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.

November 22nd

Rabbitman

The teacher gave lessons
We could use later

Against shiftlessness and sloth

But he couldn’t look us straight in the eye

Me in the front row with the longing mouth

Hot for Miss Caron’s slipping buttons

He was called Rabbitman almost to his face by the Italian punks

Who left carrots on his desk on Mondays
The greens of which he tweezed between

His index finger and thumb

His eyes were low as a beaten dog’s
Staring down for some time after them

Into the metal garbage can
Near his tasseled shoes under the desk
He cried when Kennedy died

In front of me

His shoulders collapsed
The back of his pant legs

Rumpled on the edge of the desk
We couldn’t look

His soft heart digging a desperate hole

His shoulders shaking his suit

Me who didn’t know what to think about anything—

God, I’d never seen his pants so wrinkled

A neighbor

Phenomena

It snowed in August.
I was barbecuing; a neighbor stood at my fence.
“Is that snow?”
Usually the neighbors don’t talk to us
Nor we to them; we nod if they pass by.
If they don’t wave back we nod again
At an airplane or a chipmunk rummaging over privet roots.
“I think it’s just ashes from the charcoal,”
But to myself I noted they were windlessly falling,
My nose was wet, and white dots fogged my glasses.
“What next?” he said, his shoulders slumped.
He was a tallish man who another neighbor,
An Italian ex-nun, told me
Had once suffered a nervous breakdown.
“Maybe we’re both seeing things,” I said.
I didn’t say going crazy.

The snow was like summer flies.
There were no clouds in the sky;
It fell from the trees two yards away
Where a lady had just died;
It fell from the golden eagle
Atop the umbrella protecting my picnic table.

“What next?” and he scratched at his bare knee.
I flipped a burger and rolled a dog;
A piece of charcoal hissed and smoked
As the snow started coming down now like it really meant it.

The 22nd century

 A friend of mine’s son appears to be gay. My friend loves his son and secretly hates gay men, although some of his close friends are gay men. My friend is a football fan, played football in Pop Warner, broke a few teeth, his own and others, broke a leg, was really too small for the sport, but overachieved until concussions made playing impossible. Aggressively he pursued the arts instead, wrote stories about physical oppression and unlikely heroes. His stories were very funny and bleak and thin; they lacked humanity, they smirked. He himself had a complexed need to overachieve as a man, to please his own father, who is dead and even if he were alive would never admit to being pleased, a creature of the mid-20th century, his son, my friend, bridging the gap between centuries, would simply help his father to his feet, try to make him a hero; while the grandson, the truth teller, the young boy who appears to be gay, will someday shine, have sons of his own, and life on earth in the late 21^st century will be so much his, so different, and his children, our children's children, will be afraid of nothing.

Recovering

She slept on the floor, which was fine. She had been sleeping in the recliner, the bed being so high above the ground, so precarious waking up and staring down from its edge, tipping, her arms useless, her nightdress against the sheets like water on glass, sliding, and inside her head everything lopsided, leaning to the left and down, down. The recliner was like the arms of a big gentle daddy, her solid big-armed daddy and she slept so sweetly in those arms. But the floor, where she now found herself, seemed fine in its own right, she wished she had thought of it before. No use wondering how she got there and why she was wearing a green party dress, it's just where she was, no looking back, only forward to where she would now spend her nights, and days.

Twenty years ago

Church in Aravaca

I stood outside;
a narrow street was swallowed in its shadows;
I watched a boy with many bags
seated on hard earthen steps
behind the rectory.

A sullen man stood
beneath a late-flowering tree
overgrowing the churchyard
against the fence, smoking.

In a tobaca I slowly ordered
postcards of the church
and a beligraphica.

Hoping for some stamps,
I was given a choice
of cigarette lighters from a
cardboard box.

I sat, on the park
bench, a  pew beneath
the spires, church swords clenched
with sunlight;
the tobacconist washed
the stones around my feet;
I wrote home,

-A sad boy with many bags waited
for the rectory doors to open.
A man, angry and thin, dark,
in flowering trees, the street of Aravaca, the closed Church,
he smoked away, the shadowy morning-

Posing

The platform against the wall in the middle of the studio was framed by a semi-circle of stand-up easels and stools, with flat tables on either end of the room. A thin, rough-shaven man with a slight Euopean accent fussed with drawing paper and signup sheets, a bit unsure of whether he had enough determination to settle everyone down and get the life-drawing session underway. The model was a small woman with braided grey hair tied above her head; she sat beside a space heater in a checkered bathrobe; her brows and shoulders showed wear or perhaps worry, as she quietly removed her slippers and prepared to disrobe; she stretched her arms in the air above her and bent her back and her hips. I felt that beneath her unsmiling expression was curiosity as if she wanted to make eye contact but it wasn’t what she did as a nude model; eye contact would get in the way; from the very first moments of the gathering of nervous sketchers she was to be a pliant body, holding 1 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, and 30 minute poses, in charge not only of what we would draw but how we would feel about her. Every pose included a downward glance suggesting melancholy but really showing only superiority and control. Yet her naked body—the thin crease lines in her skin above her hips when she twisted in position, the short sharp line of her backside curving up toward her spine in repose, the dark wrinkled nape of her neck below her hair—told its own story without words. She was being paid to expose her arms and ears and breasts and belly and braids; her choices of position, her tilted head, her delicate fingers and ankles, her frowning lips, exposed her as well, and it was that which I missed in my awkward work.

Father Time

In a dream I needed consoling, so she consoled me at first with a hug, which was normal, and then with a kiss, which was unusual, her lips yielding, full of forgiveness and anticipation, then her eyes, rueful, apologetic. I awoke and drew a Father Time without passion, without anger, not even a face, just an arm with a hand covering a head.

Aria

How They Rehearsed Regret

She shakes
Don’t Don’t Don’t,
Referring apparently
To his playing the one song
From old sheet music with
Chords transposed in pencil
From the tryout days
When her belly was against his back
Her polished nails on his shoulders
Each then thinking of her breath,
Of her posture, of her “placement”
Their future then trembling together
Already encased
In their brief strange crush of love.

Ben's hair

A few weeks before he died, I took Ben to see him in the Good Samaritan nursing home. It was warm and sunny for October; he was miserable that day, sniping at me, avoiding looking at me, surly, fighting with his pillows. Ben, then 11, stood at the side of the bed. “Joe,” he said, “I just got my hair buzzed.” Joe confused by the boy he'd cradled as an infant. Ben continued. “Joe,” he said, “would you like to touch it?” Joe’s hands almost translucent; old and lean but still beautiful and atremble, waiting for something sweet.  Ben leaned down,  took Joe's left hand, raising it over his head; bending down he put Joe’s hand on his hair and Joe touched it. Then, a rapture on Joe's face and in the slow touch of his fingers, the moment so tender and Joe so calm and happy and unafraid for the moment lightly touching Ben’s soft hair, and Ben sat with him. "Does it feel good, Joe?" he asked.

Inexplicably her eyes go deep

Only when we’re alone
And in the house does my dog
Listen to my whistling

And when she does
Something happens to her
Spiritually

It’s a mystery
But inexplicably her eyes
Go deep within

And her thoughts cloud
Into a pre-life
Of an old grandmother in mourning

Recalling children
Who have pre-deceased her
And whose faces

She is trying to remember
Her face in wonder
Of her choices

Without self-judgment
But tunneling to the past
With a fearless intent.

Her delicate place

Her Delicate Place

Her delicate place
was in the smile hidden behind
my car window, beneath
my cap, under
my grey wool scarf holding
my breath.

My delicate place
was in her eyes shamed within
her attendant’s cage, between
her shaking fingers inside
her blue-sleeved suit around
her thin shoulders beneath
her slow, low brows.

Our delicate place
is in her creaseless face upon seeing me,
in my breathless trance between
the before and the after of
my otherwise calloused
smiles.

Heaven

The high sky above Albany is the cold breath of angels tonight, with misting circles around the moon the color of their eyes and their wings, orange and golden and pink, the stars in some obedient order of uncalculable physics in the moon’s white shadows. There is no doubt that God is at work here, quiet above my house, on this cold and crisp and all-knowing night; he's making plans for the next storm, surely to arrive in time for rush hour.

Lucky penny

Solace

I used to believe in lucky pennies.
I thought it was bad luck
not to pick one up,

that if your eyes spotted one
and you didn’t bend down
and pinch it
and slip it into
the pocket of your jeans

where it might co-mingle
with less lucky coins that were
impressive reminders against your thigh
of slow old slides and turns and dips,
hope-filled piggy banks
that never grew up, and
flipping games
against a curb
you  played alone
against yourself
with nothing to gain,
so you were always the loser,

if you didn’t pick up a lucky penny,
even a dirty one,
you’d pay with a life in ruins,
a sucker’s investment
in a fortune of trouble,
instead of the easement
of the ache of loneliness
for one whole day.

Community theater

In Saratoga Springs, you drive to your audition in the small theater in Saratoga Park. There’s a lush golf course now brown under pines along the entry road on the left, and the Hall of Springs classically sprawling to the right, celebrating the healing waters of Saratoga and holding, oddly, the National Museum of Dance. Once we saw Tony Bennett perform live, a courageous solo concert, bold and sweet and filled with adoration and fame. The audition I attend is quite the opposite, local and almost moribund, with that community theater taste and smell and suffocating personalities who strut and stammer, fret and flounce, waiting to read for Witness for the Prosecution. I am one of them. I recognize a few, those who recognize me pretend they don’t, while a rehearsal for a loud children’s musical yells from a nearby stage. I'm in Saratoga Springs with a Saratoga theater crowd, and some chat among themselves as I try to identify who will be vying for my role. Inside me I am quiet and tired and spent and I know I am only there to observe and walk away, there’s nothing here for me except the delight of a small place of hope and braggadocio, bad English accents and actors a bit unlovely, unglamorous and not quite compelling, and I am there to compete, and I am not.

Old friends

Wet Grass

She looked at her feet and said,

“Will there be grass at the pavilion?”

I looked ahead at the curve of the road

Around the cemetery’s huge rainy field.

I said, “I don’t know, Cliff,” (which was her old name);

“We’ll all proceed in our cars, then we’ll see;

I just don’t know about the grass.”

Her mouth was painted like a face on a cardboard canvas.

Her eyes were black marbles.

“Because,” she said, “I should change out of these,”

and she pointed down at her amber lizard-skin dress shoes.

The funeral, the widow, the old friends holding umbrellas.

And late tonight I’m thinking only about

A confused reincarnation of the old Clifton,

His big swollen feet in girls’ shoes,

The shadows of worry, the ghostly reinvention

Of the way it might have been the first time,

That is, barefoot, in the wet grass.

Her bruised black eyes

Death

I think he thought of orgasm as death
and he thought his new wife was
trying to kill him;
because just thinking about her
lips, wisps of her hair
and her bruised black eyes
made him shrivel.
He had to quiet down,
so he thought about his father
lying uncharacteristically still,
hoping death would pass him by.

Mirror in the fun house

You draw yourself with a pen, with lines, scratches, blots of black, pupils that shine and glower, lids that are heavy, a jowl, a thick chin, tufts of hair that suggest a half opened curtain, bags and shadows and accusations, an old Jew’s forehead, cheekbones with shadows that trace scars of Sicilian scorn, searching challenging hoping that the face looking back at yours might at last reveal, undeniably, a trace, if not a well, of love and accidental depth.

Near "Jaws" Bridge

Sea level

Ben,
Keep calling me
Over the swallowing sea

KingBird black-knifing through the green forest
BlackEyed hare lockjawed on the tawny drive
Friends 40 now 60 now 80

Ben,
My lighthouse my buoy my bell

My child
I see the island
As a hole in the sea

Through
The fearless mist
Keep calling me

60 State Street

The building is Beaux-Art, designed in the late 19^th century by architects York and Sawyer from New York City. The atria is a transforming place, so wide and high, broad and powerful, a grand hall of human dreams and achievement, right here in Albany. Right here on the short street of power Downtown, between the proud D&H Building at the foot to the New York State Capitol crowning the hill, it presents a façade of what Albany fails to achieve: a downtown that pays beautiful homage to its history, a living museum of old New York, its merchants and scamps, its sailors, its cobblestones, its government and money, its backroom deals and its endless, timeless river. It was an appropriate place to be hosting BUILT: Albany’s Architecture Through Artists’ Eyes, a fundraising gala for a hoary nonprofit, Historic Albany. On the old walls and on decorative presentation tables were models of tribute and idealism, photos of back street decay, drawings of contradictions and contrasts, there was bitterness, and blind love, and wistful affection, and political commentary in the form of two- and three-dimensional art, a display of the visionaries and judges, the engineers and wizards of our little art world. And there were people, hundreds of them, some of the area’s most well-heeled patronesses, some of the area’s fashionably famous artists, others historians with a passion for old buildings in need of preservation and a yearning for re-use and rejuvenation. The crowd was so genuine (mostly), the art so inventive and smart and provocative, and 60 State Street, larger-than-life larger-than-Albany York and Sawyer masterpiece, a haven of wishful thinkers, and their grand vision of what, alas, Albany could have been.

Visiting hours

Prism

There’s an attempt to make her look

alive, her hair done up,

not like she wore it

but like a ‘50s model with curls,

and there’s a blush of

make-up on her cheeks,

like a flush of orange blood.

The skin between her fingers

is papery and peeling

her nails polished with

crawling daisies painted on their tips,

and on her left hand

her diamond engagement ring

a prism of gaiety

and in a moment I’ll shake

her husband’s hand,

which is in a fist

as he stands beside her pillowed head.