Listen
Can that really be Walt Whitman
on a wax cylinder chanting “America” —
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons …?
Sounds like he’s gargling pebbles,
his larynx literally form’d of this soil.
In fact, he sounds like Uncle George,
the one man in my family to kill
Krauts in World War II and return
drunk again. Most mornings he nursed
the same German stein. So badly
did he stutter, you’d think he licked
all the alum off his styptic pencil …
Some speculate that Edison recorded
Whitman’s trebly voice — another thing
linking him to Lincoln — in West Orange,
town I visited nearly every weekend since
I adored my cousin Al, George’s son.
Al’s mother’s name … Aunt … Aunt …
I don’t remember. I could phone Marti —
the other of two siblings out of four
left alive past sixty. Family genealogist,
she’s traced Dad’s line to Mary Chilton,
first to step ashore at Plymouth, entitling me
to Lowell’s title, “Mayflower Screwball.”
Why? Well, Marti found an 1830
Mendham census designating lunatick
as Nathan Cooper Cramer’s occupation;
Dad chatted with his brother, Alfred,
dead since Anzio, in his shaving mirror;
and after ECT, TMS, and other acronyms
for stir-fried brains, McLean’s in my phone.
How the hell did I get here? And what
sector of my face do I first touch
a razor to? The bedlam of thought
I have in mind is a sputter of dis-
sociation you, you only, can talk down.
No shock, then, after Whitman’s high-wire
aria, real or forged; after my pickled uncle’s
PTSD; after the father of the phonograph;
after my Pilgrim forebear who became
an orphan six weeks after touching land,
it’s you I’ll be listening to at the last. How
resonant — the bones of our middle ears.
* * * * *
Born To be Wild
Zeus keeps watch at the window,
jumpy as a rookie air traffic controller,
growling at the moon. Or is he mourning
our kids grown up and gone? Don’t know —
the way I can’t recall whose piss drooled down
my back in a Brookside, New Jersey dugout,
since 1968 was such a good year for thugs.
Okay, we were too coddled to be thugs as such.
Racoons subsisted on the backyard trash
of our Humphrey moms and Nixon dads —
the miracle of eight-track in their Cadillacs
that chauffeured us to dances we didn’t dance.
Ken, Tom, Fred, and I preferred to be the band,
since bands stood taller by virtue of standing
on wobbly lunchroom tables we made a stage.
Bands might play Born to Be Wild six times
a night and still not have the song by heart.
This was before the G-clefs of millennial sex
tattooed the torsos and butts of our young.
Still, we were melancholy as birthday cakes,
rose from our beds like mist off a duck pond,
our eyes more like lab rats’ the farther back
we smoked what we called dope on the bus.
Dumb as lint, we thought we looked straight
into history, but history was — as history is —
lying in wait like a riptide or an undertow.
So much of our lives we live over our heads!
And thus, fast-forward to this childless night
from which I’m glancing back, making shit up
to a photo of my kids, backs turned, facing the sea.