Letter from Brooklyn (3 page)

AT FIFTEEN

After Elizabeth Bachinsky, after Irving Layton

Unclasping girls' bras awkward-like, like

my first sneakers' knotted laces. Those girls'

braced grins, I loved, before fumbling forever

at their backs in light-less rooms. The stubborn

strap stayed tight. I'm sorry (I'd whisper)

and they'd unlatch the clasps (or not). Those locked

faces at fifteen . . . alright, it was eighteen . . . when

I loosed the first hook. I liked girls more before

when we played simpler games: tight-rope,

spotting her by the old train tracks. Undoing

nothing. My hand a hand's half-width away.

Needing not to touch, just stand close, I knew

to catch her before she'd fall (for me). I was good

at that. The trick of staying, as she crossed.

EXPLAINING SONNET 73 TO THE ALIENS

Let's call the speaker of this poem “you.”

You are speaking to me in metaphors,

which are kinds of lies.

You begin by telling me you are the season, autumn.

Well, you are the end

of autumn. More specifically, you are the leaves

that have changed colour and fallen

from a tree. Well, most of them have fallen.

You are the few leaves that haven't fallen

in the tree limbs that shake in the wind.

You are trying to tell me

you feel old. Though it is worth mentioning

the leaves will grow back

in a year's time. A year is not that long,

really. You want to be the trees, too.

You are the whole damn season.

You are the branches, you say,

and you are empty. Your limbs

are ruined choirs, because

the birds that sang on them are gone.

This alludes to monasteries, which were houses,

where men did little else

but eat, sleep, sing, and pray.

These houses were destroyed.

Though not by time.

But in a way by time.

A prayer is an asking of strength

and an asking that when that strength

doesn't come, we are strong enough

to endure without it.

You compare yourself to when the sun sinks.

Even though many couples

enjoy spending this time together,

you turn it into a negative thing.

You think of nighttime as Death's avatar

in the world of the living.

You say all this in a fairly precise rhythmic pattern.

It sounds like an old clock.

We seem to think we talk like the sound of time being measured.

Or how time used to sound

being measured.

There is also a scheme to rhyme.

The last words of certain lines sound

similar to the last words of other lines. I'm sorry,

that's not a good explanation.

Rhyme is hard to define.

The dictionary says it's when one word agrees with another,

terminally, which strikes me as a good definition

for a lot things.

For your final lie,

you tell me you are a fire going out.

You observe that fire extinguishes, once it burns,

everything it uses to sustain itself.

So your youth, you tell me, is no longer

the solid wood it once was.

You end by stating our fleeting presence here

causes us to love well, or at least

more stubbornly. This is said

in a couple of rhyming lines

which for poems like this are a kind of punch line

to a joke that isn't supposed to be funny.

Jokes are like prayers.

ODE TO THE DOUBLE RAINBOW GUY

“It's starting to look like a triple rainbow! Oh god! What does this mean?”

—
Paul Vasquez

You lost your shit over shades of light

or as you proclaimed,
oh my god

a double rainbow all the way
—

and were received like all our prophets,

with scorn. Too filled with emotion to reflect

tranquility, you burst into tears

that from some odd angle

made a small rainbow, somewhere.

Oh god, oh my god, you spoke like Job

in reverse, suddenly seeing that we'd

been given everything, and asked

god
,
what does this mean?

We answered you with laughter

because we no longer know

what it means to be astonished.

For this, for everything, we are auto-tuned.

Oh my god, what does it mean

to care about something or someone

that much. Woo! You knew

triple rainbows were impossible.

NATURE

Easily startled

by how her voice carries

over water. His ears perk

and his head rises.

She is close now,

having paddled deep

into the bulrushes

to find him. He stares,

then lowers his head

to let her know

if she gets any closer

he will charge.

TO MY BEARD

Whose absence haunted adolescence

Whose barren field I examined nightly for signs of life

Who grew on all the other boys first

Whose no-show suggested the absence of hair in other places, too

Whose absence I shaved with a Mach 3 razor one night till I bled

Who I glued on with shavings left in my father's drain

Whose first, stubbly signs appeared one day miraculous as
Isaac's birth

Who, if left alone, now grows blond and burly as the face of Western Christ

Who a century ago had to be long and full

Who the Cossacks forced Yacob Scheier to eat till he stopped breathing

Who no longer grows like assimilation

Whose absence is tolerance

Who stays stuck to faces of men in North York Jerusalem East Williamsburg

Who does not recognize me as I pass

THE REDHEADS OF SUDBURY

I want to write a poem called “The Redheads of Sudbury for
Rocco de Giacomo.”

I want this poem to account for how so many of the girls there

have a hair colour reminding me of candies

I ate as a boy: big foots, hot lips, and sour balls —

the tangy, cherry-flavoured ones.

Those girls all looked like something bad for you

and awfully nostalgic.

Near the end of this poem I want

one of us to sleep with the city's one-legged stripper,

who also has red hair.

This is the kind of thing the male poets of our national anthologies

used to write about it. In my poem

I make it sound like something that just kind of happened,

you know, and isn't all that big a deal.

I would like the poem to account for how I felt

and perhaps how others feel upon leaving somewhere

where it's still winter in April.

To leave somewhere north and come home to Toronto

during that brief season

that is neither winter nor spring. Where rain is pervasive

whether falling or not.

I want a certain kind of reader to feel a little sentimental

when I mention the Honda dealership on the outskirts of the city

and the rain gathering on the windshields.

When we pass the suburbs and see a billboard — for what, I forget —

with our area code on it, I feel close

to the way I imagine others do when they speak of feeling patriotic.

The feeling of being from somewhere.

Rocco de Giacomo told me he hadn't noticed

that so many of the girls had red hair, and asked me if I wanted to fuck any of them.

I said of course of course I wanted to fuck them all.

He talked about being married, said he was lucky.

It was a longer conversation, but that's the part that matters.

I don't want to be married for a long time or ever, I think.

But I was jealous of his obliviousness. Nothing at the end of
the poem

“The Redheads of Sudbury for Rocco de Giacoma”

happened in real life. The truth is we drank a lot and passed out.

The one-legged stripper part is true,

but neither of us slept with her

or even went to the strip club. But I can explain that.

My reasons for going to bed alone that night

have little to do with this feeling I've been having lately

of not being entirely young anymore.

Rather, it's only because the Canada Council

no longer gives grants for poems about that sort of thing.

MY MOTHER DIES IN REVERSE

After Robert Priest's
Reading the Bible Backwards

I dig up the dirt

& tell the rabbi

to recant

his prayer

I say

I do not

glorify

praise

or bless

I do not say

amen

I say

a woman

& he sews

the garments

back together

& I take her

to Mt. Sinai

oncology

before she begins

breathing again

& I open her eyes

& breath enters

her mouth

& mumbles ravel

into words

& sentences

rejoin each other

& she puts her hand

into her mouth

& pulls

from her throat

valiums

like sapphire beads

& she pees

morphine

like a crystal river

& perspires

radiation

till it's all gone

& she finds

her breasts

on the operating table

& sews them

back

to her chest

like a garment

uncut

& moonwalks

down the corridors

& into

an ambulance

driver's seat

& rides

home

CAUSALITY

Some believe cause and effect are simultaneous.

The window breaks at the exact moment

the stone kisses the pane. And I want to ask you

about falling in, then out, if it doesn't happen

at the same time. Though Hume said

a cause might be nothing more than a name

we give to one thing following another.

But if he were right, I would think

the covers rolling from your shoulders

used to cause the morning. The point is,

I went to college, and that doesn't make it any easier

to walk over the Williamsburg Bridge

when no one is waiting for me

on either side and it rains so thinly

the drops are only visible afterwards,

cascading from the cables.

I might think it wasn't raining at all,

except I am cold and wet, and fog obscures

the Chrysler building. But I can still see it, drawn

from my memory onto the vanished skyline.

It looks kind of the way it does

in all the old movies

I refused to watch with you. This longing

the effect of having loved

poorly. And the cause. But I can't

change what has come before. Only make

fog fold in on itself as I walk through it.

How causing it to disappear

is one of our powers.

Like the way we banish the night

by falling asleep, limbs pressed

like coin inscriptions,

or lying a body's length apart

or in different rooms in different cities.

How once in a while we cause the rain, too,

but by doing what, I have no idea.

ACTUAL PINGPONG

“Don't be afraid of me because I am just coming back from the mental hospital — I'm your mother —”

—
Naomi Ginsberg

“I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in your straightjacket that you're losing
the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss”

—
Allen Ginsberg

Through the gauzy air of some wonderful benzo, I recall you

now chemo-bald, flannel-robed, a Buddha or just some crazy

lady who is also my mother, pontificating

plastic spoon metaphysics. “If you dug deep and hard enough,

wasn't it possible for anything to be a tool of suicide?”

Mastectomized cubist breast falling

statically from the gown slanting across your chest like a sash.

Miss Psych Ward,
USA
. Though the crown belonged truly to

the pretty girls, thin

and achromatic Modiglianis, queued in a slow, wavy

kindergarten line outside the Plexiglas planet of the

nurse's station. You waved to them

and said “This is my son. He's
19
. He writes poems, too.”

Did you know then, despite the supposed gravity of the

situation, I couldn't help looking

at those faded girls in their loose swaying gowns and yet

years later taking my own stay on the
17
th floor of St. Mike's

(the family pilgrimage to the bughouse)

the girls ignored me? High school all over again in the psych

ward, as I waited for the sad hour selected from all years

(till the next hour) for a smoke —

a memory interrupted by you, a memory of you in the ward,

telling the half-catatonic lady with honey-coloured hair shot out

in all directions like a child's drawing

of the sun, “This is my son. He's taking time off to decide what

he wants to do with his life.” I pull your gown back over your

absence of breasts and gas

seems pumped up from the floorboards — the perceivable air

of things recollected in a dream, in a dream I just woke from

and told you about, this dream

in which you were dying and losing your mind and saying, “This

is my son, he's going to be a doctor and invent the cure for being

on earth.” Everything you said, coded

or nonsense. I wanted to remind you about my
18
th birthday, the

Selected Poems
1947–1995
, your inscription,
The key is in the window
,

the key is in the sunlight at the window
.
Love
,

your mother
. Here this becomes ironic or here you are beyond irony.

Was it prophetic? Insanity, the last respite from the Ironic Age, I told

myself on the
17
th
floor staring

at the key hidden in the shadows of the bars of the window. How your

delusions started to bore me — I wanted to hear Nixon was stealing

your Jell-O and Reagan, your breasts. Or McCarthy

forced you to blow him in the basement of
1504 Ocean Ave., 1953
.

Instead, uncreative paranoia — friends and colleagues out to “destroy”

you and every attempt to dissuade,

a confirmation. You thought you were clever for unveiling the basic

structure, just stating what we are all trying to ignore. Did you think

you were the first lunatic

to figure out civilization? Neither insight nor madness, but unadorned

honesty destroying your mind. Of course, I was a pawn in “the

conspiracy” that is life. “Do you want to play table tennis?”

you asked, suddenly back in the game of ordinariness. We approached

the green slab at the end of the corridor. The girls gathered round and

watched as you lost (badly) a game of actual pingpong.