I don’t want to be a creature who says
the wrong thing when someone’s pet is dying.
Condemned to a life of big feet, misshaping
high-heeled pumps. That’s not what Michelangelo
was after. When that soft duo ate the fruit of knowledge,
we got stuck despairing at an unplucked nipple hair
and stopping and fumbling to put on a condom.
Who wants that? A creature who mumbles and
slumps, who writes in clichés, who laughs at the wrong
spot, can’t understand post-modern theory,
forgets names, doesn’t photograph well, tries and fails,
what sort of creature is this?
April 8 Poem
Berlin, 1945
“The rubble women” was how they referred to
the ones who cleared the remains of the city
after the war. It seemed like heavy work for
women, but there weren’t many young men
left around. The daily pay was about the cost
of a pack of cigarettes. They saved the bricks
that remained whole to resell. The corpse of
the city. Before the cranes, the rebuilding,
someone had to clean it up, someone had to
do it. Hair under handkerchiefs, they don’t seem
unhappy, in black-and-white, despite the stench
and the hard labor, and the ravaged capital, but
anything is better than the bombs falling.
April 3 Poem
Greek Demons
On the ferry from Naxos to Piraeus port, we met an Orthodox
nun, with beads and wimple in the wind. She admired the
sketches we had made on the island. When she saw the
drawings of the ancient gods, she said, Those are demons.
Apollo and Zeus and Demeter. Her demonization reinstated
their existence, some 2,600 later, far more than the textbooks
of the average Athenian teenagers, drinking iced coffee and
tuning into the buzz of economic crisis around them.
(The Ancient Greek word “daimon” is translated as “god,”
“divine,” “power,” and “fate.”) She then proudly showed
us, on her primitive cell phone, pictures of her own drawings,
cartoon characters of squat girls with pigtails and bows and
goggly eyes. She bemoaned that the church hierarchy forbid
her using comics to teach children about their faith. Then she
said we must get married under the Church and have many
babies. In the early Roman Empire, “like pagans, Christians
still saw the gods and their power, and by an easy shift of
opinion they turned these pagan daimones into malevolent
‘demons’, the troupe of Satan. Far into the Byzantine period
Christians eyed their cities’ old pagan statuary as a seat of
the demons’ presence. It was no longer beautiful, it was infested.”
April 2 Poem
Madrid, 1990
The machinery of the saltwater tanks kept breaking. His secretary insisted
it was a spirit. After he lost a whole shipment of lobsters, as a last resort,
he agreed to hire the santero, who was at least cheaper than the
mechanic. At the first consultation, the old man asked funny things of him,
to pass a coconut around his body as he showered, for example, which would
cleanse it spiritually. And he had to drive far out of town to purchase
a live dove from another Cuban, an old lady. The dove was unnerved, fluttering
crazily as it was passed over the auras of everyone present, its feet bound by the
santero’s brown hands. Except when it was near the fast-breathing little body
of the secretary’s young child, then it became still. After two hours in the warehouse,
the santero emerged sweating, and the dove was dead. It had to be thrown in a river,
he said, which took some doing. Spirit or not, the machines didn’t break down anymore,
that was what was important. The lobster business went under months later,
when a new competitor became aggressive, hired thugs to wreck one of the shipments,
stole most of his customers in a single week, with cut-throat prices.