PAUL GRANGER'S WOUND
You were the smallest, Paul—
the shortest, leanest, blondest, bravest
in our crew—and you have retreated less far
into darkness. I remember the day
that would etch your wound into my mind,
each catch and notch of memory glistening
with your blood. There was bright sunlight
and deep blue sky a blaze of white roses
and the dark gray haze of the new state road
the highway commission had bulldozed
into our lives.
You were wearing a round-necked polo shirt
and rolled-up jeans, a black leather belt
and high-backed sneakers. Zigzag stripes crested
on your chest in vertical waves that flowed
from neck to groin: a map of some watery terrain
no friend or parent could decipher. I remember
how the dark blue denim rippled over your thighs,
the lapping rivulets at your knees, the way
your gold-brown hair was parted. At our water hole
between parkway and woods, your clothes
dropped off
and you dove into the cold spring water all of us
knew to be sacred: a dark pool released
from the dictates of nature where we could breathe
without constraint without the harsh odor of fear
or desire stinging our nostrils. You dove
and we cheered, living for the moment in the rare oxygen
of the underlife you had plunged into feeling again
the icy water of time wash over us. And then you
broke the spell, bursting the surface as you held up
your hand, gashed open with that raw diagonal slash
that even now, five decades later,
wildly pulses—that wound written deep in your flesh
with the jagged edge of glass from a smashed
beer bottle—your ruined hand held up for us to witness
in all its bloody splendor your wound, Paul: the sky
ripped open just when we needed it whole.
MISS CURTIN
Marguerite Curtin, 68, was found clubbed
to death in her Ozone Park home Tuesday.
—1995
She must have been sleeping
that dark evening in November
or reading in her upstairs bedroom,
drifting on a tide of words, then
swimming with the black but moon-
struck current all the way down river.
She must have been lulled by the rush
and propulsion of language, so that she
could hear nothing extraneous nothing
below the surge and murmur of the pulsing
stream, nothing above the moan and pitch
of it. One thing is clear: she didn't hear
her murderer enter, didn't hear
when he clicked on the TV or, later, climbed
the stairs: immersed as she was in the books
she loved, she let the world float away.
Why would she wake when death entered?
* *
I remember her in her brightness,
how she stood in the stark landscape
of the classroom, winsome and matronly,
at once. Her starched white blouse,
though buttoned to the throat,
could not conceal the rise and fall
of her breasts. We called her "Ma" Curtin,
though she was still in her early 30s.
Archetypal 'schoolmarm,' she forgave
our ignorance while encouraging
the tiniest sparks of wit and insight.
How we relished her sternness:
in her casual displays of anger or irony,
we read the grace notes of affection.
I recall her pale Irish face, her sharp tongue
and short temper, but also her nosebleeds
that taught us she, too, was vulnerable,
only older and more complete. Who knew—
if we kept hammering away at our lessons,
one day, we might shine like her and live.
DANCING WITH BOB AT TEMPLE BETHEL
We had no girls
but there were songs—
rock music beating our feet awake
"Bony Maroney" made our bodies shake
"The Twist" and "Shout"
drew the poisons out
Temple dances
were where we went to pray
and Bob would spin and wriggle like a saint
turned on a spit above unholy fire
and I would rescue him with kicks and splits
that calmed his fever for a little while
We two had sensed that dancing
eased the pain that adolescence spiked
into our brains so that we howled for love
that wouldn't arrive Like wolves,
we prowled the darkest nights
until rock music struck our lives again
like jags of lightning from a summer storm
How many boys learned worship
at the dance
and lived to love and nurture
as grown men? Bob and I would dance
until our legs couldn't stand
our feet couldn't walk our gasps wouldn't end
We danced ourselves alive and then
we danced again.
A FAMILY OUTING
Long Island, Early 1950s
A summer day and Mom gets lost
on the parkway It's getting late:
the time when shadows gather One
more turn, and we're at Pilgrim State
In the back seat, Harriet and I grin
at each other: Is she making a delivery?
Maybe Aunt Edna, who sits up front,
on edge as usual with all her grievances
showing When you're eleven or eight,
you don't know it can be you Darkness
creeps in a little under the arched
entranceway to the hospital where the car
is parked but running Now Edna is
cracking up the tears are streaming
and Mom, good sport that she is, is
already in stitches: their laughter is a cross
between howling and weeping Whatever
this disease is, it must be catching: Harriet's
snorting and shrieking Edna's choking
and hacking Mom's slapping the wheel
with both red hands and I can barely breathe
in the face of this hysteria It's a great time
to be alive when the signs shift and a new
reality encroaches: who can find her way home
then? When Mom gets us rolling again, we
fall silent: ready to be admitted at last
to this house of dementia and heartbreak.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER AT 11
Here he is, minus his camera,
the Brownie Hawkeye that has captured
shards and shrapnel and shell casings
of his life. Whoever has taken this photo
clearly loves him—you can see this
in the easy tilt of his body in his arms,
so still and free of tension. His hands
have fallen open: barely singed leaves.
Everything about him seems tranquil,
the way a 5 o'clock June breeze is:
soft, to the point of losing focus.
You can see now that even his gaze
is fading that the smile (so perfectly held
for nearly 50 years) has been smudged
or slightly erased. Who could have guessed
at his darkness, that soon he would tilt
earthwards like a tree visited by lightning?
The dark foliage of memory obscures
and deceives. Surely, this child who breathes
in the cruel century he inhabits is a ghostly self
who watches but will not speak.
AN INCIDENT OF CULTURE
Mass graves are being dug in Lapland for the carcasses
of 40,000 reindeer that must be killed and buried. . . .
--Newsday, July 28, 1986
Not only reindeer must be buried
but salmon in the streams
trout in the freshwater lakes
and lichen laced with a dark
and destructive energy
How will the Lapps survive?
Who will assure their future?
Fisheries run dry under the star
of radiation Grazing lands burn
under the Chernobyl moon
How will the Lapps survive
when food-gathering
carries a death sentence?
Seized by fatal poisons, their world
has grown silent and luminous
Who now will search for chanterelles
or cloudberries in the somber beauty
of autumn?
A DIALOGUE OF BROTHERS
Brother, what do you gain from living alone-
and what do you keep?
Vision of a split branch ripped from an oak
by lightning night descending
like a burning mountain daylight pouring
in torrents from the east loneliness
deeper than a lake that never freezes
memories that race into the brush
from every path I've taken the need
to be found again and lost
And what of you, brother—what will you
keep?
Memory of a woman who drew me
to her breast then pushed me away
her belief in me that warmed my coldest
nights
love of a child that gnaws at my heart
property that has owned me that soon
will set me free a grave with an address
a path strewn with fallen leaves
EARLY SEPTEMBER MORNING
After days of rain,
I walk in the first strong sun
to where seed heads of grass
shine silver-white
on this quiet late-summer
morning and cows
and a young calf graze
their heads dipped in brightness
What is the sun for
if not to light the moment
when the mockingbird flies
silently from the top rung
of barbed wire that rings
the pasture like a wing
of unheard notes escaping
from a guitar?
THE SOUND OF WATER
Warren Lake, Nova Scotia, 1996
Some sounds are too quietly pitched
for the human ear and here
only the green and golden mosses
know them For millions of years,
the wind's orchestra has tuned up
the timpani of miniature waterfalls
has trickled time away
Here, pine needles tick ceaselessly
in the fires of early June as if
that barely audible symphony
measured the rise and fall of the sun
Under birch leaves and balsam,
the oldest hymns of creation tremble.
HE WAS GOING
He was going to the Knicks game
at the Garden, a wet Tuesday evening,
dark smudge of gray sky.
There was a planet, fragile and wounded
as himself, and the only tool available
to save it was his tongue:
his words would stitch the severed worlds
together. I saw that the wind was his enemy
and fate his tormented sister,
that he loved the ruins of memory
and grieved his abandoned daughter.
He was a writer who had stopped writing,
a dreamer whose nights shed no light.
Only this damp and drizzly season
could reason with him.
His wife's calming fingers still held him.
2003: MARS APPROACHES
The sky darkens and Mars approaches
Death drums make a thunder gods
of the old planet never equaled
How easily we are deafened
by shocked cries jetting from torn mouths
how quickly seized by the sound
of the dead falling silent
There was a time when the next town
seemed another galaxy when the pain
of being human could be quieted
by a small meteor shower of kisses
on our cheeks.
Bio
Charles Fishman is director of the Distinguished Speakers Program at SUNY Farmingdale, Associate Editor of
The Drunken Boat, and Poetry Editor of
New works Review.
His books include Mortal Companions, The Firewalkers, Blood to Remember: American Poets
on the Holocaust,
and The Death Mazurka, which was selected by the American Library Association as an Outstanding Book of
the Year (1989)
and nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His 8th chapbook, Time Travel Reports, was published by
Timberline Press in 2002, and his 5th collection of poetry, Country of Memory, is now available from
Uccelli Press.
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