Stanislavsky and Methods

Before Kaddish, during the burial,

the ground dream too iced-over for hacking

into, the mother came up to me,

hair ablaze and said, thanks

for the poems about my daughter,

and I said, listen, this is not real,

but I always wanted to play

in a synagogue, marbled voices

and yellowing walls and she was kind

to me, a stranger in town, a fine actress.

In the morning the world was frigid

near Hoboken, my inverted hell, the Hudson

gift-wrapping in ice polluted birds.

Happy holidays to you upstate New York.

Cosmic exams ask tectonic plates

to shift south, misshaping the coast.

The daughter still lives in the Village, surrounded

by scripts of Hungarian rapings, CD’s

of Bessie Smith, neighbours after

midnight with small sores

lining their lips, not living

the dogged code that everyone should

breathe. She remains alert

to her mother’s new home, vivid

from freedom, emotional territories

widening with each winter.

Her mother is a true believer

in Jewish Miracles, the daughter,

a blurred fax not so carefree

about the hasty withdrawals of  men

and minutes, kept awake

by the nightly screaming of gays

upstairs, everyone else in the building

too drunk on TV and Ecstasy

to notice  that Manhattan shrinks

more than usual from record lows,

the island, sold and stolen many times over,      

that never weeps, or rather, always

weeps, tears flooding up from the sewers

into the laps of the homeless

who scribble memos on bags:

Dearest Mother:

please forgive me but I can’t live

in the warmth of the South

or your Temple, and where is father,

and I can’t remember my childhood

and there’s no real need

to keep on reading or caring--

you will be runned down enough

from the coming Potomac heat,

and, gee, how lucky and blessed

you are to have a healthy single daughter

willing to illustrate the awful perfect truths

about welcomed random calamities

that at least invent permanently,

as if they were part of a crowd or seedy novel

about the dramatics of atheism with an ending

enigma forcing her to enact

infamous roles in her bed about leaving.

Drunken Hercules

 

Don’t be stupid: all this perfume

and no soap or razors, no Ouzo

or tabouli or bruised Greek women,

and worse,  no future, like zeppelins,

gray antique phalluses, muted engines

disturbing the hideaway caves

of the cocky starling, he who would laugh

as I fell down Lombard Street,

San Fran’s fog stuck

in my black and broken mouth:

 

I am no man. Leavenworth Street

sends no signals, receives no callers,

but Nob Hill takes us,

minor players, by surprise

as biker bars never close

and third-party checks

are routinely accepted by strippers.

Wait: the feast has been canceled

and the clouds shift and dissolve

under the moon’s charred static

as the promised pain never comes.

We starve our girlfriends, we turn

tourists into permanent guests.

With Chinatown’s finest

filming our cathartic chant--

we want Alcatraz!--we practice

bogus hocus pocus and dress like Texans.

 

We must be cautious: our desires

and evidence are dwindling. Nightly

we crash cars into the Pacific,

right hands gripping genitalia, only

to bite off our wagging tongues,

and gods willing, have opera singers

sew them back on in the morning.

Here, there’s no law against it.

 

 

Hotel Godiva

This is the store to buy the strange

and the old and their hopeless kin:

dead schoolgirls’ sweaters, shoes rejected

by Elvis, miniature porcelain fish

angrily carved, held aloft

by black, strong string. We who have given

away our minds, been betrayed

by the bitter coasts, search now

through the belongings of others.

These mapped, blue and green walls

become our eco-system, a thrift lighthouse

of stuff lived in by drunken movie stars,

dandies named Barney, his great aunts,

their dark mauve skirts faded

from trips up the stairs, they who mend

the insane and the weak, us,

we who plow through the circular racks,

grabbing disco bric-a-brac over 50’s rayons,

knowing, deep in our addled souls,

that we’ll buy instead the goldfish platforms,

black, scraped buckle and all.

These clothes are tested and sound;

scarred from past falls or misuse, but true

and tireless, as with our second spouses’ hands.

We seek connections, a participatory democracy

of textiles and no-longer-chic shapes and shirts,

ruins dismissed on many Sundays,

traces of rouge on lapels, dead labels,

maybe tiny burnholes now vivid,

small perfect eyes that know exactly

when wars ended, when to go next door

to borrow slim, white leather gloves,

gaps easily sewn with re-cycled thread,

re-made paisleys and plaids now ours

for pool halls and weddings, parties

of patchy dreams, half joyous

that we will never again be as alone.

Panegyric for Martin’s Twenty-First

“You should learn when to go, you should learn how to say no.”

 - C. Love

I.

The seed for my finale, my son

You wobble fearlessly as you stand,

Seeking a stiff approach to possible

Posture, with me the gaping dad. I must speak

As a prophet for the slim essentials:

In twenty years you’ll come down free

From the hills,

Holy in your chosen path, your indentations

Slashing at the hard land’s angles. I warn

Your foolhardy adversaries--I’ll build

Mountains in their paths, blow twisters

Onto their homes. There’ll be no ecstasy

There, however, or later: everything

Will test you, each stranger

A potential cutthroat or slanderer.

II.

I breathed out one night and you

Showed up: alien shaped, trusting eyes.

Many shouted praise, we who lived

In worlds too small, dumbstruck how you welcomed

The streets, brought Mars closer, flooded

Arid plains with your liquid wisdom.

I wished as poor master to describe your future

To blind men, but you scooted around

Like a political nominee or celeb, your babble

A benediction that never flustered nor bored.

You were in love with Socrates’ echo as you studied the sky,

The rivers that grew darker by the hour.

Soon your worried mother mouthed warnings—

Stay close to home; hide cash in a mattress.

III.

I have put down my hammer and chisel

Forever: it’s your turn to carve, hack, make bold.

Don’t you remember my arms rocking

You deep, away from devils’ traps?

You became my chosen spoils from Jericho.

Don’t grieve: I’m now balsa, tinder stick,

Content, fast in the ground, drafty

And repressive, proud

With dirt in my molars as I block lava,

Absorb the souls of dead oysters, protect

You when I can, consolable over our slim start.

You’ll have no sibling, no rival lovers:

One plus one equals one below. Prince Martin,

I can feel your footsteps flying above--

Go far in your motley uniform towards

Bright places where nothing is, or isn’t,

So nothing for you’ll ever be numb, or lost.

Contact Michael Baker