Eve Descending

love and wild boars.

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:15:25 GMT

Love and Wild Boars

I read in the newspaper that there are wild boars, a pandemic of boars from the forests of Brandenburg, in the streets of Berlin. They come out at night, snuffling in the green spaces, feeding on compost, stepping with ungraceful menace in the paths of cars; males can weigh up to two hundred pounds and thus they interrupt the flow of traffic in the guts of nocturnal Berlin. They're the only thing I can think of to compare my passions to--snorting, inconsiderate, with teeth hanging over their lips and rank odors, stout, ungainly bellies, persistent hooves. How I wish to go about my business, but I am hopelessly interrupted, like those hapless drivers hanging out of their cars at dusk, at midnight, a little haggard and all disbelieving, peering at the carnage in the teeth of the radiator grille, all that unfortunate, costly damage, snuffed life, and tangled metal…

I’m exhausted by these little accidents, these too-warm winters. Tired of my too-passionate friends, their shameful and constant earnestness, their sensational eagerness to be hurt, the seeming obliviousness of their youth. I want them, finally, to protect themselves. I’m tired by mock-fellatio on the dance floor at parties, tired of all weeping and all recriminations, of old loves poignantly recalled, and of all tawdry drunkenness. I would like my life to be filled with pat approximations of feeling. I wouldn’t mind aping love as I ape happiness or concern. I’ve become so wearyingly aware of my body: each breast softly offered for a man to take his repose upon, the wide, shameless hips, the abundant mouth--in sum a stumpy, peasant body, not admirable, but welcoming. I’m tired of my open and approachable body, which is nothing if not self-advertising. “This body is honest, but the mouth is a liar,” I want to scream at the phalanx approaching me. I know them so well, down to their genitals and back up again. “The mouth will caress you, it will recall your name, your every comment. But don’t listen to the mouth, or the big, malleable body, this girl is tired, she’s absolutely exhausted. She’s too tired for you…”

It isn’t the genitals that bother me -- harmless as they are, naked. I’m not afraid of them, as I once was, I don’t hesitate before that blind, self-promoting little stub. No, it’s the flat, freckled torsos, the faces, that bother me--their wordless pleas and spoken imprecations, their declarations. “I’m falling in love with you.” “I want to see you again, I know it’s been a long time.” Or even, in the past: “You need me too much, this isn’t right, count me off your little list…” … The brutal miming they require, my lovers and friends, the mantles I assume--mother, because my breasts are soft and expansive; lover, with humble, pliable flanks; friend, that generic, absurd, and dessicate term, because even my mind is ripe for vitiation. No, I’m tired of this theater, which is constant, very modern, requiring real finesse in body and speech. I’m ready to give up all finesse. How can I exist this way, prodded like this, turned red, then white, by urgent thumbprints? Let me and my stubborn skin, instead, avoid all sun. Turn translucent, then transparent. I’ll go featureless then, like the Communist tenements of Berlin, my eyes slack as their shaded rows of windows. I’ll go square and uninviting, I’ll wreck entire horizons, I’ll go dour, dire, a sign of greater menace. No, I don’t care how I, mouth and mons, inflame any and all. I don’t care how well-meaning, how fresh and innocent this yearning is--how profound their need, or how little they knew their strength when they so abused my flesh. I refuse these inflammations and applications. Requests, remands, relations. West Berlin was kept free of boars by the razor wire that also kept it free of Communism; once it was slashed loose, the edict shaken off, the boars escaped the forests. Now they paw at the pavement, snuffling at skinheads and old churches, and their purpose is grim. But I won’t make the same mistakes as you, Berlin. I’ll keep the razors up. I’ll build fantastic walls around my person. How many times, after all, can I lie in that coital laxity which breeds the tender fevers of my love? How many fevers can I suffer, even with my good health? I’m tired of histories and anniversaries! Traveling-together, banter, and skin, skin, skin! Too many lovers breeds an incalculable sense of loss. A vanishing self. A rendering-familiar of every relation. Hapless, white, and horizontal, I hear: “My mind and heart are still with you in my bed.” “How is it that I could go so long without you before, and now…” “I think the real problem is that you‘re oversexed.” “You dive right back into love because it’s the only thing you know about.”

Wan, drooping, like an ungainly lily, I’ll bend my head. I’ll stammer. I’ll drop my eyes, losing my gaze in my lap, like a loose pair of glasses. My body will bend like a reed on chairs and at tables. But in the night, faced with new prospects, dark shapes will sidle up with familiar proposals...Berlin, finest of my imagined cities, so lately riven in twain, and now recalled to yourself, how will you survive? The boars have their nostrils open wide. They can sense --what can they sense? -- some treasure, a damp bloom of woe in a dark place, and they are beginning to pick up speed.

this is kind of old, but i kind of like it

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:26:14 GMT

Moon!

Teach me to hang, a sphere
of air unhindered,
to return from the dark
with aplomb, to cool,

a nomad, in patches of sky.
Teach me me to hide my face,
I want it hidden! Make us
a street of our own
on wretched nights.

Help me to breathe
silver as cats sleep
on cobbles and water
in pipes.

four poems about my year in Israel

Mon, 26 May 2008 02:07:42 GMT

Up Top Above Adumim

Out of the blue sky newer
than anything in this place the light
whitens lips and eyes:
your eyes behind glasses,
your head against my breasts,
the flowers nodding
like drunks in Jerusalem-
Jews dancing,
kneeling, sunflowers
at the side of the road.
Cypresses dark and curved as commas.
Monstrous hills with springs at their feet.

The sun comes down
to the wadi, bends its head,
& waits for the parched pools to fill.

----------

Negba, Number 8

With a hand on your back I feel your wiry life
tied in its cords of muscle and bone.
The good light comes through the blinds.
I lift your hand: outside the window, cranes
begin to lift up earth.

In every park, a memorial:
On calves hot as candles you run from me swiftly
and stretch with thin shoulders to get back the ball
you've lost in the cypress,
so red, like a flower.
The birds you've disturbed
shoot high, getting higher,
curling big circles into the light.

---

3.

In rows, tail-to-tail, peacocks and their children
march under stars
gorged fat as mosquitoes.
Orion stares with his absent mouth open
and we stare back.
In the good storehouse of my soul
I am taking you in, small hands and curls.

The heat makes us blush,
fresh water and fig smells.
An old tank is buried, rusting, in the hill.
From its mouth spill white branches
covered in flowers.

The lights of Jordan
in the heat-hazed air waver,
like a curtain to be parted.
Your hands in the small light
of the lampposts are cupped up,
ready to catch rain
that isn't going to come.

---
Atzma'ut/Zikaron

Memorial Day:
The siren comes on in a kibbutz graveyard
filled with the neat graves of its young sons.
A startled yattering of birds:
a cloud lifts off into the neighboring fields.
Cows and dogs bay from cramped throats.
All eyes are lowered. Hands clasped at backs.

Independence Day:
Jets fly in formation over Jerusalem.
Blooms of smoke from charcoal in the parks.
Hot blue, hot white, carnival colors.
We walk until the dusk
sets in, the desert chill returns.
The coffee houses open again.
We clasp hands,
wipe our mouths.
The stray cats under the jasmine
cry out coarse songs of greeting.

To the Soldiers on Bus 961

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:13:04 GMT

There's a rose in your cheeks and a squint to match
and your gun falls against the window when you laugh,
making a small sound, like the small hands of the rain.
Your side against my arm is warm; the big Jordan mountains
stretch their heads up to peck at the mist
as it lessens slowly and the motor frets,

But I won't give you my love, Asaf, not even if you ask
for it. Not even if you show me your village
on the map. I won't love your blue eyes or the way you arrange
yourself on the seat beside me. Not your ammo belt, or braces.
But I will lift my hand to pluck the button from your sleeve
while you're turned away.

apocalyptic poem? formal, rhyming

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 02:22:17 GMT

Like Gauguin’s flush-limbed girls
We walked naked in the yellow light.
We locked our eyes on the rivers
And kept awake all night.
We lost more ground, and more,
the water eating crescents up the shore.

You crushed your hand to my mouth:
“Each sound in you is mine!”
The water spread like mercury,
Soundless and fine.
Before us the mountains stood
Cloaked in their fur.
How the sun turned you red,
how it coarsened your pallor!

Every place we lay
the water took by morning.
When we passed the drowned train station
It doused the signs of warning—
The banks of the rivers
paled to ochre and churned.
You trained your eyes on me:
how the gold in them burned!

“We will turn our cool bare feet.
We will walk into the mountains,
Where the earth is dry and stony,
And the murmur of the drowned trains
Fades to silence. And the treetops
Knot together, torn asunder
With the animals beneath them--
There the sky misspends its thunder.”

edit on previous post!

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:07:47 GMT

Union Square Park Late in August

Even the cool shadows shudder
in a furor of doors.
Even the stoops are trembling.
A red-headed girl leaves a man
and he slumps on the bench as if hanged.

Ash is molting down the buildings on the breeze.
At the market the vendors hawk puckered melons.
I lie under the stone legs of the Marquis de Lafayette
and his sword's shadow slices my belly.

Out from me curl the tailpipes
of the fearsome and particolored city.
The man on the bench cups his mouth
with both hands to keep from rising.

super rough draft (union square park poem)

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 07:08:55 GMT

With the city sweating and dissolute
and noise lowering in hot sheets, and ash
molting down the buildings on the breeze,

the skateboarders keep up their brave games
and give clear whoops atop their arcs;
the one-armed man with a djembe
is half-part of this dance of slides and gutters,
and the beautiful girls give off heat
as they pass in their dresses.

I lie under the stone legs of the Marquis de Lafayette
and his sword's shadow slices my belly.
At the market the vendors hawk puckering melons.
The trucks curl sound out their tailpipes
and roar as they pass.

Even the cool shadows shudder
in a constant furor of doors.
On the world whines. On it gutters.
Even the stoops are trembling.
A red-headed girl leaves a man
and he slumps on the bench as if hanged.

fiction

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 06:11:49 GMT

"Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine"
-Guillaume Apollinaire

New Bridge. Four-thirty. Birds wheeling in clumsy formations around bell-shaped clouds. One of my feet is bare, and I can feel the tar on the planks sticking to its sole. The other has a sneaker on. Sock balled up in my hand, second sneaker a smelly pendant around my neck, I stop walking and turn outward. The Hackensack River plods on beneath me. A beer can bobs, ducks, and recedes. The banks are scrubby with half-dead horsetail, and a smell of rotting groundhog is heavy on the wind. It's ugly but it feels like home.

If I were to keep on walking, I'd cross the bridge and see a big expanse of soggy low-tide marshland, and a little cement platform below an arch of thorns. I would recall more strongly the years I sat and watched the turtles mate and the red factory across the river steam and thunder—and, even more strongly, I'd recall the year I shared joints with a doughy, doughty boy, our legs dangling inches above the water. But for now I'm okay with resting my elbows on the cold rail and watching the debris race by, letting the air ripen in my nose.

It's getting colder, though, the wind skimming and scything and pricking my bare toes. I narrow my eyes: though I haven't yet crossed the bridge, I can nearly see the boy I recall so fondly, marijuana smelling up his jeans, hair a-shiver in the wind, and myself, seventeen, barefoot, hanging on his soft arm and sighing for the kind and violet-colored world. The music sounded sweet and the sky sealed us off from danger. It fit neatly over the trees like a lid. Through the slats of the bridge, I can nearly see that first moment of milky and fearless nakedness shining through years and the murky skin on the river and the sulks and recriminations that came after-- the holistic moment of impact, fingers on back and soul on soul. There were stifling afternoons to follow, and life in a bad, slack, ransacked body, but those were instants of true and shining self-habitation. Effulgent, indulgent, and long done.

I can still recall the notions of seventeen—how we stewed up a future for ourselves, him a sturdy pillar for all citizens, me a holy mess in moth-eaten clothing, and making maelstroms at night...and in the morning, how-convenient, all that joy would still be there, bound up in one adorable indent in the sheet. How we'd rise in heady spirals, going up like stairs, each assured the other would remain the perfect newel.

A dozen feet below me the Hackensack trips mutely along, and the distant buildings keep it hemmed in and complacent. The dreamed staircase of seventeen no longer coils, tight and neat, as crisply in my mind. It's blurred by the names of a few dozen men and boys now—sweetness gone rotten, and dreams stuck shut. Planting my sticky feet, I watch a green bottle rise and sink, and imagine old dreams circling on its trembling lip—doe-eyed, nebulous things, chasing themselves, unaware they are chasing themselves. They don't yet know that theirs is a closed circuit, they can't hear the nails hammering inexorably home all around them. They chitter and fly, deaf to finality, racing around the rim til the bottle reaches the sea.

A dark plate of color descends on the sky, and the sun snaps out of sight behind a sudden cloud bank. The wind whips the horsetail; I unclench my fingers round my sock, spread it reluctantly, case up my foot. It is time to walk past the streetlamp and the bashed-in storefront by the old parking space and the green patch for the geese. Past the inn and the intersection. The future pallid, uncalamitous, a thousand dull and plausible moments arranging themselves before me in the air. I crunch over the ground, shod firmly, up the road and home.

The Dream (Israel)

Tue, 08 May 2007 22:21:21 GMT

The Dream (Israel)

I can barely admit I have this dream, it flutters around my head like a bad hairdo, but sometimes I still dream about my first boyfriend. The skinny one, with the black hair and lurking stubble, whose eyebrows grew together to a shameless V in the center of his forehead. He'd come home from college for the weekend to his family's big, new house, and we'd sit on the bare floor, socked, playing board games on interminable Sabbath afternoons. More rarely we'd kiss in his white-walled room behind the paper shades, the red and green of brick and oak peeping through. The sounds of his family echoed in the massive house, reminding us constantly of our sins. But the dream takes place long after he dropped out of engineering school and moved to Jerusalem; it takes place even after the second boyfriend, the one with big, tremulous lips and a grey Toyota Avalon; it takes place far from the orange circle of streetlight on New Bridge Road where the groundhogs come to die, and where we'd park sometimes until four in the morning; far from the laundry-detergent smell that clung to both of them when I pressed my nose into their shirts, the clean, full, wholesome smell of love...

The dream takes place in a strange Israel, scrubbed of its Semitic grime, the Arabic and Hebrew patter faded into a dull audio treacle. I walk, not naked, not clothed, through the narrow streets leading to the Wailing Wall and the excavation sites with their half-eroded pillars--pillars without roofs, lifting into the perfect sky like bodiless legs. I begin to descend toward the Wall, past the stone bones of ancient towns hidden behind fences. Joy floods my body with each downward step. I float through the metal detectors, past the bent women lifting their keys from the bins. After I pass them, I see him, the first boyfriend, dressed in the Sabbath suit I saw him in last before he left. He comes to walk beside me, clutches me, and as I feel again the minute weight of his thin hot arm I am drawn back to the place where everything that happens has real consequence.

We walk through the Wall's courtyard together. The flat stones hum and warm beneath my feet. I know that I'm sleeping--even in the dream my limbs are heavy--but the light on me is shining harshly, and my legs are round and brown. His eyes are the same color they were on the rainy day of my first terrible and disappointing kiss and subsequent blazing discoveries.

The me that's hovering just under my shut eyelids knows he left me long ago, knows, even, that he's gotten married in the interim, but the brown me in the dream knows nothing at all. She can see his white throat, octagonal glasses, thin fingers--he's narrow all through-- and can feel his wiry arm around her. The warm Jerusalem wind carries the breath of her love in it. She knows him; and his smell; and the other him; and his same smell; and the trembling wet texture of lip on lip. She knows her love will never wane. It's big in their interlocked hands. It's buried in the white ground of dream-Israel, where it will always exist.

yuri gagarin and me (revised from prev. entry)

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 22:02:15 GMT

Yuri Gagarin and Me

Down by the empty shops
in nothing but socks
you laid your palm
on the bald front seat,
clicking the seatbelt button like a telegraph machine
sending a desperate message into space--
but we were the cosmonauts there, lonely and proud,
cold ground behind us;
your hair red in the light,
your eyes hollow with stars...

Then you cast
me out to tumble with the bad milk and spent bottles.
You drove off in your little grey dome.
You heard the singing of the black lakes in your ears.
They were calling you to distant spaces.

I only died a little bit.
The blood ran thick and unquiet through me.
But I was already mapping the terrain of a new planet,
gargantuan and blue,
where even the wheedling noise of the satellites couldn't reach.

new bridge road

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 04:00:16 GMT

down by the empty shops
in little but socks
you laid your palm
on the bald front seat,
clicking the seatbelt button like a telegraph machine
sending a desperate message into space.
We were cosmonauts there. your hair
red in the light and your eyes
two pits for stars.

then you set
me out with the bad milk and the bluebottles:
"my curdled girl-
here are the flies you'll lure with your clotted call."

you drove off in your little grey dome.
you heard the singing of black lakes in your ears.
they were calling you to distant spaces.

I only died a little bit.
the blood ran thick and unquiet through me.
but I had things to do.
I didn’t have time for you.

The Girl Who Wasn't Goldman

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 14:06:01 GMT

I'm going to charge you with all the bright humanity in me and explain
how everyone here,
naked under steel
and serge and desk lights,
is sacred, bodies holy,
and their fervid fervid unions are going to raise us up forever,

But your lips, turned at sour corners, won't tremble.
The hot lights on your unlikely flesh, the thin
fur on the indent in your jaw, will burn,
And I will turn, reddening and quiet,
into a morning drowned
in the rot of its promise.

rough draft (Eclogue for the Moderns)

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 13:55:41 GMT

From where I stand, everything is bright and transient. Words and music spiral thickly down behind my eyes, corkscrewing soft and relentless towards flickering uniformity. Five hundred artists sing their muted souls out and the static, thick and sweet, pours and swirls down, down, down through me. Too many gestures for me to name, the beckonings, usherings, summonings of a hundred thousand Sirens, shift and glimmer behind my eyes. And behind everything, like a dark form moving, the desire to lay his head on my breasts, feel his hands link around my waist, and lie there. Just lie.

Enough with this urbane, melodic solitude! A thousand pop-songs’ worth of lo-fi, assonant loneliness; pinlights; grey cities. Instead, instead, I want an eclogue!—

Make me a cherry-cheeked shepherdess, my full form swelling in gingham, a flutter of grass-damp hands and dirt on my hems. And in the barn, while half of creation lows and caterwauls, something straining and finite, his tow-head of hair spilling roughly over mine. The idea of this—very remote: a shepherdess: absurd! But anything is better than 3 a. m. aloneness, the swell in the throat, the desperate text-messages. There is nothing noble in bleached-out skin, the opening and closing of lights, luminous and inconstant as the blinking eyes of frogs; in the endless numbers of us, feeling an inexplicable paucity of something in ourselves -- the edge of us dulled by all our replicated sensations.

Give me, then, my gap-toothed shepherd! Green slopes, milling white shapes like the teeth from a thousand jaws, browsing and chewing... laxity; empty space; and the constant spiral ceases. I look at the one I love and at myself, crooks propped in our hands, like a couple of dolls—ridiculous. But the wind whips at our hands, feet, faces, its thin screech erasing, erasing, erasing, until I shuck my flickering cocoon: until I have severed myself from the millions of lonely people moving from room to room in the darkness, far from the stars. And it's you I love, with your broad, round, wind-chapped shoulders, and your big white arms. And the wind in the sour first grass.

revised version

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 02:36:11 GMT

I would like to be the sort of girl who doesn't talk,
Who is still and sharp,
Lips calcified by the perfection of an urge
that gives no quarter;
When she surrenders at last to love
Her passions gather in a dark cloud of atoms
Rising and rising in her limbs.

Instead I am a sputtering machine of passions,
At times I roar, at times I mutter,
Belching forth always a curled black plume
of ambling, garish thought;
Mornings I swear I won't say a word until lunch
I am a fountain of words before breakfast;
Broad and yielding, I snack, I bluster,
I crow, I cringe, I fever to expand.

I wince at the brevity of the peerless mind,
I clutch to myself all that is fierce and disordered;
Jowls trembling, sunk in weakness,
I dream of creating a new self from a handful of bones.

new poem! feedback pls

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 17:04:06 GMT

I would like to be the sort of girl who doesn't talk,
Who is still and sharp, whose brilliance never cools,
Lips calcified by the perfection of her urge,
Which is singular, complete, and gives no quarter;
When she surrenders at last to love,
She falls voraciously and wholly to it;
And all her passions gather like dark cloud-heads,
Peaked, silent, barreling to the point of storm.

Instead I am a sputtering machine of passions,
At times I roar broadly, at times I mutter,
Belching forth always a filthy froth
of lax, untutored, ambling, garish thought;
Mornings I swear I won't say a word until lunch
I am a fountain of words until lunch;
Broad and yielding, I snack and natter,
I wince, I cringe, I fever to expand.

And I shrink always from the pain of cutting out
the fatty flesh of all I ought not
Do, or say, the shapelessness of my desire,
I wince at the brevity of the peerless mind.
I clutch to myself all that is fierce and disordered;
My jowls tremble; I am sunk in weakness;
I dream of creating a new self from handfuls of bones.

'Reading Robert Lowell'

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:09:32 GMT

Lowell, ‘wincing for pleasure
And suffocating for privacy,’
Tautly howling of his imperfect life—
How he suffered for each wife!—
Died at last going to Hardwick in New York.
Hemmed in by the precision of his verse,
I spend nights billeted with his books—
His coarse, well-moving ocean of a voice,
His monuments to choice.
Swallowed, I curl myself up, hand to gut.

This is the pothole of my age:
Mad, hot and dumb, I sink down into sleep,
Sprawled like a drunkard, forearms on the page.

"hip jewish spring poem"? mostly just bad

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 05:38:03 GMT

"Driving through MA he frowned
all through one county--
I got it out of Phyllis,
he lived there ten years on a commune
running the TV station. You know
I never know what's behind his googly gaze.
You'd think he'd tell me that--his daughter."
She shoves her lips out, gaze to the window,
squints at the boughs
of budding trees. I eye the oily fall
of her hair, thinking of my uncle
throwing his brother's dog out to the street
one Passover. I can believe this about him.
The things we tell: my uncle,
top tax attorney in the state,
pinching his lips and snatching up the grater,
mounding bitter root--
And we omit:
limber Dan mucking chickens,
cooking for seventy,
and, nights, heading to the ACTV office,
the square relentless light of the camera
burrowing into his brow,
sealing his secrets, its harsh white promise
constantly renewed.

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:50:26 GMT

In a series of film stills and stereoscopic views, I recall my father, hairy and bold, standing resolute on our front stoop; my father, hands on his spine on the floor in a spasm; my father, dancing over the stairs. Skin grey-cast, thick arms supple as old softballs, he grins. He sings a bad song about RNA transcription. He tells a dark joke and doesn’t slap his knees. My father in a 1978 slide, holding spears up beside Malaysians. An old woman with loose gums baring her teeth at my father in a picture, a loose-titted woman with a toddler behind her. My father in thick glasses with bad rims. My father now in fancy frames. My father’s large nose and ringed lips.

All these are conjectures about old pictures. My father is a good man with a head like a block and few social graces. His teeth are terrible. He has a series of white shirts and ill-fitting suits: he is the most compact 200 pounds I’ve ever seen. “There are few greater joys in life,” he says, “than coming to the basement to work out on the treadmill and seeing your daughter there already.”

“Yes,” says his fat daughter, baring her teeth in a grin. “I’m about to start.” She turns the treadmill on, high, and does a few kicks. He retreats into his office in the basement, still wearing his yellow bandanna. In the early spring he goes running in a do-rag over the neighborhood. The little children on their trikes watch him with dismay.

My father likes surveys. He fills out school forms with his indefinable job. He searches out chemists in the boondocks and makes them research teams, creates boards of directors out of the thin air, and then, once the market takes a sour turn, removes himself from the chief position to hire someone more competent and is slowly marginalized until he’s the only righteous member of a corrupt board of directors that eventually expels him. Then he is sued by a creditor, Peter, the one that came with him on the trip to Malaysia. It’s funny how these things work. Whenever he mentions Peter’s name my mother’s nostrils flare. Peter, flare. Peter, flare. Like a gong being thwacked. My father is indifferent about Peter, but he likes surveys. He writes a lot of forms.

In his office in the basement there are papers all over and a wooden hutch he took from his mother’s house. It took three hours to assemble behind his desk. The file cabinets nearly fell on me. I’m the fat daughter, in case you didn’t guess. I put my stocky palm on the file cabinet and with my whole body willed it not to fall. My straining arm, its quivering flesh—I didn’t envy my father, watching. He caught the file cabinet as it tilted. We pushed it into the corner. He arranged his speakers on the hutch and we went upstairs like victors.

(visual) art

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 02:40:07 GMT

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 23:25:17 GMT

1918 he was born
the Great Influenza Epidemic
& after
stuffed Death
turns heavily from my Father

October.
my father in the square
wet cap at his feet
it's easy
(87¢/hour)
my father

rag collar
bow-legged
sick girls, white and warm

1957 i am born
and i suckle the ragged wrecked wrists of my father

university of chicago essay (prompt: fictive brunch with whoever you want)

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 02:55:27 GMT

Marinetti arrived early, just after the olive oil spilled all over my wrists. I smiled my panicky-hostess smile and beckoned him in, apologizing in trembly falsetto about the mess. He smiled, nodded, muttered something unintelligible in Italian, and sat himself incongruously on the plaid cushions in my kitchen. Italian suit on Dutch-wood kitchen-table, scuffed leather shoes on Formica. I tried not to feel his eyes burning into me as I sliced tomatoes, but in vain. When I looked up, his eyes weren't burning my cheeks but rather the blender, all glass and blades sitting proudly on the counter. He was staring at it with exactly the glassy and slightly worshipful gaze his manifestoes would suggest: my sweet Kitchenaid, humble but undeniably "illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts." I took a deep breath.

"Mr. Marinetti," I said, switching it on--noting his palpable inhalation--"would you like to examine the blender a little more closely?"

He'd stood and cupped the whirring bowl before he remembered to answer. "Si, per favore," he said, pressing "hi" and then "lo" and "hi" again. I turned back to the cheeses, panic momentarily allayed. By the time I finished the platter Herman Melville had knocked dourly on the door, and I nodded and bobbed perilously close to his beard as I drew him into the dining room.

"Hello, Mr. Melville," I said, dotingly, drawing the curtains open. There was a pause. His moustache loomed over silent lips. The blender whirred.

"I just have a few things I need to finish up," I said, feeling my courage wane. With artificial perkiness, I added: "It's no Atlantic, but there is a pool out back if you'd like a waterfront view!"

With the dipping vegetables nestled in their cradles and Marinetti prodding the eggbeater, I hurried to the front hall in time to catch Emma Goldman poking the bell with her umbrella. Enormous hat drooping over her eyes, she handed me a volume of Greek epigrams and bustled into the dining room.

"Some salon this is," she said ruefully, taking a chair. "Nearly an hour out of New York. And I'd like to knock down a few of your neighbors' houses." She eyed me sharply. "Were you here before the brick monstrosities on your street, or were they spawned earlier?"

I nearly grinned: of course she'd caught the folly of the two identical brick mansions, squat as fat toads, swallowing the block! "They were both built very recently, I assure you, and I apologize, Ms. Goldman. There really--well--this was the largest space available to me intimate enough for a meeting of great minds."

Her gaze was keen and hot and she turned it to the walls: a drawing of a Torah scroll, Japanese prints, candlesticks from Tsfat, all felled before her. I felt quite naked. She pressed her lips together.

"Very well, Miss Lavin; intimate and Judaic enough for me. But where are the other guests?"

I cleared my throat. "F.T. Marinetti is in the kitchen," I said, jerking my head in the direction of the persistent buzz. "Herman Melville is..." I sucked in a breath. "...probably by the swimming pool. The others--Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, and a contemporary poet, Ilya Kaminsky--are due any moment." I turned to her with wide wet eyes. "Please, Ms. Goldman, let me bring out the hors d'oeuvres; I'm certain the others are on their way. Signor Marinetti arrived a bit early and I--well, everything's a bit anarchic."

"Anarchic, eh?" she said, with a little laugh. She thumped the table. "Strong oak, a little schnapps, interesting men: Miss Lavin, if you can bring me those, I won't regret coming. And if we dance, I might even enjoy myself."

"If you can't dance, it's not your revolution, eh?" I said, with a melty, ingratiating little smile. Within minutes I'd set out platters (cheese, veggies with a little onion dip, herb Triscuits) before the famous anarchist. She regarded me sternly over her spectacles, crunching a celery stick. The doorbell rang thrice and I dashed to the front, feeling my curls frizz up like striking vipers. Half-tempted to pant out "Nike!", I opened the door to admit the three founders of Dada and stammered out greetings instead. Tristan Tzara, monocle glinting and impeccably suited, stepped forward and gave me a brisk handshake; Hans Arp, handsome and Germanic, stepped smiling up beside him; Hugo Ball, long-nosed and ascetic in demeanor, crossed the threshhold in ponderous silence.

Tzara and Arp struck first at the onion dip. Ball munched dourly on a fistful of carrots; Emma Goldman was nowhere to be found. I heard the sound of raised voices and frenzied whirring from the kitchen, then impact on steel and an unmistakable shattering of glass. Placating the Dadaists with a few smiles and imprecations to stay put, I dashed to the kitchen only to find the blender shattered and whirring fitfully midway between an incensed Goldman and a rageful Marinetti.

"Fascist pig!" she called out, squeezing her umbrella tightly. The clear sign of an umbrella-tip-shaped indentation on my refrigerator made me wince.

"Anarchist buttock-broker!" he fumed, crossing his pinstriped arms at his breast. The blender buzzed mournfully to a halt. I clenched my teeth.

"My dear lady and gentleman," I began, gingerly picking up the blender. "I understand that your views are--ah--somewhat different, but I would ask... for the sake of all present... that you marshal your strengths and suppress your hatred. Such passion can greatly serve our little symposium, but only when channeled appropriately! Now, won't you please avail yourself of the snacks while I clean up this little mess?"

"All right, Miss Lavin," Emma Goldman said, removing her spectacles. Her jaw was still taut with rage. "I shall endeavor to remain in a room with this--man--without outburst. But I must simply say I question your choice of guests."

Marinetti nodded at me, mustachioed lips drawn tightly in. "Scuse, signora," he said curtly before exiting into the dining room. I leaned against the fridge door, feeling exhaustion creep up behind my eyes. I turned toward the kitchen window: Herman Melville was seated on the chaise lounge by the pool, gazing into it. Three ducks were bathing themselves in the water. The sun was setting over the bikeshed. His eyes were distant, the yellow light spilled on his beard, and for a moment I wished greatly to sit beside him, my thoughts running with his: fate and the eternal roiling sea... But a clamor from the other room tore me from my reflections. A hubbub--had I left the Dadaists and Emma Goldman alone too long in my dining room? As I left I caught Hugo Ball slipping out to the backyard in the corner of my eye.

By the time I dashed in they were nowhere to be found. A vague sound of chanting came from the hallway, and I rushed out: Tzara and Arp had taken down the collection of Nepalese weaponry my father had acquired during his post-college trip around the world (traded for quinine: bows, spears, a machete), as well as the African mask hanging over the living-room mantel; Tzara had it draped over his face, and Arp was beating "The Coffee-Table Book of Modern Art" with a spear. Tzara began a chant of one of his poemes negres:
"Who wants to throw the Zigendung?
Zigendung!
That I want to throw in the sky
Sky!
That it may let some water fall on me
some water!
That the burned grass may grow a little
fresh grass!"

Arp began a dance up the carpeted staircase, still drumming his absurd drum. Emma Goldman followed after him, joining the chant with nonsense syllables in her hearty voice. The three of them danced up and down the stairs in a writhing line. Just then the doorbell rang: it was Ilya Kaminsky at last, a bouquet of Queen Anne's lace in his white hand. His cheeks were flush with cold, eyes bright behind his glasses. Dusk had fallen; the lampposts on the front lawn had begun to glow. I took the flowers reverently, staring at him. His gaze was directed at the chanting trio on my stairs, so I took the opportunity to drink him in: deaf and glorious, whose poetry had brought me keen insight into my art, my Judaism, my very self--so unpreposessing in person, and bringing me flowers! I shook myself and led him from the dim front hall.

"That's Emma Goldman, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp," I explained, as the trio disappeared upstairs. I could hear the sounds of battering; I prayed they wouldn't enter my sisters' rooms. "As for Fillipo Marinetti... I'm not certain... but Hugo Ball and Herman Melville are in the backyard, and I..." I smiled wanly. "I am alone with the hors d'oeuvres. It appears no one's very hungry."

Ilya smiled, the transformative smile of someone raised in the cold, his eyes kind.

"I am hungry," he said, taking my hand and patting it. His voice was strong, thickly accented, with a strange cadence lent by his near-deafness. Saying little more we moved the tray of crackers to the kitchen table; the light was dim, and brilliant moonlight outlined the drying roses in the window. I saw the dark silhouettes of Hugo Ball and Herman Melville moving towards us, and then it was the four of us at table. Dim chanting could still be heard from upstairs; I thought Marinetti had probably found my computer; but the night would stretch long before us, and for now I was entirely content.

kaspar is dead

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 16:16:54 GMT

by Hans Arp

Kaspar Is Dead
Hans Arp
alas our good kaspar is dead.
who will bury a burning flag in the wings of the clouds who will pull
black wool over our eyes day by day.
who will turn the coffee mills in the primal barrel.
who will lure the idyllic roe from his petrified paperbag.
who will sneeze oceanliners unbrellas windudders beekeepers spindles
of ozone who will pick clean the pyramids' bones.
alas alas alas our good kaspar is dead. holy saint bong kaspar is dead.
the clappers raise heart-rending echoes of sorrow in the barns of the bells
when we murmur his name. therefore i will only sigh out his surname
kaspar kaspar kaspar.
why hast thou forsaken us. in what shape has thy lovely great soul taken
flight. hast thou changed to a star or a chain made of water in a tropical
whirlwind or a teat of black light or a transparent brick in a drum that
howls for its craggy existence.
now the soles of our feet and the crowns of our heads have dried up and
the fairies are lying half-charred on the funeral piles.
now the black bowling alleys thunder in back of the sun and no one is
setting a compass or spinning the wheelbarrow's wheels.
who will eat with the phosphorized rat on the lonely barefooted table.
who will chase the siroccoco devil that's trying to lead off our horses.
who will decipher the monograms scratched on the stars.
his bust shall adorn the mantels of people ennobled by truth through it
leaves but small comfort or snuff for his death's head.

"Rutland Road at p.m." -- much revised

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 08:02:52 GMT

This duke of days dries up,
gone dead. Dust to the knees,
I'm in the yard on locust day,
a time for high and buzzing things.
Hands slit on old photo edges--
dead young eggheads,
thick-lipped and done with all--
"Us, 1905"; hands locked,
wrists kissed or bit;
smiling in slipcovers, plaid skirts
and flat matte graves.

Night levers itself in;
I go out
and watch the lights,
remember my lies.
I draw my legs in
and think of him,
the no-him him
walking to me talking on the phone.
Mailing his number southbound,
Cocking his fine dark brow.
The pinlights in the windows pool and drown.

I can spit ugly spit in the flowerboxes,
I can stand by the river and wait for the foxes
with their slim dark jaws.
Red paws.
Carry on, carrion--
he wears his seal, that dusty swear
never to come home.

"No More Love Songs"

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 14:44:00 GMT

New poem. 'S been awhile. Not my best effort, but not terrible. Critique, as always, welcomed.

You say "we're lovers,"
as if the force of our love in our faces
could change things, change anything,
take us back to our redoubtable selves,
where you'd write every day:
"I'm looking for you,
I'm finding daisies in the waste."
It is that same clarity--
your brown hand sifting, the sludge falling away,
petals in the hand--
I never got, or got
how easy it was to get--
how it was simple. How on the beaches of your mind
I was to splay and lie. Get wet.
How I, your sack of light, would sit and shine.

In dank taxis,
with a sick mother, dead dog, colitic friends,
I a pennypincher,
malevolent, paunchy I,
Felt the press of that thing,
your grin for me: stars in that grin:
in me, cramps, bad winds.
The nights get colder.
The snow piles up loud on the roof.
The hail. Perfect you, tidy memory,
and me, eyes closed,
like a truck with a thrown wheel on the freeway.

first stanza shamelessly recycled

Wed, 31 May 2006 19:48:51 GMT

THE WATERSHED.

1.
This is the beginning:

Your house is absolutely full of martyrs. They’re coming out the roof, like a stuffed mouth opening, their pitiable eyes enormous. In the den: sheet music for altruistic declarations in the key of C. All around the house: pots of sea grass, watered fresh from the eyes. You, too, are part of this deluge. Your face is beginning to crack and peel like a sailor’s.

2.
You are going on a journey.

Everything is blown down at sharp angles; the storm throws power lines and cracks in domes. You watch the greens tipped up and blown away.

The wind throws a strut into your gait—you feel it pulling at your scalp and eyes.

Still. No sea grass.

3.
You go to watch a girl being cut open. She sleeps through it, but still her lips part at the first incision.

You see her several hours later, awake. You blush when you see her, as if you have been lovers.

4.
You stand with your legs planted, blood whining in your ears. Your thumbs hum over your knuckles and rest there. You shut your eyes and thicken your jaw.

5.
Despair trims the hollows from your sleepy, sloppy life. All whittled and bare, you begin to plan your return. Idly, you recall your house, lace on the pianola, your bony mother; in the squat, square center of your miserable chest, you can hear her voice.