NOTE: Dick Allen and I were close friends for many years. In 1981 we met with Frederick Turner at the Minetta Tavern where we began to develop the principles of the movement Wade Newman named Expansive Poetry. Later it became known as Expansive Poetry: The New Formalism and The New Narrative, opening poetry up again to all genres, especially in meter and rhyme. The three of us brought others like Dana Gioia, Molly Peacock and Timothy Steele into the larger movement. I collected some of our best essays, including a fine one by Dick -- "The Forest For The Trees: Preliminary Thoughts On Evaluating The Long Poem" -- into an anthology that Story Line Press published in 1989. What follows now is "Celebrating," a long poem I wrote to Dick about our 45th birthdays which we celebrated on the Lower East Side where I come from and Dick's Thrushwood Lake. It's been written about but no one has noticed that the content -- the difference between our backgrounds which might have separated us -- is counterpointed 
by the style which put us together: the rhymes of Part 1 are repeated in Part 2. ​

                    CELEBRATING
                             to Dick Allen

                           To celebrate your turning forty-five,
                           We toured my past where you had never been:
                           The 1950's Lower East Side, alive
                           With second generation Jews,
                           Poles, Ukranians (like your wife Lori);
                           Each block a town, with flower boxes, clean,
                           Where you could cure pathology with art,
                           Where I first met my comic, street-wise Muse,
                           Playing the violin for a gang that jumped me.
                           I took her to my roof that summer night
                           And, while the city snored, she kissed and hugged me
                           And talked in double stops and won my heart.
                           Thus at Ratner's I began a history
                           While ordering a travelogue of food:
                           Cheese and blueberry blintzes, eggs, onions and lox,
                           Kasha varnishkes, borscht, mushroom and barley soup
                           -- Enough to keep off thought of our mortality,
                           As they kept me from scratching chicken pox.
                           The waiter, looking like his Jewish mother,
                           Eyes a traffic cop's, held up his hand and smirked:
                           "Tell me, do you want your coffee perked,
                           Or just the beans with a side of boiling water?"
                           "I used to be the kid who fucked your daughter."
                           "I never had a daughter ... What else?"
                           So I explained to you our being rude
                           Was just a tribute to our tenements, throngs
                           Jostling through pushcarts, haranguing on and on
                           About the union, poems of Glatstein, Schwartz,
                           Itinerant knife-sharpeners singing ghetto songs,
                           Gypsy musicians, horses wearing flowers,
                           Relics among the cars -- as I am old
                           Among my memories ... Where have they gone,
                           Those intricately lived-in hours?
                           
                           Avenue A has tiny pieces of quartz
                           Or mica in its concrete slabs. "We're flush!"
                           I joked as the sun struck immigrant gold.
                           But then I saw the rubble in the park
                           Where I would practice jump shot way past dark
                           And once outscored Russ Cunningham. "Who he?"
                           You asked, knowing if you asked that seriously,
                           We'd both be pained. "Like What's-his-name, the star
                           Of your unchanging Adirondack town."
                           Like some rejected lover trying to revive
                           Memories more for comfort than for passion's sake, 
                           I called the ghost of Garfein's restaurant
                           From behind its boards. This was where plush
                           Weddings and bar mitzvahs enthralled the slums
                           Surrounding it -- with spreads of caviar,
                           Scotch salmon, Beluga sturgeon, where
                           My parents' generation foxtrotted, gallant,
                           Till after cake and coffee clasping hands,
                           Stamped the hora to Victor Goldring's band's
                           Alto and tenor saxophones and drums:
                           The notes now simply molecules of air,
                           As indistinctive as my mother's kiss.
                           You grinned, considered the lengthening ash
                           Of your cigarette, then flicked it in the trash
                           Heaped in front of Garfein's. "I can't reminisce
                           Like you, being a self-denying mystic
                           Whose life -- and yours -- are parentheses
                           In Time, yours maybe more extravagant
                           With all your Lower East Side tumult, these
                           Boarded up Kosher catering halls,
                           These discount stores."
                                                                  "No, they were elegant.
                           You see the decorations on these walls,
                           That fortress of a building up ahead?
                           We lived there on the fourth floor." "Who's that, Fred?"
                           "Frieda Goldring. Victor's wife," I said.
                           "God!" A face, drooped from stroke that once was tough.
                           "Remember me?" I asked.
                                                                    "I've had enough,"
                            She said, "of the indignities of age.
                            But I remember you on Victor's stage
                            At twelve with such a passion to create
                            With your fiddle only for the music's sake.
                            Do you still play?" We both looked in the void
                            Where memory, then effort crumbles. "I hate
                            To say I don't. But I write poems."
                                                                      "Promise me, make
                            One of this place, one that can't destroyed."

                                                      
                                                        II
           
                             To celebrate my turning forty-five,
                             We slowly circled Thrushwood Lake, the scene
                             Of poems I knew by heart, but now alive
                             With your reciting --urgent mystical news
                             You divined from an ordinary story
                             Of a muskrat, willow, and a doctor lean-
                             Ing with his violin to finger Mozart,
                             While you were swimming sidestroke with your Muse
                             Of science fiction and philosophy.
                             You told me details of your soul's dark night
                             That you transformed into an allegory
                             About the future of the Sacred Heart.
                             
                             These were the birthday gifts you gave to me
                             As we meandered through the willow wood,
                             Cautioning each other over icy rocks
                             Till in a clearing, halved our age to scoop
                             Snowballs we smacked against a dying tree.
                             I broke a branch and traced a batter's box
                             And challenged, "Try to throw one past me, brother."
                             You kicked back, then exaggeratedly smirked
                             As I mocked-tipped into the freezing water.
                            "You know an aging poet gives no quarter!
                             You'll write carping confessions now -- or else!"
                             "Oh? I will pin your ears, Decrepitude.
                             You'll write in academic free verse, little songs
                             Of life-long adolescent carryings-on,
                             Of hippie days in Oriental ports
                             Where you sold drugs, draped girlfriends in sarongs
                             (Their Middle Western braids done up in flowers),
                             All Yuppies now, perfectly self-controlled,
                             Ironically recalling days long gone
                             Only when crocked, only at Happy Hours."
 
                             But then you gave the best of all retorts,
                             "People Through The Train Window ... born to rush
                             Out on the earth and die." You sang of "old 
                             Gravestones, mystic restaurants, familial dark,"
                             As if we were standing at the opened ark
                             And davning for Frieda's spirit. She
                             Was laid to rest with Victor silently
                             Only the night before (wasn't that bizarre?")
                             In New Montefiore, what's now my small hometown,
                             A violent place where nothing can survive
                             Except, as Frieda said, the poems we make.

                             But if our efforts aren't permanent,
                             If they are crumpled into that great hush
                             With Jim Croce's voice and Goldring's drums,
                             Among the molecules of Garfein's caviar,
                             Then what? You squeezed the freezing air
                             And cried, "Oh, seize the day," exuberant
                             That you possessed this winter in your hands,
                             As if to say, "A mystic understands
                             What you couldn't notice in your busy slums."
                             But what about what Frieda made me swear?

                             When Time clicks shut its black parenthesis
                             Around Allen, Dick 1939 dash,
                             Will all our poems disintegrate to ash,
                             Even your masterpieces, even this
                             Passage I am writing now? Tell me, Dick,
                             Will everything be gone, your cry to seize
                             The day, this, that, that mystic restaurant
                             With all the Catholics, Muslims on their knees,
                             With Cohens pleading in their prayer shawls,
                             With Hari Krishnas madly jubilant,
                             With widowed Sufis shrieking caterwauls,
                             With all your dreams of histories ahead?
                             Will nothing keep of this poor Dick and Fred
                             Even the echoes of the lines you said,
                             "Can we imagine that? All dead, all dead,
                             All of us dead who never lived enough?"
                             Oh no, dear friend, though sensitive we're tough
                             And as we have survived our crazy age,
                             We'll talk forever, this page with your page.

                             And so we nattered on to celebrate
                             My 45th, circling Thrushwood Lake
                             To find our families still alive, annoyed
                             We took so long, that we had made them wait
                             For me to wish upon my birthday cake:
                                    Once upon a time, we were overjoyed.
                                                                                   
                             -from New & Selected Poems