Letter from Brooklyn (4 page)

ELEGY

This is about the first time

my mother died.

The second time was the normal way,

decaying in stasis.

Now, webs of storm-splintered wood line the shore

like shanty-church stained glass.

The ocean a loud whisper, and

too beautiful for god.

Her body, a chronology of scars,

becomes salt-stung air.

She is not anything that has happened to her,

only the pure and fine pain, alone.

IN MEMORY OF HOWARD ZINN

After W.H. Auden's “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”

Not a saint, but an angel of history,

who in peering back into the wreckage, found

us, the people. For looking forward

was his true gift. He always saw what we

might be capable of. And so we are left

now to struggle without his recognition,

which while sometimes inaccurate, was

often faithful. He taught us what we knew

and wished to forget: our independence

was for those who could afford it, and the slaves

were freed to be serfs, and the good war

was like every war, a war on children.

One could say he was unkind to the nation,

or it was the kind of tough love given to

a friend, who suffers from one of Jung's

shady types. Where there's hope for this patient,

he found it by integrating the country's

repressed selves, who are bare and as incomplete

as his research. If status, at times,

had made him blind, to us he is no more

a person now than an entire movement

of people. The patriotic remain proud

but a little less, while the scholars

accuse him of bias, and, of course, they

are right. He was not a historian, but

the narrator of a collective memoir,

where proving what happened exactly

was less important than why it mattered.

THE ILLUSION THEORIST OF COLOUR DESCRIBES A LANDSCAPE

“Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”

—
Wordsworth

The top soft of the hills, shadow dappled. On these summer evenings cold seeming as mint ice cream,

whose green appearance functions to distinguish it, say, from butterscotch.

I haven't had mint ice cream since those birthday dinners at the Old Spaghetti Factory
.

The hills are the colour of a banana or raspberry represented
as green as a sign that it is unripe.

My mother always returned, from the bathroom,
minutes before the waiters came and sang
“happy birthday” to me
.

Hills green as a signifier to keep going.

I thought then that the waiters sang because they wanted to, not because they could be fired if they didn't.

That the stars are white can be stated as
x
is white =
x
has some feature by virtue of which
x
appears white.

The stars are trick candles
.

The colour of the stars can be explained by interpreting their appearance as indicators of other physical features, where those features have causal powers on our perception of colour.

The stars are like a toy camera's flash, capturing nothing
.

It is sufficient to say “It is
as if
the stars were white.”

I followed my mother around with it like I was the
paparazzi
—

White is a property the stars do not have but might have had:
in some possible world but not in this one.

For who is a bigger celebrity
,
to a child
,
than one's
mother?

Virtual colours are as good as real colours.

Sometimes I expect her
,
any minute now
,
and after all
these years
,
to return from the bathroom
.

In the case of colour, unlike other cases, false consciousness should be a cause for celebration.

The stars are singing to me
,
because someone left
the table to tell them it's my special day
.
And
though they're far
,
if I listen close
,
I can nearly
hear them
.

FOR DAVE IN ISTANBUL

We couldn't hear the evening call to prayer

sheltered by the pub's basement walls.

We could almost think we were

in one of our locals, except the names of everything,

especially the women, reminded us we are foreigners,

the yabancılar referred to in the menu

whose drinks cost double the price.

We were Adams in reverse, arriving

last on the scene, the animals named long ago,

the earth fully decorated and Eve already fallen

and fallen and fallen. We drank our way

to the bottom of the Bosphorus, searching for the nails

our mothers took from the cross, before yours left,

you told me, to play guitar for other people's children. And mine,

whose body thinned till it seemed to be hiding within itself

like prayer beads in the palms of old men

or down the blouses of the curious girls in Taksim Square.

Each night, after last call, we ascended

the pub steps into the softening sky, the streets barren

as our pasts. We stumbled across the half toothless grin

of shoddy cobblestone roads, and the skeletal remains of a cart:

birdcage, sack of cashews, some piece of crap

with a picture of Atatürk. We arrived where we started from,

though had forgotten it again: the kokoreç vendor

like a mythic tree, waiting for us at the place where the roads part.

And we ate lamb guts, obeying the only law

binding our lives now —

not to look inside the bun. Then, the muezzin called

the faithful, and I felt pious, once again,

for being awake at this hour.

JASPER AVENUE

You spoke of Edmonton as a river god,

turning your amateur boxer father

into
a fucking vegetable
. A religion

of
one punch
. Your faith

only in metamorphoses

for the worst. How all it takes

sometimes is one good blow

to the head.
But at least it got him off

Jasper Avenue
. A joke I didn't get

till now, arriving

for the first time in your hometown

and seeing the faces

you once described

as rain-damaged suede

stumble by the dust caked

and curtained 25 cent

peep shows. You told me how

you would fuck anyone

with a car, keys to get you

out of town. I should have

seen your little indiscretions

and thefts coming for miles —

and perhaps I did. Deserved it,

in a way, as you wrote

in your Coffee Time napkin scripture:

what's fair is what happens to you

and we do what we can

and whatever that is
—

is what's right
. And now

you're married, and, well,

not poor, and I'm

walking down Jasper Avenue

to where I'll read some poems.

Yes, they pay me for this.

Though not very much.

But people listen to me

talk about all the things I had,

maybe we all had, coming.

And I always wanted that, I guess.

It makes a lot of things forgivable,

or proves, at least, they were necessary.

A SORT OF LOVE POEM

I know how I change in Kafka-esque ways,

when I get what I long for. So, I am pretty alright

with keeping our romance as is,

the exchange of letters and poems, a coffee once a year —

the subtle flirtations that may all be in my head,

or that you weave, like a web, in the night,

in the minds of nearly every man you talk to.

I am okay with that, since I am in love,

most of all, with the way we fall in love.

The burial ceremony of old skins

and sound judgement. Glorious —

how un-Plantonist I feel at the thought of you

drying your hair. And I do not write this

with a belief that it will make you see something

you cannot already. Poetry can't

substitute for the absurd currency of attraction,

the way someone winces when they sneeze

or stirs their coffee.

I write now from the place of good love poems,

the ones that have no intent,

seek to change nothing,

and live alongside the prayers of atheists,

formed simply and only,

because there is nothing else left to do.

1989

When I was a boy you were old

and have stayed that way for twenty years.

I remember you best as the world's one sad man

when The Wall fell. Your glum face

reflected in people dancing

atop televised rubble. I didn't know

what ideology was, but understood

you were against joy on principle. That Christmas

you bummed a du Maurier off a stranger

in the Golden Griddle on Front Street, and we sat

in your old Chevy, wrinkled

with dents, windows rolled up

so smoke curled against the glass

like a caged ghost. I predicted all of this,

you said, and if I had known

who Cassandra was, I'd think

she was a Trotskyite or “Trot”

as I heard you called once. Though I didn't know

what that was either, and spent

my childhood waiting for you

to strut like a proud thoroughbred.

You exhaled forecasts all night, told me

Yugoslavia will resemble an uprooted tree

and so will Iraq. You told me

peace wouldn't last

in the place of your birth

and about the intifada to come

which sounded like “ta da” —

what I imagined you would say

one day — your leaving

turning out to be sleight of hand. You told me

about the economic collapses to come, but not

tumours will grow in my mother's body.

You didn't tell me

they will fill her brain

till she believes I am a spy

and then she'll be dead. She is dead.

But not right now, where it is 1989,

the future unfolding along predictable and unknown lines

through the frosted windshield. You tell me

you are scared of snow and miss the desert.

You are thinking of moving back soon.

You are already gone.

It will be years before you appear again,

looking remarkably the same, as though

there are no disappointments left

to take the years from you. You won't

see the revolution in your lifetime.

You admit it, freely now, shrugging

like Rand's Atlas. You want now,

more than anything, to know me,

for the first time, as though

historical materialism didn't apply

to our lives. I try to tell you who I am

these days. I list off some beliefs,

if this is what makes us who we are. I tell you

I believe there is a god,

sometimes, and that Marx was right

about a lot of things, but was, probably,

an asshole. I tell you

art matters, and so does love and that's the extent

of what I know

with any certainty. But I can't

talk about the past. The word pain comes to mind

and for a moment pain and past sound like they are the same

word, that we invented pain so we could have

a word for the irrevocable that falls soft

on the ear. I want to tell you I once believed

snow made men vanish in the night, into history.

POST-OCCUPY

Tourists posing for the shot by the balls

of the Bowling Green bull. Deli. Starbucks.

The stones of Trinity Church. Opening bell. Strip club.

Reuters showing the news of the day. Black birds

in Battery Park. Scaffold. Spring. Someone

talking about the Dutch colony. Blue bank.

Lenapehoking. The ant march up Lady

Liberty's crown. Pigeons. Another Starbucks.

Ellis Island. The search for namesakes. Red bank.

Freedom Tower. Fences. Never Forgetting.

Poplars. This is an important announcement . . .

The Q train is running via the R.

Going Out of Business Sale. Grand Opening Sale.

Closing bell. Hudson River on a clear day.

NOTES

The opening of “Raising the Pentagon” is a slight variation on Norman Mailer's description of a cell mate in
The Armies of the Night
.

All the lines in “Re: Grandpa's Village” are from an email my uncle, Michael, sent me in 2007.

The italicized lines in “Breakfast at Tiffany's” are directly quoted from the character Paul Varjak, or “Fred,” in the film
Breakfast at Tiffany's
.

The lines “We were blindsided . . . /We never saw it coming” in “Occupy” are Pat Buchanan's paraphrase of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein's testimony to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2009. (“Is a U.S. Default Inevitable?”
Human Affairs
, January 15, 2010.)

“Ode to the Double Rainbow Guy” refers to Paul Vasquez whose excitement over seeing a double rainbow became an internet meme in 2010. The Gregory Brothers soon after turned it into a YouTube music video.

“For My Beard” is influenced by the poems “Nearing Winter” by Sachiko Murakami and “Cockroach Elegy” by Jeff Latosik.

The poem “In Memory of Howard Zinn” could not have been written without the aid of Zinn's
A People's History of the United States
and a talk he gave at Boston College in 2010, entitled “Holy Wars,” which I watched on democracynow.org.

The non-italicized lines in “The Illusion Theorist of Colour Describes a Landscape” are variations of text taken from the article “Color” in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
.

The line “. . . to play guitar for other people's children” in “For Dave in Istanbul” was inspired by a line in an unpublished poem my father seems to have written decades ago.