Monday

A Wolf's Reply to the U.S. Census

I was a wild child

   raised by wolves


They wanted me to be a lawyer

but I had my eyes on the deep woods.


The first day of school was hard

   the seats didn't fit

so I howled like a wolf

should.


To make me stop

   they tied me to a tree

with infinite love.


That really confused me

but it was okay – 

I made friends with the other

   bad wolves


We plotted, we developed that lean, hungry look

Oh we had fun – 


We smoked some plants and saw God – 

she played New Orleans piano

   with a left hand to die for


We spent years trying to get

   that hard groove down.


I guess our education suffered – 

they fed us junk food

   some kind of experiment

so we all ended up working at 7-11...


Did you ever get your nose broken by a junkie with a gun?

I recognized the look in his eyes

   I felt it

before the store went black

                                                   

When I got back from the hospital

it was okay, except

I forgot what her eyes looked like – 

   the piano player's.

                                             

For days I watched the sun

lick ice off the windows, sad and thirsty.


I had a dream, I went down to the river

with a news anchor

   yeah, she looked good

but then I saw my reflection in the water


and it was a strange creature

   not a wolf at all


So I ran and ran

until my 20s were over

   all the time thinking


I'm alive I'm alive

Oh it hurt.


Things are better now.

The woman who delivers ice cream,

I watch how she handles it

   so gently


She taught me that love is silly, infinite

   and man-made.


Imagine.


Except for her

I'm alone

   with my wild love,

   

my pride and evil ways.


Every day I remember the eyes

   of the junkie

   and the piano player


Mine are on the deep woods.

Sound Has a Finite Life

The telephone in my girlfriend’s apartment

in 1982 is still ringing, unanswered,

breaking the laws of physics.

The thudding echo in my heart sinks

deeper and deeper as I keep hearing

my father tell me transcontinentally

of an accident involving my brother.

The sonic boom and WIXY 1260

announced the age of nuclear propulsion

and I’m still twitching to those sweet threats.

And the snow, always falling, always melting.

Snow and silence always go together,

as if we’re straining to hear something – 

what did you say?


We like to think the saxophone solos

of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane

have traveled unimpeded through

an open door or kitchen vent and into

space where they will enter the galaxy

of Alpha Centauri in 25,000 years,

proving to the universe that we

have redeeming qualities.


In reality…

The bowling ball explodes the pins,

the angry words bury themselves

with their target,

the arguments are white noise

self-cancelling,

the sound of things unsaid,

the sound of absence I think

is Bb minor,

melancholy is a major seventh

and we can only really dance

to songs in a minor key.

Are you still listening to me?

I don’t know what happens when I stop.

Sound has a finite life and

I’m afraid I’m not reaching you.

New York


With $114 in stock boy savings

     I bought a ticket for New York where I found

a job at Orange Julius in Times Square

     and a room at a West 43rd hotel.

I worked from midnight to 7 and gave

     free Juliuses to methadone addicts

who showed me their clinic IDs

     as if they were magic passports.

Afternoons I walked and saw the new immigrants

     through basement apartment windows

crowded in smoky rooms, laughing and talking

     after their day of hard, tedious work.

An Indian mystic in the subway told me

     how long I would live and my mother's name

and showed me a worn photo of his class

     gathered around a robed man who

must have been a hundred years old.

     In the subway I also met Mark the socialist

who I believed until I found out he was

     a corporate president's son from Chicago

living on the dole in Manhattan.


Everyone had a cause in New York,

     from the cabbie who lectured me on doom

and deliverance to the man at the deli

     who spilled my coffee and told me

he knew the secret of getting rich but

     you had to work 23 hours a day.

I went to hear Charles Mingus at the empty

     Two Saints where he sat Buddha-like

at the bar on breaks, sipping Pouilly Fuisse

     and nodding to me as I passed unable to speak.

I rode the Staten Island ferry with the lost

     men and women who stood in hooded raincoats

and stared out over the water toward the hidden

     Atlantic.  June rainstorms swept the streets 

empty for an hour as people waited in Wall Street

     lobbies, marble museums, and under marquees

and I ate hot dogs at Nathan's.  The rain

     reminded me of my Midwest home when the winds rose

bringing dust and black clouds.  I was free

     in New York, and broke, alone, and hungry.


I went back to the jazz clubs when I could afford

     the cover and nursed an underage beer,

trying to look as hip as I could in clothes

     from a $2.99 store and a red bandanna

that added a mature touch, I hoped.

     One night Rahsaan Roland Kirk, blind

and half-paralyzed from a stroke, played

     like three men with his crazy horns,

a manzello, stritch, harmonium and nose flute,

     simultaneous saxophones and a crepuscular voice

that told us he had to go to the moon, soon.

     Between sets I approached him with a request

and waited as he told a young woman drummer

     who later became a jazz prodigy at eighteen

about the old days of Bird and Diz on 52nd Street.

     His new band members didn't know the song I

asked for but Rahsaan fit it somehow in the middle

     of another.  He left earth a month later.

And in Central Park on Sundays everyone had an act--

     furious magicians and dreamy steel drum players

whose music whispered, "We are not here."


The park was haunted by those who

     had no place to be.  An army deserter

who said he lived in the park a year now

     showed me his secret, spindly tree

where a large green parrot perched. I met

     a gray-haired woman who might have been

a former actress or aristocrat.  She spent hours

     in the travel section of the library

looking for a country to spend her exile in,

     and we had tea one afternoon

in a dusty shop on 8th Avenue where

     she fell asleep in the warm sun.

My job was unraveling as I missed days

     and kept the change when the boss

sent me out for supplies.  In Joan Crawford week

     I brought apple pies and foreign papers

back to my room and watched the old movies and 

     heard muffled, desperate words through the walls.

It seemed you could disappear in New York

     without being noticed but when I went back to work

I was fired.  So I stood in Times Square

     where ragged chess masters played

as if it were their last game and

     I considered my options.  Hanging low

in the sky was a huge, overstuffed, pale

     circle.  You couldn't tell if it was

a sun or a moon.

Saturday

Hotel de la Marine

If you stare at something long enough
it stops being the thing it is.
A lamppost precisely centered
in Charles Marville’s photograph
Hotel de la Marine becomes
a disillusioned romantic’s search
for clarity. He was out late drinking,
and now at dawn the streets are dim,
the facades peeling, oil smudges
in the alley, the world belonging
to the people who wake up early.
They’re more practical than us,
pushing fish carts into restaurants,
then having a smoke in the truck
on their way to somewhere else.
The romantic sits on a bench
opposite the lamppost, glimpses
a hand pulling aside a curtain
on the second floor, makes
a promise that may not survive the day.

Wednesday

Mystery Chord

The mystery chord of the composer Scriabin would bedevil audiences,
causing dizziness, flushing, the inability to speak
for several days, moonsickness, fainting, and questioning
of one’s path through life. Aware of its strange power,
Scriabin, the dark mystic-eccentric Russian, used it sparingly.

Conceived on a carriage driven through Moscow one snowy evening,
Scriabin hearing a new piano sonata in the air,
when his eyes fell on a young blond woman standing
on a street corner, her eyes, moist from the cold
or tears, meeting his. Scriabin, married with children,
felt a profound longing, wishing she were in his carriage
so that he may kiss her, without words, jumping
head first over a cliff. But the carriage moved on
and Scriabin lost sight of her in the crowd, left
with only a sound in his head, ten notes,
none of which making any sense together, but somehow
they did. Nine notes would have incomprehensible dissonance,
but with the tenth, came the new, mournful, unbearable
truth that matched his feelings. A small consolation,
perhaps, for what he desired and couldn’t have.

So he felt at the time. But the consolations
of music travel through time and space, enduring.
In 1967, my father, playing jazz piano in a lounge in Cleveland,
found the mystery chord under and in his hands.
Entrusted to him. Came without asking. He was backing
a singer who almost, on a good night, sounded like Peggy Lee.
My father taught her, like the others, how to sing jazz,
what key was right for them, how to believe in a lyric.
My father, married with six kids, may have had an affair
with her or one of the other singers. Perhaps unfair to speculate.
Perhaps beside the point. But in the middle of the song
by Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin, there it was. The sound,
the longing for something that’s not here on earth.
He hit the chord, improbably, ten fingers on ten notes
spread across the keys. He came down on the keys
with such intensity that his whole body, in reaction,
leaped backward, the back of his head hitting the bar,
knocking himself out, falling off his bench and onto the floor.

He woke up in a few moments, Peggy Lee and the bartender
leaning over him. He smiled, fulfilled. Snow started falling
lightly outside. He got to his feet and the audience applauded.
He felt rueful, but didn’t have to.
They heard it.
The mystery chord.

My father sat down to find it again, but it was lost,
like Coleridge’s dream of Kubla Khan, like Scriabin’s memory
of that girl in the Moscow winter night. The bruise was throbbing.
He felt the warm blood in his hair.
He played the opening notes of “There Will Never Be Another You.”