Je Ne Regrette Rien
 

I was nuts for her, or
it was loneliness: left journalist,
my short dark type,
sardonic, superinformed, fragile
somewhere?  When I saw her
years later, she was with
(at a museum) someone big, needy,
choleric, badly-dressed
like me, only worse.
There are ghost slogans: You’ve got to
lay your body on the wheels and
gears … or
The interest is good
but they’ll kill you on points … Ghosts
begin, that is, to quote these, then
giggle.  There goes the neighborhood.
Of course I respect you.
Dare to struggle, dare to win.


 


To Fall Back On
 

Eventually you’re forced
(stop there) to endorse
duality.
The soul sprints
over mysterious night fields
as the body spoils.
The brilliant circle
(never quite found)
who accepted you accepted
you; the wit and compassion
you offered were merely
a given.
Power is everything
and perfectly happy
to explain, for that reason, nothing.
Je est un autre, a wealthy trader.

He stares into Central Park
from some twentieth floor,
and it is only my fancy
that stills him;
in reality
he is always being called, or calling ...
Paper profits,
but his rise and rise.
Then he repositions himself,
and he is always wise.
 
From his vantage, absently, he sees
people disappearing under trees,
green or bare, in the seasons of love and
(what else?) commerce.
He does no willful harm,
would in fact like to charm
each passerby;
and if harm must be done,
relies on a power
he approaches asymptotically.

Till among his trophied shelves
and certificates
he thinks of the void
he senses, proud
of that sensitivity
(it would disintegrate if shown to many);
ponders the energy
that goes into evading
that nothing,
like the fury paradoxically spun
from black holes.
 
I know that vacuum too, its name is money.

 

 

That Briefer Garland

 
Remember how you were supposed to meet
that girl, name long forgotten, at a café,
which, when you arrived, was crowded,
and you sat watching for her
twenty minutes before you realized
she was there, head down and reading,
hidden by others, fifty feet away,
signifying how little the evening meant
to her, and how it would go
for you before you were alone again,
but you walked over to her anyway?

All your problems then
were petty in both senses,
evasions
of real ones, and intolerable
to people, who invented
values to deflect them
the way girls remembered boyfriends.
Consider: you might have
enjoyed being young
more than any winner,
which would explain the rigor of this process.

So that walking home, you invented
a kind of age that wasn't
real age, explanations
that were far from the truth,
and what you remember now instead of youth.


 


Carl

 
The war, marriage
(on leave) to Evelyn.
Back, saying little,
to wholesale,

driven, unloaded,
inventoried, loaded …
A narrow house, a yard
with zucchini.

Two kids.  The two-bus
commute till ’53 and
a first Chevy.  Half of
everything saved.

And the workbench: joining,
some wiring, done
well.  On Shabbas the family.
The dismissive nephew.

A black, demanding
the till in ’62,
dividing time into
Before the shvartzer held a

gun to my head and
After.  The bench, rebuilt
in the utility room
of a condo in California,

eventually subsidized
by grateful tenants.
The seven months
of Ev’s leukemia.

At the funeral, desperate: Get
her down there before something, 
something … Words,
always hard, now

impossible.
The daughter, marrying
a cigar-faced shaygetz,
whining and grasping, the son,

also wordless but
without skills or degree,
never visiting. 
After the stroke,

the photos (in
the tiny, exorbitant
room in a Home)
of my wedding.

In his last week,
he began to talk
about being unhappy.  His
friend, the black nurse,

trying to help, kept asking
“Why?” or
“How unhappy are you,
Carl?”  But I know this

at second hand;
I myself saw
only tools and the workbench –
neat, gathering dust

in a utility room.





Against Postmodernism


The craving remains, but luckily
paired with, countermanded by
abscesses, rapes
that are not a memory; baths
for hours, a flowered nightie, no
lice, the wicker armchair
on the second-floor verandah through whose screen
dog-walkers in the park will never see her
are the memory, like obedience
to simple, remorseful commands by
her mother, who drives her
twice-weekly (elegiacally
recapturing the girl as child and
the beauty of these suburbs) to
a clinic; who feels no
longer the old confusion, never
exactly guilt, about
her money or the way life has turned out,
no longer drinks, and avoids,
without conceptualizing, the thinly baleful
talk of her friends; avoids
most people in fact, but calls
the father regularly, who,
amid lunches and meetings, remembers
the marriage, the girl; has made
plans to fly out to see her, imagines
killing the boyfriend/dealer/rapist, is
glad of his rage and more controlled
regret (the childless second marriage also
failed), their long-
unfelt simplicity, meanwhile
pursuing whatever client over
lunch or in meetings high above
the city, where, blocks
away, the man imagined is
squatting, enduring an abstract kind of
shame for sampling the product; the
bitches, inherent traitors, no longer
move him; he only
leaves to rob and fix, can't re-
establish cred or a market (has
been threatened), watches
bugs on the floor, an un-
accountable curtain move, and
eventually craps in a corner while
the market he imagined
falls to a Russian, a former zek,
who recalls the split in the World of Thieves
between the bitches who would serve
and co-opt the state, and real men;
regards the little blacks who run
for him, the larger whites and blacks who buy,
Americans, the living generally
as soggy cardboard and
thinks, in the void after a killing,
of retirement: peace and illness
when he's old (which, though he's old,
is always later), nodding to
a probable Jew who waves
like a fool from the next screened-in
balcony before descending, in
long khaki shorts and long black socks
(this ugly but expressive uniform,
he thinks), to walk from parking lot
to parking lot, smoke
wonderfully, illicitly, and think how
he is thinking, not merely kvetching, despite
boredom and a certain
haze around the issues, which his
wife, preparing for the Blue Plate Special,
is clearer on, considering but
deferring (between calls from
or to surviving siblings) further
involvement with the temple; reading,
sometimes on hold to
her son or doctors, books
that have survived the move
and mildew, easier ones
her friends never finish, but with most
interest those by people
who lecture at the college, like
the one who sits on a bench beneath
an undistinguished palm, watching
acrylic sky and sea
and boats, considering but
rejecting the insertion of
commentary, a corrosive
viewpoint: subjects and objects
are beads on a string, not
the string; bright and hard
and themselves, they should end, if
they must, with the click of a clasp, not a sigh.