

 

The Last Ghost

Before he goes, he turns

around, surveying things

one final time, making

sure that his memories

will all be found neatly

arranged by the new boy.

A model Corsair and a Zero

square-off on a doily

beneath a ceramic lamp

his mother painted. While,

overhead, an Enterprise,

his father’s handiwork,

slowly revolves in the dark

bedroom. Sightless eyes,

belonging to the stuffed

frogs he will leaving,

look up in silence at

the orbiting starship,

lost in whatever thoughts

their cotton brains contain,

unaware of what they are

to him: his family.

 

He taps his rocker and

it rocks, predictably,

keeping perfect time.

Part metronome, part throne,

it coordinates the headlights

careening along the wall

into his mirror. Those

lightning flashes at night

will not be missed. He’s glad

that dresser isn’t coming,

really. He has outgrown

the child inside. He flips

one of the handles up,

then flicks it down again,

to hear how it collides

against a plate of brass,

letting go of the past.

The noise it makes is nice.

So he lifts it up again,

so he can hear it crash

again, a kamikaze,

ending something grand.

Performance Piece

As you might have noticed, I am writing a sort of autobiographical novella called, A Child’s Encyclopedia, in real time. I say “sort of” because I cannot completely vouch for the veracity of all of the events depicted here. Some may have been tinted by time. The story is about the house I grew up in North Tonawanda, NY and how I came to lose it.

Now and then disconnected sentences or paragraphs from it pop-up on Facebook. For reasons too complicated to go into here, I have no personal research materials (no interviews, no photos, no diaries, no letters, no newspaper clippings, no scrapbooks, no et ceteras) from which to reconstruct the first few years of my life. Everyone depicted is dead in one way or another. Including me. In a way. I am relying entirely on my own memories and occasional trips to Google to research obituary dates.

Why am I doing this? For fun, mostly. I am sure you have heard of those peculiar people (mostly men) who memorize baseball statistics and who are able to reconstruct whole games in their heads based entirely on numbers. I like to do something similar with images in my life: remembering a helicopter seed whirling down from a maple during a solar eclipse in 1973, the amount of force I used to crush a cigarette during a tense telephone conversation, the cloudy gray binding of a translation of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils I happened to glance over and see—spread open like a dead moth the floor—just at the point of climax one delirious afternoon in Harlem. This is how I waste my time waiting for trains.

But since it seems a tragedy to let all of this imaginative exercise go to waste, I thought I would start writing these things down.

What I noticed when I began to jot them down is that these odd images began to tell a story that I had not noticed at the time I was living through the events themselves, only in retrospect. I then asked myself the question: was I imposing some kind of order on the past or was the past imposing some kind of order on me? What actually was going on in my surroundings during that eclipse? How come I didn’t close my eyes in Harlem and lose myself utterly in the experience? Is there any coherent explanation for what is going on?

Yes and no.

I think the fundamental problem here is one of perspective—how events appear in isolation and broadly and collectively over time. What we mistake for the foreground in one era dissolves into the background of another. Comedy and Tragedy can occupy the exactly the same place in space and time, it seems to me, without the fabric of reality being torn apart in a gigantic anti-matter explosion.

The only variable I can perceive is the lighting. Some days are grainier and rainier than others. We are always in different places when the Sun and Earth collide. Comedy and Tragedy are not. They are wherever we are. In a way, I think that it is in the eyes of a child that we can see reality reflected the best. Not for sentimental reasons, of course—not because childhood is some golden land of innocence and opportunity—it isn’t for most us—only because childhood is the period in our lives least structured by experience. Everything seems so vivid and fresh.

For evolutionary reasons relating to survival, memories are laid down on multiple tracks in the brain at this time: skinned knees hurt more, the movement of slugs is mesmerizing and moss is a million times more emerald than emeralds. We do not yet know how to discriminate what is useful knowledge and what is not. Sometimes I am not sure I ever really learned to discriminate. Everything seems pretty important to me even at 43. Though paler. A scintilla more ghostly.

So, I have decided to compress my entire life—the most intense extremes of color and experience I have ever known—into the narrow space of a few years and test my theory about Comedy and Tragedy, space and time.

I intend to revel in my metaphorical isolation and reach out with prose simultaneously. I want to do something different in this book. I am writing it for a little girl who just recently turned 5. Right now the words I write are meaningless to her. A rainbow pair of socks made in China means more to her, I suspect, than the collective works of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare combined. As they should. Forever may they do so.

I will not always be here to send her pairs of socks and discuss the inhabitants, flora and fauna of Mars, unfortunately. She may have to settle for Shakespeare eventually. Or some good-hearted but misguided astronomer like Percival Lowell, the man who mapped the extensive network of non-existent canals on Mars. She may do something unexpected entirely. One could do worse, I suppose, than wake up a dreamer. We all learn to make do.

Even now, she is beginning to doubt that Santa has transferred his operations to Mars from the North Pole. She has been talking up Saturn, which worries me enormously. Eventually, I fear, Santa will move out of the solar system completely and effectively cease to exist. As will her crazy uncle. These things happen.

But the socks will remain, I trust, for a year or so, until they wear out. Memories of the texture of their threads will intertwine with this book. How she looks at those socks and how she reads my face later, she will compare to the younger person she talked to on Skype, the hat she tried on at a diner, a vacation we will take with her parents. I will look different, she will look different, the socks will fit differently, everything will be different. In fact, you might say that everything is already in flux and has been since I picked up my pen. Everything is already happening right now: the past is becoming the future the future the past with every word I write. That is the funny thing about time.

When I am finished, I am going to copy everything out in long hand in a Moleskine notebook (probably two) and give it to her as a present, with another pair of mismatched socks. I hope to do this in time for her 6th birthday, next year.

The book will still be unreadable, of course. Mismatched socks may well be out of fashion by next year. She may make a face at my gift. If she does, I will make a face back at her: because I know for a fact that those socks are going to be popular again. I have seen it happen over and over in the fashion industry. Things always come back into into style, even if only for a season. There is no reason for it. These things just happen.

Some are very lovely.

Drama

Looked at from the street, Comedy and Tragedy are relatives, who—for reasons of economy—live together, side by side.

For now, all you really need to know about the characters depicted in the unfolding drama is that two families have been cast here by Fate. The set consists of a duplex dwelling that was converted from a carriage house early in the 20^th Century. Our family purchased their palace (It needs a little work. But you will love it.) in 1970, the year my brother was born. We live on the left, at number 139, my grandparents on the right, at 137.

On the right side, the audience will see a victory garden, less ambitious than the one tended by Mr. Crockett on PBS, perhaps, but full of treasures nevertheless: cucumbers, peppers, rhubarb, carrots, parsnips, tomatoes, onions, and chives. This is where I dug up a crusty dime minted in 1857.

Beside the garden, there is a pleasant patio full of potted plants sheltered by a large corrugated aluminum awning. Here, men with aquamarine anchors tattooed to their hairy forearms are invited to smoke—veterans of campaigns in the Pacific—exiting with a discrete cough through a side door.

They would never be left alone with their cigarettes, however. These men were always carefully attended by my grandfather. He would excuse himself from the living room like this:

“If all you gals are going to do is gossip, I’m going outside to smoke with Jim.”

“Francis, one of these days, I am going to hit you over the head,” my grandmother would hiss.

Francis was not a smoker himself, or a drinker, or a veteran anything, actually, except for my grandmother’s rolling pin, Chinese checkers and the vinyl chloride vapors of Goodyear. (Enlarged heart, flat feet, 4F. Sorry, son.) Still, he played the role of gracious host to perfection. He will succumb to cancer while I am holding his hand.

With that same hand, on a rickety wooden gardening table, beside the clean blade of a spade my grandmother used for transferring her plants to larger pots, he would habitually place a chipped ashtray decorated with tiny pink and purple pansies. On the reverse side, the glaze bore the legend, ‘Made In Occupied Japan.’

For some reason I could never fully fathom—maybe because he was more ornery than everyone else—the only visitor allowed to smoke in the house was my uncle John, a recently retired shoe salesman. When he insisted, nobody resisted.

When my grandmother tripped, running up the stairs, shouting, “Dad, Dad!” I smiled. When she was forced by grief to complete her journey by crawling on aching knees, bawling like a baby, I almost laughed. I had never seen my grandmother act like a child before. I thought my grandfather agreed. He stood—dentureless—in a pair of periwinkle pajama bottoms and a V-neck t-shirt on the second floor landing—trying to make sense of things.

He was getting ready for work. Third shift.

“Ma, Ma, what is it?”

He lifted her gently by her elbows from where she knelt. While I am sure it took only a few seconds, it seemed like an eternity had to pass before my grandmother could gather her wits together sufficiently to blurt out, “Oh, Francis, John is dead. He had a heart attack.” I had no idea what a heart attack was, but it sounded pretty serious to me, even worse than death.

Suddenly, I felt like crying, too.

In fact, I did cry. So did my brother. I think we were watching Jeopardy! when the phone rang. The tangy scent of fried liver and onions hung in the air. My grandmother was in the kitchen, singing something incomprehensibly lovely, as was her habit, when doing anything dull, like washing dishes.

We had no idea what was going on. Uncle John had never died before. Nobody in our family ever had died until that day—not to my knowledge. What are you supposed to do under such circumstances?

After my grandfather inserted his clean teeth—grimacing in the mirror, pressing a thumb against his upper plate, making sure it was sealed against his gums strongly enough to resist the forces of gravity and permit difficult conversations—he closed the door. I sat on the stairs. I heard a tap gushing into the sink. He emerged a few minutes later clad in a pair of dark slacks, a white shirt and a sea-gray acrylic sweater with a Greek meander design dancing up the sleeves. He smelled ever so faintly of Barbasol.

After making a few quick phone calls, my grandmother drifted off to her bedroom, sobbing again, selecting something suitable to wear to my Aunt’s. My grandfather tied my brother’s shoes while she took her turn in the bathroom.

He took us next door and explained the situation to my mother, before driving my grandmother to stay with her sister, Aunt Midge, and then on to work. He always kept an extra pair of work clothes in the trunk of his car.

As I had already eaten dinner, I rejected the trembling dish of goulash my hysterical mother offered to calm me down. My brother was not a liver fan, so he may have sampled some. That, I don’t remember.

You see, I was confused. I wanted an explanation. Unable to articulate my actual desires, I asked for a Windmill cookie instead. Only my grandfather ate those, of course, and he was backing down the driveway: we didn’t have any.

By way of a compromise, my mother peeled a Ho-Ho and placed it on a plate, still half-wrapped in tinfoil. I didn’t want a Ho-Ho. I was told to stop being a brat or go to bed. I opted for brattiness and went to bed. It was already after 8:00pm, anyway. I saw no reason to sit in the kitchen and sulk.

48 hours later, a prophylactic whisper in the funeral home foyer informed me that my favorite uncle had passed away quietly on his porch, napping beneath The North Tonawanda News, after eating fish and chips at Arthur Treacher’s.

I may not like liars, but I have always admired a lie told with élan. This is part of the appeal of fiction. My mother plucked a pen out of the air that seemed to be swinging rather too freely in space and time from a chain of brass BBs fixed to little a pulpit. She signed for all three of us: Kathleen, Eric and Kyle. She carefully laid the pen to rest in the shadowy valley between the pages of the Visitors Book before she led us to the casket.

My father was at work. He would be dropping by to sign the book and pay his respects to Reality later.

Relativity

The shadow of a spectacular sunset seems to be following me. Let us call this apparition a sliced mandarin—a cross section—the fruit of memory—an orange orb whose radial interior segments resemble a star—or—for the purposes of this disjointed memoir—Exhibit A.

From my perspective—my plane of reference—the sunset never occurs. The blade never falls. Although, of course, from where you sit, it does. It must. The frozen moment exists in a rectangular wooden frame, where past and future elide into the present—your decision to continue turning pages—to pull the rope and release the guillotine.

I hope you will continue reading. The end of this book will come as a tremendous relief: even the smallest stars can weigh quite heavily upon the shoulders. But whatever you decide to do, the scene I am describing will remain—for me, anyway—the last lovely thing I see: perpetually visible in July, through the northwest quadrant of a pane of glass (second floor, double-glazed window on the extreme left, mine) at an angle of 20 degrees above the western horizon.

Our source of illumination resides at the center of an obscure planetary system approximately 93 million miles from the world I inhabit—hardly a bunny hop through the void—yet an incalculable distance from the walnut tree lit by those long fingertips of light caressing my face. What I cannot understand is why my green and gold friend should have been marked for execution. What kind of crimes against nature must a tree commit to be cut down—to be turned into poetry: pulp, toilet paper, trash—that worst of all possible worlds—Art?

I imagine that arboreal being produced nuts edible only to squirrels. I assume that the immense crowd of furry creatures which gathered beneath its boughs autumn—hypnotized by hunger—presented a menace to public health. So, in the dead of night, an ordinance was passed: that tree must die. I can only scratch my ass in wonder and move on.

Although I am sure a transcript exists on microfilm somewhere in Erie County—evil decisions are always reached and recorded in excruciating detail by The Authorities—I must confess that I was not privy to the deliberations of our City Fathers in 1970, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, or 78—the last year I occupied the front bedroom I am presently haunting.

In other words, I am 5. I am a shadow of my former self. I am not a reliable witness to subsequent events. I peer at them like Alice—through the looking glass—darkly. I cannot be called to testify in court—either for the prosecution or the defense. I take no sides in the dispute between The Town of North Tonawanda and the squirrels, my mother or my father, their divorce, up and down, forward and back, left and right.

I am sorry to be so evasive, but as you can see, this was an unusually hot summer. I couldn’t help tossing and turning. Since my three-year-old brother was constantly whimpering after his surgery (glittering scalpel, baby-blue eyeball,) I spent most nights perspiring in bed next door, wedged between my grandmother and the moon.

Each morning, the nosy scent of coffee would nudge a door open, and discover me sitting Indian-style in her pastel dressing room, reading random entries aloud to myself from a 10 volume set of books, A Child’s Encyclopedia, that once belonged to my mother.

[Turning back a page.]

The spot of doom handed down by the Aldermen—in this case, Exhibit B—was in reality a dark blue circle spray-painted on thick rough bark. I know the circle was round and that it was blue because it looked like the bumpy steering wheel my grandfather’s soft hands gripped in his Buick while I sat next to him, spitting the pits of sour cherries into a glossy brown paper bag.

I know the bark was rough because it scratched my arms whenever I embraced the trunk as a child, seeing if could comprehend its entire texture. I never could. I was too small. I lacked the reach. Now that I am older—I am 43 as of this writing—I notice that my embrace is wider. I am tempted to try the walnut again today.

Nobody is here now, except us ghosts, so let’s see what happens.

Hold on.

Here goes.

We see from the street view on Google maps that the tree has disappeared. The squirrels have scattered. The new residents of Bryant Street have dipped my delicious chocolate house (there is no more tempting form of cocoa, in my experience, than those last few peeling flakes of lead paint) into a vat of hideous vanilla siding that tastes today—more or less—like total oblivion.

Which is all just my elliptical way of saying—apart from a pair of geographical coordinates—a general shape around the eyes—everything familiar about me is gone.

The Lady Next Door

Thin flakes of the sweetest chocolate paint

curled invitingly from the door trim

belonging to a neighbor who would faint

when I pretended to be eating them.

She planted flowers with strange leaves—like hearts—

on either side of the gas meter. She

had me collect their seeds in olive jars

because I said they looked like bombs to me.

Her yard was where I saw my first eclipse.

We gathered to observe it on the lawn.

Before one word of wonder reached my lips,

the birds stopped singing and the sun was gone.

Although I knew that the darkness would pass,

I was glad grandmother gripped my hand.

Why teacher said, “Don’t be afraid,” in class,

she said she would never understand.

Diptych

I have already posted The Camel in the side bar, but since these two poems form a single sequence of thought, I thought it would make more sense to post them one after the other as they will appear in the book I am writing with Gavin.

Both, of course, are dedicated to him.


The Camel


The love is in the writing, yes. It is
this pencil—architect of all my hopes.
I suck on my eraser, like a nipple.
The friction of the lead provides some heat.
The little squiggles which adorn my man-
uscript, swim wonderfully between the
lines, like freshly ejected sperm,
seeking, out of instinct, a nice, warm
place they can kick off their flippers,
crack a Michelob, exhausted, and unwind.
A mouth, a hand, some other place. Who knows?

Your last poem mentioned your career,
retiring from porn, continuing to appear
naked, reading poetry in California.
I was in college then, learning from my dad
sucking cock was probably something
a boy in Buffalo ought not to do.
Soon after he discovered my diary,
I found myself searching for a butt one
night along the shoulder of a road
so dark it seemed to lead into a future
paved entirely in blackness, coal.

A scattering of stars, a slice of Moon,
the prick of a pink planet, Mars, I think,
took pity on me, like the passing cars.
Those headlights allowed me to pick out
a discarded pack of Camels which
concealed one cigarette and puff of air.
How incredible that find: how Moon
and Mars, Camel and cars, kept
me company that night. But the sparks
of a tossed Marlboro let me smoke
where I was going—a dim, orange glow.

I thanked the driver as he sped away,
truck dwindling to a pair of rubies. I
had no matches in my pocket—no-
thing useful, no money, no house keys:
a Latin book in my backpack, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, toothbrush, clothes,
socks and soiled underwear. And still
how lucky I felt—and not too cold—
now that I could smoke. The poetry
we’d write together was so far away—
farther than Mars, that truck driver, you

standing naked in L.A. And love,
while that Camel lasted, didn’t seem
a possibility all that remote.


Damascus

Yes, pick me up, dust me off, fill
my mouth with testicles, goat-cheese, grapes,
change my oil, enlarge my cock, replace
my heart with something softer than the plum
stone I suspect is throbbing there. Be
Prometheus to me, be Frankenstein, but leave
the memory of that lonely road intact.
I wasn’t ready then—to hold a pen
or penis properly. Forget a hand.
There is this transformation I still have
to undergo, to be myself. I smoked

that solitary Camel to Damascus.
The butt the truck driver flung from his cab
seemed a sign—a well-meant meteor
crashing against the asphalt, splashing sparks,
rolling to a stop ten feet away,
glowing. I ran to pick it up, before
the filthy filter put the fire out! I had
no matches, maybe, but I had a chance
to put one corner of my Cosmos right,
light the lost cigarette I found—to
let my lungs fill up with poetry.

To accept the universe like this,
to welcome an old Camel as just one
of those small gifts which Providence bestows,
is harder for me now than it was then.
I’m older and less flexible. I’ve lost
some of my looks, the hair I once dyed red,
my combat boots, the 1950s trench
I pawned my silver boom box for—
all those external things I thought were me—
adorn a boy I fear is dead. His ghost

appears in steamy windows. He haunts
my eyes when I am shaving. When I fuck,
I make the love he was incapable of
making. I do this in his memory.
I regard tattoos and scars the way
he looked at certain birthdays. Something must
remain besides the pools of melting ice
cream and wax. Still pictures. Poetry.
All we carry over from the past.
Stale Camels. Cars. A butt flung from a truck
rolling to a stop somewhere. Like here.

Gradus ad Parnassum

I had not planned to take any time off from blogging, but it seems I did. I attribute this to a couple of factors. Exhaustion (I have been very busy at work), poor internet connection in Queens (where I have been living on salmon, sweet potatoes, blood oranges, sex, and string beans with Yasu in Jackson Heights for the past couple of weeks), and a pitiful lack of ideas ( an endemic problem with me).

I returned to Connecticut last night. Today's burden of work is a bit lighter, and I find I have a bit of extra time to jot down a few lines of poetry.

I am going to take a self-consciously different tack toward writing. I have been doing a bit too much mock-epic, narrative, preeing, violent, quasi-cynical crap for a while, and I would like to try something more...mature? adult? nuanced? readable? I am not sure what the appropriate adjective here is. I am open to suggestions (even four letter ones.)

...


The point is: times change, people change, and poetry changes. We must keep up with ourselves, and with the times. I have been in an artistic rut. I have been reading my new collection of Elizabeth Bishop with great delight, and I have been thinking more seriously about finishing that MFA I started at CCNY a number of years ago, so I want to try something a bit more serious in tone. I want to start taking steps toward something larger. A poetic career? Who knows. Let's see how the next few months go.

...

So, here are a few baby steps toward that end. A transformative experience from 1977.


Bing


While I was sitting underneath the table
Whizzing marbles around my fruitcake tin,
Enchanted by the orbit one white marble
Traced in blue, thin slippers padded in.

Dad, did you hear? Ben Crosby's dead.
They just announced it on the radio.
Dropped dead in Spain, while playing golf. They said
A stroke. No—Bing? The radio said so.

My marble whizzed around a few more times
Before it shot off, like a bullet, straight
Across the kitchen as the doorbell chimes.
Must be the paperboy, collecting. He's late—

It's quarter to eight. The slippers shuffle out.
Ma, the neighbors say they've lost a kid!
And thawing stewed rhubarb under the spout,
An apron dipped, Go, hide yourself!

I did.