Memoir


The difference between memoir and poem is similar to the difference between fire and ashes. Decide for yourself which is which. Ragged chunk of ice and puddle of cold water was my first impulse. Decide for yourself which is which.

Every poem is a memoir. Every memoir is a wish*.

I once knew a man who didn’t know me. No argument in a poem. Memoir requires an explanation. Someone’s written a biography in verse. Haven’t seen it but it’s something I feel as I write this sentence. Considering the economics of publishing it probably won’t be published. Even if it’s brilliant, it probably won’t be published; economics.

The difference between biography and memoir? Biography has a referee.

So, how does this work? I mean memoir. This morning I remember a cranberry scone and cup of coffee. Sixteen years ago? If I was writing a memoir that year would be missing, suggesting what, that I wasn’t alive, or was asleep. Do you write everything in a journal?

Twenty-three years ago? The parking lot behind a movie theater on Ventura Boulevard. It was night. Just stopped raining. I slid my arms around a woman. She pushed her tongue into my mouth. I don’t remember her name. I like to think she remembers mine.

If you don’t remember something it didn’t happen. Every instant falls into the past immediately and immediately memory takes custody. Writing is how we honor memory. Good or bad memories. Writing is honoring the past. The past is everything.

Sometimes, and I mean just sometimes, I write something I didn’t know I remembered. Sometimes, and I mean just sometimes, I write something that causes a hand to reach from my stomach up through my chest and squeeze my heart. As I’m reading, as I’m writing, as the heart tightens, I have no idea why. Hiding behind poems is a convenience.

I’ve written poems that are too personal to dislike, for me, though that doesn’t make them good. Hopefully, I’ve exercised good judgment with them and only inflicted them on very few people. Memoirs are fitting places for apologizes. If I write one the apologies would be pronounced and deep.

“Truth is an unfortunate dilemma.”** Memoir.

*Though it might be more honest to say every memoir is wish on a two-way street. Memory traffics in trickery.
**A Personal History
It's simply a coincidence
that all the women I've ever loved
kept anteaters as pets.
But now, rearranging my past
I tell people it's not a coincidence.
The nuances of a personal history
make a man interesting, subtle differences
that causes a person to pause like a break in the wind.

I only recreate simple details,
things as easy to believe as a passage
from your sister's diary describing
how she gave her virginity to the kid
with curly hair who lived across the street,
the same kid she always ignored.
This was on the afternoon she didn't feel
like going to the movies with you and your
friends. Truth is an unfortunate dilemma.
Take the skin on my face, it's turning
dark as the wrong side of a dime,
walking is becoming difficult.
If I start to limp I'll say it's a war injury.
When properly developed
a past has the aftertaste of candy.

The Collections

Appeared in Swink Magazine, Los Angeles, Issue 2, early 2007.

The Collections

I abandoned collecting magnifying glasses
after I sold them to the president
of the Magnifying Glass Collectors of Wisconsin
whom I met by coincidence on a plane
returning from Grandfather’s funeral.
With the magnifying glasses gone
there was more room
for my shadow collection.
My favorite shadow
is of fire hydrant lying across a sidewalk
tangled in the shadow of a bicycle.
I captured it with Scotch tape,
keep it in a cigar box of its own.
It disappoints me, instead of seeing
the shadow most people only see
a knot of tape. I keep the rest
of the collection, nine shadows
to a box, in a kitchen cupboard.

In my family, men have always been collectors.
Grandfather collected violin strings,
owned one thousand and seven when he passed away.
He bought them from school teachers,
violin repairmen, even from children
who hated practicing while friends did fun things.
And Father, he kept stacks of unused bricks
hushed in the weeds behind a shed.
It took me years to understand
that it wasn’t bricks he collected,
like me he collected the shape of absence,
the missing light, the unbuilt things.

Doors

Doors are as useful for entering poems as they are for rooms. A lover abandons you, for example. You write a poem. Sadness is the door to the poem. Yes, sophomoric, but clear. Another example. You dream that your father’s ghost visits. How many poems are there about that? Doors, poems. Poems, doors.

I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you everything there is important to know about doors.

Doorknobs were invented before doors. When I first heard this I was skeptical, too. This came to my attention while reading a draft of an Alexis Orgera poem. Dinner in a Thai restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. Alexis and I often dined there. I chuckled a touch at the doorknob line. “No, no, no, Rick, it’s true,” Alexis said quickly. “Come on,” I said even more quickly. Though there was much honesty in her voice I still had difficulty believing doorknobs were invented before doors. According to her poem they were invented almost a thousand years before doors and thousands of miles from where the door would be invented.

Alexis’ sister, Kendall, a college student, had discovered the truth about doorknobs while writing a paper on the dynamics of entering a room*. The history unfolds something like this. On the Greek island of Icaria, I think 1187 BC, a stone was placed at the entrance to an important room. Before entering, a person would pickup the stone and thrust their hand clenching the stone into the room. This was supposed to be a warning to any evil gods inside that they were armed, the stone, and should leave. The Romans adopted this tradition and carried it to what was to become Germany where the door was invented. It’s not hard to see the similarities between stone and doorknob. And as demonstrated earlier, door and poem.

You can force your way into a room. You can’t force your way into a poem. Though many poets have taped a poem to a door then kicked it down. Anger at poems, a force multiplier. In fact, in 1898 the Royal Irish Constabulary, when teaching new members to kick down doors, pinned poems to the about to be assaulted doors**. This practice only lasted five months. To be honest, I am suspect of this fact. But as stated earlier, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you everything important there is to know about doors. Doors, poems. Poems, doors.

The woman who would try to kill me in a matter of minutes stood on the other side of a door. I was asleep on a sofa, the closest to the that door, the person woken her knock. Though now I remember the sound as something that more resembled the palm of a hand slapping cheap wood and not that of thin flesh over knuckles banging on a door.

So much begins that way, a knock on a door. Doors order the world in a way walls could never dream of.

There is always an instant when murderer and victim are on opposite sides of a door. There is always an instant when a poet and poem are on opposite sides of a door.

I couldn’t describe the door. I could describe the room. But I won’t.

Jeans, t-shirt, army-issue socks, dog tags – that’s what I wear. She also wears jeans. The door is only slightly open. She takes a step back, adding another two feet between us. Her shoulder-length brown hair is tousled. The door is only half-open when I see the gun, nickel-plated 9 millimeter semi-automatic pistol. The gun is level with my stomach. She pulls the trigger. The gun is at the height of my shoulder. She pulls the trigger again. I begin to duck and close the door. She tries to point the pistol at my face and pulls the trigger a third time. The door slams. Quiet.

Doors resent locks but appreciate their necessity.

She had never seen me before. Not even in a photograph. She didn’t know my name. I didn’t know hers. It was a mistake. I wasn’t the man she was hoping to kill. She never apologized. The why of this story is unimportant. The role played by the door is what’s important. The door remained closed.

Doors appear in twenty-three of my poems, most prominently in The Burdens. I feel completely confident in saying that all poets eventually write about doors.

* I can’t imagine what her major is.
** I wonder how many of these Constables were poets?
*** (This poem first appeared in Quarterly West, University of Utah, No. 47, Autumn/Winter 1998-99; is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)
The Burdens

The man carrying a door on his back resembles
an insect crawling across the pavement.
Excuse me, he says to a stranger, do you want to buy my door.
My grandfather stole it from prison when he escaped.
Before that it belonged to a brothel.
No, the stranger replies, prison doors are bad luck.
But brothel doors are good luck, the man with the door responds.
The stranger walks away.

The man carrying a door on his back
can’t stand up straight or turn his head
to see the man carrying a window on his back.

The man carrying a window on his back resembles
a streetlight reflected in a puddle.
Excuse me, he says to the man with the door,
do you want to buy my window, it belonged to my sister
she jumped out of it when she was fifteen.
Before that it belonged to a church. A suicide window
is bad luck, says the man with the door.
But a church window is good luck, the man with the window responds.

They trade their burdens the same way the man with a chimney
becomes the man with a staircase on his back
looking for anyone who wants to climb them.

Trains

Trains are the most literary form of travel, other than walking, of course. Old automobiles come close, only close. As much as I love airplanes they’re thin in literary emotion. There was a time ships were literary, that time has passed.

Somewhere in a box, perhaps at the bottom of the hallway closet, there is a photograph of Patrick R. Ballogg on a train. We were travelling from Vicenza, Italy, to Garmish, Germany. It was a long time ago. Patrick is smiling. A bottle of Tanaquery on the table beside him. I was sitting opposite. Soft winter light illuminates the side of his face. I haven’t seen the photograph in years but seem to think a young woman is sitting next to him. Trains. Another young woman sat next to me, and like me, is not in the photograph. Trains.

Trains muscle their way through distance. Trains are best experienced at night. I should have mentioned it earlier, but electric trains are not as high on the literary ladder of resonance. The exception are subways when the train struggles through a tunnel and the lights go out.

George Stephenson was born in 1781, on June ninth. Years later he invented the steam locomotive engine. He named his first one "Blucher." It pulled eight loaded coal wagons weighing thirty tons four hundred and fifty feet at four miles an hour. The men who shoveled the coal must have been buried with the black dust of that day under their fingernails. Men working on railroads seldom go to hell once they die. Yes, some are horrible, sinful people, so there is no explanation for this. Nor for the reason that Frank Sinatra collected model electric trains. Actually had a cottage devoted to them on his Rancho Mirage property.

Moonlight pulls the smoke from steam engines at night. Don’t let anyone tell you anything different.

I’ve never written on a train. I have on an airplane but it wasn’t a very good poem. I often think of taking journey on a train just to revise that poem. The fact that more poets have died on trains than airplanes* is not preventing from this. Other things are. Destinations are often a triggering event for travel, trains, in my version of the world, prove they are not a requirement.

Every time a ship sinks there will be a train crash in nine days within eleven hundred miles of that port of departure. Harold L. Watson, explained that this is a proven fact. He spent many years as an executive in railroad companies and was three emergency meetings to discuss precautions after ship sank. Railroad companies try to keep this secret. But when I told Harold L. Watson I was writing about how trains inform poetry he thought it would be fitting way for the public to learn of this danger. Poetry has always been good for this sort of warning. A thought from me not Harold L. Watson.

*The last year that the International Poetry Registry and Administration in Geneva, Switzerland, has figures for this is 2007. One poet died on a train, none on a ship. In 1989 there were eleven poetic deaths on trains and only two at sea. Figures with relationship are consistent from year to year except for World War Two. Fighting at sea and the number of poets who joined navies as opposed to armies is thought to be the cause here.

The End of the World

(from The Soup of Something Missing but first appeared in Prairie Schooner, University of Nebraska, Vol. 78, No. 4, winter 2004)

The End of the World

The End of the World brushed The End of the World’s long black hair
as if it were a story a lawyer was telling a jury
or a cloud stroked by summer wind.
Music from a radio wandered through the apartment.
As The End of the World dressed
The End of the World swayed to the music.
The owl in The End of the World’s backyard yawned.
He had seen it all before
-- men at The End of the World’s door swallowing
their tongues like medicine.
Each was treated to a different death.
Silence was one of The End of the World’s favorites.
Suffocation was another.
The End of the World’s very favorite, the one closest
The End of the World’s green heart
was the terrible way The End of the World cloned hope,
then took everything back, even the sound
of The End of the World walking away.

Failure

Who would I be without my failures?

Sometimes I think I like my failures more than they like me. And they so like me! While others measure us by our successes we measure ourselves by our failures. You know I’m correct about this.

What does this have to do with poetry? Everything.

I wanted to say that every poems begins as a failure. But after scribbling that sentence in my notebook on three separate occasions I realize it’s simply not true. Though it is one of those easy to remember lines and would be often repeated in workshops. The truth is, every poem begins as hope. The poet, or the person writing the poem*, hopes the poem about to be littered across the page will be the greatest ever spilled on paper.

Fear of failure is often referred to as writer’s block.

There are few things as enjoyable as writing badly. Sitting in a coffee shop. Scribble, scribble, scribble. I even allow myself to use words like love, dream, laughter; yes, I actually write those words. I’m convinced Shakespeare would be jealous. For those precious few minutes I don’t judge, I simply enjoy. Here’s the problem. If I closed my notebook. If I never read what I wrote, nor shared with friends the result of that joyfulness I could continue the self-delusion. Unfortunately, I’m filled with arrogance and pretense and pretend I’m really a poet. And, gasp, share my poems with the world.

Writing like this. Writing badly, when you know it’s bad and write it anyway, is like sex. Once it’s over you have nothing to show for it other than a memory of pleasure. Sex is never a failure. Neither is pleasure.

But there comes a time when failure is not an option§. There comes a time when writing poetry is too serious to enjoy. Yes, I said writing poetry is not something meant to be enjoyed. It’s meant to be hard work. If it was easy everyone would be at it and the magical pleasure of a successful poem would be less magical. All this would happen if it were easy.


You send out your manuscript to 100 contests and win none and continue writing. That’s not failure. Failure is when you fail to get out of bed in the morning.

I smeared ink across a newly written sentence. That’s a failure, but negated by the fact that I was writing.

No one would suggest that the man who crossed the finish line last in the New York Marathon was a failure.

Failure isn’t meant to be embarrassing. Though it often is.
Failure isn’t meant to be painful. Though is always is.
Failures and mistakes have nothing to do with each other.
Be brave. That’s my advice.

How many books have been written about success? Too many. The world needs books about failure, the more commonly shared experience.

The word failure is at is best in “I failed to write today.”


* Writing a poem doesn’t necessarily make you a poet. According to the International Poetry Registry and Administration, Geneva, Switzerland, only seven percent of poems are actually written by poets.
§ That line sounded so good in the movie “Apollo 13” I wanted to borrow it.

The Growers of Olive Trees

(First appeared in Shenandoah, Washington & Lee University, Vol. 46, No. 1, 1996, pg. 67; and in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Growers of Olive Trees

The mayor ordered a statue of himself
erected at the top of a steep road that twisted
up from the beach. It took five days
to find a large rock that looked like him.

On warm afternoons we sat beneath
our olive trees, played dominoes,
drank beer and retold the stories of how
we drove away the growers of lemon trees.

Questions

There are Questions so terrible they should never be asked. Each of us decides for ourselves what they are. There are Questions so sublime no answer does them justice. They go unasked.

A failed poem is an answer. A successful poem is a Question, one that would rather go unanswered. The only proper answer to a poem is another Question.

The story of Questions has little to do with the story of answers. Consider the courtroom, a trial. The conversation is Question answer, Question answer. Lawyers avoid asking Questions that they don’t already know the answer. Poets don’t have this luxury. The legalities of poems require answers. That’s how poems beget poems.

The similarities between doors and Questions is startling. Openings. What passes through has nothing to do with this. It never did. Though it has much to do with poetry.

Poetry shares room in the Art of Questions with science, one of the few, very few, places that demands answers.

Pablo Neruda’s Book of Question asked every important Question. I suspect there still might be a few that need to be asked. That’s what I write about. I’m searching.

Over the course of a lifetime each of us is asked roughly 187,326 Questions. Half go unanswered. Of those answered, 63% of the answers are wrong; another 9% will be out-and-out lies. Now that you know this will continue asking?

Since undertaking Questions I attempted to compile a list of each one that I’ve asked throughout my life. Most that began with raising my hand in a classroom were dismissed. Questions asked more than once, “can you starch the shirt and still have it ready this evening?” and “… do you love me?” were only counted once. Tempting as it was, “do I have a brain tumor?” was also only counted once*. The total was 91,876§ Questions. I then went back over the list, the ones I didn’t need to know the answer to were marked with a yellow highlighter. A red highlighter was used for Questions for which I really didn’t want an answer. Question asked to erase a silence were marked in green. 8,337 Questions remained.


*The implication of this question was staggering, for a few weeks I counted it as three questions. After putting some distance between me and the emotions involved I realized that there is not much difference between this question and “… are you pregnant?” Hindsight is an effective editor.
§ Questions asked in this book are not included in the total.

The Butcher’s Bride

(First appeared in Shenandoah, Washington & Lee University, Vol. 46, No. 1, 1996, pg. 66; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Butcher’s Bride

No one wanted to bloody their hands after the butcher
was shot through the neck by robbers who fled
leaving the front door open and three pigs
hanging in the window. And what about the dead butcher’s bride?
Men gathered to discuss how long the village would remain
without meat. They decided to repair the dock next to the cafes
they drank at each evening, pay for the work by selling
the butcher’s knives and pigs. Whatever money remained
would go to the bride. The open door would be discussed later.
The man with the darkest hair was sent to tell her the news.

The Hypnology

(First appeared in Crazyhorse, The College of Charleston, Issue 68, fall 2005, pg. 133)

The Hypnology

I

A man sits on a bus bench and flips a coin.
It’s just after midnight.
The next bus won’t arrive for hours.
To keep the cold air off his throat
he buttons his shirt to the top.
He runs his hand over his wrinkled pants leg
like a blind man smoothing
a crumpled note to read the Braille.
This has nothing to do with a bus.
The streetlights are lost planets;
flies are moons.
Heads, return home.
Tails, remain at the bus bench.
The traffic signal clicks three time before changing.
Once, he got into bed without
even removing his shoes.

II

A soft blue light sweeps the kitchen
from a television beside a sink
filled with soapy water.
On the television, two women are riding a train.
After three hours of not being able to sleep
she washes dishes, glasses, and two days’ silverware.
She imagines the two women on the television
can see her t-shirt and underwear.
The television is mute;
she doesn’t want to hear what they say about her.
A siren in the distance.
A opossum in the shadow of a garbage can.
The dishes are clean.

III

A man sits on the curb smoking a cigarette
while she sleeps; raspy inhales, long exhales,
a forefinger against a thumb
when he flicks a butt into the street
before pulling another from the emptying pack.
She wakes to walk the dog
when the moon is between
a streetlight and a tree.
Her white robe billows in the breeze,
collapses, glows in the chill.
The dog sniffs at the man
in his smoky gray cloud.

There is so little to say.
Isn’t this the best use of night,
to make us afraid, make us uncomfortable,
make us stare at the ceiling until morning.
Is sleep a skill or a prize?

IV

Now let me address you, reading
in your car, only lifting your head
when you hear the front door open
and see her coax the dog along the driveway.
Are you embarrassed like the man who can’t explain
his presence in a neighbor’s dream?

Life

A car pulled over. It was midnight. Raining. The car pulled over in front of a restaurant, Burgers, on the corner of Mott and Central, in Far Rockaway, New York. Far Rockaway is easy to find. Get on the “A” train. Take it to the last stop. Far Rockaway is last. There’s no where else to go. Decades have past since this happened. The occupants, two men, got out of the car leaving the doors open and engine running just as two other men stepped from the restaurant.

One of the men from the car touched one of the men from the restaurant. A light touch on the touch to say stop. With the other hand man-from-car flipped open a black leather wallet. I was very young. The gold shield must have gotten wet. I remember this night. The second man from the car also flashed his gold shield. Detectives. They ordered one of the men from the restaurant into the car. Only one. The other man was free to go. The world is a dangerous place. Melodramatic but true.

The man free to go was Murray Wasloff, my uncle*. The man ordered into the car after the flashing of gold New York City detective shields was Herman Bursky, my father.

My brother and I shared a bed back then. The phone ringing in the kitchen woke us. Light from the hallway glowed into our bedroom.

Is it fair to make poetry from another’s misery? Or do some things need to be written? Confessional poetry? I have nothing to confess.

I don’t remember what my mother said when Uncle Murray told her my father was taken away.

My father was not an innocent man.

The local police station in Far Rockaway is the 101st Precinct. My mother knew many of the officers there. They had been business partners with my father. Take that any way you want. She called the precinct. “Do you have my husband?” No.

She then called the FBI to make a missing persons report. He had to be missing for three days, call back then.

I remember being upset, but don’t remember crying.

Kidnapping? My mother called the FBI back to report it as a kidnapping. They weren’t particularly interested. But there was a witness, and there were gold shields.

It would be years before I would see my father again.

Ten minutes later the FBI called. He was being held at Queens Central, police headquarters for the borough.

“Okay, you Jew bastard, we want some names.” “I told you, my name is Herman Bursky.” The largest of the three detectives in the room wore a white shirt with sleeves rolled up. This was the detective who hit my father in the face knocking him backwards out of the chair each time the question was asked, and each time my father only gave his name.

Sometime, just sometimes, I think the past is meaningless.

“This thing called failure is not about the falling down, it’s about the staying down. You can have a new start anytime you want simply by getting up.” For years I carried this quote in my wallet.

Years later my father told me there was nothing wrong with the beating.

When my mother was allowed to see him the next morning he couldn’t see out of one eye nor hear out of one ear. If you’re afraid of getting hurt don’t become a criminal. My father told me that, too.

What he did has nothing to do with this story. What he did is none of your business. None of this has ever found its way into a poem.

It troubles me greatly that I didn’t start writing poetry until after his death.

*Uncle Murray really wasn’t my uncle. After my father was orphaned he went to live with the Wasloffs. Murray Wasloff was always Uncle Murray.

Notes

If you stare at an alligator for too long they can read your mind.

I find my poems in pieces, the same way they find me. Every poem, okay, almost every poem starts as a scribble in a notebook.

I consider my unresolved poems as longish notes. If the poem is resolved, it’s no longer a note. The opposite of note is memory. Note is reliable. Memory is not. Writing a note is a joy in a way we hoped writing a poem would be. Then we became poets.

When all else fails and I’m desperate for a sense of completion I rummage through my notebook for notes that I can assemble and fool myself into thinking they hold together with some sort of poetic ¬– or language – logic. Occasionally, it works†. Occasionally.

Her tongue in my mouth, could taste every word she ever said. On a napkin? No. A bank deposit slip? Many times.

The best place for notes is in a notebook. Browsing is not only possible, but pleasurable. You can’t browse a computer. Sitting in a coffee shop with nothing to write I find myself writing about the strangers surrounding me. Even makes notes of their conversation.

“She’s afraid to say she never loved him, married over a year.” How do you reply to that? “I need a haircut.”

The envelope my paycheck comes in? Twice.

Notes made on random scraps of paper must be transcribed in a notebook as soon as possible. Before long they disappear. They always do.

The dead walk through the world with their hands over their eyes. I was sitting in my car. The only paper was in the glove compartment. On the back of an insurance certificate from State Farm is where I wrote this note. Something about that feels fitting.

My girlfriend* was buying shoes. We were walking through a mall and something red and pretty in a window caught her attention. I didn’t need shoes, and since the stop was unplanned didn’t have a notebook or anything to read with me. “Yes, they look great on you” is what I said about each pair she tried on. Though she had beautiful feet and no shoes could do them justice. A line occurred to me. Lines do happen this way if you keep your mind in wander-mode.

She was standing in front of the mirror a little longer in a pair of open-toed brown shoes, a canvas texture of some sort, if I remember correctly. Needing a place to write the line that occurred to I wrote it on the inside top of the shoe box from which the open-toed brown shoes that she was admiring came from. These, of course, were the pair she would buy, none of the other trials in front of the mirror lasted so long.

At home I looked for the line on the inside of the box. It wasn’t there. She bought a different pair, a fancy sort of athletic shoe, and I hadn’t noticed.

Someone, eventually, bought the other shoes. I wonder what they thought when they opened the box and saw my note. It’s simply a coincidence that every woman I’ve ever loved kept anteaters as pets.


†(Originally published in the Hawaii Pacific Review, Hawaii Pacific University, Vol. 14,
2000)
The Week of Harsh Holidays On Orthodox Island

Sunday/ The Weatherman’s Holiday

In the old days this holiday is why a season
changed or men consummated a threat.
Bitter men call this Revenge Day.
Greeting cards are expected.

Monday/ The Day of The Atoned Rock

Candles burn. Prayers ends
with a name. Young girls secretly
relish this day: the trumpet’s
sour notes, the possibility of aftermath.

Tuesday/ Adulteress’s Day

Who wears a blindfold?
Who’s ear is cut off? Anonymous gifts.

Wednesday/ The Festival of Catastrophe

Windows are covered with red crepe paper.
Babies born this day are named after hurricanes.
Lavish parties and dances are held.
Only fast music is played. When this holiday falls
on an even date people buy expensive blankets.

Thursday/The Assassin’s Carnival

Parties and dances are also held,
though the music is louder. Gifts are exchanged.
Promises are made. Imagination
is under siege. Doors must remain open after
dark, even if no one is home.

Friday/ Electrician’s Birthday

Only two traditions are practiced.
From midnight to midnight sleeping
is not allowed. What people do to stay awake
is unique. Written confessions
are sealed and left with relatives.

Saturday/The Biographer’s Sabbath.

Nothing to do with memoirs or survivors.
Families eat breakfast together. By noon,
a sigh of pity. Men are given a chance
to change their names. The lambs
are slaughtered for dinner.

* It sounds so immature to say “girlfriend” but it accurately describes the relationship and explains why I would be there while she was buying shoes.

The Ritual

(from The Soup of Something Missing, but first appeared in Quarterly West, University of Utah, No. 50, Spring/Summer 2000.)

The Ritual

1

On the first day of spring, two men struggled to ascend a steep cliff. The depth of their muscles tested the distance of up. Fear and balance has as much to do with climbing as it does with life; ask a wild dog or fish or a man who fell. The angle of the cliff never changed, neither did the sky’s. When a man kicked a foothold into the rock the dust of another’s sweat rose in a puff like breath on a cool morning. One of the men thought about his fingernails for the first nine minutes, the other spent more time thinking about nothing. A mattress was lashed to each man’s back, depending on his strength it was either an obstacle or a promise. The mattress strained against the rope, the thin line of suffering across the stomach and shoulders.

2

A beautiful woman stood silhouetted on the edge of the cliff. She pledged to marry the first climber who reached her. From the bottom of the mountain she resembled a bride on a wedding cake. She would untie the mattress from the first man’s back and consummate her pledge as the second man continued up the face. Cool mountain air swirled between her thighs. Dozens of men gathered below to watch. Heads tilted back, hands shielding their eyes from the sun; wind brushed across the shadows in their faces.

3

When the second climber reached the cliff, the woman also freed him of his mattress. He immediately tossed it to the ground below as if it were an old worry being discarded then jumped, hoping to land on top. Most often he missed. Those who previously envied him carried away the broken body, now lighter without the weight of suffering. The mattress -- stained in the ascent, soiled by the fall -- was cleaned for use in the next contest. Few mattresses, after all, were suitable for such a struggle. It had to be light enough to allow a man to climb as fast as desire, yet thick enough to save him if he was not lucky enough to win but fortunate enough to land on it after he jumped.

The Virtu

(Originally published in the New Orleans Review, Loyola University, Vol. 33, Number 2, 2008.)

The Virtu

This wasn’t the first time I watched a woman
wear high heels in the shower.
Closed-toe this time, her toes weren’t painted
and she didn’t want anyone to see.
After she told me this her head tilted back.
Water masked her face in a way
not possible if she was still turned
to me as I stood at the sink shaving
-- or I might have been brushing my teeth,
either way, an inconsequential detail.
Water darkened the red shoes.
Though the damaged world spun beneath,
her balance, of course, was perfect.

Truth

Earlier I said I wasn’t going to write about myth but myth is related to truth. If George Orwell hadn’t said “myths which are believed in tend to become true” I would have. Truth is important but never let it become an obsession. There are more versions of truth than lies. That something might have actually happened is not the important truth. The emotional truth is what’s critical. With this said, every word I’ve written is true. I would swear on a blood-stained bible that each and every one of my poems happened as written.

I used to date a lovely young lawyer. We would often go SCUBA diving. In a poem I once wrote “Kathy … was futzing with her equipment.” She was angered by this line, claimed it never happened. (Imagine, a lawyer lecturing a poet on truth! That’s when I first began making notes on what will one day be a book on truth, a book that will become a textbook in some of the more prestigious law schools1.) I tried to explain that something didn’t actually have to happen for it to be true. What made the line true was she could have futzed with her SCUBA gear, and I knew her well enough to know that once we surfaced she was thinking of how she might readjust her equipment -- she thought of futzing! And a thought is as close as you need to come to action to make something true. Of course, she argued that the entire poem2 had little to do with reality. I disagreed and that her problem was only aware of a small slice of the world. Truth is much larger and includes what didn’t happen, but could have happened, and more importantly what you wanted to happen. Kathy believed that literary journals should have a girlfriend rebuttal column. She is now a staff attorney for the NOAA and I believe poetic justice is not within the scope of their concern so any legal action on this front is not likely.

Truth is a poetic device. Use is sparingly. Lies, on the other hand, are boring. Use them even more sparingly.

Poetry occupies a strange place in the minds of literary civilians. Is a book of poems fiction or non-fiction. If you’re making stuff up many would believe you’re writing a short story. People have a tendency to believe what’s in a poem. Though surrealism shows it’s hand and can’t get away with this. Confessional poetry runs into trouble with truth when it tries too hard to appear honest.

The difference between propaganda and poetry is not something I’m prepared to discuss at this point. It should suffice to say that they share goals. A tuning fork struck against a line of each would feel strangely familiar. That’s why intent is critical to understanding truth. Or, to be exact, intent is a more accurate stage for truth. When reality is at odds with even the most fundamental interpretation of emotional truth, reality always loses.

I write to discover truth. I write to remind myself of it. Everything you write in a poem will eventually happen to you. Write carefully.

When you write something honest with a fountain pen the ink dries faster. Pen a lie and the ink shines wet for hours. That’s probably the root of the word smear.

Writing a book on how to write a poem requires a different form of truth than writing a poem. And writing a book on how to write a book on how to write a poem demands an honesty altogether different from both of the previous. You can trust me.

1 I hired a marketing consultant, Bruce Silverman, to look into this possibility by doing focus groups with law school professors at Yale, University of Iowa, and Cardova Law at Yeshiva University.

2 This is that poem:
Secrets

The sun set into a man’s hat, I saw it myself.
A large red ball into a black bowler, For an instant,
It looked like his hair was aflame. Then darkness.
I wondered if I had seen God. This wasn’t a dream.
I was walking my dog. It reminded me of the time
I was scuba diving off Anacap Island,
Surfaced after twenty-nine minutes at seventy feet.
Kathy came up next and was futzing with her equipment.
Her back to a boast anchored one hundred yards from shore.
A man stepped from the bow and casually walked on water to the island.
Kathy didn’t notice and I didn’t mention it.
This is just between you and me. I think
someone is trying to tell me something.
I can’t prove any of this but I’ve never lied to you before,
not even when I confessed I fell asleep smoking a cigar
in a favorite chair, open book on my lap, tobacco burning
with the lazy breath of sleep, ashes piling on the unread page.

The Forgotten

(The poem is not from the Ironmongery manuscript but is in The Soup of Something Missing and originally appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, University of Alaska, Vol. 19 No. 1 & 2, 2001 pge. 271.)

The Forgotten

We waited for trains for what seemed our entire lives.
The thickness of dust on suitcases, a sign of stature,
the discipline of remaining, even as the tracks rusted.
I felt my flesh thickening, eyes yellowing, the world dulled,
waiting to travel someplace I’d never been.
Our hearts quickened when the ground rumbled.
A dog running between the tracks was a sign from God.
Once, two men sat on their suitcases playing cards.
The loser gave his suitcase to the other and walked away.
His hair, I recall, was thinning.
What was he saying? Something
swallowed by the rustle of leaves.
Do people who disappear from our lives
forget us as easily as we forget them?
On warm afternoons I removed my coat
and stood with it folded over my arm.

Fog

Fog is unresolved poetic thoughts. Fog is what happens to false starts, scraps of paper and notebooks that are only written in and never read. The Grand Banks are roughly 155 miles off of the coast of Newfoundland*. With over two hundred days of fog a year, it’s the foggiest place on earth. Considering the fact that people sleep better in fog it seems ironic that so many foggy nights settle on thick, unstable water. Unfortunately most people believe fog is simply a cloud that touches the earth. The difference between fog and mist is distance. If the visibility is less than a kilometer it’s fog; over two kilometers, it’s mist. I’m undecided if I want to discuss mist. It’s not a coincidence that the word mist shares sounds with myth.

The sound of fog is often mistake for wind. Though it’s typically deeper, with a hint of metallic. It’s most accurate description of it is that it resembles wind pushing through a rusted French horn. On the hill opposite ours, a German soldier played the trumpet as fog seeped into the valley. Colonel Soland got out of the jeep, walked to the side of the road and lifted binoculars to his eyes. That night it would rain. In the morning, three of our soldiers would be dead. I got out of the jeep, walked to other side of the road and urinated. When I turned back to the jeep it had disappeared. Sooner or later, everything disappears.

You should be able to write a poem blindfolded. You should be able to write a poem without saying a thing. You should be able to write a poem while a house is burning. You should be able to explain this. If you can’t, there’s no point. I wrote this while sitting in my car while it sat in fog.


*Somewhere in the area of 45 degrees 00' North latitude, 49 degrees 00' West longitude. I sailed there in a 28 foot sailboat to check on specific location but was nervous in that thick fog. I intended to SCUBA dive there but, embarrassingly, lost my nerve.

Last Words

I can’t imagine laying in bed knowing I’ll never again stand up, never wait for a traffic light to change and stroll across the street. I’m afraid to die, not sure what comes next. Death is final and nothing like going to sleep. You never wake up and – this is the part that I find troubling – you don’t even know you’re dead.

“Beautiful” was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s last word , and a beautiful last word it was. Poems are always last words, even when they’re not.

It seems sophomoric to say that Yannis Ritsos is my favorite poet. But he is. So many times I’ve read his poems and imagine them as his last words.

“I am dying. I haven’t drunk champagne for a long time” was Chekhov’s last words and I wouldn’t have expected less from a great writer.

Emily Dickinson’s last words, 1886, could be a poem, “I must go in, for the fog is rising.” And the fog did rise. Kidney disease took her life.

I hope to live to 100* but let me say for the record, even at this premature point, there’s nothing I have said or will say at some future date that needs to be remembered outside of my poems. Though I will check that somewhere along the way I’ve written the words “I love you” in a poem for all of those that I have.

I’ve never appreciated found poems as much as I probably should but have thought to write a poem, and here I use the word write loosely, made up entirely of last words.

One of my favorite last words used to be by Daniel Webster, according to a book they were “I still live.... Poetry!” How much I would like to believe that! You deserve to know that everything you’re reading in my book is true. I did some research. According to the New York Times article published Oct. 12, 1881, Webster’s last words really were “I still live – more brandy!”

Pancho Villa had a sense of history and drama he gets little credit for – “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

Cancer took three years to drag my father to his death. My mother sat in the chair beside his hospital bed for the final thirteen days. In a poem I once imagined his last words, then sent the poem to my mother. She called and told me his real last words. “That’s enough, that’s enough.”

The world will end in a poem. I’m convinced of it!


* Doctor Lawrence Gorlick won’t go as far to predict the date of my death but winces when I tell him of this expectation. Of course, he hopes I do live that long but always points out he’ll long be gone. If he goes first I will write poems about him. Long before he was my doctor he was my cousin and a good sport about lending his persona to my poems. This prose poem I wrote about him first appeared in The Harvard Review:

The Plan

I walked into my apartment after work and my left foot was immediately overwhelmed by the warm air. Why didn’t my right foot also enjoy the climate change as quickly? I looked down. My left shoe was missing! I was wearing it when I left the store. No doubt it was stolen by that one-legged bastard Dr. Gorlick. He sat across from me on the bus, eyeing my new shoes as we wove through late afternoon traffic. Not once did he mention the polished leather’s soft glow, the imported style. His envious silence was confession enough. In the few minutes I was asleep -- I always take short naps on buses -- he slipped my shoe off and hid it in his black bag. I know he’ll wear my shoe while he treats patients tomorrow but not on the bus ride home. So I’ll disguise myself as a policeman wounded with a bullet in the stomach. The ambulance will deliver me to his office. My disguise will be so effective that as soon as he finishes treating the wound I’ll arrest him. Before sleep tonight I’ll read a book on police procedure. His crime should not go unpunished because of a technicality on my part.

Ironmongery

Ironmongery proves that every word was once a poem.
Ironmongery indicts every word for laziness.
Ironmongery can be anything it wants to.
Ironmongery was discovered in 1711*.
Some words are braver than others. Ironmongery is the bravest of all. When ancient armies faced each other they waved swords, axes and other soon to be red-wet instruments and shouted “ironmongery! ironmongery!” before throwing themselves into battle. There are other beautiful words but ironmongery has the magical ability to drill itself into a sentence or lyric like Excalibur in the stone. The rightful king was the only man who could draw Excalibur from the stone. The poet is the person who can draw ironmongery from the dictionary. The magic of poetry. Fire-breathing words.

Ironmongery means 1. a hardware store or business. 2. the stock of a hardware store; hardware. A poem is a hardware store. Pull poems from a forge. Hammer them against an anvil. That must be how the word ironmongery was first written. I’m positive of it!

Let’s do a chemistry experiment. Take the opening three sentences and replace them with another word, any word. I’ll use shoehorn.
Shoehorn proves that every word was once a poem.
Shoehorn indicts every word for laziness.
Shoehorn can be anything it wants to.
Poetry.

* The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, pp. 1484