A Season in Europe
Go!
Go! Leave
the past behind, this
place behind. Put the
future aside to go.
Elude all grasp
with meaningless forward striding.
Possess and dismiss it all
with distance.
Go! Cut
clean the mess behind, all
thought behind. Float
past garbage in straight white wakes
from Iceland to Denmark. Aim
for aimless, futureless
motion. Ride the elation of
separation through borders
of paper and culture.
Go in order to
Go! Breathe
the new air ahead. Let
new waves break fresh
in the face. Call new
faces to break in your
space. Burst stripped,
pink-skinned through the critical
crowds. Bounce with the assurance
that success doesn’t matter, that
failure doesn’t matter,
that matter itself is uncertain. Suck
emptiness, laughing
through a straw. Savor its
delicious lack of flavor. Reality
is a tired convention, break
free! Tramp, leave at last your
companion and wait no more.
Rip the leaf from Beckett’s bough.
Go! To go.
And see how long
you last.
Two Dreams of Europe (and One of America)
Don’t know what I expected to find
when I got to Europe.
The sun cast the same glow
and the people I didn’t know
cast the same shadow as they turned away.
Don’t know what I expected to feel
in this year in Europe;
I was the same,
yet starting to change.
I long dreamt of castles, cathedrals,
and historic ruins,
not knowing quite why.
Once I was there, I
didn’t know how to control
the Heracleitus film strip
that hitch-hiked through my
eyes, offering images of the E4
from Stockholm to Helsingor,
my view of Sweden shown
as a rerun of rural New York.
The film flickered through
from Tintagel to Belvedere,
muddling on the floor of memory.
Even in the still “I” of the hurricane,
overwhelmed with sound and sight.
Don’t know what I expected to expect.
Was it these changes of self
under oxidized layers
of self-protection?
Still the film rolled on,
whipping through my mind,
spilling sounds and faces,
oceans and places,
wind, height, and freedom
in undreamed of spaces,
into a Medusa tangle,
unlookable and thrilling.
But the raspy voice
of the crippled beggar lady in the Kentish
Town Tube made me want
to keep it a pleasant reverie,
a safe family film, PG thirteen.
Old lovers appeared to haunt
The Tottenham Court Road.
I was tempted to reach out,
but I knew only startled strangers
would turn at my touch.
I still didn’t know what
I knew as the film flapped on the reel.
The hurricane died,
and the “I” fluttered, confused
over whether a hot shower
was a magical event.
Squeezing tight my eyelids to
slow the film, I needed someone again.
So, back to Paris to resurrect her
From the dream-film floor.
Now, six months away,
I open L'Humanité to read
of Kent State shootings
and hard-hat riots as we
her Sevres garret
The America I tried
to leave behind,
reimposes itself in French
phrases I hate to learn.
Five a.m., after huitres and wine,
I begin reluctant withdrawal,
rewinding the images
that no longer excited.
Back through Luxembourg and Reykjavik,
through the night in Penn Station and
the smelly mistake
of North Jersey,
I seek to turn the film strip
Back, moebius, into itself.
Rome, Eternal City
Softly padding emperors
move among the broken columns;
cats are the last inheritors
of Imperial Rome. Sub-terran
is the Senate and the silent forum
where new orgies of inhuman
screeches alarm the senses.
Furry-eyed monks glide solemn
through the final oozing menses
of an underworld that lifts
her skirts to fluted columns,
erect and white. Death’s stench drifts
up from bloody pieces
of rat remains and cats
making frescoes of their feces.
Rome, eternal city,
tourists’ sick Sibyll,
cordoned off from life,
squats in the offal,
straining to die.
Rue Git Le Coeur
A ragged man holding a bottle struggles
with grey newspapers, slugs a drink, pins
two pages with shoeless feet and
smooths more with a trembling
hand. The pages flutter in the breath
of the Metro beneath him,
and cling like tattered wings
to his bony arms. Headlines
shout of the Tet offensive and bombs in Laos.
Notre Dame raises eyebrows in stone shock
at the red seeping Le Monde.
The stench of the man rises
on the warm air of the trains
to the wrinkled noses of passers-by
searching perhaps for nearby Rue Git le Coeur.
Like me, they take pains to ignore
the battered cup the man holds up, then
resume their stroll along the banks
of the romantic, starlit Seine.
Hitching in Dartmoor
Dartmoor floats, a black blood pudding
under cold steam. Vast its brooding
beneath a sky crushing down to my
two wet shoes. It writhes for miles,
suffocating under its own
vapors. With a gag and a groan
the mud tugs at my feet.
Loneliness here is trapped in a skin
of heather that scabs a wound within.
Sheep eyes reflect my introspection,
revealing nothing as I wait in the fog.
Squeezing the road, Dartmoor’s bog
preserves few signs of Roman empire:
a moss-limned stone bridge beside the mire,
a crumbling fort and a broken, tumbled spire,
somber relics of blade and trade.
I could have come for that, or for escape,
from the monotony of my usual day,
but then, a free ride in a Morris Minor
beside a London secretary with a cape
and bells and long, heavy hair, whose
soft beringed hand curled around the wheel.
Three weeks later, the insulting ring
of her unanswered phone. The round dial
mocked and forced me to smile
at futile desires. She would never be in
and I would never phone again.
The warmth in that little car
defied the lonesome mist
that hid the dark and shifting tar.
We stayed ahead of the twist
of dissolving road, and just behind
an opening wedge of light that shined
through to lips I’d leave unkissed.
A fat crow rose from a frayed carcass,
leaving an eyeless lump of wool, blue-dyed
and wet red, as Dartmoor unclutched us.
Rubber kissing road, we passed it by,
portent of a needy call with no reply.
Licking Eyes on New Oxford Street
People bubble out of the stew
and hurtle toward me.
They swell like storm waves
before they foam and trickle by.
The next face rises:
strong nose, hurt mouth, high-style
hair. And eyes that flick up
and fasten on a moment, cupping
my face with a glance, and then,
the eyes that licked my eyes, fall again.
All these lives of silent privation
stream past to some other destination.
We walk with only the touch of eyes
to share a moment of co-location,
to acknowledge the struggle to rise
for another day without meaning.
The uncaring London sky bends
buildings down to hurry the crowd along,
past futile leaflet hands and
buskers wanting a coin for a song.
All warm-tongue efforts to lick love
into city lives must fail.
Eight million dry lives,
sixteen million arid eyes,
and there’s not enough
spit to go around.
Campo de’ Fiore
The somber, hooded statue of Giordano Bruno
overlooks the cobbled square of Campo de’ Fiori.
Cloaked in bronze, head down in sorrow, he must be
jealous of all the life he’s forced to see.
Clustered in the square, hundreds of canopy-
covered stalls droop with worn-out economy,
slack-hipped, like the women who tend
them. Curved canvas shades gleaming
fruit. Yellow and red apples tumble, jostling
geometry in a flaking blue cart. Luminous
carrots bathe in the sun with bright oranges,
their skins peeled back to show
delicate, red-tinted sections. A half-cut
melon swirls bright green and yellow
under a sprinkling of piazza dust,
colors bright against the dark,
corroded statue of Giordano Bruno.
Stained brown and oxidized,
he stares with sightless eyes
at cauliflower that bursts hard white
from dark green fists.
Layers of black mussels are packed
with tightly-curled, elegant scampi.
Silver-dark herring splay in glinting wet
patterns on slabs of ice, obsidian
eyes dulling in the Roman heat like the memory
of a life that meant less than his philosophy.
Shelled oysters nestle next to a bright lemon.
Eggs—beige, white, and brown— huddle in
rhythmic curves. A man in a splattered apron
chats with long-skirted, laughing women,
oblivious to the shapes and colors around them.
But, with their splotched trousers and gaudy
scarfs, they are part of the market-day
scene. A whiskered old woman sitting
on a crate cuts onions for a salad, stinging
the air. Fingers flash and pale crescents
drop onto the pyramid she’s building.
A life of such sights, tastes, and scents meant
less to Bruno than truth, belief and honor.
Twists of smoke rise from fires to struggle
against the breeze. A child teases a mongrel
with a stick to the unsteady beat of the
butchers at their blocks. Dark sides of beef
look brown next to the honey-combed pink
of freshly hung lung. Head down in naked grief,
chickens sag in resignation. A quick pinch
removes a spearing’s head, showing a housewife
wet freshness. “Buy a dozen for a real bargain.”
Back and forth, haggling, joking voices rise
above the square’s weed-filled fountain
where the Holy Inquisition ended lives.
Giordano Bruno broods as the sounds ascend.
His bronze eyes resent the busy square
where tied him to a stake for his refusal to bend
to days of torture. Stubbornly, he declared
his rejection of eternal damnation.
Life, he said, goes on in reincarnation.
Convicted of heresy, he told them,
“You who sentence me
are in greater fear than I.” So, he
flared like the fires toasting bread today
and stank like the scraps the butchers toss away.
Sala D’Attessa
The high-pitched whine
of a weak fluorescent light
pins indifferent time,
a dead butterfly, on dry-
mouthed cotton.
Across the cold tile
floor, impatient trousers
cross and uncross and cross
again the other way.
On a battered wooden bench,
three grey-whiskered men slouch.
Without a word, they clench
hand-rolled cigarettes in mouths
that flex, curl into themselves, then
settle again into masks.
“Tout a l’heure, Michele!”
I’d said with a farewell smile
after dinner at Taverna Roffel.
She had a sweet half-smile
and pale taches de rousseur.
We’d been happy for a while,
our time together a sensual blur.
Now without her, time has slowed:
More than three hours to wait,
longing again for our time together.
The touch of skin and salt taste
of blush-warm breasts. But for her
the train came too soon,
and for me, too late.
Opposite, eyes unfocused, against
the dullness. What might we have done
before took the train to Florence!
Through the clock’s slow-moving reflection
on the glass door, steel rails blink in the snow,
cold reminders of the distance still to go.
I gave up too soon. “Adieu.”
and her last request fell
unanswered: “As tu un feu?”
Across from me, a carabiniere
warms his hands at the cold radiator.
And I try to carry matches now,
even though I don’t smoke.
To Aunt Lilly Who Gave Twenty Bucks
My arms rose slowly after her weight,
rose silly and empty in the cool dark air.
Why did she have to drink so much?
Too many giggling toasts:
to Rome, city of love.
to Aunt Lilly who gave me twenty bucks
to enjoy in Europe.
to us, young and alive.
She had to be happy and had
to prove it with all that wine,
all that giddy talk.
But finally
to puke it all into the Tiber,
to purge herself of my partially
digested, wholly inadequate affection.
Why did she need more than I could give?
To search for the hand jammed in my pocket?
To refuse the only bits I could toss her?
Why did she have to drink so much?
To show my refusal to commit,
my lack of love didn’t matter?
Now she leans into me
as we walk down the Via d’Arenula.
I ignore the pale magnificence
of the Vittariano and the
broken charm of the ruins--
the sights, eyes are focused at last
on the warm wet nape
of a drunk girl’s neck.
Home Again
I lie in a bed too-soft,
awake with worry
because the family fridge
tried to eat me today.
Double pastel Electrolux
jaws swung swiftly shut—
rrrrr CHOMP!
Only reflex memories of Métro
doors saved me.
Throughout a sleet-gray day
I walked the smooth streets
that curl past trimmed lawns
and spacious split-level homes
in my frigid boyhood town.
No crowds, no beggars,
no music, warmth or light
spilling from basement bars,
no ruins heavy with history.
The suburbs are the same,
but feel foreign when seen
through eyes now changed.
Winter wind sighs
through a window
I forgot to close.
In my Kentish town bedsit,
I would pop another shilling in
the glowing space heater.
In that Alpine hotel, my
friends and I would snuggle
under a down-filled duvet.
Outside the Arsenal grounds,
I would sip warm Watney Red
Barrel with Brode and Tommy,
still flushed by a winning goal.
But here,
in appliance-dense America,
I’m a chilly stranger
in my own home.
I try to tell old friends
my stories of travel,
of ruins and accents
of wine and music,
of loves found and lost,
of poems written and tossed—
but their eyes glaze,
and the talk moves on to
the hunt for jobs,
grad school hopes,
anti-war marches,
draft lottery numbers,
and plans to marry—
all the stuff of “real life”
now unreal to me.
Why was it so hard
to go home again?
Had I traveled so long,
seen and felt so much that
I’ve lost my way, like Wolfe
in Time and Memory?
Would my Season be,
like Rimbaud’s, the last
words I’d ever write?
So, I huddle, fearful and
freezing, dreaming of
people and places
already slipping away.
I shiver with dislocation and
memory gone cold.
I long for warmth but
the wires of my electric blanket
tangle my feet, and I’m
afraid to switch it on.
Go!
Go! Leave
The past behind, this
place behind. Put the
future aside to go.
Elude all grasp
with meaningless forward striding.
Possess and dismiss it all
with distance.
Go! Cut
Clean the mess behind, all
thought behind. Float
past garbage in straight white wakes
from Iceland to Denmark. Aim
for aimless, futureless
motion. Ride the elation of
separation through borders
of paper and culture.
Go in order to
Go! Breathe
the new air ahead. Let
new waves break fresh
in the face. Call new
faces to break in your
space. Burst stripped,
pink-skinned through the critical
crowds. Bounce with the assurance
that success doesn’t matter, that
failure doesn’t matter,
that matter itself is uncertain. Suck
emptiness, laughing
through a straw. Savor its
delicious lack of flavor. Reality
is a tired convention, break
free! Tramp, leave at last your
companion and wait no more.
Rip the leaf from Beckett’s bough.
Go! To go.
And see how long
you last.
Licking Eyes on New Oxford Street
Individuals burst out of the fudge
Of faces and hurtle toward me.
They balloon twice ludicrous with speed
Before smashing against my face.
They foam and trickle by while
the next face rises and grows traits:
Strong nose, hurt mouth, high-style
Hair. And eyes that flick up
To fasten on a moment, to cup
My face with a glance and then
The eyes that licked my eyes fall again.
All these lives of silent privation
Stream past to some other destination.
We walk with only the touch of eyes
To share momentary co-location,
To acknowledge the joy-soft cries
In the morning, and the shared silence
In the night. The small London sky bends
The buildings down to hurry the crowd along,
Past the futile leaflet hands and
The buskers wanting a coin for a song.
All warm tongue efforts to smooth moisture
Into city lives must fail. Eight million lives
Dry, sixteen million dry-lived, dusty eyes
And there’s just not enough
Spit to go around.
Dartmoor
Dartmoor
floats, a black blood pudding
under cold steam. Vast its brooding
beneath a sky crushing to within my
two wet feet. It writhes for miles,
suffocating under the its own
vapours. The alien surface sucks in
my straying feet with a gagging sound.
The loneliness here is trapped,
trapped loneliness in a struggling skin
of heather that scabs a wound within.
Dull sheep stares are reflection of introspection
that reveals nothing in the choking fog.
The soft and changing bog
preserves Roman signs of empire:
a wavering stone bridge beside the mire,
a delicate relic of blade and trade.
I could have come for that, or for escape
from the dull monotony of modern day,
but now it’s a free ride in a Morris Minor
beside a London secretary with a cape
And bells and long, heavy hair, whose
hand curled beringed around the wheel.
(Three weeks later, the insulting ring
Of her unanswered phone. The round dial
mocked with a gap-toothed smile
at my hopes. She would never be in
and I never called again.)
The warmth in that little car
chattered metallic defiance of the mist
that hid the twisting tar.
We stayed just ahead of the
dissolving road, just behind the
opening wedge of light ahead.
A fat crow rose grudgingly from a frayed
Carcass, leaving eyeless wool blue-dyed
and wet red as Dartmoor unclutched us,
as rubber kissing road, we leave it behind.
Rue Git Le Coeur
A ragged man struggling
with grey newspapers, pins
two pages with his feet and
smooths some more with trembling
hands. The pages flutter in the breath
of the Metro and cling like wounded wings
to his silhouetted arms. Notre Dame
raises eyebrows in stone shock
at the red wine seeping
Le Monde.
The stench of the man is lifted
with the warm air of the trains
To be noticed, noses wrinkled, by
passers-by search for nearby
Git le Coeur.
Like me, they pretend to ignore
the battered cup the man holds up,
turning along the stone-walled shore
of the Seine.
Rome, Eternal City
Softly padding emperors
Move at dusk among the broken columns;
Cats are the last inheritors
Of Imperial Rome. Sub-terran
Is the Senate and the silent forum
Where new orgies of inhuman
Screeches alarm the senses.
Furry-eyed monks glide solemn
Through the last oozing menses
Of an underworld that lifts
Her skirts to fluted columns
Erect and white. A stench drifts
Lazily up from bloody pieces
Of rat spaghetti and cats
Making frescoes in their feces.
Rome, eternal city,
Tourists’ sick Sibyll,
Is cordoned off from life,
Squatting in the offal,
Straining to die.
Campo di Fiore
Clustering the square, hundreds of canopy
covered stalls droop with aged economy,
slack-hipped like the women who tend
them. The curved canvas covers send
shade over a gleaming palette of fruit
and square pans of salmon en cruite.
Yellow, green and red apples tumble,
jostling geometry in a flaking blue barrel.
Translucent carrots bathe in the sun
with bright oranges and crimson
strawberries ripened to sangria red.
Half-cut melons lie green and spread
under plastic sheets against the piazza dust.
Cauliflower bursts hard white from green
fingers. Layers of black mussels between
layers of ice, and elegant scampi. Silver
dark herring splay gaping in duller
patterns on green leaves, their obsidian
eyes drying in the harsh Roman sun.
Scabby shelled oysters are displayed with bright
Waxed lemons. Eggs, beige, brown, and white,
huddle in rhythmed curves in a box. Aproned
men and long-skirted women stretched and yawned,
oblivious to the shapes and colors in the square.
But, with the gaudy clothes they wear,
they too are part of the market day eye feast.
A whiskered old woman, hunched and sitting
on a crate, cuts greens into salad, stinging
the air with onion. Fingers flash and pale crescents
drop onto the pyramid she’s building.
Twists of smoke rise from crate-fueled fires to struggle
With the breeze. A tousled child teases a mongrel
with a sausage on a stick to the unsteady beat of
the butchers at their blocks. Dark red sides of
beef look brown next to the honey-combed crimson
of fresh hung lung. Head down chickens sag in
naked resignation. A quick pinch and a spearing’s
head pops off, showing fresh to a dubious housewife.
A babble of voices rise in slanging confusion
above the square’s weed-filled fountain.
Philosopher Giordano Bruno broods bronze-eyed on the square,
content perhaps with the jumble of life where
he was tied to a stake for his refusal to bend
to the Holy Inquisition, rejecting eternal damnation.
Instead he believed that life went on in reincarnation.
Sentenced to burn, he said, “You who pronounce this
my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.”
So, he flared like the wood shavings toasting slices
of buttered bread in the market today
and stank a while like scraps the butchers toss away.
Salla di Attessa
The high-pitched whine
Of a weak fluorescent light
Pins time,
A dead butterfly, to dry-
Mouthed cotton.
Across the hard empty
Floor, down-cornered mouths
Flex, curl into themselves and settle
Again into masks.
“Tout a l’heure, Michele!”
But our turning away smiles are stiff
Before dinner at Taverna Roffel.
Across the cold tile
Floor, impatient trousers
Cross and uncross and cross
Again the other way.
She had a sweet half-smile
And pale tache de rouseur,
Finger a feather, three hours to wait
An blush-warm breasts, but for her
The train comes too early, and for me,
Too late.
Opposite eyes wait unfocused, nestled
In dullness. Pace the floor
While waiting for the train to Florence.
Through the clock’s reflection on the
Door, steel lines blink in the snow
Blinded by the electric lights.
We give in too easily, saying “Adieu.
And the last friendly request falls
Empty: “As tu un feu?”
Across from me the carabinieri
Cracking his knuckles has given up
Warming his hands at the cold
Radiator.
And I
Try to carry matches now,
Even though I don’t smoke.
To Aunt Lilly Who Gave Twenty Bucks
My arms rose slowly after her weight
Rose silly and empty in the cool dark air.
So, why did she have to drink so much?
To Rome
To Aunt Lilly who gave twenty bucks
To being happy finally
To puke it all into the Tiber
To purge herself of my partially
Digested politeness.
To us,
Young, together in Rome we must be happy
To provi it
With all that wine
All that giddy talk
Ending with a two thousand lire tip
For the mess in the taxi.
So, why did she have to need more than we had?
To search for the hand jammed in my pocket?
To refuse the bits I threw her.
So she had to drink so muh
To show indifference didn’t matter
And because the wine was good
Now walking back down the Via d’Arenula
I’m awed by the cool white magnificence
Of the Vitteriano and the
Broken anarchic beauty of the ruins.
I must stuff it all down under the
Worship of a warm wet nape
Of a drunk girl’s neck.
Refrigerator Affluence
I’m worried,
Lying here in bed,
Really worried, ‘cause
The new family Frigidaire
Tried to eat me today.
Suddenly double pastel
Jaws swung shut—rrrrr CHOMP!
Only reflex memories of the Metro
Saved me. Probably
Didn’t recognize me
Been away too long.
Now I’m fearful and
Cold in Jersey January,
Afraid to trust my electric blanket.
Two Dreams of Europe (and One of America)
I don’t know what I expected to find
When I got to Europe.
The sun was the same
And the people
That I didn’t know
Seemed the same, walking away.
I don’t know what I expected to feel
In this dream of Europe,
But I was the same
It seems, yet strange.
I long dreamed of Europe
Without knowing quite why.
Once I was there I
Didn’t know how to control
the Heracleitus film strip
that hitch-hiked through my
eyes, pulling the images
through in stretches of the E4
from Helsignor to Stockholm.
(I didn’t expect my dream of Sweden
To start as a rerun of rural New York)
I just kept on pulling the images through
From Tintagel to Belvedere,
Letting it muddle on the floor of memory,
Dream colors streaming with light show
Sense, swaying a broken British beat and the
Bright, liquid eyes of Amsterdam at night.
Even in the calm I of the hurricane,
I didn’t know what I expected to expect.
Was it these changes of self
That oxidized under layers
Of dried self-protection?
Still the film rolled on
Whipping through my mind with
The elation of a mad projectionist,
Spilling sounds and faces,
Oceans and places,
Wind and height, freedom
In undreamed of space, spilling
Into a Medusa tangle,
Unlookable, wonderful.
But the raspy voice
Of the crippled beggar lady in the Kentish
Town Tube made me want
To keep it a dream,
A safe family film.
Then old friends began walking the
Tottenham Court Road, but
Only strangers turned to my touch.
I still didn’t know what
I knew as the film flapped on the reel,
The hurricane died,
And the calm I fluttered, confused
Over whether a hot shower really
Was a magical event.
Squeezing tight my eyelids to
Slow the film, I needed find someone again.
So, back to Paris to resurrect her
From the dream floor
Now, six months away,
I read about the Berrigans
In French in her Sevres garret
And America is fainter than
A dream, but waiting.
Five a.m., after huitres and wine,
I finally begin to return
Through all the unknown
Expectations, through new images
No longer exciting –
Through Luxembourg and Reykavik
Through the night in Penn station and
The steel smoke mistake
Of North Jersey,
Turning the film back moebius
Into itself.