American Melancholy Read online

Old America has come home to die.

  Bosses treat you like shit on their shoe

  they can scrape off any time.

  And they do.

  From the Great Lakes, where

  he’d worked freighters

  in minus-

  zero

  weather, lost

  half his damn fingers and toes

  to frostbite. From the mines

  at Crater Falls, Idaho, where

  his lungs turned the hue

  of anthracite. And from Moab,

  Utah, where he’d been incarcerated

  seven years for a rob-

  bery he hadn’t done,

  Old America has come home to die.

  Romantic life of a “hobo”

  lasts until your legs go.

  Old America freckled with melanomas,

  straggly hair to his shoulders

  like the boy-General Custer, and

  fester-

  ing sores

  on his back, sides, and belly

  has come home to die

  where no one remembers him—

  “Uncle Eli?”

  who’d sent postcards

  from the West long faded

  in Granma’s photo album

  as out of a void

  in an era before Polaroid

  Old America has come home to die.

  Old America with a blind left eye.

  Old America with a stump

  of his gangrenous left leg, amp-

  utated at the knee.

  How bad I treated my family

  who loved me.

  Come home to say I am sorry and I love you.

  Great-Granma’s youngest sister’s

  son Eli who’d left the farm in 1931

  to work on the Erie Canal, but no—

  disappeared somewhere west

  beyond Pocatello, Idaho. We’d guessed

  you’d died in the Yukon, or in

  the Eagle Mine in Utah. Capsized

  in the Bering Strait, or vaporized

  at the Fearing Nevada Test Site

  or murdered by railroad cops

  and flung into the Mississippi—

  poor Uncle Eli!

  Sins I have committed these many

  years, I regret. Wash my soul

  clean before I die.

  Trying to explain why

  he’d left home except—

  Where is Marta? Please

  let me see Marta—his brother’s wife

  he was in love with, and Marta told him

  she was pregnant, and he abandoned

  her to her violent husband like a coward.

  Years I never thought of Marta, or Ma—

  any of you. Now, that’s all I think about.

  Forgive me how bad I behaved

  when I was young . . .

  Old America, we are not cruel

  people, but the fact is mostly we’ve

  forgotten you. And Great-Aunt Marta

  too—died in 1961. And her oldest

  son Ethan, who’d be the one

  you’d want to see, is gone, too—

  somewhere south of the 38th parallel,

  Korea.

  Where are my brothers—Frank, Joseph, Frederic?

  My sisters—Margaret, Elizabeth?

  My cousin Leah?—so many cousins . . .

  Old America, frantic to repent,

  has brought us presents—

  flute carved out of a walrus tusk, Inuit

  doll and soapstone skulls, beaded belts and

  miniature pelts and something that causes Maya to scream,

  Oh God—is that an Indian scalp?

  Old America has come home to die

  this first week of December

  in time for Maya to videotape

  an interview with Great-Uncle Eli

  for her American Studies seminar at Wesleyan—

  Life of an Oldtime “Hobo.”

  Her classmates will be impressed—

  Old America is like awesome, fantastic—

  and her professor will grade an A—

  Tragic, vividly rendered & iconic.

  Jubilate:

  An Homage in Catterel* Verse

  For I will consider my Cat Cherie

  for she is the very apotheosis of Cat-Beauty

  which is to say, nothing extraordinary

  for in the Cat, beauty is ordinary

  like the bliss

  conferred

  upon us

  in the hypnosis

  of purr-

  ing.

  She has been known

  to knead her claws

  upon a sleeve.

  And on a knee.

  And on bare skin,

  sharp claws sinking in—

  just a warning.

  For she is of the tribe of Tyger

  and eyes burning bright

  though cuddling

  at night

  until you wake to discover—

  where is she? Cher-ie?

  Don’t inquire.

  * * *

  For in considering my Cat Cherie

  I am considering Catitude—

  each Cat the (essential)

  equivalent of all others

  not varying freak-

  ishly in size

  (like crude D*gs)

  but pleas-

  ingly Platonic.

  Cat-chutzpah

  is the “sheathed

  claw”—

  no heart borne

  upon a foreleg,

  but

  your challenge

  to decode,

  like poetry

  of a subtlety

  that does not bark

  its meaning

  but forces us to

  be just a little

  smarter than

  we are.

  (Unlike D*gs

  whose un-

  critical adulation

  makes us

  dumber.)

  * * *

  Of Twitter it is estimated

  somewhere beyond thirty-one percent

  who tweet are feline,

  in nocturnal prowl

  slyly retweeting

  their kind,

  reproducing,

  replicating

  the dark rapacious ever-

  fecund feral soul

  that is the sea

  upon which “civilization”

  floats, uneasily.

  For such eloquent Kitty-Twitter,

  only the most elegant Kitty-Litter.

  But if you ask, Cherie, what

  is this?, the reply is

  blank blinking innocence.

  Mew? What’s with you?

  * * *

  —“Live free

  or die”—is the Cat’s

  very soul, that

  makes of us,

  by contrast,

  fawning and obsequious

  beings (not unlike

  D*gs). Such beauty

  instructs us in its own

  perfection

  for it is beyond

  mere “use”—no work-

  cats, watch-cats,

  plebian beings

  but each descended

  of gods

  as ancient Egypt

  honored; and how

  like a deity, to sink

  teeth into a rat,

  a creature that

  squeamish

  mankind abhors,

  while maintaining

  purest Cat-

  innocence.

  * * *

  Sandpaper tongue,

  utter long-

  ing.

  Cat-love the nudge

  of furry-hard head.

  But oh, where has she gone?

  Kitty-kitty-kitty! She may come

  when called

  (like the D*g)

  but mostly

  she will not

  for

/>   (unlike the D*g),

  she has got

  an interior life,

  inscrutable,

  inaccessible,

  unpossessable.

  She does not aim

  to please, or aim

  at all. Her blessing

  is a fluke, as readily

  withdrawn as given.

  Never will she do your bidding.

  Never will she falsely flatter,

  nor deceive you

  that you much matter

  beyond the reach

  of the hand that pets

  and feeds.

  Also she has got

  much busyness

  out-of-doors

  by moonlight.

  Don’t inquire.

  * * *

  But there she has gone

  headfirst through

  the Plexiglas cat door

  to return with,

  dropped on the floor

  at my feet,

  a small carcass very still.

  Oh Cherie, what have you done?

  * * *

  Only the Cat’s gift is freely given.

  The Dog in subservience as in chains

  has no free will, and so—

  Oh Cherie—is this for me?

  * * *

  For I will consider my Cat Cherie

  whose tail switches irritably

  across these keys

  when confronted with prose

  found wanting.

  For it is irrefutable, the Cat

  is the harshest critic of prose, cattedly

  rejecting what has been doggedly

  written.

  This will not do, at all.

  This is not it. At all

  where the D*g drools

  delight with very mediocrity,

  in complicity.

  Sometimes, the furry Cat-

  sprawl

  obliterates the typescript

  utterly

  for you dare not move

  a limb, a tail—

  even (gingerly)

  from the laptop—

  at risk

  of provoking a hiss—

  Mew! Whom’re you touching, you!

  * * *

  If I dare rise

  from this desk

  prematurely—

  if I dare plead

  (human) exhaustion—

  vehemently

  Cherie will dig in her claws

  securing my knees

  with the cry Mew!

  Where d’you think you’re going, you!

  Thus hours, days & ages

  accumulate in pages

  and pages into books

  and books into oeuvres.

  Purrlific the literary

  judgment.

  * * *

  The very best books (it is said)

  are not ghost- but cat-written.

  Simenon, Colette, John le Carré

  not least Hemingway—

  Auden, Eliot, Philip K. Dick—

  Borges and Burroughs and

  Patricia Highsmith—

  Jean Cocteau and Henry David Thoreau—

  H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe—

  (“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat!”)—

  Twain, Bradbury, Raymond Chandler—

  Sartre, Sylvia Plath, and—Daniel Handler?—

  not least Samuel Johnson—

  (“But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no Hodge

  shall not be shot”)—

  rapidly retreating into the mists of Time

  where Muse is suffused with Mouse

  until the two are merged in mystery—

  Cat and collaborator.

  Kite Poem

  for Billy Collins

  Some-

  thing there

  is in the American

  soul that soars with

  kites that soar! Some-

  thing alive with the roar

  of the wind lifting the kite

  that soars above rooftops, tree-

  tops, and awestruck heads! And yet—

  Something there is not in the

  American soul to adore the

  kite that fails to soar.

  The kite whose tail

  is tattered in the

  TV antenna.

  The kite that rises

  thrillingly

  at dawn

  then crashes

  vertically

  at your feet

  in a heap.

  American Sign Language

  At the podium

  measured and grave as a metronome

  the (white, male) poet with bald-

  gleaming head broods in gnom-

  ic syllables on the death

  of twelve-year-old (black) Tamir Rice

  shot in a trice in a park

  by a Cleveland police officer

  claiming to believe

  the boy’s plastic pistol

  was a “real gun”

  like his own eager

  to discharge and slay

  while twelve feet away

  at the edge

  of the bright-lit stage

  the (white, female) interpreter

  signing for the deaf is stricken

  with emotion—

  horror, pity, disbelief—

  outrage, sorrow—

  young-woman face contorted

  and eyes spilling tears

  like Tamir Rice’s mother

  perhaps, or the sister

  made to witness

  the child’s bleeding out

  in the Cleveland playground.

  We are made to stare

  as the interpreter’s fingers

  pluck the poet’s words out of the air

  like bullets, break open stanzas

  tight as conches with the deft

  ferocity of a cormo-

  rant and render gnome-speech

  raw as hurt, as harm,

  as human terror

  wet-eyed and mouth-grimace

  where words that can be uttered

  cannot follow.

  Hometown Waiting For You

  All these decades we’ve been waiting here for you. Welcome!

  You do look lonely.

  No one knows you the way we know you.

  And you know us.

  Did you actually (once) tell yourself—I am better than this?

  One day actually (once) tell yourself—I deserve better than this?

  Fact is, you couldn’t escape us.

  And we have been waiting for you. Welcome home!

  Boasting how a scholarship bore you away

  like a chariot of the gods except

  where you are born, your soul remains.

  We all die young here.

  Not one of us outlived young here.

  Check out obituaries

  in the Lockport Union Sun & Journal.

  Car crash,

  overdose.

  Gunshot, fire.

  Cancers of breast,

  ovaries, lung,

  colon. Heart

  attack, cirrhosis

  of liver.

  Assault, battery.

  Stroke! And—

  did I say over-

  dose? Car

  crash?

  Filling up the cemeteries here.

  Plastic trash here.

  Unbiodegradable Styrofoam here.

  Three-quarters of your seventh-

  grade class now

  in urns, ash.

  Those flashy cars

  you’d have given your soul

  to ride in,

  just once, now

  eyeless

  rusting hulks

  in tall grass.

  Those eyes you’d

  wished might crawl

  upon you like ants,

  in graveyards

  of broken glass.

  Atwater Park where

  you’d wep
t

  in obscure shame

  and now whatever

  his name who’d trampled

  your heart, he’s

  ash.

  Proud as hell

  of you though

  (we admit)

  never read a

  goddamn word

  you’ve written.

  We never forgave you. We hate winners.

  Still, it’s not too late.

  Did I say overdose?

  Why otherwise are you here?

  IV.

  “This Is the Time . . .”

  Hatefugue

  This is what I hate.

  I hate that the bullies & thugs of the world

  who wound, damage, devastate others

  are then by the dark magic of art

  enshrined in the art of those others

  who have survived, & whose survival is commemorated

  in art; I hate that the suffering of victims

  flowers into art, white helichrysums bravely enduring

  in frost, through bleached rib cages.

  And hateful the pride in survival, the words victim,

  survival. And hateful the pride of triumph—

  You did not murder us utterly, we are still here.

  Are you surprised, some of us are still here?

  And we will multiply!

  I hate that pride, so small it fits into a Grimm’s thimble.

  I hate that Celan’s great poem of the Holocaust,

  “Death Fugue,” flowers out of the dung heap of the dead

  & could not have come into being otherwise.

  I hate the necessity of art that is compensatory

  for such evil.

  I hate the very triumph of such art that would suggest

  the horror is not absolute, for such art

  has flowered from it.

  I hate the meager survivals,

  the crushed straw through which the drowning man breathes,

  and such gratitude in such breathing

  through the crushed straw. I hate

  the dirges, the dances on broken feet,

  the sound of shattering glass

  that is the voice of defiance in sorrow.

  I hate the fact of it that is irremediable,

  and I hate the history that enshrines the fact.

  I hate this having to pay such rapt attention to the bullies & thugs.

  I hate how they continue to command our attention,

  I hate that the greatest revenge seems to be beyond us—

  to erase, to forget. To obliterate the memory of such evil,

  the swastika, the silly mustache commanding

  the marching men, smokestacks and empty skies,

  the swagger of the bully, the mean smile of murder,

  the swill of evil,

  the smells.

  I hate that the great art that has flowered from such carrion,

  yet carries the whiff of carrion, the terror of the victims,

  the suffering of the innocent that never ceases,

  and the bearing witness that must never cease—

  I hate that such knowing annuls all possibility

  of not-knowing.

  And most, I hate that the bullies & thugs are the prime movers,

  whose polished boots set all into motion,