Archive for June, 2007

Our little band of visiting artists
Is unprepared
For the elementary school assembly.
Pandemonium ensues
And the principal, Mister Harsh,
Turns out all the lights.
So we volunteer with the fire department
And go house to house
Helping people look under their furniture
For dangerous animals.
Panthers, cheetahs, grizzlies—
They could be prowling behind your couch
Waiting for the right moment
To pounce.

At the barbershop birthday party
For a weasely mafia capo—not that fat Tony,
Daydream of a Jersey insurance salesman—
All the male relatives wear matching
Brown and gold patterned shirts
And nervously wonder why
There’s no food.
The bleach blonde wives joke with each other
About the pointy rhinoplasties
They all got from the same surgeon.
But everyone is anxious
And hungry.

An unwanted lodger,
Some stubble-faced smart-ass
Who sold a screenplay once,
Gets a bad beating
At the hands of his hosts.
I do my best to stab him
In the belly with a sharp stick
But he crawls off like a bug
And retreats to the room
With thousands of tiny lights.

Remember the reporter who broke the story of the failed assassination attempt on RFK in ’62? When he was an art student in the fifties, he made wood and paper sculptures covered with genitalia, and mailed them to his uncomprehending mom and dad. As an old man he turned his house into a museum. Nice guy, too.

A crush at the school crafts fair—
An old woman dragged her empty cart
And wobbled distracted toward the door
Just as a very small boy tottered that way,
And was pinned between cart and jamb.
Waah!
In fact that catastrophe did not occur,
Although you saw it coming.
Why do you always imagine the worst?
Can’t we all just pay attention?
Hey, anybody need a dog?
He’s giving this one away.
Free dog here!
So yeah, he got a certified letter this morning.
Uh-oh. And?
It’s official.
He got dual citizenship? That is so cool!

Why are they called the Dark Ages?
It’s not so very light out right now.
Still we want that medieval romance
Or believe we do
But what is it?
Not Frodo and Gandalf,
Not the quest for the grail,
The Pythons’ slapstick or otherwise,
Not freezing cold huts and smoldering hearths.
You want to carve an angel on a column
In a limestone cathedral
And walk outside
To summer fields of lavender.
Is that asking too much?

A battered white door
In the Gowanus Canal
Floats beside the reflection
Of a dark water tower.
Open that door
And descend the murky depths.
There’s more down here
Than murder weapons
And industrial waste.
Dream of broken history,
History of broken dream,
Flowing, roiling,
Bubbling, boiling
In the aromatic stream.

We debate the purpose
Of the silver bands
Embedded beneath the grooves
Of a clear vinyl LP
And a broken laptop,
Bent on its hinges.
Jammed inside are an old diskette
And a phone message cassette,
Contents no longer available.
But let’s make a guess:
Two radio stations
That broadcast Dodgers baseball,
Two shucked ears of corn,
Two job opportunities
And someone says your hair
Makes you look too old.

We ride a blue ocean swell
That rolls inside a massive ship.
We are calmly carried along
A cavernous tunnel,
Unafraid but curious
About what may occur
When we are swept out
To the daylight around the bend.

Moving again. The truck is loaded
But you don’t leave yet.
You have time to spend
In the empty white rooms.
You hope for a summing up,
However artificial,
Phony as the day
Is long, most likely,
But still you want the payoff.
Maybe you should let that go.

From near and far you gather
And many are reunited
For the first time in some years.
You want to trade notes
But the music is too loud.
So you shrug,
Shake your head
And shout good-bye
When it’s time to go home.

The electrical cords were tangled,
So many long wires
And such a mess
You can’t imagine.
Some days you want to be a rock’n’roll drummer.
Some days you’re just glad it’s summer.

En route to the religious retreat
We eat sugar-free fruit concoctions
Out of ice-cream cones.
Are they any good?
Only in the context of what’s
Available on the church bus.
We talk politely to the woman
With the curious white beaked helmet
And what appears to be a cigarette
Protruding from her third eye.
She seems kooky but harmless,
So we ask her what it’s all about.
She smiles, says it’s not a smoke,
And leans over to give a better look.
The object unfurls like a flag
To reveal a tiny line drawing of a woman
Under a palm tree, surrounded
By a cartoon word balloon
That says, “I know my kittens
Are alive.
They are alive, alive, alive.”

When we reach the compound
Of the cultists we see
Rows of small wooden boxes
On the side of the road
Like crypts in a tiny cemetery.
Then comes a solemn procession
Of square-headed faith healers
And evangelists with hooded eyes.
At the center is a small woman,
A mystic whose obscure beliefs
Make everyone nervous.
She has a deeply lined face
And trouble with her legs.
She takes white powder
To ease the pain.
A mound of the drug
Melts into a puddle
On the table backstage.
The leaders want her out of the way
But she coolly eludes them
And keeps her own counsel.

Is it acceptable to habitually ignore someone whose office is down the hall, when you see him or her at least once every working day? How about averting your eyes from a person that you’ve seen on the subway platform three times a week for the past five years? You might consider that the regular intersections of your daily routine with those of people to whom you are personally or professionally unconnected are merely coincidental and insufficiently important for the disturbing of your privacy. Perhaps you don’t want to give the merest glimmer of inviting even a nodding acquaintance with your neighbors because you don’t have the time.

There are hundreds of excuses for withholding recognition from familiar faces. Here’s why none of them hold up: your fortress of aloofness doesn’t register as strength; it raises doubts about you. Your neighbors who might otherwise nod at you in passing and forget about it may instead start to wonder if you are ignoring them out of simple snobbery or something more strange, like pathological shyness. The more severely judgmental may suspect you have a personality disorder. Over time you might be stoking the resentment of those you ignore until it becomes outright hostility. Why provoke such harsh feelings from people who, as far as you’re concerned, don’t even know you? Why not smile? It could save your life.

Naturally all of us have had the experience of being haughtily ignored by people we see on a daily basis. We let it go—what else is there to do? But one day when a fellow employee’s habitually averted eyes left me particularly exasperated, I realized that there were quite familiar people on my office floor, usually much younger than I, whom I, too, never acknowledged in passing. I noticed that I was guilty at times of looking past a certain glum-faced junior associate when our paths crossed in the corridor. So the next time I saw him, I smiled a little and gave a slight nod.  And his reaction? He ignored me, of course.

TOGETHERNESS

You hang a wet blanket
On a line in front of the TV.
I push it aside like a curtain,
Though I intend no incivility.

Half the stereo is missing,
Don’t know where it went.
You press buttons in the electrical guts
Of the remaining radio,
Indifferent to the risk of shock,
But you can’t turn it off.

A late spring snow fills
The front seat of the old Volvo.
You throw handfuls of slush
Out the window as we drive
Through the white world.

The two-man TV talk-show team hosts their gabfest from the bottom of a big bathtub. Sometimes it’s white with lion feet; at other moments more conceptual: bathtub as circus ring, with the sharp-suited co-hosts sliding on their backs across the floor. The boys inherited the premise from their network predecessors and are eager, if not desperate, to abandon it for a new idea—but what?

When we finally got to Forest Hills
The whole city was blacked out,
So we bought flashlights and extra socks.

We arrange the marble fragments
In a loose design on the floor
And do not ask what they’re for.

Philatelist Alert! Stamp collectors are excited about the discovery of a rare Pamela Minetta by Dr. Jack Lankin, a street-wise professor from a New York show business school. No word as yet what the wily old academician is asking. He just smiles like he’s got something up his sleeve.

When you follow a family
Of foraging black bears
Over lush suburban lawns
Do not be afraid, even though
You expect you’ll have to wrestle.

Plainclothes policemen make deli sandwiches
On the dashboard of your car
While an old friend from out of town is at the wheel,
Nervously driving you down Washington Street.
They reach over the back seat
To spread mustard, stack meat and cheese.
You pretend it’s nothing unusual—
The cops are always pulling you over
And using your car for a kitchen.

The former president arrived
In a pale green suit
And set us all to wondering
If we could get away
With that color.

Another job for the maintenance crew:
There’s a hole in the bathroom doorframe
And moths are getting through.

Inside the closet in your old bedroom
Hangs every print shirt you ever wore,
Plus a collection of boot-shaped beer mugs
With rusty spurs on the heel.

Unless the strangers on your street are coming at you with switchblades, it’s fair to say you can pay them no mind. But what about the recognizable neighbors who aren’t brandishing knives?