Saturday Poetry: Maxim

The children of unhappy mothers
Grow up slow.
It takes them so long to do anything at all:

To eat with spoon and fork, to walk, to talk,
To potty train, read and write or
Sleep through the night.
Or spend an evening without a sitter.
To get a driver’s license or
Pay back the loan.
Or leave home.

My Friend, Guitarist Matt Nichols

For your Memorial Day weekend listening pleasure! He has 2 great CDs: CLASSICAL ELECTRIC GUITAR and GONE. Listen to more at http://matthewnichols.com/

His composition:

Make Concubinage Legal in America

In the spirit of like-I-have-this-time-to-waste, I have been reading accounts tawdry and, ehem, from the paper of record, serious, about the projectile vomit which is the Schwarzenegger-Shriver scandal.  (And I know I don't have to link to nuthin' because you have, too.)  Things have gotten so bad in the Republican Presidential field that Obama may win a second term in part because the opposing team is so damn bad.  (Remember when Republicans were all a-twitter with proposing constitutional amendments so that a certain Austrian-born naturalized citizen could be eligible to run for President?  Oh where oh where was Orly Taitz then?)

Daniels dropped out -- I sure his wife, Adultress Cheri, Repentant Cheri, has been reading about all things Newt and Callista, and all things Arnold and Maria and said, No.  Oh Hell No! to subjecting herself to that press scrutiny.  So, no Mitch Daniels to kick around any more.  (Yawn.)  And Newt?  He's been punked by the American press and hasn't copped on yet.  The longer he pretends he's running the worse it will get.  And wait until they catch his wife delivering a speech or answering a question on tape.  The 2 of them will be American mincemeat very soon.  Mark my words.  As for Romney, Pawlenty and the rest of them?  Booooooooring.  And we Americans long to be entertained.  But, I digress.

It's polygamy I'm concerned with today, the need to codify and legalize it so we can stop this Oh-Mary pearl-clutching every time some powerful, prominent, full of himself American male exercises his droit de seigneur in our meritocratic, no-royalty-on-this-side-of-the-Atlantic country.  Let Bill have his Monica, and Arnold his Gigi, his Mildred, his... and so on.  And let all the Hillarys and Marias go on about the business of getting older and jowlier.  Let them expose those swinging-like-a-hammock upper arms that are the proud badge of the female crone.  And let Wives No. 1 spend the rest of their lives doing more meaningful work than running interference for the pigs they married, resuming the careers they abandoned, or pursuing the dreams they deferred.

The kind of men they married will always "be among us".  And there will always be women who want them and will do anything to have them.  (See Sinclair, Anne as Lady Macbeth.)  But, why demean an entire life being in association with them?  They should obtain status as a First Wife.  Once achieved they are officially off the hook for their husband's behavior.  (It's more efficient than divorce.)

Saturday Poetry: Coffin

Except of course it's Sunday.  (Keeping promises as best I can):

My father was buried

at his request

in a "simple pine box"

which costs $3,000 a fact

explained to us

his legitimate children by

his old childhood friend,

the mortician, a man

dying of emphysema.

It was the penultimate

joke he played on us

leaving us to calculate the portion of

our meager inheritance that

was now going to house his

cancer-silted bones.

There is no such thing as

a simple pine box he announced.

Daddy, of course, with his spendthrift’s malice,

at war with his love of money,

would have known that and yet

insist that he be buried in this way

as if he wanted God to recognize in him

an essential humility that had been

so betrayed by the many years of

voracious profligacy.

Saturday Poetry: G Train to the Last Stop

Summer in New York

I needed a job,

and took the first one I got.

She told me to ride

the G train

til you can’t go no more.

South into Red Hook

Smith Street

the last stop.

Lilli & TeTe Go for a Walk

I love my 5 year old niece, I really really do.  There's got to be a word short of pedophilia which describes the insatiable physical lust an adult can have for a particular child.  And unless one of my kids buys me some granchirren, I may not have any and Lilli will be the closest I get to having one.  Which is kind of all right because she's magnificent but even though we both agree that I'm an Old Lady she sometimes and accidentally calls me Mommy and then we get into Heather Has Two Mommies territory and it gets all effed up and that's my clue to go out to my office and let her Real Mother raise her thank you very much.

As much as the two of us love each other when her Real Mother asks me to "take her" for more than a few minutes I clutch.  Like at my age what am I gonna do with a little kid?  But, then my last better angel takes over and I say yes and such was the case today when Sister had to go somewhere (preferably without child) and instead of forcing her to drive Lilli to and pay for a baby sister (which I'm mean enough to do) while I sat around watching grass grow I was Surrogate Mother for the morning.

This morning involved delivering our neighborhood newsletter to local apartment buildings, and going over to West River Memorial Park to participate in a clean up.  We brought along one of those cool tools that you can pick up garbage with without bending over.  (God's gift to the middle-aged.)  And she used it as a crutch krunking down the sidewalk holding my hand explaining that both her right and left legs were broken.

I'd prepped her the night before that we were going to do a lot a walking so she was up to it and, as is the case with this hyperverbal honey, we never ran out of things to talk about which is one reason we stopped at the local Dunkin' Donuts so I'd get a break for a few seconds while she had pink doughnut with sprinkles in her mouth.  And I needed a break.  A ream's worth of paper is heavy; especially after my second trip with it on my back in 2 days.  Although everywhere we went this morning was only a few minutes away when your knees are a-throbbin' and your back is a-hummin' its enough to make you want to flag down a cab.  (Oh wait!  I'm in New Haven not New York!  Snap!)  I was the one who needed crutches.

We walked to the Park through one of the most asinine intersections in New Haven.  The lights are timed for drivers, impatient drivers and even with the walk signal I had us running across the street (or what passes for running with cauliflower knees).  No matter how fast you go the lights at Derby and Grasso change so fast you go from being a pedestrian to prey in no time flat.  I for one can't wait until drivers who go through red lights can get shot.  With a camera that is.

Safely on the other side we signed up, grabbed a black garbage bag and strolled along the rugby field looking for garbage.  We were not disappointed.  Sisyphus had his rock; modern Americans have their trash -- the wrappers, the bags, the papers, the cans, the plastic lids, the cigs, and so on.  Lilli was a trooper.  Because we had the trash gripper we were both entertained.  But, after a while we both realized that filling the bag would require crawling into the brambles.  (Oh, don't even mention all the gooseshit on the bottom of our shoes.) So, we worked for a few more minutes and then ran into an acquaintance.  I was ready for adult conversation but no sooner had it started than Lilli interrupted me with a must-tell recounting of the fat lady who was crying.  My acquaintance tried mightily to understand what she was saying.  I didn't.  It's like "Now you have to talk about this?  Right now?  Can someone else have my attention for 1 minute?  Please?"  So, cranky aunty that I am I just cut Lilli off.

And later when we were alone again she let me know it.  "You hurt my feelings," she told me.  And I leaned in all solicitous and asked her what I, I had done this time.  She told me about the lady and goddamn if it made less sense then than it had a few minutes ago.  The terrible thing about living with children is that you do get "it" after a while.  (I say terrible because if you've become that good at decoding their idiosyncratic language, what does that make you?  An idiot savant?)  Not always on time or right then, but you do get it.  She'd witnessed a woman freak out on the green the week before when she got separated from her husband.  The woman frantically called him on her cell phone.  I know this because Lilli's Real Mother told me the story when they got home, and Lilli was asking her if she found him.

She was still processing that when we wound up at another green expanse and that was the story she was trying in her inimitable 5 year old way to tell me, but I was too busy.  Once my sister came to pick us up the mystery got solved.  "Yes", she said, "the lady found her husband.  I saw them on the green on my way to work a few days later."  So now I know.  Now Lilli knows.  And as a bonus, she's graced me with her forgiveness, which clears the space for love.  And God knows, I need it.

Saturday Poetry: Oceanid

I've decided to post a poem on Saturdays.  This first one is from my unpublished manuscript, "Turn Left at the Dead Dog".

I moved to New York in the early 90's and temped to make a living.  One of my most memorable gigs was working at a Brooklyn shipyard in Red Hook as a secretary.  I'd take the G to it's last stop, Smith Street, and walk by the Red Hook projects to get to work.  The shipyard's lifeblood, Navy contracts, was drying up, and these old-timers, many of the men were in there 60's, knew that their life's work -- engineering, welding, painting, and so on -- was coming to an end.  (The shipyard was where Brooklyn Ikea is now.  My, how times have changed.)  I wanted to memorialize and honor a beloved world.

This poem came from imagining the kids swimming at the city pool near the projects, one of the great rituals of a New York summer:

Oceanid

 

I just love it in the summer

she says to me.

To get off work, while it’s still light?

You walk by the pool.

The kids are playing.

Brown kids black kids.

A few of them are white.

They glisten like baby seals

in bathing suits.

Screaming Spanish, English

It doesn’t matter

You see them running

boy after boy

boy after girl.

And the girls

they’re getting so bold now

not like when I was that age

we couldn’t go to the pool you know.

Our mothers didn’t want us getting too dark

and besides it would ruin our hair.

Lazy Mira got the beating of her life back then

and she was almost grown.

Mama had paid to have her hair done nice for a wedding

beautifully straightened, you’d a thought she was white.

Mira was that light, but as soon as Mama left

she flew to the pool where Mama saw her,

right here where we’re standing now,

arms full of A&P.

Fast Mira, a pink bikini

running around the edge

pretending to be afraid of Danny B,

who she loved, I don’t have to tell you.

And some little shit of a kid, pulling himself up out of the water

butted his bald head into my sister while she was dancing backwards

and she flipped a horseshoe right into the deep end.

Mira could swim, but it didn’t matter.

She knew she was dead.

Required Reading for a Rainy Day

If it weren't for the ability to link to great writing I'd had no ability to write at all.  Ta-Nehisi Coates' reflection on Trump-birtherism-Obama.  (His father is Paul Coates, publisher of Black Classic Press).  Here it is, The Longest War.