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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WHITE LIES White Lies The First Day of School Kid Killers The Pile On When We Were Ten The Favorite Renovations The Prisoner Buggy Racing Consent How Winter Ends One for My Father Another for My Father Faith The Way It Was Holocaust
WHITE LIES There was a lie about it not hurting and another about all the ice-cream you could eat. They told me they'd see me soon and left me with a nurse. They never told me about the mask or the terrible counting backward from ten--until I heard, through blinding white-mirrored light: 9 (I couldn't breathe) 8 (I couldn't even cry) 7 (His eyes, his mask) 6 (Pressing on my face) 5 (Hands holding me down) 4 Dimmer, swimming lights-- First day of school I knew I would cry, but I didn't. The teacher's name was Miss Puritan, and she screamed a lot and said we didn't listen. When the boy who sat across from me raised his hand, she screamed at him for interrupting. Later, he let a small yellow stream run from his desk to puddle under another kid's next to me. But I was too terrified to even pee and never thought I'd get home alive. KID KILLERS Johnny Santa Maria lived across the street from me, but he was 2 years younger so he was a real little kid. I knew he was kind of sick because his skin was yellowish- brown and he was very small. Not that it mattered because he was only 5, so no one ever had to pick him for their team at recess. When he didn't come to school at all, we barely missed him. One day I was playing cowboys in our driveway with the silver guns and leather holsters I got for my birthday, and a big, black Cadillac limousine pulled up next to his house. When his folks came out, they told me Johnny was dead from something they called leukemia. Up till that time I thought only a car could kill a little kid. THE PILE ON We'd play tackle football after school-- a range of ages, littler kids like me to maybe eleven. The yard by the high school gym was foot-worn smooth, hard mud. We'd choose up sides. I was small but sneaky; could sidestep bigger blockers, blitzing the quarterback, catching his arm or leg until another kid finished the tackle. But once they threw the ball to me and when, to my surprise, I caught it, first one kid caught me and then another, until everyone piled on so that I lay on the ground, unable to move or breathe, and it wasn't fun anymore. After that I learned to wrestle, squeezing my opponents in a deadly scissors. Once you know fear, you can inflict it. When we were ten, my friend Dicky and I would climb out the attic window of his house, four floors above the slope of Prospect Hill, to perch on an eave just flat enough to stretch our backs down on the cooling grit and tar and feel the pull of gravity in our groins. We'd watch the sky turn orange-blue, then black, a crack of moon and Rigel rising over maple tops and roofs, the sunset birthing more stars as light waned. We didn't talk, aloud at least, but shared in gestures: sweeps of arms across the sky, fingers citing planets, hands cupping constellation, our feet aimed at the nothing of the edge. If either of us ever prayed, we learned to then, when, defying danger, we surveyed the earth from four floors high, imagining that we would never die. THE FAVORITE We had a contest to see who'd last the longest, barefoot on the brick walks one broiling afternoon. Used to pain from earaches, I got to fifty, counting each second off loudly, "one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two." No one could get much past that until my cousin Paul. Late summer, thick-soled, every grown-up's favorite, he lasted one-hundred-fifty seconds on burning coals. Not even Bradford Hughes, whose father used a horse's harness to punish him, could beat that. RENOVATIONS The door to the basement demands that it be opened, chips in thick layers, revealing ancient wood. A bent nose for a handle, lifted, leads to an aging furnace hissing clean the gray cement. Should I descend, a hand will reach to clutch my ankle through the 2x4's pulling me down with a cry to concrete hard enough to crack my skull. There is the door to be opened. Whether I descend or not, I live in fear. THE PRISONER In the prison of my childhood I waited for hours until I was alone, my brother not home to tease me, my folks out, the house quiet except for the constancy of passing cars, the tick and chime of my grandfather's clock, bought for him when he was nearly blind. No one to boss me, hear what I said, care what I did. I would lie completely still-- shallow breathing, on the flat wool nap of our old gray rug, the painted-flower table lamp shadowing the walls. I was the sickly kid, always promised someday I would be better. That meant I must be bad. I would pretend that I was dead and wonder why it didn't frighten me. Only when steps echoed up our long back hall, did I cry. BUGGY RACING Memorial Day, my friends, Al, Bion, and I sat on the stone wall in front of my house on Cabot street to watch the big parade that started just blocks from us at Balch playground. It was a brilliant, sunny day, reminding us of school's end less than a month away. The holiday was not to remember soldiers who had died. In 1953, we thought of all the heroes we knew, who'd fought in W.W. II in the Pacific, like Buzzy Branch's father, who kept a bottle on the mantel with two Jap ears afloat in formaldehyde. The Beverly High School Band led off, followed by the National Guard with polished shoes and hup-two-three's, artillery and jeeps. The St. Mary's Crusaders Marching Band, prized throughout the State, with premier twirler, Linda Towers, at the front tossing her baton a twenty feet grease. To steer, we tied a clothes- line to a 2x4 bolted to the front, the axle held on by big bent-over spikes. For brakes, a stick to drag a tire or the ground. Just then we heard the sirens rushing to somewhere near our street. We might have run to see what, but it was dusk, a school night, and we had to go in. Next morning, Beverly Times headlined: TOWERS GIRL KILLED INSTANTLY when a car struck her bicycle on Cabot Street. The driver said he couldn't see her, lost in the glare of a large red setting sun. In school, they asked us to say a special prayer. Friday that week the paper said her funeral passed the dirt embankments and artificial pond where we caught golden carp or perch on wooden poles with rusting hooks. A dirt road that brought us to the rear of the Saint Mary's Cemetery. The front gate, we knew was almost always locked. We climbed over the old stonewall avoiding clumps of poison ivy, and lifted our buggies over. If the gardener were here, he'd chase us away, but no one saw his car or heard the mowers. Before us stretched the hill-- so much like a Soapbox Derby course we used their rules, marking a starting line in chalk on its short, flat top: No pushing off. No rocking forward in your car to boost your speed. Just a clean coast down, eyes peering up from hood-level, head tucked low to cut your wind resistance. I got off first as Bion counted "Ready, set . . ." I knew he always took one long, deep breath before he hollered "Go!" So I was ready. But Al's car streaked by me by mid-hill, his white wheels gleaming. I might as well have dragged my brakes the way he won-- by twenty feet or more, crossing the finish line between two graves with a victory whoop loud enough to wake the dead. He jerked on his brake before the iron gate, and I coasted around a corner to the one tar road across the cemetery's front, along the Herrick Street Extension.
replete with gladiolas, wreathes of roses bound with black ribbons, a mound of freshly-cut flowers and the newly-engraved brass plaque: Linda Towers, b. 1938, d. 1953. The hot sun soaked me with sweat. My throat was dry from exercise and shouting. I sat in my wooden buggy, fee along the plank under the rounded hood. And I realized then that she would never see the sunlight or perspire in the dry heat of June; that she would never toss her baton high and flash her smile at multitudes applauding at the curbside because her head had smacked against the long, hard quarry stones that line old Cabot Street, even as I stood admiring Al's car just blocks away from where she'd fallen, and Dr. Girsch, the town's emergency squad doctor and, also, coroner, pronounced her dead. CONSENT In the hospital, she still spoke to me, even near the end when she only screamed at her children that they wanted her dead. She'd whisper about girlhood in Russia, cry for her mother she never saw again after she left Rostov. She even said she wished she could live a little longer though her life had been so hard. But she lapsed unconscious, lingering a week at least, her arms black and blue from intravenous. The last day I saw her, the nurses had tied her to the bed to keep the needles in. The next day, her children made the doctor stop all heroic measures and in a day or two they had killed her just as she had said they would. HOW WINTER ENDS Were the snow piles really as high as mountains along the edges of the parking lot when I was young? I'd walk the ridges, survey the frozen world of shoppers hurrying for groceries far below. On the way home from the Prospect Street School when I was six, seven, ten, when I wasn't home sick with earaches because I stayed out too long in a storm or didn't wear the red wool hat with earmuffs my mother told me to, I remember there were mountains plowed up in front of the A & P on Cabot Street, snow packed so new and solid it shown blue-white and brilliant for healthy climbers. Or was it like so many lots I visit lately, with soot-specked snow in piles, chest-high and melting, caked with road-sand, retreating, revealing the litter accumulated through the season to be disposed of when the winter ends. ONE FOR MY FATHER It was in a car he said he loved me, plainly, for the first time-- driving with him from Long Island to a second house I'd purchased, down in Florida. He had already, made clear that he objected: "What do you need it for?" he asked. "You'll never get your money back." I couldn't tell him but I knew it was another way to say, "Father, I am a person." I tried to tell him, "I want to do something for you." Of course, my offer to set him up turned into his traveling to help me fix the place. Of course, he told me he didn't want me to: 1. make the property a shelter to cut his taxes; 2. provide a haven for his old age; 3. look after him. But in between his big shot son's financial statements and his own meager sense of what he needed, he reassured me he did not want a fancy funeral, no year of prayers, no kaddish, no carrying on. After all, he lived a simple life. He was always sincere. And somewhere, I think about Exit no. 3 on the New Jersey Turnpike, he insisted that he really loved me so I didn't have to prove anything anymore. ANOTHER FOR MY FATHER Of course I have always loved him if a part of me still shivers at his rage, the belt he wielded, or how I could cry at his insistence that he's not special (and therefore I am not). For me, he is special, even if I give you an example that seems small. In all the winter nights he answered calls from relatives and strangers: "My car is stuck. My car won't start. My car cracked up." He'd get up from a warm seat and go to aid them. Even now, he's fixed every car I've ever owned. How could you not love someone who keeps me going? THE WAY IT WAS Push the swinging lavatory doors open to a black leather jacket back, a comb through long greased hair. My guts tighten. I'm fifteen again: chess whiz, high school intellectual. He's a shop boy--tough kid-- could put me through the wall with one well-muscled arm. He turns to say hello, respectfully, acknowledging that I'm college staff, he's just another student. All day, I walk nervously through the halls. HOLOCAUST There were these cardboard-backed pictures with sepia photos of young men in uniform, swords at their sides, mustaches, side whiskers--handsome. My Nanny, Esther, would let me play with them. I memorized each face, each medal and brass polished button. When World War II was over, I know they disappeared but only half remember whether Nanny burned them in front of me or if I learned she did, later when she realized that all her five brothers were surely dead.
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