The Bookends Review

LG  1967–2013

when I brought you into my country
everywhere I had gone became
the town or river of a child and
you renamed it to your own music

and you were singing even though I
had broken into the refrain and
would do so again on leaving the
one mild country of your tune and words

I could hear the music of the child
you used to be when we talked in June
and knew nothing would interrupt it
in your time or out not even this

– Rodney Nelson…

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They stood at the top of the mountain. The hot breeze blew against their sweaty faces. The green pine poked into the clear sky. At the summit they stood on smooth boulders. They had climbed it many times. They knew each crevice, crack and hold. Gerard dropped his pack, and sat on a boulder facing south. Lionel stood and breathed the air rising from the stretching Adirondacks below.  

It had been a long hike up.  The hard rain from the day before turned the trail to mud. They slipped more than once. Lionel enjoyed the challenge. Gerard complained the entire way.  

Lionel hated standing there. He hated for the journey to end. He hated the rising smooth boulders of the last two miles before reaching the summit.…

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these stairs are designed to murder a man
who’s had too much to drink

narrow, they wind like a medieval dungeon
to a bathroom that smells like death

upstairs where i left my wife alone
you can hear the six german men laughing

crowded around the tiny bar over their bottles of astra
and that black liquor the bartender keeps pouring out

i can still eat their cigarette smoke in the air down here

fourteen years off of those things
and i still think about cigarettes every day

think about them more than love or my own mortality

i wonder what i’m doing here clasping the sweating wall
in a german dive bar where i don’t belong

four thousand miles away from brooklyn problems
beers deep into an early hamburg afternoon

i’ve understood next to nothing that anyone has said to me today
i’ve done nothing to make myself heard

the light from the bottom of the stairs
looks like an oubliette

and i’m tired of trying to make this world my own

if i ever make it back up those steps
i think i’ll grab one of those german’s cigarettes
smoke it until i’m sweating and sick
like the first time i ever had one of those things

ask those laughing bastards
what their german word is for sadness or loss.…

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Because the wind is high, it blows my mind. — John Lennon

Some days the whole world reminds me of you. Of your wisps of dirty blonde hair hanging below your cheek bones. Of your emerald eyes, deep and intense.  Of the fierce innocence of our adolescent passion, so full of hope and newness and everything wonderful. Except when it wasn’t. Because you and I sprouted from the junkyard of broken homes and broken dreams, born to parents who preferred the liquor bottle over their children.

You were pretty cute that day after drama class in your baggy jeans and sleeveless flannel shirt. Introduced by a friend and note with your phone number–The catalyst to a high school life of never having to be alone. Two souls began weaving together, ripe with firsts and fantasies of limitless futures.…

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Clinging to my mother’s arm
I watched the blood orange sky
blot out the twinkling stars.
Out house burned.
Ashes of our tall, proud crops perfumed the air

Rebel soldiers, creeping dogs in the night,
shot my brother.
His crimson blood stained the river.

We were never to drink from it again.

We left that homier shore.
I did not understand
my parents whispering and furtive eyes.…

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It was the weekend. My grandfather had died only days before, a Jewish death on Christmas, the irony still laughing in my head. It was also New Year’s Eve. I was sitting in the middle of the room, alone, the people spinning around me even though I had yet to take a sip from the vodka-cranberry someone had shoved into my hand. Boys eyed me up and down, sleazy and appreciative in turns. My not-black dress squeezed the breath out of me.

A serious miscalculation, but I was stuck – my driver James was already in the corner of the room with a girl on his lap, the intoxicated rebound from his newly failed relationship of three years. We had different priorities tonight, and it looked like he at least was accomplishing his.…

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Hand- me- overs from a learned brother,
they lay cracked and misshapen
in the bottom of the dark closet;
a symbol of some latent sadness.
It was there, but hidden from
the innocence of youth.
They spoke of a man in need of
something above and beyond the
benefits of comfortable footwear. 

I can remember his facts.
He never drank milk.
He denied my sister a trip
to the shoe store in the snow.
He wouldn’t say why, couldn’t reveal
the fear, the compassion. He was
unable or unwilling to console his wife
when her anxiety surfaced late at night.
So, he would do deeds for the needy.  …

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