Alone and Not Alone Read online

  The Alexander Archipenko exhibition was the largest I had ever seen of his work, and as I moved from sculpture to sculpture I felt grateful just to be there. But I wasn’t really “there,” I was in a wholesale meat market. The smell of raw flesh and gore oozes out the ramshackle front doors where trucks have backed up to disgorge sides of beef and pork. Just inside are butchers in threadbare aprons streaked with blood. One of them waddles his mammoth girth toward me, a cigarette dangling from his pudgy lips, a strange leer on his face. He is the one who lewdly propositioned a friend of mine who lives a few doors away. Nineteen sixty-one.

  Now, in 2005, I am walking through this museum on the very spot where those butchers slashed and chopped up carcasses. The fat one is no doubt dead, like my friend and Archipenko. The exhibition is fine, but I can’t focus on it, so I simply pause before each piece.

  Finally I can’t restrain myself from approaching someone, who happened to be a guard, an Indian or Pakistani woman, to whom I say, “Many years ago, when I first came to New York, I had a friend who lived a few doors down the street. Do you know what this place was then? It was a wholesale meat business.” She looks at me and says, “Yes, it’s amazing the way they change things so fast,” and looks away.

  The 1870s

  Homage to Michel Butor

  1870 Work on Brooklyn Bridge begun. Charles Dickens dies. Jules Verne writes 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Rockefeller founds Standard Oil. Robert E. Lee dies.

  1871 British Columbia joins Canada. Marcel Proust born. Rasputin born. Pneumatic rock drill invented. Stanley meets Livingstone. Whistler paints The Artist’s Mother. The Great Fire of Chicago. P. T. Barnum opens “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

  1872 Jesuits expelled from Germany. Grant reelected President. Bertrand Russell born. First operation on the esophagus. Piet Mondrian born.

  1873 New York financial panic. Germans evacuate France. First color photograph. Zanzibar abolishes slave trade. E. Remington & Sons, gunsmiths, produce typewriters. Tolstoy writes Anna Karenina. Buda and Pest unite.

  1874 Winston Churchill born. Gertrude Stein born. First roller-skating rink. First Impressionist exhibition. Pressure cooking invented. Thomas Hardy writes Far from the Madding Crowd. First ice cream soda.

  1875 Carl Jung born. Thomas Mann born. Rainer Maria Rilke born. Maurice Ravel born. Madam Blavatsky founds Theosophical Society. Camille Corot dies. Georges Bizet dies. Hans Christian Andersen dies. First swim across the English Channel.

  1876 Korea becomes a nation. Brahms composes Symphony no. 1. Turks massacre Bulgarians. Pablo Casals born. George Sand dies. Bruno Walter born. Carpet sweeper invented. Degas paints The Glass of Absinthe.

  1877 Edison invents the phonograph. Gustave Courbet dies. Queen Victoria becomes Empress of India. First contact lenses. Canals on Mars observed. First public telephones in the U.S.

  1878 Greece declares war on Turkey. Hughes invents the microphone. Mannlicher invents the repeater rifle. W. A. Burpee does something with Burpee seeds.

  1879 British/Zulu War. Joseph Stalin born. Albert Einstein born. Discovery of saccharin. First public telephones in London. Paul Cézanne paints Self-Portrait. Edison has an idea and invents the light bulb.

  One Thing Led to Another

  If it wasn’t one thing

  it was another.

  You can’t believe

  how charged everything is

  with meaning

  because it is meaningless.

  Joy in the curtains,

  the farmer in the dell,

  a fellow named

  whatever it was—Floyd?

  And then you had arms and legs

  and it wasn’t funny.

  It was a freshly baked pie.

  I could care

  more or less.

  Like a machine

  in the heavens, shooting,

  or an exclamation point

  in the motion picture industry.

  Cut.

  It’s always something.

  “Tuck in your shirt”

  is not said to a dog.

  What’s the use of whining?

  No one really enjoys it.

  The Rabbi with a Puzzle Voice

  Wait a minute

  I forgot something

  The rabbi with a puzzle voice

  Pieces flying around in the air

  Texas Lithuania and now another one

  A rectangle

  He is singing them

  I always knew he was

  And the song is oh

  I don’t really know what

  Very old like a doughnut

  And a look through its hole

  But he is singing

  And that’s the main thing, no?

  The other main thing

  Is that you’re on that rectangle

  Floating to the ground

  As it loses its oomph

  And other shapes are flying out above you

  And you are on them too!

  How can this be?

  It is part of the jigsaw puzzle

  And the sad voice that created it

  Why did you have to be anyone

  Whoever you are

  Is what the rabbi sings

  Whoever he is

  Maybe he’s not a rabbi at all

  There was a reason I had forgotten him

  And a reason I remember him

  And his puzzle voice

  But where are his edges going

  As now he too breaks into pieces

  Pieces pieces

  That arc out in his song

  Syntactical Structures

  It was as if

  while I was driving down a one-lane dirt road

  with tall pines on both sides

  the landscape had a syntax

  similar to that of our language

  and as I moved along

  a long sentence was being spoken

  on the right and another on the left

  and I thought

  Maybe the landscape

  can understand what I say too.

  Ahead was a farmhouse

  with children playing near the road

  so I slowed down

  and waved to them.

  They were young enough

  to smile and wave back.

  The World of Us

  Who was the first person to say

  “I think the world of you”

  and how did he or she come up with it?

  It’s the kind of thing

  one ascribes to a god

  or a great philosopher

  or a lunatic

  on a good day. Now

  it’s a cliché

  because we can’t think it,

  we can only hear ourselves saying it.

  There are a lot of things we can’t think

  or don’t want to. It’s hard

  for example

  to think of skin as an organ

  —an organ is a kidney or a musical instrument

  or even a publication—

  but ask any doctor

  and the doctor will say

  “Yes, the skin is an organ.”

  Imagine having that organ removed

  (being skinned alive)

  or rather don’t

  at least not too vividly.

  It’s better to keep a barrier

  between oneself and things

  that can be horrendous

  like life.

  Don’t go around all day

  thinking about life—

  doing so will raise a barrier

  between you and its instants.

  You need those instants

  so you can be in them,

  and I need you to be in them with me

  for I think the world of us

  and the mysterious barricades

  that make it possible.

  But you say

  “First you say to raise a barrier

  and then not to.”
/>   Yes, because these

  are two different barriers,

  one a barrier against life,

  the other a barrier against being alive.

  Being alive is good, life is bad.

  “So, what about being dead?

  Is that bad?

  And what about heaven?”

  I don’t know about being dead

  because I can’t remember what it was like,

  but I do know

  that it is awful and amusing to be part heaven

  and not know which part of you it is.

  Unless you don’t think about it,

  in which case

  you find yourself looking up and saying

  “That is the best cornbread I’ve ever eaten.”

  Along with it comes a yawn at the end of a long and satisfying day,

  everything quiet and thrilling

  inside a consciousness surrounded by a night

  in which exclamation marks are flying toward a single point.

  Curtain

  Standing in the bathroom peeing

  I look up at the curtain in front of me

  red cotton with little yellow flowers

  from Liberty Fabrics (London) 1970

  and I feel I am flying up into the heavens

  until I remember that soon

  I will turn 70 and at any moment

  I could feel a sudden paroxysmal pain

  in my head and with the curtain

  dropping away fall over dead—

  this could happen right now!

  But it doesn’t, the curtain stays put

  and I’m standing there

  and the curtain still looks good.

  Homage to Meister Eckhart

  I promised myself

  I would explore my void

  the space I occupy

  and won’t

  but I’m still waiting

  waiting

  waiting in a room

  for the room to change into an idea a flower might have

  The sun shines down on the flower

  in the idea the flower does have at all times

  and at all times you hear its thudding

  and in between the thuds

  is a silence in which a thud almost is

  The first time I heard the word void

  it was from the Bible: “And the earth

  was without form and void.”

  I was a child. I thought it meant

  the earth was without void.

  Which meant nothing to me

  because I did not know the meaning of void.

  And I didn’t know there was a comma

  that changes everything:

  “was without form, and void.”

  The cosmos changed by a comma!

  Years later a big face with no features

  came out of the trees in the night

  and said, brutally, “Void”

  as if handing me a gift

  I opened my eyes and there it was

  in the mirror it was I or something else

  I wasn’t sure

  but I was happy to be in between

  My soul was growing up

  It had learned how to put quotation marks

  around everything

  which destroyed everything

  to make two of everything

  one for each eye and one for each ear

  but the eyes get further and further apart

  from what they see

  as the ears get closer and closer

  to what they hear

  like the dot terribly far away

  and big in front of your face

  at the same time and loud

  So move

  the mirror

  the Void

  into another mirror

  or Void

  and just let go

  But the eyes eventually alight

  on words like SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS

  printed on the side

  of everyone’s head

  the way CLEM KADIDDLEHOPPER used to be

  and MEISTER ECKHART and MAX JACOB

  all appearing nightly

  in a revue set in the void of heaven,

  the void that allowed God to be there

  as the sole spectator

  until your void and his void were almost the same

  as the void of Spongebob and Max, Clem too,

  but not quite, for, as Eckhart says,

  “The nothingness of God fills all things

  while his somethingness is nowhere”

  and so “The very best thing you can do

  is to remain still for as long as possible”

  and wait for the nothingness of God.

  The Incoherent Behavior of Most Lawn Furniture

  Suddenly the lawn furniture moves to different spots and stops, overturned or sideways on the ground or hovering in the air, then the pieces jerk, flip, or fly into new spots, in no pattern or rhythm. But the wooden fold-up lawn chair, with its wide strip of canvas forming a gentle sling from top to bottom, remains still. Its striped pattern ripples in the breeze, and though its wooden frame eventually turns gray it never rots or breaks, no matter how inclement the weather. Over the years, however, this lawn chair slowly grows less and less visible, so slowly that no one notices, until it disappears. It remains there, unseen and lost to memory, until one day someone remembers its green and orange stripes, its welcoming curve, its simplicity, there in the sunlight.

  The Street

  The last time I came back to New York I didn’t know

  that it would be the last time you’d be here

  though you are still here in the form of you

  who a block away walk toward me until it isn’t you,

  it’s someone with a fine head and silver hair and blue eyes

  and the suggestion of not being like anyone else

  and it’s you I’m waiting for as I walk past Little Poland

  or come out of New York Central Art Supply or stop to look

  at the poppy seed cake in the window of Baczynsky’s on Second Avenue,

  the cake I brought up to your place sometimes

  when we were working together and you’d say “Tea?”

  as if it were spelled with only the one letter.

  Knowing you were there made me be more here too,

  made New York be New York,

  fueled my anger at the new buildings that ruined the old ones

  and at the new people with their coarseness and self-involvement

  you avoided by going out to buy the Times at 5 a.m.,

  then came back and made yourself a pot of espresso

  and read the paper as if you were in Tuscany

  which is where you soon will be

  in that niche in the wall all ten pounds of you

  and I’ll leave the city that’s slipped a little further away no a lot.

  Paris Again

  I’m afraid of the thrill of touching you again

  and seeing you appear before my eyes

  because you are beautiful the way things used to be.

  One day I sat down in a café and ordered an accent aigu

  and a citron pressé and looked at Paris.

  I said to myself This is Paris and you

  are in it so you are Paris too. Garçon,

  encore un accent aigu s’il vous plaît

  but he didn’t look pleased he was Parisian.

  Maybe I too could learn how to be grumpy

  and snooty and Cartesian and quick all at the same time.

  The Nord-Sud metro line ran all the way

  from the tips of my toes to the top of my head

  where it paused and went down again

  and every time it went past Odéon I thought

  of Reverdy and how grumpy

  and suddenly fiery he could be and figured

  he would have no patience with a guy like me

  who had a touch of Max Jaco
b ready

  to leap up and turn an angel into a sad witticism

  about the God Pierre was wrestling with as if

  they were both made of granite. But they weren’t.

  And neither was I, like those who love and have loved

  and are still afraid of the thrill of the beauty of everything that is gone.

  London, 1815

  We go clippety-clop

  because we are horseshoes

  on cobblestones. O

  to be a houseshoe

  in a house

  and resting comfortably

  alongside another houseshoe!

  But the horse clops on,

  our echos echoing

  down a dark alley

  behind a dark house.

  Of Copse and Coppice

  When asked

  if I knew the meaning

  of the word copse c-o-p-s-e

  I said “Of course, it means . . .

  I think it means a field

  or meadow.” One

  of the first poems

  I ever wrote said

  “Where is the copse

  with verdant green?”

  because at age thirteen

  I wanted to use

  words new to me.

  Now copse is new again