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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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ROBERT BOHM
A Slave of Will, the Intrinsic Is What We Make It for Joyce Steins I won’t degrade what we did, won’t call that mix of beer and humping sex. It was much more than that: a spectacular failure to connect even when connected. I held on to you as I went in, falling it seemed past the logic of things, beyond why shale crumbles or the right woman’s thigh is like the infinite. That’s when there on he floor from below me your mid section slammed up against my belly, trying to rise straight through me and escape through the ceiling, hating my over drinking and punching of walls. It was then that I came, each of us so slick with sweat in the downtown walkup that we slid out of each others’ clutches, you sliding out the door and me slipping off to sleep. We never saw each other after that, our on-again off-again love-thing finished at last. So now 42 years later, I’m not sure what I feel when googling you I locate your 14-year-old obituary in the Times. The writing is very clear but predictably says nothing about us, which means I can’t find anything to anchor me in the fact of your death, although there is mention of details which indicate your trajectory, how you never stopped going after getting away from me: a year later you received your anthropology degree and following that there was a stint working at the American Museum of Natural History. You were still then more or less the woman I knew, angular- faced, tallish, in your 20s, hanging out with west side motorcycle riders, your old flame Bobby Dane bragging that no matter how much education you got you still had room in your heart for the scrappers you knew when young. The part of the obit in which you end up owning your own trendy restaurants and drinkjoints, even that is no surprise, I guess, particularly that one place you had, Le Bar Bat on W. 57th St., with its blue handblown glass bats gliding wings spread in dim light on this side of that line beyond which the ambience ends and whatever is out there returns, as did also and repeatedly the unsublimated you, with your art and child abuse fundraisers and long before them (the obit writers didn’t know about this, did they?) you once getting multiple sclerosis mixed up with rheumatoid arthritis in your panic to rid the world of pain. About that same time one night you dubbed yourself Moon Madonna in my flat on Thompson St. in the Village, then years later according to the Times you became “the self-styled Mama Iguana” at your Tex-Mex cafe on 19th, going from table to table, talking up the patrons while secretly (this is the info I bring to the picture) every bit of you was still your Slavic building-supervisor daddy’s big-boned daughter in love with his toolbox, in which he lugged around, you once claimed, everything one needed in order to take apart cubism and understand it inside out. A Coney Island night was when you said it, us swigging from a Schlitz quart while you pontificated about everything, including one of your favorite topics: the amusement park’s Wonder Wheel, which symbolized you maintained all that sucked about people, our circular logic in particular, “the way we think our thoughts are actually going someplace when the mind gets on its ferris wheel, but eventually it gets off in the same fucking spot where it got on!” Staring at me, you laughed grumpily then, a lover-of-life brought low by your own gifts. But you figured a way out, didn’t cave in, didn’t let yourself or anyone else hold you back. Earlier, I didn’t know what to feel about your death. Now I do: that it’s one of those moments when what I feel doesn’t count. Your life spoke for itself. Poem for Gregory Corso Filthy streetsnow piled on the corner of Thompson and Prince. I noticed it but only half-assedly, looking down from the walkup designed by an architect who knew more about the bare-bones of things than any poet did. Which is why (the bare-boned part) so many of us but not him ended up living in those ratholes, crawling over kids’ heads if we had to, anything to get our mescalin or day-old chop suey, all the time hoping the linoleum peeling from the rotted floorboards would teach our skin to curl up at the edges too, revealing that we also had decayed underneath. That was the poem each of us hoped to scrawl, an epic to honor (in your words) “a property with a single ruin -- Me,” the me being the banged up ego you saw as the holy grail in which eternal spirit chose to be carried from one location to another. And so knowing we were the anointed, we crowded into the Village, pushing out the Italians and Ukrainians, in order to make space for our poems. You however orphaned at birth and an ex con by twenty had grown up there and were holding on to it, sometimes slipping through jimmied doors to steal whatever it is that makes an unsuspecting pipefitter hum Frank Sinatra songs at dawn. Anyway, not long ago I read in the paper how you died in 2001, a year or two after a filmmaker found your mother still alive, a woman you’d never met and had long thought dead. Consequently for all those years she was less substantive than the Italian ruins you liked to visit, those remnants of a lost empire of make-believe that you loved but didn’t really believe in and then in the end there she was, Mother, and you were finally home, dead. The sadness that walks among us now, holding a Gucci bag and saying the parties in Chelsea are nicer than ever, isn’t for you. This poem however is Another Poem for Sajitha Darker than a grand piano on a stage with the key lid down for the night the ocean’s depths are the heart's most wounded parts spread everywhere while far above waves fling white foamflecks into a light unechoed down here, except by fish pulsing near the ocean floor, their scales coated with luminescent bacteria that make the depths glow like a chemical charge igniting a synapse in the brain, this being the act of me thinking about your hand dragging a brush across a canvas and suddenly there’s a fish swimming into view, the water dark yet also glimmering |
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