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.