Yearling

He almost died the other day but they saved him

While he was dying he remembered

A morning in January 1937 and a loud milk truck

Three bottles on the porch for the rich Greeks across the street

Wakes him at five, still dark, corner street light still flickers

Snowed all night, still snowing in the South Bronx.

His father already gone, rides two El’s to Flushing in Queens

Building the mayor’s new airport Laguardia

WPA pick-and-shovel job, thirty dollars a week

First job in almost eight years

Two kids and a wife to support

One severely crippled by polio, no vaccine in those days.

He gets dressed, patched rich Greek hand-me-downs

Long-johns, pants, boots, hooded parka

His mother has hot Wheatina ready

He creates triangles with it and then eats them one-by-one

He goes to the back room, kisses his paralyzed little sister on the cheek

Still sleeping.

He walks through the snow with his net-bag two blocks to the ice-plant

He picks up the big coffee jug in the empty office

Goes to the German bakery next block

Old lady fills the jug and net-bag full of big pastries

Back to the plant, free ice that afternoon.

He walks through the snow, now letting up

To the Wonder Bread, about ten blocks

Two day-old loafs, no preservatives, nickel a loaf for the week

Then another block to Home Relief

Six eggs, day-old bottle of milk, cream on top, no preservatives, all free

Back home to ice-box.

He's not the only one with a net-bag

Lots of kids his age with net bags, boys, girls, some younger, some older

Waiting in the snow at Wonder Bread and Home Relief.

Over to Mr Lempke’s down the street

Blind old man grinds coffee in his cellar, fills his net-bag

Small bags of “Lempke’s Special German Brew” for the bakery

Also the restaurant and grocery across the street

He delivers it all for a quarter, real silver in those days

Eight AM: Meets his pal Vinnie Puccio down the block

Mother and father both dead, lives with his grandmother

Walk to school together, it has stopped snowing

Paulding NYC Public School Number 56

Named for the first principal years ago Mrs Carlson says

Long time ago probably, but he thinks that’s right…

Hard Sell  (repost)   

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 publicly - the flawless form

That is the human animal? – sickening yet fascinating images

Men women children all colors – many 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 easily

He unplugs his wrath at the smug alienist

His head hurts - It is another two hours

Before he is able to sleep…

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

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

Beautiful Dreamer (Re-Post) 

He is beyond the narrow valley - he has clawed his way into the dreamery

But this deliberate and medicated journey is now flawed

By the smoky drabness of this mid-fall day

Before the silencing of snow overtakes and muffles his languor

Wild things seem to fly at him from this bitter-leaden patch of sky

Try as he might to sweep them away - still they come 

Hounding him into a sort of middle consciousness

Not fully aware - not yet swollen with the rudeness of sleep

He sees island spruce bending slightly waiting for inevitable ice

Even though the scrubs of alders he struggles through

Are burnished bright with death of leaf

Their lovely tangled leaves on fire - their sugars spent

He stumbles and is jabbed by lost branches of stiff birch

He is in pain - he is bloodied by their vicious sharpness - he is hurt

He must get help - but who on this massacred island is there for him?

He is ravished by fear - no one will find him - there is no one to help

He has lost his way - where is the middle path? - the one he must take

To return to "life among the living"* - so much of this tangled mass of moss

Falling from above is stuffing up his mouth - he cannot breathe

The wild things are crawling into him and biting his insides - he hurts

He is on a gravel beach - He picks up a stone with a starfish 

Frozen into it a billion years ago - and there are bloated bodies floating now

Carved up by cruiser fire in the Pacific straits - eyes eaten by crabs

A totem washed out of an African grave glides on a wavelet toward him

A huge cranberry wave roars up beyond the sea-moss laden ledges

Seas fairy-colored by buoys - brilliant hues of yellow-greens and reds and oranges

Detonate below him and carry him flying above the blood of bodies

Seeping from smashed ships lining the bottom of seething Leyte Gulf

He is in the forest again - its blackness blinds him - he cannot breathe

On this rocky outcrop the ghosts of Sarah Bradford and her eight children

Smother him with hugs and tender kisses - has he come to save them

From the axes of rampaging savages? - they cling to him like sucker-fish

The wilderness suddenly explodes - a great copper-beech crushes down on him

Mud seeps into all his openings - he struggles to free himself from the mush

Cormorants light on the copper's branches and peck at him - why are they here?

So far from the implacable sea - a harbor seal slithers toward him barking softly

It smiles a toothy smile and sucks the smothering mud from out of him

What is this animal doing in the middle of this violent tree-fall?

Eyes open dully - comforted by blindingly brilliant sun filling his room

Breath slows - he has survived yet again - to return to "life among the living"

      (In the early 1600's, Abenaki Indians harassed by white settlers. killed a white woman and her eight children

                         who had fled to an island in Muscongus Bay, Maine)                                                             *Marsden Hartley

The Lute Singer   

I've come alone tonight to the Port Sa-Id

With only enough for a beer and some bread and cheese

It's early yet but hopefully friends will stop by in a little while

To stand me a bit more through the protracted night

A few Anatolians and Greeks from the Hoboken docks

Fresh from Onassis' tramps are dancing for the rest of us

All of us mature and immature - Young and middle-aged and old

Ogling the few pathetic whores except for one still young

And still quite pretty - but give her just a few more years

The four musicians step down from the tiny stage

Having just finished a loud and amplified set

Two bouzouks a fiddle and an oud rest abandoned on cheap metal chairs

As Selim the giant bartender leads the old man to the stage

And hands him the unplugged oud - The middle-eastern lute

Shriveled and shrunk he wraps himself around the clumsy bowl

And his first riffs up and down the unfretted rosewood neck

Tells us we're in for a considerable treat and quiet down

Except for two far-gone drunks at the end of the bar until Selim shuts them up

The blind old man plays unaccompanied and along with us

The silenced band sits with closed eyes in sympathy with his unseeing eyes 

His ancient music washes through and over us

And lifts us beyond the smoke and clinking raki glasses and low murmurings

And the light laughter of the pretty whore

Until slowly all fall silent in the Port Sa-id

His voice is now an angel's voice sifted through a star-blown sky

Softly falling from irradiated dusts of stars to settle on a misted desert sea

He sings to us of blanketed bedouin sipping tea around a pitted fire

He sings of love's labor gone astray - He transports dreamers such as us

Beyond our odd and now-remembered reveries

He sings to us of vivacious girls and too-young wrinkled mothers

With sleeping children curled in their laps

Silently they weep their bitter and perceptive tears

He sings to us of love's labor gone astray - A sad forbidden love

He sings the sobs of a beardless boy whose stern-faced lord rejects his pleas

Because the boy's corrupted blood would defile the maiden he desires

And desecrate the tribal absolute

The blind balladeer sings to us what we already know

That both are utterly destroyed by love's intensive labor lost

Love's labor rooted in her belly gone so mournfully astray

He sings they drink the fatal juice of the desert juniper

Born and unborn - to sleep forever under the merciless stars

The old man's song ends abruptly on a minor halt

As if it might start up again at any time - but he is done

And for a moment there is a death's silence in the Port Sa-id

Until the delicate sobs of the pretty whore returns us

To this crowded corner of our sordid world

Far from the eternal silences of unforgiving desert hills

The Dance of Christmas   

"When cockleshells turn silver bells

 And mussels grow on every tree

 When frost and snow shall warm us all

 Then shall your love prove true to me"

                      (Medieval Lullaby)

They started burning down Columbus Avenue

The day before the Last Christmas

And the boutiques and shops were ashes when I left

I drove almost five hundred miles that day without a stop

Most of it on deserted interstates - Past shut-down tolls and hojos

Because everybody had gone down into their holes

Even though the satellite dew-lines hadn't yet lit up

What scared them though was that right after the morning news

The TV's all went black and I guess everyone figured because the U-N

Had been torched the night before - maybe this time it was for real

So I was beat and almost out of gas

And when I saw this thirties-deco sign for Lido gas

Flashing way off through new snow

I threw the old Toytota Land Cruiser into lo and plowed right off that six-lane

Up to this worn-out mom-and-pop on Old Route One

I pumped myself the last four gallons they had left

And when I went in to see what else there was to boost

I saw them and they were dancers I was sure

Cheap red wine was all they'd bought and a mars-bar for her

And they were counting coins out for the old guy in the gloom

But what intrigued me most was they were dug 

From a bejewelled evening bag by the emaciated girl

Who dropped one and it sang so I knew it was real silver

And in the lot outside spun soft by head-lit snow

I saw that she was middle-big with not much time to go

So I followed their ancient Subaru for twenty-seven miles

Down through the empty-center of a rivers-split Maine spit

To a blistered no-name Baptist church smoking on the headland

Some naked studs bared on its northeast side

Shingles curled some gone - but all-in-all still mostly fit

Everything round it though had fallen down

A pocked scape of ice-filled holes once topped by dormered capes

That spelled a once-and-peopled place

Now only weirs were remnanted and angle-skewed in coves

With shredded cuts of spruce where once the working wharves thrust up

And claws of hard-fasted ice sharpnelled smashed cobs

Their remains cloned beyond into fantastic sepulchers

Tide-scalloping the frozen bay

They saw me then before the black set in

And waved me to the broken church - its back stacked as it was

Against the massive spruce-head spur

So that the wind was split into a thousand shafts by sentinel pine

And softened to pleasant moan inside

And it was warm in there

A scented salt-sweet smoke hazing the upper beams

Mixed with the bitter fragrance of the pine-pot on the hearth

For they were boiling beer to celebrate the birth

God only knows how two of them not two hundred pounds between

Had tackled up a thousand tons of rock

And built this russian oven right on that ledging face

Where once an antiseptic altar stood

And now that oven's endless chains chimed softly on its reels

Propelled by driftwood heat which also baked the azymed bread

Suspended on its shelves

That warm soaked too in the rock and rose into my bones

As weary now I settled in a shattered pew

And waited for the final service to renew

 She came and sat beside me then as the boy went round and pumped the lamps

And as the light bleached out the dark I saw that they were painters too

 They'd decorated every crack and cranny of the vault

With stern-faced saints and holy maidens and flooded them with gilts

Sublimated with alizarins and lustrous lazulies

The apostates had walked out long before the baptists repossessed

And now the once-naked nave gleamed brilliant

With streams of their abandoned vestments pulled from encrusted chests

And hung from soaring astragals

Out of dredged teak from some palatial wreck

They'd even carved the holy bema-doors

God's Mother the Theotokos at left - Her Son as always to the right

Lifted with longing from the jungle-wood

Festooned with saffroned peri-winks and blue beach-sanded glass

I felt her touch and as I turned to look

The boy lit robber-candles before each minor saint

And this I did not understand

Was I wrong?

Was it just possible they were migrating magyars?

Perhaps the last two atsigans wrung from an extinguished hindu tribe?

Doomed by some genetic curse to course this marbled round

Until the flame they worshipped torrefied our sphere?

Were they now setting out to steal what they really had not made?

To take from where they'd knelt?

Strip the still-hidden apse where they once sprawled

Sobbing up fears and joys and misbeliefs?

 It was with primordial eyes

Glint-garneted and venerable coals quiescent in reproach

Love-glistered with sacrificial tears mirrored in mine

That she dissolved in eloquent relief

Man-rooted self-centered disbeliefs

God first was Woman - I was certain now

Alone - Haired-over and a dwarf

She swung down from the shrinking primal forest-dark

Mothed by the brilliance of abyssinian savannah

And halting-stood to peer above the taller grass

Before she squatted on that sun-warmed mound

To drop her double-helixed babe

 She stood before me now

As the first of the ballistic mycotoxins arched above

And somehow her strange whisperings told me

We'd come full circle doppler-wise

Because the deadly fungus would be followed soon by mop-up mega-shots

As both led me to the lavabo for the last time

It was that all our tears would mix together in the holy bowl

And now with purified hands

We heaped huge cuts of spruce upon the hearth

To light the farthest corners of the shrine

The chains were lowered and the bread brought forth

The cups were filled with bitter piney brew

We drank and drank until the pot was tossed and then I fell

Before the still-shut screen and slept

When I awoke clad now in purest muslin-white

The altarstone shone forth from newly-parted amphithyre

This huge basaltic millstone once carved from pre-silurian slag

Had been deposited as if by some exalted force before the apse

Its frontal iridesced by isinglass and malgamed mussel-pearl

And on its recessed rosewood board cross-carved with sacred signs

Blazed brilliant the bottle-chalise of their wine

Filled to its neck (or so it seemed) with rubies cut

From far lime-caverns of Ceylon

The altarboard held too the paten's ironstone

With to-be-concecrated bread still fragrant-warm

From the cob-oven's eucharistic shelf

 And as I lay transfixed

The boy resplended now in white and cloth-of-gold

Mounted the sacred stage

Crismarium cupped in his hands

He poured the holy oil on all four corners of the board

Then dipped a tiny square of linen-white and gave it to the girl

Godmother

She'd robed herself in flowing scarlet-maddered silks

Thrown on some fabled looms in Radsimir

A radiant sybil dressed in dazzling organzine

She placed the unguent-cloth above the center of my eyes

Anointed

She gave me of the bread - He of the wine

And then they sat me down to watch the final dance

The fire roared as they poured on more boughs and drift

The flames spat-spit beyond stone pillars of the pit

 With steps measured in sand through an infinite glass

They moved to touch - A glittering and sanctified glissant

Their ageless eyes love-locked in selfless grace

Then suddenly he lifted her and whirled in place

Silk-fire fused with cloth-of-gold

Her body became his

They were but one imploring form writhing there on the chancel steps

And now I knew why they had lured me to their gypsery

Reluctant sacristan they'd made of me as I brought forth their Child

And laid it wrapped in altarcloth upon the timeless rock

Between the bread and wine

I turned to face the oven crimsoning the nave

In time to see them both consumed by zarathrushtran fire

For they had cleansed themselves (or so they thought)

Of iconoclasts like me

As when they first had danced a thousand centuries ago

Before the aryan flame

But as before their agonies had been dishonored and abused

They'd failed again with me and mine

Or had they?

 For as I looked back

The altarstone was sudden-shapeless black

The Child and all the holy things were gone

And in their place

Splendigital in their malevolence

Some burnished grains of silica glared

This vacuous legacy of louts

Had stripped and savage-strobed the gentle shrine

Into a electronic snake-pit writhery gone mad

An amplified and syncopated panasonic lunacy

Riding a thousand-line special matsushita track

And so it came to pass

In this mind-shattering Cathedral of the Hip

That Child had been replaced by Chip

Outside the southern fire-force

Ash-laden with cremated cities of the south

Had reached the frozen coves

As super-annulated mega-heat

Boiled ice into vermillion steam

I heard her last and first and loveliest of songs

For as I breathed the final rem-soaked firefly

Exultant in exquisiteness came her primeval lullaby

 "When cockleshells turn silver bells

  And mussels grow on every tree

  When frost and snow shall warm us all

  Then shall your love prove true to me”

Life Class  

His rich old aunt had traced their family back to Cadillac

And so in 1914 he felt honor-bound to volunteer at his Louisiana Parish

He was severely wounded in one of the early battles

And stayed on in Paris even before the armistice was signed

Enrolled at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts

He studied skeletons - cut up corpses - learned to draw from plaster casts

He was bayou-born and bred yet he drank with lost Russian Jews

The expatriates Soutine and Chagall and Moldovan

He visited with Picasso and Vlaminck

And traded cigars and sketches with Rouault

They became his friends although he did not understand their art

Especially the deliberate distortions of the human form he loved to draw

First from casts - later from life

It was as if time stopped for him with each new pose

With each sensuous curving of flesh and sub-surface bone

God's handiwork held a continuous fascination for him

Even after thousands of sketches and finished studies from the nude

He came to know more anatomy than some young surgeons and smiled from on high

When one of them got into trouble sectioning a cadaver in the theater

And had to consult a text

He was a bull of a man - Short and squat

His shoulders sloped with power and he limped

One leg shaved down from wounds that earned both Bronze Star and Croix de Guerre

He was cursed with Lautrec's disease

The absinthe carafe always at hand

A battle with himself he eventually would not survive

But that was still to come

For now he was a young man in the City of Light

With lovely girls to draw and love and pulsing streets to roam

And the conviviality of friends to fill the joyous nights

His inheritance arrived with regularity each month

In tiny increments at the American Express

More than enough to sustain his simple needs and also share

With less fortunate friends

He had no illusions as to his gifts

Content to caress the model's contours with just his eyes

Rarely looking down or lifting his pen from the vellum

Until each exquisitely-shaped form materialized

 Chaim Soutine was his closest friend - Undisciplined and mad

A chain-smoking consumptive

He was a mess and his pictures were a mess

A mindless slop scumbled together in just hours

Pigment slammed angrily into pigment without first drying

He mixed his colors such as they were directly on the canvas

Most notably murderous reds and nauseous greys

Vicious pictures of bloody abbatoirs emerged

Slaughtered chickens - sickly choir-boys

Scarred drunks sprawled in streets teeming with scran

Wild violent landscapes

One day Chaim took him to Ambrose Vollard's to see crazy Vincent's pictures

He recognized Chaim's tortured madness in them too

But there was a difference - Unlike Chaim, Van Gogh could draw

He brought thirteen of his sketches from the gallery folio

And a small sunny Provence landscape that reminded him of the fields

Of his childhood home in Jeanerette

Chaim told him Vollard had been buying Vincent for some years

On Modigliani's advice Leo Zborowski and Paul Rosenberg

Were also buying Chaim - mostly with absinthe

And hiding his pictures in a warehouse

 In the summer of '41 when jackboots and tanks

Thundered down the Elysee and marched into his beloved Monmarte

He left Paris on the last free train for Lisbon and Pan-Am's trans-antlantic clipper

He carried only a small valise of personals and his precious Vincents

The twelve ugly Soutines purchased from Chaim over the years

Had been rolled into sealed metal tubes

And shipped to his friend Yasuo in New York

He was almost fifty now and like Chaim his absinthism had debilitated him

That damned accursed worm-wood juice had slowly poisoned his insides

And he'd having blackouts for some months

He also had to mortgage his inheritance to get him to Manhattan

Kuniyoshi put him up in a corner of his loft

A five-story walkup - with Marcel Duchamps

He of armory fame - descending nudes - and fifty chessboards on the floor below

He started teaching life classes at Cooper Union and the League

After a few weeks he also found himself a loft and that winter

He finished the last of the absinthe he'd shipped the year before

Together with those sickening Soutines

 I first met him after the war in '49

In the back room of McSorley's down the street from the Union

He was sitting with Kuni listening to Dylan Thomas recite

For yet another complimentary glass of ale

I watched his eyes mist as the poet's eloquent voice

Flowed out his immortal verses

I was enrolled in Kuni's painting class at the League on the GI bill

And when Yasuo saw me he invited me to sit with them

(It was strange to sit opposite a man whose progenitors

I was taught to hate a few short years before)

Yasuo introduced me and I told him I was thinking of taking his life class in the fall

He said he needed a monitor for his evening classes on the nights he wasn't there

And if I was interested I could start tomorrow

(So this is how I got to know him and know his story)

That night we all went back to Kuni's for saki

With Dylan staggering in the lead

Because he wanted to see those wild re-stretched Soutines again

They were still stored in a corner of Yasuo's loft

And screamed at us when we uncovered them

 As the months slipped past he slipped fast too

The absinthe had been replaced by bourbon

The pain in his shattered leg became unbearable

He started missing classes and I had to lie to the director

That he was home sick or that his creole aunt was dying

And he had gone to visit her in Jeanerette

It was my job to schedule the models and run the clock to time the changes

(Some weeks a luscious Kim Hunter or Maureen Stapleton

Or a young Charlton Heston or Marlon Brando posed)

I also helped beginners master his exceptional course of rapid gestures

Interspersed with laborious contour images and final studies

And I critiqued the novices at sessions' end

No one complained he wasn't there because no one really cared

That summer I went up to Maine for a couple of months

When I got back I stopped by his place and he was gone

He had been living with one of the models

A pretty light-skinned black young enough to be his daughter

She told me she found him dead one stifling evening in July

He had been drinking and fallen and broken his head

I looked for the Vincents but they had disappeared

She said she didn't know anything about them but I did not believe her

I went to Yasuo's to find out what they did with him

Kuni said a lawyer had the body shipped to his wealthy aunt in Jeanerette

The lawyer asked to see me when I got back from Maine

He told me what little money was left went to the girl 

He presented me with a detailed summary of all costs

And that the aunt had paid the remaining balances and his expenses

And that was almost that except... EXCEPT... he had also willed me the Soutines!

My God!... Those twelve fabulous magnificent incredible Soutines!

Some years went by and then one quiet August afternoon

A man representing Paul Rosenberg New York Incorporated

Acting for a Dr Alfred Barnes of Philadelphia said to be a noted collector

Came to inquire about my inheritance

Did I still have the pictures? - Would I consider selling them?

Was there a proper provenance for each?

Fortunately my benefactor had seen to it that Wildestein in Paris

And later in New York authenticated them as works of crazy Chaim

I wondered about the sudden interest in that maniac's work

The art critic of the New York Times came through for me

It seems Paul Rosenberg Paris Inc had recently discovered

A fantastic cache of Chaims in an obscure corner of their vaults

And had cleaned, repaired and re-varnished all ninety-four of them

Also according to the Times

After the appropriate hoopla and interviews with major critics and experts

A retrospective of Chaim's works was to be mounted

At New York's Museum of Modern Art affectionately known as Moma to honor

This long-overlooked Master of the French Expressionist School and anoint him

With the belated posthumous recognition he so richly and emphatically deserved

Moma-Rosenberg-Barnes lawyers told me they were willing to negotiate

Enormous sums for me and also declare my Soutines to be on permanent loan

To Moma Incorporated for tax purposes

I was told this would inflate my net worth to the sky

Without the corresponding fiscal penalties

 Soon representatives from other Famous Museums of Contemporary Art arrived

Asking to see my pictures and when I showed them only slides

They were disappointed but declared if my Chaims were truly genuine

They would outbid Moma Incorporated to enhance their own collections

I kept stalling and as the opening of the retrospective drew near

Their bids soared into the stratosphere

My benefactor's loft was broken into several times

As I had picked up the lease after his death and was now living there myself

My Soutines though had been carefully crated and sealed

When the furor first arose and now resided safely

In a fireproof and bonded warehouse way up north in Portland Maine

One day while all this was going on

A friend asked me to accompany her to a much-ballyhooed auction

Of Artists of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist School of France at the Pace

We sat quietly in the back listening to the spectacular price pyrotechnics

When suddenly my benefactor's small exquisite Vincent

Framed elaborately in carved and gilded wood

Appeared on the auctioneer's easel

A noticeable stir arose from the hard-eyed speculators and assembled dilettante

When the haughty pro on the stage asked the "Ladies and Gentlemen"

To kindly begin the bidding at three-hundred thousand

(Very low for a Vincent I agree but remember this was still the 1950's)

After a delay as some technical problems with phone bids were resolved

It was purchased for five-hundred thousand by a well-manicured gentleman

Whose company manufactured wind-up toys for early discounters

Assembled by dexterous children in the partitioned and democratically preserved

Lower half of the Korean Peninsula

I whispered to my companion

Of the irony of Vincent's one and only documented sale to artist Anna Brock

For it was shortly before his death in 1889 that she purchased his "Red Vines"

For four-hundred francs

What was the exchange rate at the time my pretty friend asked?

Approximately ten to one or about forty dollars I replied

But I digress - Let's get back to my Soutines

In the winter of 1913 - two of Chaim's pictures along with the works

Of the deviants Braque and Brancusi and Duchamp and Picasso and Cezanne

Along with other Impressionist and Expressionist and Cubist and Fauvist and Dadaist

And God only knows what other French innovations

Showed up on a Manhattan dock

These weird works were solicited by the Ash-Canners and other American artists

To be exhibited jointly with their own

They were immediately condemned by knowledgeable customs officers

Who declared emphatically this stuff was shit not art

Thus subject to various import duties and assorted tariffs

Fortunately the Constitution did not agree and it was all allowed to be exhibited

Along with stacked rifles and mortar tubes and primitive tanks and trucks

Within the sand-stone walls of the huge armory at 26th and Park

Where everything was promptly vilified and spat upon

By critics and public alike

And so to make a long sad story short

After a frenetic schizophrenic aberrant and very lonely existence

Creating his sick images in relative obscurity

Some twelve years after his suicide in 1943

And many long and bitter years after his armory humiliation

Chaim exploded like a comet all over Moma's hallowed walls

That's right by God!...

After all those impoverished disillusioned self-destructive years

Chaim had finally arrived - Gone "public" so to speak

He was now a valuable "commodity!"

He was money in the bank for all the hustlers and promoters and the tax cheats

Chaim's retrospective was an incredible success!

Prices for his pictures soared as reams of florid and exuberantly critical prose

Flowed from the pens of the cognescenti

It was as if his madness had infected one and all

Punched them in the gut with his brilliant observations of the human scene

Staggered them with his masterful execution and technique

Students of Art gazed passionately at his extraordinary imagery and dreamed

Fashionably-dressed women and impressionable girls

Wept openly in Moma's galleries

Impeccably-tailored businessmen and Wall Street bankers were moved

By the compassionate representations on its walls

Directors of museums and proprietors of upscale galleries uptown

Hounded me at all hours with lucrative offers for my treasures

(The Times reported one of Chaim's lesser works had recently been purchased

For five figures by the Shah of Iran!)

All that summer I could not work - I could not sleep

I started drinking bourbon

I was rich - Incredibly rich and it was driving me crazy

I could not stand it anymore!

So on a crisp evening in early autumn I got into my '51 Packard

And drove all night up to Portland to the fireproof and bonded warehouse

On Commercial Street down by the docks

I had them load my cases of Soutines into the big car and borrowed a wrecking bar

I drove up the coast to the State Park at the mouth of the great Kennebec  

Where once - one hundred and twenty four unfortunate souls

Commanded by an elderly and frail George Popham

Were dumped four hundred years before

It had turned cold and gray and there was no one but their ghosts

To witness my pitiful act of defiance

I lugged the crates down to the beach and pried them open

I propped each picture against the rocks

And there was crazy Chaim

Displayed for me for the last time in all his frightening glory

I wiped away the tears and stacked the pictures

And the remains of broken crates into a tall pyre

I siphoned some gas out of the Packard and soaked everything through

And lit a cigarette and smoked it down

And flicked the butt

Later the wind came up

The sea flowed angrily over the sooted rocks and washed them clean

Chaim's ashes floated off with the receding tide and

Dissolved

Disappeared

Vanished into the vastness of the dispassionate sea

Wild and crazy Chaim would have loved it!

I'm sure he really would have loved it! 

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 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 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

St Mary’s Park South Bronx

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 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 multi-sects 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 simmering 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 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 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 sound of shells swooshing above

Trees suddenly disappear from the face of the opposite hill

And the brassman blows his nightingale whistle

Nightingales in Flippoland? … the crazy bastard

The frightening lowlight of a seeping dawn

Spawns lissome palms that shadow the edge of his lobelin world

As he utters his self-taught liturgy

Clutching the philacto around his neck

With splinters from your Son’s Agony my Mother sewn inside

A liturgy perhaps echoed by ghostly paracletes

Marching across palaces of plains below

As 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 make it my Mother Marymilk…?

Will he make it…?

This is your night of nights my Mother

You must whisper to him… You must let him know…

There’s no more time left…

Will he make it...?

O God…

Mother… Mother…

Mamma… Mamma… Mamma…

MAMMA!!!

*March 25^th - Medieval celebration of Christ’s conception

There was a Time Not Long Ago   

There was a time not long ago

When all seemed attainable and sure

Pure days that ran together without change

A many-colored canvas bright

With innocence of artless sun-filled thrall

There was a time not long ago

When snow-clogged streets became the playgrounds of our gods

Sun-struck streets that also split with August heat

Tar dug from cobbles wadded into bitter gum

And every hour sparkled with the marvel of it all

There was a time not long ago

Ground peach-pits round brown finger-grips

We rode the backs of trolleys

To watch our Giants and our Yanks stretch summer hits

And there were day-dreams in our post-game ball

There was a time not long ago

We picked the supper dandelions in Divello's fields

And fished City-Island's flounder fens

Burned red for lack of sun-screen we could not afford

And prayed to soar beyond our brightening pall

There was a time not long ago

From the roof of an ancient tenement high on our hill

We see a smogless panoramic brilliance

The tallest buildings in the world

With love in our arms that fourteenth fall

When every hour sparkled with the marvel of it all

When Winter Comes   

When winter comes - It comes too soon

To consummate the garden's pride

Now - Few feet markings of shore birds on snow

In randomed cross-hatch show at all

And wash out with each tide

Indigo clouds have massed beyond the reach

Prophetic vision of the violence to come

As lichen cease their crawl across feldspathic rock

And icy lacings weave around the glacial stones

All living slows - Some life succumbs

The summer's innocence has fled in sorrow

In full retreat before Alberta's blows

As old exhausted spruce in wind-swept coves

Collapse with heaviness of years

Felled by fierce winds and waves and weighted snows

The weariness of years now settles in

The tragic mountain of desire is stilled

The dreams decay - The needs are nil

When winter comes - It comes too soon

To resurrect the unfulfilled

Winter Spider   

The spider threads its silky floss

Across the edge of time

Filiform spews from her spinerette

An almost invisible gossamer

Arachnida busies herself never stops

Her matchless artistry a marvel to behold

Silvery veins of spit drawn on air

Fasten delicate filament to lifeless twigs

Autumnal flies have disappeared

Arachnida's sustenance perished

She retreats into my welcoming cellar

And slows her pace to feed on water-bugs