THE POETRY CHALLENGE
Who writes THE BEST POETRY
in America today?
(c) copyright 2007, David B. Axelrod
|
THE POETRY CHALLENGE Who writes THE BEST POETRY in America today?
(c) copyright 2007, David B. Axelrod |
|
|
HOME REMEDIES TWO SONNETS IN FEAR OF CANCER When I listen to a Concert I Want to Move Campsite,
(for Alan and Carol) One pound of carrots, give or take a beet for coloring. A centrifugal juicer, stainless steel container. Thick, pulpy fluid, downspout to fill a 6 oz. cocktail glass. "Only $200 for the machine," he brags. "Taste it! It's terrific!" One swing and all my mouth cries out for artificial flavors, sugar, additives. Seeing my face, he seizes the drink and downs it as quickly as an alcoholic. Later, discussing what things can kill, he says that nuclear plants and DC-10's are dangerous, citing statistics, quipping: "Chicken Little only has to be right once!" I point out that dying is easy-- less than a minute and you are gone, unconscious of any pain. "It's thinking about dying that fills one with fear." "Oh no," he says, "I'm not afraid. I have my healthy foods." He creeps to the edge of the hedges on the darkest night, his bee bee gun beneath a surplus army jacket. This is where he went to school. He's older now and knows the rules and how to break them. Raising the polished butt beside his chin he fires, pointing at the room where he was kept--one quick report of well-pumped air-- and runs for it. The pellet punctures 3/8ths inch glass, a burst of silver petals through the other side, one violent glass flower for the teacher. A white saltbox house beneath a bleached white sky: white shingled roof reflecting sunlight; white asbestos siding still damp with haze; a white Pinto hatchback in the driveway with a white Virginia license plate and CB #KAFW- 9802. White concrete walk to the street and neighborhood school where all the white kids are learning about the world. (for the Scammaccas) With the subtlety of a pickpocket a finger of cloud reaches for the sun, a gold watch over the seasons. One barely notices the cold slight of hand which follows, so suddenly the summer has been stolen. Marilyn, b. 1947, nearly died, 1979, a regular day early spring, 32, an accountant for a heating and plumbing firm, rushed to the hospital, coronary, the ambulance sending its early warning; they saved her, despite the kind of chemistry that blocks the arteries. Now, her clothes don't fit and she has twenty pounds to go; no salt, no sugar, no fat, no stress, no heavy exercise, no job, no cash, no relatives who give a damn. At 32, there must be something to say yes to. Her boyfriend has left her. The doctor says she's doing fine. TWO SONNETS IN FEAR OF CANCER Ù 1. THE ODDS MAKERS Awakened simultaneously at one, we argue who's to blame, whose cough resounds percussive, whether health foods help prolong one's life; count careful people still struck down. We quote the facts, make odds and place our bets: In WW I, one out of four was killed. Now one if four will die a cancer death. An hour--no sleep. The bottle rattles, pills half gone; we drink a glass of tepid juice. Our terrors slow their ticking, numbed by drugs that stop diurnal clocks. At noon, transfused with sugared tea, we slump behind our mugs, ignore the nitrates bursting in our guts, the table strewn with bacon rinds and butts. Crises, you never let me comfort you, would rather sit alone in dark and cry, as is we hadn't been together through ten years of births or watched our close friends die. To show your rage at life you call the cops, phone threats of self-annihilation, 9- 1-1. I wake when the receiver drops. Dazed, I find you flushed with fear and blind with tears. You only asked them for protection-- a guard with gun to keep the cancer out. "Don't call again," I beg. "The cops will come and get you." Then who would drive me crazy, shout my fears away, or with her madness, fight to wear me out enough to sleep at night?
The wind sounds the house for cracks. Under my bedcover I picture your car careening home through rain showers at sixty, a mile a minute closer to me. In half-sleep, I calculate time, rate and distance: problems I can't solve. At 26 m.p.h. the water breaks to white-ridged caps. Jets shatter the air enough at 750 to outrun their sounds. I pull back the covers to stand in total darkness, imagine the highway's wet sand-- a shock as I touch the floor. White lines rush toward me, reflective. Wind, rain, plane crash, car wreck excluded, in an hour you will return. In the stillness of my bedroom all distances converge through wind- thrust vehicles, across highways of sound and seas of air. A man has found a cheap alternative source of energy. He rolls his junk and newspapers into logs to burn. He calculates The Times is worth more as fuel that he paid for the news. He marvels at the small pile of white ash when the combustion is complete; plays with the crusts of charcoal sometimes left, leadened, sulfurous. He burns an old book. The pages are read off one by one by the flames. The words go up in smoke. He burns a photo album, watches the silvered nitrates flaring out one last bright image. Soon, he runs out of books, of photos, of scraps. He burns his clothing. His hair. At last, his skin. He is left by the old heat stove, cooking himself on a slowing flame. He hopes his carcass will be done in time for supper. 1. The wind carves a figure from the dark, hollows the ears to let it hear; the orifices open, breathing. The wind marks out the hollow eyes. 2. Wind create me Wind inspire me Wind enter my body where you can 3. Cracks are "The Enemy" letting drafts of notices in to bother us. What can we do to stop the Wind. man? Wracking our crickety necks with notices we dare to read, old Windman moves to us in dark. He's like steam on the windows, growing larger. Hold your breath; he'd entered the envelope of you. 4. Tell us about Uncle Sam, Windman. Move like an anthem; your hiss is our salute. Wave the flag. Blow our brains out with a gush of blood. 5. Windman is the whistler who draws us to his car, drags us in, drives us ten miles away and beats us, only to make peace when he licks and cools our wounds. Windman, the gentle killer, moving through crowds, leaving no traces like the practiced wife beater beating his wife. 6. What does the Windman eat for dinner? A swallow of air. A burp as a compliment. But what does the Windman do for a living? Drives a fast car with an air- cooled engine. Where does the Windman rest (if he does)? on the edge of his bed with his feet in the air. How does the Windman treat his lover? What goes lightly all over like sweet gas makes giggles. But what does the windman do about death? When the ashes are scattered the wind cleans them up. (A Notarized Poem.) The oak clings to its leaves, a lover unwilling to let go its dead: we pay too much for mourning I have read so here are my wishes. November--the crisp leave chafe, and I am writing to save you money. Turn me quickly into clay--cremate me and mix my dust with water, mold me into any shape for kids to play. Or let me, simply blow away, like oak leaves hard to let go, but soon enough forgotten. No expensive plots or stones or coffins-- just the fast escape of energy and little matter. Less effort than a tree--dispose of me. Only remember, I loved you even more than poetry.
Grief is a formality. It greets you at the door, astrologer, teller of truths. Grief is a throbbing in the blood, a pulsing headache, a cheap TV commercial promising a cure. I am asking you, why can't grief be a scream or a cry? Why should it be that any stranger can offer sympathy? People are paid or pay: business is business. Grief is also a commodity, a future to be traded, a transaction made in tears, barreled like oil to bring you a share in someone's misery. So I am telling you to buy from me, buy from me: and I'll pay you back for all my grief. Ù THE SUFFERING GOES BOTH WAYS (A "Swastika Poem" for William Heyen.) The German-American boy of six, what could he understand of war or pain? His father, scraping the swastikas off where they'd been smeared on the front door-- the boy was only six. His immigrant father worked in a defense plant on riveting the fuselage of Douglas DC-3's. What could a boy know of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald? When the news came that Roosevelt was dead he cried because he couldn't go to the picture show his mother promised. But Hitler, hidden deep within the bunkers beneath Berlin, stamped and screamed the gods and sent a sign his Reich would rise again from ashes and bombed- out cities. When the boy was twenty-three he visited Germany and the family who'd stayed behind. One older aunt served tea and strudel which he savored, but he had to ask her, what was she doing during the war? How could it have happened? It was then she dropped the smile-- the fond expression for this brother's son-- and in a voice like testimony at a trial, she explained: Your Uncle Max and I, we had our camera store. He was alive then. We had a family and our business. So I would walk to work, past the train tracks and the depot and I would hear some voices moaning and once I think I saw a hand sticking out of a boxcar. but it was the war. That wasn't anybody's business. What could I do? Once . . . once I was walking home and the smoke -- you know, the smoke -- smelled it and I shouldn't say this. It was late, supper time you know, and I couldn't help myself from thinking it smelled like pot-roast cooking. So very him her response, he finally understood. (Spring, 1977 -- The New York Times reports the 1,000th victim of violence in Ireland since British troops were sent to keep peace in 1969.) This was no accident or else it wouldn't count. John Gallagher in '69 was the first. Now Corbet is the thousandth, the bullet holes punched in the skull, the clotting blood, his eyes as wide in terror as a suffocating fish. In the Irish countryside, as with any war, people till their fields under fire, wincing as explosions irrigate their plot; or wounded, they water the crops with blood. In cities the alternatives come clad in steel -- tank cars not tractors, discovering mines hidden in the streets. A street sweeper cleans Mr. Corbet's blood away. Another milestone in the aging war, a Catholic funeral; another marble tombstone in the churchyard placed in headline as casually as a clerk filing forms. You think that it is hidden because your front lawn is frosted neatly as it was raked last fall; things put away, the Christmas lights set to blink at dusk, but out back it is still summer -- the deck chairs askew where the wind has edged them up against your leaf-filled pool, the water churning browner; a cracking snake of hose, a rusting grill. A half-deflated raft floats limp as someone' body waiting to be boxed and buried. Ù WHEN I LISTEN TO A CONCERT I WANT TO MOVE (For Aaron Kramer.) Who is the fool dancing in the concert aisles giving the conductor competition? Over the footlights he lofts spinning amid the cellos (his favorite instruments). Where did this idiot learn to drive his semi- conscious through an orchestra? Always, one moving in the audience, a drumming in his blood, a need to dance what others only dream. (For X. J. Kennedy.) In America poets can read with their backs to the window with no fear of official bullets. They can read with windows open, blinds up, their voices carrying over the traffic moving red green red past their perches. This is not so, we know, in some countries where one must close the windows, draw the blinds and whisper to small groups of people who later find friends to whisper what they hear. There, poetry is held dangerous and dear. In America, poets can read with their backs to, or facing a window . . . imagining an audience was there. I have driven this road so many times my passengers throw their hands across their faces, gasping at curves, but tonight I am alone, and while it is 10 p.m. on a late May night, it is so dark I know the road by instinct only. A sudden cold shower rising as dense mist from the concrete, I test my courage, accelerate toward the clouds, taking cues from either side for what I can't see ahead. At 65 I feel the tires sliding, the rear begins to fantail and in another moment I'll centrifuge out of control. My pulse races, my hands tight on the hard rubber wheel. What we know of death we learn in these moments and I laugh through the S-curve certain that I have triumphed. George visits me like an ancient martyr, his hair unkempt, eyes blackened from lack of sleep. He talks till 2 a.m. for fear of stopping. Others have slept on slabs of stone, bricks for pillows. His wife, at 38, is dying-- a lump as heavy as clay. They say they cannot operate. When he rests his head on her he says he hears it. George is proficient at filing papers. His fingers move him through details of the day. To dress each morning he imagines consent forms for surgery printed under his buttons. Out in the garden, where she sits blankly in the sun, the vegetables have wilted from an early frost. She planted them before the hospital and diagnosis. Now it is a question of whether the aunt who does canning will think it proprietous to pick the green tomatoes. You who question marriage and its worth, who wish for trains at night to chase your mate and crush her to release you-- an accident less gruesome than an illness-- hear George's cry at night and give him license. Perhaps you love's outlived its usefulness, a car that's not worth fixing. He only asks that he can still go shopping, bring home strength and hold her in his arms. (Written on the sixtieth anniversary of the Titanic which sank at 2:20 a.m. on April 15th, 1912, with the loss of 1,513 lives.) We round off casualties to the nearest handy number, with our mouths full of water and suffocating, we round and make the death of 1,500 (forget 13) who perished, not all from drowning: some from exposure, a suicide or two, some crushed by others, some attacked and murdered. Time and the waters wash our histories, blotting out details, treating the past like a hit-and-run victim sprawled face down in a puddle, unable to breathe. We recall events as casually as water rising below a placid deck, as relaxed as bubbles from the corners of mouths. Ù
CAMPSITE, The couple who played jumping jack in the water, nude, both giggling; after, tangling waist-high intimate at a farther extremity of the beach; who kissed like and his water nymph, writhing in brine; walked proudly out of the water to eyes aslant, glancing at them out of curiosity or lust; sit dressed in dungarees now, tee shirts loosely fit, not even leaning close to talk over the supper table; looking quite usual, but feeling secretly naked. All those years of scrapping iron, furniture, old clothes, he saved for her in the old black safe, combination his secret, then on no real occasion, dressed up in his good silk suit and bowler, walked in the local jeweler's to strike a deal, placed the small felt box beside his pocket watch. He gave her the ring that evening: fine platinum, large diamond, seven chips to seat it in the center. He thought her face would shine enough for even his weak eyes, but Nanny, who pinched her children's toes in discount shoes and soured herself on stringy rouslefleish, was adamant: yes, it was hers; she would not return it, never wear it, nor forgive him. All that suffering had to be for a reason. My mother liked to look in other people's windows as she went walking. "Just curiosity," she would say, "to get some notion of how my rooms could look." She'd put me in the stroller, or older, I would march along with her, stretching to see: a man in the kitchen elbowing a metal table, his kids' toys spread across the linoleum, supper a greasy odor, not something to be seen. But in richer neighborhoods (not ours), she'd hesitate a step or stop-a slight hop on one foot, higher, to see above the sill: the Louis Quatorze loveseat, the couple on their crushed-velvet couch, blanched colorless by TV light, in the shadows. Curiously, though she's older (and so am I), my mother still looks in windows and her house hasn't been redecorated in a dozen years. When I was a little kid, Ma took me to specialists who couldn't practice in Massachusetts-chiro- practics. We'd drive with Uncle Harry (who could have been a doctor but got spinal meningitis) forever to new Hampshire. It was always late and dark when we'd arrive and go right in. We never waited except after I took off my shirt and sat balanced on his table to hear my list of allergies related. Then he'd begin to rub me firmly like a father should, until I trusted him. I remember the white flash and pain when he'd snap my neck. After a year of that, there was the doctor who x-rayed my head for asthma, the dietary therapist, the doctor who prescribed the dozen pills a day. What made her think there was a cure? (For Jessica.) Daily, I surrender you in pigtails, pleated skirt, to the school bus, rationalize the system that takes you away: you will be stronger after their trials, surer of their faults if you endure. Over tea at breakfast I see you at your desk, head bowed in prayer, thanking some Creature for your milk and cookies. Sorting silverware, I hear the jingles that you learn, substitutes for something sensitive and fine: seasonal songs or patriotic music. In my study, I picture you with Dick and Jane, their will-less ways, complaint. I stay home, a low-paid lehrer. You board a school bus to return, the window in a language as crude as commands. Quietly, as I greet you, I grow bitter at my poverty. Uses everything we cook with to play with a kitchen crook pie plates in her pillowcase cups in the carriage a coarse salt trail from the cupboard to her room. Peek around the corner catch her frying her favorite marbles. She will not lie: "I took this pan to cook for Daddy and here are the apples of my eye."
|
