April- Poetry Month

April is a busy month: Exodus, Easter, wildflowers bursting their bulbs and tax-time. However, with April about done we shouldn’t forget the notable holiday: National Poetry Month. As Wm. C. Williams said, it is difficult to get the news from poetry yet men die every day for lack of what is found there.

Yes, and now more than ever we need an antidote to the violence of bulletins. Poetry demands a different kind of reading than a newspaper. Words like brushstrokes; an immersive experience. Life is found between the words which can open a shuttered heart.

I contend one doesn’t need to write poetry to be a poet. It has to do with allowing that sensibility to find expression; to perceive life metaphorically and find associations between this and that. It is less a way of saying than a way of being. One can live their poem.

I thought to take this occasion to offer some poems I wrote years ago which I just came across.

Work

A warehouseman lifts a crate / and his arms are holding a child.

With a cleaver in his hand / the butcher watches a rose / bloom on his apron.

Under the hydraulic lift / seven colors arrange themselves / at the mechanic’s feet.

Through leaky margins / these moments ease their way in / with blood and oil.

______________________________________

Grandpa Harry

 

He was the kid wheeled by pushcart

from Warsaw to Hester St.

hiding the rotten peaches on the bottom.

Winter meant gloves with holes

for his fingers to count on

and thaw over an ashcan cooking chestnuts.

He saw out of the sides of his eyes

for grabbing hands.

He could yell in four languages,

shut his ears to all of them

and to the hooves beating

their baruchas and curses on the cobblestone.

 

Words and chestnuts were cheap, he said

seventy years later in his backyard.

He still can’t listen much

but remembers more than he ever heard.

He needs his noise-

it keeps his blood moving.                                                                                                                                                      

Crickets make him nervous

when they hesitate,

then start up again

rubbing their legs together         

bargaining for his life.      

_________________________

 Ours Alone

 

The English muffin has survived the toaster.

Your maple syrup has 50% more…

My fiberized cereal with 30% less

has me thinking of that landscape in Connemara,

rich in desolation; oxen the mid-summer night.

Now we are walking in the Bois d’ Amour.

What passes between us is hushed.

Everything for sale in the Sunday paper

but we have (common)wealth and need nothing.

You shape a new poem in that spiral notebook

with your yellow pencil and pink erasure

deciphering the off-shore fog and skeletal tree.

Buzzy, the hummingbird is a no-show.

Nearly bare branches, empty bowl.

The silent n at the end of autumn.

O, this voluptuous life, this quiet jubilation.

 

Conversational Jam

That’s what we do, over lunch or dinner; a table for two, three, four or more. Our words, our intervals make music, unrehearsed. Call it conversation or call it improvisation. We jam. brass, bass and basoon. I can’t hear you. Muffled vibes. Sometimes words over each other. That reminds me of the time I… There goes a monologue, unzipped, a solo, saxing an amazement, a complaint, a plea. Digressing, Jammin'. Cymbals might clash, double reeds reconcile. Every time is never before. This ensemble. We riff. We say our piece. There's always room for the odd ball, the contrarian. Ornette Coleman dares in his wailing. Thelonious meanders down the river of his realm. We listen and hear our own instruments syncopating.

Men jam a different sound. Trumpets. Drum rolls. World War II reenacted again. Moving salt and pepper shakers around the way he surrounded the troops, the way you sank the winning basket. He percusses to persuade. Another toots his horn how he rebuilt his engine. Baritone sax like a jack-knifed big rig. That ain’t nothing, catch this trombone. Unstill the utensils. The Bird speaks a new language on tenor sax.

Women pass the Prosecco. piano and flute. Sweetmeats, anyone? Their strings pluck the drizzled salad. Sounds of how. Questions the bass asks up and down. Clarinet me more, do tell. Here’s a sidebar and the others hum and sway. It must be jelly ‘cause jam don’t shake like that. Take five. Cello me home.

 

 

Early Years

Did I ever tell you about the time I ……….

Yes, you did, now be quiet and eat your prunes.

We are only allotted one childhood and we're too busy living it to take notes. It is a sort of hood as we live those years part in wonder and part in the fog of hurts and bewilderment. All that’s left are a few shards which we spend the rest of our lives polishing and editing till we can’t tell what really happened from what might have happened.

Our story becomes our told narrative, our myth, our truth. We are the star of our movie, alternating between victim and hero, sometimes bystander or witness. I might say everything wrong with me is my older brother’s fault. He got the mumps one Saturday and couldn’t take me to the serial when the Lone Ranger promised to take off his mask.

I never did see the cowboy’s face but had to assume his several orifices were well centered like the rest of us. Otherwise, Tonto would have left many Saturdays ago. I was probably about four or five years old.  However, the disappointment may have seeded my imagination. Some of us wear a mask our whole lives guarding our true selves as if being revealed as vulnerable is too high an emotional price.

Stuff happens early on and we either make something out of it, let it pass or allow it to fester. Growing up is hard enough without feeling deprived. I felt I was deprived of a deprived childhood. My household didn’t align with the sitcoms but there was no murder or mayhem.  I was closer to Tom Sawyer than Huck Finn with no Mississippi to raft down; only some popsicle sticks to watch sailing along to the sewer.

There must have been a moment when my infantile brain had to sort out fantasy from reality. Comic books were not of the same order as Life Magazine. Knowing the difference is the beginning of critical thinking. (I can look back and report I was a multi-millionaire at age six when I owned the first Superman comic book. Clearly I was not a visionary) Ironic how fabulists have captured so many minds in today's American landscape. Lies, maliciously spread, require an audience of stupendous gullibility or arrested development. Clark Kent would never had put up with this.

We got our cues from images issuing out of the radio. Words became pictures. Those visuals were reinforced on the big screen. Early on, I knew the good guys from the bad guys by a mustache alone. Did I appreciate that the barroom brawl in Westerns was a choreographed male ballet? Of course not. But I knew that most men wore tuxedos and sailors were great dancers.  I also knew I could never be Cary Grant, suave and debonair. At best I might get the second banana but more likely a face in the crowd.

Amazing how I reconciled the ways of film with my mostly unremarkable life. One of my earliest movie memories was One Million B.C. (1940). After watching Victor Mature do battle with dinosaurs, it’s a wonder I got home in one piece dodging the saber-tooth tigers in my head. One has to wrestle with one’s demons.

Scared as I was of the unknown, I was drawn to it. The Maltese Falcon turned out to be a hollow piece of bric-a-brac but the hunt was what drove the cast on. Obsession defies logic. Of course, seeking is a noble state but finding is even better, particularly when it is right in front of you all the time.

Hollywood was a dream factory projected largely by a handful of Jewish immigrants. This idealized world of studio heads and directors became the American dream. It fit. Even as a child I soon learned it was aspirational or to put it another way, a sanitized fable. That message came through on a subconscious level. Sorting out the essence from the tale takes a lifetime. There are riches beyond the literal. Everything warrants another look from our album of glories and wounds. And all this time I was becoming whom I would be.

Now let me tell you about the time I…………

 

Midway

Six months after Pearl Harbor the U.S. defeated the Japanese at the battle for Midway Island. It would seem foolish to say it was a turning point in the war, yet it was. That name Midway became a symbol to rally our forces in the Pacific Ocean.

A few months later a new movie house opened in my neighborhood named Midway theater and a couple of blocks from there a pharmacy renamed itself Midway Pharmacy.

I worked in that store while attending college. It was a typical 1930s drugstore complete with fifteen stools at the soda fountain. I remember the soda jerk who greeted every customer with, Thanks for coming in today. His name was Buddy and he lived it.

My time at Midway Pharmacy was also midway for me at Brooklyn College of Pharmacy. By 1952-53. it was increasingly clear to me that the profession I had entered was no longer the one I would be practicing. Pharmacy, as I knew it, had died along the way. 

The mortar and pestle would soon fall into disuse. Even the torsion scale would rarely be used. Apothecary jars would disappear and, over time, that distinct drugstore smell vanished as fountains became a relic of a bygone age. Inexplicably, the olfactory sense has its own recall mechanism. I can still conjure that aromatic air, part perfume, part egg salad or malt from the luncheonette and part crude drugs in a mix whose vapors blew away in an enormous exhalation.

The previous summer I worked at Perry’s Pharmacy; a store so resistant to change there wasn’t even a typewriter. Perry, himself, wrote directions with his fountain pen on labels which were not yet gummed. We made our own glue from acacia which smells rancid after about five days. Midway was a giant step into the future and besides I couldn’t turn away the raise from thirty-five cents/hour to fifty cents. At this rate I might someday become rich.

At this midway point I should have known pharmacy would never be my passion. I could have pursued a career as a power forward in the NBA or more likely in academia. The education I was receiving prepared me for a bygone world of Materia Medica and pharmacognacy (recognition of herbs and other flora). We were asked to memorize botanical origins of plant-based remedies which, upon my graduation, had largely fallen into disrepute.

I look back at all the scribbles I straightened, even as my back bent. The grinding, the grind / the pouring, the weighing, the weight / spatula, slab, Galenicals / a world fatigued into words / Something lost in this long letting / minim by dram by grain.

It took me decades to find my creative juice as a pharmacist. By the late 1980's our role was redefined from dispenser to counsultant. Conferring with patients was my salvation. It happened in mid-life.

 

Life and Death in the Pharmacy

Abel Mehana, your wife is here. She says you died last Thursday,

A good customer seven years for ten minutes a month.

I knew what kept you alive but I didn’t know you

except for the stones in your pockets clinging against the nitro and digitalis.

You dealt in turquoise. There was turquoise in your voice.

Now bargain with me once more with Damascus in your eyes.

Haggle with those magnificent arms that signaled the gods.

Fling your hands across the counter, veins blooming into rings

Chips of earth swinging from your pulsing neck.

I will meet you as an alchemist performing miracle healings.

Each tablet carries my blessings. They create small uprisings,

realign organs and confer with microorganisms for a new homeland.

My incantations label the bottles. So much passes through me

lids on apothecary jars lift with the power of rhizomes and roots

and any potion in my hands contains everything I believe in.

 

Agonizing Reappraisal

When I was a teenager (a few years ago) I knew everything. I couldn’t be wrong. If I was wrong about the worst song or the best shortstop, Dodgers vs Yankees, I might be wrong about everything. It took another decade to question the absolutes.

It’s alright to be wrong; not altogether but somewhat. In fact, rightness and wrongness may be incremental. My dogma hasn’t entirely died; only mostly dead. It is a long deathbed scene.

By 1956 with the Hungarian uprising, it was clear that defense of the Soviet Union was wrongheaded. Suppression of dissent by a maniacal head of state was indefensible. The government gave socialism a bad name.

In no way did this shift justify our domestic right-wing anti-labor agenda or their racist, misogynist and hawkish platform. Contrary to my youthful paradigm it was possible for both sides to be misguided. Fortunately, there was a third force pushing for mutual disarmament and peaceful coexistence.

Today I am again interrogating myself. It is hard to fault the Democratic Party’s foreign policy with its lofty ideals in defense of a free sovereign state but I find myself wavering. Count me among those who cannot support the continuing military build-up in Ukraine.

Important to note we are not a model for liberal democracy; not since Trump has uncaged the beast which has long festered as a pernicious force in our blemished history. We have never come to terms with the genocide and slavery upon which we are founded. The beacon we once were has proven to be a flickering match.

More importantly, we are far too confrontational abroad. We seem to act out of a messianic zeal with little tolerance for differences. Without condoning illiberal regimes, we must figure out a way to coexist with them. They do not necessarily threaten us in their wanton ways. This is not the eve of WWII but it could be the eve of a nuclear war. Our ultimatum to China and even the unyielding demands regarding a ceasefire in Ukraine are not conducive to a negotiated settlement in this unwinnable war.

Furthermore, the global consequences are catastophic for developing countries with energy supplies disrupted causing hardship along with the threat of famine. What happens on the Black Sea has ripples in the sands of the Sahara. 

The question is not who is right. Of course, Putin is a deranged criminal with no regard for human life. I say that is irrelevant. With eight million refugees and mindless destruction, the toll is far too great and too dangerous moving ahead. Someday borders will be justly regarded as folly. But for now, our thrust must be for a cessation of this unconscionable war. 

As an aside, it should be noted that Lockheed, Raytheon and Boeing et al are salivating with the bonanza of Pentagon weaponry contracts and no end in sight. 

A reappraisal may be agonizing but the American empire is in decline. We cannot police the planet nand we must be more mindful of perceived provocations.

Authoritarian regimes, antithetical to our way of life, have sprung up on every continent. Our task is to resist proto-fascism at home and find détente with foreign states through diplomtic initiatives. Let the repressive states fall by their own weight. As for the best shortstop, forget about it.

Words, Those Vanishing Squiggles

The Gettysburg Address is notable as much for its brevity as for its substance and eloquence. And rightly so. It has the lyricism and concision of great poetry. The speaker before him couldn’t say in two hours what Lincoln said in two minutes. His few words foreshadowed the end of florid oratory and ushered in the notion that less is more.

After WW I we buried ornamentation along with twenty million soldiers. The lost generation of the twenties had no patience for long-winded sentences. Public discourse was aligned with the staccato of the Jazz Age and Gershwin’s Rhapsody.

Hemingway wrote the shortest short story ever in two sentences: Baby shoes for sale. Never used.  

And here we are speaking in clipped blurts. We’re making good time on our way to nowhere. Fast food, Quick Lube, In and Out Burger, pinched minimalism. We have commuted our sentences to a vocabulary of the patriarchy: Spit it out. Did you, or didn’t you? Shut up. What have we got? Bottom line, how much…. all stripped for transactions. Soon we will settle for shrugs and grunts, nods and frowns.

My impulse is to push back. Why, I ask? The well-turned sentence can be a thing of beauty. It got Henry James reinvited as a constant dinner guest back in the day.

My mind jumps from Henry James to a street like National Blvd., the way it meanders in its elongation. It digresses and vanishes as if it lost its thread and then reappears just in time for its eulogy. Both James’ sentences and National demand our attention. You cannot skim or take your eye off the street sign. They challenge our perceptual span. National, you are a sentence with a dozen commas, (really, very) dense with adverbs and dripping with adjectives till they die from polysyllabic exhaustion. I shall call you a trickster, appearing and disappearing, like a great idea that explains everything, breaking the linear sequential in your fits and starts.

And what’s wrong with that? Forget your vertical thumb. National, you are a horizontal thumb. We have words, don’t you know? Words for nuance, for precision and rhythm, for flavor and grace. National, you are a trail through the thick, dodging what once was the La Cienega swamp, an equestrian trail around those brambles and boulders …before they paved you, tributaries and all.

Bless you National Blvd, infuriating as you can be. One can take the offramp and leave the unrelenting rush of life, take a subversive turn, meet oneself coming and going and ponder how once he was a Euclidean line and is now a labyrinth in the wonderment of life.

There is life yet in the bathwater we threw out. The more we discard words from public discourse the greater their value when a full sentence shows up as an artifact from a distant time. There are some of us who crave the long-winded, winding many-splendored ways down the road and lush progression down the page.

Beauty and Truth

This is a banner year for wildflowers. They are frolicking in their banners. Drunk on rain, bulbs are bursting, dancing the hora, petals trumpeting. A thing of beauty.  One kind of beauty.

Then there is the beauty in truth and here’s where it gets murky. In some cases, beauty kills…

Claude Monet, you were dangerous once,

upsetting the order in plein air.

Now we’ve made you a cliché.

You rhyme with lily pond and footbridge.

We have taken your measure with coffee mugs,

Devoured you with magnets on the fridge.

You keep the gift shop going.

We have loved you to death.

I yearn for your fractured light.

 

In his Ode to a Grecian Urn, Keats ends the poem with the lines, Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty / That is all you know and all you need to know. However those deathless lines were in quotes as if the urn itself were speaking, not necessarily the poet and that has sprouted over two centuries of head-scratching. Keats seems to be raising the ordinary to high art and the truth therein as he celebrates the urn. The beauty also lies in his inspired words the urn evoked.

For example, I find my urn in everyday Japanese ashtrays, saucers and bowls. The simple contours and minimal strokes rendered casually, so it seems, touch me as much as most museum pieces. They seem to say, look at the commonplace for beauty.   

Edward Weston found eroticism in the close-up of bell peppers with beads of perspiration and their shapes writhing. He dared us to see as he did, voluptuously. His camera made a mistress of shifting sand; the thigh of a dune and the shadow of a gull upon it.    

Truth itself got decapitated a couple of centuries back. Big TRUTH became dethroned to small truths, deconstructed into points of view, the way Picasso saw in his Cubist paintings.

Santa Monica is a thing of beauty. If I didn’t live here, it would be a destination with its palms as tall as lighthouses, the pier, palisades, promenade and the sweep of its coastline. And then there is the life on the streets and the funk.

There is even a certain beauty in the truth of the ugly. We are transfixed at the sight of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. At the same time prettified art is hard to look at.

Some things are so ugly they are beautiful in their deviation from the agreed-upon standards of beauty. There is the beauty embedded in the creases of an aged face, a sunset smeared with the day’s pollution, the patina of old masonry; the beauty of authenticity.

Lincoln Blvd is no Champs-Elysée’s. It is void of pedestrians or arresting sculpture, no striking architecture or greenery. It is a boulevard devoted to wheels starting with the homeless and their shopping carts filled with life’s leftovers. It is choked with traffic, fast-food joints, car washes, auto repair shops, gas stations, quick lubes, and used car lots, A mirror of Americana.

Beauty is one of those words under constant revision. My preference is for inclusion from the jacarandas on Eleventh St. to the all-night laundromats on Lincoln Blvd.

On the other hand so much of what passes for art is simply a matter of decontextualization. Put a band-aid on an orange and it becomes an exhibit. Perhaps beauty, in the art world, is no longer an operative word except as experiential. I would replace it with transformation. Art needs to alter our ways of perceiving, however imperceptible that may be. What happens in this act might be called beautiful. 

 

 

Enough Already

When is enough, enough? We may have lost our faculty for critical thinking, our sense of civility and capacity for empathy but as a nation we remain world class consumers. We buy goods and services sufficient to keep about 1.5 million workers on the Amazon payroll. I know the feeling. I’m one of those consumers. When we are not online buying, we are in line at Costco, that shrine of excess. How fast can I eat a dozen pears before they turn to mush?

Capitalism legitimizes greed without end unless it coexists with some ethical force as a corrective. And greed turns into shopping which brings out the scolding preacher in me, a voice I allow to vent now and then even if I may be talking to myself.

As a gross generalization it can be said that the  word enough is not in the vocabulary of the one percent. There’s a hole in their imagined bucket which can never be filled. As the Bard said, Apparel doth oft proclaim the man (and woman). I suppose accessories are also included. I submit that the person proclaimed is the persona, not the real self. No designer watch or electric car can fill that empty space within. Jeff Bezos owns cars worth eighty million dollars. (Everybody needs a hobby) Did John McCain really need seven residences? (It must be a burden to remember where he left his toothbrush.) Could it be that the yearning for more is misplaced? 

Now I must disclose that I am no ascetic. I am enriched by beauty and greatly admire women's adornments, style and fine fabrics. I regard it as wearable art. When is it enough? I have no idea.The object itself is not the problem. It is an acquisitive impulse that warrants a pause and self examination. 

However, apart from things, there is a far different sort of possession in which you never get enough of that wonderful stuff, according to Wlliam Blake. 

The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom, said he.                                                                                                           

Blake was a visionary whose philosophy was antithetical to the accumulation of material goods. He warned against the false god of money and how power corrupts. His notion of excess is an expression of passion, that inexplicable urge toward ecstasy. His poetic sensibility found him reaching for the divine. I suspect the wisdom he meant was an enlightened state which transcended all earthy goods. Only at that perch can we know what is enough.  

Can we love enough, forgive enough, evolve enough to retain our wonder? In that sense I don’t believe there is such a thing as enough. Keep on keeping on.

I must remember to take Blake-consciousness with me on my next visit to Costco. I would start eating my dozen pears at the checkstand if only they were ripe. Thirty percent of our nation’s food gets thrown out. We have yet to learn what’s enough. Shame on us. Our excess has yet to bring us to wisdom. A modicum of dispossession might lead us to Blake’s notion of excess.

 

 

Life Itself

We are living in a world gone mad. Alias in Wonderland.  Lewis Carroll has us speaking in Jabberwocky. The hush money is loud. Vaginas, says Trump, are landmines. What was sordid and illegal has become a virtue for evangelicals. Is a life of crime to be rewarded with Bozo in the Oval?

All of which explains why I take refuge in baseball. (Wait, don't go away... yet)

It's a small vice. The crack of the bat is better than breaking news. The human drama makes sense (even though it is meaningless). Players observe the rules. The scoreboard doesn’t lie. There are no goalposts to be moved. Yes, teams steal signs but that’s not even a misdemeanor.

Fans know implicitly that baseball is a lifespan with its decades of nine innings including a seventh inning stretch which must signify something. Then there are the metaphorical bases we must traverse depositing us back where we started at home.

Every game has a loser and no manager with arrested development demands a recount declaring the winner's runs are rigged.  Failures teach us to get over it. Fandom also crosses our current ideological divide, even as it sets up a generally harmless rivalry.

The ballpark is made of primordial elements: infield earth, outfield grass with agreed-upon boundaries. I have traced its origins to my ancestor Igor who swatted some flying insect with a tree branch or was it when he halted a rock aimed at his cave entrance? Rock to ball to planet. The experience of connecting: barrel of bat to ball, is beyond the reach of mere words. The one I hit seventy-five years ago is still in flight orbiting a distant sun. It gets better with every recall.

This season the teams have decided to speed up the game against my mild resistance. Nothing wrong with slow, say I. Where else can a poem be written in between pitches? It used to be a time for contemplation interrupted by an occasional hurrah. More than once the meaning of life was nearly within my grasp.

Baseball was once a pastoral sport played on fallow fields or parks with trees as foul poles. Now it has yielded to urbanity, aligned with our impatience. Enter: the clock. No more lingering. Buy a hot dog at your peril of missing an historic play while the mustard is dripping on your jersey.

There are no alternative truths in the stadium. No fact-checks needed except to see if some record has just been broken. Consider it as a clash of dialectical proportions. In recent years stats have been dominant. But it is still a game of hunches. The rational coexists with the intuitive. Out of these opposites something emerges that feels like life itself.