Starting Again
old woman wants a glass of ginger ale
she turns to see the drums invert the rhythm
she starts again & starts anew
she sings above scarred birds
she calls for luck
to wind & stone
to start with no one's home
a mardi gras beat
puts her to sleep
A friend was praising double entendres in songs and shaking his head over how explicit much of today's music is. No nuance.
I immediately thought of the dirtiest song I've ever heard: "Shave 'em Dry II" by Lucille Bogan aka Bessie Jackson, a song from the mid 1930s. The title alludes to rough sex & the rest, include her lewd cackle, leaves nothing to the imagination. It's pretty funny as well.
Ma Rainey either wrote the original or adapted it & for her "dry" meant without a man.
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
~ Gustave Flaubert
I feel reassured, confirmed, bolstered, a kindly eye has looked upon us all.
I had a conversation with a young man I know but hadn't spoken with in a long time. We got onto a subject that was of professional interest to me for many years; in other words, a subject I was paid to know about. It didn't stop him from correcting me with ludicrous misinformation. Was that what made it feel like he was acting in a misogynist manner? Did he assume he knew more than me because I'm a female? Or was there some other reason that stopped this high school dropout from being willing to be informed where he was incorrect? Pure (male) ego? Not knowing enough to know how to think through his claims? I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt but he made it tough.
Happy Constitution Day, Norway! Happy National Day!
When I was out with my Norwegian teacher last week, she saw a poster for an event that would be taking place on May 18. Oh look! she said. That's the day after May 17. We both cracked up, knowing that meant something to us but only a "duh" to most people.
Come celebrate at the Norwegian Seamen's Church or at Amundsen's, the Norwegian store on Mott Street! Theoretically I'm going to both but I'm søvnig og søvnløs ~ sleepy and sleepless, so who knows.
The poem of the week is the Yankees game. Or any game. On any day.
5-0 Yankees over the Twins in the 8th.
BASEBALL.
The pigeons roosted right outside my office & had a baby on February 15. I saw PiJean from the moment of birth as a tiny yellow speck to his murder (yes) 2 months later. One parent, with a new partner (the first was another victim) built a nest in the same spot shortly after. Two eggs! I came back an hour later to find both eggs splatted on the ground. Why? Who would do such a cruel, unnecessary thing? The new super? I put up a sign asking for the pigeons to be left to roost in peace. I put a few twigs on the ledge to encourage them to build a new nest. They didn't, but hung around for a while. A week ago, the original parent-pigeon stood right on my doorstep & talked at length, looking right at me the whole time. It sounds crazy but I had no doubt that she was telling me something. And then I never saw them again, so I'm convinced she was saying they were lighting out for a safer place. Maybe there was a thank you for feeding them & always talking in a friendly way. I am heart-broken. It's too quiet down here now & though I look for them on the block, they're gone gone gone.
Lucky would spend all year combing through catalogues to find us presents, always excellent & personal, like a little jewelry box. He made borscht for Thanksgiving. He turned my cat Psycho, who had licked off all her fur, into fluffy calm Nikki. He eventually had an aide who, by the time she had heaved herself up to his top-floor apartment, refused to do any chores or shopping. He was fine with that. He cheated at cribbiage & smirked when he beat me. He died on January 1, 1989, & the building was never the same.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
~ Arthur C. Clarke
Do dismissiveness, contempt, and laughing-at count as destroying?
In this fraught & frightening time, it felt important to be at the bat mitzvah of a young person working out her Jewish identity. The solidarity and kindness in the assembled family & friends was reassuring and soothing. We are having conversations we never imagined. Some non-Jews can imagine what we're feeling. Best of all, there were plenty of Fruit Gems.
Is it really only cultural conditioning that makes most people uncomfortable with the idea of a mixed-sex locker room? Were those people sincerely surprised that others expressed reservations?Heterosexual women mind dressing with gay men more than with gay women, which makes me pretty sure it's about privacy and not broad- or close-mindedness. Certainly not about rights.
Ah, a more involved conversation than I can get into now, to be sure. What's right or fair or kind is one thing ~ right now I'm trying to figure out if people really are OK with an all-gender locker room or if it's their politics leading the way (which is what I suspect because they pretty much all identify their spot on the political spectrum in this sort of conversation). But I don't know.
To be continued.
On his 100th birthday, May 9, 2006, my siblings & I met in Washington, D.C., for the day. Today, his 118th birthday, one sister & I spent the morning laughing together. We discovered we are both obsessed with the 1950s-60s panel show What's My Line? & like the same panelist, remember the same episodes. That funny way of being in tune with someone. Well, especially someone who's your 10-years-younger twin.
I gave her 3 things when we walked home together, then leaned on the wall of the Marble Cemetery to continue our conversation.
1) A saying, one I learned in Maine, where you have to be from there for several generations before you're considered local. They say, The kittens may be born in the oven but that don't make them biscuits.
2) A joke. This is the standard version: A Chinese guy turns to a Jewish guy in a bar, punches him, and says, "Fu*k you and your people for sinking the Titanic!"
The Jewish guy: "Huh? It was an iceberg..."
Chinese guy: "Iceberg, Goldberg, Steinberg, all the same."
3) A hug.
Exciting & horrifying to see that a car was going 60 mph east on 2nd St from 2nd Ave (correct direction) to MY CORNER then sped across First Ave & the wrong way on 2nd St east of First Ave. Not just any car: a Dodge Charger. Was Bill Hickman the driver? And not entirely on the street. It was ON THE SIDEWALK. (The link includes a short video.)
To copy the truth can be a good thing, but to invent the truth is better, much better.
~ Giuseppe Verdi
Of course he was talking about art not disinformation.
I went to the store & class, I had two zoom meetings. Busy day for a weekend. And it rained. Two people died and one person was born. Nothing new under the clouds.
High in November
Cheery as a lamb
Johnny toddles by & tousles my hair.
… & I'm back in my first months in NY, my empty apartment
(now with so much art & books & breathing) —
the light fixture I thought was a gas outlet:
scared to touch it, I didn't see my walls for years.
One Fourth of July, Brodey sat on the middle part of an aqua sectional couch—
the only piece I had—
grilling over his shoulder on the fire escape
in the hibachi he'd brought.
Later I pushed that couch out the window.
I found broken glass
in a jar of bouillon powder
& the company by way of apology
sent me a case of caviar.
I opened my tenement icebox one day
to nothing but caviar & decided to throw a cocktail party.
I bought a blender
& made a drink of honeydew melon & vodka.
I eat cookies with specks of salt
& kiss Johnny on his way to lie down & watch
something that makes him laugh.
I look at Biala's flowers every day
& every day I'm abashed to see them.
Just like Ollie, my 40-years-older boyfriend
who I loved so much,
I managed to get old
being the same old fucked-up me.
Frank Bruni includes a feature in his weekly column called "For the Love of Sentences," where he invites readers to "nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications." Voila:
Speaking of book reviews — my Times colleague Dwight Garner weighed inmemorably on both a memoir and a collection of essays by Joseph Epstein: "Epstein favors tasseled loafers and bow ties, and most of his sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie." (Kevin Callahan, Forest Hills, N.Y., and Elinor Nauen, Manhattan)
Saw a whole bunch of Elizabeth Murray's drawings. So good! Took a hard exercise class at my expensive gym. (The gym is free for me cuz I'm old.) Got 3 books I ordered: A textbook for my next Norwegian class, Learn Norwegian with Word Search Puzzles (kind of hilarious & I learned the word for skunk is stinkdyr: stink animal), & the collected Jack Spicer. The books arrived days late. I hate UPS. Fainted at the unabashed antisemitism at my home & alma mater, the Poetry Project. One of these days I'll say more. Sad at the death of Paul Auster, who was Johnny's friend at Columbia. Johnny has the distinction of having published Paul's first book. For some random reason I remember him trying to get Johnny to have a playdate with their similar-age daughters, mid-80s, & Johnny turning up his nose at the idea of going to Brooklyn. Made plans for two simultaneous events; not sure I can manage that. Maybe once I learn to yodel I'll master being in two places at once.
Loved Emily Nemens' The Cactus League. Everything about baseball, with a little actual baseball thrown in. Read it!
Meeting Emily last month inspired me to sign up for all the MLB radio broadcasts. I turned it off for a minute, at a 4-4 Yankees-Brewers tie & 5 minutes later the Yankees had scored 7 runs.
My life of baseball & driving is drifting back...
I'm trying to ignore war, technology, climate change, economics, elections, this week's trial of the century, etcetera (etcetera), by not writing about it here. I don't have any insights that I didn't strip from all the newspapers & magazines I read. My cozy life is where I'm staking my days. My beloved, my team, the poetry I read & write, the distant dream of learning to yodel. It's all I can do. (Oh, & a little community organizing.)
While I'm not much of a weather guy (except for snow. I love snow!), I'm appreciating the perfect day today: hot with a chilly breeze. Incandescent tulips. Sprightly clouds. Spring is everything all at once.
As Ted Berrigan wrote, "And if the weather pleases me, I'm happy every day."
We got the sign made in 1983 in Ocean City, Maryland. It came down when they put up a new door & Keith (pictured), who takes care of things & works in the store downstairs, glued it back up a day or 2 ago. People sometimes stop me coming out of the building: "Did Pound live here?!" I don't tell them the real reason for the sign. We would see all those buildings with their fancy-ass names: The Van Gogh, The Dakota, The San Remo. Why shouldn't we have a name, we thought, & why shouldn't we be able to say we live at the pound.
Note: I forgot to write in advance that I'd be off 2 days for Passover. Not that it's over. Just 5 more days of the holiday of affliction.
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
~ Picasso
I thought, Hmmm, that sounds a little too tidy for Picasso. Did a little more digging.
The purpose of life is to discover your gift.
The work of life is to develop it.
The meaning of life is to give your gift away.
~ David Viscott, psychiatrist and talk show host in the 1980s & 90s
from Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations (1993)
There's been a lot of crappy stuff happening lately, but having & seeing old friends more than makes up for it. Seeing what a long way we've come... reminiscing about significant moments & small ones... knowing all the names no matter how long-winded the story... knowing that we've had each other's back all this time. It's great & the rest seems petty & unmentionable.
The pigeons made a nest & actually laid TWO eggs. One pigeon is the same one, but with a new mate. Everything was fine this morning at 9 but when I came back a couple hours later, the nest was gone & the eggs smashed on the ground. I assume the new super destroyed their nest & eggs. Cruel. Unnecessary. The birds were as upset as I was ~ it's easy to identify the cries & gestures of distress. In case they try again, I taped a sign to their ledge: PLEASE let Walter Pigeon & Rita Dove roost in peace.
I moved into the Ezra Pound the same month Jimmy Carter was inaugurated & am now the person who has lived there the longest. It was easy to get an apartment & cheap. I don't know where people on SSI live these days but back then Bobby & Lucky, who were a couple, had their own adjacent apartments. I asked Lucky once how he got that nickname. It wasn't enough that his real name was Homer, I must have figured. He lit up: I really am lucky, he said. I have enough to feed my pets, & I hardly ever need to borrow more than $20 to get through the month.
Hearing of the recent death of Hall of Fame manager White Herzog (who managed the Cards in the 1985 World Series), I thought of this poem of mine from the same year:
Game 4, American League Championship Series, October 12, 1985
Bases loaded no outs & pitching on a mere 2 days rest
Dave Stieb looks so desperate I chew my fingers as tho
at a Stephen King movie, I can't watch alone!
so call Steve, who's sleeping
but amazingly enough Marion has the game on
not however imagining poor Dave
is as hounded as he looks to me
talk turns to tomorrow's reading
—oh man he just walked in a run—
I haven't really been watching you understand
typing all day
nothing like a reading to burrow for poems
Steve's a little depressed, Marion says,
he has to finish
all his poems
Yeah, I agree, I have about a million works
that're terrific till late innings then stop short
I'm getting a stomachache
watching Stieb claw around for help
And so is born another million-dollar scheme
The Relief Poet!
who'll come in at the end with a trick pitch
witty poignant heat
& finish off your poem tidy up your poem
getting credit for a save of course
Then I remember for Marion
the incredibly short shortstop
the Royals used to have was Freddie Patek
& we 2 happy geniuses hang up
as Tom Henke comes in to get the inning's last out.
Another nest, another egg, another worry.
Can I love again, knowing what love can lead to?
This time around, they'll have to find their own food. It was way too messy & eventually the original two pigeons brought home too many friends.
For progressive people the present is the beginning of the future. For conservative people the present is the end of the past.
~ Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), Hungarian sociologist
And as we progress through our lives, we often find a spot where we would like the present to stop. "I'm good, let's stay here."