Alone and Not Alone

 

Alone and Not Alone

Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution,
cbsd.com
or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to:
[email protected]
.

      Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

Some of the poems in this volume were published in
Aphros, Cerise Press, Coconut, Connotation Press, Court Green, Courtland Review, For the One Fund Boston
(Granary Books),
Hanging Loose, Poem-a-Day
(Academy of American Poets),
Sentence, Tablet, Test Centre,
and
Upstreet
.

Contents

• Title Page
  
• Copyright
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• Dedication
  

1. What Poem
   
2. The Roman Numerals
   
3. Butterfly
   
4. Reality
   
5. The Chinese Girl
   
6. Smudges
   
7. It Takes Two
   
8. The First Time
   
9. Circles
   
10. Grandpa Brushed His Teeth
    
11. Coffee Man
    
12. Where Is My Head?
    
13. Survivor Guilt
    
14. The Young Cougar
    
15. Radio in the Distance
    
16. Face Value
    
17. The Plank and the Screw
    
18. 102 Today
    
19. The Pounding Rabbit
    
20. Mountains and Songs
    
21. It All Depends
    
22. The Elevation of Ideals
    
23. Birgitte Hohlenberg
    
24. Pep Talk
    
25. Preface to Philosophy
    
26. You Know What
    
27. A Bit about Bishop Berkeley
    
28. The Step Theory
    
29. My '75 Chevy
    
30. For A.
    
31. Art Lessons
    
32. A Few Ideas about Rabbits
    
33. The Value of Discipline
    
34. Pea Jacket
    
35. The Ukrainian Museum
    
36. The 1870s
    
37. One Thing Led to Another
    
38. The Rabbi with a Puzzle Voice
    
39. Syntactical Structures
    
40. The World of Us
    
41. Curtain
    
42. Homage to Meister Eckhart
    
43. The Incoherent Behavior of Most Lawn Furniture
    
44. This Schoolhouse Look
    
45. The Street
    
46. Paris Again
    
47. London, 1815
    
48. Of Copse and Coppice
    
49. Manifestation and Mustache
    
50. Shipwreck in General
    
51. French Art in the 1950s
    
52. Three Poems in Honor of Willem de Kooning
    

    I Felt
    

    The Door to the River
    

    Zot
    

53. Alone and Not Alone
    

• Funder Acknowledgments
  
• The Publisher's Circle of Coffee House Press
  
• About the Author
  

Alone and Not Alone

What Poem

What poem

were you thinking of,

my dear,

as you breezed out the door

in your long coat fur-tipped

at the top?

What animal

once wore that fur

and licked it

with a long, raspy tongue

that lolled to one side

in the afternoon shade?

If only you too

could lope across

the Serengeti Plain

and grab something

in your powerful jaws,

instead of pausing

at the door and saying,

as if in afterthought,

“Write a poem

while I'm out.”

The Roman Numerals

It must have been hard

for the Romans to multiply

—I don't mean reproduce,

but to do that computation.

Step inside a roman numeral

for a moment, a long one

such as
MDCCLIX
. Look

at the columns and pediments

and architraves: you cannot move them,

but how beautiful they are

and august! However, try to multiply

MDCCCLXIV
by
MCCLVIII
.

How did they do it?

I asked this question some years ago

and never found an answer

because I never looked for one,

but it is pleasant,

living with this question.

Perhaps the Romans weren't good at math,

unlike the Arabs, who arrived

with baskets of numerals, plenty

for everyone. We still have

more than we need today.

I have a 6 and a 7 that,

when put side by side, form my age.

Come to think of it,

I'd rather be
LXVII
.

Butterfly

Chaung Tzu wrote about the man

who dreamed he was a butterfly

and when he woke up

wondered if he weren't now

a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

I love this idea

though I doubt that Chaung Tzu

really
thought that a man would think

he is a butterfly,

for it's one thing to wake up

from a dream in the night

and another to spend your whole life

dreaming you are a man.

I have spent my whole life

thinking I was a boy, then a man,

also a person and an American

and a physical entity and a spirit

and maybe a little bit butterfly.

Maybe I should be more butterfly,

that is, lurch into a room

with bulging eyes and big flapping wings

that throw a choking powder

onto people who scream and fall dead,

almost. For I would rescue them

with the celestial music of my beauty

and my utter harmlessness,

my ætherial disregard of what they are.

Reality

Reality has a transparent veneer

that looks exactly like the reality beneath it.

If you look at anything,

your hands, for instance, and wait,

you will see it. Then

it will flicker and vanish,

though it is still there.

You must wait a day or two

before attempting to see it again,

for each attempt uses up

your current allotment of reality viewing.

Meanwhile there is a coffee shop

where you can sit and drink coffee,

and where you will be tempted

to look down at the cup and see

the transparent veneer again,

but that is only because you are overstimulated.

Do not order another cup. Or do.

It will have no effect on the veneer.

Sometimes the veneer becomes detached

and moves slightly away from reality,

as when you look up and see a refrigerator

in refrigerator heaven, cold and quiet.

But then the veneer snaps back

to its former position and vanishes.

This is a normal occurrence—

do not be alarmed by it.

Instead, drive to the store

and buy something

that looks like milk, return

home and place it in the refrigerator.

Days go by, years go by, people

grow older and die, surrounded,

if they are lucky, by younger people

who do not know what to do

with feelings whose veneers

have slipped to the side, far

to the side, and are staying there

too long. But eventually they will grow hungry

and tired, and an image of dinner and bed

will float in like a leaf

that fell from who knows where, and sleep.

The Chinese Girl

When I order a coffee that is half-real, half-decaf, with half-and-half, the women behind the counter invariably give me a blank look and wait for something to come clear in their heads, and when it doesn't I repeat, slowly, my order, gesturing with my fingers to demonstrate the half-real, then the half-decaf part. When it finally registers on them and they fill the cup, I point to the carton of half-and-half. Then one of the two—they work in pairs—asks, “Shu gah?”

However, the youngest of the morning crew of five understands better than the other four, so I always hope to have her wait on me, not only because of her better English but because she is the cutest. Of course not all Chinese girls look the same, but descriptions of them tend to sound the same, so I'm not sure that it would help to say that she has straight black hair, parted in the front and held in place by the bakery uniform's light-green kerchief, a slightly flattened nose, and dark eyes, with a small mole on the right above her top lip. Her modest demeanor lends her an air of innocence. She is what, around eighteen?

I always look forward to seeing her on my weekly visit to the bakery. This morning when I walked slowly along the display case of dazzling muffins, buns, rolls, danishes, and other pastries, trying to decide among them, I heard her voice on the other side, asking, “Can I help you?” Never before had one of the crew left the cash register area to do this.

Concealing my surprise, I asked her, “Are the croissants ready yet?”

“I will see.”

When she came back from the kitchen she said, “Five minutes.”

“Then I'll have one of these danishes.”

“You want small coffee, no? Half-regular, half-decaf, with half-and-half?”

Astonished, I said, “Yes, that's right. You have a good memory.”

“I remember
you
,” she said, causing my heart to flutter. But my composure returned when she asked, “Shu gah?”

At the register she handed me the change from a five. I took a single and, pointedly ignoring the tip jar, handed it to her, saying “This is for you.
Sheh sheh
.”

“Thank you,” she said, lowering her eyes and almost imperceptibly drawing back.

I got the signal, so I headed toward an empty table, where I removed the plastic lid from the paper cup and took a bite out of the danish. A band of steam rose from the coffee, like a curtain on a miniature stage. The Chinese girl and I are living in a remote part of China. Our past lives have been erased. She is unspeakably devoted to me and I adore her. We say little, passing our days in a state of calm I could never have imagined.

Smudges

Smattering of gray puffs    rocks are they

large ones but    if you pick them up      light

too light      but fun to lift      and marvel at

they don't make “sense”     they

aren't broken they are what      you

have laughing in you      almost out

smudges come out      of the rock

you breathe in      and out      the same gray rock

each time as if looped in a cartoon

of a sleeping man      from whom z's

emanate

Smattering of gray puffs      a man is one of them

a cloud    a smudge      a powder of stone

from which a city arises      with people in it

and ideas      that flow toward you and through you

it's too late      it's already happened     to the next you

and the gray smudge    that is your face    turning

into your next face    the one you forget

as soon as it happens    as you fall away

among other smudges that are falling away

smudges and puffs falling away