Signs & Wonders Read online

  As soon as any earthly sovereign

  Receives a slight in his own estimation,

  “You are the enemy---” he tells his nation,

  “---Of this or that king! Go and do him in!”

  His people, eager to avoid the pen

  Or some such pleasantry I will not mention,

  Hoist muskets and ship out with the intention

  Of making war on French or Englishmen.

  So, for some martinet’s fantastic whims,

  The sheep come stumbling back into the stall

  With broken skulls and mutilated limbs.

  They toss their lives as children toss a ball,

  As if that old whore, Death, who lops and trims

  The human race, comes only when we call.

  2/ The Spaniard

  A Spaniard claimed that everything in Rome---

  Its churches, castles, its antiquities,

  Its fountains, columns, palaces---all these

  Were equaled or improved upon at home.

  To put him down and keep myself amused,

  I one day went and bought at the bazaar

  Inside the Pantheon a hefty pair

  Of testicles a sheep had lately used.

  I boxed them up quite nicely and I had him

  Take a good look. I said: “These very ballocks

  Are the same two that once belonged to Adam.”

  He first seemed quite astounded by my trick,

  And then he said: “These are impressive relics,

  But in my country, we’ve got Adam’s prick.”

  3/ The Coffee House Philosopher

  Men are the same, on our little sphere,

  As coffee beans poured in the coffee mill;

  One leads, one follows, one brings up the rear,

  But a single fate is waiting for them all.

  Often they change their places in the parade,

  The greater beans displace the weak and small,

  And all press toward the exit with its blade,

  Through which, ground into powder, they must spill.

  The hand of fortune stirs them all together,

  And that is how men live here with their fellows,

  Going around in circles with each other,

  Lost in the depths, or struggling in the shallows,

  Not comprehending what or why or whether,

  Until death lifts his little cup and swallows.

  III/ Near Jeffrey’s Hook

  The Twentieth Century in Photographs

  Different faces, formats all the same:

  A profile set beside a frontal view

  And nothing else included in the frame

  Save, at the bottom, for a coded row

  Of numbers dashes letters that replaces

  A name best left unsaid by those who knew it.

  Two aspects of one face there, not two faces.

  Behind each is a blank wall, we intuit,

  More like an edge each one could be tipped over,

  Once photographed. Impossible to read

  These inexpressive faces and recover

  The thoughts of those who have been so long dead,

  Who died, in fact, before the photographer

  Had time to fix them in his clear solution.

  Although their eyes meet ours now, we are

  Still not there yet: no stay of execution.

  Poem for the Millennium

  Prophets proclaim the perfected hour,

  Extinctions everywhere endanger survival,

  Terminate the terrestrial tenure of mankind:

  Off on a tiny atom-bombed atoll,

  On our waste waters a dragon waxes,

  A saurian sprung from seed mutated

  Becomes a behemoth that blocks out the sun,

  As it lifts off on loathsome leathery wings,

  Eager to seize and sack our cities;

  The anxious await an asteroid’s impact,

  While Gaia groans at the gaping earth

  And fires flicker from faults long-hidden,

  Deep as all delving; in utter darkness

  The earth’s shelves shift and shatter,

  Drifting apart; dormant volcanoes

  Revive and vent their viscous magma;

  Great walls of water wash beaches away;

  A terrible toll is taken in lives.

  Now, at the New Year another menace:

  A viral invader evades our defenses,

  And stunned computers convulse and crash;

  The bright screens before us go blank at once,

  Their voices vanish into the void.

  The match is struck: strife and disorder

  Spread from the cities out to their suburbs

  Of merchandise malls and manicured lawns

  Wend their way to the trackless woods

  Where bearded boors in faded blue jeans

  And flannel shirts feast upon freeze-dried

  Provender pressed into packets of tinfoil,

  Endlessly brooding on engines of evil

  And hatching horrors under their hats.

  Some faintest flaw sends feelers out,

  A hairline fault finds its way to the surface;

  The cleft becomes a network of crackling,

  And the vase shivers, shocked into shards:

  Chaos increasing causes such failures.

  Lightly leaping a break in the line,

  With woven words we ward it off

  Over the silence: caesura that stands for

  The fell fissure we feel underfoot.

  Who Knows What’s Best?

  I am the decider and I decide what’s best.

  —George W. Bush

  1/

  The ones we bomb to liberate

  Have really got an attitude:

  Despite the care we demonstrate

  The ones we bomb to liberate

  From tyranny respond with hate:

  How’s that for sheer ingratitude?

  The ones we bomb to liberate

  Have really got an attitude.

  2/

  And those we torture to set free

  Have got no cause to sigh and groan:

  As we export democracy

  The ones we torture to set free

  Are stripped of human dignity

  In prisons no worse than our own.

  No, those we torture to set free

  Have got no cause to sigh and groan.

  3/

  And what is all this fuss about

  Who knows what’s best? The ones in charge,

  Believe me, don’t have any doubt.

  Say what? Is all this fuss about

  The liberties we trample out?

  Our nation’s powerful and large,

  So what is all this fuss about?

  Who knows what’s best? The ones in charge.

  Getting Carded

  We couldn’t know what we would lose

  When the ENDANGERED SPECIES sign

  Began to turn up in our zoos---

  A small white card propped up on a

  Shelf in front of the cage or pen

  Of one selected for this honor,

  Translated from its habitat

  Into a compact modern flat.

  By what ENDANGERED, or by whom,

  It couldn’t know until too late:

  One day it woke up in this room

  Where it patrols compulsively

  The borders of its shrunken state

  And stares at what it cannot see:

  Far dominions, other powers.

  Its glance keeps on avoiding ours.

  You wonder why it didn’t learn,

  Although, quite frankly, it seems not

  Even to share your mild concern.

  Time to move on: the fourth grade class

  Behind us wants to claim our spot

  And press its faces to the glass.

  We leave ENDANGERED and its text

  And wonder who’ll get carded ne
xt.

  For the End of the Age of Irony

  Why, if it’s gone now, is there this leftover

  ambience seeping into and staining the

  fabric of our conversation,

  like red wine spilled on the bone-white sofa?

  Though its infrequent sightings are treated as

  cases of mere mistaken identity,

  and though its age may now be ended,

  it seems that irony’s not quite done for---

  one old employer pays it occasional

  visits on Sundays, riding a trolley car

  out to the suburbs where it lingers,

  though much diminished, as he informs us:

  “Odd to contrast its formerly vigorous

  habits of growth, its flourishing presence in

  those lives to which it once seemed central,

  with its now-marginal situation

  off in the corner, fusty leaves withering---

  if only we’d remembered to water it

  every so often, yes, if only

  with our crocodile tears, if only ….”

  Such insincere remorse may remind you of

  how you enjoyed the late Donald Justice’s

  version of Baudelaire’s evasive

  elegy made for the clumsy servant,

  wondering only whether the French version

  should be preferred for its insincerity

  over the translator’s nostalgia

  for those emotions he never suffered.

  It may seem strange that an inability

  to speak of irony without irony

  argues more clearly for its value

  than any argument it’s not part of,

  or that nostalgia is the more keenly felt

  out of proportion to the experience

  causing it, as a magnifying

  lens will make any poor micro, macro.

  But you were always taken with artifice,

  drawn to it like a sow to a truffle bed,

  weren’t you, finding it a refuge

  from the unbearably lofty motive,

  as from the unendurable punditry

  of those whom mere self-interest animates;

  you saw it deftly undermining

  acres of wind-powered bloviators,

  and noticed how, when we get too serious

  in its defense, it vanishes utterly;

  ironists surely would consider

  such an odd outcome as---well, ironic.

  Better to leave its fragile and fugitive

  self to recover, with our negligence

  offering all it really needs for

  any eventual restoration:

  which someone someday (on one reality,

  many perspectives) will lightly illustrate

  merely by letting you know that the

  beautiful necktie you’re wearing, isn’t.

  Near Jeffrey’s Hook

  1/

  No one is living here now who can say

  What it was once called by the Lenapé,

  Who must have given it a proper name

  Before the Dutchmen and the British came.

  They lived here lightly, nourished on demand,

  And signified their tenure of the land

  With firesites, with mounds of oyster shells,

  Flint arrowheads, clay bowls, dog burials---

  Remnants that come to light now and again.

  Their present was as it had always been

  While ours isn’t what it used to be,

  So we imagine what we cannot see:

  Propulsive figures in a bark canoe

  Whose blades divide the river’s stream in two,

  Now gliding skillfully along the shore,

  An image from a present long before.

  2/

  We see what they could never have imagined:

  One Eighty-first Street’s still-evolving pageant

  Of up and coming keeps on coming up,

  Bright oddments caught in a kaleidoscope---

  A single orange skin, expertly twirled

  Will wrap itself three times around the world!

  Here are peeled oranges in plastic sacks,

  Electric storefronts filled with shirts and slacks

  Advertised at nearly wholesale prices;

  Here someone peddles sugar-syrup ices,

  And in the window next door is a frieze

  Of chickens spitted on rotisseries;

  ---And if the river where the street concludes

  No longer summons up archaic moods,

  On certain evenings it reflects Monet’s

  Sunsets of pinks and oily, buttery grays . . .

  3/

  We thought that what was possible must be,

  Moved to invention by the necessity

  Of finding needs that inventions satisfied:

  Necessity might be a stream too wide

  To get the goods across in half an hour.

  As we became more certain of our power,

  We couldn’t help but act on what we knew:

  The inconvenience of the river grew

  More noticeable until everyone

  Agreed that something really must be done:

  A river, though it isn’t real estate,

  Can be exploited just like real estate.

  Laid end-to-end, sticks of dynamite filled

  The hollow tubes mechanically drilled

  Into Manhattan’s ancient upper crust,

  Which cracked up in a sudden cloud of dust.

  4/

  The river yields, whatever its intention,

  To engineering’s silver-spanned suspension …

  Blasting left floors and windows all askew

  In buildings that went up in all the new

  Neighborhoods along the northwest ridge,

  A bonus from construction of the Bridge.

  Five years ago we moved to one such, built

  In 1925. A perceptible tilt

  Was proven when we let a marble roll

  From one room to another down the hall

  Until it stopped to listen by the door,

  Explosions having modified the floor

  Three quarters of a century ago.

  Further explosions brought a steady flow

  Of refugees into the neighborhood,

  Fleeing the tyranny of race and blood.

  5/

  Locked in the languages they spoke from birth,

  And as unable to assert their worth

  To the indifferent here as to resume

  The lives they might have died escaping from,

  They’d long since learned that all they had been born to

  Was now replaced by nothing to return to,

  Yet they were fortunate, they understood,

  From what they’d learned of fortunes, bad and good.

  The small, dark woman in the old cafe

  Below the Cloisters brought a silver tray

  Of sweets and coffee, placing it before

  The man who feared a stranger at his door;

  And he who ate and drank that afternoon

  Had no idea that he was served by one

  Who day by day rebuilt her life, yet might

  Still wake herself with her own screams at night.

  6/

  The German Jews and the Dominicans

  Were followed here by actors and musicians

  From more expensive neighborhoods, intent

  On finding a lge apt, rv vu, low rent.

  We followed them, their violins and basses

  And sundry other instruments in cases

  Up the escalator at One Eighty-first

  And out onto the street where they dispersed,

  Drawn by the life that goes on after work;

  Or walked with them across Fort Bennett Park

  Until, whether in couples or alone,

  They sought a privacy much like our own,

  Sustainable for those who
do not mind

  The paradox that freedom lies behind

  A triple-locked door in an uncertain hall.

  (It is called an apartment, after all.)

  7/

  Here is the river flowing as it will,

  Here and beyond us always, never still,

  Sustaining and sustainable for now.

  ---No need for us to work things out or through

  When it has done that for us, as it seems,

  And offers its assurances in dreams.

  Tonight, it’s somehow risen to our floor

  And slides between the threshold and the door---

  Is it rehearsing for some future case?

  A window opens on another space

  That we, only by leaning out into,

  Can draw within: a partial river view

  And a corner of the bridge, brilliantly lit

  By nighttime traffic passing over it---

  An image held, as we return to sleep

  Of knees and elbows crouching for the leap.

  Foreboding

  (After Alfred Kubin, Die Ahnung, 1906)

  What dark form has awoken

  over the sleeping village

  in the early morning chill?

  It will have no rest until

  below lie only broken

  bodies among the pillage.

  After 9/11

  We lived in an apartment on the ridge

  Running along Manhattan’s northwest side,

  On a street between the Cloisters and the Bridge,

  On a hill George Washington once fortified

  To keep his fledglings from the juggernaut

  Cumbrously rolling toward them. Many died

  When those defenses failed, and where they fought

  Are now a ball field and a set of swings

  In an urban park: old men lost in thought

  Advance their pawns against opponents’ kings

  Or gossip beneath a sycamore’s branches

  All afternoon until the sunset brings

  The teenagers to occupy their benches.

  The park makes little of its history,

  With only traces of the walls or trenches

  Disputed, died by, and surrendered; we

  Tread on the outline of a parapet

  Pressed into the asphalt unassertively,

  And on a wall descending to the street,

  Observe a seriously faded plaque

  Acknowledging a still-unsettled debt.

  What strength of memory can summon back

  That ghostly army of fifteen year olds