A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out to us today, you may stand upon me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song. It says,
Come, rest here by my side.
Each of you, a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.
They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside the River.
Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you,
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of
Other seekers—desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot,
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought,
Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am that Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours—your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here, on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, and into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope—
Good morning.
"On the Pulse of Morning" from ON THE PULSE OF MORNING by Maya Angelou, copyright © 1993 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Is it good for the Hebrews?” Moses’ mother asks, shushing
her boy before he strikes out enraged by the overseer’s brutish
behavior. And is Prince Hamlet’s impetuous dagger—
having left the loquacious, all-too-human Polonius to stagger
downstage, while we unconcerned, applaud the murderer—
not dangerous (does anyone wonder) for the Danes? A shanda fur
di Goyim, my mother says, as Madoff dupes both Hadassah
and the Dems. O, Weinstein, bedding your shiksa goddesses
while Wikipedia dubs you Rapist/Felon/Jew, is collective sin
the victim or oppressor’s weapon? Dirty laundry or desecration?
the critics argued as Roth’s Portnoy neither balanced nor tipped
the scales. On the other hand, here I sit, bookish, ill-equipped,
as Tevye would say, for this farkakte world, tracing my tree
back through Tysmienica, one hundred percent (23 and Me
reports) purebred eastern European Jew. One-fifth of Nobel
Laureates, and less than one percent of the population we tell
our exceptional selves, trotting out Einstein, Kafka, Proust,
Koufax, as if ordinary was our ancestor’s shame. Be a credit
to your race, Mary tells baby Jesus. Is it good for the Jews?
my grandmother asks before navigating Atlantic Avenue.
She marches ahead, intrepid as Moses crossing the Red Sea.
Take my hand, I cry out, arm outstretched. But she is eighty
years dead, so I step off the curb. Hineni, I call. Wait for me.
Copyright © 2024 by Richard Michelson. This poem was first printed in Tikkun (January 4, 2024). Used with the permission of the author.
It was essential, Einstein stated, that he bring his violin
to Berta Fanta’s salon on Prague’s Old Town Square.
It is 1912, four years until Relativity, and six before
the first wave of the Spanish flu will kill, among the
500 million infected, the painter, Egon Schiele, already
despondent over the death, three days earlier, of his lover,
Edith, and their unborn child. Painting his pregnant lover
the day before her death he could already hear the viola
and mournful bassoon of Mozart’s Requiem Mass. Ready
now to sketch himself dying, he gazes into the small square
of his shaving mirror, and recalls how he first entered the
Vienna Academy of Fine Arts at age sixteen, even before
his initial shave, no younger student accepted before
or since. He died, never to know he’d won that spot over
the seventeen-year-old Adolf Hitler, who’d later loathe
“degenerate art” and “physicist Jews,” moving to Berlin
to pursue politics, aborting both brush and pen. The square-
root-of-time displacing millennia-of-atoms is music already
usurping Einstein’s brain as, nodding to Max Brod, he readies
his violin under his chin. The pianist, who already has four
of his 83 books penned to literary acclaim, looks squarely
into the eyes of his closest friend, Franz Kafka. Brod loves
his quiet companion’s unpublished scribblings, which violate
all of fiction’s conventions. He had offered Franz absinthe
for courage before inviting him to Berta’s if he’d recite the
story about a transformation into vermin. Yet, rising to read
to his fellow Jews, even Kafka cannot conceive of violence
so extreme that each present will be dubbed a cockroach. For
now, though, let’s leave these imaginative culture-lovers
in paradise; and in a Kafkaesque absurdity of E=MC squared,
time travel to British Columbia where we’ll reappear squarely
inside a brothel owned by Bavarian born Friedrich Trump. The-
oretically viable, we can locate the villain who, full of self-love
emigrated at sixteen to avoid the military draft. He has already
planned a move to Queens, where he’ll die five months before
Schiele of the same deadly flu, his atoms still infecting us via
his grandson’s love of Hitlerian speech; even Kafka cannot square
anti-alien taunts with Melania’s Einstein-visa violation. I pray Thee
Lord, a fevered Mozart pleads; forgive me, forget me, I am done for.
Copyright © 2023 by Richard Michelson. This poem was first printed in The Common (March 2023). Used with the permission of the author.
my father said, again and again, shaking his head
in disbelief at any ostentation; the neighbor’s gold-
plated knocker (we still banged fists) or my own lust
to own the seductive canvas or the waxed bronze bust.
It is not only the idea—which should hold all the pleasure—
but the poet’s pencil marks on paper which we treasure
above the memorized poem. And so I fan my flushed face,
signaling the fast-talking auctioneer, who has traced
the provenance, and picks up the pace, multiplying offers.
And who now does my father’s bidding? Heaven’s coffers,
perhaps, are for the destitute; but why did he have to die
to escape the shitty crime-ridden, never-to-be-gentrified
neighborhood of both our births? The cost of living,
he would argue, is not the worth of being alive.
But still he checked each lottery ticket which littered
the empty lot next door, praised their silver latex glitter,
praying to the beautiful unscratched, like little gods.
Money talks, he taught me. But nobody beats the odds.
“More Money than God” from More Money than God, by Richard Michelson, © 2015. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
When she was fenced off even from herself, she had that strangled feeling
as if the alphabet forgot her lips.
How did she mend thoughts that snapped like strained violin strings?
Sometimes, her mind was a turnip she buried in the ground.
Licked by wind, old chairs were left scattered on her ghetto street,
abandoned by Jews rounded up for transport.
But to where?
And she watched grief sit on the shoulders of women
whose legs were knitting-needle thin,
women who covered their eyes with their hands
and still recited blessings over candles lit to honor the Sabbath.
Once, she overheard someone say, “My heart was a sparrow—
now it’s caught in a vice.” Reading Dostoevsky, she was shocked
to learn he spent four whole years in a Siberian prison
with only the Bible as his friend. This gave her hope, so she could still fall in love
with a certain kind of star bright as a glowing złoty, a shiny coin
in the sky, even when she thought the moon was inside out.
Soldering bits of life together like scraps of steel, she and her sister Chana
believed it would be a sin to ever laugh again. But, they laughed, Lord,
they laughed and their hearts were brown wings.
From Aunt Bird (Four Way Press, 2024) by Yerra Sugarman. Copyright © 2024 by Yerra Sugarman. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
In this neighborhood you’d better learn to fight,
my father says. Real schooling’s from hard knocks.
Books won’t save your life. He knows I’d rather write
and read. I don’t talk back. His love is no birthright.
Instead, I bluff, act tough. He teaches me to box.
In this neighborhood you’d better learn to fight,
he says, or you’ll be prey; better tough Israelite
than studious Black Hat, defenseless Orthodox.
Books won’t save your life. I know you’d rather write.
Next day was Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights.
“Hey Jew-Boy,” some kids jeered (as if I wore ear-locks).
I was no Maccabee. Bluff called, I could not fight.
I came to battered, bruised, but had no appetite
for bloodshed or revenge. Instead, I walked for blocks,
prayed books would save my life. I swore someday I’d write
these lines. And now I have. We never kissed goodnight
yet every poem I wrote, he saved. The paradox:
a bullet stopped his life; lead plug he could not fight.
I escape the neighborhood with every word I write.
From Sleeping as Fast as I Can (Slant Books, 2023) by Richard Michelson. Copyright© 2023 by Richard Michelson. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
Assétou Xango performs at Cafe Cultura in Denver.
“Give your daughters difficult names.
Names that command the full use of the tongue.
My name makes you want to tell me the truth.
My name does not allow me to trust anyone
who cannot pronounce it right.”
—Warsan Shire
Many of my contemporaries,
role models,
But especially,
Ancestors
Have a name that brings the tongue to worship.
Names that feel like ritual in your mouth.
I don’t want a name said without pause,
muttered without intention.
I am through with names that leave me unmoved.
Names that leave the speaker’s mouth unscathed.
I want a name like fire,
like rebellion,
like my hand gripping massa’s whip—
I want a name from before the ships
A name Donald Trump might choke on.
I want a name that catches you in the throat
if you say it wrong
and if you’re afraid to say it wrong,
then I guess you should be.
I want a name only the brave can say
a name that only fits right in the mouth of those who love me right,
because only the brave
can love me right
Assétou Xango is the name you take when you are tired
of burying your jewels under thick layers of
soot
and self-doubt.
Assétou the light
Xango the pickaxe
so that people must mine your soul
just to get your attention.
If you have to ask why I changed my name,
it is already too far beyond your comprehension.
Call me callous,
but with a name like Xango
I cannot afford to tread lightly.
You go hard
or you go home
and I am centuries
and ships away
from any semblance
of a homeland.
I am a thief’s poor bookkeeping skills way from any source of ancestry.
I am blindly collecting the shattered pieces of a continent
much larger than my comprehension.
I hate explaining my name to people:
their eyes peering over my journal
looking for a history they can rewrite
Ask me what my name means...
What the fuck does your name mean Linda?
Not every word needs an English equivalent in order to have significance.
I am done folding myself up to fit your stereotype.
Your black friend.
Your headline.
Your African Queen Meme.
Your hurt feelings.
Your desire to learn the rhetoric of solidarity
without the practice.
I do not have time to carry your allyship.
I am trying to build a continent,
A country,
A home.
My name is the only thing I have that is unassimilated
and I’m not even sure I can call it mine.
The body is a safeless place if you do not know its name.
Assétou is what it sounds like when you are trying to bend a syllable
into a home.
With shaky shudders
And wind whistling through your empty,
I feel empty.
There is no safety in a name.
No home in a body.
A name is honestly just a name
A name is honestly just a ritual
And it still sounds like reverence.
Copyright © 2017 Assétou Xango. Used with permission of the poet. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 9, 2020.
May I venture to address you, vegetal friend?
A lettuce is no less than me, so I respect you,
though it’s also true I may make a salad of you,
later. That’s how we humans roll. Our species
is blowing it, bigtime, as you no doubt know,
dependent as you are on water and soil
we humans pollute. You’re a crisphead,
an iceberg lettuce, scorned in days of yore
for being mostly fiber and water. But new
research claims you’ve gotten a bad rap,
that you’re more nutritious than we knew.
Juicy and beautiful, your leaves can be used
as tortillas. If you peer through a lettuce leaf,
the view takes on the translucent green of
the newest shoots. Sitting atop your pile,
next to heaps of radicchio, you do seem
a living head, a royal personage who
should be paid homage. I am not demanding
to be reassured. I just want to know what you know,
what you think your role is—and hear what you
have to say about suffering long denied, the wisdom
of photosynthesis, stages of growth you’ve passed
through. I can almost hear your voice as I pay
for you at the cash register, a slightly gravely sound,
like Kendrick Lamar’s voice, or early Bob Dylan,
both singers of gruff poetic truth. Nothing less
was expected from you, sister lettuce, nothing less.
Copyright © 2017 by amy Gerstler. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 1, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
I followed you down the switchback trail of the Grand Canyon and we slept
in a crevice, and we own that,
and we own those moments tossing the football in front of 4073 Wyncote Road
until the streetlights snapped on,
and we own the smoke bomb the cops threw at us and a few thousand others
at the Jefferson Airplane concert, Akron, Ohio, 1972,
and we own the whole country we passed through, all the way to the ocean,
where we checked into a hotel and you discovered, lying atop Gideon’s Bible,
a black film canister’s worth of weed and half-a-pack of rolling papers,
and we smoked it, and it was good, unbelieving of our luck,
which we own, and the lunar landscape surrounding our tent in Big Bend, Texas,
and the stars, so clear we could read by them, and did,
and we own The Godfather—Part One—on the big screen of that packed theater
in Evanston, Illinois, and we own that fear
when were lost in the Tennessee woods, into the dark, and you followed
some analytical instinct until we found—lo and behold—a road,
and Bob Dylan, who was ours, and Joan Baez, who was also ours, singing
“The Times They Are A-Changing” in the War Memorial,
and watching the Indians—miracles of miracles—beat the New York Yankees
at Yankee Stadium during the 1995 heatwave—that, too, that victory, was ours,
and I remember how quiet you sometimes were, and I asked about it, and you said it’s a feeling you
get, you don’t know how to talk about it, and I’d like to think
we own that feeling—how we bested the myths. We didn’t become murderer
and victim. We didn’t cheat on the other’s birthright.
Oh, my brother of the other world, my brother who perhaps will greet me
when I arrive at that place prepared for by our father,
who is now joined by his own flesh and blood, which is not blood, which is not flesh, but bones and
perhaps spirit,
which we believe in, like the moon, or the unpredictable Cleveland weather,
or the way the snow descends on the fallen leaves,
or how the sun glazes them now, for their moment, stirred in the slight wind,
the same wind that blew the Jerusalem dust in our faces, which we own.
From Our Portion: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House Press, 2015). Copyright © 2015 by Philip Terman. Used with permission of the author.
I Have Not Come Here to Compare Notes But to Sit Together in the Stillness at the Edge of This Wound
Asked if it isn’t weird to be at an awards ceremony with Gregory Peck,
Dylan says, “Well, listen, everything’s weird. You tell me something
that’s not weird.” He might as well have said “big,” that his songs are
a witness to magnitude, that your poems are. And why shouldn’t they be?
Look at the epic of your life, at the people in it, all heroic. And to think
it began with an accident. Somebody looked up at the night sky and saw a star,
somebody in Cracow or Belgrade, maybe, or the city where you live now.
Carbon, nitrogen . . . there was an explosion, and now you have to pay attention
to everything. At the party, everyone was talking about the crappy TV series
that’s so popular, and you didn’t say you wanted better, wanted more.
That same night, you met the man you’d love so hard it made your teeth hurt.
He said, “Hey, baby,” and you snapped, “I’m not your baby.”
I have nothing to say to you, really. I just want to see what I’m looking at.
I want so much not to listen to you after all this time but to hear.
Copyright © 2016 by David Kirby. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 22, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
From Collected Poems 1947-1980 by Allen Ginsberg, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Used with permission.
A mouse went to see his mother. When his car broke down he bought a bike. When the bike wore out he bought skates. When the skates wore down he ran. He ran until his sneakers wore through. Then he walked. He walked and walked, almost walked his feet through so he bought new ones. His mother was happy to see him and said, "what nice new feet you have on." —paraphrase of a story in Mouse Tails by Arnold Lobel hey, listen, a bad thing happened to my friend's marriage, can't tell you only can tell my own story which so far isn't so bad: "Dad" and I stay married. so far. so good. so so. But it felt undoable. This lucky life every day, every day. every. day. (all the poetry books the goddamn same until one guys gets up and stuns the audience) Then, Joe Wenderoth, not by a long shot sober says, I promised my wife I wouldn't fuck anyone, to no one in particular and reads a poem about how Jesus has no penis. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist, attractive in a fatherly way, says libido question mark. And your libido? like a father, but not like mine, or my sons'— "fix it." My friend's almost written a good novel by which I mean finished which means I'd like to light myself on fire, on fire with envy, this isn't "desire" not what the Dr. meant by libido? I hope— not, it's just chemical: jealousy. boredom. lethargy. Books with prominent seraphs: their feet feet feet I am marching to the same be— other than the neuronic slave I thought anxiety made me do it, made me get up and carry forth, sally the children to school the poems dragged by little hands on their little seraphs to the page my marriage sustained, remaining energy: project #1, project #2, broken fixtures, summer plans, demand met, request granted, bunny noodles with and without cheesy at the same time, and the night time I insomnia these hours penning invisible letters— till it stopped. doc said: it's a syndrome. you've got it, classic. it's chemical, mental circuitry we've got a fix for this classic, I'm saying I can make it better. Everything was the same, then, but better. At night I slept. In the morning got up. Kids to school, husband still a fool- hardy spirit makes me pick a monday morning fight, snipe! I'll pay for that later I'm still a pain in the elbow from writing prose those shift+hold+letter, I'm still me less sleepy, crazy, I suppose less crazy-jealous just ha-ha now at Jesus' no penis his amazed at the other poet's kickass friend's novel I dream instead about the government makes me put stickers on my driver's license of family members who are Jews, and mine all are. Can they get us all? I escape with a beautiful light-haired man, blue-eyed day trader, gentile. gentle, gentle, mind encased in its blood-brain barrier from the harsh skull sleep, sleep and sleepy wake and want to sleep and sleep a steep dosage— "—chemical?" in my dreams now every man's mine, no- problem, perhaps my mind's a little plastic, malleable, not so fatal now the dose is engineered like that new genetic watercress to turn from green to red when planted over buried mines, nitrogen dioxide makes for early autumn red marks the spot where I must watch my step, up one half-step-dose specific— The psychiatrist's lived in NY so long he's of ambiguous religious— everyone's Jewish sometimes— writes: "up the dosage." now, when I'm late I just shrug it's my new improved style missed the train? I tug the two boys single file the platform a safe aisle between disasters, blithely I step, step, step-lively carefully, wisely. I sing silly ditties play I spy something pretty grey-brown-metal-filthy for a little city fun. Just one way to enjoy life's trials, mile after mile, lucky to have such dependable feet. you see, the rodents don't frighten I'm calm as can be expected to recover left to my one devivces I was twice as fast getting everywhere but where did that get me but there, that inevitable location more waiting, the rats there scurry, scurry, a furry till the next train comes "up the dosage." Brown a first-cut brisket in hot Dutch oven after dusting with paprika. Remove. Sauté thickly sliced onions and add wine. (Sweet is better, lasts forever, never need a new bottle). Put the meat on onions, cover with tomato-sauce- onion-soup-mix mixture, cover. Back in a low oven many hours. The house smells like meat. My hair smells like meat. I'm a light unto the nation. I'm trying to get out of Egypt. This year, I'll be better. Joseph makes sense of the big man's dreams, is saved, saves his brothers those jealous boys who sold him sold them all as slaves. Seven years of plenty. Seven years of famine. He insomnias the nights counting up grains, storing, planning, for what? They say throw the small boys in the river (and mothers do so). Smite the sons (and fathers do it.) God says take off your shoes, this holy ground this pitiful, incombustible bush. Is God chemical? Enzymatic of our great need to chaos? We're unforgivable. People of the salted cheeks. Slap, turn, slap. To be chosen is to be unforgiving/ unforgiv- en, always chosen: be better. The Zuckers are a long line of obsessives. This served them well in war time saw it coming in time that unseeable thing they hoarded they ferried, schemed, paced, got the hell out figured out at night, insomnia, how to visa— now, if it happens again, I won't be ready I'm "better." The husband, a country club Jew from Denver, American intelligentsia will have to carry me out and he's no big man and I'm not a small girl how fast can the doctor switch the refugee gene back on? How fast can I get worse? Smart again and worse? Better to be alive than better. "...listen:" says the doctor, "sleeping isn't death. All children unlearn this fear you got confused thought thinking was the same as spinning—" Writes: "up the dosage." don't think. this refugee thing part of a syndrome fear of medication of being better... Truth is, the anti-obsessional medicine works wonders and drags me through life's course... About this time of year but years ago the priests spread rumors of blood libel. Jews huddled in basements accused of using Christian babes' blood to make unleavened bread. signs and wonders. Christ rises. Blood and body and babes. Basements and briskets and bread of afflictions. I am calm now with my pounds of meat made and frozen, my party schedule, my pills of liberation, my gentile dream-boy, American passport, my grey haired-psychiatrist, my blue- eyed son, my brown-eyed son, my poems on their pretty little fleet-feet, my big shot friends, olive-skinned husband, my right elbow on fire: fire inside deep in the nerve from too much carrying and word-mongering, smithery, bearing and tensing choosing to be better to live this real life this better orbit this Jack Kerouac never loved you like you wanted. Blake. Buddha. Only Jesus and that's his shtick, he loves everyone: smile! that's it, for the camera, blood pressure normal, better, you're a poster child for signs and wonders what a little chemistry does for the brain, blood, thought, hey, did you know that Pharaoh actually wanted to let them go? those multitude Jews but God hardened Pharaoh's heart against them [Jews] to prove his prowess show his signs, wonders, outstretched hand, until the dosage was a perfect ten and then some, sea closing up around those little chariots the men and horses while women on the far shore shook their tambourines. And then what? Forty years to get the smell of slavery off them. Because of this. Bloody Nile. My story one of the lucky. Escape hatch even from my own obsess— I am here because of this. Because of what my ancestors did for me to tell this story of the outstretched hand what it did for me this marked door and behind this red-marked door, around a corner a blue-eyed boy waits to love me up with his leavened bread, his slim body, professional detachment, medical advancements, forgive me my father's mother's father was the last in a long line of Rabbis—again! with this? This rhapsody of affliction and escape, the mind bobbing along in its watery safe. Be like everyone. Else. Indistinguishable but better than the other nations but that's what got us into this, Allen, no one writes these long-ass poems anymore. Now we're better, all better. All Christian. Kind.
Copyright © 2012 Rachel Zucker. First appeared in Columbia Poetry Review. Used with permission of the author.