Ridgewood (Where We Wait)

We take the most delicious train

to the Queens-Brooklyn border to get here

Where everything is liminal, uncertain, undecided

Even the foundation, Arbitration Rock, at the house on Onderdonk

Was buried for centuries, dug up, and chucked on another imaginary line

The streets are on a grid, and the border on a diagonal

making a stair-stepping hypotenuse of the confused

A challenge to put your time to good use

even on the oz-like yellow brick road on Stockholm

You hear Poles on the street muttering “Marnowanie mojego

czasu tutaj” through the bachata dripping

from the apartments above the stores on Fresh Pond Road

Two of the best restaurants in the boroughs

Rosa’s pizza and Zum Stammtisch mark

the north and south borders of the hill where we wait

During the seventy-seven riots, Ridgewood

seceded from her stepsister, broke from Boswijk and Breuckelen

-

There’s racism here like carbon monoxide smoke:

at the Ridgewood Y, a man sweats through his shirt

revealing swastikas pierced through the skin underneath

and the Romanian dentist down the street drilling

says “Cred ca am pierd timpul meu aici”

through the machinery scream and burning enamel

she won’t say this if you understand what she means

Walking past the 99 cent stores and the pharmacies,

remembering that there is good, fast, and cheap

But you can only have two of them at the same time,

Crazy Loretta, under her navy knit woolen hat

in her pink sweatsuit and winter coat, smokes

her shaking hand-rolled cigarettes below the train

trestle grinning with her jaw-jutting through

her inch thick specs. She waggles her chicken bone fingers

saying, “Hiya honey” when you walk by.

If you are brave enough to stop and talk to her,

she’ll tell you that her nephew plays

for the Texas Rangers and her daughter

is a doctor and she’ll probably give you bedbugs

She’ll tell you, fascinated, like a child: “when you squish them - the blood comes out”

She’ll tell you the same thing tomorrow - Loretta forgets.

In her mind, a phrase like green smoke from her youth

Ich glaube, ich bin meine Zeit hier

The playgrounds are packed with children

practicing how to swear, the girls huddled

reading Twilight like the Bible, and the boys

huddled reading the girls like the Bible

A woman yells to her son to come home a third time

and mutters “Creo que estoy perdiendo mi tiempo aquí”

Buried in Machpelah Cemetary less than a mile from my house,

is the place Houdini is still staging his greatest escape

He has a wide audience. Sometimes I think there are more dead

residents of Ridgewood than living ones. The cemeteries stretch

the borders of the appropriate spilling into Christ

the King high school’s front lawn. Driving Cypress Hills street,

the Manhattan skyscrapers rise looking tomb-toothed parallaxed and

blurry through ephemeral sepulchres, stones, and cement angels pointing at the sky

On one of the stones it says simply: Videor perdo temporis hic

I think we are wasting our time here.

Moving Pictures

[VOICE-OVER]
Hollywood directors don’t get it right about the sound
When she pressed her chest against the ground steel cylindrical round
of the shotgun, and splatter-painted her heart and its protective
gear all over 72 Fuller Avenue, Islip, New York - I heard it.
It sounded nothing like artillery fire. It sounded nothing
like a fusillade of cannon. It sounded slapstick. [l.s. ext. through window]
I rolled onto my elbow and her working draft epitaph:
“Sounds like Donna is having a bad morning”

[FLASHBACK]
The acrid smoke awoke us peeling our eyes like onions
I poked around the grounds, searching for a source, (what I always do)
Jan knocked downstairs at Donna’s door
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Donna said, “I caught my toaster oven on fire”
They share a laugh, I relax, and Jan burrows back into bed.
I open the windows, draw diaphragm-deep, stretch back my head,
exhale spring-delicious air. Then, the sound, like someone tripping over a chair,
a plastic-bag pop and a crumpling thud, and my ironic, unfortunate, eulogy.

[REAL TIME – U.A. SHOT ON FRONT OF CAR]
Screeching Camaro tires. They get this one right. Through the fourth wall the car brakes.
I pull on terrycloth shorts, someone is screaming, running before I am awake,
Someone is screaming; barefoot rugburn down the stairs. I punch Donna’s door
The shrieking dissolves to a keening: “Call the police! Donna’s dead!” [DOLLY-ZOOM.]
I send Jan to call 9-1-1, as the ambiguous someone comes into focus - a man? “What happened?”
I yell at the blank whiteness. From the other side of the door – voice trapped in a can
“The police said we have to call from down here” said Jan in a voice too low;
“What?” I say to Jan. “You have to open the door,” I say to the unknown.

[INTERIOR SHOT B:] Pan to distraught man with blood-covered hands
Attempting to open a door with a knob of smooth brass

[HAND-HELD]
The man, five foot five, paces the pastel living room retching obscenity prayers
Wore a white t-shirt covered in gore. He gripped at his broom-bristle brown hair
The pre-set pea-green phone hung anachronistically from the kitchen wall.
I play fullback; blocking with my body as Jan and I enter from the hall
She strides to the phone and lifts the receiver. Glitch. “The phone’s dead”
“It’s off the hook in the bedroom,” he sobs onto the couch. She starts to head
there, and breaks the 180 degree rule, running out the back door, and down the street.
So there’s me, potential killer, and ‘what’s behind door number three;’ I chose door number three.

[P.O.V] The entire bedroom was pink, before Donna redecorated
She is sprawled like a painted nude on the bed, among the stuffed animals,
legs bent and twisted to the side protecting her pudenda,
She is also wearing a white t-shirt, this one however, has a rather large rip
Between her breasts, red all the way down.
It matches her hair and her panties match the pink of the walls
I see all this while trying not to see – like a Polaroid, with color slide intensity.
The gun, satisfied with the shot, leans rakishly against the wall.

This the Hollywood fuckers get perfectly. The blood splatter and spray
As if from impish children with paint cans, Pollocking all over the walls in play.
After fuck-you-ing the 911 operator until the sirens and lights arrived, the interrogations
and explanations for continuity, ‘she called him before she…, he moved her body, emotion,
he was her ex, she was on heart medication, made her depressed,’
No toaster oven but a bathtub of burned diaries, my Allen Smithee mind
repeats: “Let’s get out of here, let’s get out of here, let’s get out of here”
hoping for the nitrate to ignite, or the arms of the end slate to snap together.

believe in the G.U.T.

I don’t have time to count these syllables
craft and shift words like hairs on a bald scalp,
wait for a fickle muse to share the buzz,
& tickle me back when I am past her help.
Refuse crude allusion through stolen fruit;
the works of lifeless best left to decay,
and weed the useless words out by the root-
the parrotry dry pedants use for play.
Instead, we build up beauty from the bone
and viscus. Haul false hauteur to the ground,
enthusiastic, energy un-honed,
draught our laughs until we have half-drowned.
Around the ways I’ll waste my days with you -
a solipsistic solecism, so untrue.

Allie's Mitt

When the radiation sickness yellowed me,

As the chemo shook out every red hair that I had,

And my white blood cells were a deconstructing artillery,

I scanned the green writing through eyes filmy, cataracted:

Deep grooves cut into the leather of memory

Written in the fused scent of mink oil,

And the good, clean dirt of the ball field,

Driven, discolored, so deep into the laces

Simple to slip on the player’s right hand

He used to cover the white scars and stitch-mark traces

The mitt that, for hours, we used to play catch with

we would be Feller, Newhouser or Ford

(fewer remembered backs of the catchers)

Alternately glaring down batters or squatting so low

ready to receive the sock in the pocket

And the Dodgers would never get past us,

until dusk made the ball too small to see.

After our team suffered its greatest loss

He carried the glove folded from Ernie’s to the Edmont –

equipment never misplaced. Protected with a cardinal red hat –

half a battery - left at the end, delayed, tearful but happy in the rain

The verse evidence still in green, the poems all arranged:

don’t let me disappear

don’t let me disappear

don’t let me disappear

From heel to web

in Holden’s handwriting.

Performative Anxiety

Longing for the Derridean fairy tale, She

Spins the pages with liminal pixiedust.

He leans in, waiting on the margins to hear his cue

The binary opposites urging resolution

They are in agreement on this

The girl leads him to the stage where fables are made

It plays snippets of Kant’s moral imperative

Like a universal clockwork cockblock

She is afraid and unwilling to be a hypocrite

It’s like alchemy – mercury – a Max Ernst dream

They refrain from comment

He traces the girl’s lips

She pulls back inwardly, as he pulls forward

There is little actual movement

It is mumbling about Jesus in some numb dead tongue

But the prologue is finished. The scene begins;

the parts that lead to his entrance are reached;

They are attentive - attuned. The girl moans textually

She is frozen nearly zombie-white with fear,

It finds its privileged voice invoking logos,

But he must speak the lines as they are written and

play his hour upon the stage…or is truth a fiction?

The girl lights his cigarette. They applaud.

Once upon a time

Opposing Goliath

“For who is this uncircumcised Philistine,
that he should defy the armies of the living God?”
(1 Samuel 17:26)

I charge down the arched hall that leads only to him

past so many squares and unfinished slaves;

He rises, twice Goliath in feet, meter or cubit

with head of Colossus and conquering hands

and I am gripped as if he were a Kubrickian monolith

He’s too much for the church

Tensed glaring contempt in contrapposto

The carved garbage marble discarded -

tossed by Agostino and Rossellino

I gawk, walk, make mumble-some talk

In the room the women come and go,
Misunderstood by Michelangelo.

The Sistine Chapel is overfull

With overfed transsexuals

and what were Eliot’s feelings for Verdenal?

I want to place at the appropriate distance

Another “beloved” hewed from ebony a

Nubian woman posed in an underhand

windmill Jennie Finch pitch

poised to sling her stone at the Philistine

Ontotheology by Number

Ontotheology by Number

for Nikki Giovanni (2009)

Can you tell what kind of man I am

by getting a look at my junk?

do you think you can know me

by what I am throwing out here?

But how some archaeologists and

these miners of mind try to divide the lines;

digging and digging to sneak a peek

I can show you if it pleases you

If I haven’t already

it will take some time

almost as long as

(re)prisoning yourself

into the cave.

Can you know what kind of poet I am

by engaging with me in this moment?

intertwining, analyzing, intertexting

Synthesis

Do you really think you can know me

by these flickers of shapes?

I know that you’ll try

You will shed your scales and

lift your heads so the blindfold

lets in the light

and when you have judged

what is inside of me

what will the resolution

be?

Will

you never hear the words

from me again, or will you

build a religion from my bones?

Either way, I’ll be dead and smiling.