Lox and the Poet

Having written about herring, I’ve had a groundswell (of two friends) demand that I give equal time to salmon. Wild salmon lead a life of high drama, particularly in the third act. Having swam the swim their opera ends with a heroic struggle upstream, against the current, dodging hungry bears, only to spawn in exhaustion and die from the effort. The continuation of the species is assured as the curtain goes down. 

The alternative is to be caught and poached, baked, broiled or ignominiously smoked and sliced thin, the equivalent of a deathbed root canal. 

A platter of lox brings to mind a poetry group I attended at Beyond Baroque about thirty-five years ago. Part of this happened and part sprang, swimming upstream, from the river of my imagination. There was a poet in that workshop whom I shall call Manny Platz. We all read our work and cringed waiting for an assault from the esteemed leader who often ripped our deathless words to shreds.To save his soul Manny stopped coming after a while but reappeared one day as a waiter at Murray’s, a local deli.

It came to pass that it was Murray who published Manny as a menu item, a found poem with a greater audience than any literary journal and no one to tear him down. Yelp was not yet.

A year later he was suddenly gone. Where’s Manny, I asked the manager. He quit and went to Nova Scotia, I was told. His words were now legendary.

       The Ballad of Manny Platz

 

Was he thinking Nova Scotia even then,

of running a bait and tackle shop,

getting no bites, poem after poem,

every other Tuesday in the workshop?

God knows the place was rotten with hunger.

 

Too deep or not enough, they said.

Too poetic for a poem.

I don’t believe a word of it

or write what you know.

 

Between rejections, he waited tables

At Murray’s Deli, lived off tips,

and wrote what he overheard in booths.

Years of kreplach and knishes,

then Murray published him under lamination.

A Manny Platz of Five Stanzas: Lox with moxie,

any new-fangled bagel, cream cheese, onion

 and two eggs scrambambled.

What is it like to see your name,

on the page next to

an Elliot Gould (chopped liver) 

or a Lenny Bernstein (philharmonic Reuben)?

I’m out of here Manny said, 

heading for Nova Scotia

 

to pull salmon and smoke it

from inexhaustible waters he practically owns,

where every poem swims, leaping

against all that’s expected and safe.