Fortuitous Poem by Saul Bellow (age 89)

I don’t do much of anything these days
And I spend much of my time indoors.

By far my pleasantest diversion
Is to play with Rosie, now four years old.

It seems to me that my parents
Wanted me to grow up in a hurry
And that I resisted, dragging my feet.
They (my parents, not my feet)
Needed all the help they could get.
They were forever asking
“What does the man say?”
And I would translate for them
Into heavy-footed English.
That didn’t help much either.
The old people were as ignorant
Of English as they were of Canadian French.

We often stopped before a display
Of children shoes. My mother coveted for me
A pair of patent leather sandals
With an elegantissimo strap.
I finally got them—I rubbed them
With butter to preserve the leather.

This was when I was six or seven years old,
A little older than Rosie is now.

Amazing how it all boils down
To a pair of patent-leather shoes.

Fortuitous Poem by Wilfrid Sheed

You noodle around
With tempo and sound
Until you get the perfect fit
For that particular song,
And then,
So long as you can sustain it,
God is on your side
And everything comes easily
And even the waiters smile.

Fortuitous Poem by Isaac Babel

Benya,

If you were an idiot,
I would write to as to an idiot.
But I know you aren’t one,
And God help me not to change my mind.
You are acting, excuse me, like an amateur.
How can you not know
How helplessly
We are sitting on our surplus wheat
Because of the glut harvest in Argentina…
And I will tell you,
From the bottom of my heart,
That I’m fed up in my old age
Eating such a bitter piece of bread
And living through such hassles,
After working hard all my life
Like a simple horse-cart driver.
And what do I have to show
For all this hard labor?
Ulcers, pains, worries and
Not a wink of sleep.
Stop this nonsense, Benya

Your friend,
A far better one then you might think,

Rubim Tartakovsky

Fortuitous Poem by Thomas Sowell

I am not Dear Abby.

“But what do you say
To the welfare mother
Or the ghetto youth?”

I cannot imagine
What would have led
Anybody to think
That I was writing handbooks
For welfare mothers
Or ghetto youths,
Or that either
Would be reading them,
If I were.

Fortuitous Poem by Saul Bellow, II

(To Phillip Roth)



There aren’t many people in the trade
For whom I have any use.
But I knew when I hit Chicago
(Was it twelve years ago?)
And read your stories
That you were the real thing.

When I was a little kid,
There were still blacksmiths around,
And I’ve never forgotten
The ring of real hammer on a real anvil.

Fortuitous Poem by Saul Bellow

Russian Baths in Chicago


Mickey who keeps the food concession
Fries slabs of meat and potatoes pancakes,
And, with enormous knifes, he hacks up cabbages for coleslaw
And he quarters grapefruits (to be eaten by hand).

The stout old men mounting in their bed sheets
From the blasting heat have a strong appetite.
Below, Franush the attendant makes steam
By sloshing water on the white hot boulders.
These lie in a pile like Roman ballistic ammunition.

To keep his brain from baking
Franush wears a wet felt hat with the brim torn off.
Otherwise he is naked.
He crawls up like a red salamander
With a stick to tip the latch of the furnace,
Which is too hot to touch,
And then on all fours,
With testicles swinging on a long sinew
And the clean anus staring out,
He backs away groping for the bucket.
He pitches in the water
And the boulders flash and sizzle.

There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail.

Fortuitous Poem by Haruki Murakami

She looked to be in her mid-fifties.
She was short and stocky, and from behind, had a weird sort of gait, like a crustacean.
She wore tiny metal-framed glasses, but the space between her eyebrows was flat and broad and you could clearly see the downy hair growing there.
She had on a wool suit of indeterminate age, though no doubt it was already out of fashion by the time it was manufactured, and it carried with it a faint odor of mothballs.
The suit was pink, but an odd sort of pink, like some other color had been accidentally mixed in.
They had probably been aiming for a classy subdued sort of hue, but because they didn’t get it right, the pink of her suit sank deeply back into diffidence, concealment, and resignation.
Thanks to this, the brand-new white blouse peeking out of the collar looked like some indiscreet person that had wandered into a wake.
Her dry hair, with some white strands mixed in, was pinned back with a plastic clip, probably the nearest thing she had had on hand.
He limbs were on the beefy side, and she wore no rings on her stubby fingers.
There were three thin wrinkles at her neckline, sharply etched, like notches on the road of life.
Or maybe they were marks to commemorate when three wishes had come true—though he had serious doubts that this had ever happened.

Two Afro-American Women

Three weeks into the grand jury,
(Murders, random shootings and assaults),
She came in, 16 years old, pretty and poised,
A witness to her boyfriend’s robbery,
The school had lost power and
And they were walking to her house,
When he was jumped on and lost
His cell, debit card and shoes.
The prosecutor asked her
How long they had been together,
And she replied, two years, paused shyly,
And added, two months and 10 days.
And everyone laughed—
A magical moment amongst the urban grime.

In the same case, another witness
To a threat against the victim
By one of the robbers,
In a high school cafeteria,
Was an older, petite woman,
Working class by the look of her hands,
Dressed up as if for church.
The prosecutor asked her
What was she doing at the school,
And she reply, with dignity, I volunteer,
My two kids got high school diplomas there,
And I thought I should pay it back
By helping people like me
Who come in and feel lost.

Picture of Family Life

Our three room Warsaw apartment,
The living room which doubled
As Father’s and my bedroom at night,
A gloomy autumn Sunday,
Boredom I learned to disguise
To avoid lectures.
Father tells us to gather around
We’re going to have family time.
He directs and sets the stage,
A desk lamp is brought over to help
The weak overhead light.
We are sitting in a circle:
Mother on the sofa bed reading,
Sister sawing some piece of clothing
She was told was too expensive for her to buy,
I’m darning my socks, a skill
That was actually taught at school,
Father hovers over us, his own job
Is to select music from our new radio
With a glowing green cat’s-eye.
Father is humming with the music
He is happy, that is clear,
The rest of us are looking for pretexts to escape.

Many things have puzzled me about these episodes,
The chief one being where,
Having grown up in an orphanage,
Did he get his idea of what family life looked like.
Now I think I know:
As a kid, he must have read a book,
Some 19th century saga of family life,
And there must have been an illustration
A woodcut or metal engraving
Showing a family, bathed in light
Sawing and reading and listening to music,
And he must have said to himself,
One day I will have it.

My son finds amusing

My son finds amusing
My ambitions to publish
My poetry.

He tells me that
I shouldn’t worry about
My books after I will
Move to a nursing home;
That any university library
Will be happy to take them
As soon as I offer them
The copyright of all my
Written stuff for free.
(He’s an IP lawyer
And he thinks it funny.)

My revenge will come
When I will be published
One day and a book
Of my poems will have
An acknowledgements page
That will quote this:

“As for giving thanks to,
I have nobody.”

Books' Fate

I don’t know what will happen
To my books when I will have to move
To a nursing home. Who would want
Volumes of Polish and Russian classics
I bought over the years to recreate
What I remember of the bookshelves
Of our Warsaw apartment? Odd to
Think of them rotting in a landfill
Somewhere, providing food and
Perhaps some variety in otherwise
Boring life of the ever helpful microbes.
What is this? They would raise their eyebrows
(Though they have no such thing);
Tolstoy, I think we have tasted him
Once sixty generations back;
But this? Slowacki; I don't think
We have ever had the pleasure
Of meeting this prolific fellow;
Call all the cousins, they won't want to miss it.

Fortuitous Poem by Tom Stoppard

The train slows
Crawling through the French quarter of the City on the Delta.

The sun hangs like a copper pan
Over boarding houses with elaborately scrolled ginger bread eves.

In the red-lit shadow of wrought iron balconies
Octaroon Loreleis sing their siren songs to shore-leave sailors,
And sharp-suited pimps push open saloon doors,
Spilling light and ragtime to underscore the cries
Of old men selling shrimp gumbo down on the levee…

The Day the News Came from Poland

When the news came from Poland about his family
Father lied down on his bed and wouldn’t move;
It was also the day of his son’s bar mitzvah.
A big social hall had been rented in Brooklyn
And the boy was giddy with anticipation.
When it became clear that his father wouldn’t go
The boy screamed at him telling him he had to.
The father went. When the crowd cheered
“For He Is a Jolly Good Fellow”, something
On his father’s face made the boy realize
That he had done evil.

The boy’s name was Maurice Sendak.

Screenplay Writers Like Prostitutes

Screenplay writers like prostitutes;
They help move things along
To stay within the 100 minutes target
Skipping all sort of complications
(How will he get her to sleep with him);
In exchange the writers give them
A heart of gold and a happy ending .

With his profession (international selling)
And his awkwardness with women
He had learned enough about prostitutes
Not to expect a heart of gold
Or a happy end or much of anything.
He was too old for sex now
And thought of the women
When he didn’t want to feel sorry for himself.

There was a woman in NY, very pretty,
He thought too pretty for the agreed price
And the shabby establishment
Till came the time for her to undress
And she said “I hope you don’t mind
My mastectomy,” which he didn’t really
Only a scar where the breast used to be
Burned itself into his retina for ever.

Outside his hotel in Santo Domingo
A woman approached him
And explained in simple Spanish
That three women standing
On the other side of the street
Charged very little only because they were sick;
Grateful, he went out with her
And three days later had to look for penicillin.

The Russian woman at the Frankfurt airport
Was brusque to begin with
And become more short-tampered still
After he reminded her that he had paid
For an hour; but it wasn’t worth it
And he let her go; maybe she was freelancing
And worried about her pimp.

In Dar-es-Salam, at dusk
The approach was humble
But the tone was urgent
And when the price was named—
One dollar at the black market exchange rate—
He couldn’t say no. The place of business
Was the cab of a truck parked nearby.

That woman was a grandmother, for sure
And yet, of all the women he had ever met,
Paying for it or not,
None could compare to her beauty.
At least as he remembered it now and
Though he knew that memory played tricks
He liked this particular trick.

He hoped that
The money he handed over,
In greasy bills that stuck together,
Paid for some food and a child’s toy.

Fortuitous Poem by David Bellos

…the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions:

The first is that we are all different…
The second is that we are all the same…

Translation is another name for the human condition.

The Judge Turned to His Wife

The judge turned to his wife
As the dinner was placed on the table
"You wouldn't believe the guy I had today
Actually tried to tell me that the city was late
Paying for the after-school basketball clinics
The school district had hired him to run,
And he couldn't pay his child support on time.
I told him, Sir, if you don't like the way the city is paying
Get yourself a nine-to-five job or sell your car
But do not come here before me offering excuses!"
The teenage daughter mumbled under her breath:
"Way to go, Dad. You really showed him.
Those nine-to-five jobs are like so everywhere
Practically begging for workers and his car,
Probably a piece of junk, worth maybe like 300 bucks,
And his only way of getting to his job.
But it's good to know you are ready
If the city is ever late paying you."
The judge and his wife exchanged a look;
The word "puberty" did not need to be said.

Issue of Statistics

From the Nuremberg testimony of Dr. Wilhelm Höettl, SS-Sturmbannführer, Directorate VI of the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) regarding a September 1944 conversation with Eichmann about a report that Eichmann had prepared at Himmler’s request setting out how many Jews had, by then, been exterminated.


[…] Er sei auf Grund seiner Informationen dabei zu folgendem Ergebnis gekommen:
In den verschiedenen Vernichtungslagern seien etwa vier Millionen Juden getötet worden, während weitere zwei Millionen auf andere Weise den Tod fanden, wobei der Großteil davon durch die Einsatzkommandos der Sicherheitspolizei während des Feldzuges gegen Rußland durch Erschißen getötet wurde.
Himmler sei mit dem Bericht nicht zufrieden gewesen, da nach seiner Meinung die Zahl der getöteten Juden größer als 6 Millionen sein müsse. Himmler hat erklärt, dass er einen Mann von seinem statistischen Amt zu Eichmann schicken werde, damit dieser auf Grund des Materials von Eichmann einen neuen Bericht verfasse, wo die genaue Zahl ausgearbeitet werden sollte.
[…]




([..] On the basis of his data, he (Eichmann) came to the following conclusions:

About 4 million Jews had been killed in various death camps and a further 2 million had been killed by other means, mostly through shooting by the Einsatzkommandos of the Security Police during the campaign against Russia.

Himmler was not pleased with the report because, in his view, the number of killed Jews should have been higher than 6 million. Himmler declared that he would send to Eichmann someone from his own statistical office who would, using Eichmann’s data, prepare a new report, in which a precise number could be determined.”[…])

Instructions for Disposal of Property

(from Deputy Director of the Main Economic-Administrative Department of the SS to the commanding officers of the Lublin and Auschwitz concentration camps concerning the disposal of property of the exterminated Jewish population. The property was to be referred to as belonging to “thieves, fencers, and speculators” (“Diebes-, Hehler- und Hamstergut” ))



“1.

….
…
2. Alle Preise setzt das SS-W.-V.-Hauptamt fest, unter Beachtung gesetzlicher Richtpreise. Diese Festsetzung kann auch nachträglich stattfinden. -Zeit- und personalraubende-kleinliche-Wertfeststellungen können hierbei unterbleiben.

Im Allgemeinen sind Durchschnittsstückpreise festzusetzen, z. B. für eine gebrauchte Männerhose 3. – Mark, für eine Wolldecke 6. – Mark usw.

Für die Ablieferung der unbrauchbaren Gegenstände an das Reichwirtschaftsministerium sind im Allgemeinen Kilopreise zugrundezulegen.

Es ist streng darauf zu achten, daß bei allen zur Abgabe kommenden Kleidern und Überkleidern der Judenstern entfernt wird.

Es sind ferner mit größtmöglicher Sorgfalt alle zur Abgabe kommenden Gegenstände auf versteckte und eingenähte Werte zu untersuchen.


I.V.
F r a n k
SS-Brigadeführer
und Generalmajor der Waffen-SS”






2. All prices shall be set by the Main Economic-Administrative Department of the SS taking into consideration the official indicative prices. The valuation could take place at a later date as well. Detailed item-by-item valuation involving the time- and personnel-consuming procedures will not be necessary.

In general, it is desirable to set average prices per item, for instance, used man pants—M 3, a woolen blanket—M 6. For items considered useless that are delivered to the Reich Ministry of the Economy, the price should be set per kilogram of weight.

Close attention should be paid to the removal of the Star of David from the transferred under- and over-garments.

It is imperative to search with the greatest care the items to be transferred as they might contain hidden or sawn-in items of value.


Signed
F r a n k
SS Brigadeführer
and Generalmajor of Waffen-SS

Die Jüdin Ita Bryt

“Im Namen des Deutschen Volkes!
Strafsache gegen
die Jüdin Ita Bryt aus Wachock, Kolejowastraße 20, geb. am
15.11.1910 in Wachock, ledig, Tochter des Moszek u.d. Laja, geb.
Wierzbicka,
wegen unbefugten Verlassens des Wohnbezirks
Das Sondergericht Radom im Generalgouvernement hat in der Sitzung
vom -7. Mai 1942, -an welcher teilgenommen haben:
beauftr. Richter Langenmayr
als Vorsitzender,
beauftr. Richter von der Warth
beauftr. Richter Heyne
als beisitzender Richter
beauftr. Staatsanwalt Ballat
als Beamter der Staatsanwaltschaft,
Justizangesteller Cilwik
als Urkundsbeamter der Geschäftsstelle,
für Recht erkannt:
Die Angeklagte wird wegen unbefugten Verlassens des jüdischen
Wohnbezirks zum Tode verurteilt.
Die Angeklagte hat die Kosten des Verfahrens zu tragen.”




.
.
The accused was Ita Bryt, age 32.
The case was decided by Judges Langenmayr, von der Warth, and Heyne.
The crime was leaving the ghetto without permission.
The punishment was death.
The costs of the proceedings were assessed against the accused.

Science, Love And Poetry

At the very end
of "The Psychology of Love"--
A long scholarly book
with footnotes and end notes
and abundant citations,--
After the literature review
And plenty of original research,
The author, a well known professor
From a renown university,
Got down to providing
The answer to the question
Of what romantic love is:

""Ninety percent, sexual desire not yet sated."

If her academic career stalls,
She might do well writing poetry.

Reading Comprehension

In middle school,
I read "War and Peace"
And skipped all the boring parts
About peace and sad parts
About war as well.

In high school,
I read "Anna Karenina"
And skipped all about her
And Vronsky too
Because I liked
Kitty and Levin more.

I college I read
"The Magic Mountain"
And skipped the big fight
Between Naphta and Settembrini
Because the very same fight
Ripped my family apart.

Now I don't skip;
Books like "Metamorphosis",
"Heart of Darkness", "1984"
need to be read
like airline safety cards.

Fortuitous Poem from the Talmud

A man had two wives,
One young, one old.
The young one pulled out his gray hair,
The old one, his black.
Thanks to both wives,
He became bold.

(Bava Kamma 60)

Fortuitous Poem from NYT Magazine Interview about Divorce, II

It’s funny, my ex and I had a lot of the same habits—we loved the same TV and the same junk food. But in general we were complete opposites. I was the spoiled, better-educated, well-traveled wild girl, and he was a meat-and-potatoes Long Island boy. In retrospect, we were not compatible at all. I mean, who doesn’t like TV and junk food?

Fortuitous Poem from NYT Magazine Interview About Divorce, I

I thought he was hot—I liked his Robert Smith Hair and hipster clothes. He was intelligent, clever and deeply kind. He had all those creative pursuits that he was really engages in and pretty good at, but didn’t seem to have any illusions about being able to make a living doing them. He also has this absolutely infectious enthusiasm that can make the world seem like an almost magical place, and when we started dating, he got really enthusiastic about me. I felt calmed, like he smoothed out my rough edges, in a good way.

But some of those things begun to change even before we got married. He gained some weight and stopped paying as much attention to how he looked, and his creative output slowed dramatically. Instead, he begun spending most of his time playing video games and watching television.

Fortuitous Poem by Patti Smith

“One Indian summer day we dressed in our favorite things,
Me in my beatnik sandals and ragged scarves,
And Robert with his love beads and sheepskin vest.
We took the subway to West Fourth Street and spent the afternoon in Washington Square.
We shared coffee from a thermos, watching the stream of tourists, stoners and folksingers.
Agitated revolutionaries distributed antiwar leaflets.
Chess players drew a crowd of their own.
Everyone coexisted within the continuous drone of verbal diatribes, bongos, and barking dogs.

We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us.
Robert enjoyed being noticed and he affectionately squeezed my hand.

“Oh, take their picture,” said the woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.”

“Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They are just kids.”

Fortuitous Poem by Walmart, Inc.

Regal Wide Body,
White Heaven,
Mom Remembered,
Pieta and Last Summer,
Lady de Guadalupe,
Lovely in All Ways,
Sienna,
Sterling De Luxe,
Executive Privilege,
American Rose,
American Patrio,
Supreme Distinction,
Supreme Distinction Cameo Rose,
Dad Remembered.

Fortuitous Poem by Roberto Bolano

“This is a big city, a real city,”
Said Chucho Flores.
“We have everything.
Factories, maquiladoras,
One of the lowest unemployment rates in Mexico,
A cocaine cartel,
A constant flow of workers from other cities,
Central American immigrants,
An urban infrastructure that can’t support the level of demographic growth.
We have plenty of money and poverty,
We have imagination and bureaucracy,
We have violance and the desire to work in peace.
There is just one thing we haven’t got,”
Said Chucho Flores.
Oil, thought Fate, but he didn’t say it.
“What don’t you have?” he asked.
“Time,” said Chucho Flores. “We haven’t got any fucking time.”

Fortuitous Poem by Robert Penn Warren, II

We would have no doubt have gone that night too,
If the rain had been a different kind of rain,
If it had been a light sweet rain,
Falling out of a high sky,
The kind that barely whispers
With a silky sound on the surface of the water
You are swimming in,
Or, if it had been a driven, needle pointed, cold cathartic rain
To make you want run along the beach
And yell before you took refuge in the sea,
Or even if it had been a torrent,
The kind you get on the Gulf,
That is like nothing so much as what happens
When the bottom finally bursts
Out of a big paper bag
Suspended full of water.

Fortuitous Poem by Robert Penn Warren

A month from now,
In early April,
At the time when far away,
Outside the city,
The water hyacinths would be covering every inch
Of bayou, lagoon, creek and backwater,
With a spiritual-mauve to obscene purple,
Violent, vulgar, fleshy, solid,
Throttling mass of bloom over the black water,
And the first heartbreaking, misty green,
Like girlhood dreams,
On the old cypresses would have settled down to be leaf,
And not a damn thing else,
And the arm-thick, mud-colored, slime-slick mocassins
Would heave out of the swamp
And try to cross the highway
And your front tire hitting one would give a slight bump
And make a sound like kerwhush
And a tinny thump when he slapped heavily up
Against the underside of the fender,
And the insects would come boiling out of the swamps
And day and night the whole air would vibrate with them
With a sound like an electric fan,
And, if it was night,
The owls back in the swamps would be whoo-ing and moaning
Like love and death and damnation,
Or one would sail out of pitch dark
Into the rays of your headlights
And plunge against the radiator
To explode like a ripped feather bolster,
And the fields would be deep
In that rank, hairy or slick, juicy, sticky grass
Which the cattle gorge on and never gets flesh over their ribs,
For that grass is in that soil
And no matter how far the roots could ever go,
If the roots were God knows how deep,
There would never be anything
But that black, grease-clotted soil
And no stone down there to put calcium in that grass.

Fortuitous Poem by Philip Roth

So that Mr. Scapello
Would not descend upon the boy
With his chalky fingers,
I walked up the three flights to Stack Three,
Past the receiving room
Where rheumy-eyed Jimmy Boylen,
Our fifty-one-year-old boy,
Unloaded books from the cart;
Past the reading room,
Where bums off Mulberry Street
Slept over Popular Mechanics;
Past the smoky corridor,
Where dump-browed students
From the law school relaxed,
Some smoking, some trying to rub
The colored dye from their tort texts
Off their finger tips;
And, finally, past the periodicals rooms,
Where a few ancient ladies,
Who had been motored down
From upper Montclair
Now huddled in their chairs,
Pince-nezing over yellowed, fraying society pages
In old, old copies of the Newark News.

Fortuitous Poem by Leszek Kolakowski

There came a point, however,
That philosophers had to confront
A simple painfully undeniable fact:
That of the questions that have sustained
European philosophy
For two and a half millenia,
Not a single one
Has been answered
To general satisfaction.

Fortuitous Poem by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

I have spent several years now
Teaching people to speak
And today I want to speak to you
About what is not said,
What is beyond the tale,
The account,
The reference.
…
Today I have come to keep quiet
And protect the silence
Of those who have kept it.
I shall not speak…

Fortuitous Poem by Wallace Stegner

If we could have foreseen the future during those good days in Madison where all this began, we might have had the nerve to venture into it.
I find myself wondering whatever happened to the people, friends and otherwise, with whom we started out.
Whatever happened to poor Mr. Hagler, who had only his salary? Whatever happened to Marvin and Wanda Ehrlich, and the Abbots, and the Stones.
How much would they understand, from their own experience, of what has happened to us?
I hope they have done more than survive.
I hope they have found ways to impose some sort of order of their chaos.
I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don’t want it ended, as Sid may right now be trying to persuade himself he does.
…
And now I see the figure, dusty-gold in moonlight, coming steadily up the road from the stable. It is blurred, its shadow encumbers its feet, but it comes without pause, is if timing itself to meet the family coming down from the hill.
“Sid?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.

AC Man

"So how much cooling were you getting last summer?"
The burly AC man asked.

"Not much. Thought it was my wife
Fooling with the thermostat."

"Wives. They aren't always the problem.
Your Freon was low."

Poor Folks

The poor are just like you,
Except that
On a good day,
They are poor but surviving,
Though still worrying,
More than you can imagine,
About the bad day
When they might not.

So they go out and buy
This very expensive insurance
Against that day:

Letting distant relative board in her house for free;
Slipping the teacher $20 not to report her kid helping skipping classes to deliver meals;
Working for a pimp whose father was her mother pimp;
Refusing jobs that don't come through the preacher who takes his cut but doesn't forget;

Properly examined,
Poverty is a success
In a struggle against destitution.

On their wedding night

On their wedding night
He said to her:
"I suppose that
Having lived all that time
together would make it hard
to make this a big occasion",
To which she replied:
"Suppose all you want
But I have work to do."
"Work to do?"
"A speech, to be precise"
"A speech?"
"Yes. I have prepared a speech
To a certain body part of yours;
You may wish to listen as well,
Learn a few things this way."
"I am all ears." "Whatever.
I need you to move this way.
Now. Here is the deal.
You have a choice, my friend:
On the one hand,
You can have a life of comfort
Satisfaction, happiness
With all your needs taken care
By a very attentive attendant
Who will be on duty
Most nights and weekend days;
On the other hand,
You will have a life
Of eternal boredom
In a glass jar full of formaldehyde
In a forensic storage facility
Visited by people who will
Point to you and say:
Remember that case?
The jury acquitted her
After she explained to them
What a great deal it had."

Two Demons

Maxwell's Demon
Is a clever little fellow
Who looks at molecules of air
Coming towards him
And, if they are in a hurry,
He opens a tiny trap door
To a container next door
Fooling thereby
The Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Poetry's Demon
is a strange little fellow
Who looks at particles of the world
Coming towards him,
And, if they are otherworldly,
Open is tiny trap door
Tp our amygdala
Fooling thereby
The First Law of Pointlessness.

Pluralitas Non Est Ponenda Sine Necessitate

Necessary pluralities:
Samsa's lazy father,
Karenin's pointy ears,
Oniegin's amber pipes,
Dr. Bovary's clubfoot case
Achilles' shaggy breast,
Mr. Bleaney's sixty-wat bulb,
Aren't subject to Occam's razor.

Parable of Poetry Translators

One day, people who read poetry are given the gift of languages, of being able to read poetry in all the different languages. As they gorge themselves on the poetic riches they discover, the market, meager as it was, for poetry translations collapses. Translators turn to substitute teaching, babysitting, and landscaping. Soon, however, the readers' happiness vanes. With each wonderful poem they discover in other languages, they start to feel the absence of such poem in their own language. The more the find, the more they feel a sense of loss, a sense of negative poetry, a zone of emptiness that is poised to engulf them. They beg translators to go back to work and start translating again. The translators agree but drive a hard bargain: the poetry readers can keep their languages but must agree to never offer any criticism when a translator gets the meter and the rhyme of the poem but changes "ocean" to "sea".

Poetry Workshop Brought To Standstill

As the first session was about to end
The elderly gentleman in the back,
Who hadn't spoken at all,
Blurted out suddenly:

"I wonder if anyone could help me;
I love my grandchildren
But I am now the same age
My father was when Alzheimer
Took his mind away
And I remember my kids
Refused to spent any time with him.
I am afraid that what happened to him
Is happening to me too
And I thought if I memorized some things
It would slow it down.
Even a little bit.
Can anyone here
Suggest a poem I could start with?"

In the silence that followed
All of us poetry lovers
Looked down on our papers;
Our teacher went up to the man
And gently took him outside.

Micro Philosophy

"I think, therefore I am"
Is a deep truth;

"If I thought about my wife
while married as much
as I think about her
in divorce, I would still
be married."
Is an equally deep truth.

Fortuitous Poem by Neal Stephenson

Let's set the Existence-of-God issues aside,
And just stipulate that in some way
Self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet
And immediately began trying to get rid of each other
Either by spamming their environment with rough copies of themselves,
Or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored.

Channel 101 at 4 AM

Channel 101 at 4 am
offers for sale,
a bit too frantically
for so early in the morning
or so late at night,
two fine products, viz.
Miracle Spring Water and
The Anointed Faith Tool,
that will, according to
specific testimonials of
satisfied customers
cure cervical cancers,
erase IRS debts,
arrange for divine money transfers,
get rid of your drug addiction and
get you a new house with no down payment.


Channels 700-733 at the same time,
offer HD versions of different tales
of explosions that kill the bad guys
but good guys fly through the air
and gracefully pick themselves up;
of bullets that drill only tiny holes
with blood that, oh so tastefully shows itself on the clothes
of vicious creatures that like scary music,
of zombies, vampires, and creatures from outer space.
or the attic, the basement, or the space behind the mirror

I switch back and forth and there is no doubt
people on Channel 101 look more believable:
their hair color is garish,
their teeth are bad,
their skin is pockmarked
their waistlines don't know what a gym is.
Their stories show some promise but could be improved,
a script doctor or two could do it easily,
maybe the creature from the lagoon could deposit the money,
and the rapid sharks could eat the IRS tax collectors,
and vampires could cure cancer by biting the zombies.

Maybe even do something about insomnia.

Happy People

Galina, the Russian barber in Vilnius,
Has finished telling me about the troubles
Of her son and her daughter-in-law.

She adds an afterthought:

But there are no happy people anywhere;
The only happy people left
Are alcoholics with friends
Who buy them drinks."

Different Dogs

Walking to school
With my son
And our black lab
We meet at the intersection
Our crossing guard
A large African-American woman
Who, if the light is red,
Will bend down to pet the dog
And the dog will jump
To lick her face
And she will repeat
What she often says
That the dogs in this neighberhood
Are all so friendly,
So different from the dogs
In her part of town.

One day my son will ask
Why the dogs are different
And I still don't know how
I will answer him.

Dear Ms. K.

Browsing through
A poetry anthology
I came across a bio note
About you.

It said you came
From Kishiniev
And wrote poetry
In Russian and English.

Which is so weird
Because I love
Russian and English poetry
And used to travel to Kishiniev.

Once I even spent a night there
Boozing with a Russian poet
Whose poems were praised
By Brodsky himself.

Two pretty girls
Joined us that night
They both went with him
When they closed the restaurant.

I googled you
And you look very pretty;
Why didn't we meet
When I was in Kishiniev?

It also said that you
Divorced your husband
For not appreciating
Poetry enough.

Yesss! I thought,
It is you and me
Defending Pushkin and Auden
Against philistines like him.

But then it mentioned
The name of the poet
Your tiff was about--
And I have never heard of him.

So now I feel
Kind of small;
It might be better
If this letter remained unsent.

Culture Shift

'Look into your mirror
And repeat after us
"This is who I am today
This is not who I will be tomorrow"'

Management consultants
Had gathered all employees
In the main meeting hall
Charged with bringing about
An enterprise-wide culture shift.

Small mirrors had been distributed to all employees
Who now repeated the consultants' words monotonously
Thinking to themselves, perhaps, this isn't as bad as layoffs.

Amount of Decency

Old-time China missionaries
Recount a tale of an outbreak
Of violent anti-foreigner riots
When merchants and teachers
Were imprisoned and
Placed singly in cells with
Local petty criminals;
They learned to keep in touch
By tapping on the walls
Passing messages from cell to cell
In English, German or French.

The chain would be broken
If any one of them was
Taken out and shot;
The chain would be restored
When the Chinese prisoners
Would listen to the sounds
Of tapping on one side of their cell
And repeat it on the opposite wall.

They knew nothing
Of what the messages meant;
They knew how to increase
The amount of decency in the world.

Union of Unpublished Poets

We,
The many,
The deserving,

But ignored,
Unappreciated,
Lacking a topic,
Subject to blocks,
Fearful of rejection,
Shy of a blank page,
Bereaved seeking solace,
Born in wrong time and place,
Enthusiasts of social progress,
Out of tune with the language,
Coming to terms with our divorce,
Never more than honorably mentioned,
Disgusted with the crap that's published,
Saddled with families needing a breadwinner,

Do hereby
Demand that Congress
Have our poems published
As a matter of congressional earmarks.

In Praise of Geometry

The richest kid in the class--
His Levi's, authentic to the little
Piece of cloth sawed to the back pocket,
An object of intense envy
To all the boys who just knew
That girls would follow nothing else--
That kid got up and went to the blackboard
And with one, well-placed, chalk line
Showed beyond any doubt
That every triangle's interior angles
Sum up to 180 degrees.

It is quite possible
That everything I remember
About the kid, the blue jeans and the girls
Wasn't so. But the proof is still valid.

High School Danse

High school dance from long ago
Remembered in every detail;
At the far end of the school gym,
A band, four boys, just like us,
Except tonight, oh no, tonight
They belong to an altogether superior race.

At the near end, our teachers,
Dressed up and looking out of place
Policing the length of girls' skirts
And trying to keep their breasts
(Such as they were) from any contact
While slow dancing with the boys


The long walls were for wallflowers,
Each sex buttressing its own,
Eyeing the other side furtively
While pretending to watching the band,
Between them a vast space
Sparsely populated with dancing couples.

Every now and then, a boy
Would peel himself off his wall
And walk across that length
That seemed to expand to six soccer fields
As he tried to cross it; his object dimly perceived
As he was looking at the floor in front of his feet.

And he just knew that everything about him
Was so visible to every girl that would soon start
Pretending she was too tired to dance:
His pimples, his glasses, his sweaty hands,
His unfashionable shoes, and his pants
That never saw the inside of a foreign currency store.

"At least being a lousy dancer won't matter much now."
He would think to himself walking back across the vast space.

Homage To Non-Nabokovian Translators

--"What are you writing, Little Peter?"
--"An opera, Vassily Ivanych."
--"About me?"
--"When the plenipotentiary will call you in, you will find out,"

Is an extremely funny joke. In the original.

We, Soviet Writers

We, Soviet Writers,
Wholeheartedly salute
The faithful guardian of the Revolution--
The Chief Directorate of Political Administration--
And call on the Government to award the OGPU
The Order of Lenin.

We shall devote our creativity
To the service of the proletarian revolution!

We shall fight ceaselessly
Against the agents of the bourgeoisie!

On the literary and art front,
We shall rip off the masks of class enemies!

Death to counterrevolutionaries and wreckers

(The Literary Gazette, 11/20/1930)

Troubled In Warsaw

Confidential help lines
You can call in Warsaw
(from Gazeta Wyborcza,
Poland's main daily):

AIDS;
Drug addiction;
Depression;
Homelessness;
Child abuse;
Family violence;
Alcoholism;
Old age;
Dawn's syndrome;
Physical handicaps;
Pregnancy;
Eating disorders;
Religious sects;
Trafficked women;
Parkinson's;
Alzheimer's;
Smoking;
STDs;

and the last entry reads:

Jewish--For people who discover their ancestry and are having adjustment problems.

Vladimir Putin and Philip Larkin

Vladimir V. Putin,
Whose grandfather cooked for Lenin
Is reading Philip Larkin's
"Homage to a Government",
Sent to him by his London embassy.

Putin's English isn't too good
But Larkin's unadorned prose
Gives him few problems.
He finishes, nods to himself
And says to his underlings
Who stand at attention
Around his desk:

"Now this is exactly
What I've been saying all along;
The only thing I don't understand
I why they call me a dictator
Who's dragging Russia
Into the Middle Ages
And they call him
England's best-love poet".

His underlings wonder
Who this Larkin guy is anyway.

Two Russian Women

The first one,
I know from the painting--
"Young Girl with Peaches".
The painter is Valentin Serov,
The year is 1887,
The girl name is Vera,
(Which means "faith").
In a modest sunroom
Of a Russian country house,
The girl is sitting at a table
With four peaches in front of her;
Light of quiet hope
Permeates the room.

The second woman
Makes a brief appearance
Fifty years later
In Akhmatova's "Requiem".
After Kirov's murder,
Thousands upon thousands
Were placed under arrest.
Long lines of silent women
Queued at Leningrad's prisons' gates
Trying to find out
The fate of their menfolk.
Standing in line,
Akhmatova saw an old woman howling.
Perhaps her name was Vera.

Two Mathematicians

In 1953, two mathematicians met
In a restricted security area
Of the Walter Reed Army Hospital;
One was dying of bone cancer,
The other came to cheer him up.

They were famous
Though not for their mathematics,
Beautiful as it was;
The security was there because
One invented the computer
And the other the nuclear bomb.

They came from provincial cities
Of the Austro-Hungarian Empire;
Their math had saved them
From what happened to their families.

To distract his friend from pain
The visitor picked up a book
Lying on the night table
And read in the original Greek,
They both remembered from their youth,
The Melian dialogue--a tale
Of the strong and the weak
And their confrontation
Twenty three hundred years ago.

You can, if you wish, connect the dots
Between the dialogue and the bomb;
I, for one, wish that my high school
Left me something, anything,
To comfort a dying friend with.

Returning from USSR

Some came back with reports
Of dirt, stink, and poverty.

I gave them to read "A Room and a Half"--
About a poet's one room Leningrad apartment
Partitioned by a wall of books.

Others came back envious
Of the deep souls of the Slavic people.

I gave them to read "Shock Therapy"--
A medical miracle story of
Making corpses work in Kolyma.

Rubber Band

The boys' name was Kuhl,
The tallest and smartest kid
In Mrs. Kowalczykowa's class,
Grade School No. 23 in Warsaw.

He showed me once
A rubber band with names
Of all the cool kids in the class.
Mine wasn't among them.

Everyone knew his father was a big shot--
In charge of all the state farms;
Later we learned it was a demotion
From Deputy Minister of State Security.

I met him, in my mind, several times
Somewhere on a Warsaw street;
He'd recall me with difficulty
And would have no memory of the rubber band.

I would want to know
What happened when he found out
What his father's job was
In the Ministry of State Security

He would say: I asked no questions
He was a wonderful father though I know
There were plenty of wonderful fathers
Rotting in prisons he had supervised.

And then he would say: let me ask you
The same question and the conversation
Still, in my mind, would fizzle out.

Samuel S.

Samuel S.,
Lodz Ghetto survivor,
Is prepared for my visit--
Rows of photographs
Are spread out on his coffee table.

Him, he says, his name is Stark
Was an associate professor,
A dogmatic communist before the war,
Became a devout Catholic after the war,
A homosexual. friend of the family,
Never believed in God.

This one's name is Fishman,
Lost his whole family,
Was sick in hospital in Israel
A friend came to visit him,
Looking for him,
Spelled his name in Hebrew,
They called, "Where is Pishman?"
Everyone was laughing,
In Hebrew, "p" and "f" are the same.

Little Iosif

His ambitious mother
Sent Iosif to an English language school;
Rich kids found
His accent hilarious.

He begun to loath
His mother,
The other kids,
The English language,
His countrymen in general
And everyone else.

He loved computers
And dreamt of taking over the world.

When he dropped out of the school,
He changed his name to Silikonov.

His troubles with police started early.

Kohen

With his Alzheimer progressing
Father tells me
That he is a Kohen
And that so am I
And that we had rights and privileges
During synagogue services.

Privileges? What privileges?
I think to myself,
You haven't been near a synagogue
Since you were a child,
Since before your father,
Gassed on the Serbian front,
Returned home to die
Of influenza in 1918;
Your mother married a man
Who wanted you out of his house
And you ended in an orphanage
From where you emerged
A carpenter and communist
And no longer a Jew,
All of which God
Must have approved of
Since it save you your life
In what happened later.

I don't say anything;
What would be the point?
Except perhaps to note
For the benefit of above mentioned God
That according to some cosmologists
All possible worlds exist out there
Which makes it possible
That somewhere
A frail but otherwise healthy old man,
Who's had a boring life
Avoids cemeteries,
Doesn't touch the dead and
Looks forward to being asked
To recite the Priestly Blessing.

Barren Hill

The TV documentary
Lingers on a barren hill
That changed hands many times
During the Spanish Civil War
With great many casualties
On both sides

When you go back
To the beginning
Of what had caused this bloodbath
In villages and towns across Spain
You will find no more
Than a marital tiff.

Medical History

Life insurance is serious business--
The nurse sent by the broker
Was suitably solemn.

My medical history was boring--
My parents' equally so;
As for the extended family, I lied.

I said they'd died of old age--
The truth wouldn't fit
On an insurance form.

Born in Middle of Awful Century

I was born in the middle of an awful century
To cripples jumping on their amputated limbs
To make the kids and themselves believe
That things were normal.

The lie was seen through eventually
But it served its purpose to teach us
The virtue of not asking questions

Missing Poets' Unnatural Biographies

Killed on 'Bloody Thursday' (April 4) on the way to rail cars destined for Belzec;

Died in Auschwitz; some works saved in Ringelblum's archive;

Arrested in 1952, died in the GULAG;

Deported from the Lodz Ghetto, died in Auschitwz;

Arrested in 1949, died in 1952;

Died in the Ghetto either in 1942 or 1943;

Arrested in 1949, shot August 12, 1952;

Deported to the GULAG in 1937, died in 1940;

Killed in Krzemieniec in the spring of 1942;

Deported from the Warsaw Ghetto, died in the Poniatowa camp;

Killed in the 1937 purge;

Killed in an Aktion in Lwow with her husband, small son and old mother;

On the way to a gas chamber with other Belgian Jews, threw a brick at an SS guard and was shot on the spot;

After the children in his orphanage were murdered, attempted to hide with a peasant family but was tracked down and shot;

Murdered by the Nazis in Lwow;

After the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, sentenced to death based on false testimony;

Died in the Warsaw Ghetto; date unknown;

Arrested in Bialystok by the Nazis and taken in an unknown direction;

...Moved to Otwock where he was murdered in 1942;

Killed in Lachowicze in 1941;

Murdered by the Nazis in Pomerania;

Murdered by the Nazis in Ponary;

Died in his native town in a Nazi pogrom with five brothers and sisters.




(From an anthology of Yiddish poetry)

Family Tree From Provincial Poland

Your father is not your father;
Half of your family is not your family.

Do you want to hear more?

During the War, your father was a POW,
Your mother hid a Jew--a lawyer from Lomza.
He stayed a year and had to leave
When neighbors started asking questions.

You are his son.

When your father came back from the POW camp,
He was told you were your aunt's illegitimate son
Your mother took in to protect her sister from shame.

So now you know why your father treated you the way he did.

The new farmhouse built after the War--
And the orchards--was paid from the money
Your Jewish father had left for you.

If you go back to claim it,
Your brothers will kill you.

Eine Kleine Dick Madam

"Eine kleine Dick Madam
Fuhr mal mit der Eisenbahn;
Dick Madam, die lachte
Eisenbahn, die krachte
Eins, zwei, drei,
Und du bist frei!"

The words of a German nursery rhyme
Mother taught me when I was little.

Which was a strange thing to do
Given the family's history and its silences.

About the missing extended family
Replaced by fake aunts and uncles;

About staying home when other kids
Went matter-of-factly to religion classes;

About cases of oranges that arrived in winter
And were carefully hidden from neighbors;

About letters in strange script
Written late at night...

...

Perhaps Mother couldn't help herself
And smuggled a nursery rhyme
From my Grandmother who otherwise didn't exist.

Fortuitous Poem by Rudi Blesh

The voice sings and then--
On fateful descending notes--
Echoes its own phrases
Or imitates the wind,
mournfully and far away,
In huh-uh-ummm,
Subsiding like a moan
On the same ominous,
Downward cadence.
The hign, sighing guitar notes
Vanish suddenly into silence
As if swept away
By cold autumn wind.
Plangent, iron chords
Intermittently walk,
Like heavy footsteps
On the same descending minor series.
The images--
The wonderer's voice and its echoes,
The mocking wind running
Through the guitar strings
And the implacable, slow, pursuing footsteps--
Are full of evil,
Surcharged with the terror of one alone
Among the moving, unseen shapes of the night.
Wildly and terribly,
The notes paint
A dark wasteland,
Starless,
Ululant with bitter wind,
Swept by the chill rain.
Over the hilltop
Trudges a lonely,
Ragged,
Bedeviled figure,
Bent to the wind,
With his easy rider
Held by one arm
As it swings from its cord
Around his neck.

(On Robert Johnson singing his "Hellhound on My Trail")

In Memoriam of Felix Weinglass

Felix Weinglass
Was a peasant
From Tarnopol province
Of pre-war Poland
And a self-educated
Talmudic scholar;
He wrote in Polish
A book of 113 pages called
"The Spirit of Talmud--
A Small Collection of Talmudic Citations
From All Walks of Life".

The book was published in 1939
When the author was 76.
Nothing is known about his fate;
A single copy of his book survived.

Conversation with Friend

"Don't be daft",
She answers,
To my question if
She had ever thought
That she would live
In a democratic country.

"The wild optimists among us
Hoped for a slightly larger
Margin of freedom:
A few books published
From the prohibited index,
Being able to travel,
Perhaps as far as Yugoslavia,
Having an argument with your friends
Without checking for bugs in the walls.
Seems laughable now."

"Was it then?"

"No."

"So what was it about?

"I did what I did
Because it was a decent thing to do,
Even if it accomplished nothing,
Except it made it perhaps easier,
For other to do decent things.
Perhaps not much
But for me it was plenty.
That's why I kept quiet
When they were looking
For posts to fill after the changes."

She

Art of Socialist Shopping

Where I grew up,
You entered the store softly;
You ignored the empty shelves
And you waited politely
For the sales ladies to finish chatting.
You didn't approach them closely
But you tried to establish eye contact
And when you did, you apologised
For disturbing them. Then it was time
To let them know what you were after
Which you did using carefully chosen words:
"Perhaps, you might have some..."
That "perhaps" was very important--
It signalled that you recognised that
Not having any of whatever you were after
Was the expected norm, and that if, on the contrary,
They did have some of it somewhere,
Under the counter or in the storage area,
You were prepared to properly appreciate
Your good fortune.

If the gods of socialist commerce
Were kind, one of the sales ladies
Would tear a corner piece
From a sheet of brown packing paper,
Roll it into a cone
And pour into it your bounty
Of sugar, or wheat, or rice,
And you would hold that cone
At the sharp end, to make sure
It wouldn't unroll as you walked home
Very happy.

Best Years of His Life

You know, what hurts,
He said to his son,
Is how much I helped him out
When he came new to be our boss;
So many were against him
And I worked so hard to turn them around.
But then when I wanted to go on my own,
I had every right, you know,
He turned against me,
Just like that. It hurts.

--Gee, Dad,
My son said,
It sounds like you
Gave him the best years of your life;
Maybe you want to call Mom
To tell her that now you know
How she felt when you dumped her.

They Had a Wonderful Marriage

They had a wonderful marriage.

But then he
Found on-line
A book called
"How My Husband's Affair
Became the Best Thing
That Ever Happened to Me".
He thought it was a funny title
So he gave a book to his wife
As a joke.
It wasn't funny, she said.
Indeed was not, he found out.
She was having an affair
And didn't feel it should be
The best thing that ever happened
To her husband.

So she left him.

Telemachus

Telemachus,
Searching for his father,
Meets Helen who
Twenty years after the abduction,
Has lost none of her beauty.

She likes the budding warrior;
He feels uneasy under her gaze.

She turns to Menelaus and says:
"Just remember,
None of it would have happened
If you only me enough."

Stepmother

Exhausted and silent,
Driving back
From the nursing home,
We arrive
At her appartment
Which used to be ours.

She makes tea,
She sits down,
She talks about the time
When she took my father dancing
And she did such an excellent job
Leading him around the dance floor
That a stranger came up to their table
Knelt down, and begged my father
For a permission to dance with her.
"Your father," she tells me,
"Never was happier, never was happier."

I want to leave but don't
It is only an old lonely woman
Recollecting her happiness--
An existential moment,
Dear to poets and those
Who fear their own old age.

She Was Short, Plump, and Cheerful

She was short, plump and cheerful,
Her large bosom stuck in my boy's memory,
She was one from a line of peasant women
Who got a Warsaw residence permit
By working as a domestic for us.

After she has left,
Snippets of my parents' conversation
Hinted, with regrets, that there was
Someone in her native village
Who wanted to marry her.

She reappeared later
Carrying a swaddled baby
Asking my mother's help
Finding another position
(Hers having been filled).

Without being asked
And without hushing her voice
She said to everyone around:
"The man was no good
But I got a little girl out of it".

I was shocked and indignant--
I knew from novels
How women were supposed
To hide their shame instead
Of flaunting it with pride.

Now I imagine her
Helping with her grandchildren
With all the cheerfulness
She had
Taking care of me.

She Says "Hello" to His Would-be Lovers

Having made love to him,
She reaches for a marker and says:
"I'm an open-minded girl
And don't mind if you have
Affairs with other women,
Provided they keep off
My favorite parts of you
Which I will now mark
Off limits for them.
Right here, the most important part,
You shouldn't be surprised,
You know my strong feelings about it;
Then your belly, I will mark if off too
Since I like to use it as a pillow;
Your torso, a playground
For my finger nails, must, as such
Be stricly off limits as well;
Now your back, I don't mean
To be greedy but restrict it I must:
When I take my little bites here,
You get these cute white marks
That then turn such a lovely red;
As for further up, I will just run
My marker around your neck--
Your face is mine to gaze at
When I can't sleep at night;
Your hair, I am afraid I need
To hold on to when you try
This disappearing trick in my cleavage;
We are left with the extremities--
Your arms, I am sorry, but
I can't let go for sentimental reasons
Having to do with our first date;
Which leaves your legs:
Here, I insist on keeping them
On account of what happened
When I saw them first,
Sticking ouf of your tent
And I caught myself thinking
That the rest of you was
As lovely as those legs;
And now I know
What you are thinking:
That I am not fair
And that I am not leaving you enough
To have an affair with,
But that is not totally true:
Right here: The top of your head,
Your bold spot. I will circle it.
Your lovers can have it.
I will even write on it,
'Hello'"

Snowflakes

Before getting ready for bed
You go out to check
The snowfall's accumulation:
Should you start shoveling now
Or get up earlier than usual.
You look at your car's vanished bumper
And at the cold halo of the streetlight
Where swirling snowflakes
Make their brief appearance.

Those snowflakes transport you
Fifty years back to another snowfall,
In the Tatra mountains where you parents
Sent you for "fresh air"; your parent's friends
Had a housekeeper who came from a small village
In these parts, which is why you were here
Breathing fresh air with the housekeeper,
And the friends' daughter, a girl your own age
Which was seven or eight, perhaps.

During the day you played with her in wet snow
At night, the housekeeper would visit
Her friends and relatives in the village.
She'd come home drunk, collapse in her bed and snore.
The snoring was the girl's signal
To get our of her bed leaving her nightgown behind
Come under you covers and invite you to do "things" to her.

You were too scared to move or say anything
Except to point to the window over the bed
To try to interest her into checking
Whether she could see any snowflakes that would
Promise fresh snow for the next day.

The girl has now been dead for many years,
Died young of breast cancer in New York City,
I still can't force myself to write her name.

Marriage After the Kids Are Gone

In Valby,
Copenhagen's unglamorous quarter,
Red-brick apartment buidings
Covered in graffiti,
In Hotel Rossini,
Where the locals stay
Avoiding tourist traps downtown,
At breakfast time, an elderly couple
Stands at the restaurant's entrance
Surveying the buffet table.

Without a word, the separate;
She approaches one end of the table
With cheeses and butter
He, at the other end,
Starts toasting slices of white bread.

Sitting down at their table,
They exchange cheese for toast
Still without a word.

With the kids gone,
That's what marriage is:
Knowing exactly the trade--
What cheeses and how dark the toast.

Irish Rabbi

Looking at our six year old son
Lost in a book about baseball,
His finger playing with
A ring of his strawberry blond hair,
His body swaying rhytmically,
My half-Irish wife says:
You know how you joke
About how you can't
Have a drink in a Jewish pub,
Well, at least you have
A little Irish rabbi at home.

Lenif, II

Two years after its discovery
Lenif is fighting a war
With its neighbors: Benif and Genif.

Benif expected
Lenif troops to come
From the South and North
But they came from the East and West.

The trap didn't work out,
Thought the troops were well-armed;
They had swords but no shields
Because they had no coat-of-arms.

They had no coat-of-arms
Because they couldn't agree on what it was
The fight over it was so bad
That there was a civil war about it.

Lenif, I

The country of Lenif
Was discovered
By my son, age four.

It was located
In Western Siberia;
Lots of empy land there.

Lenif was landlocked
Unless it bordered
A warm sea to the south.

Its neighbor was called Benif,
Mostly friendly,
With an occasional war.

The spoke opposites in Lenif
But they also had
Their own words:

"Mom" was "Balko",
"Dad" was "Lalko",
"Hello" was "Lazha",
"Good-by" was "Vashakoo".

A detailed map of Lenif,
Of which many were made,
Is still available on request.

Mashed Potatoes and Sourmilk

Sister had the chore
Of peeling the potatoes
When she got home from school
And leaving them
Covered with water
In a small pot
Ready for when
Father came home
And lit the stove.

Mash potatoes and sourmilk:
The potatoes were hot,
And sourmilk cold,
And there were two ways to eat it:
The volcano way and
The winter day.

The volcano way
You sculpted a volcano
Out of the mashed potatoes
And poured the sourmilk
Into the crater and the stuff
That overflew on the slopes
You called the lava.

The winter way
You flattened the mashed potatoes
On your plate and then made roads
By dragging a fork across,
And then you poured the sourmilk
And watched it fill the roads
While saying "Winter is coming"
And pretending that you were freezing.

Look at My Sister, My Stepmother Said

Look at my sister,
My stepmother said,
She's just burried her husband
And then her father-in-law.

The father-in-law was ninety-five,
You can't blame him for dying,
His son wasn't sixty yet,
Should have lived longer.

And yet, perhaps it's better,
The son dying before the father,
If the son had lived, he'd have asked
Why all the money went to his brothers.

Questions

In his nursing home,
Father kept on asking
The same questions:

How is your son growing up?
Is everything ok with your job?
Is the roof of your house leaking?

I would answer as usual:

Your grandson is a lawyer now and has finished growing;
I am retired and collect a pension just like you;
The roof is fine and should be ok for another twenty years.

Half an hour later
Father asks the same questions
And I repeat my answers.

Then words left him,
First nouns, followed by
Verbs and adjectives.
He still tried to ask
The same questions
With what was left to him:
Personal pronouns.

Sleep Therapy

In the middle of the night,

I move in search of sleep

From the couch to the guest bedroom

From the TV to the IPhone.

After a while, my dog

Leaves her cushion by my bed

And follows me around

Looking worried.

To her, the giver of food and affection

Seems flummoxed by something

As simple as sleep

Which is not a good sign

She shows me

There isn't much to it:

You find something soft on the floor

Turn around twice, plop down, and sigh.

Death

When Mother got very sick
Father gifted me ignorance;
Sister went to Warsaw to say good0by,
Mother tried to kick her out.

She feared people
Would steal her husband;
When he went grocery shopping,
She followed him in her nightgown.

He worried about the winter
In the winter, death came.

The men from the funeral home were drunk
Father drove behind their truck
To make sure they wouldn't loose the coffin
Skidding around icy corners.

He carried everywhere an old shopping bag
With a yellow catalog of German tools;
In between its pages,he kept all the papers
That made the death official.

I thought that, for everything he had gone through
In his life, he at least deserved a decent briefcase.

At the funeral, my sister and I intruded
When the last Jews of Warsaw
Buried of of their own.

It has been thirty years now,
I hardly remember her endearments for him;
His, I hear every time I visit,
Spoken to my stepmother.

Dog Shrink

The dog shrink insisted
On bringing the offending animal with us.

In her office,
She said she hoped
We wouldn't mind
That she would be wearing a ski mask--
Apparently, she was allergic to dogs.

The dog growled at her,
I felt like growling too.

What she told us we already knew:

The dog was old,
The dog had bossed the household her whole life.
The dog won't be able to change now just because there was a new baby around.

We had to choose.

Years later,
That baby younger sister
Told us we should have kept the dog.

My Father

I haven't ever been hungry
As he was in 1929-33.

I haven't ever been cold
As he was in 1941-43.

I haven't ever been shot at
As he was in 1944-45.

I haven't ever been in love
As he was in 1933-83.

Intruder

In a rented beach house,
A lonely bookcase,
With a dusty offering
On crumbly yellow paper:

Reader Digests,
Romances, detective stories,
And 10,000 Jokes for Every Occasion,
Probably acquired at a garage sale.

One newish hardback stands out
In maroon covers, uncomfortably
Rubbing shoulders with her neighbors--
Milosz's "A Treatise on Poetry".

Inconceivable that it was acquired
The complement the collection;
Probably, was left behind by a guest
And missed greatly thereafter.

Taking it wouldn't be theft;
Rather an act of kindness,
Letting her neighbors,
Close their ranks against the intruder.

Bakelite Phone

The black bakelite phone
With a sluggish rotary dial,
Installed in our Warsaw apartment
Made us part of the elite;
Phone lines were scared but
Farther, a retired army officer,
Was entitled to one.

He looked with suspicion
At any use of the phone
That wasn't for emergencies;
He had it placed in the hall,
Making us stand while calling,
To keep the calls short.

My friends dreaded calling me
And getting him on the phone--
He had a habit of
Putting the receiver down
Once he thought he'd heard enough.

One day I saw him
Talking on a phone
While combing his hair
In front of the hall mirror--
He was smiling and I knew
He was talking to a woman
Who wasn't my mother.

Caught in Bed with Her Own Husband

The first time,
They weren't even married yet
And her college roommate walked in on them;
She wanted to hide her face under the blanket for ever,
Having told her roommate quite a few times
That she could do better then the ackward guy
She had nicknamed "Dopey" and was having sex with at the very moment

The second time,
They already had jobs, kids and a house,
And at night, once the kids were down, would collapse senseless,
So they would leave work and meet for lunch and sex in the empty house
And her mother walked in on them
Looking for shears--she was in the neighborhood
And the rosebush she had planted needed to be pruned.

The third time,
He's just had a heart attack;
And feared that the ICU tubes were sucking his life away
and asked her to hold him back;
She lied down and put her arms around him
And a nurse walked in on them and said:
"My, someone must be feeling better now."

Elan Vital

A high school friend,
At a reunion 30 years later,
Brushed aside
His heart condition
And advanced alcoholism
And said with defiance:

"You know,
If I stop taking
My heart medication
And limit liquids
For a day or two
I can still get an erection.

Bucarest, After 17 Years

With some greenery,
Billbords for cell phones and jeans,
And a clear spring day,

The monstrous quarter--
Blocks of flats for Securitate officials
Sourounding the palace on the hill for the Leader--
That Causescu had only half-finished
Before their bullet finished him off,

Doesn't look so bad.

A cause for optimism or pessimism?

438-01

The New Millenium
Finds you in Ashgabat,
And you discover that
The Turkmenbashi--
The Leader of the Turkmen People--
Loves his country.

Which he should
Owing most of it.

To visit, oh say,
The Turkmenbashi Textile Mills,
In Turkmenbashi City,
You get there
On the Turkmenbashi Highway;
And you stay there
At the Turkmenbashi Hotel.

But then a big surprise:
The cell phone company
Is named with the most exuberant eloquence:

"438-01"

What He Didn't Ask Nigerian Writer

He went to a book reading
By a Nigerian writer
With his daughter
Who studies Africa.

Though he didn't know her books
He liked the fragments she read
But questions from the floor
Embarassed him--people
Grabbing the mike to prattle
About their feelings when they
Read the books. Who cares,
He wanted to say but instead,
To speed up the time.
He amused himself imaging reaching
For the mike for himself. And saying:

"You know, the stuff you write about,
The heat, dust, poverty, violance,
I don't recognize any of it.
Why should I, I admit,
I have never been near to Nigeria in my life.
But I do have a personal connection
To your country. Very personal, in fact.
When I was in the fourth grade,
P.S. No. 3, Warsaw, Poland,
Neighbors who lived the same floor as us
Had just returned from a two year stint in Nigeria
Where they were building a road
Or a steel mill perhaps, something socialist
In any case. And they returned rich.
And not just rich--having more stuff'
Than others--but real rich--
Having stuff nobody else had.

The neighbor's son, a boy my age,
Had been my best friend before they left;
Was my friend no longer;
Now he walked around the courtyard
Of our apartment building
In flip-flops, unknown until then,
Whose clap-clap sound
Was a proof to all of us
Of Nigeria's immense riches."

He smiled to himself
Imagining how mortified
His daughter would be
If he did reach for the mike.

Seven Stages of Seduction

I. While in grade school, I am sent to a private tutor, which my parents could hardly afford, where I encouter verbs that don't conjugate and nouns that have no cases--English sounds like baby talk.

II. I watch "Rio Bravo" eight time with my sister (who pines for Ricky Nelson) and I can follow John Wayne's words to the villain: "Slowly. And if I say "Stop", stop, or I will stop you).

III. I learn by heart the lyrics to the Beatles's "Hard Days Night"--the most memorable achievement of my high school education.

IV. At a train terminal in Vienna, I approach a woman selling snacks and say: "Coca-Cola, please" and she actually hands me a bottle of brown liquid.

V. I try to read my first book--The Cuban Missle Crisis"--with two handsome brothers on the cover and a distant memory of people in Warsaw lining up to buy flour and sugar fearing another war.

VI. I finish my first novel--"The Godfather"--a present from my American girlfriend to cheer me up when I am sick with hepatitis; I learn useful phrases like "go to the mattresses" and "to make one's bones".

VII. I encounter English poetry--a phrase in "Nostromo": "the common decencies of the civilized society" and I am stopped short and forced to reread it aloud several times, each time awed by this cascade of c's and s's. I try to tell people around me about my discovery and they look at me with pity. They don't know I am not crazy, merely seduced.

Adult Education

Out of a middle-age effort
To appease my childhood ghosts,
I took an adult education class in Yiddish.

There were two of us in the class
Plus elderly Mr. W., the teacher.
By the third week,
When we had learned our alef-beis
And how to say our names,
Mr. W. announced that it was time
For us to experience the beauty
Of the language he was teaching;
Then he started to read to the class
His poetry in Yiddish.
He was a prolific poet
Who didn't mind
Having no response
To his poems
From his puzzled students.

At the end of the class
He told us that he hoped
We wouldn't cancel because
His meagre fee kept him from starving.

Childhood ghosts
Don't appease lightly.

God Named "Universe"

"Lucyna Lobod,
From Wroclaw
(Southwest Poland),
Went to the Other Side
And came back.

She reported that
She had met there
Various Gods

One of them,
Named "Universe"--
In charge of our planet--
Was worried about us.

Universe told Ms. Lobod that
A comet was on its way
and would wipe us out
Unless we found
A pharaoh's mummy
And placed it in a sarcaphagus
In Cheop's Pyramid."

I listen attentively
To my stepmother's chatter
To keep her from changing the subject
To my father's "acting out" at night
When he doesn't know who and where he is
And gets lots on the way to the bathroom.

Fortuitous Poem by Ernest Hemingway

Nick stood on the log, holding his rod, the landing net hanging heavy,
Then stepped into the water and splashed ashore.
He climbed the bank and cut up into the woods, towards the high ground.
He was going back to camp.
He looked back.
The river just showed through the trees.
There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.

Fortuitous Poem by Martin Rees

If one had to summerize,
In just one sentence,
What's been happening since the Big Bang,
The best answer
Might be to take a deep breath and say:
Ever since the beginning,
Gravity has been molding cosmic structures,
And enhancing temperature constrasts,
A prerequisite for the emergence of complexity,
That lies around us ten billion years later,
And of which we are part.