The following poems appeared in the Literary Supplement of our February 2001 Issue.

In the Garden of the Senior Residence

Jean tells us how she’d go to pubs
and meet American soldiers—she’d sing
the latest songs—White Cliffs of Dover,
Berkeley Square—teenager in London
in the war years, time of privation,
of jokes in the bomb shelter. She tells us
in the fading light, surrounded
by wings of the building.

Every night, after feeding all
her younger brothers and sisters (mother
dead, her father an alcoholic),
out she’d go—it was a wonderful
time—“Sing us another one Jeannie!”—
as well a terrible time—“The boy
you danced with could be dead
the next week,” she says.

We hear a siren beyond the garden
walls—a resident rushed to the hospital.
An American married Jean, brought her
to Massachusetts; when he beat her,
she had to leave him. A nanny in Boston,
raising other women’s children—
when the husband died, her sons
began to visit her.

Tears in her eyes as we speak—
the new director of the residents’ choir
won’t let Jean sing solos,

so she’s quit the choir. “My heart
isn’t in it anymore. They all
like my songs—I know the words
of all the old songs—but she
doesn’t want me to sing them.”

Sing for us, I ask, sing
White Cliffs of Dover. “Here?” she asks.
“Here and now?” Please, I say,
and she sings—her bright, clear soprano
reminding us of bright nights
when life was waiting for everyone young
to bite huge chunks and down them with beer
before the sirens wailed.

—Lewis Gardner

 

Territorial Imperatives

Two waspy Watch Hill women
encumbered with enough stuff
to see them through the season
mount the weathered steps to their cabana
without a backward glance.
They think I am one of them
and ask me over-the-shoulder
to get the gate.
I comply and then duck under,
desperate to pee,
and squat between two rolls of dune fence
exposing my indecency.
Into the spaces between their chatter
of Who’s Who in Westerly
the pee rushes and roars,
leaving me half-amused
by my own audacity,
half-expecting the hew and cry
of indignant responsibility
to hound me from hiding.
Empty at last
I drip dry
zip my fly
and sally forth
onto that mile-long stretch
of sundrenched sand
looking like I own the place
but willing to share, noblesse oblige,
with three fish-belly bathers
two bronze fishermen
and one imperious gull.

—Julia Van Develder

 

 

An Irish Lunch

Look, America’s oldest living Communist,
you whispered, nodding at the marbled face
with fogged glasses over a boiled cabbage plate.
Their national headquarters is down the block.
The window hasn’t changed since Nixon resigned.
At 34, you limped with an adjustable cane
after an amputation of an infected toe,
but you knew every store on 23rd Street:
the Lighthouse with the trinkets made by the blind,
the used doo-wop shop, the dollar paperback emporium
where you collected dime novels for their covers:
wavy blondes in loose shoulder straps
with apish shadows towering in the alleyways.
While our Guinness settled like fine soil
in our mugs, we watched the Communist grope
with palsied hands through the folded green napkin
of his soda bread basket. He cursed his frozen butter.
You leaned between our tables and asked if
the Communist wanted to write a book: his story
as told to a professional, whom we would arrange
through our publishing house here in the toy district.
You laid your embossed business card
on his white table cloth, black letters tough as stitches.
You’d have to kill me first, the Communist said.
Perhaps he knew you edited tax manuals,
while I read the slush pile with a sponge
for licking return envelopes. After he paid
with American Express, you tugged on your wrinkled khakis
and said, Must’ve been my socks. The Communists think white
means FBI. Privately, I suspected your lisp
from gum surgery, but you ordered us Irish coffees
and told me again about meeting Lady Bird Johnson
for a Texas wildflower book, how at 82
she cursed to make her agent blush
and told you to marry a rich wildcatter’s daughter.
Finally, we grabbed free mints
and stepped out into the honking humidity
of Seventh Avenue and the rest of our lives:
I became a reporter for Reporter Metals,
but you died at 37 from tongue cancer
sneaking past your jolly words.

—Will Nixon

 

 

Hiking Giant Ledge, Catskill Mountains
I
At about 2,000 feet a pall of fog
cuts visibility to 30 yards.
The cloud is stable, still, and there is no sound
of wind in the new spring leaves.
We expect certain miracles or horrors in fog:
vision of lancers in wet armor
on a desultory retreat; or the death in cold rain,
with a broken leg, with no help,
and the leg,
looking at it close, is very broken.

You will die here, in this fog, on a high mountain.

The trail makes us sweat. She strips her blue shirt.
My first time with a topless hiker, and the trail ascends,
darkening under the cloud and a canopy of pine.

II
Back in the city, at Parkside Lounge on East Houston,
where a poetry reading is in progress.
At the bar, a bald short man slams down
his pint glass with an architectural exasperation.
He rolls his eyes,
grits his teeth,
pouts, then tells the bartender,
holding up his glass, “A Harp. In there. Please.”

And slams the glass once more on the bar.

Ah, the Angry Young New Yorker. He has not been served well.

III
I suggest he take a good hike.

Mountains of ice, dust,
Dear as winter fire
Built of twenty twigs
And one red-robin colored log.

A good climb
Makes you shut up, at last.

Whatever romance is in these high places
Is at the end of exhaustion,
Having done well, hurt your feet, been cold,
Hot, cold, having heard
The air thin,
And heard from the rarefied issue of your blood
A rare moan.
Slump on the glop of moss on rock,
And there is no view—too much fog—

But you have come from somewhere low
To somewhere high,
And this need not be said at all.

IV
Then: the shouldering mountain thunder
And the clip and click of small petals rained on

And a voice not my own
But of tender fire-light
In the long cold upland tarn
And the smell of gunpowder
And the wide swung axe on the firewood
And the mosquito that sucks all night long.

V
My Lady and I lay in the long grass
By Pecoy Pond
Where the ticks bite
And there are rattlers in the rock eaves
And there is a thumping in the treeline
Of big mammal antlers rasping the hemlock.

We strip, skip rocks,
Swim in the cold gilt spring tarn,
Uterus, intestine,
Penis and gland and hand and breast
And sumptuous ass….

We dried each other by the blackberry bush.

And I watched her naked by the falls
That drains the pond.
Her knee and I and thigh.
She is colored sometimes like rum,
And colored sometimes like milk, and she has blue-green eyes.

Epilogue:

I
Return to city. It is a cavil
To think my eye
And I, shall be clean
From two or three forest hikes.

It is rumor
What the drunk Satyr tells us.

He says there is
A stream
Where the living
Shall be happy.

On this vacation:
My daughter brought
Me the skull of an ox.
My mother dug up
An old gun in the garden
And a rotten pair of socks.

II
Daddy went mad
Drinking springs
On mountaintops.

He thought
There was pure water—
Always tasting
Strange grit.

One day,
He wouldn’t drink
Any more, And his body
Shrank, his eyes
Dried up,

His spleen dropped,
His balls returned
To his abdomen,

His big toe disappeared,
His meaty thigh
Made no shadow,

And on the longest day, Solstice,
he went to the mountains to die.

III
These hikes have
Taught me nothing.
I was someplace low,
Then I was someplace high.
They are remedial learning.

—Christopher Ketcham

 

Remembering Rhinebeck

Slow hiss of the radiator is silenced.
Silence rings like a flat line in my ear.
Dust quickly surrenders,
And I am restless from all I didn’t do today.

Time conspicuously leads.
I freeze in the face of such agility.
I’ll just sit here and watch the night.

The building outside hides, line by line
Yielding to my own reflection.
My ceiling creeks above,
With muted thumps.

When I close my eyes I see Rhinebeck.

A fierce dusk blows through the windows pushing back the curtains bathing me in vibrant orange and pink air, filling me with fragrance, the scent of live earth. Night air resonates with crickets and swaying leaves. A distant stream is never hushed. The grass a cool cushion under my toes in the front yard. Each dewy blade tickles my neck and cools my skin. With each inhalation my stomach expands then sinks rhythmically. The stars are strong in Rhinebeck, an infinity of silver specks shine bright, illuminating my light clothing and skin so that I too feel small but strong. Eternal.

—Rebekah Meola