At First Blush
At first blush, it appears an unambiguous portrait, the subject a man in meditation— adamantly upright posture, well-cut jacket, background in soft focus. From another angle, one sees a woman with a broad, strong face and red hair. Viewed from a third angle, the subject is a beast, half-covered in sleek fur, half in phosphorescent feathers. Studied from yet a fourth angle, the portrait is of a woman entirely unlike the first—caffeinated, haunted, angular features—the man from the initial view no longer a man but a small boy, three or four years old. From this last angle, the beast appears to be a large black dog, its teeth sunk into one of the boy’s legs, the boy’s face contorted in pain. A remarkable self-portrait.
Vermeer
When she was getting close
to the end, we cached the hospice morphine
in the fridge behind the ricotta cheese,
in case.
We moved her bed into the living room,
where she could look out onto the Hollywood hills.
She slept and slept.
Waking, she said she’d dreamed
she was a delirious little bird,
and everything around her—
a fragrant field, a grey branch, a dusty road—understood her.
Later, she said she’d dreamt
of rope and wire, of Lvóv in the War,
of nameless relations hiding
with other Jews in the sewer,
shards of skin and glass
and skeins of hair washing away
in gutter water.
She said she knew she, too,
was washing away.
She laughed a little light laugh,
and I heard a chime at the edge of her laughter
that puzzled me, until I understood it
to be her feeling of having only laughter left.
I found a few letters in her closet from her father,
written in his Yiddish accent— “vel” scrawled for “well,”
history in its plainest, most intimate sense.
In the old country he’d been well-off,
which ended with the revolution—
something struck off, something stuck on,
the old secret tales, and blood in the mouth.
Like all children, one accepts
that animals that die do not come back to life.
After he came over, he found work as a bookkeeper.
In their day, people here got used to seeing them,
grandmother in her shawl.
There were many immigrants on the boulevard,
like now, easy to spot,
their hazy look, like charcoal sketches,
and their unfortunate choices of colors.
Poco moto the light scatters.
Outside, Los Angeles shimmers like a piano.
On the ceiling over her bed, the windowpanes
shape the lunar light into an arrangement of rectangles.
I ask her if she is afraid,
She says she sat once in front of the painting
Young Woman with a Water Pitcher
for an hour.
Then it no longer troubled her,
her inconsequential life.
Causation
Acquittal is caused by crime,
tooth decay by Cupid.
Winter causes diligence which causes nuns,
and Popeye is caused by spinach and the ocean.
One leaf causes Fall,
which causes New England and sin.
Sunset Boulevard causes hitch-hikers
and Cadillac Eldorados, which cause men
to reach over, causing night sweats.
Insults are cause for accounting,
disasters are cause for Zen masters,
and heartache causes religion,
which causes heartbreak.
Divorces for cause are caused by marriage,
which causes parenthood,
which, in its turn, causes because I said so.
Drowning causes confessions,
and the mouth filled with vocabulary causes cowardice.
One whiff causes the buck
to snort and stomp the ground,
straining to locate you
without regard to beauty.
Date
When she arrived, she did not say
too much about her journey
or the mint tea she drank en route.
We did not lament the destruction
of earth or bring up the vegan position
on dandruff.
We watched an old movie
with women in hats as big
as braising pans.
and when we’d touched and told
enough, we cut each other’s hair
and burned each other’s baby pictures.
Table for Two
We dreamed of a life of pâté en croute,
always arriving with a fig mostarda,
a life in which a contralto-green cilantro pesto
could be counted on to refresh the gamey lamb.
Why should the search for perfect cheese puffs be less important
than the search for pure black or the sound of one hand?
Together, we would change the world
one warm French potato salad at a time.
Tonight, the truffles ebony, the marrow gleaming,
her glass eye gazes out across the dining room
from the sepia photo over the bar,
and all these years later, here am I, man
of a certain age, overcome
with nostalgia, near tears,
my carefully mussed hair
glistening in the incandescent light.
Notes for Wedding Vows
We’ll watch black and white movies exclusively.
I will not be fat.
There will be acoustic guitar.
It will be feng shui.
I will not smoke indoors.
I promise I’ll stop doing that thing you hate.
Also, the other thing.
Two or three children—you decide—
I’ll read to them about snow, and
when they’re older, I won’t run away.
I’ll make classic mistakes,
but in your final moments, I’ll apologize.
When you’re gone, I promise to be devastated.
I will not feel relieved.
Originally published in The American Journal of Poetry
Self-Portrait with Tree
I want to have you,
I murmur
to the photograph in an airport
of a tree on a ridge,
its frail silver gelatin silhouette
leaning against a bright sky.
The shadow hovering
at the edge of the frame
must be me.
Trigger Warnings
I believed I knew the contents
of the firing chamber, knew
the sear surface and hammer materials,
until one day at the zoo,
as I leaned on a railing watching the gibbons balletic,
I saw in the acrylic panel enclosing the cage
my own reflection, an unarticulated skeleton in a specimen jar.
As snow fell in late afternoon,
and with regard to the color crimson,
I considered how snow and crimson sometimes left me distressed by the sound
of my own shattery breath,
how hearing
a guilty verdict on the radio while driving
to my parent’s house made me feel
like slapping myself.
I really can’t say
if my index finger is required
to actuate a firing sequence,
or my thumb to activate the cocking machinery,
but while swimming laps at the Y,
the pale skin of the old man in the next lane wearing a blue bathing cap
provoked an encounter with solitude,
bringing tears that pooled in my goggles.
On a couch
at the end of the hospital corridor,
watching the night custodian buff the linoleum
aroused a trumpeting angel beast.
Another evening,
as I urinated in the bathroom of my favorite bar
while they were playing “Rap God,” which I love,
I was consumed by loneliness, and then, later, strange purification.
I don’t know anything
about the safety or logic
of the trigger mechanism,
nor can I say with any certainty
how easy or difficult to release
the hammer.
Dear
I saw Mick Jagger once
with his girlfriend at a café two tables away
from where my mother and I were eating lunch.
“Mick Jagger!” I blurted under my breath,
as if I’d just arrived from the sea floor.
My mother was eating a wedge of cantaloupe
in her manner—
first, the silver knife under the flesh,
but leaving the severed pieces to rest
in place on the rind, then
a series of precise vertical cuts,
rhombus chunks of melon
a small clutch of passengers
shoulder to shoulder in the boat of rind.
I told my mother I’d secretly taken a cellphone picture
of Mick and his girlfriend
and felt bad about being so selfish.
Not selfish on purpose, mother said,
but I replied, Yes, on purpose.
But not really meaning to be selfish, she said,
but me saying, Yes, I was,
until she said, We are not selfish, dear.
Sword of Glass
It was my father’s father
who at last came to dinner from far away,
gulped a whiskey, grinned, and said When I have a whiskey,
I feel like I’m a new man & then the new man wants one, too
my father pouring another & the new, new man
also wanting a whiskey
who tucked me in after dinner whispering,
You must go right to sleep, because if you don’t,
when sleep does come, night will expand
& become a great mass, mold will grow on you,
& in the morning, the sunlight will cut you
like a sword of glass, & you’ll never again
be able to jump up and down.
& he clicked off the light
who for my 13th birthday at his apartment
set out a platter of prunes smoked meats pickled herring
horseradish jam poppy seed rye from which I assembled
a smoked meat sandwich & as I bit growled,
If you don’t like pickled herring, you should tell me
& next time I won’t order it. You don’t know what it means
to be a Jew. You imagine a heaven, sky that shines like a fish,
& the sound of the surface rasp of the sea, but this
is a sorrowful world of fat-free cheese, & recumbent bicycles,
of Christian Science & lonely reflections, of old plow horses—
sullen, worn & indifferent to the whip. The meadows shun those horses!
Everything stings! Everyone cries! & he threw the platter onto the floor—
prunes, jam, meat, all of it
who dressed like a Turkish pimp for Marsh & Jennifer’s wedding,
silk tie painted with women’s faces & palm trees, shouting
when Marsh stomped the glass, Pop goes the hymen!
& washed down two shrimp cocktails with bourbon commanding,
Let us all feast on pie! Rhubarb. Mince. Spanakopita.
waving the menu, calling the waiter, Where is the King of Pie?
smacking a fist on the table, Bring us kingly pie!
Pie for the women in evening gowns, pie for the bride & groom
who, leaning over, took my hand, & speaking softly
& only to me, said, Your father told you I fled the East
to avoid conscription, but I fled because I killed a man
who called me Brudny Żyd—a Dirty Jew.
I was fifteen. You can trust the forest,
but people are chiselers & wolves. Fuck them.
who, when I entered his hospital room,
asked the rest of the family to leave, saying
Sit with me. I can do nothing else.
Skin rashen from whisky & sugar, he grasped my arm,
The River Pishon used to wind like a snake through the larch & pine.
You’ve never seen the boreal forests & soon they’ll be gone.
If I were young I’d disregard the speakable world
& only study the sinuosities of women
& he looked out the window, whispering
more to himself than me,
Life is sunlight held together by blood,
the words drafting like seagulls through motionless air.
And I walked out to the exhausting allure of another day,
to grass the height of the moon, to other, older family faces
appearing at random on petals, bridges, boulders.
In Pleiades, 2015
From Sword of Glass