New Poems
/Hi All,
Below are some recent poems that I wanted to share. Thanks for reading. And wishing you all a lovely entry into Fall.
x
Judy
FATHER’S DAY POEM
My father smoked Camels, two packs a day.
He wore a fedora, worked like crazy,
and believed he was lucky,
that his life was better than his father’s.
They’re not as hard on the Jews now—
I heard him tell my Uncle Dave, many times.
Actually, they discussed how good or bad things
were for the Jews for forty years.
And who the enemies were, which
ones were worse than the others,
and the Pirates, the poor Pirates,
always in the cellar, year after year.
HEAVEN
I hope to kiss both my grandmothers,
who I have missed all my life,
to have them cradle & comfort me,
as curled in their arms
and no longer numb, I cry.
I cry as I am rocked back & forth
and passed between them;
my grandmothers’ hands stroke my skin
until the ravages of life
that have branded me,
are healed & I am pink & tender
& new as first wildflowers.
Then my grandmothers croon
the truth, a cadence sweet & simple,
and at once the onionskin layers
of mind-papering are peeled away
and the confusion that reigned
shoots high & away & scatters~~~
buck-shot confetti swirling in ice blue air.
At last, unscarred & clean, I understand.
I know why one soul was born---lean & blessed,
supple & strong: Joe DiMaggio!---
& sent to this earth on the exact same day
as Jimmy Jones, who I remember
at our door each June, blind and nodding
in unmatched plaids,
come to tune the old player piano.
Everything is explained: my grandmothers
tenderly place each note of precious truth
in a hollowed green melon, carved into a basket
I can carry, and we are blown home, completely;
and all is just as it should be
and never, until this moment, was.
MAIDEN AUNT ESCAPES
1
She of gentle home-bound feet
-not by clay but cloth-
recasts black & white & technicolor
threads into
the exotic wildland of dreams:
star-strung
galaxies to fly through
whole and to return,
skimming waterways, fabled
granite cities—le Seine, Paris
in the Twenties, the famous 1939
at Hollywood & Vine.
2
Bits of Lillian’s sadness:
only her own hands
to soothe peach-scented cream
on thinning skin; the left hand
that trembles, the skin brown
& dotted as an owl’s wing.
A photograph kept under starched sheets,
Clark Gable, his dazzling, crooked smile,
hidden from the sight of sister Ruth;
and next to Clark rests Lillian
in sepia, at eighteen, looking dreamy,
up and away from the camera, ready
to begin the life that never comes.
3
Only fantasy is treasure, the careful
gift she never shares, but unlocks
in the great darkness
so as not to grieve too long,
to welcome the deeper sleep that comes.
SCREAM
♡
after Edvard Munch
Layer upon layer waiting til
the pump that beats
falls still and stops.
Give me ground a stone a stalk
a place firm enough
to stack this
wild Grief
that swallows hard
splits the rib cage
open edges raw red
blood blackens crusts the soft core
where Hope used to sit.
Witless Hope spread
her naiveté eagerly as a child
butters bread.
God help me.
It is hard to stay here where
trees blood & eyes are so weary
so scrutable.
This may be about having had enough.
This may be about wanting
the world to come.
LIKE LEVANA , JEWESS OF CORDOBA
I feel it with me,
dwelling near my face,
above my throat,
humming there,
blessed there.
My soul and I know
the earth
as home for now;
we sway to the rhythm
of festival harps.
Adorned in
colored stones, skin
polished with precious oils,
we press lips to pages
of sacred text.
We lap up the world like wine,
and do not foresee an empty glass.
SOMEWHERE
Somewhere a chestnut horse
plods along a leafy trail.
His steady rider
also nods. They move as one
one bent unit
rolling like a song
up and down the shifting rays.
They are off
to find another place,
humming, easy as summer.
It may seem
they 've left me here,
amid the noise and street-scapes
but in the airborne scatter of the song
I am riding with them.
When we get there,
there will be
apple trees in hot September
shedding for us-the horse, the rider and for me.
The juice will slake our thirst.
The drenching sun
will slide to four o'clock
as quick with joy and sweat
we three mount up
and find the trail again.
TWO
Two fell asleep listening to Gregorian chants.
Two occasionally babysat for little money.
Two learned to merengue at the Arthur Murray Studio.
Two hired a woman named Carol for rides to the airport.
Two drank so much Little Sumpin’ beer they passed out.
Two rode uninsured horses in Massachusetts.
Two wore Grouch Marx masks when visiting someone in a hospital.
Two snuggled in a booth at El Floridita, Havana.
Two angled for salary increases at UPMC.
Two sometimes inquired of one another “How’s my breath?”
Two dosed on Zen drops for stress relief.
Two disagreed about politics.
Two finally decided to never speak about politics but
Two never voted for the same presidential candidate.
Two listened to Adagio for Strings and dissolved into tears.
Two penned a fan letter to the composer, Samuel Barber.
Two mistrusted the news media.
Two walked across the Carcross Desert in the Yukon.
Two flipped over in a Range Rover.
Two raised a wonderful son.
Two sold self-published books from the trunk of a Chevy.
Two got stinking drunk at a cousin’s retirement party.
Two made love on the grass in a neighborhood park.
Two made love in a conference room at work.
Two sang “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” at a country club party.
Two tried living off grid on a tropical island.
Two read out loud in bed.
Two preferred Southern Gothic writers: O’Connor, Faulkner, McCullers.
Two photographed mudslides on coastal highway 1.
Two rescued a dog with the mark of a black heart on his flank.
Two once carried this dog down a subterranean tunnel.
Two were the chummy sum of one plus one.
A PRIEST’S TALE
The kindly priest was drawn to Sweet Tranquility.
Still lithe despite his sixty years
he chased her past pink wildflowers
whose trembling petals reminded him of her.
He knew she was not human but he did not care.
He was hungry for her.
He long searched before realizing
she was hiding from the world, including him.
When he came upon her nest he found a perfumed note.
It said she had to return to a star
where all lived on sweet soup and cherry wine.
She promised to stay accessible to him.
“Realize, I will always come to you in dreams. It is all I can do.”
He remained by her nest
and wept to Sol, the setting sun:
Where has Sweet Tranquility gone
and shrouded her face?
And the sun could only guess:
In clouds swollen with sorrow…
Piteously, the priest cried out again and again
but Sol, deafened, streaking gold and red,
drew down and disappeared
bearing the light, the nest, the wildflowers,
and all that had been revealed, away.
SKINLESS AND BONELESS
for Dora Iwler
Skinless and Boneless
is how they wanted you.
Heartless and Gutless
is how they were.
To gorge themselves
on the flesh of your people
Was the method they used
to feed their rage.
Vilified victim,
chosen again,
you chose survival.
Butchering, baking,
bearing corpses and ashes
they have goosestepped
into history.
Skin, bones, brain
and screaming soul,
you are still here.
ISRAEL IWLER AND HIS PEACEFUL COW
After seven hundred
days of night
he emerged,
a stunned Jew-bird
on bleeding
hands and knees,
light-blinded by
the years in his
deep cave home.
He came into
the presence of
the green-sprung
world again,
and remembered:
a sun, a moon,
the roof of stars.
It was when
he saw his own
cow, dumb, peaceful,
and not frightened
in the quiet field,
that he fell down
and howled;
savage
beneath a drift of
wind and heedless blossoms
he clawed
and wept
and tore apart
the abundant ground.
OLD LOVES
The twin of myself
that I am in my mind
never parted from them,
those old loves;
we spend our days
walking through the home-town
places we knew,
the green streets where we played,
under buckeye trees that
shed for us when we
were the tiny and masterful
collectors.
We scale the blueberry hills
under the same hot sun, bodies in joyous sweat;
above rise the elephant clouds,
close by the rocks and carved markers
we learned not to fear.
Mother calls and the sharp-edged
hour ends in a hush.
So this is an afterlife:
a pause without
and not without them,
a time to abide
not entirely lone
yet alone,
but not to dream; no,
our souls wait quietly,
a pile of tiny stones
closely crowded
on either side of this fluttering
opaqueness, this thin blue curtain,
and they know.
They know that I am coming.
JANUARY
Beyond the window
wind driven snow,
down from Canada.
Trees like bones,
old black skeletons
shaking in pain.
I am alone and ill,
hiding here;
just a cold but I like
to say I never get them.
On my daughter’s wall
Aunt Lil’s petit point
little girl sits with her bunny
in a country field
while Aunt Lil herself
lies in a grave
I cannot find
somewhere out in Shaler;
my daughter’s grown,
a woman now
making her life, tentatively,
but still
on her own.
Aunt Lil had a narrow life
but left these
vestiges in yarn: the little girl,
the tulips, the talit bag. Pieces of
herself for the children
who never look at them.
All is heat
the man of science said.
A mere moment’s heat, at that.
The bunny in the field
is made of thread.
The little girl has gone away.
Try to stop smoking.
Take care of the cold.
WAYS AND MEANS FOR VIVIAN
When she wants to be kissed and petted
she tells kindly lies that stretch
like clothes-pinned laundry angled
to grab up sunlight. Yesterday’s soiled
underthings flap bright and new.
If the day is clean and the wind is right
she lies and the garments lie and both are considered
if not entirely lovable at least good enough.
When she wants to be loved without condition
she whispers kindly promises. These rise in the air
like coveys of tiny birds determined to fly south
although the way is fraught with shearing wind
and raging night-storms.
And if the man is full-hearted
and fresh enough, love is offered like sweet
coffee in the morning, just as the first cool updraft
arrives and a whole new universe of birds takes off.
TO CIVILITY
Blessed is he who expects nothing,
for he shall never be disappointed.
--Alexander Pope
Clouds, shaded soft
as dove’s wings,
yield most days
to showers, sometimes sweet,
but often harsh
as the first days of mourning,
as when spring
rains moisture
upon the cold earth,
heaps wetness
on us all, lies heavy
in the chilled trees,
as well as on the children;
mists them
green-barked and thick-skinned
forcing growth along sloping streets,
streets of bricks and poles and wires
without the steady
sun of other places;
perhaps this is why
the hardy sprouts never hide
from unsparing light:
they learn early to stretch,
to climb, to bob high,
to forgive and love each other.
THE GREAT GOD OF CHILDHOOD
spoke out loud to Noah
on Little Golden pages:
Collect all animal pairs!
Come, dumb, beloved creatures---
the best thing
about the world is not the world;
the best thing about the world is you.
Colossal rains
washed the earth,
dazzling as the sun
on puddles
where we splashed our feet.
He saw every rippling circle
we made move,
as He had moved
the Ark and moon and stars.
He dwelt in green trees and blue waters;
bright leaves and ladybugs and buckeyes
He sent for us, the little collectors.
But the earth began
to turn on its own axis
the stars were mapped drifting
millions of light years away.
I never stopped peering
into clouds for Him
until the moment you left
me sunk thick in fog, alone
I called out to you:
Vaulter! and again: Vaulter!
In a dream you scaled
the hills and catapulted steeples
skyward, to Him.
You flew away with the night
that would open into any other
stretch of golden sunlight.
Dinner Date
The man was justified, I admitted,
because he had served there.
I gave him that, anyway.
He’d been the soldier, and his soldiering
had to mean something. You could see
how much in those tight lips and his fist
squeezing the wine-glass stem, hard.
So I gave him that.
Then I told him Danny never came home.
I really laid it on:
24 years old, law school, Penn, his goodness,
sense of duty. The Navy pilot:
the way he was raised, how he was the first,
for me, the first and best,
and what it was like for us, the lush days
and the nights, summer after young summer.
I kept steaming on, juiced with the wine and some
strange rage: the obscenity never seemed
more obscene, this now old man still fighting
his black-hearted shitty military cause.
It was finally for nothing, I whispered, evilly.
Nothing. Your service, his death. Nothing.
He quit arguing. Shut up.
I felt queasy, like I stepped on something
and made it stop moving.
SISTER MARDI GRAS
If it keeps on rainin’
levee’s goin to break
and all these people have
no place to stay.
---Memphis Minnie, 1929
Old town never could decide
whether it was soil or water
hot city that celebrated death
hosting jazz funerals
dark place where cemeteries
now lie under water
swampy land that grew exquisite
scandalous corruption
violently strangled hostess
of artists and crawfish and music:
Sister Woman hears your wounded voice, so sweet so hot so sweet
and remembers how you shaped her.
She must sing and dance far, far away from you
far from your watery grave,
far from your fat drowned heart.
SOLOMON AND SHEBA
Cloaked now in myth
Shadowed by anguish
But once a thing of splendor
A matter to remember:
A great ancestral love.
Let this song recall the grandeur
Of Solomon and Sheba
He, the Man, a king She, the woman-queen
Flesh and spirit Jew and Black
A song of remembrance,
A paean to a proud fierce love.
Take my hand.
Your hand is onyx My hand is pearl
Reach with me
Into the deep warp of time
Storied lives and martyred lives
All layered now within the
Beautiful
Cold
Earth itself
Let us seek the reliquary of emeralds
The bloodstone vault.
Let us drape ourselves in the glory
That was. Let us render sweet requiem to
That blending
Those majestic lives
That splendid human love.