May the Stores Be Better Where You Are

Among other things, this short piece is actually an homage to the New Jersey of my childhood, even though it pretends it isn't. It originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of The Pinch. I think I'm going to read it tomorrow night in Ohio, where I'm reading with Mark at Cleveland State. In the coming days, I hope I'll be able to pass on some pictures of the Lake and other Clevelandish curiosities.

And now I must get this tired self to bed.

* * *

Two Guys

When you lost what you remembered, New Jersey became as tired as they said it was, and childhood sprang traps, ready to bite into the skin of our ankles. Will we get it back? Maybe it’s a relief that we’ve left it behind, and we can both give thanks for this bout of forgetfulness. I never really missed Two Guys as much as I missed you. The automatic doors, the trading stamps, the blinding interior, monstrous as a spaceship: you deserve better than nostalgia. There’s always more to give our lives to, even if we thought we’d landed at the end of the world. May the stores be better where you are. May you not waste a single second thinking about what you should or shouldn’t buy. And if you should hear a boy calling for his mother by the record department, walk on. He’s doing much better than you think, really. He owes you that. The songs are blue and glistening, even if he has a hard time making sense of them from here.


Click here for vintage Two Guys TV commercial.

Immensities

Early yesterday, Mark climbed up the ladder on the south side of the house to find an immense zucchini on the roof, hiding inside the vine spangling the chimney. It had already cracked of its own weight at the stem. Still, what a thing to find, with its hard green rind and spongy dry interior, fleshy with seeds, vaguely sweet, vaguely useless. A little like a brain gone haywire. A Moby Dick of a zucchini, a vegetable torpedo, a tusk. More life and more life and more.

Here's an immensity of another sort: the Niagara Falls passage from Salvatore Scibona's The End, which I'm teaching this week. The paperback is due out on October 6.

from The End
Salvatore Scibona

The titanic physical dimensions of this place gave to the movement of any small ting, any merely human-life-sized thing, an illusion of supernatural slowness. The Canadian cars on the opposite lip of the canyon seemed at best to be creeping. Any splash, any arbitrarily chosen patch of water you followed into the cloud below, appeared not to fall (since what could take so long falling?) but to drift leisurely down the face of the cataract. A few clouds overhead and these other clouds, what a shock, drifting up into the sky. And down by the base of the falls the clouds were so thick as to obscure completely his view of where the falling water made impact with the river itself, giving him the impression that the water wasn't descending into the river at all but into a befogged chasm, where it was swallowed up and annihilated. Raw senses were not to be believed in this place. And he had to ask himself if the unchanging physical rules that governed small things in fact changed radically in the face of a really big thing. As in, if he dropped a newspaper into the river up here it might turn into a flamingo by the time it got to the bottom of the falls. Next to him the river was clean, green, fat, and fast. Down there, postfall, it was blue and teemed with hills of brown scum. A knee-high sycamore sapling, very still, only one leaf ashiver, grew not six inches from a current that could have thrown a truck over the cliff's edge. Somehow, a little upstream of the falls, these brave, industrious people had managed to build a bridge over this arm of the river, had managed to sink the pylons into the rapids, and couples were walking hand in hand in yellow rubber rain slicks over the bridge toward Goat Island, which split the Niagara River into two arms, one falling over the Horsehoe Falls, the other over the American. A mile off to his right, downriver of the falls, another, far longer bridge spanned the gulf, hundreds of feet above the water, connecting the second-and fourth-largest nations in the world. He put a nickel in a binocular telescope and aimed it at the bridge and saw a kid throw--was it popcorn?--into the wind and hang his hand over the rail to watch it fall.

Crashing and Active

The picture above is from the top floor of the Port O' Call Hotel in Ocean City, New Jersey, where we stayed after the reading last night. Ocean City is, by and large, a place that wants to be more casual and comfortable than dramatic, so when we walked into the room and saw that view down the coast, we both-- gasped? Well, some burst of enthusiasm came out of our mouths. I'm not sure this shot is exactly gasp-inducing (height, light, distance: none of that comes across here) but I loved the sound of the surf up there, crashing and active.

The reading at the Arts Center in town turned out to be sweet. Mark read poems right off his laptop, so new he hadn't printed them out. I read work from the new manuscript, Unbuilt Projects, and two sections from Famous Builder set in Ocean City. The audience was kind, appreciative. Eager to laugh. But intense too. During the reading my mind wandered to my mother, who had loved Ocean City and spent her childhood summers there. Many of the touchstones of her youth--The Music Pier, Shrivers, The Flanders--are still intact. She would have loved to have been there. I also thought of Denise, who had loved Ocean City too, who even wrote a novel set in a fictionalized version of the place. Just last month, on August 1st, she'd talked about coming to the reading, so from the podium I couldn't help but think of how it would have felt to see her looking back at me. Instead, though, her brother Joe and sister-in-law Nancy were there, as were her friends Ron and Jean Block. On the way out, Nancy said she'd had a box for us. Inside was Denise's collection of Blue Willow, which she'd wanted us to have. We hugged, got quiet. We said good night. Back inside the hotel room, Mark and I opened up the box. There she was in bowl and saucer and dish between layers of tissue paper, fill-air, and bubble wrap. We passed the pieces back and forth. We didn't say too much. I was aware of the sound of the surf through the crack in the window.

A Small Animal in a Plaid Night

Today just happens to be the one-year anniversary of this blog. I'd like to say thank you for tuning in to these posts and pass along this sweet poem from my friend Michael Carter, who sent this to me tonight. A present to me, a present to you.

(The building below is in our backyard in Springs: one half my study, the other half our storage room. I wanted to get a shot of the garden while it was still leafy and green. Note insane zucchini vine, which wants to eat up the house.

And, yes, I did give a reading in Amherst on the night of Michael Jackson's death, but didn't know that till afterward.)

Off to Ocean City for the reading tonight!

* * * * *

Paul is at the Lectern
Michael Carter

Ardent translators, the nasturtiums
     eagerly listen to today’s dispatch
sending up orange periscopes
     of understanding. What is the purpose
of their beauty? Bright safely flares
     above lily-pad leaves. Once a Cape breeze
lifted all the lily-pads from a pond’s
     bald pate like a scene from a move
all at once a shadow peek underneath.
     The garden’s middle age spread
yields all this ground cover
     wispy back hairs shamed
into an industry. Moving through life
     or simply turned around on Amherst’s back streets
listening to the radio, looking
     for the lecture hall. I ran in
desperately needing to pee. Michael
     Jackson’s death was just announced and
thunderstorms threatened a rain: turbid
     drive home with streaky windshield wipers
offer erasing moments of clarity. Then suddenly
     Paul is at the lectern resolving all things.
Two buttons nipped in the sleeves of his shirt
     peering from the pattern, the eyes
of a small animal in a plaid night watching
     everything that I can’t; like the slow creepage
of the nasturtium’s cress pungent
     in salads or folded together with butter
for a peppery spread.

The Tree Tries The First Yellows It Thinks Of

Autumn on a Small Tree
from Expectation Days
Sandra McPherson

After shyness,
I grew to offer almost anything in public.
But that valor--

abashment will track it down; I've wanted
razors for some meant
display of awe. And spontaneity

earns reconsiderations,
pooling of reflections,
talented to drown.

I don't know if the tree,
its fifth autumn,
still tenses with surprise.

Or becomes kinder
--that sometimes saves one--
befriends the imperceptive air.

But there is no more privacy finally.
The tree tries the first yellows it thinks of,
then revises, revises, in front of all.

I think I've seen it let
the leaves it hasn't grown yet
fall first.

Fresh Pond, Amagansett: September 20, 2009, 7:00 PM

Here's Katell Keineg's concert version of Nick Drake's "River Man":

River Man - Katell Keineg

Who Knew?

From Cartier-Bresson:

The photographer must try to make people forget about him, sense things that are revealed in a fleeting moment, catch the instant when a person in a setting comes face to face with himself, and delicately slide the camera between the shirt and the skin. I never give instructions to the person in front of me; it is up to me to move around, and I often want to say: ‘I’m not here, just be yourself.’

I don't know who took this photo of my late friend Denise, but she's entirely here: "beyond time and place and condition" to quote Flannery O'Connor. "Face to face with [her]self" is another way to put it. The child is here. The adult is here. Vulnerability and expectation. Sweetness, melancholy, intelligence. Humor too. Just about everything I knew is in that face, even though it was taken when she was 21, in 1973, ten years before we first met at Rutgers. I'm trying to get my head around the fact that she'll have been gone one month this coming Tuesday. It still seems a shock to lay that down in text; a large part of me still refuses it. (Shouldn't there be a new email from her waiting in my inbox?) But going for a run first thing this morning felt significant. First run since her death. First run since my mother's death back in May. Who knew the body wanted to be in motion?

Should I Come in with that Back Beat?

From the September 21st issue of the New Yorker...

***
Alternate Take: Levon Helm
Tracy K. Smith

I've been beating my head all day long on the same six lines,
Snapped off and whittled to nothing like the nub of a pencil
Chewed up and smoothed over, yellow paint flecking my teeth.

And this whole time a hot wind's been swatting down my door,
Spat from his mouth and landing smack against my ear.
All day pounding the devil out of six lines and coming up dry

While he drives donuts through my mind's back woods with that
Dirt-road voice of his, kicking up gravel like a runaway Buick.
He asks Should I come in with that back beat, and whatever those

Six lines were bothered by skitters off like water in hot grease.
Come in with your lips stretched tight and that pig-eyed grin,
Bass mallet socking it to the drum. Lay it down like you know

You know how, shoulders hiked nice and high, chin tipped back,
So the song has to climb its way out like a man from a mine.

I See My Light Come Shining

Bel Air, Caribbean, Royal Hawaiian, Singapore, Shalimar, Suitcase

Here, the motels of Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, courtesy of my brother, Michael. The local term for these designs is Doo-
Wop, though I'm not exactly sure the look summons up Dion and the Belmonts or the Del Satins for me. I hear something closer to the Jetsons theme. Frances Faye. Definitely Rat Pack, but humbler.

Interestingly, Wikipedia suggests a range of more precise descriptions, substyles coming into use: Vroom, Pu-Pu Platter, and Phony Colonee.

FYI: Mark and I are reading together on Friday, September 25th, at the Ocean City Arts Center, which is 25 miles up the road from Wildwood Crest. Yes, the same Ocean City of my youth. And one of Arden's favorite places in old age.

Jetsons theme song - Jetsons theme song

I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate - Frances Faye

Now and Then I Call Your Name and Suddenly Your Face Appears

A House is Not a Home
in Callaloo and in The Best American Poetry 2009
Terrance Hayes

It was the night I embraced Ron's wife a bit too long
because he'd refused to kiss me goodbye
that I realized the essential nature of sound.
When she slapped me across one ear,
and he punched me in the other, I recalled,
almost instantly, the purr of liquor sliding
along the neck of the bottle a few hours earlier
as the three of us took turns imitating the croon
of the recently-deceased Luther Vandross.
I decided then, even as my ears fattened,
to seek employment at the African-American
Acoustic and Audiological Accident Insurance Institute,
where probably there is a whole file devoted
to Luther Vandross. And probably it contains
the phone call he made to ask a niece
the whereabouts of his very first piano.
I already know there is a difference
between hearing and listening,
but to get the job, I bet I will have to learn
how to transcribe church fires or how to categorize
the dozen or so variations of gasping, one which
likely includes Ron and me in the eighth grade
the time a neighbor flashed her breasts at us.
That night at Ron's house I believed he, his wife,
and Luther loved me more than anything
I could grasp. "I can't believe you won't kiss me,
you're the gayest man I know!" I told him
just before shackling my arms around his wife.
"My job is all about context," I will tell friends
when they ask. "I love it, though most days
all I do is root through noise like a termite
with a number on his back. "What will I steal?
Rain falling on a picket sign, breathy epithets--
you think I'm bullshitting. When you have no music,
everything becomes a form of music. I bet
somewhere in Mississippi there is a skull
that only a sharecropper's daughter can make sing.
I'll steal that sound. More than anything,
I want to work at the African-American
Acoustic and Audiological Accident Insurance Institute
so that I can record the rumors and raucous rhythms
of my people, our jangled history, the slander
in our sugar, the ardor in our anger, a subcategory
of which probably includes the sound particular to one
returning to his feet after a friend has knocked him down.

House is not a home - Luther Vandross

My Dove

Madoo is "my dove" in Old Scots, and it's the name of painter Robert Dash's garden in Sagoponack. We'd been wanting to go for months, but it wasn't quite the summer of rest and refreshment. Luckily, we made it before the leaves changed. Sometimes standing inside someone's quirky vision is exactly what you need, though you might not know it until you're there. We weren't exactly ourselves for that little while, but there might be a better way to put it. Let's just say it was like being in a novel, or inside a book of poems. Contained in space and time. A vehicle for the senses. The gate, the bench, the fountain, the ginkgo, the tractor through the parting in the trees.