Alone and Not Alone (4 page)

A Few Ideas about Rabbits

It's hard to understand what

a rabbit is

It lifts a paw

and hesitates

For a moment its nose

and mouth are all cat

and those eyes, so worried

so harmless

but it might scratch you

accidentally

and that camel back

and tiger crouch

ears of lemur

perked up

Mouse-kangaroo

The rabbit runs around

eating and doing arithmetic

There is the story of the grateful king

who offered his subject anything

he wanted, and the subject said

Take this chessboard and put

a coin on the first square

then double that amount for the second

and so on, to which the king

readily consented

and when they counted

it turned out to be

a billion trillion coins

(or something like that)

more than the richest king

could afford

Imagine if the man had asked

for rabbits

Well that's what Nature asked for.

In Australia I think

there's an area that has

ten rabbits per square yard

Ah, we must shoot them

cry certain Australians

and others say No

ship them to a place

that has no rabbits

But there's a reason

there are no rabbits there

like at the North Pole

or in the Gobi Desert

or on Park Avenue

Anyway I do not trust a rabbit

because I have no idea

what it is thinking

I trust a worm because it isn't thinking

If rabbits could say

“I will hop into this garden

and eat the lettuce”

I would like them more

The Value of Discipline

I am very disappointed in you, Myron.

You are a very smart boy,

and we had high hopes for you.

But now this.

I don't know.

Go to your room.

Myron heads toward his room,

but does his head hang low?

No way!

He is looking straight ahead

and feeling a hot black liquid

trickle through his heart.

Great galleons

bound through the rough seas

and on them bearded men

are shouting sailor things

as if to the wind.

Back in his room

the objects look older.

What joy to make them

walk the plank!

Avast! Avaunt! Splash! Garrrr!

Pea Jacket

Years ago I had an old pea jacket

Slightly scruffy but not unclean

was my overall look and I lacked

the easy assurance that comes with money

because I had very little

It was okay, not having money

I wasn't starving or lacking anything I needed

though by contemporary standards

I should have been envious or angry

I wasn't

All I cared about was my wife and friends and family

Books writing perception great art and gigantic metaphysical questions floating in on good humor

Society could take care of itself more or less

(It turned out less)

and I was happy enough and eager

I think what I mean is I was young

so that no matter what anyone might think of my jacket

I liked it it fit well and was warm in the New York winter

collar turned up and hands snug in pockets

It came from a secondhand clothing store

at the corner of Bowery and Bleecker maybe it

had belonged to a drunken sailor

What do you do with a drunken sailor early in the morning?

Put him in bed with the captain's daughter!

There was a label inside with his name and serial number scrawled on it

It felt odd wearing his name I snipped it out

I don't have anything monumental or metaphoric to say about my jacket

It's just a pleasure to remember it and how good it felt on me

Then one day I started wearing something else

and a few years later I gave the jacket to someone I liked I don't recall who

The Ukrainian Museum

Just walking into the new and beautifully designed Ukrainian Museum was a pleasure: varnished hardwood floors, white walls, clean lines, understated lighting, and the luxury of newness. An older Ukrainian Museum had been located in a second-floor apartment in a tenement building on Second Avenue, without even a sign outside, several rooms of dismal paintings in drab light; the one time I ventured in, there was not a single soul in the place, not even a guard. Twenty years later the museum moved a few blocks up the street to a space protected by two security checkpoints. I was greeted, if that is the word, by a woman who coldly asked me what I wanted. The two exhibition rooms were slightly larger than closets. Now, walking into this third incarnation made me feel so light and carefree that I had to be reminded to buy a ticket.

The Alexander Archipenko exhibition was the largest I had ever seen of his work, and as I moved from sculpture to sculpture I felt grateful just to be there. But I wasn't really “there,” I was in a wholesale meat market. The smell of raw flesh and gore oozes out the ramshackle front doors where trucks have backed up to disgorge sides of beef and pork. Just inside are butchers in threadbare aprons streaked with blood. One of them waddles his mammoth girth toward me, a cigarette dangling from his pudgy lips, a strange leer on his face. He is the one who lewdly propositioned a friend of mine who lives a few doors away. Nineteen sixty-one.

Now, in 2005, I am walking through this museum on the very spot where those butchers slashed and chopped up carcasses. The
fat one is no doubt dead, like my friend and Archipenko. The exhibition is fine, but I can't focus on it, so I simply pause before each piece.

Finally I can't restrain myself from approaching someone, who happened to be a guard, an Indian or Pakistani woman, to whom I say, “Many years ago, when I first came to New York, I had a friend who lived a few doors down the street. Do you know what this place was then? It was a wholesale meat business.” She looks at me and says, “Yes, it's amazing the way they change things so fast,” and looks away.

The 1870s

1870
   Work on Brooklyn Bridge begun. Charles Dickens dies. Jules Verne writes
20,000 Leagues under the Sea
. Rockefeller founds Standard Oil. Robert E. Lee dies.

1871
   British Columbia joins Canada. Marcel Proust born.   Rasputin born. Pneumatic rock drill invented. Stanley meets Livingstone. Whistler paints
The Artist's Mother
. The Great Fire of Chicago. P. T. Barnum opens “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

1872
   Jesuits expelled from Germany. Grant reelected President. Bertrand Russell born. First operation on the esophagus. Piet Mondrian born.

1873
   New York financial panic. Germans evacuate France. First color photograph. Zanzibar abolishes slave trade. E. Remington & Sons, gunsmiths, produce typewriters. Tolstoy writes
Anna Karenina
. Buda and Pest unite.

1874
   Winston Churchill born. Gertrude Stein born. First roller-skating rink. First Impressionist exhibition. Pressure cooking invented. Thomas Hardy writes
Far from the Madding Crowd
. First ice cream soda.

1875
   Carl Jung born. Thomas Mann born. Rainer Maria Rilke born. Maurice Ravel born. Madam Blavatsky founds Theosophical Society. Camille Corot dies. Georges Bizet dies. Hans Christian Andersen dies. First swim across the English Channel.

1876
   Korea becomes a nation. Brahms composes Symphony no. 1. Turks massacre Bulgarians. Pablo Casals born. George Sand dies. Bruno Walter born. Carpet sweeper invented. Degas paints
The Glass of Absinthe
.

1877
   Edison invents the phonograph. Gustave Courbet dies. Queen Victoria becomes Empress of India. First contact lenses. Canals on Mars observed. First public telephones in the U.S.

1878
   Greece declares war on Turkey. Hughes invents the microphone. Mannlicher invents the repeater rifle. W. A. Burpee does something with Burpee seeds.

1879
   British/Zulu War. Joseph Stalin born. Albert Einstein born. Discovery of saccharin. First public telephones in London. Paul Cézanne paints
Self-Portrait
. Edison has an idea and invents the light bulb.

One Thing Led to Another

If it wasn't one thing

it was another.

You can't believe

how charged everything is

with meaning

because it is meaningless.

Joy in the curtains,

the farmer in the dell,

a fellow named

whatever it was—Floyd?

And then you had arms and legs

and it wasn't funny.

It was a freshly baked pie.

I could care

more or less.

Like a machine

in the heavens, shooting,

or an exclamation point

in the motion picture industry.

Cut.

It's always something.

“Tuck in your shirt”

is not said to a dog.

What's the use of whining?

No one really enjoys it.

The Rabbi with a Puzzle Voice

Wait a minute

I forgot something

The rabbi with a puzzle voice

Pieces flying around in the air

Texas Lithuania and now another one

A rectangle

He is singing them

I always knew he was

And the song is oh

I don't really know what

Very old like a doughnut

And a look through its hole

But he is singing

And that's the main thing, no?

The other main thing

Is that you're on that rectangle

Floating to the ground

As it loses its oomph

And other shapes are flying out above you

And you are on them too!

How can this be?

It is part of the jigsaw puzzle

And the sad voice that created it

Why did you have to be anyone

Whoever you are

Is what the rabbi sings

Whoever he is

Maybe he's not a rabbi at all

There was a reason I had forgotten him

And a reason I remember him

And his puzzle voice

But where are his edges going

As now he too breaks into pieces

Pieces pieces

That arc out in his song

Syntactical Structures

It was as if

while I was driving down a one-lane dirt road

with tall pines on both sides

the landscape had a syntax

similar to that of our language

and as I moved along

a long sentence was being spoken

on the right and another on the left

and I thought

Maybe the landscape

can understand what I say too.

Ahead was a farmhouse

with children playing near the road

so I slowed down

and waved to them.

They were young enough

to smile and wave back.

The World of Us

Who was the first person to say

“I think the world of you”

and how did he or she come up with it?

It's the kind of thing

one ascribes to a god

or a great philosopher

or a lunatic

on a good day. Now

it's a cliché

because we can't think it,

we can only hear ourselves saying it.

There are a lot of things we can't think

or don't want to. It's hard

for example

to think of skin as an organ

—an organ is a kidney or a musical instrument

or even a publication—

but ask any doctor

and the doctor will say

“Yes, the skin is an organ.”

Imagine having that organ removed

(being skinned alive)

or rather don't

at least not too vividly.

It's better to keep a barrier

between oneself and things

that can be horrendous

like life.

Don't go around all day

thinking about life—

doing so will raise a barrier

between you and its instants.

You need those instants

so you can be in them,

and I need you to be in them with me

for I think the world of us

and the mysterious barricades

that make it possible.

But you say

“First you say to raise a barrier

and then not to.”

Yes, because these

are two different barriers,

one a barrier against life,

the other a barrier against being alive.

Being alive is good, life is bad.

“So, what about being dead?

Is that bad?

And what about heaven?”

I don't know about being dead

because I can't remember what it was like,

but I do know

that it is awful and amusing to be part heaven

and not know which part of you it is.

Unless you don't think about it,

in which case

you find yourself looking up and saying

“That is
the
best cornbread I've ever eaten.”

Along with it comes a yawn at the end of a long and satisfying day,

everything quiet and thrilling

inside a consciousness surrounded by a night

in which exclamation marks are flying toward a single point.

Curtain

Standing in the bathroom peeing

I look up at the curtain in front of me

red cotton with little yellow flowers

from Liberty Fabrics (London) 1970

and I feel I am flying up into the heavens

until I remember that soon

I will turn 70 and at any moment

I could feel a sudden paroxysmal pain

in my head and with the curtain

dropping away fall over dead—

this could happen right now!

But it doesn't, the curtain stays put

and I'm standing there

and the curtain still looks good.