On Coffee

All across the city, everybody is making coffee.
In the shops, the bodegas, McDonald’s, diners,
apartment kitchens, depreciated condominiums:
Turning on kitchen lights with a clack or click
and reaching down the filters or French press,
then grinding the beans or uncapping canister,
slinging grounds, swishing sound, into the filter.

Then a scent which is like a presence or person
appears as everyone stands, sleeping, eyes shut
waiting for the coffee to perc. Going back into
half of a dream, dream epilogue, denouement,
the flutish sound of the Vltava River receding
in Smetana’s “Moldau,” night visions receding.
Wrapping things up and the day getting going.

So a person comes into the room, as in winter
when home for Christmas, coming downstairs,
the coffee’s already on and your house is full
and alive. Living alone, one can set the maker
the night before, but the effect is hollowed out.
Still it is some sort of sacrament, the moment
coffee is tasted: One rare undegraded example.

An Oldie But an Oldie

Austin Poem

And what it all came down to was
faces sheened with sweat and beer cans,
cigarrettes held dangling and hesitant,
eardrums pulsing and heads throbbing
while the waves washed over and into
and through bodies in tight jeans worn
with years and snuff cans, wallets
and token key trinkets given by girlfriends
long gone and friends miles away,
for remembering.

The way light reflected from shoulderblades
and shadows marked cheekbones with hollows
and high points that could be read like Tarot,
the shape of hips and tanning, sandals,
and uncertainty – where go? what do?
Listen: it will explain itself, in time,
if only you shun earplugs and sunglasses,
if you let yourself believe you can be witness
to something big, that something big, even if it’s small,
is still possible, like the fixin’ to die rag,
or a gong and different camera angles:
don’t watch the TV, on the screen up there,
because it’s not real, even if it looks close:
your angle is the best, much better than all the rest,
don’t you know that? And how many times
have I told you I love you? And how many times
won’t you believe me? How many times
will you shake off and turn left, 90 degrees from me,
and fold arms, slipping them, one, after, the other,
under and above each other, until they come to rest,
like a sigh, like a dream, layered and comforting
each other, when I’m left here holding a tired joint
and glasses whose frames you used to like,
flicking a lighter, on, off, flame, no-flame,
with a snick each time, our relationship’s metronome.

Here are sideburns frayed like newsprint,
red hair close-cropped and boyish, but in the style,
flower prints on summer dresses and old shirts
with patterns and holes and bits of paint and white-out,
and eyes drifting like smoke, like empty river rafts,
hunting a place to put in for the night,
find some saltback and a biscuit,
a campfire and a scarred guitar, and later on,
embers and the smell of trees, the haunt of crickets
and nightbirds, coming from everywhere, surrounding
from all points and permeating until the tingle comes
and the first rays of the rising sun break.

Streetlight humming and heightening,
light from the Tower spilling down and shaking,
still nervous after these several decades,
but also, still there.
Talk and blonde hair and eyes furtively met,
the glint of green or hazel and thinking of cats
creeping at night through dark alleyways full
of stumbling and linked arms and silly songs
sung by friends, off-key and maybe not remembered
in the morning – let’s not consider years from now,

No, let’s be now.
Skipping and lions and tigers and oh my
when he kisses you for the first time, unexpectedly,
against redbrick and white cement crumbling,
but wanted oh so badly for so long,
for all your life it seems, ever since you were in the womb,
longing for a twin, doesn’t even have to be identical,
fraternal even, just somebody to be there and hold
your hair back when you’re drunk in the street
and steadying a concrete curb with a shaking wrist,
or when your dad dies and your mom drinks whiskey,
bottles of it, in his honor, as a tribute, she says,
with mascara running and hair graying and you
pulling away, twisting in your head side to side
with arms out, flailing, looking for a doorjamb
to steady yourself under and hide from the falling plaster
and asbestos: your fault’s quite overdue.

And for you, somebody to be there so you can feel,
and not be afraid, somebody to touch your hand
in that way and have it speak encyclopedias and dictionaries,
when two decades of preachers haven’t filled you
with anything but nervousness
and a contingency plan.

Breeze through bushes and light off freshly-washed cars,
seeing the moon big in the sky, like in a movie
set in the Pacific, starring a volcano and sex.
Bicycles and cardboard, skateboards,
held hands and married couples far too young
to be anything but clutching.
Smells of beer, cops, pizza, Chinese food,
take-out in those boxes that you’ve always wanted
to have in a fridge to share with that girl
who’s never yet appeared, but the poster that flutters
across the pavement and smacks flat across the street,
on a telephone pole, just so you can read it,
makes you hope that maybe, maybe.

Neon and argon and pitchers of beer collecting drops
while lungs collect tar and nicotine ebbs and flows,
stilling the seas of turbulent growing up
and giving the flotsam and jetsam a time
to be what they are, and be good for that.
Pool cues and blue chalk and the echoing crack
of the break and the thunk-thunk of a lucky shot,
two stripes solid in the hole, quarters stacked,
chinking, chinking, plans made, broken, made again,
feeling good about having a friend who drives a stick
and drives your car okay, so you don’t have to worry.

Will to Blog Apparently Rising

One:

All this brief bus ride I have been writing
two poems in my head: One a screed against
our fame-drunk nation—I feel sorry
that Natasha died, but she is no more
than anyone; she is not some blonde god—
and the other a thing addressed to You,
and the semi-sexual sound you make—
mmff—when I put my hands on your hips
and you sling your slim arms around my neck,
clinging like a baby animal to its mother.

Two:

This morning I was whistling in the mirror and noticed
how, though the sound changed dramatically—slid up and down, filliped
over the notes—my lips, poised in an "O," did not move one bit.
I thought of how much my tongue was flipping and flicking inside
the dark, small cavern of my mouth while I whistled,
how it's like the unseen flopping of thoughts behind placid faces
waiting on the early-morning subway. And on the subway, the read-out
that shows the next stop and the current time was scrambled, a chaos
of red, green, and yellow LED lights as we crossed over the bridge.

And then at work I found out that a man
I emailed with and interviewed two weeks ago
had been killed in a car crash, at 57. He was nice to speak to,
had a good email manner, and seemed like a friendly sort.
If I emailed him again
there would no longer be anyone at the other end.

Tuning Up

Angry and running
a little late on the subway rucking
over the Williamsburg Bridge, and rehearsing
what I’ll say to her and why,
with a running color commentary
as to whether I should say anything at all
on the TV in another room of my mind,

suddenly a shaft of trumpet-colored light
bugles its way up the boulevard
through the lots, Luger’s, Bambini Art—
“fans, cups, kites, cops, eats, nights”—
to stop me warm in my thoughts,
like a C major seven amid cacophony.

Diffuse, the light stroked, almost petted
over the tops of buildings and the bay—
I thought of Brooklyn spread out in the morning,
its zip codes strewn like carpet samples.

But soon we were across
the bridge and back underground,
the cars having crept
their way above us, and the hate—
the winter, the jockeying—had returned.

Then I dreamed of spring and coffee,
and of one day not far off when,
layers having been shed
in dribs and drabs,
we’ll ride in rolled shirtsleeves
with the train windows triangled open
and the light returned but changed: opalescent,
like the pearlized snaps on a Western shirt’s front,
the subway car’s air perfumed by the smell of sea.

Hell's Kitchen

At the backside of Columbus Center,
which previously was only a Circle,
I kill time—
having walked twenty-six blocks up Ninth—
in a café, not a bar.
The movements are the same.

The center’s twin towers rise
in perfect parallel
like a key from the future. The two frame,
between them, an equally shaped bolt
of severe blue; together the three
look like the optical illusion
in which a fork’s tines appear variously
to be four or three.

I am unfamiliar
with this part of the city,
save for the day, nearly
a year ago now, when I went
to inspect an outpatient rehab
with a soon-to-be sponsee,
and coming here

assaults me and my balance,
a head-rush when one stands
up too quickly, or how in Abu Dhabi
the city spread out before me
like a dusty Oriental rug:
I can only ever know a corner
of anything.
And what if everything
is similar?

Only a corner of Carolyn,
ever a sliver of Serena.
Perhaps within my own self under
thick opaque ice
warm seas I’ll never see
slosh and wash, submerged,
unknown underwater peaks
of my blinkered consciousness.

File under fragments, Ice-related

Though not quite sastrugi*, the Jersey swamp's
wind-whipped, frozen hillocks on the way in
to work put me in mind of Antarctica,
and the cold-storage smoking-room's window,
through which I looked out onto the alien
Ross Ice Shelf, busted-up and jackknifed
like a California freeway after an earthquake,
and wondered, "Where in the holy fuck am I?"

* sastrugi = wavelike ridges of hard snow formed by the wind

Linda's Tavern, Capitol Hill

All these black-and-white pictures of patrons
on the wall of Linda’s, a bar I’ve never been to
in a city I arrived in yesterday—

an arm-wrestling match between a guy and a girl;
lit cigarettes at the bar, clearly dating the photo;
a woman with fine red lips
and thin arched eyebrows, smiling
with her mouth open;
four band guys sitting at a table
with a sign saying
“drummer wanted”;
a bride and groom, come presumably back
on their wedding night
for a drink at the bar where they met;
a dead-drunk, slumped Santa Claus—

remind me
of the boxes of antique photos
in the Chelsea flea markets:
glossy-haired, stoic farmers;
women in black dresses right up to their chins;
grubby-faced kids now our grandfathers;
a forgotten-named dog, dead now eighty years—

for Linda’s will one day close
the photos taken down and stored away
until our tattoos our mustaches,
our self-consciously cocked hats our jokey outfits
our complicated hair our loves our lives
will be rifled through disinterestedly
by a Saturday shopper in search
of something for her bathroom.

Manganaro's

Hopping off the bus before
Port Authority, I look right to make sure
nothing’s coming—then I hit the avenue
running, up to meet one from the spring before,
with whom, on stoops, I had coffee and chocolate croissants.

That was a good spring. This January day
feels like spring: high fifties, fresh in the air.
Every year it seems
I write about the trees blooming
confusedly, their wood-brains believing
or wanting to believe it’s spring.

Up Ninth with a spring
in my step a sign
flashes red: Manganaro’s,
at which I’ve eaten—chicken parm subs the size
of footballs, and a story of two brothers
in a decades-long fight
over the red sign’s name. I, too, have a name,
but no brothers up here share it.
A little winter goes a long way
for this Southern boy.

Arrived at the park, I find the park’s been made
into not-a-park, rather a rink,
for the winter.
The buildings above, however,
with their white floodlights,
remain the same.
In the city and the buildings and the streets,
in the seasonally shifting park,
I seem to perceive an analogy
or a metaphor for me.

The Path Sick Sorrow Took

When I went out
I'd been in twelve years. It was kind of quiet,
very much a whimper. I moved to San Francisco
and two nights after I went
to a place in North Beach called Vesuvius.
I just walked in on a cool afternoon and it was all
as I'd left it: the dark, scarred wood bar,
the familiar, not unpleasant gloom, the bottles arrayed against
the mirror. I went in and sat down
and ordered a scotch on the rocks.

It was amazing to me how easy it was.
The glass was sat before me
without comment or question.
I picked it up and hefted it, felt its weight
in my palm and then
took a deep drink.

The heavens did not crack open, the bar did not split,
I did not drop where I sat, struck down.
It was really rather anticlimactic.

I felt like the reformed thief
who once more takes up
his lockpick. I felt like when,
after having been in England for a year,
I drove again. The movements, the patterns
were all still there though rusty. They did not take very long
to warm up, to loosen, to work back in.
I'd uncovered a rut worn an age ago
through a field long since overgrown.
The path remained.

What happened after, where the path still led,
I don't have to tell you. The path still led
where it led. I may still be breathing
fighting fucking crying loving lying
but mostly I am dead.

File under jokey fragments, recent

1.

In retrospect,
my life was tits and whiskey.
I'd be lying if,
on this late-November night,
I said I didn't miss it a tit. I mean a bit.

2.

I need to write more about other windows.
I'm getting bored of my own stories:
Yes, Antarctica, dishwasher blah blah blah.

3.

I have sat imperiously, tie'd and jacketed,
in the lobbies of luxury hotels.
I have sipped coffee in Venice Beach hostels,
washed up from a firing.
I have mopped floors at the world's bottom
and fallen before bulls.
I'm 28. I should have spread things out more.

11/27/07

The dates dotted in this journal, with gaps
amidships, are clicking on up inevitably,
as they are wont to do. Three years now,
and my want for you, my want of you,
keeps coming back like an old football injury.

I never played, but the metaphor seems apt:
prior glories, hard hits, a longing looking-back
that, too rigorously examined, having kept reading,
proves not to hold up so well. Well oh well.

Used to I could induce rapture
at will, by picture, poem, or rereading
old emails. Often, substances got in on the act.
A doomed, dready dreaming, mouthing a memory
like an ice cube in August: delicious, but gone quick.

Now not so much. Sobriety's conspired
to make life realer. Clarity can be a bit dull.
That old pull's perhaps been dispelled
by my newfound stability. The pilot light's lit
but I've turned off the gas.

Post No. 200!

Happy Post No. 200 to me! To celebrate, here's a something I wrote:

On Sun and the Interest of What’s Happening

In the Viennese café, after the movie,
we chose a sunstruck seat
in the covered outdoor garden’s corner.
“How have you been doing?” we asked one another.
“How was Japan?” “How are you and your man?”
“Japan was good,” I said. “Japan was really great.”

Maya was enjoying Brooklyn: the quiet, the space,
the more-laid-back life. But she wasn’t sure she’d stay

in the city forever. In fact, Maya was sure
she wouldn’t stay. I sipped my latte and picked at
the strudel with schlag. The light made it all
seem somehow unreal, like when in shadow
you view a street thoroughly smashed by sunshine
across the way. “And I don’t know where I’ll go.”

Earlier, in the movie, a bad-for—but mad-for—one-another couple
looked out, arms around waists, onto a Paris dusk.
I thought of my girl like that, then, and London.
It wasn’t good but it was something.

“So who do you see?” Maya asked. I stirred
from my sunny reverie and rearranged the cutlery, anxiously.
A minute earlier I’d have had an answer, but the sun seemed
to shut all that down;

the light a viscousness in which I’d been trapped,
sap slowly surprising an insect, henceforth caught,
preserved for eons, dust motes dancing in slo-mo.

Everything telescoped. “Joe,”
I said. “I talk a lot to Joe.”

This one goes out to Dad

I read this recently in The New Yorker. I was surprised by the use of my own personal dad's favorite hymn, as well as by the—not onomatopoeia, but something close (does anyone know the word for this?)—that ends it. An excellent poem.

Aubade in Autumn

by Peter Everwine October 15, 2007

This morning, from under the floorboards
of the room in which I write,
Lawrence the handyman is singing the blues
in a soft falsetto as he works, the words
unclear, though surely one of them is love,
lugging its shadow of sadness into song.
I don’t want to think about sadness;
there’s never a lack of it.
I want to sit quietly for a while
and listen to my father making
a joyful sound unto his mirror
as he shaves—slap of razor
against the strop, the familiar rasp of his voice
singing his favorite hymn, but faint now,
coming from so far back in time:
Oh, come to the church in the wildwood . . .
my father, who had no faith, but loved
how the long, ascending syllable of wild
echoed from the walls in celebration
as the morning opened around him . . .
as now it opens around me, the light shifting
in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and across
the bedraggled back-yard roses
that I have been careless of
but brighten the air, nevertheless.
Who am I, if not one who listens
for words to stir from the silences they keep?
Love is the ground note; we cannot do
without it or the sorrow of its changes.
Come to the wildwood, love,
Oh, to the wiiildwood as the morning deepens,
and from a branch in the cedar tree a small bird
quickens his song into the blue reaches of heaven—
hey sweetie sweetie hey.

Autumn comes and the days all start late

All at once one October morning you wake up and the light’s different, angled through the open window which, all night long, eyes closed and mouth ajar, you faced, a bit of breeze come through to flutter the curtains. It’s fall in New York, and it’s as if a crew of window-washers threw a bucket of sudsy water on the city and then squeegeed it clean. A film’s gone, hot August haze burned off, and everyone’s friendlier, more calm, not sunblind and sweat-soaked, sticky.

It’s one of the city’s two annual periods of transition, spring and fall. Summer and winter are static, owning the days and weeks with unquestioned authority—but spring and fall are interregnums, chinks in the armor, breakdowns in the system that summer- and winterly holds total sway.

Today, the twentieth, ten days later, is a gray day; now we should be sweating through shirts, the city reeking of garbage and last-gasp sex, hail-mary flirting, the end of a season; a sort of madness like in Sam’s summer, with which you empathize—but no, you’re wearing a sweater and so’s the carved-blonde beauty sitting across from you, her front to the window and her back to you, in profile.

Strangling Karl

Things being today
what they are, all my old things begin
to become mythy and massive—
my economist friend from Oxford,
I’ll tell the kids—or maybe
he’ll come visit and we’ll tell, in tandem,
the story of how he strangled Marx.

To have a fondness for what’s past—
like Woody Allen for Annie Hall, or me
for the Bodleian and the Firkin, mornings
on the river vomiting up beans on toast,

is a good thing if taken rarely,
like a dozen donuts bought and downed
on a Sunday-morning whim—then
it’s like when the wind brings
a sudden scent of sea
with no sea in sight.
But dwell overmuch

and it edges toward what
the old sea captains called Nostalgia
and Debility—an overripe August stink
that threatens to overwhelm
with its too muchness, a realm
of malignant growth, a pestilential
purple cabbage plant,
a garbage-fed mulberry tree
that leaves a fermenting carpet
of fly-wracked berries.

So these are my thoughts
with respect to returning
for my high school reunion.

But kept in check, forward momentum maintained,
with second sight I see a morning
years from now—though I may never
take a drink again, a cigarette
can always be snuck: we’ll recreate how,
in Berlin, we came upon a looming stone statue
of Engels, standing, and Marx, seated—and Kevin,
lover of capitalism, acolyte of Adam Smith,
managed just barely
to get his arms around the stone neck of Karl,
with a gleeful grimace on.

I’ve still got the picture.
He got that Marx sumbitch something good.

On a quiet Cobble Hill afternoon

On a quiet Cobble Hill afternoon,
the season's first nice Saturday, I sit inside
at a window smoking
and drinking Diet Coke, outlooking onto
the brown brick building set below bright
blue sky, framed by the window
two rectangles, one above the other, seamless,
like a real-life Rothko.

A bumblebee, dronelike, is surveying me.
Against the blue he -- the bee --
is black, shadowed, shorn
of his yellow.

Earlier I was napping.
Earlier I was listening to Sky Blue Sky.
Earlier than that I was in the city.

The brown building's now lightening,
in response to what the sun does daily,
sinking off west.
The bee has buzzed off.
My cigarette's done and now a noise
of cars somewhere, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway,
gently, like a white apartment curtain fluttered
by summer wind,
breaks my reverie.

The smokes pop out

Going through old pictures, the smokes
start to jump out at me; there's one
behind my ear, head-on
to the camera and inscribing a circle,
perfect in its symmetry,
a white-rimmed lunar eclipse.

I look tough.
Most of the time
photos lie by showing only one aspect
of a thing at a time.

In the photos we all have cigarettes.
We don't,
but we look like we could or should,
because we are young.
Cigarettes are for the young, and quitting
is an acknowledgement of
one's own mortality.

My life will not be
a field by the river, crawdads
and free smokes, festival beer
and in-jokes.
Or it won't be that entirely or all the time.
So, realizing that,
down go the Marlboros.

That Friday

That Friday
* a Hunter Slaton original

That Friday I was fizzing angrily above it all,
in a the hell with it, hail-mary mood. The clouds
were grey so the Empire was too, gunmetal,
like a battleship, or a battleship in the game Battleship.

That building had moods. Feelings
rushed through me like high clouds, quickly,
over a scooped, fresh-scrubbed valley. The reason was because

of the meeting. During the meeting (and after, and later)
I had seen red, like a Pamplona bull on the boulevard. A righteous fury'd risen
within me, a red mist a bulletspray.

Leaving my work building
the street was a curl I shot; I made appointments
left and right: a stalking,
deep-breathing, Serenity Prayer-saying
sneaker-clad tiger, burning bright.

Put a Geiger counter on me and
I would have fairly crackled.

After I got nearly to where I was going
in Bryant Park I paused. The grass
was all ripped-up and gone, sand-flooded. A small sign said

"The lawn is closed for reseeding." I should say it was.

Pacing through puddles I counted it down, checked the watch
did some breathing, before the interview. The meeting:
would it turn out to have been a good or bad thing?

I couldn't tell and couldn't smoke; I'd quit. That morning
I'd woke sober, for the 10th month. Ten times ten times ten times I hadn't, hating
the swim up from sleep. But not this one.

On the air was the smell of spring: fresh, newness, thaw;
the opposite of November woodsmoke. I remembered
my intro to the city'd been here, into 11 W. 42nd and the green chairs

of Bryant Park. The park was not being reseeded then
and soon it would not be again.

I pushed through the tall revolving doors and went in.