THE POETRY CHALLENGE
Who writes THE BEST POETRY
in America today?
(c) copyright 2007, David B. Axelrod
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THE POETRY CHALLENGE Who writes THE BEST POETRY in America today?
(c) copyright 2007, David B. Axelrod |
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RESURRECTIONS Resurrections Code Blue For Gail, Who Called Herself "Charlie" Steve Comes Back Pickling Seeing the Specialist Cat Walk Toy Maker You've Changed He Said The Critical Weakness A Guide to Suburban Birds Torrey Pines, Mid-Winter, Stony Brook Harbor Speech Therapy If
"Crap shoot. Life's a crap shoot." Her soft eyes fix on me for sympathy. "Once I wanted to be dead," she says. "Tried to snuff myself." The pancake makeup over what beard is left shows the slight beads of sweat. Mascara dilutes with tears. "How long did you feel this way?" I ask in a voice trained neutral by year of interviews. "I've known I was different since I was three. I suffered till twenty-seven." Trans-sexual, a woman with balls, saving for an operation. "The world is whacky, anyway," I say, "Look at me." "Oh no," she reassures me, "I'm comfortable with you. You're probably normal." In my dream, I put my hands up, my head back, dive toward the sky, rising to the other world, thinking "This is the magic we all have, the power that we seek." The unshaven man, standing on the corner dressed in filthy dungarees, ragged work shirt, a strip of greasy towel to assault the window of a car stopped at a light; he seeks the power. The old man lying on the tight-sheeted hospital bed, bare skin exposed beneath a half-opened cotton johnny, bony hand pressed to his temple; he seeks the power. The sixteen-year-old girl, panicking on the birthing table, crying as they prepare her, her ankles tied, a mystery inside; she seeks the power. I rise slowly, press my back against smooth plaster walls, raise my hands to dive, see the light above and yearn for it. Suddenly, terrified, I fight to keep my feet down. "Hold me," I call my wife, asleep beside me. "Hold me down or I will die," Awakened by my cry, she reaches round me: "I'm here, I have you." Anchored fast, I remember what I've dreamed and watch my wife; listen as her breathing deepens. Next day, I tell my friend my dream--my fear of disappearing. He says the right hand holds the power, sends it to the left. Circling his palm over my head, he calms me. He is Abenaki, native American, grows his own food, studies the seasons. It's late March and he asks me to watch him tap the sugar maples on forty acres passed to his hands, ancestral lands. Standing behind his house, we feel the syrup flowing through thawing roots and leave the earth, welcoming what is sweet within us. That night, my wife says she is sick, stomach uneasy. I place my right hand over her belly, my left just at her side to make a circuit; tell her what I've learned. Does she believe me? No need to hear her say--the energy a rush of heat between us an she is cured. This is the medicine we all seek, the power that we have. We dream to find it. CODE BLUE So the doctor left it written on my chart: "pain killers on demand"--a junkie's dream. I'm in the hospital--a skin graft on my leg. It's in 9 p.m. I've read 100 pages of Saul Bellow's Herzog. I've watched TV. I'm bored. I push the button for the nurse and ask for something. What harm in getting stoned, drifting numbly off to sleep? I roll over, pull a corner of my pajamas down the same I've gotten all the other shots. "No," nurse says when she returns. "Here's where its done," and she rolls me back to grasp my arm, find a vein, sting me as she pushes the needle in. She leave me with a wad of alcohol- soaked cotton compressed in the crux of my arm. So what happens then? I die. I feel myself fading-- can barely push the button for the nurse. All I remember is floating in the room, looking down through a circle of heads, people in white robes, wondering if they were angels. Someone ashen white is lying on a stretcher. Someone is counting, "60 over 40, 60 over 40. Damn! We've lost his pulse again. He's dead." I realize the person I see is me. "Wait a minute," I say. "I'm here," and instantly I'm on the stretcher; hear them counting "30 over 10, 40 over 20, 60 over 40. We've got a pulse again." I sleep for fifteen hours. When I awake, I ask a different nurse what happened. "We went code blue with you," she says. "You should have seen them running from every corner of the hospital. "You mean I fainted?: I ask. "Oh no", she laughs we gave you up for dead. We tried adrenaline, the paddles. Just when we quit your heart began to beat again. You say you are an exotic dancer, brag how good you are, rubbing yourself against the wooden rails that separate your bright spot of stage from the small Formica tabletops where guys mostly in their twenties chug beers and cheer you on. "I tease them, let them tuck 5's and 10's in my G-string. If I go bottom- less, I get them good and hot. That's when I really get a lot. I drive them wild;" your shoulders stiffening as you talk, your jaw thrust forward like an angry child. "Come down and watch me." Your eyes dance in a sideward glance; the open buttons of your baggy shirt an invitation. And now there is no chance to see you on the circuit, your hips pumping frustration into every bastard in the bar. Your long brown hair, that whipped you as you whirled, is stilled. Your try- to-catch-me eyes are closed; your half-smile, a tight-lipped, eternal grimace. OD-ed at 21 How far away from everyone you've danced, as if death alone could be exotic. STEVE COMES BACK Your bull neck through the back window of a beat up Cadillac, seated half a head above the steering wheel your white painter's cap. but you died a year ago, outside Tampa where poverty and hope had brought you for a short try again at home improvements. When your wife was dying you needed 3 thou a month for shellfish serum someone said would save her. Every job half done. Get the check, pay the doctor, run to the next paper-hanging, partitioning, paint job. In no time, twenty years of reliability ruined and your wife dead. You told the judge "What you want me to do?" "Pay your bills," he reprimanded you. "The doctors take everything. I can't pay no more." When the judge threatened to lock you up for contempt you laughed and left. They never came to get you, though one troubled daughter got herself arrested. You dreamed of native Naxos, Greece; packed for Florida. In
your mind you felt the pressure building. They found you early in the morning slumped over the wheel, the hood of the '74 Caddy wrapped around a Southern Pine. The coroner skipped the alcohol in the blood, the accident trauma; listed the cause of death as a cerebral hemorrhage. How could he know the bubble had burst long before? (for Lyn Lifshin) You salt your food layers thick spoil a fancy steak disguise home fries preserve yourself in brine washed with coffee through your stained teeth. Too many tastes to mask-- Too many kinds of flesh lovingly toned until their flavors sour swallowing poison instead of life: spoiled fish tough bird rancid meat. Handshakes of salt across your plate, finger-pinches like surprises, slow inverted streams of salt. A poultice complete with crusted edges drying, applied inside you, heating you in your thirsty sleep. SEEING THE SPECIALIST And then there was the Nazi doctor who struck the child between the eyes and struck the child between the eyes and struck the child between the eyes, and I wait, and I wait, and I wait-- each moment another blow so my eyes cross or close and I stagger in my pain, and the doctor comes again to visit for just the moment that he chooses, with a ball peen hammer and a smile. Reaching to shake my hand, he pulls me toward him, his vice grip on my wrist. I struggle. He is smiling all the while. He wears a wool tweed suit and smells of pipe tobacco. I see his hair is thinning, receding to reveal a vast, unwrinkled brow. For a moment I feel his smile--believe it. There are no degrees on the pastel walls. He is not in his own carpeted office. This is the examining room. Suddenly, I remember for one painful second before he strikes, and I know I will be seen again and again by the doctor and I will be told, "Be glad. He is an expert in his field." (for Emily at eight years old) The cat walks into the study as if he owns its, turns on his motor (a delight of snores and groans) and does a cat- walk on my desk before he settles in my lap. My daughter, seated on the floor is doing homework--History and English, Math and Science, a bag of books that builds her biceps and her mind. The cat jumps down to nose among her papers, whack a soft paw at the pencil filling workbook blanks. We watch him at his mindless play. Wishing we could waste our time that way, I say, "I'd like to be a cat." My daughter sighs, "Daddy, do we believe in reincarnation?" Emily asks if dolls really come alive at night. "Why not?" I answer, "They need to play." She does not know the prayers other children say, thanking god, who gives them back their soul each morning so they can awaken. I sit with her until she falls asleep, her toys arranged and ready. "Play people," I ask them--mother, wood with painted curls, father with plastic fedora, baby with red cheeks, "Were you once alive? And did you believe in god until one day, asleep, he stole your soul, reducing you to things stored in someone's toy box?" "But Daddy," Emily startles me, sitting up in bed, "why won't they talk to me? Don't they know I love them?" YOU'VE CHANGED, HE SAID "You've changed," he says, "gotten fatter." "I'm in therapy," I say. "Not half so pale, unlike before; you had an Auschwitz pallor." "I'm in therapy," I say. "You seem much calmer. Have your relaxed? You were a boxing glove in every face "Therapy," I say. "And broken noses still received your smell; not that I'm hinting you weren't well-liked, but like a boxer, waiting for the bell, I'll tell you people used to reel away from you." "Now I'm in therapy," I say. "Oh really? Therapy? And does it help? I'm told those shrinks can't cure a cold!" "In therapy," I say. "and in times like these I need it." I know it is a weakness to believe everything one sees in dreams or reads is true, but I do. I fall in love with every heroine who asks me to love her gently, with slow hands around her waist. I'm just a sucker for a cheap romance. Once, I listened as a student read a story in my workshops. It must have been a dream she'd had, though she said fiction: She was a teller in a bank only there were mirrors on every wall; the carpets, furnishings were fire-engine red. A bandit entered, dressed sleekly, all in black, demanded that she take him to her vault. And though she knew it was wrong she longed to lead him there, past crystal chandeliers, mirrors reflecting red around their faces. Only after he had entered did she scream in fear. I never told her that her dream was true; only reassured her that some men yearn equally for a gentle lover. A GUIDE TO SUBURBAN BIRDS 1. Parking lot Gulls They preen beside puddles squawking over dumpster tidbits. Mother gull astride a paper nest. Young gulls defending their territory defined between white parking lines. Old gulls like sailors too tired to go to sea. 2. Highway Hawks The crows may leave the meadows to pick at a recent roadside kill. Why should they bother with field mice, harder now to find? Here's fast food for any bird. Only, a hundred feet above, just at the edge of the pine barrens, a hawk still spans the sky, waiting for a movement he can identify. 3. Dump Swallows Yes, gulls, circling noisily above a dozer as it spreads their dump truck dinner. And yes, pigeons, perhaps refugees from city streets, cooing in a quieter corner. But also, two swallows on a chain link, trying to decide which home to buy. Atop Torrey Pines State Park where the sun warms a spring sea breeze, no one cares that four phantom jets just turned south toward tumultuous Panama. Surfers 450' below are idle dots, and hikers passing prickly pears, chemise, black sage, know only that the beach trail is not just a walk down but back through 50 million years of history--strata of iron-rich sandstone, fossil oyster shells-- so that for those emerging from crevices carved patiently by infrequent rains, the passing fighters--high as they fly, fast as they disappear--are not half so important as how their sounds merge, finally, with soft surf. MID-WINTER, STONY BROOK HARBOR The man in the Agway oil truck parked by Stony Brook Harbor, eats lunch, drinks on Orange Crush. 52 degrees at midday in February on Long Island and the weatherman promises more. The oilman tilts his plastic bottle, one last swig, but does not hurry, as if to confirm that winter's over, i'm-out-of-oil-burner-stopped emergency calls are far behind. Stretching elbows out behind his head, bright sun illuminates his face. The tide rushes from wetlands leaving mudflats oozing black-- surprisingly free of trash. He reads his Newsday, watches a moment more, starts his route again. Cold lingers in these waters into July. Beyond his truck, twelve or twenty boats, cocooned in blue plastic or graying canvas, await the subtle Sunday afternoons of summer. SPEECH THERAPY People can say what they want with words like windows rattling in the wind and what they say is air articulated through screens and frames, fricatives, sounds hanging like innuendos stretching knotted necks, shades like coatings on the tongue, curtains of conspiracies to silhouette the dead. We break the glass, keyless, open the windows wide with promises of familiar things but find the house is empty, robbed before we came. People say "love" like glass shattering. But is there ever anything to steal? IF If this were the last time I could write, I'd tell you that the red begonias are still blooming in the Indian summer sun. People live, suffer, are healed or die, even as the frost will finally wilt the succulent stems of flowers. Some people think death is an ending. Others believe a move to warmer climates will save them--as if there were a sun belt that could hold their belly in or that the sun could tan away their wrinkles. Dear wife, when I'm gone-- sooner burnt than buried--keep still. Sell what you need to live. Be happy. Complain that summers are too short, that the privet hedges grow faster than our yardman cuts them. Don't go south. Rather, take the begonias in.
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