In Phoenix

Portofino Restaurant at the edge of the desert

Lights twinkled above us like Chinese lanterns.

Candy ordered veal parmigiana, lush and wet.

I had veal piccata—

ooh, your father’s favorite, she slyly said—

thin and unfilling. A tanned singer with tight blue-white hair

did Volaré and Song Sung Blue

accompanied by taped music,

an organ and a snare,

his shirt white with black pin-flowers, his close lips,

his thick voice, his hands caressing the mike. At the next table

two couples stopped eating,

listened, shoulders rising and lowering to the music.

His teeth were ageless;

he flashed them and shook a tambourine

and rolled his hips.

Candy ate intently, and her whiskey sour

made her translucent eyes reflect the lights.

The old waitress with the tall black hair

touched the back of my shoulders

with her breasts

on her way to the kitchen;

“Your father used to flirt with her,”

Candy said, her eyes glowing.

Misfits

In seventh grade I was in a one-act play that was performed for the whole school. It’s title was “Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil.” (On the Samuel French Website, you can buy the acting edition for $6.50; it was first presented at the Christodora House in New York City in 1916, but your still have to pay French $45 per performance; how much could they be banking on “the Lentils” a century later?) I played the boy watching his mother boil lentils while a queen and a mime and a milkmaid and a blind man and a ballad singer pass by. The seventh grader who played the milkmaid in a bright-pink woman's dress was named Sheila, and she was almost a pariah, at school and in the neighborhood; her face was terribly scarred and hideously mis-formed. I’m not sure if the director, Mrs. Levy, Diane Levy, my English teacher, who was a hard, teased blond with thick black-framed glasses and leather-tanned skin, cast Sheila as a mean joke. The boy I played was probably nine years old and I wore Bermuda shorts, a dull white button-down shirt, and suspenders, with knee-high black socks and sandals. (I was the up-and-coming actor at Bethpage Junior High School, and would star in Arsenic and Old Lace the next year, playing Cary Grant; a boy named Roy, already an eighth-grader and the school star, who was tall and full-bodied in a middle-aged suit with middle-aged hair and eyes, played the blind man with words of wisdom and pats of affection for me as the young boy; he had white powder on his big eyebrows and lots of age make up, and made great eye contact, at least with me.) It was humiliating, exposing my naked knees to the entire auditorium crowd, and horrible having to kiss mis-formed Sheila as the milkmaid. At the curtain call, I heard only the jeers and the hoots and the whistles, holding Sheila’s sweaty palm in one hand and Roy’s big palm squeezing mine in the other as we stood together on the edge of the auditorium stage. My first time among a troupe of actors, us against them, me and Sheila and Roy and the others, and we showed ‘em, standing right up there and taking our bow.

Medical maintenance

Pills

The two are bright colored,

purple and sea-blue,

cheerful

as the coolest crayons,

tiny tube-shaped

balloons

that swirl off

through your bloodstream

like candied joy

 dispensing happy days on end

to your pounding heart

and your stomach

those friends

you haven’t seen in years

so you remember them

as they were then

undiseased

undecayed

 as if days don’t turn

into decades

and you just know,

your nerves tell you,

that they’re living a languid life

 in a luscious lagoon

and that they must be doing well.

Retiring

Dad Looks Calmer in Phoenix

Got a photo of my father, and nothing else, from Candy, in the mail yesterday. He's sitting up
in his leather recliner as if she propped him up there for the photo. He's near a
wall table with a small reading lamp and many cups on it; an iron with
its cord all askew is visible beneath it. It's a straight-on photo.
His belly, which must be bloated with the passage of time,
appears flatter, and his legs, which are dangling so
his Khakis have ridden up over his sneaks and
white socks so his sapling-thin shins are
exposed, look like they may be short
twigs under those pantlegs. Still,
he's tan, his silver wig well-
combed, with very few trou-
ble lines around that gold-
en clenched jaw.

Off the Avenue

The little girl across the street lives in her house with her mom and dad and some cats I can see in the upstairs windows. She’s the only child on the block that gets a bus to take her to School on the Avenue. We live too close to School on the Avenue so I have to walk, which I don’t mind if my brother walks with me and doesn’t let his friends mess with me, which is most of the time. The girl has a very very very very white face and wears a big sun hat or her mother carries an umbrella, walking from their front door to the bus in front of the house. The girl also has very very very skinny legs and holds her mother’s hand and skips on the sidewalk and almost falls sometimes, her mother yanking at her to keep her skinny legs upright. The lady with chunky arms and cheeks who drives the bus always looks like she just had a permanent, but also looks like she doesn’t have a lot of hair and you can see her scalp. She always wears a blue or green sweatshirt for a football team that she must like, and her arm always hangs out the driver’s window, as if she thought she could if she wanted to stop the bus with her hand along the ground. The windows of the bus are dark but I imagine children exactly like the little girl are already sitting on the seats when she gets on. Most days I like to walk to School, it’s thrilling and there’s a lot to see on the Avenue, around the corner, a lot of smokers in cars driving downtown, puffing hard on their cigarettes, a regular guy named Billy with red eyes who stumbles and sways along the sidewalk holding a paper cup with coffee in it, my shadow as long as a whole block walking in front of me, the tip of my head crossing the street way before my legs reach the corner. But just one day I’d like to take that bus, really see the children who are like her who I know must be seated on it and see if they are at all like me, too.

Birthday girl

It was her birthday. She had bought herself purple silk panties, and she was wearing them under her lime-green slacks walking to work. She rubbed her thighs together and moved her hips to run the silk up and down her stomach. It was starting to get colder out in the early morning, but the bus never came and she could save time having one more cigarette while walking the seven blocks along Delaware, then the long hill down beside Lincoln Park, past the empty playgrounds and the dying public vegetable gardens, the yellowed cement low-rent high rise,  the pre-washed streets half-deserted but bright-lit by the rising sun above the east side of the river, at this time a wealth of rich color and shadowy opportunity. But the day was typical, she passed nobody she knew for she knew nobody, her usual invisible self only more so since it was her birthday and to everyone else down here—the bored crossing guard on his metal stool, the cop smoking on the station steps, the frantic blond, her dress and costume necklaces flying, carrying her small sick white dog into the animal hospital, the school children in brown uniform crossing against the guard’s direction, the grocery shop owner with heavy lids, rolling up the security gate, exposing his sad old produce in the window, it was just another day, she was  just another semi-familiar nonentity from the neighborhood who for them was not celebrating a another year on earth in her purple silk panties, just  simply a day older than she was yesterday.

Next door

Sleeping Spoons

Unenthusiastically,

the woman with the long straight hair

is watering her porch plants this evening

with a white plastic can.

Isn’t she edging toward spinsterhood?

I watch as she moves around on her sore feet.

She bought the house 8 years ago,

our fat new neighbor, and introduced herself;

we soon uncovered her

when, upon leaving alone on a vacation cruise,

she asked us to enter her house,

walk up her stairs,

past the soiled laundry on her bedroom floor,

into her humid, randy bathroom

to feed her emaciated cats.

Now she lumbers with the watering can as if riding,

laboriously, on waves of pine planks.

She looks down—do her eyebrows knit?—

at two plastic chairs, faded and weather-eaten,

adorning the porch, sleeping spoons.

Albany

It’s how I see myself surviving, 
wandering downtown near a dirty corner 
where I used to work in the building 
with the print shop in the back, 
Vinny’s sub shop still open in front. 
It’s on a hill in what might have been 
long ago a hot part of the city, 
with speakeasys and singing on the street 
on the ground floor of tenements 
that are now half-boarded-up, 
with holes for doorways. 
I’ll get scraps of food 
from the arabs’ chicken place 
on the bottom of the hill, eat it slowly, 
and leave still hungry and thirsty. 
I’ll be dressed cleanly, 
in a blue raincoat that 
my wife once gave me and 
I have never worn, and in khakis 
that are like new, 
and in hush-puppies and thin white socks. 
I’d never have truly lived here, 
and I’ll never leave, 
I’ll breathe and walk 
and wander around downtown, 
not really lost, you can’t get lost 
in this city, but looking like I’ve lost something, 
maybe my step, my anger, my deeper breaths, 
my love of colors, something that was lively and loud, 
but now quietly, sweetly I’ll be looking here 
and there with little conviction 
for this gray old place. 

Worn

Lost Sock

It wasn’t just any sock
Like in the interchangeable thinning black
Streams of knitted store-brand wool
Your skin shows through
Like veins in the hand of a very old uncle, veins that,
If they could speak, could weave such stories
Of blood rushing, escaping
Through undarned lapses, gaps
Measured not in reams
But in years.

These were French socks and
Like France small and sly and
Clustered in places
So you could get a toe in but
On your first visit perhaps
Not a whole foot
But which we kept trying on again
Because, well, it’s French.

But it’s years later,
Their connection to events blurred,
She who bought them, helped them on and off,
Washed and separated them, now pretends she never knew
They were French, that they’re not interchangeable,
That they could speak;
It’s, just: One’s lost, good riddance,
And: Didn’t those used to
Belong to me?

Oldies

Most mornings I wake up with the phrase of a song in my head; it usually dawns on me somewhere between peeing and preparing the coffee. This morning the phrase is “I hear you knockin’/But you can’t come in/I hear you knockin’/Go back where you been.” I try to remember my last dream before waking in the dark but that fails me, so I just try to make sense of it. I think, One’s mind might slip into that phrase in sleep when one’s body has got to pee. Or maybe it was a grim reaper dream, a fragment of an old movie in which death is at the door. Some songs, of course, return you to a young age; you close your eyes and allow yourself to become younger, like looking at one of those erratic patterns in those books with the right side of your brain and suddenly seeing a unicorn. The part of your mind that remembers, it’s an out of body experience, and you’re seven years old and it’s summer on Agatha Drive and Jeffrey Handel and you are on the curb flipping baseball cards and the pot has grown to over 500 cards and you know you’re going to win and take all of Jeffrey’s cards, right off the sidewalk and his red face is trying not to be sad, or you’re ten years old on the beach at Center Island on the Sound with your sister and her friend Cheryl with the Italian nose and the brown freckles wearing the pink bikini that rises above the bump where her backside starts, and there’s a song playing on the transistor radio, “See You in September," or maybe it’s “The Duke of Earl,’ and you can feel the sand scratch inside your bathing suit. “I Hear Your Knockin’” is not resonating with aching thoughts of yearning, so what?, there's got to be something, a meaningless old song that was in your dreaming head, is God finally talking to you in your sleep, doesn’t it scare you, are you safe, can you start your day with more than a hope that maybe only good will happen to you today?

Brooklyn baby

The Rent

In Brooklyn, we lived
in an attic, I am told,
until I was a year
and a half old
It was in the house of a
Mr. and Mrs. Farber;

we liked them,
they were kind,
they were gentle.
I remember, they stood in the foyer
at the foot of the stairs;
remember it kindly.

The attic was under
a flat roof.
I can hear my mother’s mouth
singing at me,
There are things in this world
I don’t know.

The attic is a good place,
tall windows, no curtains
bright sunlight on the walls

I suppose my father
must come home
I suppose there are beds
and a sink and a place
for clothes, I suppose
we eat and the smells
and the bugs in the summer
and the noises like horns
and voices from the street

And he must
make some money
and then gives her some
Somewhere there’s a snap purse
in which she folds
the money she’s to give
to the Farbers

She must
do something else with her time,
my sister must look at me
my father must be there
so much must be happening
that I don’t know.

Bet the Farbers
could have fixed it 
I bet they could have
made her stop singing.
But they took her money
gently and watched us climb
from the foot of the stairs.

Good messages

I get e-mails a couple of times a week from Eddie Bauer and Barnes and Noble. I suppose I could click on the “Unsubscribe” link on the bottom of the message, but I never actually open the e-mail, plus Eddie Bauer could be a very nice man who may someday have something personal to say to me having nothing to do with fall sweaters or slim jeans. Then he’d have to title the e-mail, “Gary, this is something personal for you from me, Eddie Bauer—the man, not the store—that could change your life." I seem to be waiting for phone calls and/or e-mails that will alter my life and make it outstanding. It’s not out of the question, in fact, that kind of thing has happened once or twice before. True, not from Eddie Bauer, but you can’t be too careless or one life-changing good message will slip by. I have a smart phone which tells me if someone has called when I was away from it, even if they don’t leave a message. When whomever it is doesn’t leave a message, I look at the area code of the number that the smart phone is showing me; if it’s a plausible area code, local for example, or New York City, perhaps, and I don’t recognize the rest of the number, I fantasize about the message that might have been left. It’s almost invariably from a woman I once knew, although sometimes it’s from a New Yorker editor accepting a story or a poem I had forgotten that I had submitted. Almost inevitably, it’s from someone who deeply needs me, desires me, admires me, and wants, no, needs to tell me so. Rarely has it to do with getting a large sum of money, because those fantasies are long gone, stored away into the desperately hopeful days of my thirties and forties, days that drifted into one another for years without anything outstanding happening. I suppose you could say, I didn't make them happen but that's not the point of this little story. This story is about what happens to you, what you deserve, what will make everything make sense. Back then I'd imagine winning the lottery and how it would change my heart, my marriage, what I would carry in my wallet; large sums of money would transform me, make me taller and braver and more honest. Now of course I know better. I know the only dreams worth having are ones of fame, and adoration, and love, like nothing I’ve ever known before. My smart phone will tell me.

We need rain

the affairs of our lovers

We need rain
The white lilacs are in bloom
yet have no scent
The uncut grass
feels unrooted to the yard
and ready to yield to the wind
and vanish into that unknown
My own mood thirsts
for sadness and
swelling hope
and memory from far mountains
to undammed rivers
of poems and
the affairs of our lovers.

City produce

I’ve always been darkly fascinated by seedy super markets. I’m mesmerized by the character of the fleshy people glancing by me, by the crammed rows of generic boxes and cans, by the doors that open automatically  and electronically close you off, away from the hot summer street. I became the family food purchaser in the summer of 1973, when the family was just Barbara and me, just Barbara and me for eleven years, before hungry children. Only once did we go together to the Red Apple market on our corner of 70^th and Amsterdam. I would have been happy to stay there all day, watching the sweating, smoking store manager in his lofty perch in open offices above the cash registers, furtively spying for shoplifters, or negotiating the peanut butter and spices aisle with my shopping cart doing u-turns around cereal box displays. It was like a baseball field to me, so perfectly measured like the distance from home plate to shortstop, shortstop to first. A skilled athlete, like me, could push his cart in and out and around with no errors, squeeze through narrow spaces without knocking over cans of olives or displays of pantyhose. I saw immediately that for Barbara the Red Apple was a manic house of horrors, a place that one escaped before screaming, an odd place where grinning failed actresses with smeary red lipstick on line at the register purchased 20 cans of cat food and only that, where men with wire glasses painstakingly examined bruised fruit while we waited to pass on to the equally bruised lettuce, the damaged tomatoes, the wounded avocado. In the early days of marriage, these are the kinds of things one must learn, and fix. For me, the delights were in the simple, wonderful colors, and the texture of the sticky floors, and the low-hanging florescent lights, and the grey-green tile ceiling, and the big fat bodies, fat multi-colored shoulders banging past, pressing into you and a whiff of someone’s frustrated breath. For me, we were young, married life was grand, the city stank with porn and grit and poverty and rotten fruit and artists, failed and rich, everything transparent and extreme, it all was happening in the aisles of the Red Apple. The colors, egg plant and lime green and razor-yellow and blood, blood reds on the fingernails of the old ex-actress at the register buying cans and cans of cat food.  

For me, it was super. My whole life in front of me, ripe, and full of promise.

Siblings

Not Just the Thing, but the Idea of the Thing

It was Christmas Eve
and I just had an argument in my own house
with my second brother, who’s the one
with the wife
who tortures their child.
My brother drinks
and I can’t say anything until I drink
and the wine is...
not so good,

not just mixing with my cold blood but
the warm idea of it, wine at Christmas,
It makes me cry, him defending her
and my husband looking at me helpless
and his arms wrapped around our daughter’s
whose nose is wrinkled by our yelling and
whose eyes rise to the tree lights
while her hands wrap so tightly around his fingers

I can’t even look.
I blame my house for it,
not being big enough to accept my family;
not just for the rooms and the awful, wrong furniture
but for not having a heartbeat like a living thing.

And it wasn’t like that when I was a child;
whatever the argument,
whatever the tortures I imagined,
no matter how helpless my brothers and I felt
in the limpness of the quiet,
That house, our childhood
Swallowed us in safety like warm scotch-breath from old lips.

Smoke

On my recent visit to Albany Med emergency room, I was asked about my smoking history. Somehow I am still at some risk for, say, bladder cancer because I smoked two packs a day from 1967 to 1973. I had my last cigarette in another emergency room, New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital, in July 1973, some six weeks after my honeymoon, where I smoked in the canoe on Willsboro Bay, smoked at night in the Montreal hotel, smoked in a cab, smoked in the car, smoked in bed, poor Barbara. My gut was killing me, but the cigarette was good and inhaling it consoling, rassuring. It was a tiny waiting room on a side street three blocks from the Park, perhaps on East 77^th Street, and there was cigarette smoke all around. After the doctor, Dr. Barr, took my appendix, showed it to me in a jar, there were no empty beds available in semi-private rooms in which to recover, so I lay for two days in a ward for the poor, the ailing, the old, we all were lying on metal cots, semi-ignored by overworked staffers. I stared at the ceiling, craving a cigarette. From the shaking old man lying in the cot beside me I learned of a solarium some fifty feet away, with ash trays, and planned a trip with my IV. But poor Barbara said, Aren’t you in too much pain to make the trip? Perhaps you should wait one more day. So I just pictured what it would be like to have my next cigarette, holding it between my right index and middle fingers, or tamping the filtered end on the palm of my hand for a tighter draw, or the draw itself filling my upper chest. Lying among the poor groaning mostly black ward patients, I closed my eyes and held my yellowed fingers to my nose. The next day I was moved to a semi-private room with Vincent as my roommate. He had just been operated on as well, for a respiratory problem, he told me. He cleansed his lungs several times a day, sitting up on the edge of his bed, facing me, breathing into a tube connected to a pulsing machine, his eyes calmly watching me watching him. Most days his friends from an East Side Italian deli near where he had worked as a dental assistant for over 40 years snuck in sandwiches on crusty bread that dripped of egg plant and hot peppers and olive oil, and on the side we ate chunks of moist imported provolone which crumbled in our fingers. We watched John Dean testify against Nixon on the TV above his bed, Vincent scowling, disgusted by the dishonor of one betraying his friend. Vincent was a handsome man with an expressive lively face, bushy eyebrows, flowing white hair, and an emaciated body, ribs and elbows and neck that I could see through his hospital gown as he sat and faced me, his eyes smiling, only one of us left three weeks later to never have to think of smoking again.

Sweater days

Sweater Days

We moved to Hopewell Junction, New York in September 1964. God I guess I must have been a delicate child. I mean it was 10^th grade for Christ’s sake, what was I doing lying on the bathroom floor trying to cool my headache on the tiles the first day of Roy C. Ketcham high school. Must have been that new-paint smell, that new house, the cow footprints on the empty lot next door, the stark brown new neighborhood in a former cow pasture, no lawns no trees no fall flowers, dust on the road where I would soon walk to meet the bus where that smirking prick of a fellow 10^th grader, Loren, would sense my weaknesses, the crowded school halls, my mother psychologically beside me, where the gay 10^th grade English teacher named Dick something would have told my mother I should try out for plays to meet people—he didn’t say try out for the tennis team, or soccer, or God, baseball—, aware only of my mother, knocking on the bathroom door, her panicking voice saying it was cool enough out to wear my favorite, lemon-colored, button-down, mohair sweater, wouldn’t that be nice?

The yellow brick road

spotlight

/i grew up understanding judy gar-

land her heart pounding beneath her

blue and white dress i walked with her

on the kansas dirt in patent-leather shoes

looked up to where she was singing to the sky

at what we couldn’t see where we couldn’t fly as if as             children

we saw the future together the yearning the                                    know

-ing the love of pretending to love making be-

lieve that yearning was a good thing that

reaching and never finding was a good

thing the lights on your face the aud-

ience loud and screaming inhuman

adoring addicted to the need to

never love yet be loved/

Old friend

Ivory and Ebony

It’s been years since last

they played together sweetly

a team of eighty-eight,

a clarion, a chorus line.

After all, they’re

ninety years old, their

bones brittle, their

teeth chipped, their

joints stiff, some ligaments

useless and dangling

and their poor neglected

underbellies are

unpadded and rub pain-

fully against their hips.

And still, their throats

earnestly ring

against the odds

against each other

beyond the sour day,

and still they reach

for harmony, a recollection of

a Christmas party

a friend’s smile at the door

a lover’s forgiveness.

Herman Melville

Before the storm

A man with a mop of hair, propped on his bike in the middle of Old Helderberg Road, talks on a cell phone, a block away from where Herman Melville went to high school, both the man and Melville young Albany locals wondering about the future, recording this day in time. My son, on a stay in Tel Aviv, tells me on his cell phone that he read in the NY Times that Hitler’s bodyguard died yesterday, he was 97. Old age, World War II, fading from direct memory as our fathers die. Today people are clinging to September 11th, talking about it with strangers, remembering where they were, what they were like at the time, talking on cell phones, forming a reason for its place in the one and the all. When I was small I saw a newsreel at the Syosset wide-screen movie theatre showing a reunion of Civil War veterans, with grinning, toothless survivors of the North army and the South in mock war poses then laughing together; hobbled on wooden legs, shaking their canes jauntily at each other. Afterwards, I watched “Around the World in 80 Days” in Todd-AO, about two relatively small men racing history and time, ending with a day found that they thought was lost forever. Which days would we want to replay, which stories rewrite, which memories erase? Our very worst days, our very best ones. Stop, take the phone call, make your point, remake the moment, before it all happens, before the storm, then get back on the bike and rush ahead and confound history and time, right here along Old Helderberg Road.