With his Silence - 7/27/2010

It is like gathering
all the salt from the sea

locked arthritic hands, aching.

His wife opens the water bottles for him.

There is no end to this,
I want to tell him.
No finish line.
This is life now. This is just what it is.
You are beating the cancer, yes,

but your kidneys are dying.
The knee won’t get better.
The pain will always be there.

If you are in pain,
say something!
Be honest with the doctors.

I have a whole list of things to say,
but he will lift
those pale blue eyes
sea water eyes,
like his daughters,
from the paper
to me

and say everything with his silence.

And I know
I will be quiet, too.

Sunday Morning - 7/25/10

I sit with my mother at the table
and talk about the business of books.
I'm mid sentence and she stops me,
holds her finger in the air.
The silence lingers,
as her eyes scan the newspaper in front of me.

"Who died?" I ask,
because what else could it be?

"Oh, it is her. Oh how sad," she says and for a moment
her face crumples.

"Oh how sad. She was only 48."

"Who?" I ask.

It was a neighbor.
I don't recognize her name
and upon seeing this, my mother,
who has lived for so long in this house
on this street,
describes the departed's location on the block.

"Next door to the Levinsons"
she tells me.
"Remember?"

"Oh, I say, sure," but I'm lying.
I have no idea who she is,
this woman, who my mother tells me had no children
but was engaged to be married,
dead from cancer.

"It's always so sad when a neighbor's child dies."

I think of the boy down the street,
who died in high school and the line I stood on
to get into his funeral. It wrapped through the parking lot.

My father is on the couch,
the newspaper on his lap,
just having fallen asleep,
He is cold, always cold
and his fingers are locking up.
My mother opens all this water bottles now.

and I think about how long they have been here
in this house,
on this street,
my whole life.
Always here.

I think of that and how I hope it's longer still.
Just a little bit.
Please.

Voice of God - 7/23/10

On the 86th street overpass
in the part of Brooklyn the tour buses
don't go to

lay a pair of sandals,
side by side,
neatly tucked against the
chain link fence.

And next to them a wrapping from the Holy Bible
on audio cd and I thought to myself
even the voice of God couldn't save him,
when he dove and landed on the cars below
small stones embedded, still
in the skin of his heels.

He should have taken the Book.
The weight of it might have kept him
tied to his earth
a little while longer.

The thin onion skin paper
reminding him of his own paper thin skin
down near his sex.

So simply construced
and durable
unlike the body
crashing and popping
against all that metal.

Flight - 7/22/10

I grabbed your hand
when the plane lurched
and the lights went out.
We were just in the air
and I thought to myself,
This is when they crash.
It's on the news all the time.

Take off or landing.
Right at the beginning and the end.

We were on our way to your grandfather's funeral
and I thought of your mother,
how small she would look
in all that black
her long blonde hair
and nervous fingers

finding out at the funeral home that
we were already gone.

What the Neighbors Said - 7/21/10

It was an unraveling
like these sorts of things always are

a thin spool of thread
where the sweater once hung

a dead bird
it’s neck craned backwards
at a tilt most unnatural

unfeathered wings snapped
like pencils which you side step

the fall from great heights,
from nest to the shore

from roof to the pavement

from hanger to floor

from heaven to hell

the door slam
like the crash of thousand
beautifully carved marble statues hitting the sidewalk

at once.

Big Sur - 7/19/10

Am Alone, says the king,
walking down the stone path.
Am Alone.
And at first he means it, they all do.
At first.
Until the silence grows
louder than the noise he used to make
down in the dirty city bars.
It grows like the moss on the trees,
like the gray hair on his arms.
Am Alone, they say
to get better
to be well
and still and peaceful,
to quell the fury.
But they hate it, like all kings hate being king.

They have no idea,
these men
with the bright ideas,
with the looks that give and take
away from the spotlight
and all their fickle tempers,
their broken glasses,
cutting the bottom of feet.
All the roaring.
They hate it
when there is no one to hear them.

Nothing but silence and the echoes
of their own fury thrown back at them
from the ocean’s mocking slap.

But,
still, Am Alone,
something I have never known
not truly.
To live without it.
To forget and be forgotten.
To be still
for as long as I wish
vibrating like an atom.
Forever, even
Am Alone.

For Harvey

We toasted you the night you died,
but I couldn’t help thinking that you
didn’t seem like the kind that would die.

Which is a very stupid thing to think.

Salinger died. But he already checked out,
decades ago firing shotguns at curious trespassers.
Steinbrenner died the day after

they found your body in the bedroom.
But it didn’t make sense. You couldn’t be dead.
You are too real to die.

You are supposed to be in Cleveland
in the grocery store.
Behind the Jewish lady with all the coupons
arguing over canned soup.
You are supposed to be living through the same
shit as the rest of us.
Bus routes
and late bills.
Sick mornings and fights with the wife.
You are supposed to be nervously checking the phone book
for another Harvey Pekar.

Not dead and still and peaceful.