How We Met Tallulah

There was a time very long ago – a sweet-time time

When cobbled streets were mostly level with the tar that held them in place

And smooth enough for pink-rubber spalding-balls to bounce accurately

And old paint-flaked broomsticks salvaged for bats               

And stick-ball games with the ‘catholics’ versus the ‘greeks’

It was great fun that one summer in the South Bronx in 1937 –

Irish Catholic kids from Cauldwell Avenue against us Greeks from Eagle

Until one day late in August when Harvey and Sam Roth moved into our block

To the empty apartment on the second floor of the old blind man’s house

They were Jews…

Their mother was a beautiful lady that ran a beauty parlor

Their father was shot in a hold-up in his hardware store the year before

They used to live above it but the mother sold it and they had to move

So there they were - sitting on their stoop watching us

With a kind-of sad look in their eyes as we played stick-ball on our street

Harvey was about 14... a tall good-looking kid, thin as one of our broomsticks

His brother was younger and short and kind of fat

Every couple of days a cab would show up in the afternoon and this rabbi

Would hustle them in and take them to the synagogue on Jackson

For Jewish lessons…

And then one day a few weeks later when the Irish kids came looking for a game

We didn’t have enough Greek guys for our side

So we broke down and asked Harvey and Sam to play the outfield for us

Boy… that Harvey could hit and field like a pro and we beat the micks bad

And so the next day we went down to the cops and got them both PAL* cards

The  Giants were in town that week so Harvey and Sam and me

We rode the 163^rd Street trolley free over the Harlem River to the last stop

Which was where the Polo Grounds was and because it was a week-day

We got in free with our cards and climbed high up into the right-field stands

And sat with a few thousand other kids who also got in free to watch the game

If I remember right… it was the sixth inning when Mel Ott came up to bat

With two men on base and Johnny Vander Meer pitching for the Cincinnati Reds

Mel lifted a high fly ball that would have been caught in any other ballpark…

It came down right where we were standing and Harvey caught it barehanded

He was so tall he reached up over everyone else and just grabbed it with both hands!

After the game we walked down on the field toward the clubhouse at the end of center field

To see if we could get Mel Ott (whose real name was Ottenberg) to sign it for us

This wild-looking lady was walking ahead of us and once in a while

She would take out a silver flask from her purse and take a swig

It was a long walk and she was swaying a little by the time we got to the clubhouse door

Harvey was passing the ball around to the kids who were walking with us

And the lady asked if she could see it too… She said she was good friends with Mel Ott

And she would get him to sign it for us if that was okay with us

She put her arm around Harvey and they walked into the clubhouse together

I think Harvey was kind of holding her up… I think that’s what she really wanted

A few minutes later Harvey came out with Mel Ott and Johnny Vander Meer and the lady!

She showed us the ball with Mel’s signature and also Johnny Vander Meer’s!

Mel introduced her to us as one of the greatest fans the Giants would ever have

Her name was Tallulah Bankhead and she was one of the greatest actresses on Broadway

And that her father was the Speaker of The House of Representatives of the United States!

So there!...

The  Polo Grounds was originally that… A field where polo was played… It was  oval-shaped and the left and right field foul poles

were only about 250 feet from home plate while the center field line was over 500 feet away… to pull hitters like Mel Ott , Johnny

Mize and Bobby Thompson, long fly balls would turn into home runs as Ralph Branca sadly found out in 1951…

Johnny Vander Meer has the distinction of being the only pitcher in the history of baseball to pitch 2 No-Hit games back to back…

On June 11, 1938, he "No-Hit" the Boston Braves and 4 days later he did the same to the Brooklyn Dodgers...A  feat that will

never be repeated because someone would have to pitch 3 No-Hitters in a row to break his record...                   *Police Athletic League

These island woods have given up the ghost

The only growth a mindless aldershoot

As sickness from the south and west

Floats in on warmer rain and snow enroute

To northern lakes

The last great conifers are choked

By resurrected remnants of ancestral crush

Slurried into enormous furnaces and then upsmoked

Far from mid-western streets forloned by soot and slush

To fall as poisoned flakes

The matchless brilliance of long-past dawns

Once fresh with jewel-drops of uncorrupted fog

Is but a heart-rent memory now shorn

Of all its loveliness - a septic bog

A pestilence thought dead awakes

These mournful woods they creak and moan

Their cankerous malignancy now obvious for all to see

But no one comes and they are left alone

Exhausted in their ennui

Elegiac of man's mistakes

The Birthday Party

April 20th 1938

It is a warm lovely evening in the South Bronx...

After the cops check us out in the lobby below

We are allowed to watch from the roof of the tenement across the street

The orchestra has been playing for some time

Melodious waltzes float across to us

Through the enormous open windows of Ebling's Casino - An elaborate beer hall

Each of its huge windows framed in long burgundy drapes*

Great chandeliers flood the immense hall with brilliant light

We see tuxedoed waiters putting final touches on long banquet tables

Two immense banners are hung behind the stage - Spotlights playing over them

One is the American flag - Next to it the intertwined broken crosses of Germany

White-circled in scarlet and black

Dozens of smaller versions of both hang from the ceiling

Miniatures of each are placed side-by-side in the center of each lavish table

In the street below - glamorous arrivals emerge from gleaming limousines

Distinguished men in immaculate dinner jackets - some in splendid uniforms

Stately women in gorgeous gowns and sparkling jewels

Tall young men wearing smart brown uniforms

Stand on either side of the bright red carpet leading from the curb

Blond and muscular - their arm-bands decorated with the broken crosses

They form an avenue for the dazzling couples disembarking from their limousines

Traffic has ceased on 156th Street

The cops are everywhere - on foot and mounted on skittish horses

Even the trolleys have stopped running on St Ann's

More limousines wait - lined up on the steep hill above the Hall

Hundreds of curious people stand behind the barricades on the sidewalks below

Many are Jews from the tenements and open markets a few blocks away

Everyone is strangely silent as each polished car pulls up

And their resplendent occupants step out

The smiling couples gather on the steps of the ornate flood-lit entrance

Photographers' flashes memorialize the growing assembly

At last the final limousine rolls up - longer than the others

Small german flags with the broken crosses are mounted on its fenders

The honor guard click their heels and raise their right arms in a stiff salute

A tall man in brown uniform and glistening boots emerges and returns the gesture

Scarlet bands with the broken crosses are wrapped around his upper arms

A beautiful woman in a long white gown follows

People around us whisper she is a famous opera star from Germany

The brown-clad leader takes her arm and guides her up the steps

A low muttering rises up from the barricades

The police stiffen - The mounted officers edge their horses closer

Rotten tomatoes and eggs fly from the crowd

They fall short into the street - A few splatter against the limousine

None reach the tall thin man and the blond woman in the beautiful gown

The brown uniforms start toward the barricades but are called back by the leader

The mounted police charge the crowd

A few are knocked down but are helped up - Everyone runs down the hill

The cops chase them across St Ann's as the first trolley rumbles past

The glittering guests promenade into the great hall

We watch from our roof-top as they search for their places

When they are seated the waiters draw Ebling's beer in decorated steins

From shiny taps set into the walls

They place them in front of each male guest

They pour champagne from bottles in ice-buckets for the women

Finally they roll in carts piled high with heaps of steaming food

Our mouths water

The orchestra strikes up brisk oompah tunes

Everyone sings along and clinks and drinks and laughs and eats

A long time passes

Finally the leader at the head table taps at the microphone

The orchestra stops playing

He stands and raises his glass and proposes a toast

Everyone stands - holding their steins and glasses of champagne

Benny Grossman and his uncle are on the roof with us

Mr Grossman owns the candy-store on Eagle Avenue and understands German

He says the tall thin man wishes the Great Fuhrer a happy 50th birthday

He thanks the Fuhrer for his victory over the Reds and the Jews in the homeland

Out shoots his arm and he bellows into the microphone "Sig Heil!"

The people stick out their arms and yell back "Sig Heil!"

We ask Mr Grossman what it all means but he just looks sad and doesn't answer

Benny asks him - What's a Fuhrer?

The great chandeliers are suddenly dimmed and this immense movie screen is lowered

From the ceiling behind the orchestra as it leaves the stage

We see an incredible image projected

We see what looks like millions of people sitting in a collosal stadium

High above them this gigantic symbol of the broken crosses

Sits atop a long circular row of tall columns lit by powerful lights

We see what looks like millions of soldiers lined up in perfect formation

They stand absolutely still as powerful searchlights play over them

Everyone is very quiet like they're getting ready for something to happen

The screen is suddenly filled with Hitler's image!

He wears the same uniform as the soldiers far below him

The people at the tables in the great hall stand up and cheer and clap

The leader growls into the microphone and they shut up

Hitler starts to speak -

Softly - Slowly - Hypnotically at first

As he goes on - his voice gets louder and louder

Until he is screaming and making strange weird crazy faces

He waves his arms wildly and lifts his hands to heaven like the priest in our church

The hordes in the stadium and the hundreds in the hall

Set up such a deafening roar 

That it scares the hell out of Benny and me

Benny's uncle tells us Hitler says the German people won't take it any more!

Hitler screams Germany is now the most powerful nation in the world!

He screams they have rid themselves of the Red cancer in their midst!

He screams German workers won't be starved again by Jewish bankers!

He screams Germany will take back what was taken from her in the last war!

He screams Germany might take back a lot more!

He screams the German people will again be masters of their fate!

He screams Germany's 'New Order' will live for a thousand years!

When he is finished - a fat man in uniform with lots of medals stands up

Out shoots his arm - "Sig Heil" he yells!

The people in the great stadium thunder back 'Sig Heil!"

The crowd in the dimly-lit hall burst out "Sig Heil!"

Twice more he yells "Sig Heil"

Twice more everyone explodes "Sig Heil!"

Mr Grossman says in Yiddish "My poor people"

Benny whispers to me in English what he says

We both don't understand

"What poor people?" Benny says to him "Everybody's poor in the South Bronx!"

Mr Grossman smiles and says "It's pretty late...

Tomorrow is for school and we should go home now

To our mommas and our pappas and our nice warm beds"

*In April of 1945 in the hills of Northern Luzon, our small EST (enemy submission team) attached to AFWESPAC,

received our monthly ration of beer... It was a case of warm Eblings... The brewery was only a few short blocks

from my childhood home where my mother cleaned and polished the four units three times a week for credit of

half the rent which was $40 a month...

Ebling's was destroyed and burned by the junkies in the early '60's for its copper brewing kettles and

everything else they could carry off... A few short blocks in the other direction, the newest member of the

Supreme Court of the United States, a little girl named Sonia was growing up...

Mother Marymilk

Mother Marymilk

His middle is heaving-sick Mother Marymilk

Listening to this hantle-pack on hill G8

As fourteen faces ashes-splashed

Swim at him in this spinning abyss

Hear their brassy baby minus his brass

So the slants won't know him out there Mother Marymilk

Hear him spit logistics and they all nod and make some sounds

They know the bit

As this fuzz-face eager-to-kill-them-all kid louie

Hawks out his azimuths with colored pins

Perimeter he says

He says it easy because he doesn't really know yet

And they nod and make some sounds

But down inside it hits shock-terror deep

And burrow-burns the brain

And slips the stomach from each one of them

Perimeter he says because he really doesn't know yet

That it's a finish-line harshed by the sullen soil

Bleeding the guts and sap of bodies slagged to it

By the yellow grinners' dum-dums

A finish-line to be littered later by mattress-cover coffins

Help him please help him sweet Mother Marymilk

Help him because he's blood-bawling and gut-crying deep inside

Help him because this time the mail might muck him too

Face-down and ripped

And maggot-heads would stick from out of him

And find grub-crawling tough in this dry-blood-blasted wretch

Of Rembrandt's ox-hough quat of him dog-tagged up the teeth

So that the ghouls would know this slag-slob in his plash of blood

When they come grubbing in the dawning

And the ones who sent him here Mother Marymilk

The ones with good-bye kiss-wish-kisses

Can hang their satin window stars and cry

But if they looked back not so long ago my Mother

They would have found him sweating in the Frisco hooker's bed

Not knowing not knowing not knowing why

He drives into her driving driving

And she just grits her rotted teeth - The mouth

That honey's him as silently spits out her sadness

And pity for him oozes from her middle and juices up her sheet

Another five-buck stain

And through her dampened hair he sees the frosted god-light

Flat-flick her desolate wall fighting the Bodega neon

The god-light is losing Mother Marymilk

His light! - Christ not she!

Does she believe too?

But why does the light suddenly shine more brightly now?

Look again - and God He lithographs his smile

You you he says - look at you my little lost son

Drunk and trying to be big man

You drive into my little daughter you hurt her

Hurt her till she's raw

Her rotted ovaries convulse with every thrust

And when it's over go retch into her toilet bowl

And flush your trojaned guts down to the sea and out

Out along the level of a sick night street

Where shafts of sunken lights hunt the darkness

Like gone strangers hopped on horse

Out where the blood levels in the split of sidewalk

Just before your eye as you drunkenly pass out

And die once more

Is this that same child sweet Mother Marymilk

Lying here in this bloody plash

Who one evening came to your park

And walked up the path of your park

To the hill in the middle of it

And climbed the hill

And looked out over the world's gathering darkness

And slowly the Blue Batman descending upon it

Drew up his cloak about it and stilled it?

You know my Mother

It came to remember a kite

A kite cross-pieced and blowing color rose-red

With yellow frail-tail

Just like the jungle-birds in books it wants to move

And now how easy-freed into a sun-wind

It snaps to the catch-breeze and up it flaps

Like a sparrow on its maiden hop

O how that kite plays the air

Like a cutter plays the sea

It bounces along its currents and circles about its temples

Like a gannet in heat

Cutting cutting

It cleaves the whole sky up and slides along its edges

Up down and over its singing orbit

A fleet insect fret-making multisects a lily-pond sky

Sweet Mother Marymilk

Why couldn't it have stayed a lovely fragile kite-bird

Loose and sailing ovate seas of heaven

Through merry summers into innocence forever?

Why did it have to burst itself aloft

And now a wild and flaming seraphim

It smashes down upon the kinder-quieten

Sudden-vengeful and Barrabas-bent

Now it grotesques the caravansary of sky

A bloody musselin spurred on by Mumbo-Jumbos Mummers

Now it pursues the screaming child

Across the broken rock of Molino's mote-hill

And o that execrated child - its omphalos slipped

Blinded and reeling across the terrorized earth

Stumbles falls and is convulsed

As the maddened kite-shaft stiles it through

Stilletoing its frailty

Sprawl crucified child stigma-stiled

Among the maiden-hairs turned to be widow-wails

Torn by vindictive vanity of wind

Shrip-shripping the cross-pieced paper radiance till it is bare

A stiller world of kite cross-formed still pulsing in the wound

It sends its shadow slowly over the sudden-shadowed land

An earthened greyness lowering relief

Torpid in its stupor

Peal now spirit-bell

Peal now soul-bell

Passing-bell peal your mournful requiem

For what if the tender dike is sprung my Mother Marymilk?

What if the gentle rain you sob for your beloved crucified

These tears which float it from its hilltop agony

Ruptured in its cocoon

Weary of its infinite memory?

What if the child becomes man?

Its blessedness made sound and fury

Its grace candled to an intolerant glare

Reborn again

Reborn to desecrate its kinder-dream

Reborn and furious now it is lost to itself

Lost to you my Mother Marymilk

Lost to the whole of God's world

Lost and looking back

Up through its spinning abyss

Up through its choanoid loneliness

And now

Low

Bleak

Hollow-helled hollow-burned

Down into its center dream it falls

Not to the right - not to the left where it is easy

But where napalm follies the wall-about

And anguish rails and rails

Now you say to him Mother Marymilk

Now you say to him

Now you must know me not easy but hard

Love me you say to him 

Love me not the soft and easy way most do

But as you found me in the harlot's mouth-spit

And the grinner-gunners' sights

As you found me in the maggot-heads which spurt the wound

And the sidewalk blood spilled from your eye

So you will not find me in the easy church

Where all my transient lovers sing a little love

And then go out into the real and cut each other's gut

Only here you will find me where fear festers 

In this watery-eyed swamp of your anonymous brassman

Minus his brass

Only here you will find me

Perimetered within his pre-dawn azimuths of death

Waiting now in this gouged and muddy earth-slit

You hold him close soft Mother

As the 105's finally open up

And he hears the sibilant sounds of shells swooshing above

Trees suddenly disappear from the face of the opposite hill

The brassman's bird whistle blows

Lissome palms shadow the edge of his lobelin world

As he utters his self-taught liturgy

Perhaps to be echoed by ghostly paracletes

Across the palaces of plains

Skymass deepens aureate in rainment of this radiant Lady-Eve*

Sweet Mother Marymilk... In these next few moments...

Please whisper to him...

Please let him know...

Will he live or will he...?

*March 22nd - Medieval Celebration of Christ's Conception

Lauri Viita

Four verses translated from the Finnish by Melanie Manos-Salmi

 Kirkomeno 

When the pastor grows tired of berating them

And looks to organist

The common folk stifle a cry

And sing sing sing!

So that a net encircles their souls

And transports them to the sacrement

For The Visionary

Preach pastor-man

Your words are significant and must be shared

With those whose ears are deaf

Even if your worries do not make sense

Your harangues overwhelm them with their noise

Gospel

Only its heat guides the blind to the burning flame

Let's not have a sermon, director of souls

Rather a glowing of spirit, as the heart guides the way

To light, goodness and truth

Poem

I once descended into the ocean's depths

To feel a pearl-oyster's deathly pain

Its brilliant gleam rubbed into rock

Is only an earing now

Annie Millicent

He will resurrect her

He will bring her back from where her soul reposes

She will be reborn one of these nights through his will

She will be reborn one of these nights through his words

She will tell him what it is like to lie in this lonely place

Interred within this unsympathetic necropolis

For more than a hundred years

"Is her's the only Roman marker

Preserved among so many Lutheran stones?"

She will float up out of the icy ground

She will appear to him as he imagines himself beside her

She will whisper to him about herself one of these nights in a dream

She will curl up in his arms and never be afraid again

She will know he'll understand because he is the father of daughters

She will burrow inside his anorak and be warm again

Shielded from the shivering arctic winds

Moaning through the scattered monuments

"Was she a bright lovely child or a spoiled difficult little girl?

And does it really matter?"

She will tell him about her friends

She will laugh about the happy games they played

High above this fledgling town - Up here on the Pyynikki Ridge

Sliding down its white hills on the sparkling winter snow

Running up its green hills on summer afternoons

As their nannies gossiped about their mothers' minor sins

"Even then - She was always within sight of her eventual grave

With the loom of the Aleksanterin Cathedral hovering"

Yes - She will tell him about herself

She will whisper to him about her mother - How beautiful she was

And how much her mother truly loved her

And that she forgives her mother for what happened

And she will speak to him about her father one of these nights in a dream

How handsome and kind and clever he was

And how much he truly loved her

"But why did they leave her to rot in this lonely place?

Why didn't they take her home to Lancashire with them"  

She will tell him about the men in frock coats and stove-pipe hats

Who came to talk with her father in their gracious dining room

And smoked cigars and sipped brandy beneath the grand chandeliers

As they unrolled long sheets of ivory parchment on the great table

And spent long hours discussing them and marking them with quill and ink

While their maid served coffee and Karelian pies

Was her father the High Manager at the new mill

Or the Chief Engineer come before she was born

To harness the rapids roiling between the lakes?

        "In Affectionate Remembrance of

                    ANNIE MILLICENT

                       Daughter of

             Henry and Betsy Horrocks

              Who Departed This Life

                  February 10, 1879

                     Aged 7 years

       'Of Such is the Kingdom of Heaven' ''

Will she tell him how she died?

Perhaps she was knocked down by a run-away horse

Pulling a sleigh beside the Mariankatu?

Perhaps her mother averted her gaze for a few moments

As she played with her friends in this little park

And the crazed animal stomped her into the snow turned red with her blood

At this very spot where she lies in the frozen earth

Because her father wished it so

Will she tell him how the grave-diggers built a great fire to thaw the ground

And that her parents left for England and home that same bitterly cold day

After they lowered her broken body into the ground?

Of course - She won't tell him of her father's magical vision

He sees it for himself each evening from his daughter's house

Up here on the Pyynikki Ridge*

As the city below glitters and gleams with its myriad lights

He accepts better than most - Those crinkled parchment sheets

Transformed into the proletariat poet's urban paradise

"From the country-side they came - Not just from the North

But also from the West, from the East and from the South

From all parts came a constant stream of new human material

Those tough fixtures of the land who with a dream in their hearts

Finally decided to take charge of their fortunes -

This is how they came -

Those who built this town for us!"  

Lauri Viita - (Moreeni - 1950) - Tampere Finland

*Our daughter married an exchange student from Tampere and has lived there for

more than twenty years.                    Lauri Viita is the Poet Laureate of Finland

In the intermediate world between wakefulness and sleep

There comes a time when sporal fluid is flushed

Into the lower extremities somewhere between the button

And the balls

And a welcoming tingle seeps out of marrow

Tickles hair roots to abstraction and this fever

Penetrates and stirs the blood into a billow of flesh

A hardening of phallic veins

For in the dark of night with radio ear-piece in… he listens

To a really cool physician/somatist holding forth

Dispensing prosaic platitudes to mostly teen-age adolescents

Saturated by the acrobatics of internet porno-gymnasts simulating bliss

They call in… in rapid fashion - Their vacuous innocence is infectious

Each call explicit in addressing the gyrations, positions, and licking

Of the internet athletes with whom they are obsessed

And will it hurt if they try it themselves?

He watches occasionally - dirty old man… Has it come to this?

Has it become the norm to disgrace for all to see - the quintessence elegance

That is the human animal? – sickening yet fascinating images

Men women children all colors - some in manifest pain and degradation?

He is appalled and yet he watches their humiliation

With a sickening glee - hypocrite that he is

Spellbound and yet unable to stray from the vacillating forms

Twisting themselves into unnatural modes

The grandiloquent doctor with degrees up the ying-yang

Calms the excited youngsters with pithy advice

Warns of dangerous sicknesses if not protected by latex

Of pregnacies if not extinguished by the “morning-after” pill

It is midnight when the sage shuts down

But not before his engineer informs him of the “Count”

A record forty-four calls in two hours!... And before he signs off

He tells us tomorrow night he will pontificate on Cable yet!

The listener cannot calm himself

He unplugs his wrath at the smug analyst

His head hurts - It is another two hours

Before he is able to sleep…

Note: The earliest evidence of very explicit visual sexual imagery was discovered

inscribed on the walls of a seven-thousand year-old European cave

Powders

Powders

Fine earth-dusts

Beneath a stone upturned

By the clattering

Mob-pourings after centurions

On the mocking-run to Golgotha

They drive a poor shrunk Man heaving a Cross

Bright honor they do to One

Who gave them alms from heaven

Bread from stone

Life

See them all for their total pale shadows-grey eye

Each surly ash etched deep in monotonic dullness

Yet slowly slowly now

Out of the loveliness of death's oncoming shade

Deep deep within Exquisite Quiet

Where Temple bleeds out thorn

And Hands and Feet shed iron studs

The Agony whispers in the sad and delicate air

"Forgive"

See Perfection and Futility

As Twin Agonies inseperable as earth-dusts

Lying beneath an upturned stone

High on the mocking-run

Powders

Blowing time out of mind

Powders 

Upon which the mind is nourished

Ellie

He was just twenty in late '45 when he was discharged from the army

He got a job in a bakery cleaning up the mess left in the machines and ovens

After the bakers were done for the day

The owner's wife then had him gather up the broken loaves and pastries

He delivered them to a settlement house run by Franciscans on the lower east side

Often he stayed and ate and helped the brothers serve a simple meal

To the drunks and prostitutes and junkies that roamed the neighborhood streets

One evening a young hooker came in with a couple of experienced pros

The older women left because they didn't like yesterday's warmed-over stew

He sat with her while she ate and then they went to a bar

He bought her a drink and he had a beer

She told him her name was Eleanor but he could call her Ellie

She said she was eighteen but he knew she was younger

She asked him - Didn't he think she looked like a young Betty Grable?

He told her he thought she was very pretty

She said she was from Baltimore

She told him she was trying to save enough to go to Hollywood and be a star

She asked him if he had money to be with her later but he said no

(He'd seen enough syph movies in the service but he didn't tell her that)

She shrugged and started to light a cigarette when she suddenly fell to the floor

Shaking violently as the seizures consumed her

The black bartender whose name was Leon came around

And shoved a dirty bar-towel into her mouth

After a few minutes she stopped shaking and passed out

Her tight skirt was stained where she wet herself - A puddle formed on the floor

Leon helped him carry her to a booth in the back

He said she'd probably come around in a while but wouldn't be much of a lay

He said he could fix him up with someone else - but he said no

He sat holding her hand until she finally opened her eyes

She told him she lived around the corner

Could he please help her up the stairs

She didn't think she could climb those five flights on her own

If he liked he could stay the night - It wouldn't cost him anything

She had some wine and a couple of bottles of beer

He was welcome to it all - She said she couldn't drink any more

Because she said it would make her sick again

When they got to her place she said she would like to take a bath

She wouldn't be long and in the mean-time he could help himself to a beer

A few minutes later he heard a loud crash and glass breaking

He found her sprawled naked over the edge of the tub

Her head was in the water and her hand was cut by a shattered water glass

He jammed a wet wash-cloth into her mouth like he saw Leon do

He picked her up and carried her to the bedroom

He bandaged her hand as tightly as he could and dried her hair

When she stopped shaking he stretched her out on her bed and covered her up

He lay next to her all night with this sick feeling in his stomach

He looked at her for the longest time before he fell asleep

He thought wild feverish thoughts about how he would take care of her

He would get a good job and make a lot of money and they would get married

He would find a doctor who would cure her

They would have lots of kids and live together and always be happy

When she woke up next morning

She thanked him and apologized for having two fits in a row like that

She said it was the first time that ever happened

He told her it was okay - she couldn't help being sick and if she didn't mind

He had to leave to go to work but he would come back after he finished

Instead he quit his job and went back to his room and packed his things

And got on the subway to the Bronx

Intruders

Happier are those who have not moved

Along the ruined island leas - hollowed by grinding seas

Or lost themselves in green-splashed piney groves

Touched by the salted fog

Because the ones who do so are intruders

They come

Trying to search out- to find (although they may not know it)

Decriement of their own existence - escape

From their dark city-prisoned ways and days

These summer people hie themselves

Into viridian ravines - down miniature valleys

Humming with heat and summer bugs

They clamber the mossy rock - the curving ridges

Waddle the meadowland and marsh - Trip over yew

Stub tender toes reaching the wind-blown bluffs

There but to gaze beyond a speckled sea

To 'dream' they say - to 'get away'

Not even hearing the surf smash the carved cove

So far below

The gay intruders aim their Canons

They dab at canvas or scribble up a pad

All the while waving at one another across chasms

They bring box lunches and thermos jugs of coffee

And throw their empty beer cans at the gulls

And their laughter is thin against the sea wind

But sometimes one of them just simply sits

A small silhouette on the tall head-land

And listens to the caw-caws of the soaring gull