National Poetry Month 2006
Cleaning Out the Mail Basket
I.
Restless after our argument,
I plow through credit offers (expired).
Sort, sort, curse
the new-blooming paper cut.
Usually, you handle the mail.
Not because I asked,
but because you are neat
and I am not.
It is my mess you clear up,
so patiently
inquiring whether I require
each piece of junk,
I itch to pinch you, yell
Just chuck it!
From the first, you inveighed against this basket,
frayed now after eight years.
You hate it with a vehemence
I don’t get. Secretly.
As though I can’t decipher
your pursed lips, the hiss
of sigh leaked as you, daily, martyred,
check the overflow and discard.
II.
When I met your wholesome family I got
how you could loathe such a homely object
as a mail basket, even after I explained how
its stiff twisted fibers make me desire
to whip a lover with a thin bamboo cane,
hard enough to raise welts.
Raising more than that in you.
Do you know how you’ve tamed me?
I, whose bewildering genius for mess
drives eggs to kamikaze feats,
leaping from my hands to paint themselves
on the kitchen floor?
In my pigpen wake,
garlic skins migrate, cling
to garments in the bedroom, far
from the kitchen where they shed.
Now I don’t allow filth to accumulate. To keep you
in love with me, I’ll do anything. Even housework.
III.
Today I let you leave for work angry,
and now, under the bills, in the clutter, I uncover
a snow globe ring from my little sister.
It recalls the time when glitter
was one of my wardrobe staples.
During our first-dating days.
In the tin bristle of paper clips,
pencils, cough drops, change
shirt buttons, a “register to vote!” pin,
an eye pencil sharpener,
a ceramic medallion on a gold ribbon
(might have been a gift ornament),
a nub of yellow chalk (??)
a pen shaped like a lipstick,
there’s the snapshot from the thrift store
in Germany, our vacation
celebrating your 30th birthday.
One day I’ll write a short story
about these long-lost ladies
who sport beehive hairdos
above their white-rimmed sunglasses
as they pose on a carousel ride.
IV.
If you would shout at me once in a while,
our fights wouldn’t last three days.
I wouldn’t have to excavate
your silence like digging
through this damned mail basket
which silts dirt under my nails
and stings my paper cut.
When I witness, mingled in this receptacle
the detritus of our life together,
I know. Nothing will keep
the grit of you out of me.
Nothing can make us stay
in tidy, separate piles.
What Google Can’t Sort Out for You
The addictive database combinations of search terms
may yield results, or answers.
You are an outlaw with in-laws.
Your psychopomp is animatronic, otherwise engaged.
An etext poem about Persephone does not prove
palliative, suggesting that a daughter is fodder.
In a computer’s burial mask,
hunt your patron goddess, rack up a book list on Amazon.
Discover your BMI, your IQ, routes along the 1/9
to the new bierhaus on Grove Street.
Scout fashion trends in the Times, design a strategy
to foil gravity with cunning
use of collagen.
Meanwhile the clock melts on the wall.
I’m Kicking in the Door of the Cage
She says, joyously
pursuing divorce.
I wonder why she bothers to explain.
My beautiful sister is no prisoner
of etiquette. She carves her own luck
from the marble of the possible.
Blonde hair flashing like lights on a landing strip
that guide descent.
At Grandma Schmidt’s Funeral
During our last visit I crocheted.
Her attention wove in and out
like that hook in the wool.
Rod strove for a subject
like he’d dropped a stitch.
Love thick on our tongues
in this dainty parlor of dust,
wheelchairs crouched in a circle
like a frontier wagon train.
Bloodless fingers splayed on lap afghans
twitched offbeat to ragtime jazz.
At Grandma Pecht’s Funeral
Stuffed into an overstuffed armchair
the thought occurs to me:
all the angels I’ve ever known
have been secondhand
or dismembered.
Why should I think this,
surrounded by attenuated relatives
who mourn their missing matriarch,
the North Star burnt out?
They reel in their shiny best shoes,
clutching each others’ lapels.
The lamps cast a sepia tone.
Every photo appears to be weeping
in its curly gilt frame.
Dismantling the Fingers of My Blue Right Hand
Rage has asphyxiated it.
Each finger curls, dried-up iris,
Toward a vaulted, sulky indigo.
That first uppity finger of shame
or identification
whizzes into the stratosphere, doubling for the great benefic.
Its mound splits into nine moons,
each with its own coterie
of glittering flotsam and press agents.
The rude finger is vaudevillian and taskmaster.
Middle child, pleaser,
with a future as a U.N. translator,
it has learned to juggle, all by itself.
It bounces beyond its mound,
hitches the half moon of its nail
to a caboose, bound for deep green.
The bride-and-groom finger, blushing
has paid its mound hush money
to forget the bachelorette party.
Sun dazzling, the chariot
of its knuckle rides roughshod
over the plain of the palm
and is spotted at last in Texas
lolling over the lip of too-tight denim.
The smallest finger, tattletale
with a rigor mortis complexion
makes a great sous chef
but instead becomes a postal worker
spending its days cocked and aimed.
The thumb, that monkey with a typewriter,
snarks in the corner, laughing.
Make Like a Tree And
I have departed like a sole
from a synthetic leather upper.
Present the way a spouse
consumes the headlines over the morning eggs.
As air is discernable in dirt,
I infiltrate my daily bread.
Quit the way a sequin jumpsuit hops on its Harley,
throttles off in a dust cloud.
Trundling your errors,
a daybed camouflaged by its collapse.
Cotton shirts wilt by three pm.
Suspension bridges vault builders over their edges.
Sincerity now available in on-the-go six-packs.
All the drastic ways in which days leak through respiration.
Mask hanging off one ear, no armor at all.
Language a pocketful of jacks on a hardwood floor.
Delight a manniquin with face sandblasted.
Nourishment a drip of fluids.
Time elapses like a fault line.
Poem at Lunchtime
Two cleancut twentysomethings
impede my egress from the office
by staging a staring contest
on the corner of twenty-first street.
In a café, with a perfect view of Union Square,
I analyze pedestrians’ footwear.
Metallic ballet flats the clear forerunner
of next season’s hobnailed boots.
Though a chorus line of yellow tulips
sways on stems in front of the bodega,
they appear staged as the vendors
hawking organic banana bread.
The best connection I can make,
eavesdropping a conversation about a long-dead sitcom.
Things You Think Nobody Loves but You
My sister the middle child
calls me from bars, crying
out, “Listen!”
whenever a song from our youth
pounds from the jukebox.
The answering machine screens,
she leaves messages: static
punctuated by her glee,
garbled, overlaid with beer.
The music of yesteryear
is recycled about every twenty minutes.
Just so, the girls we were
Lurk always in our auras.
When we get together our shadows play jacks.
Taste of Chinatown 2006
The lion dance spanned five seconds
on account of the downpour:
a glowing baby blue head
with gold teeth, veering
its cruel gaze toward overstuffed trash bins
as though to devour severed fish heads,
(bead black eyes crusted with breadcrumbs
and staring into the boiling sky)
discarded from skewers
by oily fingers twitching
hoodstrings of anoraks
to keep the sky
from heaving its spittle
onto our upturned faces.
Learning the Taksim at Manhattan Plaza Health Club
Slow, emotive movements,
hip rolls, undulations,
appear stark, underwater fish under harsh fluorescent bulbs.
Swimmers glazed with chlorine dew
strut by the windows, sporting Speedos
but no leers of prurience
on their merely curious faces.
The treadmill junkies don’t spare us a glance.
They barge past, all pumping arms
and tangled engine of metabolism.
We shed the choreography of the past two months
(sharp shimmies, quick wiggles)
like chiffon, lifted fingers fanned,
our eyelids at half mast.
Watching Grey Gardens at the Playwrights New Horizon Theater
We fidget in cushy seats, itchy royalty
of East Hampton preens before
disaster crammed into the second act.
We shun the coral smile, tangerine chiffon
pantsuit of the well to do.
We crave the ghoulish and the gothic
deathlock of mother and daughter mouldering
in crumbled mansion, cats
maurauding like a plague of oversized, fluffy roaches.
Raccoons rattling the mementoes in the attic.
Errand boy Jerry the lightning rod
heralds the clap of thunder in the mother
daugher calls him the Marble Faun.
In the end, I flick the tears off my cheeks.
At the Raquy and the Cavemen Show
Heidi cups her bellyful of baby.
The doumbek’s tek-a-tek
erects her spine as a monument.
Rolando practically douses his elbow in the ravioli,
unheeded, as he devours the
doum doum tek-a-tek, tek-a-tek-a-tek,
offering his glance like a bouquet to Heidi.
Rod, alive, alight, his lovely lithe body
clad lightly in a white tee shirt,
appears as a single spear of red beard
beneath the dim chandelier.
I being unmade by the drums,
stunt double for my troubled heart
waiting in the wings, stronger and more aerobic.
Nightmare on Elm Street
Tense strings saw the soundtrack in half:
One hemisphere in the camp of eighties pop,
the other some strangled windpipe.
Introducing Johnny Depp, who would vault
to success. He has a defenseless face
under a crest of wavy hair.
He’s got the jimmy legs. He’s wide awake.
His nightmare feigned in a wholesome
narrow white bed under sports posters.
The sodden mattress disgorges his
absorbed blood in a geyser,
sprays a lake onto the ceiling.
Earphones disgorged lie white as veins.
Synechdoche Is Ruining My Life
Oh, synechdoche, occupational hazard,
you goad me to return time and again
to the talismanic power of cosmetics.
Though I have ironclad proof
to the contrary, I believe
the perfect red lipstick will metamorphose
me into Marilyn Monroe.
As though our favorite heartbroken vamp
could be distilled and decanted.
Oh, synechdoche, which came first in me,
the ragged claws or the silent sea?
It’s your pernicious influence
that makes me loathe a stranger
on sight for wearing white shoes after Labor Day.
Prayer Stations
Babble of Union Square notwithstanding, here are these stringy-haired young people with pitted skin and red aprons that make them appear for all the world like they work at the God Home Depot, proselytyzing on the fringes of sidewalk that are already crammed with incense vendors and tables creaking under the weight of piles of pashminas. Right in front of the Whole Foods Market and Forever 21. As though what they’re doing is wholesome. As though I can ignore the stench of triumph in their unsolicited, “God Bless You!,” which might as well be the trumpeting of , “I’m better than you are!” so smugly superior are their mugs, so queasily does the blessing settle on my undefended and entirely too thin skin. Seeking to convert in my turn, I press a brand-new lip shimmer into the palm of the dowdiest girl, murmuring, “Here, take this. It only costs $2.50 and it will brighten up your entire face.”
Children of Eden: Cain
They squandered my inheritance of bliss
in favor of this rock, this place.
Choice the horns and choosing the beast.
I have left my mark on all those who desire,
insatiable, the question rather than the answer,
pleasure spread before safety like a sacrifice.
And if Abel in his facile obedience
struck me as the one cliff
I will never be done leaping, so be it.
Blood will be obeyed,
it’s that simple.
Clamoring to paint itself
rosy on this ruined, beautiful world.
A Pop Culture Viewing of The Ten Commandments
It was difficult to separate Charlton Heston
from Planet of the Apes,
even in his Moses sandals,
the lash of the taskmaster’s stripes
on his back as he wallows in the mud pit
with the Israelites.
I didn’t recognize his wife, all courage
and scratchy fabric artfully draped,
until her cheekbones peeking out of her hood
clicked: It was Lily Munster,
in biblical garb, fueling the hero
the way she handed the lunchbox
to her Frankenstein monster husband
every day after school all those years ago.
