Y2K

On my most fearful days, the days where the gap between my instincts and my self-confidence is the widest and apparently the most insurmountable, I wake up thinking I know nothing of importance. If I have the energy I analyze what I mean. I mean that I can’t figure out how to do anything practical that will have a practical result. I mean I can start a project but never find my way near the finish line. That’s everything seems like a finish line, the end of a race during which I get winded early and fail, fail, fail to achieve and rest from the achievement. And there are few expressions I hate to hear more than “Everyone feels that way.” Because tied into the fear is absolute certainty that there is no one who feels “that way” but me. In fact, the only thing that makes me feel better, gets me going and reminds me how smart my little boy was, is hearing how stupid everyone else can be. Do you remember Y2K? The entire world was, like Gigi, trembling on the brink. Mankind had produced a computer-generated Armageddon, a quicksand of global financial destruction. Everywhere you turned, everywhere you went, people were talking to strangers, connecting to each other, girding for the coming of the inevitable end. I sat in a friend's house on Martha’s Vineyard with happy people sipping champagne and chatting idly. Quietly, over several hours, we watched the world on TV as one city after another across the globe exploded not into economic smithereens but in glorious celebration, a tribute not to failure or fear or insufficiency or any of my little worries, but to the farcical heartbreaking brilliant catastrophic glory that was the 20^th century and to the delirium that we humans had turned another corner in spite of everything.

The old gal

Burial

For now
My dog—uninterested
In life, in chewing,
In thought, in love for me—
Is interested only in burial.

Later, the bone, a white rawhide,
Will be sniffed out and disinterred
And, gnawed and drooled upon,
It will be torn wildly apart
Into wet and white runts,

At which point
I’ll throw them away
With the wasted table scraps
And crumbs of bread

And slowly
My dog will come to me,
What once was there
Now gone.

How to budget

My shampoo is so expensive I must spend 25 cents every time I wash my hair. And sometimes, more than I need comes out in my hand and then what? It’s not like I can put it back in the tube, so I use it, probably 35 cents worth. I don’t have that much hair. What a waste. But it’s the shampoo my hairdresser says I should use. She’s not just my hairdresser, she’s my friend, she’s been cutting my hair for 30 years and right from the start we were friends, she’s dear and generous and has had the same true heart all these years and I care for her and would trust her with my life. So naturally I trust her when she tells me what shampoo to use. I must admit too that sometimes I think my hair looks fuller now than it did a few years ago, falling out in clumps, before this shampoo was part of my daily toilet. I don’t really have to buy it more than once every three or four months but thinking about it I realize it’s so expensive I must spend 25 cents every time I wash my hair. Or if I’m going out that night I might wash it again in the late afternoon, and that would be 50 cents.  At least. If I’m careful and in control when I squeeze the bottle and not thinking about something else that may be annoying me. So we’re trying to budget, again, so I ask myself how can one budget that? Do I put some money aside each paycheck to cover myself for the day when the shampoo runs out? I don’t even do that for auto repairs, tires or oil filters and a bum radiator. But it should be in the budget somewhere, otherwise who am I fooling when, at certain times in the month when it's all expenses and no income and I look at myself in the mirror, with my hair frizzing off my head like a mad scientist, I wonder, what will happen to us all if we can’t pay the bills?

Dreaming in color

Dreams

1. The Affair
The feel
of a set of hotel keys
a set of thoughts of
what it’s been, of what
it will be
again, played out
in the screaming of her pulse,
outlined like a face below water
by the crisp wrinkles
of a white envelope between the fingers
of the man who pulls it from its hiding
place in the branches
of a mean growing bush
in a meridian between traffic
coming down, going up State Street.

2. The Accusation
Our old friend
G. her hair young and
blazing, on a lawn like a Wyeth autumn
beckoning me from three arm’s length
with her voice, her hair,
her large eyes, her old love,
her innocent boy sleepy in pajamas
waving from the front door.

3. The Fairy Tale
A young woman
like a young you
delicate in her lace, in her
wedding gown, in a skullcap
like blushing Cinderella’s
in the window of an arboretum
a raglan sleeve shaping a feminine
hand gesturing to the stars
high above the lawn
where I stand dreaming
by her stone castle,
where far below
you stand
anticipating my return.

4. The Re-creation
Writing this poem
sliding out of white sheets
on the bed of our apartment in the city,
you stir, purr and, to forget
nothing, I try to write by
standing above you, how
it feels of
what it’s been and
what it suddenly is,
again.

Playing Songs and Carols

Playing an amped portable electric piano with 56 notes, seated on an ottoman, the piano on the radiator, requires a sure-fingered fluency and a noisy room overstuffed with warm partygoers who are interested mainly in hot hors d’oeuvres and cool chit-chat. If your middle right finger, for instance, is weak or tired or sore and sits heavily on an A with your left hand playing a G chord, it ruins an otherwise evocative rendition of  I’ll be Home for Christmas, when other Christmases with another piano more forgiving would have brought the living room a kind of soft silence and pure tone to soften the hungriest of visitors, and carry them to the best of remembrances, their hunger instead for sweet childhood, late friends, grandparents’ frosted windows, a young beautiful mother and father, the miracle of Christmas lights and twinkle in the living placement of notes from a singular old rich piano and a clear voice of a man aching to be young.

Controlling the message

“The internet is fucked up,” my son said. We were discussing “Seinfeld” and the smooth career of Seinfeld himself and we slipped into discussion of the rest of the cast and their lives since and then naturally of Michael Richards. “If he had only been heard by just the audience that night without somebody videoing it, he might have just been able to apologize and that would have ended it, instead of it going everywhere, with Seinfeld having to go on Letterman to defend him.” We decided it’s the modern way of doing celebrity business: control the message while appearing transparent. It began with Watergate. In his own clumsy, half-distrusting way, Nixon created the internet. He tried to control the message about the burglars but didn’t destroy the tapes. Be a snoop but watch out for snoops. Nixon did the former but self-destroyed because he carelessly overlooked the latter. That’s the internet message to my twenty-first century children: trust almost no one, they’re all listening, and some want to impeach you, expose you, hurt you and as long as you try to be free, there will be those interested in watching you be ruined, and take an occasional pot-shot of their own on Twitter. We tell my children, control the message, the complicated, nuanced balanced truth simply doesn’t matter. It’s a bloodless world with a short attention span, and it’s listening to me, and you, right now. Forty years ago we were so happy, we Nixon haters, with Watergate, with watching him pathetic and beaten. We didn’t realize it was a double-edged sword, exposing evil only to ferment ignorance and hatred all these years later.

Shortest day of the year--the sun's resolution

Please set, old sun. Then don’t refuse to rise in the morning, behind white winter clouds. Burn and rise and conquer the grey and frozen earth. Old sun, please set and settle deep into yesterday’s final darkness and have it be gone and forgotten, forgiven, and embraced for being done and past, its memory a long dead friend whose faults you’ve dismissed and whose life you celebrate now and then with a drink, a private joke, and a smile. And one thing more, old sun: make tomorrow last a little longer this year, warm and strong and young for a little while longer this year and  we may recover, and again feel your life, your hope.

Christmas Eve

The golden dog who bit his nails got excited and knocked ornaments off the tree with his tail. The boy played the spinet and the girl danced the Lindy by herself. The woman scrubbed the kitchen floors and cabinets. The man adjusted something using the vice on his basement workbench. A neighbor walked over with a tray of cookies and the man said something fresh to her about baking. The dog sprawled in the hallway with his paws cheating onto the living room rug. The boy lay on the rug near the piano and teased the dog with his fingers. The woman put the ornaments back on the tree, talking or singing to herself or to someone. The man left for a while, the gravel in the driveway spitting back from the tires of his Impala. The girl closed the door to her room and put on her hi-fi. The boy, who also bit his nails, examined under the tree and saw his name on at least three tags on big boxes. The dog seemed to be smiling and looked expectant. The man stayed out until after dark. The boy played a Hanukkah song on the spinet, then a Christmas song. The woman sang in the kitchen with a bad voice like a little girl. When they ate dinner, late and dark, the girl chattered and laughed hard through the silence. And then came the opening of the presents. The dog pranced and ripped at the green wrapping paper with his half-bitten nails and his smiling teeth until the man on the couch yelled at him to stop. The woman in the rocking chair, the girl on the floor, the boy played the piano and they sang together the boy's favorite carol. Joy to the World.

Grand

How much is that, it sounds like a lot, sounds big, Grand. A grand. If I was alone, an old man living in a house of memories, I could eat for six months on a grand and still feed the dog. If the car needed new tires, and god knows what else it would need, I could get really good ones,  winter ones, with deep treads that stopped on ice on downward hills, for half a grand. If I was really old, and didn’t drive too much, they could last ‘til I was dead, and someone would have $500 left. A hundred dollars seems like a lot, a grand should seem like a fortune. A penny isn’t what it used to be, you don’t even pick them up for luck. A nickel is a waste. I know some rich people for whom a grand to them is like a ten dollar bill to me. They could give me ten dollars and I could buy food, if I was alone, an old man,  to keep me alive for six months, and the dog, and they wouldn’t even remember where the money went. I’ve never held a one-thousand dollar bill, how the hell did Grover Cleveland end up there? Yet somewhere in my life a grand became not so grand. When I started thinking about growing old as I’ve been instructed to think about growing old. What’s a grand to me in retirement,  alone in a nursing home? With only a grand, I’ll be curtains in less than a week. If I leave my kids a grand, what’s the measure then of my life?

Family gathering

The Children

On Thanksgiving night
after the children read poems aloud
to pass the time, the niece
with freckles the titles, the nephew
with exotic eyes and ears the stanzas,
we began the meal
of three marriages attended
with silences the older children
disdained, and those
under ten withstood by
pivoting their heads like at a tennis match,
while the one nephew,
at eleven in his sly precalcified plumpness,
told jokes and ate himself into a blurred state
of giddiness.

One city block

White seems to be the prevalent light of choice this Christmas on my street, flattening the already colorless landscape of one- and two-story houses that are the homes of my, for lack of a better word, neighbors. Those abodes with no lights are lost in the night, holes of dark mystery, widows, single mothers, students, but the rest, the yards of the Christmas regalia, have been brought to thin brightness by someone, some family with no shape or soul, just some cold white lights on a creepy, leafless bush.

Around the corner, in front of a closed bar, looking down into the gutter, Jim, our brave local who stumbles here and there on our one city block, looks thin and pale and glassy-eyed, the cold night a mere inconvenience, or less, a trifle. Night is the wrong time to be sober, the wrong time to be forgetting where he lives. He sees color in the oil spills and the rubber streaks of foreign cars that have driven by, he sees pale greens and wet orange glistenings, he sees shapes like single-celled watery creatures under a microscope, he sees his own watery soul under the concrete. He lights an old cigarette and drops the lit match into the abyss.

Downcast

Wait Wait Wait

said her eyes from the bed

he heard before he swung

as he blew the candles out

over the sound of the motor revving

covering her face from the camera

his grandfather touching his shoulder

not letting go of the clip on her bra

she shouted from the platform

the door closing behind them

touching her hair while her fingers shook

he thought the earth was crying

Nun's story

She was the first girl to let him—invited him—the daughter of a butcher whose shop was just off Main Street downtown. They dated briefly in college, her cherished mother having died of cancer a year before. They were closest on thin rugs on wooden floors, often sharing her Benson and Hedges Thins on the shabby holey Madras rug in the drear living room of her apartment in a rundown old house on Elm Avenue, her head in his lap. One night he thought she was asleep and he watched her twitching eyes and bruised moving lips, her pinched child’s nose, the scar under her left eye, tears falling away down either side of her face. 

He saw her not long ago, her hair nearly shaved, salty white, but her head still tilted, her tiny brows raised, her smile still crookedly smart as if still seeing the world as sad and silly like a child making up a story and slyly sharing the ending too soon, her body, perhaps still thin and soft but long lost under the layers of a deep and thick nun’s coverall.

Singing about the Christ baby and the red-nosed deer

I stood in the outer lobby of the Slingerlands Price Chopper, wearing a red apron, ringing the small bell and singing a cappella every Christmas carol and song I know, getting louder as I got comfortable. Lot's of great interaction with odd Bethlehem people (Ah, Bethlehem), lot's of fun and funny looks. One woman stopped to sing some of "Rudolph" with me, her face very close to mine, grinning a toothless grin. A burly guy in his 40s said, "I like a man who takes his job seriously," and put $5 into the red pot, and then fist-pumped with me and went on his grocery way. Another woman in her '50s told me a story about being separated from her mother when she was little, on Pearl Street shopping at Whitney's; her mother panicked, called the police, and the little girl was found outside the store with Salvation Army Santa, ringing his golden bell. Several old and frail women thanked me for singing and smiled sadly, and at least two young men with drawn brows and poor clothes avoided eye-contact as they put in their money, and then said "God Bless" under their breath, for which I was grateful.

Export Agency

At the office on the 10^th floor, he has a cubicle in which he speaks German on the phone with customers from New South Wales, talking novelties and the wiring of brassieres, reassuring them of consignations on the Upper West Side the evening after they fly into LaGuardia. Then, on his lunch hour, he balances on the fire escape behind the office and smokes Parliaments and sweats under his white collars and white armpits and his face is  red as always with blood pressure and as he stares across the empty lot at the hundreds of windows facing him from the back of the Martha Washington Hotel for Women he thinks of the future. He will work later tonight, wait for Mabel at the phones to leave, wait for the owner Mr. Jamias the Greek owner to leave, wait for the surly, pregnant bookkeeper Maria recently from Naples to leave, lock the doors from the inside, change his clothes in his cubicle from his grey suit into a blue Mohair turtleneck and a pink cap (a new addition), watch the numbers descend in the elevator with his eyes almost closed, stop at Henry's in the lobby for a fresh pack of cigarettes, step out onto the street and stroll around Park Avenue South between 30th and 31^st Street, smoking and breathing in the evening dew and the smell of chicken fat wafting out from the doors of the Bellmore Cafeteria, where lines of cabbies on their break with their Vacant signs off will be queued up along the sidewalk for the best chopped liver sandwich in town.

Albany's Hudson

Look at the river. It laughs at the city, “You should do my bidding, there is no crossing me, your bridges will collapse, catch fire, erode and be swallowed, my beauty requires no beholder, make your choices better, love the river's edge, the river bed, the river who brings you to the other side, to the road to the ocean, the nearer you are to me, your homes on a sloping hill sliding down to my shore, your windows rising to the sun off my waters, your children’s eyes closed, their faces breathing in the fresh grass, the lush lawns, the ancient rails, the paths to the past, when the earth, the homeland, the water’s edge, the wise old ancestors, lived alongside me, peaceably allowing time to pass as it will so richly, until you sweetly pass on.”

The beginning of December

She took a walk, just to the corner, where Helderberg met New Scotland. It was cold, she had her favorite mittens, white and silky, like skin, like milk, and her comic bonnet which she knew made her a character on the street with the lads, which is what she called the schoolboys, the Ormond’s twins. If they weren’t in school they’d be laughing innocently behind her back. If she had had children, they’d be about as old as the lads were now, fifth graders. In the fall, on the first day at School 19, she always found a reason to take a walk, if it wasn’t raining too hard, and she’d follow right behind the lads, walking on either side, hand in hand, with their daddy, who walked too fast for them and rushed them along the sidewalk. She’d want to pick one up, it didn’t matter which, they were identical, and whisper in his ear, mind your daddy, move those little feet, it’s a big day for you, but just another day for him. She could see their lives rolling out in front of them, from this day forth, growing into strapping lads, Albany lads, firemen, maybe, or policemen with good girls as girlfriends and then wives. Her lads. Right now they were in school, old Miss Thompson’s class, same teacher as she had oh, twenty years ago. Same room even, next to the library, first floor, seat by the window looking out at the flagpole, unable to concentrate, thinking, it’s December, only 17, 16, 15, more days ‘til Christmas Eve. Now she hated Christmas Eve almost as much as Christmas Day. 17, 16, 15, more days to go, passionately grateful it would be over, she could get back to little walks to the corner, warm enough with her fur-lined white coat, her bonnet, and her favorite mittens, silky like skin, her husband would have said, back then.

Shutters

These 30 years our lines connect our roofs, we share electric power and our words cross through the wires, yet we just wave to each other from our driveways, she once young and soft with babies, their father then coming and going as he pleased. I can't recall having heard the sound of her voice, and her shutters reveal no lights from within, but her grandchildren laughing sweetly on Saturdays jumping into her car are clearly the dearest children in the world.

A normal retired Monday

The house is quiet, the furnace is temporarily silent, the only sounds the dog’s footsteps following up stairs, down stairs, her nails clicking against the hallway’s wooden floors. The computer dings that you have a new e-mail. You're waiting, thinking objects may come alive at any moment, the yellow walls start to shimmer, a bust of Beethoven begins to smile and frown, an angel painted on a bowl sinks and soars, three figures that were drawn last night, a pleading woman in the foreground, two men behind her, left and right, begin to dance in place, a stone Pisces holding up books moves its lips, bats its eyes, the floral prints on the carpet spin like a kaleidoscope, the pillow in the dog’s bed curls and moves in a dream in its sleep. The phone rings five times, your voice calls out from the answering machine please, please leave a message, and then the house is quiet again, quieter. So used to voices and radios and airplanes and barking neighborhood dogs, all that resonance; the quiet and the aloneness, the old songs in your hollow head are deafening. Outside, the mail is suddenly dropped in the creaking box by following and preceding footsteps; someone should oil its hinges; there are no messages in the box, no sounds, no breath or movement closing in from the past or inching towards the future; just two thin bright shiny circulars and a water bill.

The Price Chopper

She’s the girl with tired skin who’s always there at Price Chopper with her smart face and with her grocery store air. It says: This is where I belong, who my family is, for what it’s worth, this is more like my home than any home I’ve had, here on Sunday after Thanksgiving, making myself useful. She’s not particularly friendly to the customers—the worried dark-haired girl with an infant in a carrier in her shopping cart, the bent-over scowling thin crab of a woman slowly following her adult daughter through the aisles, the thick hard man in his mid-thirties, wearing tight large rugby clothes, his hands in fists, his head darting here and there, me, a real regular old fart in glasses and jeans and dirty cap, just hoping as I always do for someone who’ll make eye contact. No, she’s locked into her world where she belongs, locked into the aisles and the counters and the vegetable bins spraying water over her hands fussing over the broccoli, locked into gossip with the jawing woman arranging flowers in the florist cubicle, telling in-jokes to the manager in produce with the headset to her ears, her small manager eyes darting here and there and her pouty dry lips snapping orders into a mouthpiece, rushing on tiptoe to soothe the flush-faced general manager who is also talking to a headset and knitting his brows with his greased hair and starched-white shirt and shiny orange tie that matches his complexion. But finally, my smart-faced girl ends up cashing out my mother-in-law at the register, whom I’ve known half-a-century, who is slowing these last few years but still a-twinkle, making people stop for a moment so the girl who has ignored me and others all these months with her smart face and grocery store air and in-jokes, on this Sunday after Thanksgiving relaxes, stops for a moment and smiles when my clever mother-in-law asks her name: “Molly,” she says and we all twinkle, just for a moment.

Under the covers

Waiting to eat

Before Thanksgiving turkey and stuffed cabbage,

Challah and rice pudding,

Yams, and peas with pearl onions,

Listening in New Brunswick to Uncle Julius’ cackles—

Rising like an angry cat above voices in the kitchen—

Clash with Doris the maid’s heavy white shoes in the hallway

And the coughing and laughing of older cousins

The clacks and bumps of the bumper pool game

Somewhere down below,

Cousin Melanie and I are expected to nap

Under Auntie Gertie’s smothering blankets

With the bedroom ceiling’s afternoon sun

Tic-tac-toe-ing through Venetian blinds.

Melanie, a pillow over her head,

Curls her knees, in the swell of the bed,

Her back to mine, beneath the feathery comforter,

Pulls her pajamas down below her thighs,

Settles, nestles against me,

Breathes in, breathes out,

and so we wait.

Noon on the Empire State Plaza

Skating at the rink at the Empire State Plaza, alone. On your lunch break. The plaza cold, deserted. Alone. The ice, the noon sky, unchipped and shining, your mind blank, under towers of state workers yearning to retire, like you, only for you, time has stopped in a short sweet moment of perfection when you feel without thinking this meeting of man’s needs to nature’s must be the work of God, your only real existence pure bliss.

Thanksgiving '64

We went out to dinner for Thanksgiving. I was in high school, my sister in community college, dating a boy named Chip who would jilt her, crush her senseless. We had moved to Hopewell Junction a few months earlier, to a new development on a hill where Angus cows had grazed and left their droppings. The restaurant seemed to my sister and me to be expensive, not Chinese, or pizza that we were used to, it was in an old Colonial house with fireplaces sparking and we all ate prime ribs au jus. I didn’t know my parents were unhappy together, I thought all families were like ours, quiet, anxious, slumping. I remember the cheese cake for dessert, with pineapple on top. At home, my sister found a 33 LPM album with songs to dance by, a tango, a cha-cha, a waltz, a lindy. The carpet in the living room was mustard-colored. The window looking out on the brown street and our peach-fuzz new lawn with cow footprints was concave. She put the album on the record player and we danced together. I was in high school but never had had a drink, I drank coke with my cheese cake, but we were quite intoxicated, and danced the lindy fast, spinning, and then the waltz, which we both seemed to know, we spun and my eyes hit the wall above the piano and the dining room ceiling and the mustard floor. My sister could really dance, spin forever without being dizzy, but I spent the next three days throwing up. She picked up with a new boyfriend, later married him and waited for him to return from Viet Nam, and later waited for him to recover his senses, his self worth, his sobriety. My parents waited for me to get married before they divorced with my help, my mitigation, my advice, my arbitration. Don’t remember any Thanksgivings after that one, the four of us together. But when we were small, my parents danced the jitterbug in our living room in an earlier house, on Long Island, speechless, sure-handed, and with grace, and I watched them.

White-buttoned flowers

Jasmine

You’ve never had much feeling for this house

the little A-frame,

its white siding its black shutters

which neither of us

thought much of changing

adding personal touches

to increase our affection

where our boys grew up

so when they are old

it’s what they’ll remember,

all they’ll remember,

the ill-fitting never-locking side door

the spring mice’s black eyes

against the wall behind the bookshelf

the backyard border

of yews and privets and wild roses

with snarled branches and roots

Before this house

we took a trip to Spain

the August before our eldest was born

and had dinner and drank Rioja wine

late at night outdoors under a gauze roof

as girls in floral dresses swung by

and azaleas hung in pots

beside bags of water the waiter said

kept the flies away

and instead of a fence

the restaurant was marked

by a cast-iron black trellis

spun with white-button flowers

so lush in smell it was more like sex

the near-rankness of sex,

moist inside your nose

and languorous inside your mouth

your eyes smiling drunkenly from it

and it could only last forever

and be the place where you belong

even now

Harold Pinter and other cars we've owned

The death of a car is a passing. Our first car wasn’t even our car, but we were lent a blue AMC Matador for our honeymoon, and since we were playing at being married we pretended it was ours, pretended the camp in the woods on Willsboro Bay near Lake Champlain was ours, pretended the rowboat and the chilly damp rooms of the cabin and the kitchenware and the ashtrays and the smoke up the chimney were ours. The first car that was ours we nicknamed Harold Pinter, Harold Pinter the Pinto, and like a first dog his passing took the longest from which to recover. We sang many songs happily together in that car, we solved problems in it, perhaps we strapped our first baby into a car seat on its back cushions. Later cars we seemed glad to be rid of, a used and useless big Ford of some forgotten model, a white Dodge Neon that was new and then very soon old. When the green 1998 Civic died today, Ben said, "I rode in that car since I was 10 years old," and back then our boys were sprouting stalks with legs too long already for the back seat, their heads soon to be too high, too big, for a little Honda. It was time to say goodbye to the dead car, and drive it to the parts guy and collect $300 for its unbroken bits of memory.