Poetry

Manhattan Skyscraper WWII

 

Betty Buchsbaum

1939

The closet-like elevator in our skyscraper
creaks as it descends. I'm alone with Emil
the elevator operator, a short balding man
who has come from Germany, speaks
with an accent, wears white gloves and bows
his head slightly even to me when he says hello.
After he says it's nice out or rainy
we're silent. I never know what to say.
Riding the elevator, tenants rarely talk
to each other or to Emil. Except for my father.
If he were beside me, he might tell Emil
a Jack Benny joke, relive a Babe Ruth homer.
I wish I could speak in his easy-as-breathing way.
I never ask Emil where he lives, or whether
he has a family, never ask him about Germany.
or Hitler, born April 20th like my mother.
But late at night, waking from nightmare,
I look out my window at the moonlit waters
of the Hudson flowing, my atlas shows, to the Atlantic--
that dear, enormous ocean that can drown
those terrible men should they try, ever dare try
to snatch Jewish children asleep in their beds.

1942

An air-raid siren splits open the night,
shrilly warns everyone in skyscrapers
go to windowless halls on middle floors.
How lucky we are to live on the 11th floor
of a 20 story building--layers above
and below like sandbags, Jews who don't
stick out. We set out folding chairs
in our 4x10 hallway. I hope Joe DiMaggio
and his wife in the terraced penthouse
will come to our floor. I'm not a big fan,
but I'm glad the rules apply to everyone--
go to the middle. Unlike the day
of the building strike--Emil and the doorman
wearing signs outside, all of us forced
to climb stairs, but I saw Mrs. Joe,
in full-length red fox, come out of the elevator,
the super running it just for her.
Now, sitting in our hall packed with neighbors,
the air stale and hot, I close my eyes
and imagine bombs slicing through upper floors,
shattering lower floors--the glorious middle
an airborne Ark, lifting.

Michiko's Plan

I look for faultlines in Michiko's plan
to drive far North when she decides it's time,
turn off the engine, curl up into cold.
Michiko is not sick. She is my age, 72.
We are sipping green tea in her living room,
her face as unlined as 45 years ago
when I met her, young wife and mother
come to this country from Nagasaki.
I've had a good life, she says, maybe long enough.
Never want to live merely to breathe.

We talk about hoarding pills,
how to get the right kind. Her brother,
a doctor in Japan, would send a supply,
but foreign drugs may be stopped
or expire before our chosen times.
We rule out a plastic bag over the head.
Go back to her plan to drive North into snow.
The more I'm drawn to her solution
of a final journey North, the more
I want to show us both its flaws.

You may be too ill to drive.
She gentles her teacup in one palm,
I'll ask one of my children.
Uki, he'd do it, he's not fragile.
I think of my three.
Do I have any children
I don't consider fragile?
I'll just open the car door, her calm voice
continues, roll out into snow,
won't leave a smell, maybe remain whole.

Now we're both silent. I see her lying
in snow-covered woods, just off the road,
Uki, her first-born, driving away.
I can't tell if he looks back through the mirror
or only straight ahead,
can't know if her lips form the word Uki
or love or scared or oh--
I shiver at such aloneness.
But as snow falls impartially
on rocks and trees, on her slim body,

it is August, summers ago,
Mt. Desert island: Michiko and I
on a trail up a round, fir-pated mountain,
our children straggling behind.
Hot, mosquito bitten, still a way to go
I say let's turn around, but she
in 2-inch heels, skirt to her ankles,
says softly, as if I've missed a simple fact,
how can we not finish
what we set out to do?

                -- Betty Buchsbaum

 

---

War Horse

 

Theresa Burns

I remember her crying twice, my war horse mother.
The first time, my brothers Dan and Gene
were playing football one morning in the living room

and crashed into the brown sectional sofa,
the piece that curls into the corner, split it open like a baked potato.
It was one week old exactly. We heard the pine frame crack

upstairs, right through the cartoon voices on TV.
A minute later, there were seven or eight of us standing around
in foot pajamas, pajamas with trap doors, stretched out at the knees,

stunned into silence like skinny troubadours waiting for our cue,
the peculiar sideshow of her losing it. She just cried.
The broken sofa stayed for weeks, white stuff spilling from its sides.

The second time I was maybe nine. Toward the end of dinner,
when the others had gone, we sat staring at the greasy wreckage,
the puffs of dirty napkins. I mistook this for a good moment

and asked her which of us she loved best.
All the same, she answered. I pressed: You must love
one of us more, no one is that fair. No, all the same, she said,

and began scraping a turquoise-flowered plate with a fork. I made it
easier: which between Dan and Gene, you must love one more?
No, really the same, now stop it. She was pushing the chair back,

but I went on. Isn't there one thing you like about the other
a little more? And finally, I suppose Danny is quieter, I like
quiet children. And I said, Does that mean you love Adele more?

That's when she started crying the second time-
                                        -no, that's when I cried. She said,
Don't be so stupid. Clear this stuff off the table before Pop gets home.

Postcard

After the birth, we sent you
out to the world-

nine shrieking pounds
on the hospital bed, a broom
of black hair sprung from your head.

On your wrist: a bracelet with a number
that matched the one on mine.
They came each hour,
it seemed, for the little milk
and the heel prick.

You were no bigger than my forearm,
but already fierce, arms
flung up by your ears, chest curled out,
as you howled your backbone
to the room.

Fuerte, the nurses said.

Other pictures of you that day:
asleep in the plastic bassinet
or swallowed in the pink bunny suit
we'd brought to take you home in,

but this one seemed truer
to the animal you were:
female, indiscriminate, nocturnal,
one black eye trained on me as you fed.

                -- Theresa Burns

 

---

She'll Wait

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon Photo by Lisa J. Parker

For the grayest day in September.
Until she remembers the word for
rhododendron, it disappears from her mind,
truant, sometimes months at a time.

For newer words. For a bill
from the cleaning service, the women
who vacuum around her and don't back away
when she jolts awake in the antique bed.

For music, for the rough work-
songs, the grunting caesura that separates
daytime from evening, this time from that,
For him to finish rubbing the silk

between his finger and his thumb,
for the fabric to nap. If he wants to dry her
on a white stone in the sun like a plum,
to make something clean and useful

of her body, to make nothing of it,
she'll wait until she remembers
what cannot keep her. Rhododendron,

just yesterday, she did not know the word
for this. Until what's flowing stops itself.

The Orchard
                York Springs, PA

In the orchard
fruit still on the tree,
dark, bruise-red,
undropped.
Fruit not waiting
to drop.
The apples look suspended
as if they might hold
there forever, not one
meant for tasting.
For miles, the trees,
craggy skeletons of a winter,
the apples like painted
antique ornaments,
the backdrop you want
to insult, say gray
drop-cloth of a state.
You would not keep
still in this place any more
than you would
place wooden fruit
in a bowl in your living room.
Despite the hills,
despite the road's roll past
the old white house
you thought of purchasing,
for a month wistful
over its tall windows,
its high porches, the prospect
of seasons told in
summer fruit stand,
smell of fresh pear, crisp
fall, despite the apples
refusing to fall,
you can't resist
leaving here.
You look forward
to the apples.
You drive back
just to leave.

                -- Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

 

---

Skating Lessons of the Fifties

 

Marea Gordett Photo by Thomas Morrisey

Passing the round pond near the weeds
I say to my son, There it is.
Where he taught me to skate.
You remember. Your Grandpa.
He smoothed the argyle socks over toes.
Laced the glove-white leather.
First the eyes, then doubling over the silver
hooks with light tugs of his hands
and pulling them tight, knifeblade
against his leg, probably crimson underneath
as we sat frozen on the stone wall
in the middle of the century.
We flew next to him like sparrows as he ran
pushing our shoulders into emptiness.
It was frigid in those days, especially
handed over to death like that.
We raced chained to a whip, my father a speck
in charcoal slacks and clip boots miles away
on a bench, unearthing binoculars and watching
the natural history of his daughters
skate the lurid turn
into women.

                Fires burned
on the ice. Hockey pucks stormed off
the sticks of eerie high school boys
who, even today, loom dangerous
hanging onto gears on highways.
From the weeds the boys beckoned until I saw
wild hands passing a silver flask.
Caught the eyes of the left wing watching
me as he slid by the trashcan goal post,
slamming all the pent fury
of nineteen years in that shoetown
into one ash stick, puck flying past my face
with the pure hustle of check, hook and
shot I knew nothing about
but wanted to rush to-
as one craves the smell of gasoline-
instead spotting the high brown weed of my father's
glove waving us home to the immaculate calm years.

First Recital

The wristletted girls skidding onto the stage before us
seemed slim divas coaxing arabesques and pliés
from pencil legs, pain and humor
traveling the dark audience like a wave
as we watched from the wings,
bald lights whitening our faces, in the pit
the elephantine piano lady zoned
into another sphere of fame and light
swaying her bulk left to right
in two large ripe motions
like the Galloping Gertie Bridge listing
in the wind blowing down the river gorge
before it fell to its imbecilic
harmonic death-

        That is why vertigo seized me
at eight years old, a shy girl stopped
in time, marking my parents in the blind
front row, my father's nervous hat on his lap,
my mother in her white blouse and suit caught on every
beat pushing forward my frozen slippers,
seizing my stilled mind that went blank
as a March lake open only to shadow,
my sister bending beside me, mouthing the steps,
the kind dance teacher inside a curtain miming
the relentless bends and turns of this European torture--
all four wills pushing against weight and time
and torpor until memory came to me like a film rolled backwards
restoring bridge, suspension wires, and plunging cars to order.

                -- Marea Gordett

 

---

On Passing the Museum of Natural History

 

Judy Katz Photo by Lisa Wolfe

This evening, from the back seat of a shoddy cab,
as we bump along the pitted street where construction
for months reduced this city block to rubble and its neighbors
to nervous conjecture, where a yellow crane was last spotted
hanging its head in the dirt, we now look under the swaying skirts
of the elm trees and behold, just at our sight line, the planets themselves-
Saturn with its amber tinge, Pluto small and cold, our own Earth
fixed in its watery beauty-all nine accounted for,
lit and suspended in their new pellucid universe, as if late one night,
in some Herculean effort, the long necked crane shook off its slumber,
reached into the Heavens and pulled them down.

Urban Renewal

That little Spanish-Chinese place on 81st & Amsterdam
where you asked me to marry you
is gone-
its row of glazed ducks in the window.

Where you asked me to marry you,
I don't remember what we ate;
its row of glazed ducks in the window
our witnesses.

I don't remember what we ate
the night we first met at Man Ray in Chelsea,
our witness
a mutual friend, in town by chance.

The night we first met at Man Ray,
also gone,
a mutual friend in town, by chance suggested
you pick me up outside the Zig-Zag Bar & Grill,

also gone,
and give me a ride in your beat-up car.
You pick me up outside the Zig-Zag Bar & Grill.
You lean across to open my door

and give me a ride in your beat-up car,
that later becomes our beat-up car.
You lean across to open my door,
and the rest, my love, is history.

Our beat-up car,
also gone.
The rest, my love, is history.
That little Spanish-Chinese place on 81st & Amsterdam.

                -- Judy Katz

 

---

The Yea Sayer

 

Maurya Simon

(Cairo, en route to Palestine, 385-386 CE)

I repair sere codices and tattered bodices:
I seem to have an affinity for mediating
between the sacred and the profane.

I accept my lot, trudging from marketplace
to liturgy, from wheelbarrow to stylus-
mending our clothes, tending the soul's fuel.

Today, the road's gravel is dimpled here
and there with mint, thumbnail bracts of dill.
Spring again, and the world's too lambent,

the distant fields ashiver with rain's varnish,
the dawn sky streaked with arterial blues
and violets, songbirds accenting the quiet.

I've embraced this life as would a ghost.
I grow old in my solitude, my thick hair
cropped, my ampullae emptied of perfume.

In the market, the women close their faces
to me: I'm served last, after the lepers, given
shrunken loaves, wormy dates, rancid oil.

Some spit behind me as I turn to leave,
or fling pebbles at my back-hard enough
to pepper my skin with stinging welts.

As usual, I take the least trod path back
to our austere hermitage, the longest way
emptied of travelers, but for misled goats,

or bony stray dogs keeping my company,
escorting me past the steadfast cypress,
lying wordlessly at my feet where I rest.

Today, two of them mate crookedly under
a cashurina tree, the female's wry face
a cameo of pain and heat, the male's penis

jamming into her like a fiery red pestle,
a froth oozing from where they're joined,
his fangs bared, his grunts almost rapturous.

I've vowed to leave the flesh's savors far
behind me, have salved my cravings with denial
and prayers, a fervid pledge of abstinence.

And still this crude spectacle of fornication
quickens me, plants an oily tension in my
thighs, clamps hot tongs about my groin,

until I'm drawing back the folds of my robe,
thrusting my hand down to rub myself and
imagining that it's his body's flesh grazing

mine, his loins entwined around mine,
his mouth sucking my lips, his tongue's
soft wand tenderly wetting my mouth-

and I am falling, floundering, pitched,
fused to a spasm of release-O loneliness!
O arctic world! There is nowhere to go,

nowhere beyond the senses, for sanctity's
merely a mirage that vanishes with flesh.
The dogs stand stiffly now, buttocks joined,

one's face turned east, the other westerly:
both spent, yet welded together as one beast.
I whore myself to Eros, hoard my grief.

Paula's Circle

(Rome, 381-382 CE)

Evenings, we gather at Marcella's Aventine mansion.
Our hostess softly greets each of us: pigeon-toed Principia,
Asella with her lopsided wigs, mild-mannered Furia-

(oh irony inherent in her name)-lithe Lea, whose beauty
rivals Athena's, green-eyed Titiana with her guttural stutter,
and finally, large-boned Thea, whose Greek is meticulous.

We've eschewed the decadence of the feasting table,
renounced our lavish stola, our gold-embroidered pallium
used for encloaking ourselves like peacocks in silken veils;

we've removed diadem, earrings, bracelets, anklets, rings,
and put aside forever our lanolin creams, earthen rouges,
antimony mascara, our eyes' glittering hematite shades.

Among these barefaced ladies, I'm richly clothed in faith;
my shy-lipped daughters shimmer as my brightest rubies.
We pray together, sing Hebrew songs that Hieronymus

intones in his deep baritone, his beard's sable tip dipping
to punctuate the verses in a way that my Eustochium and
Blesilla find humorous-though they stifle their grins.

Beyond our circle, our friends revel in gluttony, strain
to appease the sexual greed consuming their bodies
with the speed of a straw fire, or drink themselves into

impotence and cruelty, mistreating their own children.
I, too, sailed those turbulent seas and nearly drowned.
But for this priest, I would have severed my life-

O how to describe the delicacy of my newborn love?
How to express this tumult of yearning, calmed only
by brushing my lips against a prayer's silent splendor?

Chastity becomes my refuge, my shelter: I enter its
shining white room-windows flung open to heaven-
and a shock of electric pulse blasts into my heart,

a field of anti-gravity moves through my body-
God's invisible hand-my naked spirit consumed,
my life dissolving into milk-cloud, atoms, dust-

                -- Maurya Simon

 

---

$5.                   American Poem
                        -what came into my hands
                        as change, I didn't discover
                        until later. We were home
                        when I showed Paula

L. B. Thompson Photo by Megan Barron

the marvelous ordinary 5
dollar bill with those few
handwritten lines on its
pillared building side, in the top
right under the circled numeral
5, plain

                        and quickly scribbled with the kind
                        of pen you might find chained
                        to the counter at the bank-

blue letters, two of them
almost hidden in the green bushes
at the base of the Lincoln Memorial:

                        Small
                        Jerk Chicken
                        Sweet
                        White rice

Just like that.
We couldn't stop staring at it-
Little food order on a 5 dollar bill
-Something pretty and narrative

                        Small
                        Jerk Chicken
                        Sweet
                        White rice

Maybe it's the journey from earning to eating-
we even
talked about keeping
the money; not spending it;

                        maybe framing it double-
                        sided for the living
                        room mantle, but we'll probably
                        end up tipping with it-

Variation on a Theme by King David

Praise to you!
Praise to you my snappy love!

Praise you in clean socks on a Queens-bound
        train; praise you
for your famous avocado
        sandwiches; Praise you from Brooklyn to blasphemy!

I've called the mayor to praise you; & a third-
        base coach; even
that no-neck accountant
who doesn't have the decency to nod hello
        has agreed to praise you!

Praise you with bongos and fine fancy
        tea; praise you
with rhumba, tango & marmelade; praise
        you with your knickers at your knees!

I praise you on Flag Day, & on whichever equinox
        allows for the balancing of eggs;
I praise you with eggs!
        Brown ones & jumbo & Faberge Tiffany blue!

On the white of your wrist I praise you;
        on the vaccuumed throw rug; I praise you full-
page on Sunday! With faxes
        & foxgloves & brushed cotton sheets;
with sky-write & timbrel &

wink! Let every soul
        in the Battery Tunnel honk
her horn to praise you! Praise you
        with ripe limes & wrestling mats;
praise you tax-free with agates and tin foil
        & all sparkly things!

Praise you with foggy spectacles and Wisconsin green cheese!
Praise you to the afternoon of orthopedic sneakers;
        praise you from poinsettia to piccolo!
Praise you & praise you & praise you!

        My love,
                from Brooklyn to blasphemy I praise you!

                --L. B. Thompson