Poetry |

“Listen” and “Born To Be Wild”

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.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.