Blessed as We Were Read online

  to have a tongue and sit in New York and bleed

  only a little, from one or two cuts, and lucky

  to walk the way I do and have my own secret

  and shoulder my bag as I get up and walk

  to another part of the city, past, I’m sure,

  shoes and wine and futons, thinking up

  a plan for not eating, a place for my papers, a room

  to read in, a chair to live in my next two years

  and keep my tongue intact, poor suffering mouth

  at the corner of Fourth and Grove, and lie down hard

  when I have to and sit where I want and wait for my own

  restaurant to open and drink my coffee at last

  in a certain park, at another bench, this one

  with curved iron sides in stamped black: fruit and flowers

  and yellow lacquered slats, a bench for wailing,

  with a name on it in English and even dates

  for someone to study and only three short lines

  to memorize, the plate attached with bolts

  from front to back, the metal treated, a rat

  for witness, a sparrow to eat the pizza, a Times

  to sit on, a daughter for whistling, a mother for staring,

  and someone to loosen the bolts and someone to stand

  in front of me with a flute and throw his hat

  on a little Turkish rug and someone to sit

  beside me and wail, “coffee from 1940,”

  “pie from 1936,” the only

  song I know, half Mississippi, half Poland.

  His Cup

  His song was only a dot—a flash—if anything,

  somewhere above that haze which he remembered,

  when he thought about it, as a world on fire

  or a white mind watching. When he shook his cup

  there was a tremor, something like a distant

  coruscation, he knew this and his own mind

  was always either on that or on the sky

  north of his grandmother’s house and the long building

  they called the forge and the 1939 Chevy

  with the gray metal visor and the sweet acorn

  with the spiked helmet. He remembered a pig

  burning in sand and how they hunted all day

  for the two hot eyes, and he remembered floating

  under the wire they stretched across the creek

  and holding his breath. The violin star is closest,

  the trombone star is farthest—or the drum star—

  depending on what he sang. He worked this out,

  some ratio or other, forty years ago

  in order to learn how music worked. If there

  was an analogue for what he did it was a

  nova exploding in front of the Chemical Bank,

  a state of mind of the millionth brightness, his cup

  gone wild, the light spilling—nothing

  could take that from him. He ate from a leather case

  and slept where he worked; he put quarters in one pocket

  and dimes in another. As far as a change of belief,

  as far as the red and the blue, as far as abortion

  and standing armies and cheaper health care, even as

  far as the final outburst, he was silent—

  dumb, you’d say—that was the evil of music

  as well as the good; and twice he changed his corner,

  and once he left his cup where it was and started

  howling, what else could you call it? Moaning,

  hissing even, such was the light there and such

  was the uncreated light. He ended up

  somewhere between a rubbing and scraping, maybe

  a kind of sucking, but mostly he plucked, for plucking

  was how he explained it, he was both singing and plucking

  and dust and gases were collecting for he was

  thinking of something else, oh, prairie schooners

  fording the creek, the raging channel against

  the farther side; and justice again, that which

  confounded it from the beginning, and he was

  dying to taste those pork chops and walk the fences

  between the cows, and he was dying to feed them

  and watch them eat; and in the second brain,

  for it is always the second brain that makes

  the lucid sounds, or so he reasoned, he watched

  himself in a black suit seated at a score

  on a polished stage with pipes behind him and baffles

  to the left and right, his shoes polished, the light

  shining on the wood, a rapt audience

  of college students in rags and older professionals

  and businesspeople ready to leap to their feet

  and shout for him, but he just finished the piece

  on a long slow note and waited for the last

  invisible sound and then two seconds of silence

  before he rose and entered that thunder, his mind

  already on the next great piece, how this time

  the strings would fly more and the lights would burst

  without stopping, or put it this way, there would

  be a desert and he would walk till the blood

  was almost gone and he would be a thrasher

  with only two sharp sounds, or he would play

  the first instrument, something to do with slapping

  and something with whistling. He was grateful to the woman

  who kept applauding, he bowed to her, he did

  that dumb kissing with his hand, only finding

  a ratio between the two, the sound of kissing,

  the sound of clapping—she would give him a dollar

  if she were passing by his bank, the light

  was on her and she was the light; like him

  she made it appear and disappear, her clapping

  in tune with his kissing, in an empty hall

  of maybe three hundred seats—they were the last

  and walked into the parking lot, a single

  Plymouth was there, the moon was full, the frogs

  were at it again, such melody, and such, such

  gruesome rhythm—he loved all frogs—his head

  was in her lap, the car was moving, the cup

  was spilling again, this was his major explosion.

  Greek Neighbor Home from the Hospital

  Where he hung the bird feeder a month ago

  a kind of film is covering the thin glass

  and where he threw his wine glass down a bleeding heart

  is starting to show under the motherly leaves.

  He has walked to the wire fence three times

  to study my tomatoes and he has smelled

  my roses in a downward movement in which

  his good leg was one anchor and his cane another.

  I can tell by the clicks of triumph and the loud

  rattle of his newspaper the Russians

  have sold missiles to the Greek Cypriots

  and Turkey is going to suffer. As I recall

  he put the key to the padlock in the pot

  of new lettuce and I can see his glasses

  under his chair in case he panics. The wind

  makes both of us smile a little and the swallows

  for just a second seem to lounge, the sky

  is so blue, they almost rest. He leaves his chair

  by twirling; he hates their rectitude, and since

  the dog is dead, and since his wife went to live

  with her daughter again he closes the door by himself

  and either sits in the kitchen and falls asleep

  over his cane or climbs his eighteen stairs

  before he turns the light on—I’ll know which

  by the count of thirty, either one of which,

  to my way of thinking, is better than the brutal

  battles they had, at least for my own s
leep

  over the honey locust, before his stroke

  a month ago in front of the glass feeder

  separating the different kinds of birdseed

  into their small compartments without giving

  too much away to the poisonous squirrels, poor Greek.

  Pennsylvania Bio

  I wore a black knit hat

  so I could be undistinguished in the war

  and carried a small bag

  so I could be mistaken for a doctor;

  and once in a whorehouse

  while waiting for a friend of mine to finish

  I examined the madam on the kitchen table;

  and I spent Sunday at either the Serbian Club

  or the postwar Literary Club on Atwood Street

  above the prewar clothing store, and ate

  hot sausage sandwiches and cold buttermilk

  across the street from the first Carnegie Library

  and made plans for the next seventy years. I drove

  Andy Warhol to the East Liberty train station

  in my father’s 1949 Ford. Believe it or

  not I bought a 1950 Buick

  thirteen years later for fifteen dollars and drove it

  into a junkyard five years after. My first

  instrument was a kind of kazoo and that led

  naturally to a golden trombone. I was

  loyal to my own music for fifty years

  though I detested snare drums and tap dancing,

  just as I do those singers now who hold

  their left fists in the air while holding the microphone

  inside their mouths. And I hate short-sleeved shirts

  when they wear them with dark neckties, skinny swine

  knocking on closed doors; and I had a habit

  of counting bricks, a nice obsession compared to

  washing hands or touching car doors, it gave me

  freedom with walls so I could handle bulging

  and sagging when I had to; and one of the summers

  I read Steinbeck and made love—in the bedroom—

  to my aunt’s cleaning woman in upstate Pennsylvania

  and learned to adore the small town with its rows

  of stores and trees on the sidewalk and only a short walk

  into the country, in this case up a steep hill,

  the dogs more sullen the farther up you went,

  and Russian and Roman churches below, the sunlight

  on the river, the bridge empty, the outer one

  half-hidden, I was shocked by the sudden distance,

  and I had a Brown’s Beach jacket with a reddish

  thorn in one of the pockets, which was my toothpick

  for thirty-five years, and a vest to match, and a flattened

  acorn I kept in the darkness; and I had a pencil

  I used to keep my balance, the edges were eaten,

  the lead was gray, the green eraser was worn

  down to the metal, and I had a spiral notebook

  I kept for emotions, and I folded my money.

  Massachusetts Song

  That is the education of a tree,

  one stick by which morality, aesthetics,

  music, and politics are taught,

  whether a pecan or plum;

  and that the wire,

  although I hate to mention the wire,

  and reddish apples and limbs so low

  they drag on the ground;

  and that the confluence where

  five branches start, a university

  hard by the lonely peach;

  and that a nest for the bluebird,

  a wooden box with a hole

  too small for the sparrow;

  and that is the loaded branch of the pitch pine where

  I saw the perfect body and heard the song

  in secret oh I swear you swallows I swear

  you sunlight on the salt grass what the blue jay

  called silence what the rose hip

  and the dead raccoon called home you crows.

  A Rose Between the Sheets

  Taffeta for you and taffeta for me, a rose

  between the sheets and one sitting on my finger

  as if it were a ruben-stein; a dress

  you held once in your arms against your face

  and one I lifted over your waist and spread

  like a noisy pillow; you in your silk and me

  in my leather jacket, nothing else, raw silk

  for you, cowhide for me, and velvet

  on your lips, your cheek on fire, the red of the one

  against the red of the other; lustrous, I’d say;

  and always bright, and always florid, and ready

  always to escape; your marriage for you

  and mine for me, wool, wool, in my face

  and cotton in my arms, a linen once I touched

  with such a silly reverence, and burlap

  with the loose weave, the smell of burlap, and crepe,

  the way it draped, the way it absorbed the light;

  and lace for romance, and corduroy for romance,

  and satin for you, and satin for me, and creases

  and buttons, a kind of board, I’d say, a bed,

  a cushion for your ear, maybe green, maybe

  gray for your hair—and blue for me, or peach—

  I love the peach—a scarf for you, a scarf

  for me, a white carnation for the cold,

  a sunburst, a rose of Sharon for the darkness.

  Street of the Butchers

  It was called the early years in upstate Pennsylvania

  or it was called the first long trek with a footlocker

  up over his shoulder so he had to bend both knees

  at almost every landing. He held his head

  sideways, as if for listening, it was called killing

  worms, the bells had already started, the second

  or third, he thought; by his calculations, the ringing

  would stop by the number seven. He thought maybe

  almost two seconds for each long ring; he counted

  himself among the chosen ones to be in the

  bell’s range. He knew he would lie down on his back

  after he tried the faucets and opened the windows,

  and go to sleep with the sound. It was called

  the first concert, the bird in the iron mouth.

  Last Home

  The name of the alley is Pine Street where the rottweiler

  pushed his way into a degrading doghouse

  past a filthy towel that served as a floating

  door or window to keep out the light. The street

  is called Walnut where there is a posted sign

  and six or seven refrigerators for sale

  in the front yard and two or three boarded-up windows,

  and it is Fifth, I think, where I walked through

  the mourners in front of the converted synagogue;

  and it is one of the hills, Ferry or College,

  that I climbed up to see if I could strike a

  balance between my leather lung and my sodden

  thigh, and which would go first and how long it took

  before we could breathe on our own and whether the sycamore

  that split the stone sidewalk came by the wind

  a half a mile below or it was just planted

  for shade and beauty. And how high you had to go

  to see both bridges, and where you should stand to hear

  the roar, and if you still could hear the ringing.

  Larry Levis Visits Easton, PA, During a November Freeze

  I said “Dear Larry” as I put down his book, Elegy,

  across the street from the Home Energy Center

  and its two embellished secular Christmas trees

  and its two red wreaths over red ribbon crosses

  enshrining a thirty-inch stove in one of its windows

  and a fifty-gallon
water heater in the other,

  knowing how wise he would have been with the parking lot

  and the tree that refused against all odds and all

  sane agreements and codicils to let its dead leaves

  for God’s sake fall in some kind of trivial decency

  and how he would have stopped with me always beside him

  to watch a girl in a white fur parka and boots

  build the first snowball on Northampton Street she collected

  from the hood of a Ford Fairlane underneath that tree

  and throw it she thought at a small speed-limit sign

  although it landed with a fluff just shy of the twin

  painted center lines inducing the three of us,

  her lover, Larry, and me to make our own snowballs

  from the hoods and fenders of our own Fairlanes although

  she threw like none of us and to add to it

  she was left-handed, so bless her, may she have

  a good job and children and always be free of cancer

  and may the two of us scrape some roofs before the

  rain relieves us, and may we find gloves for our labor.

  Short Words

  Some dried-up phlox so old the blue was white

  and something like a fireweed and grass

  hopeful as always and I with a poison berry

  I wanted to eat and make it my morning cracker,

  and coffee so sweet I knew I put a sugar

  substitute into my cup and milk so sweet

  it might have been Carnation, and there was wind,

  whether it was the rain coming in or only

  a little cleanliness, and in the burn pile

  a dead and rusty pine tree halfway sticking

  out to remind me of the 1950 Buick

  Mike Levey gave me in 1963

  and I drove five years later into a junkyard,

  and how I lost two jobs and almost three

  because I was a little like Amos and longed

  only to hear short words and one day a whole

  student body waited in the parking lot

  while I walked in alone to get my letter

  of intent from a nervous college president

  with pink fingernails and shaking fingers;

  and who was it climbed the six-foot wall by himself

  in order to teach his classes the Board of Idiots

  at Temple University erected to keep

  the Negroes out, and who is still ashamed

  after fifty years he turned away from his first