Fred's Poems, 1996–

Found poem 1

Change
at Jamaica
for the Patchogue
Train

(found in Penn Station, New York, 7/27/96)


Manhattan Haiku

The bronze light of 6 p.m.
Flashes off the brick buttes and concrete mesas
of Seventh Avenue.

After twelve days of rain
a great flood of tourists
washes over the curbsides of Times Square.


Sibelius at Starbucks

Chair legs clatter across the floor
The bow glides across the strings
The poinsettias are red
The lake waters are blue
Muskrats meander among pine needles
 and spars of rotting spruce
The violin plunges head first through the ice
Real-estate lawyers bark into cell phones
 beyond the plate glass
The violin soars to the topmost branch
 of a bare-limbed birch
Cheap white china yields up the dregs
 of a double espresso
And chocolate-brown vans haul away
 the day's done deals.


Ideographic Landscape

Walk this way, she said
Around the triple dagger and
Into the peak-roofed house
Where the man with four swords
Thrust through his torso
Pleads for mercy from the
Ancient couple who care for
The stiff-backed trumpet player.

Through the window
Beyond the door
Across the open space
Between the columns of black ink
Where the one-eyed dog is winking
At the three pigeons as they
Lift their wings all at once
And flee the small black spot
That marks the midpoint
Of the night.


The Buddha and the Onion

Take this onion, said the Buddha.
Discard the wan green stalks.
Remove the parchment husks.
Then peel it carefully,
One translucent layer at a time.
Be patient. Work slowly. Keep peeling.
Find out what's inside.

Years pass. So many layers,
so wan and translucent.
Until nothing at all.
No fruit, no core, no kernel.
Just tears.


Cosmology

Strewn on the tabletop among the hundred red sequin stars
Are four potato-shaped pebbles — decrepit comets —
And a dessicated clove of garlic like a burnt-out quasar.

The comet whose trajectory the astronomers disputed
Veers away into the post-cataclysmic dust as
Betelgeuse, warped red giant, pulses toward supernova
Like Lenin in his cloth cap and goatee just before
His brain exploded and he plunged into the black hole
     of 1924.


Matter in 3 States

Tiny ivory mussel shell
bound by black cotton thread
to pitted surface
of grey-brown igneous pebble.
Stone the extrusion of volcanic fire
Shell the artifact of living tissue
Thread the processed product
      of industrial revolution.
These earthbound items
all forged from star-stuff
yet ineluctably here:
tangible, orderly and durable.


Metropolitan Corridor

Neither urban nor rural
but an in-between sort of place
where everything used to happen.
Telegraph lines and steel rails;
long pine poles steeped in creosote
capped with glass insulators
and strung with copper wire.
In the days before cell phones and satellites
Words and journeys were etched into the landscape.
Every town had some consequence——
a junction, a switchpoint,
a place to change trains.


Postcard:  Lover's Leap

The man in the red shirt
stops two yards back from the cliff-edge
and gazes
past the twin stacks of the old electric plant
toward the lighthouse
on Cardiff Hill.

Two bridges, no clouds
and one old switch engine
in the Burlington yards below.


Virginia Street

White wooden backyard fence with a gate.
Tire swing on a hickory tree.
Piles of autumn leaves from Helen Carstarphen's yard
 ——I set them on fire once.

Going to funerals in Illinois.
Picking crabapples and wild grapes
 along the roadside by the levee
 so Grandma could make jelly.
Looking for persimmons and not finding any
 except once or twice.

Eating roast beef every Sunday.
Listening to the radio next door
 with Uncle Tom Robinson.

Watching the ants on the peony bushes.
Burning trash in the backyard oven.
Admiring Grandma's morning glories—
Waiting forever for them to bloom.

Hammering nails on the new garage roof.
Running up the back porch steps,
Crashing into a post and getting
 two stitches in my forehead.

Not crossing the street for months
 after Ricky's dog bit me.
Selling lemonade on sidewalks
Where no one ever walked by.


Thornwood

My son is nearly nine:  he never
goes outdoors on his own.
But when I was eight
I could tramp in solitude all summer
in the woods behind Virginia Street,
dodging the black thorn branches
and following the creekbed to its source
on the hillside below the Cunningham place.
I'd take off after lunch, return near sundown
when the house windows along the eastern ridge
turned golden and my father came home
bearing coils of wire and old telephones
for me to take apart.
After supper, Grandma laid aside
her thornwood walking stick
and we sat down to play double solitaire
until bedtime.  But then I couldn't fall asleep
because the shadow of the telephone cord
cast on the wall by the moonlight
looked too much like the blacksnake
my father killed with a stick the year before
in the attic behind my aunt's bedroom.


January

Toward sundown I knelt
on the purple patterned cushions
of the overstuffed sofa
And gazed through the sheer ivory curtains,
Searching the skies for snow.

The mercury dropped
The clouds gathered
The first flakes fell:
My spirits soared.

That night, the same dreams—
Suspension on long steel cables
over a bottomless abyss;
Under the yellow light bulb,
The man with no face
about to open the back-porch door.

The next morning,
Sixteen inches—
   No school!


Knots

Two flights up
    from my Aunt Georgia's office
A troop of Sea Scouts kept their knots
    upon display.

Bowline, sheepshank, two half-hitches——
Intricacies of rope that seemed arcane
    to my eight-year-old fingers.

A few years later I would learn
    to tie such knots myself.
By then it seemed a rather pointless craft
    to one so landlocked.


Saverton 1956

Bright summer laugh, dark cake
studded with six candles.
A barge floats downstream,
slides silently through the locks
and moves on down the river.

Beached, becalmed, stranded;
waiting for a wave to wash you
back into the channel.
The riverbank's dark cake
holds the river but the river
still runs
like a wild lost angel.


C x H  =  W(g) + F(s)

Wheat and barley.  Oats and rye.
Amber waves of grain.
The bumper harvest of 1957
Overflowed the elevator and heaps of excess wheat
Filled the street at the foot of Pine Street hill.

But grain can only be piled so high
Before it spills into a broader heap.
Where once the odd seedlet
Meandered off from the edge alone,
All now collapse and fly apart at once.

An equation might describe some sort of limit:
The size and shape and weight
Of the individual grains,
The friction of the surface,
The number of grains in total,
The height and circumference of the pile ...
Add it all up and calculate
How many layers of seed on seed
Before the whole thing falls apart.

Jefferson and Madison thought
they had it figured out:
With the proper checks and balances
The Republic could keep on growing.
Wayward grains would amble back into the pile.

But the Founders never reckoned with
The laws of chaos
The rules of disorder
The enormous effects
Of minuscule perturbations.
The least little seed at the far edge
Shifts imperceptibly and
The whole thing tumbles down.


Reds

Candle, clothespin, sled and drum
Objects from a child's book of colors.
They're all red, or
Have a little red in them.
I was a Red once myself——
Still have a little red in me, I suppose.
Uncle Alfred didn't, though——
He smoked those big cigars
With the little red and gold band.
Were they
Cuban cigars?
Was that why he hated Reds?

Summer of '63——he took me to Washington
We stood in line for the White House tour
Saw all the monuments
Visited the Smithsonian.
But he had to get us out of town fast
Before the Reds showed up.

The next time I went
I went with the Reds.
Uncle Alfred stayed home.


Nails and Stones        Russell reads this poem


In the last week
     of the last summer
     of his life
Charles Barton bent
     over the old wooden dock
     pounding twenty-penny nails
     into the thick pine boards.

Nearby, his grandson Russell,
     four years old,
Cast small smooth stones
     into the black waters
     of the lake.


The Waves in the Cove

The waves in the cove that make music all night
Crescendo at dawn as the wind turns north.

The wind turns north, pushing the gulls
Off their course and bringing the cool rain.

The cool rain drums on the windows and roof
While the chipmunks chatter of death beneath the eaves.

The wind turns south and the rain relents.
Light fades from the water, the chipmunks disperse and fall asleep.

Then the waves in the cove again.

(After William Stafford, "The Light by the Barn")


Thompson's Point, 1 a.m.

Beyond the rough plank bench
at the edge of the cliff where Sarah
nearly slipped through the fence
the quarter-melon moon
hurries through the haze
and disappears behind Hurricane peak.
There is no wind.  No waves are lapping
in the cove, and the children
are sleeping on the second floor.
Only the faint chuffing of an oil barge
on the New York side
as it passes Split Rock Mountain
where the Abenaki held off the Iroquois
before Champlain came to claim the lake.


Thunder

My mother always hated thunder and lightning.
It was thrilling, though——waiting and
watching for a funnel to appear
so we could run for the basement
and huddle in the southwest corner.
It wasn't the wicked witch but the tornado
that scared the bejeezus out of me
in the Wizard of Oz.

Thunderstorms sweeping out of the southwest
 descending on the river towns——
Thunderstorms as we traveled home from Illinois,
 through the black-soiled bottomlands
 between Kinderhook and Hull.
Thunderheads mounting high over Kansas City,
 the airplane bounced through the clouds.
Thunderheads mounting high over the Pampas,
 borne toward Buenos Aires
 by the Santa Rosa winds, harbingers of spring.
Three unbelievers setting off
 on a pilgrimage to Lujan
 as the skies opened.

A lot of death that year——
Carol's miscarriage at the decrepit old hospital
out by Parque Patricios, near the Riachuelo,
on the way to Avellaneda.
And all the tombs of Recoleta
where history rests, not quite in peace——
Lavalle and Dorrego,
Rosas and Sarmiento,
Evita Perón and Aramburu.

Washing dishes at the sink in the ill-lit kitchen
of Jeremy's flat in the Calle Chacabuco,
I sliced my finger open on a shard of glass.


I don't know where it comes from--

     --the conviction that I must never dwell
 in a hot climate
where rattlesnakes and black widows
without faces lie in wait.
The dry lands are not silent:
Diamondbacks rattle, coyotes howl,
scorpions scuttle across the sand.
My body has no way of remembering
how to stay alive among such predators——
no craft or lore acquired in childhood:
where not to step, which brush piles to avoid,
how to discern the fine steel strands of silk
suspended from the branches of the night.
With arrows, fire and flowers
the beasts are beaten back,
but fever from forgotten wounds
rises in the hours before dawn
and I no longer know how to return
to winter or a river.

(Inspired by Gordon Grice, The Red Hour-Glass:
  Lives of the Predators. Certain lines and images
  echo Pablo Neruda, "Poetry", in Isla Negra: A Notebook.)


Trail of Tears:  Eastern Terminus

Rain clouds hover just above
the broken line of peaks
that defines the western horizon.
It is sunset.  The snows have melted
and the river is running swiftly
through the gathering night.
Under the pines, beside a row of barrels
laid end on end,
sits the man with a furrowed brow
and large, deep-set eyes.
He is waiting there for his children
to return from beyond the mountains.
But he cannot yet see the lightning
that will tell him they are gone for good.


Historical Entomology

Soldier beetles can be found flying in warm sunshine
     with their colors resembling old uniforms.
The day before he died, Stalin feasted on a sumptuous plate
     of soldier beetles steamed in beer.

These insects are of little economic importance,
     although they may feed on certain pest species.
Seventeen years before, an old Georgian peasant
     had told him of their pungent flavor.

Soldier beetles live in meadows on the edges of woodlands.
Several Red Army battalions survived on a diet
     of soldier beetles in the days of the Great Famine.

Adult beetles also eat the pollen and nectar of milkweed flowers.
When the schoolchildren laid their bouquets on Stalin's bier,
     a great swarm of soldier beetles flew out of the milkweed blossoms.

The larvae are flattened, with a velvet covering of short hairs.
Wrapped in his velvet-lined greatcoat, Molotov shuddered
     as the insects took to the sky over Red Square.

Certain species find prey on the ground or in soil
     and low-growing mosses.
Outside the Kremlin walls, soldiers flung themselves to the ground
     and the vast crowd dissolved in chaos.


Beneath a fortunate moon

       dark matter shrouds the planet.
In the sweet water       the fast fever
the seven stones of summer
warm the body       cloud the mind.
Slender hands braid optical fiber
into silver pathways
stretching toward the other shore.


My father rose early that morning

     donned his double-breasted navy blue suit, put a four-in-hand
knot in his wide maroon tie, placed his fedora on his prematurely
gray head and set off for the Burlington station behind the Mark
Twain Hotel. The Zephyr would not leave for St. Louis until half-
past eight, but a large crowd of travelers already filled the
sofas and overstuffed armchairs of the waiting room, where they
sat chatting complacently, though some were vaguely beset by
uneasiness: the novelty of integration, anticipation of the Bomb.


Downstairs

The telephones. The vise. The handsaw.
The blue willow plate.

The cornet. Its mouthpiece.

The picture window. The washing machine.
The underwear. The red and white metal chair.

My father. His striped coveralls.
His black rubber apron.

The cameras. The photographs.
The enlarger. The slide projector.

The amber lightbulb. The potassium ferrocyanide.



No Answer

It is unnecessary for us both to speak.
Let us be silent, serious, contemplative.
A bright green feather of cloud
looms just above the horizon.
This has been given us to help the pain,
though we neglect to make use of it.
The children have ventured far beyond us.
Some people hurt from this, but we are resigned.

When the smell of the flowers was overpowering,
we held our breath and walked a little faster.
This gained us but a few moments,
and still I had to fight off so much purple
that I missed the small black spot
that appeared suddenly in the corner of your eye.


The urgency of light

The architects were angry that morning.
The craftsmen refused to relinquish the calendar.
Detectives waited at the bus stop,
forcing passersby to recite from an eye chart.

I couldn't stay in the front rooms:
they were too green, too cold,
and no one was responsible for them.
The upholstery was sodden with formaldehyde;
bits of bark clung to the wooden table legs.
Paw prints of small fierce animals
smudged the windowpanes,
and a cylindrical magnet threatened
to disarrange the solid stacks of dominoes.

Science had no answers:
The chronometer was locked away in a cabinet.
The saxophone spun blindly on its axis,
and the slide rule hanging from the pegboard
gave a value for pi
that everyone knew to be false.


In the western room

At the hour when box elder bugs
come down from the rafters
the mailman has already come and gone
leaving nothing but seed catalogs
and a postcard from downtown Topeka.
Two stories below, the green garden hose
coils tightly around its gray steel bracket
and the drainpipe shudders against the siding.
A rising wind exposes the pale undersides
       of the maple leaves
and translucent clouds turn abruptly opaque.


The flatness of the landscape

My hair had grown long.
Banished from the marching band,
I took refuge among the gatecrashers
who gathered daily outside the state prison
where the thick walls exuded an odor
of mildewed concrete.

In the hazy exhaust of a '62 Buick,
I exchanged glances with a pickpocket
whose mastiff had quietly slipped its leash
and was about to defecate
on the wrong side of the police barricade.

Two minutes to one and not an ambulance in sight;
too far to walk to the Boonville Bridge.
In the other direction,
six crows, a field of soybeans
and the Golf Club on Highway 5,

where Uncle Doc the optometrist has just lit up another big cigar
and started in on his story about the old boy from Memphis
who could drive a ball 300 yards even though he was legally blind.


3 places I have lived

Behind the red-brick hospital,
the pile driver's clang of steel on steel.
The baby carriage rolls along
across St. Mary's Avenue,
past Dr. Verbeck's osteopathy clinic
and into the flats along Magnolia Street.

Tossing away her cigarette,
the girl in the black raincoat
runs to catch the 57th Street bus.
Through the cold mist
the Paramount Building looms faintly
as I wander from Midtown
to the Upper West Side,
until the sun sets
behind the ruined orphanage
atop the ridge on Levering Avenue.

Then the clack of wood on wood,
and I hurry down the lawns
below the Nelson Art Gallery,
across Brush Creek Boulevard,
23rd Street, then 14th,
to St. Mark's Place and home.


His Glass Eye Kept Him Out of the Draft
But Now His Half-Brother's on the GI Bill

Half past noon on a Saturday,
two years after the War.
Empty coal barges drift downstream.
Just north of the Boonville Bridge,
Uncle Finn leans against the fender
of a '42 Dodge. The 12:15 out of Glasgow
clatters through the grade crossing.
Finn tips his hat to the fireman,
takes a last puff on his stogie
and lets it fall to the pavement.
"Never should've left Sikeston," he mutters.
"That goddam boardinghouse——
what a losing proposition."


5 Lines


Steering by firelight in a boat with blue oars.


Electricity shoots through the soles of your feet.


There is more to the land than nostalgia.


This is the white page at twilight.


This is the scale-model universe.



Consider an idealized experiment

The smell of freshly washed sheets.
Motion along a track.
Roses on a sunlit trellis.
Khaki tarpaulins folded into bundles.
A beach strewn with egg-shaped stones.
Flaking paint on rusting steel.
Dark leaves against a twilit sky.
A small aircraft at the edge of a cliff.
Moonlight on a choppy sea.
Wind passing over a field of grain.
A tunnel. Falling rocks.  A quarry.


Garbage cabbage Babbage

Appealing to an anomalous analogy,
Mr. Babbage throws the beets out with
the basura, charging the circuit of digital detritus.

Electronic eggs, stirred flippantly into
the farfalle:  garbage or groceries?
Hamburgers are hardly intelligent but
ice cream implies even less information.

(Jules— more jelly, please!)

Kale is a killer:  let's loose a few more
kilobits down the lead pipe.
They've mislaid the microchips, Mr. Newton.

(And no noshing!)

Orange offal; putrid prunes.  The quagmire,
where quince and raspberry register
near the top of the squeamish scale.

Techniques for turning trash into turnips——
underutilized since the onset of vegetal variation
——have laid utter waste to the warehouse.

(Don't fret:  yesterday's Yardbird is tomorrow's Yeats.)

ZZZzzzzzzz . . .


Recipe

Flour, starch and ether
Charred wicks and candle wax
Waistbands      watchbands
and rusty hacksaw blades.


Thirteen Ways to Waste Time
in the Western Hemisphere

Sample tapas in Tampa
Puff a Tampa in Tampico
Pick at pico de gallo in the Galápagos
Gallop through Gallup.

Get wasted in West Orange
Peel an orange in Pelham
Smoke a ham in Skokie
Snort coke in Cahokia.

Skulk slyly through Minnesota
Measure minnows along the Minnisink
Salt salmon in Secaucus
Caulk a sailboat in Ho-Ho-Kus.

Sink slowly into the Great Salt Lake.


Garden View

But what you did didn't matter——
not in that house, where
the doors would not close;
not on the long driveway,
where cigars rode up in Pontiac sedans
with the windows rolled shut
and upholstery that smelled of old carpets.

Sticks, trees, rain, people—
A dusty odor of pesticide
and an immense pile of dead leaves
turning to mulch for the rosebushes.

Sixteen or twenty years later
her things were distributed
to nieces and nephews;
for the neighborhood children,
a single wide shallow bowl.


I forgot ...

     ... how dark it was,
how signs stand between mind and matter,
how garter snakes practice invisibility,
how radios rust when submerged in mud.


Postmadrugada

She missed the bus:
It came once a century
when the pigeons smiled
and the sharks' ears peeled.
Intensity under the ground,
Saturn's plumbline. Unhappy fellows,
playing bridge with a marked deck.
Where was the eager child?
Snap to; wiggle——
respiration that whistles.
Whenever she listens, it snows.
Apricot seeds for breakfast,
tea biscuits for lunch.
For dinner, a loose tooth.

In the morning we get drunk
on heavy water. Dawn is the moment 
of exasperation: Insomniacs stagger
through the suburbs; Eagle Scouts
send messages no one answers.
Three streets over, the grass is dying.
Poison frogs sing after dark
when the willows shed their bark and
the motorman pulls the hammer down.

Too full, too far, too few.
Esperanza sin amargura. Pacifícate.


Snap, Whirrr

What shall we do with Mr. Land's camera?
Dispense with the darkroom. Hold it at arm's
length, squeeze the button slowly——steal our
own souls. What, a shock of recognition? 
My father, meticulous shutterbug, despised Polaroids.
	

Found in Translation

The magician of the ounce
casts his crystal eye
outside the sketch and
catalogs the strong waters
of the landscape.
Two histories down,
explorers of the sea
conceal their knots
behind curtains of pure ivory.
In the furnace of the patio
the rain is appeased and
the sullen nimbus hesitates
before the bankrupt line
of the western horizon.