First poem

October

1. Potholes
You sigh.
“It seems like we’ve been driving
For years.”
On a spider road leading,
We know, we hope,
To the ocean; little more than
The ocean.
It was a dark day, dark road,
Not knowing
Where it ended,
(Sea, It all had to end);
Where was the goddamn ocean?
The season was over,
The sky was autumn-teal.
Wet-hooded beachvines
Scratch the roof,
Whip wheelcovers.
Muddy carpath swells, coils,
Axle rolls, see saws,
The sand soft,
(Ocean must be near).
You groan.
“Good thing the car’s old;”
Drops on the glass;
“Windows, up or down?”
You’re cold,
And mute.
My, high, voice:
“Hope it doesn’t die.”
(It would be goddamn hell
Dying like that.)

2. Poppies
You sneeze.
“Oh, look,
The yellow-brick road.”
Ahead a blowing plain
Of dry lavender and prickly bushes
Of  currants that look
Like poppies.
The ocean was in sight,
But silent.
“I’m cold now,”
(As if it’s your fault)
Put on the blue sweater
You never gave me.
Ahead a lavender plain
Pricked with red
A salt-bleached
Slat-grey path
A mile long—
But Sight
The silent sea.
You stare out
At October.
(Never been here
Ever been there,
A vast heath,
Midnight clouds and
Mean new birds
Snipping beneath the barefoot poppies.)

3.  Storm
Eddying  back,
Birds like black confetti
(Like the first razor’s edge
Of ashes’
bitter-burning conflicts)
The planks creak:
A hidden twittering poppyguard
Knifes up from the lavender.
We both wanted to run
To the sea,
Hushed heath
Before the endlessly
Hushing sea.
Are you thinking
Where it all will end,
These terrible birds with
Circular purpose,
Closing, rising, swarming
Like crazed black bees
Between us and the ocean?

4. Flight
You stare out
Of my handhold,
Through wingblack clouds,
To the dunes of the sad ocean.
I walked  a tottering rope
In a hard sand track.
Staring back at
Heath’s end
A black-twitching
Wind
Waits.
Your weary winter coat,
Sand-dead,
Covers your head.
“I can’t hear a word...”

Green hair

There's a decidedly unfeminine woman who recently walks her recently acquired small black dog on my old street, about whom I fantasize, dreaming about what might change in her that would make her what I grew up thinking of as a woman. Her hair is so flaxen dry it looks light green, like unwatered grass. Sometimes she has her preteen daughter with her, whom I worry about, in that way of becoming a woman as daughter of this woman. And yet she's pretty, this mother, this dog walker; I once was buying wine around the corner and she was short a dollar ahead of me at the counter and I gave Cindy, the quirky ex-nurse managing the old wine shop, the dollar, and the green-haired woman quavered with gratitude and told me her name was Jenny and she would repay me. Jenny, a tricky name for the woman about whom I now wanted to fantasize, despite her wan skin, her unimaginative glance, her slumped bony shoulders. And now she has a small black dog who drags her along the sidewalk and mocks her style of walking, and otherwise dismisses her as a boring mistress with bony thighs, boring in a cotton-shirt, bony-shorts kind of way. That's it: she needs to be someone's mistress, not a slave to a silly dog, not a wimpy mother, but a blond, glistening mistress, sweating and salivating and yearning and swaying, please, please, before it's too late.

In the wine shop

The Actor

A good actor
doesn’t need his face
to speak of
shames and humiliations
but merely with his back,
a drop of his neck,
a shift in his hips,
the sigh of his shoulders—
that subtle grandeur of anguish

Look now at
the bottle of scotch,
his one hand
ruddered around it,
my old friend
waiting on line
with no wish
to be seen by me,
his unmistakable head bowed,
performing a quiet aside,
his upstage hand
laying cash on the counter

He says all we need to know
about our Marlowe days;
an actor in silhouette
is a chill of backlit
illumination.

Ed Wynn

My friend Joe was vibrant and virile in his 50s when I met him and he still had a lustrous head of silver hair when he was 80 and told me confidentially, with Barbara in another room, and with a serious face, that he was Gay. We had been having gay old times with Joe since he first taught us what it really meant to act on stage, to act with courage and truth, to speak and listen from "la panza" (which he pronounced like my Sicilian relatives "la banza") which meant the belly but he also meant the groin. He was beautifully sexual, everything he was was from la banza, yet he whispered to me that he was gay. Perhaps it's what held him back, not fully allowing himself to be himself, honestly and with courage. He ended up not on stage but in the classroom, hoping he could show the way to others to do what he could not. He must have been beaten down because in this way, and only this way, he was like the hopeful dog who wants so much to approach you and be caressed but cowers away from your hand reaching for his face.

He worked for Ed Wynn, on his TV show in the early 1950s, when TV was spontaneous and unexplored and risky. I seem to believe he told us he was Wynn's dresser, and Wynn trusted Joe and told him about his son Keenan who had romantically teamed up with Van Johnson and how happy they were together but the studio insisted that Johnson be married, and Wynn cried to Joe when he found out. (Keenan Wynn's first wife, Evie, after divorcing him, married Van Johnson.)  My childhood memories of Ed Wynn's public persona was of a big lovely man with a big lovely Jewish nose and great twinkly eyes. My adult memories of Joe are of a great lovely man with a big lovely Italian nose and eyes that were lit from within, fearless and demanding and seductive.

Idle Time

Too much time on my hands, I've been spending hours and now weeks watching the dog die, listening to her breathing in her sleep, over-monitoring her bowel habits, imagining visits to the vet, questioning that skin sensitivity on the back of her neck that causes her to cry out when putting on her collar, imagining her fully dead, picking her up, lifeless, and putting her, in, what?, a box, do we even have the right box to carry out a small dead dog, and what's that car trip going to be like, and will we share it alone, she and I?

I was told you know when "it's their time" when they stop eating. So, she eats fine, but how can I trust that? she's a bitch, a terrier, a smartass, a bigmouth, always gone against the grain, recalcitrant, unaffectionate, cat-like almost, so she'll just keep eating greedily right to the end, die eating too fast maybe. Too much time on my hands, other things to notice that I choose to avoid, breathe away from, people whom I worry about, not their deaths but their lives, their choices and non-choices that I can't at all impact or redirect, just watch idly and say stupid things and be nervous. I prefer to continue to watch the dog die, for the next week or month or three or four years.

Standardized patienting

Practice                                   

Three times today I had full physical exams

done by first-year medical students. They each began

by palpating my skull, each saying

“Tell me if this hurts.”

Their fingers are young and still soft like teenagers

learning what it is to touch,

but already theirs are not just fingers but

measuring instruments

calibrated to seek and discover abnormalities

on my head. I look in their eyes,

at their widening pupils

as they pull down my lower lids; one says,

“Good pink,” as she examines my conjunctiva

and I wonder if she knows something I don’t;

I can see her tender eyebrows which express

concerns of memory; “What am I missing?”

her eyebrows seem to say, which reminds me she’s not close

to being a real doctor, just a recent child

trying to convince herself of what she hopes she knows,

while my expression tries to convince her

that my wrinkled, mottled skin was,

not that long ago, young.

“I will listen to heart sounds now,”

she says, after asking my permission

to untie my gown, “so breathe normally,”

but how do I breathe normally

when thinking about my heart and its sounds

and feeling the cold stethoscope

and smelling her antiseptic fingers

and curious whether my heart

sounds different from other hearts

and how I wish she might value my heart, my unique heart,

my healthy old heart? Finally, after a series

of neurological tests—my eyes following

her shaking fingers; my eyes closed

while standing with my hands out palms up,

rocking on the balls of my feet; then she says

“Do you mind if I remove your socks?”

and rubs a rubber claw along my leathery soles—

I return to sit on the examining table,

yanking at my gown above my knees.

She stares at the floor, and I know

she’s silently cataloging my organs.

She nods, twice, and taps my shoulder goodbye.

Snail mail

I had a friend who died last year, Ted, who wrote six or seven letters a day for decades, I'm sure 'til the day he died, what many today call snail mail. He had many good excuses, all on the communication availability list of excuses: he didn't own a computer, probably couldn't type, he certainly couldn't drive, having given up automobiles in 1952 as unnecessary. He was a literature professor of what must be referred to as the old school, not the glib old school of slick ad-speak, but truly old school of reading novels aloud in American Lit I, and memorizing pages of poetry, a skill on which he prided himself, although he tried hard not to pride himself on anything. We would be sitting at a table in his old basement kitchen, him talking about poems or Greta Garbo or the beauty of his mother or the coldness of his physician father from the mining town in Pennsylvania where he was raised  and me watching a cockroach climb the tiles above the sink; Ted would close his eyes and say the words of a Sharon Olds poem he'd heard that morning on the radio read by Garrison Keillor. 

It bothers me a little bit that it was a chore to visit Ted, now as I get older and lonelier, but I remember so much that I learned about living in one's imagination, and waiting to die, in one's imagination, from our weekly get-togethers. Right now I remember going one day a few years ago when he was a young fellow, a twice-cancer-survivor in his mid-eighties and I noticed he was crying, and he said with a smile, "Two of my closest friends died this weekend," and in spite of my knowing his love of florid language and theatrical timing, I knew it was true and something I wouldn't soon forget.