Howard Faerstein has poetry recently published in Nimrod, Great River Review, Cut Throat (Discovery Poet), 5AM, Common Ground Review, Comstock Review, The Main Street Rag, and Mudfish. His manuscript, Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn, has been accepted for publication by Press 53 and will appear in early 2013. He's presently working as an adjunct professor, teaching American literature at Westfield State University in Western Massachusetts.
--------
Unfathomable
If ice is dead sky
as four year old Arlo suggests,
and it's true that
poetry's value is in its total uselessness,
and if, as the maintenance guy muttered
when called in during a blizzard (verbatim),
the logic of my essential status still escapes me,
(snow continuing, verbatim, in Massachusetts),
and if as Allen wrote
Everything that falls breaks into endless tiny
moments, each one large, a style of its own
then our moon tonight is a grand piano,
its strings plucked by wind, spilling waves of icy chords, driving
wood frogs to freeze themselves to life.
This world may appear overly accessible
but leopards (a handful now) wait in the bush.
All along we pray chronology
keep to a slow & steady beat—
father and mother first,
then older sister, kid brother last.
If one miracle grants beatitude
and it's necessary to perform two to clinch sainthood,
then how easy to accept that 12.5 billion light years
from spinning earth pulses a proto-cluster, a billion years old.
Who remembers that the "head of all Turkmen"
banned lip-synching in Turkmenistan,
changed the months of the year
to honor his own name,
and who can forget the Mainland
forbidding reincarnation without authorization?
Over half this accessible planet
is still ruled by mandarins, martinets, madmen.
Listen, Arlo:
if in fact language presupposes artificiality
and it's only black holes keeping us adhered
then I believe ice is dead sky.
I believe in the posthumous pussy willows
alive in the dry vase.
Paradise Alley
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley
"Howl" — Allen Ginsberg
In 1968, before the moon landing
& after the Summer of Love,
as a favor I dropped off homemade meth
to a guy whose girlfriend's black hair was streaked with silver.
As soon as he injected a match head's worth
he collapsed
& I was sure he was dead
but when he came to minutes later
he thanked me-
It was the best-
& he wanted more
as if there were any more.
When I thought I'd killed him I was in a sweat.
The girl in the half-plastered brick room
decorated with album covers—
The Fish, The Mothers, The Dead—
was crying.
I had no wisdom whatsoever.
All I wanted was a journey.
~
Billy the Greek told me I had a weak mind
& it was true.
Too weak to sleep only once
with Jeanette, the Barbados woman.
It wasn't long before she hit me with a chair,
startled cats diving for cover
in that ground floor apartment by the park.
A patrol car every night in front.
Her skin browner than oak leaves after frost.
~
I still dream of Nixon resigning & my father,
who kept his autographed picture on an end table,
driving through Brooklyn
picking up shirts and blouses
from the Ebbets Field project
& from the judges on Prospect Park West.
He'd take them to Mel's Dry Cleaners on Greene Street,
pick them up 2 days later,
price & mark them in his store,
then deliver them to the judges & projects.
When I dealt I did the same.
Bought an ounce of hash from Vinnie for $90
sold it to friends for $100.
I'm so like my father,
a middleman running errands
~
He came to my apartment when Jeanette was living there.
Seeing her, he dropped the bundled laundry & fled.
~
On the way back from Paradise Alley
Ian ran a light on Myrtle Avenue.
A beat cop waved us down but Ian floored the Chevy
& the cop commandeered a gypsy cab,
giving chase through the breathless ghetto. We won.
Ian, found dead a week later in his backseat, drove back,
searching for the tossed out drugs.
~
Dock Ellis says he pitched a no-hitter on acid,
In my case, I read The Times stock quotes to my father.
It made him happy, he said, for us to be closer.
After the killings at Kent State
all of America went on pass/fail
& so I graduated college.
~
Those who despised the government & its war,
those who hated all authority,
provocateurs, opportunists, pacifists,
those hoping to get laid,
thousands coughed in a fog of pepper spray
in the middle of Connecticut Avenue.
Wex threw a brick at an unmarked car.
Two cops stepped out,
hands on pistols.
From the rooftop came more bricks.
The cops quickly back in their car,
plowing their way around the block.
~
After Janis sang
& the Southern Comfort tossed,
thoroughbreds reared in the paddock
& throngs of youth camped out
in grassy fields by the racetrack parking lot.
At dawn I heard a motor start,
someone asleep in a mummy bag in the van's path,
then a scream which has never faded.
~
I introduced Jeanette to my friends.
She slept with a few & later,
in an armed robbery,
paid a surprise visit on Paul,
clerking the late shift at the 8th Street Bookstore.
~
After fleeing New York
I lived on a cliff,
sun & fire those months of hiding.
No one to visit & the cops didn't know me.
It was so quiet in California
walking on red tide beaches
I could hear stray shells & buried mines
popping in the East.
~
On the night Jeanette & I made up
an astronaut stepped out on the moon.
Looking up, he saw the Earth,
half in shadow,
half light.
People Next Door
After he broke my best friend Frankie Williams' glasses,
I slammed Ricky Richter in the solar plexus.
Then the Williams family drove upstate for the weekend.
That night, with news of Frankie's sudden death,
the building's mothers massed in our living room.
He was Catholic, the mirrors weren't covered.
I never could explain how I felt
at ten: Frankie, identical twin of Bobby, dead.
I knew their differences as I knew
the smell of roses rising from Mrs. Zinnie's garden,
the piano gleaming in her window, an American flag draped over the sill,
all the courtyard faced with red brick just blocks from the Hudson.
Even as I lacked understanding,
I meant to hurt no one.
Sometimes I've known what to do.
In Arroyo Seco where the setting sun
threaded through cholla like a raveling spool,
I told Filemon, the viejo,
if he ever laid a hand on my dog or raised his gun
I'd kill him
& he shut the door in my face.
In Flatbush the three sisters' bodiless heads out a window
gazed upon me double digging the earth.
Come summer they asked
why my blue & lavender hydrangeas
flourished while nothing grew in their unplanted dirt.
I offered, You can't leave everything to God.
In Bay Ridge false-faced Mrs. Cassidy complained when I tossed
a ball in my room & when I told her to shut up
my father forced me to apologize to that religious woman.
Still I haven't always known what to say
or the difference between right & wrong.
I shed no tears over Frankie's casket.
In South County curious neighbors wondered why sticks tied with rags
were stuck in my garden & when I shrugged
they departed downcast, sprigs of cilantro in hand.
The woman in the snow in Santa Fe,
her sisters helping her from the car, shower cap covering her bald head,
raincoat over her bathrobe open,
robe open too, as she stepped
carefully toward the dark end of the house.
I said nothing.
How romantic it seemed
coming west to the Four Corners
settling by the Animas, the Florida, Los Pinos;
like Henry Hudson sailing up the bay
before his crew mutinied, casting him overboard
to disappear in the river named after him.
I once saw Stanley telling Ollie that honesty is the best policy.
That wasn't square. If only Tom Paine were laid to rest with honor,
not simply thrown in a farm field, how different America would be.
Seven llamas stand in a Colorado meadow.
Brown-headed goats & greasy sheep shimmer on the county road.
In the next house I live in cardinals will again arrive late
& I'll wait to eat until they eat.
I want my neighbors to love me & I'll love them back.
We'll barbeque chicken, I'll play Muddy Waters loud
& we'll watch the birds flying back & forth between our yards,
the fences made of sycamore sticks or lilac.
I Go Back as Far as Brooklyn
I go back as far as Brooklyn and its dark brown trees,
forsythia, too, inside fenced curbside plots
fronting bars & beauty parlors, the long avenues
pop-ups from picture books,
and everything a puzzle waiting to be solved
like sycamore bark & the building courtyard
crowded with Catholic girls in Easter outfits.
It was the time of the Cold War.
My transistor radio was subverted by race music.
On my knees I prayed my parents would vanish
behind an iron curtain or disappear under the boardwalk.
I had no dog to run alongside me when bike riding
past the wide plane trees I loved so much & left far behind
in that city of buses & cabs when I was small.
Hunger
I help myself to material and immaterial,
No guard can shut me off, no law can prevent me — Walt Whitman
Along the pink rock mesa
fronting two brown hills,
last spring's fledglings
attempt song.
I steal a flicker's flash of fire,
sun-glint on a kinglet's ruby crown.
I take all that I can.
Fear drives me to it.
Some birders place mist nets around yards,
catch incoming migrants,
hold blue-winged warblers to their mouths.
I gather feather and stone,
hang Jerusalem cricket
& clown beetle in the front window.
Dragging off all I can lug,
greed spurs me on.
From the newborn
desperate to talk,
I breathe evidence of fingers and toes,
and from their necks,
so goose-like they light the Rio Grande,
I rifle a message to my mother
about stars
that go on like numbers,
forever.
Then, running down the wash,
I thieve the blood wood of your heart.
Make it my own.
Without fear of consequence
I grab as much as I can hold.
Hunger makes me do it.