These are new poems from my forthcoming book. They've previously been published
in Poetry, Partisan Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Ontario Review, and Pivot.
WHAT HAPPENED
What happened to Mozart who sang like a bird
More golden than Yeats’ imagination wrought,
Where is Shakespeare’s passionate thought,
Does his ghost pace on Hamlet’s stage?
And what of Dante who consigned to Hell
His former friends who did not treat him well?
Where is Sophocles whose simple myth
Became the basis of psychoanalysis.
And Freud who smoked his mouth to death,
What happened to him, to his depth
Of soul – is it lying like a clay shard
In an earthen hole, and poor Dylan Thomas
Who ranted “Death shall have no dominion,”
Knowing he lied, or the Brothers Grimm,
What became of them, dust in sunlight
Turned like a clock – watch it long enough
And you’ll go mad, or Paganini
Whose fingers danced and women swooned,
Or Gower, or Chaucer who made
Such exquisite mixes of English and French
The birds that slepen al with open eye
Would weep to hear the Earth took him?
What happened to Donne who would have us listen
To sermons about our limitations,
And Boccacio, a name to stuff in your mouth
As a squirrel stuffs nuts when fall leaves redden?
What of Herbert with his convictions of heaven
And Apollinaire, that fantastic name,
Verlaine, Villon, Baudelaire, names
That once strode Paris, and Renoir, Cezanne?
What happened to Picasso, where did he go,
And Marc Chagall who would live forever,
And Michelangelo upside down,
Painting all night like a motley clown,
And Jane Austen, so precise about the minutiae
Of interactions, where is her flesh
With its intricate cells,
And Emily Dickinson who lived alone
As if time never happened.
What happened to Einstein,
His brain in a jar,
And Galileo, Copernicus, Blake?
Put them together and what do you make
Of these disappeared, where did they go?
We know but we are too timid to say,
Of Whitman who whistled his own way,
Hands in his pockets, ready to loaf,
Or Frost that dark and folksy man,
Beckett waiting in a garbage can.
All these geniuses and little you
With a pen in your hand, a non-believing Jew,
What of your life, where did it go?
It passed in an instant. Oh.
TO MY YOUNGER SELF
The past is like a library after dark
Where we sit on the steps trading stories
With characters we imagined ourselves to be.
Neighbors in clothing from our childhood stroll by,
Unmolested, nodding at us, benevolently.
One with your father’s face tips his fedora.
You lower your face in shame. I look back.
Someone is sitting at a long table,
Reading in the moonlight. I must look startled.
He holds a forefinger to his lips,
As if it is a candle for the dead.
You tap me on the shoulder and I turn back.
The street is dangerously empty,
Except for the newsstand lit yellow
Where your mother in a blue nightgown
Showing beneath her coat buys The Times,
A pack of Kools and, eyeing us, lights one.
You race to her, turn a corner. Goodbye.
I’m frightened as if I’m a foreigner
In a city under siege. Yet I know
It is still mid-century. Underground
Are only subways carrying boisterous
Party-goers or somber family men
Working the night shift or harmless bookies
Respectful of the No Smoking signs.
I walk to where the newsstand, shut,
Advertises brand names I’d forgotten.
I shove my hands in my pockets and whistle
A song we danced to when we were young.
I walk on for blocks, until I smell
Smoke from the burning borough of the Bronx.
TWENTIETH CENTURY
A winter evening under a John Sloan El.
Fedoras tilt in unison against the wind.
The pink neon lights of a Polish bar
Invite Grandpa in, while my son
Does pushups on the rug, and I chin
In my mother’s kitchen, and my uncle
Argues he could beat Willie Pep
If Grandpa would let him turn pro. I burn
In his disappointment, forty years ago.
Now Grandpa comes brawling into the street
And, arm-weary, staggers home on schnapps
And sits me down to watch Sugar Ray dance
Till he turns into Counting Crows, and my son
In my uncle’s pecks flexes in the window
Where stenos in thin coats huddle against the snow.
One of them my mother, seeing my unborn face
In a taxi, hails it and rushes home.
SEPARATION
I ran out of the house
The world said Boo
I ran back to the house
My mother said I
I ran out of the house
The world said Die
I ran back to the house
My mother said Why
I ran out of the house
The world said Who
I ran back to the house
My mother said Lie
I ran out of the house
The world said Dread
I ran back to the house
My mother was dead.
OTHERS
There is a timeless world in which they live,
In which old wounds are healed, right paths are taken,
In which they get exactly what they give,
In which they’re loved and pampered, not forsaken.
Some waited too long to have a child,
Some to marry, crumple a dull career,
Some to leave a spouse whose voice was mild
But whittled down their soul from year to year
And some turned wooden in their smiles and tongues
And some paced fragile hour to room to hour
And some took fire and smoke inside their lungs
And turned to powder in their office tower.
Oh, time ticks even in the infant’s caul,
On mourners’ wristwatches despite the Dead.
Somewhere God weeps, sorry for them all,
For what He’s written, and for what She’s said.
I sometimes see The God in Auschwitz smoke.
For years I watched Him fight internal fires.
At times I heard Her as a dirty joke
Old cronies told, maddened by desire
For sex and celebration, holy zest
For golden faith they’d swipe from churches,
Spilling with red wine, Montalcino’s best,
For what intrigue can’t seize, mere cash can’t purchase:
The intimations in the dawning light
That waken in a poet freed from time
Only when passionate, when the mind is right,
Only when stressed, when the soul must scan and rhyme.
SPRING MUSIC
(in memory of Egon Dumler)
Philip, Billy, Roger, Bob, and Ted
Won’t see this spring, or any other season.
There’s not one pair of eyes among the dead.
Spring’s rhythmical and rhymed, devoid of reason.
The birds are trilling bits of Bach and Brahms.
The vines are improvising drafts of psalms.
The seemingly senescent cherry trees
Open fresh flowers, pink and white and red
For our gardener listening, eyes closed, on his knees
As if they’re whole notes rising from the dead.
The sky insists it’s innocently blue,
That nothing happened, Egon, not to you.
copyright frederick feirstein 2008
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