Category: Poetry

In the spring, planting
commences, the roots of
verbs and gerunds
are persuaded to cloak
themselves in new
soils and stretch
into blank territory
without the sun’s
compass; the weeds
that hold as fast as skin
distracting the soft and
hairless on their route;
to thicken and thickening,
rinds and lemons,
the oranges trees
souring at the twigs
without ever flowering:…

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Donna asked me
to run off to the farm,
raise goats and sheep and turnips
with her. Seventh grade,
   and I don’t know, don’t go,
though china doll Donna
   with her hair
like a central Kansas night
is still a Helen
   in high school,
every guy wants her,
  and I’m no different,
though I love
   what she writes me
in her letters
   as much as her looks.

I kept that one
   about the goat farm,
take it with me
   when I travel,
and sometimes I write back,
   cursive script
into the past,
letters to the girl
from that boy
back in junior high.

And she never
   writes back.

– Kevin Rabas…

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The ‘sixties went by in a blur for Jerry and Mike,
remembered in fragments, bright and discontinuous.

Phil Spector shadowing them in the studio,
his head swiveling like a bird of prey.

The Dixie Cups, Jewish Valkyries, setting up
harmonies that made Mike’s scalp cringe.

Hearing in ’64 The Beatles’ version of “Kansas City,”
knowing then something of the curve and contour of time.

Jerry at dinner with Motherwell and DeKooning.
Jerry wrestling with Mailer by the bar at Elaine’s.

Mike at the Village Gate hearing Stan Getz
blow long and long into the coming dark.

The stone-faced Customs man at Heathrow
who liked to say: “If you’re Stoller, where’s Leiber?”

These were not, like the fifties, the time of their time:
the days in diminuendo, a falling away.…

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I’m in my old neighborhood
shortcutting though yards
never past the witches’ house
once it rain frogs
& packing popcorn we thought
was snow
snow of course was snow
enough
snot on mittens
bombing the cars
on Grand Boulevard
hiding behind evergreens
thick with ice daggers
most of the houses
stayed dark inside except
for one room
old people lived there
couples or widows
and now I’m not sure
how much of what I remember
is made up …

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1.
Clustered before fiery steel barrel
hands knotted oil rags of talk and beer bottles
warmed like fur-lined gloves
in crisp night air standing
next to the rained on, pissed on,
had sex on three-legged recliner
sitting in the back parking lot
of the corner liquor store

2.
We see him as levels of brutality
his grime, a second sweaty suit
eyes crossed like missed answers on the test
Gray plaits betray his gait as he pulls the squalor
of two garbage bags up on the bus like Sunday’s
chicken dinner placing them on the seat like giant
platters of mustard greens and fried corn
on finely polished wood.  He looks around,
takes a seat, pulls out a book…

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The camp’s directors were thrilled,
of course, that Mr. Robeson
would perform for the children.
They had reservations only about
the program the great baritone intended.

To mix Hebrew folk songs
with Negro spirituals was one thing;
to sing to the young people
in Yiddish was quite another.
Yiddish was the language of exile,
of the ghetto, galut—
not what this generation
of young Jews should be hearing.…

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In the high court of sparrows
I plead my wants, turn on
every light switch, gather twigs
build a nest of sorrow

in the high nest of wants
I build sparrows, gather light,
court twigs of sorrow
plead every switch to turn

in the twigged light of nests
I court the plea of sparrows,
build high my wants, my sorrow,
turn, gather the switch

to strike the sparrow, to empty
the high nest, to gather fallen twigs,
to touch the still feather,
to plead my guilt in the court of sorrow

– Jim Zola…

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