The Day I Met Ava Gardner poems
Alan Harawitz
deerbrook editions
published by
Deerbrook Editions PO Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions first edition
Š 2019 by Alan Harawitz All rights reserved ISBN: 978-0-9600293-7-2 Book design by Jeffrey Haste
Contents Connections 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45
Fifty-Minute Hour Easy Chair The Terrorist June Wedding My Old Man Mother At 81 Mother’s Day Last Rites Eternal Paradise I Ain’t Marching Loud Neighbors Irresistible Greeting The Day I Met Ava Gardner Everything Settles Helicopter Being Here Poetry Of Seinfeld Blind Man Bike Ride Bookshop In Portland, Maine Born Too Late E Street University Finding Religion Ice-Cream Sandwich Catskill Waters Dairy Cows Aquarium Fish Bait Art Of The Egg Cream Koufax Dog Park A Friendly Face K.C.C.
Commitments 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 70 71 72 73 74 75
Warm Coffee The Closed Fist Then Came The Son They Follow One Who Leads Three Small Poems About God, Man, And Animals Streets On Fire James Dean And Little Bastard American Original Arbus Art Army Of Dogs Beauty Stays No Apple For The Teacher March On Washington Nothing Up My Sleeve Pecking Order He Paints New York Dear Google Feathers On A Hook Harley Car Talk Hummingbird In A Strange Land Small Bird End Of Summer Summer At The Cape Three Small Poems About Life, Sex, And Death
77 Acknowledgments
For all the boys and girls— Karen, Obie, Wally, Maggie and Hug
Connections
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. from This Be The Verse —Philip Larkin
Fifty-Minute Hour I wanted to know as I opened the door, Am I not your most interesting patient? The most intelligent, sensitive, delightfully screwed-up person to ever lie across your couch? Are you just a little bit envious when I tell you about the biggest trout I ever caught in the Colorado mountains? The reason I ask is that scrawny specimen of a stuffed rainbow trout hanging on your office wall. And the way you keep asking me about the flies I used—the size and color and “How remarkable: you tied them all yourself?” Or is this just one of those tricks shrinks use to get someone to open up? If it is, I don’t think it’s working. I’m not opening up. Am I? Every time I come here, we seem to talk about fly fishing, all the places I’ve been: Alaska, Montana, Colorado, California, Maine. And I see you taking notes, lots of notes. Just what are you writing down? It feels odd at the end of the hour, the check I write and that cocky look in your eye as you say, “See you next week, same time.”
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Easy Chair Cigar smoke billowing up behind the newspaper like a campfire inside a teepee. The big easy chair with the outline of his body in its soft contours, large ottoman to hold the weight of heavy feet and legs. My brothers and I running around the house never really getting a good look, only the harsh smoke that seemed to follow from one room to another. And she, always there, supper on the table. Dinner in grim silence. A return to the big blue chair and a gray haze in the small den we could barely see through.
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The Terrorist From across the room sharp pain in my thigh. He’s at the door face tightly drawn, blonde curly hair. Red Ryder Daisy Carbine in his right hand, BB rolling along the floor. “Better not tell mom, you little bastard.”
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June Wedding Wedding vows in June: I’m stoned on hash, eyes covered by dark glasses, a smile on my face as the rabbi talks about the sanctity of this day. I’m the happiest bridegroom anyone ever saw, so relaxed until my mother starts complaining about the seating arrangements. She wants to know why she’s sitting so far back from the dais. My father is also sitting far back, precisely as far away as my mother, with his second wife but he doesn’t complain. My older brother is smiling big and wide. He is also stoned on hash. Little brother gets up to make a toast to me and my new wife, but he is overcome by June heat and tension from being in the same room with my mother and father and not being stoned on hash. He faints before completing the toast. We carry him to a shady spot and lay him on a table like a big wedding cake. Everybody fusses. His eyes flutter. He says he’s all right. The wedding goes on. Uncle Leo takes lots of pictures.
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My Old Man When my father picks up the violin, with its long neck and curved body, he holds it like a woman. His eyes close and his upper lip trembles slightly. His bow hand smooth across the strings. His fingers dance near the pegs. The sound is the sea or the sun or the tears of some long lost love. And he doesn’t look old. When he stops playing he opens his eyes, a soft smile crosses his face and he asks, “How was I?”
15
Mother At 81 You sit in your chair like an old car waiting for the crusher, head pulled to one side. Left eye stays shut almost all the time, even with those pink-rimmed tortoise shell glasses the nurses make you wear every day. You talk in non sequiturs or so low I have to lean forward to hear you say: “Get me out of here. I have to get out of here.�
16
Mother’s Day I could almost love her, but not enough to hold her hand as she lay on the white bed in the white room expiring in front of me as I sat beside her in stillness, and then non-belief for a few seconds. Ridiculously clutching the only book that made sense to me at that moment-Holden Caulfield, you pathetic fool! White bed sheets, white walls, white nurse’s uniform: a cacophony of silence.
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Last Rites Auntie died last week, her body decomposing in the tub, classical music playing on the radio. She lived alone in a decaying graffiti-ridden building. Now in a pine box. The relatives come to pay their respects. We are eight and ten are needed for a minyan. The rabbi brings two strangers in. He asks my father for her Jewish name. His face reddens when he says he doesn’t know. Nevertheless a prayer is read. We drive to the cemetery. Four men carry her to a hole they dug. We each shovel in a little dirt. No words are said. We leave before she is covered.
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Eternal Paradise She gave us the grand tour in the silence of a battery-operated golf cart, weaving in and out of the vast acreage of gravestones like a camp director guiding us to the ball fields, the archery range, and the lake where the children would frolic all summer long. Only those residing here on this Florida plain of death would frolic no more: The final resting place chosen by all these Jewish doctors and lawyers, scholars and teachers, bookmakers and gamblers, heroes and scoundrels. And now my father would join them surrounded by his neighbors in the strangeness of this tropical paradise of eternal summer and heat, palm trees and golf courses they so eagerly gravitated toward. And he would be happy to know (as I learned from my tour guide) that Seinfeld creator and comedian Larry David’s mother was buried just a few rows away.
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I Ain’t Marching Once I lived in Far Rockaway. Not far from where Phil Ochs lived. Phil Ochs, the folk singer. The “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” Phil Ochs. Who took his own life. Who used to sing at Gerdes Folk City on West 4th Street in the Village. Dylan sang there too when he first came to New York. On Monday nights—hootenanny night. Carolyn Hester, Big Joe Williams, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and so many more. Now it’s gone, part of NYU where kids commit suicide on a fairly regular basis and no one seems to know quite why. It’s bad publicity for the school. They’d like to keep it quiet but everything is on the Internet. Facebook. Google. It’s hard to keep a secret these days.
20
Loud Neighbors It seems ironic: you being a photographer and your picture now in The Daily News. I knew you more as a voice, a kind of atonal music vibrating along the walls of my bedroom. Or the pounding beat of your harsh footsteps penetrating the ceiling to the accompaniment of her high soprano, terrifyingly shrill. In retrospect I never took either one of you seriously enough: Everyone has loud neighbors. Living in the city you expect it, even joke about it. But killing her, then leaping off a pier, impaling yourself on the pilings below, must have surprised even you.
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